ICA has been part of my scholarly life since I was a graduate student, and, if elected, I'd like to replicate its centrality in my development as a scholar for others.

My goals for ICA are twofold - internal familiarity and external visibility. In mapping their realization, I follow the lead of the many remarkable people who have led the organization thus far. Let me tell you a bit about myself and what my goals as president would be.

I'm the Raymond Williams Professor of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communication; I also head its Scholars Program in Culture and Communication. After working in the Middle East as a wire service reporter, I earned my PhD in 1990. I've been active in ICA for nearly 25 years, serving as Chair of the Popular Communication Division (and helping it earn divisional status), as an active member of the Journalism Studies Division, Mass Communication Division and Philosophy of Communication Division, as chair (twice) of the ICA Awards Committee and Best Book Award Subcommittee, and as member of the Research Committee, Nominations Committee, Publications Committee, and the Young Scholar Award Subcommittee. I've also served on the editorial boards of three ICA journals - Journal of Communication, Communication Theory, and the new Communication, Culture, and Critique.

ICA needs to take two quantum steps forward - making its members more familiar to one another and more visible to the public. Doing so means drawing more fully from our diverse experiences and knowledge base. It also requires making explicit what has at times remained in the background - often neglected connections across divisions and interest groups, uneven attention to geographic diversity and multiple national identities, insufficiently articulated public interest. ICA has taken some action in all of these arenas, but my hope is to facilitate the development of platforms where we can speak forcefully, broadly and authoritatively about communication in all of its relevant arenas. This involves addressing three questions - who are we, where are we and what are we?

Who Are We? The sustenance of our field depends on our recognition of how different we can be from each other and yet still retain a core called communication. Growth in the form of new interest groups and divisions is critical, but the field's integrity depends on its members knowing what other people in the field are doing. Incentives for cross-divisional conversation already exist, such as theme panels or co-sponsored plenary sessions, but we can do more to get us talking with one another. We can think about panels incorporating scholars across divisions and interest groups or debates on core questions in the field. We all profit from the different projects undertaken in the name of communication, but we need to know about them first.

Where Are We? ICA needs to live up more to its claim of internationalism. Regional conferences, strategic cooperation with IAMCR, and the multi-lingual capability of our website are important moves. But we can also consider reviewing conference submissions in languages besides English, with greater translation capabilities made available at the annual meetings, as well as facilitating more varied committee composition, travel scholarships, membership fees and selection of conference sites. The establishment of organizations like AMIC, NORDICOM and most recently ECREA points to communication's growing regional relevance, and we need to connect more fully to these regional initiatives. Organizing a logistic database of regional and national communication organizations around the world - paralleling IFCA's efforts -- would help address the opportunities and dangers of globalization that so integrally touch our field.

What Are We? Addressing the first two questions will better situate us to communicate to those outside of the organization what ICA is all about. The establishment of a press office that distributes press releases of key conference presentations in advance of the conference and webcasts some of its sessions, development of ties with specific news organizations, such as C-Span and SCOLA, and better links to organizations like the United Nations and the Erasmus Mundus Foundation, will all help us more effectively reach beyond the confines of the academy. The voices of ICA belong in contemporary public debates, and I hope to make that happen with greater ease, regularity and impact.

I am eager and ready to address these questions because they draw from notions of communication consonant with my own trajectory - both academic and practical, international and locally situated, eclectic and focused. My research is highly interdisciplinary, focusing on journalism, culture and collective memory, with an emphasis on images in times of crisis. I have authored or coedited seven books, one of which, Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory Through the Camera's Eye, won ICA's first Best Book Award. The others are Almost Midnight: Reforming the Late Night News; Covering the Body: The Kennedy Assassination, the Media and the Shaping of Collective Memory; Visual Culture and the Holocaust; Journalism After September 11; Taking Journalism Seriously: News and the Academy; and Reporting War: Journalism in Wartime. I've published some 70 articles and book chapters and delivered over a hundred invited lectures to national and international social science research councils, humanities commissions, academic departments, and research centers. My scholarship has been translated into eight languages, I've lectured in over a dozen countries, and my media criticism has appeared in The Nation, The Jim Lehrer News Hour, Newsday, News Photographer Magazine, Nieman Reports, National Public Radio, and Radio National (Australia). I have received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Freedom Forum Research Fellowship, a Fellowship and Goldsmith Research Award from the Kennedy School's Shorenstein Center at Harvard University, a Fulbright Senior Specialist award, and numerous top paper awards from both ICA and NCA. I have been active in the task forces and committees of NCA and AEJMC, and so have the contacts necessary to facilitate inter-organizational cooperation. I co-edit (and co-founded) the journal Journalism: Theory, Practice, and Criticism, and I recently edited a special edition of Political Communication on "New Ways of Thinking About Journalism." In addition to ICA journals, I serve on the editorial boards of 13 international journals, including Critical Studies in Media Communication, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, International Journal of Communication, Cultural Sociology, Popular Communication, Journal of Holocaust Studies, Memory Studies, and Journal of Global Mass Communication.

If elected, I bring a well-grounded and broad familiarity with the discipline, a rich acquaintance with other disciplines, a life experience that has been enriched by many years working as a journalist in the Middle East, 25 years of wide-ranging service to the association, and a profound respect for communication and its considerable relevance to the facilitation of global dialogue.