President's Message: Running Bulls and Sacred Cows
Earlier this month I spent a few days in Northern Spain, in the charming town of Pamplona. I left town just ahead of the charging bulls who run through the old section every morning of the world-famous Festival of San Fermin. Unlike thousands of tourists from all over, I wasn't there to follow in the footsteps of Ernest Hemingway, although I did sit in a cafe on the square he made famous, next to the Cafe Hemingway and the Gran Hotel La Perla, where you can stay in the room he slept in, though he didn't pay €1800 per night.
I was there to participate in a very different sort of festival, and no bulls - or tourists-- were injured during the conference on "Diversity of Journalisms: Shaping Complex Media Landscapes." The conference was jointly organized by the School of Communication of the University of Navarra, which holds an international conference every year, and the ECREA Journalism Studies Section, whose chair, Professor Ramon Salaverria, is on the Navarra faculty.
The School of Communication - the oldest school of communication in Spain, currently celebrating its 50th anniversary - occupies a somewhat forbiddingly modern building in the middle of a bucolic campus of green lawns and shade trees.
The conference brought together scholars, faculty and graduate students from 20 countries. As one would expect, Spain and Portugal were the best represented, but there were numerous participants from Germany and the UK, as well as scholars from Aruba, Australia, Belgium, Chile, Cypress, Finland, France, the Netherlands, Peru, Poland, Romania, Russia, Switzerland, Turkey, Ukraine, and the United States.
The range of countries represented was impressive, but even more so was the range of topics and the quality of research presented. The central focus of the conference, on the challenges that journalism faces in the current era of technological, economic, and political upheaval, could hardly be more important. The viability of democratic institutions and systems, as we know, depends on the availability and quality of information in the public interest, and this has historically been the signal contribution of journalism. It is also no news to anyone that the current state of journalism, as a profession, a livelihood, and a social force, is neither secure nor satisfactory. Thus, while no bulls were injured during our conference, it was good to see that some sacred cows were challenged.
We are doing a disservice to our students, our field, or ourselves, if we are not willing to reopen closed questions and re-examine settled debates about the role, structure, and function of journalism in the present era. In raising and exploring these questions it is crucial that we expand our horizons beyond anyone country or political system. Thus conferences such as this one are enormously valuable, as they bring together scholars and data drawn from a multitude of contexts, offering mutual illumination and forestalling narrow assumptions and ethnocentric conclusions.
But, it is not my present purpose to report on the content of the conference sessions, as interesting as these were. I assume that many of the studies reported will make their way to the pages of scholarly journals in the field - indeed, I took the opportunity to solicit submissions to the International Journal of Communication. Rather, I cite this conference as an example of the vital importance of such international scholarly gatherings and enterprises for our mutual enterprise.
Many of the participants at the Pamplona conference would shortly be travelling to Istanbul for the IAMCR conference, and I hope to see many of these folks at the annual ICA conference, either next year in Phoenix or the following year in London. But there is a difference between the large, multifocal conferences such as ICA and IAMCR and smaller, topically focused conferences such as the Pamplona conference. Both are valuable but they are not interchangeable. Excepting the plenary slots, ICA now runs around 26 simultaneous sessions, filling and overflowing hotels, and often overwhelming folks with the array of mutually exclusive choices. Even the Pamplona conference had four simultaneous sessions, excepting plenaries, and the choice was often difficult. There is no perfect solution to the challenge of scale and focus, but we have reason to encourage gatherings both large and small, multinational and regional, single and multifocused, as we work towards a truly international and diverse community of scholars concerned with the vitally important issues of communication in the modern world.
In this regard, let me note two regional conferences that ICA is cosponsoring in the relatively near future.
In Lille, France, on March 7 - 9, 2012, "Communicating in a World of Norms: Information and Communication in Contemporary ?Globalization," a conference co-organized by ICA, the GERIICO [Group of studies and research on information and communication], and the SFSIC [French Society for Information and Communication Sciences]. ICA past president Francois Cooren is one of the organizers of this conference, which will constitute the 2012 ICA Regional conference in Europe.
In October 2012, ICA will cosponsor a conference organized by the Faculty of Communication of the Catholic University in Santiago, Chile. The conference will focus on "Trends in International and Latin America Communication Research," and we hope that it will help further the engagement of ICA with colleagues and programs in Latin America. Stay tuned for the conference Call for Papers…
At the recent Board meeting in Boston, when we determined that the 2016 ICA conference would probably be held in Fukuoka, Japan, it was also agreed that we would engage with colleagues in China to support and cosponsor a number of topical and regional conferences in the coming years, as a way of extending and expanding our involvement with this vital community of scholars.
It is important for ICA and for communication studies everywhere that we maintain and accelerate the pace of our involvement with colleagues and students in all parts of the world, and our engagement with meetings and conferences large and small is a key part of such efforts. At the same time, of course, and with an eye to our commitment to environmental sustainability, it will also be essential for ICA to further explore and develop our use of virtual conferencing, as we initiated successfully during the Boston conference. But that's a topic for another column.