Eight preconferences have been scheduled in Montreal on May 21, the day immediately preceding the ICA Conference, and its opening day of May 22, 2008. Six will take place at the Le Centre Sheraton, site of ICA's conference; the other two will take place on the campuses of nearby universities.

Following are brief summaries of each of the preconferences; more information can be found at the ICA website (http://www.icahdq.org). The April and May issues of the Newsletter will feature closer looks at each of the preconferences.

PRECONFERENCE # 1: The Long History of New Media: Contemporary and Future Developments Contextualized

Thursday, May 22, 9:00 am - 5:00 pm
McGill U

Cosponsored by the ICA Communication History Interest Group and New Media & Society.

This ICA preconference explores the historical dimension of new media with regard to theoretical foundations, methodological approaches, and contemporary developments. The historical dimension of these facets of new media scholarship is all too often inadequately addressed. The purpose of this preconference, then, is to bring together scholars with a common interest in exploring the historical contextualization of new media. This purpose is situated within a wider celebration of the 10th anniversary of New Media & Society as a leading journal for scholarly exploration of new forms of mediated communication. This anniversary will culminate in a special issue of the journal drawing from papers submitted to this preconference.

PRECONFERENCE #2: Mediating Global Citizenship

Wednesday, May 21, 9:00 am - 8:00 pm; Thursday, May 22, 9:30 am - 3:00 pm
Le Centre Sheraton

Cosponsored by the ICA Philosophy of Communication, Global Communication & Social Change, and Political Communication Divisions, and The Center for Global Communication Studies, Annenberg School for Communication, U of Pennsylvania.

As media deliver not only images of 'the world' but epistemological and ontological notions of world construction in new fragmented highly individualized spaces of mediation, it is timely to debate and critically assess not only 'cultures of difference' but reflect these in the perspective of an integrative conceptual framework of global citizenship. The preconference will discuss these approaches and attempt to identify parameters of global citizenship as a mediated form.

PRECONFERENCE #3: What is an Organization? Materiality, Agency, and Discourse

Wednesday, May 21 and Thursday, May 22, 9:00 am - 5:00 pm
HEC Montreal, U de Montreal

Cosponsored by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, U de Montreal; HEC Montreal; ICA's Language & Social Interaction, Organizational Communication, and Public Relations Divisions; and Waikato Management School, New Zealand.

Leading international scholars from various disciplines will gather in Montreal, Canada, to discuss and debate central issues of contemporary organization theory. Obviously, the concept of an organization as primarily a social and economic reality has been challenged from many sides in the past 20 years. Critics coming from various fields of the social sciences (sociology of science, anthropology, discourse analysis, and semiotics, among others) have offered new metaphors and constructs to recast the reality of contemporary organizations in very different realms: culture and meaning, interaction and discourse, and materiality and artifacts, among others.

The work of James R. Taylor is an outstanding example of an attempt at synthesizing these various trends in a conception of organization that gives new meaning to basic concepts of organizational studies such as agency, conversation, text, and materiality. With a view to advance the discussion on the fundamental issues of the nature of organizing, agency, and text, this conference brings together the contributions of leaders in the fields of communication and organization studies in a debate convened around Taylor's work and extends it in several new directions. Keynote speakers include: Barbara Czarniawska (U Göteborg, Sweden); Bruno Latour (Institut d'Études Politiques de Paris, France); Haridimos Tsoukas (ALBA, Greece, University of Warwick, UK); Linda Putnam (U of California, Santa Barbara, USA).

PRECONFERENCE #4: The Global and Globalizing Dimensions of Mobile Communication: Developing or Developed?

Wednesday, May 21, 1:30 - 7:00 pm; Thursday, May 22, 8:30 am - 5:00 pm
Le Centre Sheraton

Cosponsored by U of Michigan, Temple U, and Telenor.

This preconference has the intention of examining the global dimensions of mobile communication. Mobile communication (both via traditional mobile telephony and via other wireless systems) is being felt on a global basis. There are, for example, currently more mobile telephones in the developing world than in the traditional industrialized countries. Thus while mobile communication has become a relatively normal part of daily life in industrialized countries, it is also becoming increasingly common in the developing world.

This means that mobile communication is truly a global phenomenon. The use of mobile communication in both developing and industrialized countries has had dramatic impact on how we communicate and how we access basic information. Through use of mobile communication we coordinate our everyday affairs, we use the technology to enhance entrepreneurial opportunities, and we have gained a way to organize assistance when it is needed. In the industrialized world, many countries have more subscriptions than they have population and in the developing world, mobile communication is morphing into an efficient way to organize remittances between guest workers and their families back home.

PRECONFERENCE #5: Remapping Public Media

Thursday, May 22, 8:00 am - 5:00 pm
Le Centre Sheraton 

Cosponsored by ICA's Communication and Technology, Communication Law and Policy, Journalism, Mass Communication, Philosophy of Communication, and Communication Divisions, and the Center for Social Media, School of Communication, American U.

