In each Newsletter leading up to the conference, we will highlight a few of the exciting preconferences that have been planned for Phoenix. This month, learn more about "Borders, Migration, and Community"; "The Political Communication Graduate Student Workshop"; "Historiography as Intervention"; and "Media Research in Transnational Spheres."

Borders, Migration, Community: Arizona and Beyond

Time: Thursday, 24 May 9:00 – 16:30
Location: Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, Arizona State U located at 555 N. Central Avenue, Phoenix AZ 85004, less than one block from the Sheraton Phoenix Downtown Hotel. (Cronkite Theater)
Limit: 75 persons
Cost: $100.00USD (Includes Lunch)

Organized by the Ethnicity and Race In Communication, Feminist Scholarship, Popular Communication, Global Communication and Social Change, and Philosophy of Communication Divisions and the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Special Interest Group.

For many of us, ICA's presence in Arizona raises difficult concerns in the wake of the state’s newly passed – and fiercely contested – anti-immigration law, SB 1070, which, as critics argue, legitimizes racial profiling but, as polls indicate, enjoys broad support among voters in Arizona and beyond. Members from several of ICA’s scholarly sections articulated these concerns in a variety of ways – some proposed a boycott of the Phoenix conference as a form of political protest; others pointed to opportunities for intellectual discovery and dialogue that our concerns collectively highlighted. This preconference emerged from these discussions, and reflects the joint efforts of six scholarly sections within ICA: Ethnicity and Race in Communication; Feminist Studies; Global Communication and Social Change; the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Interest Group; Philosophy of Communication; and Popular Communication. The event is cosponsored by all six sections.

The preconference brings together scholars, artists, and political activists working on issues of borders, immigrants, and community. Our interest in these issues is at once scholarly and political, and the preconference is geared to three ends: (i) to explore the cultural, discursive, and communicative contexts and implications of regimes of border control and migrant rights; (ii) to examine international echoes of these struggles as they take heterogeneous form and spur polyglot resistances across the world; and (iii) to engage in dialogue with oppositional voices (within Arizona, the United States, and beyond) that represent a range of grassroots mobilizations and popular expressions organized variously against ethno-racial repression/discipline and toward building political and civic community.

Drawing thematic links to the 2012 conference theme, "Communication and Community," the preconference is geared to careful examinations of community devastation, decline, and dissolution in the context of neoliberal capital and global labor flows that make boundaries more permeable and borders more policed. Inviting a range of voices – activists, advocates, artists, and scholars – the preconference convenes a rich and rigorous dialogue between scholars and practitioners about discursive notions of home and place, xenophobia and nativism, cosmopolitanism and subalternity, and so on. Our hope is that these discussions will facilitate careful interrogations of the role we as scholars of communication can play in critiquing contemporary apparatuses of ethno-racial rule, but also in learning from and participating meaningfully in ongoing struggles over community, civic responsibility, and citizenship.

We also wish to acknowledge the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, Arizona State U, and Dean Christopher Callahan for their generous support in hosting our preconference.

Political Communication Graduate Student Workshop

Time: Wednesday, 23 May and Thursday, 24 May 9:00 – 17:00
Location: U of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona
Limit: 50 persons
Cost: Student: $100.00 USD (Includes breaks and lunch, transportation to the conference in Phoenix on 24 May)

Please note: This preconference is not held at the Sheraton and is only open for graduate students who submitted their work for consideration. It is being held at the U of Arizona campus in Tucson, AZ.

The preconference goals include providing guidance, feedback, and professional socialization to political communication graduate students at the master's and doctoral levels, introducing graduate students to ICA and inviting them to take part in the academic discourse on political communication through ICA, and cultivating a network among young political communication scholars. To achieve these goals, the preconference will bring together a select group of graduate students working on political communication projects and provide them with the opportunity to present and discuss their projects in a constructive atmosphere. The preconference will also address common issues graduate students face, including working toward publication and building a CV. The event will take place at the U of Arizona in Tucson.

Historiography as Intervention: Communicating Across Geographies, Communities, and Divides

Time: Thursday, 24 May 8:30 – 17:30
Location: Phoenix Sheraton Downtown Hotel
Limit: 100 persons
Cost: $ 100.00USD (Includes morning and afternoon refreshments, lunch on your own)

Sponsored by the Communication History Special Interest Group

Anna Everett to speak

Writing histories can engage in contemporary struggles and change the way we see the world and its possibilities. The past provides tools, warnings, solutions, and mistakes. This ICA preconference convenes communication scholars pursuing historiographic work and historians addressing communication-related areas. Engaging communicative acts and Communication as a scholarly field, this preconference addresses established and vibrant areas of historic inquiry as well as neglected areas needing appraisal, including historiographic methods and/or historic data, theories or subject matter that suggest tools, offers insight, or communicates information with the potential for impact on contemporary society. The preconference will also feature invited speakers from across fields.

