President's Message: The Days Ahead
2 April , a Tuesday, was a wonderful and hopeful day. On that day countries from around the world came together and voted 154 to 3 to adopt the United Nations’ Arms Trade Treaty, a treaty regulating the international trade in conventional weapons. As a New York Times op-ed piece (12 April 2013) describes (full disclosure: it was written by my oldest daughter), this outcome was “a monumental achievement after seven years of diplomacy, lobbying and out-and-out arm-twisting.”
15 April, a Monday, was a terrible and bloody day. At least 55 people were killed in coordinated bombings and attacks in Iraq. The Boston Marathon bombing took the lives of three people and injured more than 200. In Afghanistan a bomb killed 9 and wounded 22 and in Pakistan several people were killed in a roadside bombing. These are just a few of the tragic stories in the press that dark Monday; these headlines ignore equally troubled and untold stories across all parts of the globe that happened not just on that Monday but every day.
As I read, listen, and reflect upon these types of events, irrespective of where they are happening, who is doing the reporting, the talking, the organizing, the framing, or the interpreting, the centrality and importance of communication processes are readily apparent. And yet, as much as we know and as certain as we are of the communicative constitution of our societies, our global and local politics, our families and our communities, the role that our scholarship and teaching can or should play in understanding, explaining, or helping shape these momentous events and their aftermaths is unclear, sometimes contested, and oftentimes overlooked.
Our conference in London, with its theme “Challenging Communication Research," is a fitting site to consider and interrogate the challenges events such as the ones of 15 April pose for our own scholarship, for our teaching, for our profession, and for our association. A necessary, but I would argue insufficient step is to add our expert voices to the ongoing public debates whether that be in the mass media, policy arenas, or deliberative sphere (and indeed, ICA’s Communication Director JP Gutierrez is working closely with colleagues across the globe to get our research placed and noticed across multiple media outlets). As an association we need to do more; we need to find ways to support our students, our colleagues, our institutions and our associations to engage these critical issues through both conventional and nonconventional means. We need to make stronger connections with civil society and our local and global communities. This is not easy. There are voices that question and critique, among other things, the epistemological premises associated with scholarly/civic engagement, there are groups that eschew the moral dimensions "creeping" into the objectivity of social science and our classrooms, and there are questions of how (or if we should) review, evaluate, and legitimize the blogs, Twitter feeds, and the utilization of emerging digital forms that are becoming the modus operandi for sharing our expertise and engaging in public debate and collective action.
My goal here is to add to the voices of many ICA members who have made pleas for embracing public engagement and social responsibility as forms of scholarly activity but who find little institutional or professional support. To find the means and will to support these efforts will challenge some of our most traditional assumptions about organizational structures, ethical positions, and individual responsibility. But as Robert Safian argues in another context, “We have grown up with certain assumptions about what works in an enterprise, what the metrics for success are, how we organize and deploy resources. The bulk of those assumptions are wrong now. The world in which we were raised and trained no longer exists.”
Clearly, it is already the case that across the social, physical, and biological sciences and the humanities basic assumptions about higher education and academics’ responsibilities to our global society are being challenged. In past newsletters, Larry Gross wrote of the need for a re-evaluation of the focus and mission of communication studies programs and proposed distinct directions for rethinking the role of the communication discipline. During the past year, our executive council, the ICA board and publication committees have been discussing and developing responses to the emerging demands for unrestricted and open access to our peer reviewed articles by the publics who have funded our research. Conference panels and pre-conferences are attempting to address issues of professional socialization and the changing conditions of academic employment across the discipline. As an association we are working hard to address our responsibilities to our colleagues and students throughout the world.
It is time to reconsider what other responsibilities we have to ourselves and to the global community. This means we have to confront and address messy problems that implicate ethical, practical, and political tensions inherent in our demands for theoretical and methodological rigor and our responsibility to use what we know to address the critical issues facing our communities. Communication studies are directly relevant to struggles across the globe for a better quality of life. The diplomacy, lobbying, and arm-twisting associated with that hopeful Tuesday in April were communicative acts grounded in knowledge about interpersonal, intercultural, organizational, and media dynamics and facilitated by an organizational structure that provided spaces and support for those conversations to take place. ICA needs to create institutional spaces for innovative types of engagement. The events of the past week, the past month, the past year, and the perils and promises of the days ahead demand no less of us.