This preconference examines ways to imagine public media in an open, digital environment. What makes media public in an open, digital environment? How can scholars and audiences recognize public media that is generated neither by legacy outlets nor by traditional media producers? What does a new "map" of public media look like? What new behaviors, phenomena, or connections emerge? How do traditional mass-media and digital intersect in emerging public media?

How do traditional public service media use new digital opportunities? How can effectiveness be understood, measured, depicted? What kinds of organizations, policies, and resources are needed to create not only incidents and projects but habits and archives in emerging public media? What kinds of research are needed to analyze and imagine emerging public media? This preconference will build upon the Center for Social Media's Mapping Public Media project (http://centerforsocialmedia.org/mpm), directed by CSM Research Fellow Jessica Clark. This research forms part of the Future of Public Media project, funded by the Ford Foundation and directed by CSM director Pat Aufderheide. It will showcase cross-disciplinary perspectives and conclude with discussion of a research agenda on public media in a participatory digital era of communication.

PRECONFERENCE #6: Communication and Social Change: Theory, ICTs, Media and Francophone Spheres

Thursday, May 22, 9:00 am - 6:00 pm
Le Centre Sheraton 

Cosponsored by Faculty of Communication, U du Quebec a Montreal; Departement de communication sociale et publique, Chaire Unesco-Bell en communication et développement international, GERACII, UQAM.

Following the theme "Communicating for Social Impact," the colloquium seeks to bring together the community of researchers interested in the vast domain of global communication and social change. The aim of the colloquium is to share their knowledge concerning the practices and the theories in communication and social change.

Researchers have anticipated and have also been a part in trying to understand and map out the social impact of communication both at the global and at the local level. The preconference seeks to:

1. Identify the ways through which communication theory by itself can have an impact on human action and help change local situation;
2. Map out the diverse aspects of social change through some geographical examples;
3. Reflect on the role and the impact of ICTs in society;
4. Question media as regards to globalization and hybridity.

Keynote speaker is Robert Craig, U of Colorado.

PRECONFERENCE #7: Analysing Media Industries & Media Production: An Emerging Key Area for Communication Research

Thursday, May 22, 9:00 am - 5:00 pm
Le Centre Sheraton 

Cosponsored by ICA's Popular Communication and Feminist Scholarship Divisions. This preconference brings together established and up-and-coming scholars who are examining the fundamental question of how popular communication artefacts come to take the form they do. This question involves re-examining questions of cultural production, the status of cultural industries, and their organization in light of new approaches drawn from cultural studies, feminist and critical race studies, and global studies. This is a vibrant and interdisciplinary area, drawing on sociology, cultural studies, organisational and management studies, political economy, economics, social history, cultural geography, and social theory, to name just a few. Which theories and methods are most likely to consolidate the recent success of this field of analysis? What tensions exist between the various disciplines contributing to the field and how might they best be addressed?

The preconference addresses these questions in four panels, consisting of leading speakers that represent disciplinary and geographic diversity. Each group of presentations will be followed by open roundtable discussion from all participants. The preconference is meant as an inclusive dialogue, a chance to search for points of agreement as well as clarify differences. Position papers will be posted to all participants before the conference and we will establish a blog for participants to post questions and challenges that we may address during the course of the day. Following the preconference, we expect to look to participants for next steps in considering production or industrial studies as part of the communication discipline.

PRECONFERENCE #8: Bridging Scholar/Activist Divides in the Field of Communication

Thursday, May 22, 1:00 - 5:00 pm
Le Centre Sheraton

"Communicating for social impact" requires deliberate attention to the role that scholarship plays in affecting social change. This preconference addresses the divides between research and advocacy in the field of communication, specifically in issue areas such as public health, media diversity, communication policy, global communication and Internet governance, journalism, technology usage and diffusion, and political communication.

This preconference seeks to build upon recent successes forging tighter linkages between researchers and advocates (see, for example, Robert McChesney's work via Free Press; the National Consortium for Media Policy Studies [COMPASS]; the Necessary Knowledge for a Democratic Public Sphere project at the Social Science Research Council; the Global Internet Governance Academic Network, or GigaNet; the Collective Behavior and Social Movements division of the American Sociological Association; Sociologists Without Borders; the Civil Society Practitioner Program at the Oxford Internet Institute; the post-graduate diploma in Media Advocacy being offered by the Centre for Culture; Media and Governance in New Delhi; and other organized forms of engaged scholarship), with an eye toward developing concrete solutions that could contribute to an environment in which researchers and advocates are better able to engage in mutually beneficial collaborations, and in which, ideally, the traditional distinctions that have existed between scholars and advocates can be diminished.

We encourage participation from individuals or groups in academe, journalism, industry, government, and civil society who are engaged with advocacy issues or conducting research on those issues. The goal is to coalesce a set of concrete proposals for institutional change that can lead to tighter linkages between research and issue advocacy.