President's Message: The Phoenix Conference - A Celebration of our ICA Community
With 2166 attendees from 50 countries (our third largest conference to date), including 949 students and more than 550 first time conference participants, 452 sessions, 14 preconferences, 3,874 tweets, and about 300 ICA members up from their seats dancing (or at least swaying) during Native American artist Jana Mashonee’s extraordinary plenary performance, our 2012 Phoenix conference captured the very best work, creative efforts, technological savvy, and joyous enthusiasm of our ICA community.
Indeed, this year’s conference was not business as usual. Based on feedback from the Boston conference as well as the many discussions regarding the controversies surrounding Phoenix as a conference site, the Phoenix program brought together communication scholars and community members in a diversity of new convention formats. Community Artists and Activists in the Face of (Im)Migration in Arizona brought an art installation to the exhibition hall. Occupy activists participated in a preconference, as did professional journalists, scholars, and educators who addressed global immigration issues. Documentary film makers were part of an extended session on Latino/a education in Arizona, and a special session was devoted to journalists whose reporting puts them at risk in communities throughout the world. Glenn Weyant’s acoustic workshop on music of the borderlands, Awol Koun and Arok Ding from the Arizona Center for the Lost Boys of Sudan, Shawny Anderson's remarkable students who have traveled globally to communities in crisis, and Stefan Weitz, the Microsoft Director of Search all challenged and enabled attendees to confront, consider, and address the conference theme “Communication and Community.”
This year, the closing plenary also took on a new form and it was a great session. Joe Walther (Michigan State U) expertly set the stage for the topic, a new form of debate, and audience participation. The debate, “The Internet is the End of Communication Theory as We Know It,” featuring Carolyn Marvin (U of Pennsylvania), Jeremy Bailensen (Stanford U), Jack Qi (Chinese U of Hong Kong), and Steve Jones (U of Illinois – Chicago) represented four unique positions and raised several intriguing questions for communication scholars. About 500 people attended this provocative and entertaining session. For those of you who missed this outstanding plenary, it will soon be archived and available on the ICA website.
Several experimental formats were also developed for 26 extended sessions. The response was terrific. Program planners have already begun sharing best practices (e.g., the Escalator Session where researchers received feedback from established scholars regarding their submitted work was a favorite; A high density session coupled with the opportunity for in-depth discussions of papers also received rave reviews). It will be exciting to see what new formats are tried in London.
There were several other new conference features. The Mobile App was a huge success and the twitter feed in the exhibition hall created lots of interest. Twitter seemed ubiquitous this year. We added hash tags for each division, and more than 3800 tweets from 704 people (about twice the number of tweeters as last year) reached 460,375 twitter followers. The exposure was 2,656,789! The funniest, most clever, and other exceptional tweets received ICA special rewards (read our new Communication Director JP Gutierrez’s article to get all the specifics). I particularly appreciated being credited on Twitter for the fabulous fireworks display we enjoyed on Friday night (apologies to the Phoenix baseball team the Diamondbacks who may have had something to do with it).
We live streamed sessions throughout the day and made them available to virtual conference participants. Special thanks to Wiley-Blackwell Publishers for supporting this evolving effort. The virtual conference had more than 2,450 visits, 1,336 unique visitors, and 10, 447 page views. We had 44 papers available for comments and responses; one paper on social media had 130 visitors! The keynote addresses by Lance Bennett (U of Washington), Hans Henrik Holm (Danish School of Journalism), and Sonia Livingstone (London School of Economics) were very well received as were the special workshop presentations by Marshall Scott Poole (U of Illinois) and Alison Bryant (PlayScience LLC). Their presentations will also be archived for ICA member viewing. Visitors to the virtual conference came predominately from the United States but there was also participation from members in India, Germany, the United Kingdom, Israel, Croatia, Netherlands, Japan, Turkey, and Australia. We will be sending a survey to those who registered for the virtual conference; analyzing usage patterns and responses to this survey will help next year’s conference planner François Heinderyckx continue to refine the virtual conference.
Besides adding new features to the conference, several traditions were continued. A series of Masters Classes, featuring Jack McLeod (U of Wisconsin), Mark Knapp (U of Texas – Austin), CC Lee (City U of Hong Kong), Dafna Lemish (Southern Illinois U), James Curran (U of London – Goldsmiths), and Stan Deetz (U of Colorado – Boulder) provided unique opportunities to interact with some of the best known scholars in the field. We had presentations by four of last year’s named ICA fellows Patrice Buzzanell (Purdue U), James Dillard (Pennsylvania State U), Ron Rice (U of California – Santa Barbara), K. Viswanath (Harvard U). Regional receptions highlighted the vibrant communities within our ICA membership and Friday evening’s tequila tasting, reception and tour of the Heard Museum was an ideal way to experience local art, architecture, indigenous culture, and delicious regional foods. To recognize and celebrate our diverse community as well as service to ICA, we added several new categories of ribbons (including language ribbons, editor ribbons, and first time attendee ribbons) and received a few suggestions for other ribbons including “on the job market.” I look forward to seeing next year’s ribbon offerings.
On Saturday ICA President Larry Gross gave his stimulating presidential address, "Fastening our Seatbelts: Turning Crisis into Opportunity” preceding the annual awards ceremony. Receiving awards in recognition of their accomplishments and service to the field and to the organization were:
Overall, from the things the ICA planning committee could control to those we couldn’t, the Phoenix conference was a great success. There are always challenges in planning such a large international conference and I want to thank the executive committee: Francois Cooren, Larry Gross, François Heinderyckx, Barbie Zelizer, and Patrice Buzzanell, who just finished her term on the board, for their advice and support and all the division planners for their willingness to try new things and work on a very tight time schedule. I am grateful to Patricia Moy (U of Washington), our conference theme chair, who put together a great set of panels and is currently editing a special volume highlighting the best work and provocative ideas from the conference related to our theme.
The conference hotel staff was superb and certainly mother nature deserves our gratitude. When the ICA staff arrived on Tuesday we were met by temperatures of 44 C/112 F. By the time we had the festive opening reception at The Grotto on Thursday night, the temperature was in the high 20s C/80s F and it remained reasonable throughout the conference. But none of this (except perhaps the weather) would have happened without the amazing leadership of our executive director Michael Haley and the equally exceptional staff including Colleen Brady, JP Gutierrez, Emily Karsnak, Sam Luna, and Mike West. It truly takes a community to plan a conference and make an organization work. ICA is indeed fortunate to have such a dedicated, generous, competent, and delightful staff. My heartfelt thanks to them for everything they did and to all our members who made Phoenix such a successful conference. It truly was a celebration of our ICA community.