Bedlam Oak won a top student paper award from the Organizational Communication Division of Western States Communication Association for the 2026 conference in San Diego. The title is "Resistance within resistance: The formation of spontaneous activist coalitions." Here’s the abstract: “The 2023-2024 academic year saw a surge in student protest organizing across the U.S., with over 130 encampments established in response to the war in Gaza. This single-campus case study examines the formation of such a movement and the challenges inherent in its organizing. Through interviews with activists and the construction of a detailed timeline, we trace how a unified coalition formed spontaneously in the days after the war began, evolved throughout the academic year, and ultimately fractured into two opposing groups due to internal conflict. We theorize that such Spontaneous Activist Coalitions (SACs) develop as a resistance to existing institutional decision-making structures when these structures limit how members respond to a social crisis.”