Tentative Schedule (Subject to Change):

8:00 a.m.-8:30 a.m.: Arrival and Setup
8:30 a.m.-8:45 a.m.: Welcoming Remarks
8:45 a.m.-10:00 a.m.: Invited Discussion:

What Counts as Communication History? From media technologies to social interactions, from visual culture to information networks, how do we define the history of communication, both as a phenomenon and scholarly field? This panel debates conceptual definitions and limitations, as well as examines what and who can be excluded – and constituted – through acts of definition and historicization.

Panelists will include Norma Coates, U of Western Ontario; Robert McChesney, U of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; and David Serlin, U of California, San Diego.

10:00-10:10 a.m.: Break
10:10 a.m.-11:25: Roundtable 1:

Weighing the Past, Projecting a Future: Practicing Critical Communication History In Dangerous Times

Focusing on the practice of critical historical communication research, this panel reflects on the historical and political conditions that have motivated and inspired their inquiries, theoretical foundations, methods and goals. What constitutes "critical" or "radical" communication history? How do our political commitments inform our work at the intersection of communication, culture, politics, and history? How do we understand our formation as scholars and/or activists, including the historical forces that have shaped the substance of our work, our sense of self, and our theoretical, methodological, and political commitments? What are the responsibilities of critical communication historians as activists, public intellectuals and citizens? Featuring:

• Janice Peck, "Critical Historical Research as the Negation of the Past in the Name of the Future"
• Inger Stole, "From Culture Shock to Scholarly Pursuit"
• Jason Loviglio, "NPR and 'The Great Moving Right Show'"
• Carol Stabile, "The Personal is Historical: Feminist Media Studies, Historical Materialism and Experience"
• Steve Macek, "'A Good Dose of Tear Gas': On the Dialectical Connection Between Critical History and Radical Activism"

11:25 a.m.-12:40 p.m.: Roundtable 2:

Counterhistories, Contradictions, and Contestations: Recovering the Past to Remake the Present

Across diverse sites and perspectives, this panel examines how recovering lost, neglected, or unknown pasts can intervene with our understandings of contemporary culture, issues, and debates. Featuring:

• Mariano E. Navarro and Jose Luis Ortiz, "Magical Towns vs. Middletown: Reassessing Tepoztlan’s Place in Communication Historiography"
• Ben Peters, "Technological Utopianism in Early Soviet Networks"
• Alison Trope, "Another Side of Hollywood: Locating the Roots of Hollywood Philanthropy"
• Terra Eggink, "Of Pre and Post, Human and Non: The Case of Animal Trials"
• Fred Fejes, "The Fort Lauderdale LGBT Community: Real and Imagined"
• Abiodun Salawu, "'Not Iwe Irohin but Umshumayeli': A Revisit of the Historiography of the Early African Language Press"

12:40 p.m. -1:40 p.m.: Lunch and Interactive Screening Exhibit:

Retelling or Recalling?: Generating a Counterhistory of CBC Artspots

Get a hands-on experience with this Mary Elizabeth Luka and her rough-cut documentary, made using Korsakow System software for interactive, nonlinear database films. CBC Artspots was a decade-long national public television and internet-based program rooted in collaborative cultural production, influenced by historic artist interventions on television; and incorporating contemporary discussions of identity politics. Over 300 visual artists and 1,000 volunteers produced 1,200 short interview-based, experimental videos about artwork and artists, and six long-form documentaries about Canadian arts. Ceasing production in 2008, this collection of multiplatform, public broadcast productions on the fine arts—the largest to date in Canada—is being archived by the CBC. Most materials are no longer accessible to the general public or creators. This documentary's semistructured, reflexive interviews with Artspots participants and nonparticipants will begin documenting counterhistories of this 10-year display of visual culture on television and the internet, closely examining the potentially totalizing narrative of Artspots as early 2000s convergence culture in North American public broadcasting.

