For the first time in its history, ICA sponsored a regional conference in France, more precisely in Roubaix, a town located in the Metropolitan Region of Lille, Northern France. No less than 200 scholars coming from 19 countries around the world participated in this event, titled "Communicating in a World of Norms," which took place from March 7-9. This international conference was co-organized by ICA, the University of Lille 3, and the SFSIC [French Society for Information and Communication Sciences], and aimed to develop strong scientific relationships between communication scholars represented by ICA all around the world.

One of the objectives of this regional conference especially was to make ICA more visible to French and, more generally, francophone scholars, given that the French-speaking world has been historically underrepresented in our membership. We believe that this goal was reached, with the massive presence of scholars coming from France, Belgium, or Morocco, who were able to meet and discuss with ICA colleagues from all around the world, coming from countries like the United States, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Russia, South Africa, and China, just to name a few. This conference thus created the conditions for future collaborations between different research traditions that otherwise tend to ignore each other.

A total of 118 presentations were scheduled and organized into 32 panel sessions that were regrouped in four axes of research: 1) Communicational Approaches to Norms in Organizations; 2) Visual worlds: Contributions of Information and Communication Studies to Visual Studies; 3) New Media, New Public Spheres; and 4) Communication Between Cultures: Another Globalization? We hope that this event will not only increase our membership coming from the francophone world, but will also ultimately allow ICA to become even more international.

François Cooren (Université de Montréal) and Patrice de la Broise (Université de Lille 3) served as co-organizer.

Click the following link to view video footage from the Lille conference.

For your information, the breakdown of conference attendees by country is below:

200 participants coming from 19 countries