London is a nearly perfect venue for the next ICA Annual Conference. Not only is it one of the most vibrant cities in the world, it also hosts an exceptionally high density of world-class communication departments. The next ICA conference is being organized with the aim to give participants the best of both the city and the scholarship. An exclusive, top-class local arrangements committee was assembled including representatives from Birbeck College, City University, Goldsmiths, Kings College, London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and Westminster University. Members of the committee are bursting with creative ideas to give attendees a true London experience. We are taking for granted that delegates who want to visit the landmark tourist attractions will not require our help. Instead, we are trying to create opportunities to experience a more concealed London, one only known or accessible to the initiates.

The theme "challenging communication research" was knowingly left to be interpreted in many different manners. Theme Chair Leah Lievrouw (U of California – Los Angeles) will make sure that the theme brings us to new, uncharted territories that properly challenge our ways. Plenary sessions are being planned with the aim to feature outstanding personalities whose presentations will resonate with the British context of communication research and  its history and will contribute to the development of the field at large. 

The conference will take place at Hilton Metropole, in the North of central London, on Edgware Road. If you are into maps, the GPS coordinates are 51.5192,-0.1697 or 51° 31' 9.4152" N; 0° 10' 10.8551" W. It is very conveniently served by four metro lines and is just around the block from Paddington train station with express service to Heathrow, London's main international airport (Europe's busiest airport), and also to Oxford. Within a ten minute walk are Hyde Park and Oxford Street, Little Venice and Madame Tussaud’s Museum. The British Library is just four metro stations away, next to St-Pancras station where high-speed trains offer direct service via the Channel tunnel to Brussels (in 2 hours) and Paris (2 hours 20 minutes). The room rate negotiated by ICA Executive Director Michael Haley is 115 GBP (about 180 USD) which, for a Hilton in central London in June is simply incredible, not to mention that it includes full breakfast and, possibly, access to the internet.

The conference venue will be somewhat challenging because we will be using every single conference room in the hotel, and those are distributed in different areas, thus making the task of going from one room to another a little more tedious than usual. Together with the Hilton staff, we are preparing innovative and efficient ways to remedy this.  A large part of the conference rooms will have undergone a major refurbishing by then, and many of them have windows. The lobby of the hotel will also be completely overhauled.

Though the overall format of the an ICA conference tends to be fairly stable, new concepts or formats are tried every year, largely based on the feedback received in the postconference evaluation survey. Because the survey is still underway at the time of publishing the current issue of the Newsletter, it is not yet possible to list all changes and innovations that will be implemented in London. It is very likely that the Master Class format will be less limited to research and expanded to teaching and pedagogy.

Because so many stakeholders of communication research are present in and around London, we are expecting that many preconferences will be organized. Allow me to repeat once more that outlines of proposals for preconferences must be sent to me by the 1st of September. The call for papers, panels and sessions will function on the usual calendar: the full call for papers will be available online starting 1 August, with the paper submission system opening for submissions on 1 September.