1:40 p.m.-2:55 p.m.: Roundtable 3:

Praxis in Pluralistic Fields: Engaging Transdisciplinarity

The study of the past and the writing of history cut across numerous disciplines. This panel stages encounters between sites as diverse as aesthetics and cartography to provoke richer understandings of how we and others can critically engage with the past. Featuring:

• Vicki Mayer, "Placing Everyday Culture: Lessons from MediaNOLA"
• Peter Schaefer, "Why is 'Ether' in the 'Ethernet'?"
• Carolyn Kane, "Cool Pinks and Hot Blues: Bridging Genealogies of Warm–Cool Color"
• Lauren M. Bratslavsky and Benjamin J. Birkinbine, "(Re)Discovering the Analog: Investigating Archives in the Age of Digitization"
• Josh Lauer, "Against Progress: Media Archaeology and Historical Representation"
• Christopher A. House, "Religious Rhetoric(s) of the African Diaspora: Using Oral History to Study HIV/AIDS, Community, and Rhetorical Interventions"

2:55 p.m.-4:05 p.m.: Roundtable 4:

Policy and Priorities: From Insights to Action

How can history contribute to debates on public policy? This panel presents diverse examples of policy-related research to spur thinking on what communication scholars and historians can offer in the shaping of contemporary policy. Featuring:

• Stephanie Ricker Schulte, "The Singularity: Solving and Scapegoating History"
• Michael Dick, "A Case for Historiographic Innovation: Interrogating the Narratives of the Federated Social Web Initiative"
• Yasuhito Abe, "Historicizing the Fukushima Nuclear Crisis in Japan"
• Mandy Troger, "Free Markets for Free Media? Learning from U.S. Media Policies in Post-WII Germany"
• Aharon Ariel Lavi, "The Price of Thinking Ahead: Lessons From the Israeli case of the Commission for Future Generations (2001-2006)"
• Ryan Ellis, "The Premature Death of Electronic Mail: The United States Postal Service’s E-COM Program, 1978-1984"

4:05 p.m.- 4:15 p.m.: Break

4:15 p.m. - 5:30 p.m. Featured Lecture: Anna Everett, Professor of Film and Media Studies, U of California, Santa Barbara

Preconference Organizers: D. Travers Scott, Clemson U, and Devon Powers, Drexel U. Contact: D. Travers Scott, dscott3@g.clemson.edu

Media Research in Transnational Spheres

Time: May 24, 2011, 11.00 – 17.00 (open for registration) 
Location: Phoenix Sheraton Downtown Hotel (ICA Conference Hotel)
Limit: 50 persons
Cost: $50.00 USD

Transnational media research has a long history in our discipline. However, over recent years our methodological paradigms have been severely challenged. Transnational research is, on one hand, faced with the methodological 'mapping' of a new territory of communicative spaces as crucial spheres of trans-border public communication, on the other, with a need to critically investigate these emerging terrains through methodical approaches which often still consider the nation as the core ‘unit’ of analysis.

This preconference aims to serve as a 'workshop' for reflecting these challenges and for identifying new methodological approaches as well as frameworks for quality measures and benchmarks.

The preconference brings together speakers from various international regions, from Asia, Australia, Europe, Israel, and the US. The preconference is open to anyone who is interested in these much needed debates.

Chair: Ingrid Volkmer, University of Melbourne, Australia

Program

11.00 - 11.15 Rethinking Transnational Research (Ingrid Volkmer, University of Melbourne)

11.15 - 12.45

• Klaus-Bruhn Jensen, University of Copenhagen, Denmark, "Lost, Found and Made: Global Data Flows for the Study of Local Communications"
• Gerard Goggin, University of Sydney, Australia, "Studying Global Internets: Media Research in the New World"
• Kai Hafez, University of Erfurt, Germany, "The Methodology Trap: Why Theory is Rather Adynamic in Transnational Media Research"
• Cees Hamelink, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands,  "Policy and Theory for Global Communication: Just Friends?"

12.45 - 13.00 Break

13.00 - 14.30

• Andreas Hepp & Nick Couldry, University of Bremen and Goldsmiths-University of London, UK, "Analysing Cultural Complexity: For a Multilevel Approach"
• Umi Khattab, University of the Sunshine Coast, Queensland, Australia, "Methodological Pluralism: Interrogating Ethnic Identity and Diaspora Issues in Southeast Asia"
• Saskia Witteborn, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, "Virtual Localities: Forced Migrants and New Media Practices"
• Maria Hellman, University of Stockholm, Sweden, "Emerging Transnational News Spheres in Global Crisis Reporting?"

14.30 - 16.00

• Anna Godfrey, Emily LeRoux-Rutldege, BBC World Service Trust, London, UK, "'Africa Talks Climate': Comparing Audience Understanding of Climate Change"
• Kavitha Abraham-Dowsing, BBC World Service Trust, London, UK, "What is Governance? Citizens’ Perspectives on Governance in Sierra Leone and Tanzania"
• Akiba Cohen, Tel Aviv University, Israel, "Parochialism and Cosmopolitanism in Global Television News Broadcasts"
• Lisa Parks, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA, "Footprints of the Global South"

16.00 - 17.00

• Katharine Sarikakis, University of Vienna, Austria, "Global Media Policy Research: returning to Grand Theory?"
• Oliver Boyd-Barrett, Bowling Green State University, USA, "Researching Global Media: A Research Agenda Conclusion"