Internationalization has been at the forefront of recent conversations at ICA, particularly with respect to the role of ICA in serving as a platform for international communication scholarship. Keeping the diverse membership of the organization in mind, the leadership of ICA has been particularly committed to (a) expanding the representation of scholarship from diverse international sectors, and (b) developing strategies that facilitate the publication of international scholarship. This question of international representation plays out in terms of the scholarship that gets selected and presented at the annual meetings of the ICA as well as the scholarly work that gets selected to be presented in the journals of the ICA.
The issue of internationalization calls for further dialogue among ICA membership on what exactly is internationalization and what are the appropriate strategies for internationalizing.
Let's begin with the definitional issue: What does it mean to internationalize? What makes a scholarly organization international in scope? What makes scholarship international? There are two interrelated threads here in terms of labeling the international scope of communication scholarship. First is the question of context. Scholarship might be defined as international to the extent that it focuses on an international context, including (a) studies that use cross-cultural comparisons, and (b) studies conducted in cultural contexts that are different from the cultural context of the scholar conducting the study. Second is the question of the national, regional and cultural affiliation of the scholar participating in the production of knowledge. Both of these questions are important in terms of the representation of diverse voices, contexts, and epistemologies in ICA, and call for further dialogue and debate about the meaning of internationalization for the association.
Beyond the definition of internationalization, it is worthwhile to engage in a conversation about the need for internationalization. Why internationalize? What are the pros and cons? What goals of ICA would be served by internationalization? What are the epistemological and ontological implications of geographically based disparities in the production of knowledge? Do such disparities exist in the scholarship that gets represented in ICA? If they do, is it important to address these disparities? Why? Why not? And if we generally agree that such disparities in knowledge production limit the scope of diversity in the discipline, what strategies might we adopt to address these disparities. With these questions in mind, I invite further dialogue on internationalization in the upcoming issues of the newsletter. Please send your submissions to me at mdutta@purdue.edu.
