Without question, communication research is thriving, and so is ICA. But who outside of our community of scholars really cares? President Obama’s communication director used to be an actor and now is a lawyer. Chancellor Angela Merkel’s communication director was a news anchor. I cannot say much about the career training or professional backgrounds of the communication staff members who advise Russian President Vladimir Putin, President Hu Jintao of China or Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, but I would be willing to bet that none of them were trained in communication research.

I am not arguing that these communication directors are incapable of performing their jobs. However, I do wonder why our discipline, with decades of research about the ways in which people communicate and interact with each other (with or without the media), has not been identified as a clear path for those seeking such careers. I also worry that so few people from outside our field really care about what we have to say: It seems to me that our discipline lacks the impact that it could and should have both inside the academy and beyond. Certainly, communication as an academically established discipline is relatively young and hasn’t had as much time to develop as more traditional social sciences, let alone the humanities. But don’t we deal with the problems that currently move the world? People from around the globe are now connected more closely than ever before and it seems to me that no important problem can be addressed without communicating across national, cultural, or ethnic boundaries. Yet, whether interpersonal or international, mass or computer-mediated, intercultural or intimate, this communication takes place without seeking advice from those who claim to be and who I think in fact are experts in it. Could part of the problem be our own reluctance to leave the lab or the library, our constant striving to produce the most rigorous and flawless research, so that we do not want to compromise by engaging with the banality of reality? I want our research to matter, in the short-term and the long-term. Not that we necessarily need to produce research to answer immediate questions, but we should keep in mind what the real problems are and to try to use our research results in order to tackle them.

Mass and political communication of course play a major role as our societies need to be able to understand each other. But so do computer-mediated interpersonal communication, international and intercultural communication, entertainment research, and health communication, to name just a few. Every year at our annual convention, I am truly impressed by what our field has revealed about all these forms of communication but I am puzzled that so few leaders, institutions, and regular people from the outside seem to listen. And this appears to be the case now more than ever before: It’s trivial to state that our daily way of communicating with each other, particularly with digital media, has fundamentally changed over the past few years, yet we seem not to be in a position to reflect on these fundamental changes and to inform the various stakeholders what this means for us, for our communities, for our children now and particularly in the future. As Calhoun most recently has put it: “The field literally studies ways in which the world is made.”

However, I am afraid that so many do not listen to what we say because the discipline is so fragmented. I don’t mean to lament the diversity of the field, but rather the fact that there is little communication about communication between the various perspectives and the different parts of the world where the work is done. We are fragmented within various national contexts, where we have quantitative and qualitative, social scientific and humanistic approaches, to strive either to understand or explain the most pressing problems but apparently almost never both at the same time. And we are fragmented between national contexts where there seems to be a one-way street of influencing and energizing research agendas that usually originate in the US, less frequently in Europe and Australia, and rarely in Asia, Latin America or Africa. I wonder whether the fact that we cite the work of other disciplines (psychology, sociology, political science) more systematically than they cite our work is also an indication of this state of the discipline.

ICA is supposed to be a truly international organization, yet it’s run primarily by one part of the international community. They have certainly done a wonderful job, making ICA as strong as it is today. And the fact that most officials at ICA, whether as editors of our journals, chairs of most of our divisions and committees, or fellows or organizers of ICA are located either in the US or, less frequently, in Europe or Australia, is a consequence of the organization’s history. But in this sense, ICA’s leadership does not reflect the membership, almost half of which is from outside the US. I certainly do not believe that this is about doing communication research better or worse. But I have come to learn that people around the world do communication research differently. After studying at the University of Heidelberg, NYU and the University of Michigan, and working at the University of Toronto, the University of Music, Theater, and Media in Hannover, Germany, at the USC Annenberg School for Communication in Los Angeles, at the VU University in Amsterdam and now at the University of Mannheim in Germany, I have been amazed by the array of perspectives the scholars from these different institutions and in these different countries take when they study communication problems. I am convinced that I will have still more to learn, as will all of us in the discipline, as we become more familiar with the theories and research developed in Asia, Latin America, and Africa. I do believe that a true internationalization, or better, globalization of communication research is yet to come. For me, it’s about bringing together the various theoretical and methodological roots of our discipline which are represented differently in various parts of the world and in different cultures and sub-cultures, in order to inform each other and to learn from each other. As we bring our field under a more cohesive international umbrella, the fragmentation of approaches to communication research will become less relevant. Perhaps even more importantly, such a change will encourage more of a shared identity amongst communication scholars and thus encourage us and others to care more about our field at large. I believe that there are too many boundaries within our discipline that keep us from conducting unique, collaborative and transformative research. National and cultural background is one of the biggest, which is a shame because as communication scholars we should actually be much better at communicating with anyone and everyone.

In my view, ICA should be a place where we transcend those boundaries. For this, we need to represent the world not only on ICA’s Board of Directors but also, for example, among the editors of our journals. As editor of Media Psychology (2005-2008), I became aware of how difficult it is for scholars who do not come from an English-speaking background to get their manuscripts accepted. This is not because their research is of any lesser quality, but because reviewers and editors alike are more critical when they review a manuscript that is without any obvious mistakes but one that is written in a way that displays some awkwardness in style. We should certainly embrace the fact that English has become our lingua franca, but I am sure that a better representation of non-native speakers among editors, reviewers and also representatives on the various ICA boards and committees would increase the sensitivity to the issue of geographic diversity of authorship in our journals. And I have every hope that a more globalized discipline would be more heard and sought after outside the field.

Here are a few examples how I envision a more globalized ICA:

• Support communication research in developing countries through stipends for scholars who would like to participate in exchange programs. These could also help facilitate the founding of new communication departments by providing those who’d like to take on this task with expertise from others who have had the experience.
  
• Create a “Communication Matters-Prize” for those who develop innovative, substantial and conclusive answers to the most pressing human, social, and/or political problems of our time.
  
• Vitalize and energize our connection and collaboration with the UN and its various divisions (UNHCR, UNICEF, UNESCO, etc.) through research on the organization’s communication-related projects.

Where would I like ICA to be at the end of my term? I envision an organization that embraces a globalized perspective, that looks at questions and uses theories and methods that are developed wherever communication research takes place around the globe, to do fundamental as well as applied research that relate to the most relevant and pressing issues we currently face.

Image courtesy of the U of Mannheim