After our very successful 2011 conference, preparations for our 2012 conference in Phoenix are now in full swing. Along with our Executive Director Michael Haley, I visited Phoenix in March to get a sense of the location and the opportunities and challenges the site presents.
The conference will be held 24-28 May 2012 at the Phoenix Sheraton Downtown, a new hotel that is located adjacent to a large convention center. The hotel offers many amenities and advantages for our members, including a very reasonable room rate ($115 USD), free wi-fi available in all the conference rooms, several types of meeting rooms that will enable different type of formats, public meeting spaces, and enough rooms so that most of our members can stay at the conference hotel. The Westin, located within a block, is our overflow hotel. Phoenix's light rail provides quick (20 minutes), easy (direct form airport to hotel) and cheap (about $3 USD) access to the hotel and many of Phoenix's museums and points of interest. The area surrounding the hotel has a fair number of restaurants and the city and its environs offer many interesting possibilities for preconference and post-onference meetings.
Given the controversy surrounding Phoenix as the selected conference site, I have met with the local arrangements committee, including Majia Holmer Nadesan (Arizona State U West), Amira De La Garza (Arizona State U) and Diane Rutherford (The Arizona Republic) to address many of the issues that were raised at the last two ICA board meetings and in discussion with ICA members. We are in the process of planning some (hopefully) exciting and provocative events for our members that explore the relevant issues both locally and globally.
The conference theme for the Phoenix conference, "Communication and Community," was chosen specifically to enable ICA to address our discipline's role in the study and understanding of community and the controversies surrounding contemporary events like those in Phoenix and throughout the world. Along with the conference theme chair, Patricia Moy (U of Washington), we hope to create a conference program that a) explores the role of communication in the constitution, development, maintenance and dissolution of community; b) addresses the normative, ethical, methodological and theoretical challenges of emerging notions of community; and c) examines the ways in which communities (including our own academic community) address the tensions, contradictions, and dualities of community convergence/divergence and fragmentation/integration.
Communication scholars across ICA Divisions and Interest Groups are well positioned to articulate the multilevel dynamics of community and to engage various communities in our work. To integrate our theme more fully into our conference and recognize the outstanding divisional contributions that are being presented we will be giving top theme paper awards to a select group of papers in addition to featuring cross-divisional papers, collaborative projects, and miniplenaries in specially identified theme panels.
A series of interdivisional debates addressing critical contemporary issues of "Communication and Community" are being planned, as well as series of special events focusing specifically on our regional communities. Based on feedback from ICA conference attendees, new session formats are being designed to further attendees' active engagement in the intellectual debates and emerging research, pedagogical, and professional paradigms across our field. For example, I have instituted an extended session for all Divisions and Interest Groups for the Phoenix conference. Panel planners are urged to use this 2.5-hour slot in new and creative ways, including sessions comprised of working papers and feedback; town hall debates about critical issues in the Division; visual and performance sessions that enhance traditional presentations; bringing in local NGOs, schools, or other community groups to interact directly with conference participants, etc. At our planning session in May, conference planners were very interested in new ways of "conferencing." We all look forward to seeing the results of their efforts in these extended sessions.
We will continue to tweak and experiment with new opportunities in the enormously successful Virtual Overlay component of the conference that Larry Gross began in Boston. Larry and the staffs at Wiley and ICA did a superb job putting on this complex technological/conference experiment. We have learned a great deal from the experience and the immediate feedback we have thus far received. This feedback, along with the results of our conference online survey, a twitter survey to those who participated in the very active tweeting during the Boston conference, and a detailed survey and analysis of user input from Wiley will hopefully help us make next year's virtual conference even better, more accessible, and more engaging.
The Phoenix conference is also an opportunity for ICA to implement many of the ideas our membership and internationalization committees have developed for enhancing our sense of community for first time attendees and those coming from nations that have not previously been well represented at ICA. We will be developing a newcomer's guide for navigating the conference along with several other initiatives including pre- and postconferences that address scholarly and professional concerns.
Overall, the plans for ICA Phoenix are progressing well. Panel planners and board members have been highly receptive to the innovations that are being proposed. I continue to welcome any ideas for plenary speakers or special events for the Phoenix conference. Planning the conference is truly a community effort.
