• President's Message: 2008 Montreal Conference a Huge Success! Over 2,000 Conference Participants from 51 Different Countries
• Content Editor to Join ICA Newsletter Staff
• Livingstone Publishes First ICA Annual Report
• Angharad Valdivia Selected as Editor of Communication Theory
• 2008 Board Meeting
• 2008 Awards for the Interactive Scholar to Scholar Paper/Poster Session
• ICA Presents Annual Research Awards in Montreal
• Sandi Smith Wins 2008 Fisher Mentorship Award
• Seven New ICA Fellows Named
• Conference A Great Success-And There's More!
• Student Column: Welcome Michele, Farewell Rebecca
• News of Interest to the Profession
• Division & Interest Group News
• Calls for Papers
• Available Positions & Other Advertising

The phrases most often heard in the hallways and session rooms for our 2008 Montreal conference was that the quality of presentations was quite high and the engagement among session participants, including audience members, was among the best ever experienced by ICA conference attendees.

Not only was the quality outstanding but, with our final registration figures surpassing 2,050, our 2008 Montreal conference also was one of our best attended. We paneled 474 total sessions including paper, interactive display/poster, reception, meeting, panel, and roundtable discussions. Even with a 43% acceptance rate, the 2008 conference was our third largest conference in ICA history and our largest non-U.S. conference. Quite a lot has changed since we first expanded beyond North American borders in 1977 for the (West) Berlin, (West) Germany conference.

We now boast 43% non-U.S. membership, and 33% non-U.S. attendees for our 2008 conference. We also had 51 different countries represented in our program. In this column, I'd like to recap the 2008 conference theme, "Communicating for Social Impact," and discuss a few of the many conference highlights. There are, of course, far too many members to thank for making this such a successful conference.

Communicating for Social Impact

This theme was designed to reflect the recent questioning within ICA and other associations about the ways in which we, as a discipline and as individuals, meet society's most significant challenges. The purpose was to draw attention and bring together people interested in using our disciplinary knowledge and long-standing engagement in multidisciplinary efforts to change the world in positive ways.

As a result, our 2008 theme directs attention to the initiation and publicizing of communication research in different regions of the world through varied media endeavors and platforms. In addition, it challenges us to reflect upon and communicate the meaningfulness of our work and its translation into venues where the people who most need this research can access it.

Our theme and miniplenary sessions as well as committee/task force reports and development of new initiatives in Montreal reflected the 2008 charge. Our 2008 theme linked nicely to Sonia Livingstone's efforts to make ICA's worldwide work and affiliations transparent and productive-a charge that will continue throughout my own presidency in task forces; directives to existing committees; greater attention to our awards especially those promoting the visibility of communication in community change; and initiation of new projects. The new work will address many issues, ranging from assessment of divisional/interest practices to enhance value to our members, through creation of white papers to sort through how ICA might better react to and frame contemporary issues in which we should engage.

2008 ICA Conference Highlights

Our opening plenary featured the National Film Board (NFB) of Canada's award-winning "Filmmaker-in-Residence," an immersive multimedia social change project. Over 200 ICA members attending this opening session and many more returned from one of 8 preconferences or travels into Montreal to attend an opening reception that went well into the night! Tom Perlmutter, the Government Film Commissioner and President of the National Film Board of Canada, and Filmmaker-in-Residence producer Gerry Flahive provided an inspiring opening to our conference. We also would like to thank Andre Caron for facilitating this session and Francois Cooren and members of our local organizing committee for connecting with the NFB. As I am writing this column in June 2008, the Filmmaker-in-Residence website is receiving the prestigious Webby Award in New York City. Other entrants for the "Documentary Series" category were the M.I.T. Media Lab, PBS, and the National Public Radio.

Besides our opening plenary, the only other plenary session we included this year was our interactive paper/poster session, renamed Scholar-to-Scholar. This year, we expanded our poster displays to two levels to accommodate the 147 papers programmed to this session and to use the open atrium space with connecting elevators in Le Centre Sheraton. Scholar-to-Scholar had some of the most visually appealing research presentations ever displayed at any of our conferences. Our President-Elect-Select, Barbie Zelizer, added a new award for posters with visual appeal (see this ICA Newsletter article on award winners for this new, and our other, poster awards).

We retained the 9 am - 6 pm conference schedule instituted by Sonia Livingstone as well as the registration/book exhibit area circling around our wireless cyber cafe. Besides our book exhibitors, we also had booths showcasing the NFB; our upcoming Singapore conference in 2010; our new Encyclopedia of Communication, spearheaded by Past President Wolf Donsbach; and our first ever theme book based on the 2007 San Francisco conference theme, "Creating Communication: Content, Control, and Critique," and edited by Nico Carpentier and Benjamin de Cleen.

The morning and afternoon refreshments and free wifi access in our cyber café were greatly appreciated by attendees. Rather than having a single day for our film series, we interspersed films connected to our conference theme throughout our program.

Some new features in 2008 were the inclusion of seven miniplenary sessions scheduled at noon on Friday and Saturday. Most of these miniplenaries were packed with audience members and some had standing room only! They featured an inaugural ICA Fellows series on the future of our field and wisdom that these distinguished ICA members can provide for current and future generations. They are recapped in the next section of this column. We also hosted a reception in honor of all our plenary and miniplenary speakers-this reception was open to all conference attendees and their guests on Friday evening. It featured local foods from Quebec. The reception provided an informal but elegant conversational space in which attendees engaged in some lively discussions.

Following feedback from our last conference survey, we had recycling bins at the registration table and at other sites throughout the hotel for conference bag inserts. We also collected conference bags for redistribution since they could not be recycled.

We wanted to provide a gift from Quebec for our attendees that was uniquely Canadian and represented the atmosphere of French Canada. We hoped that you enjoyed receiving the pot of caramel in your conference bag!

Miniplenary Sessions

Let me just recap our seven miniplenaries!

• Arthur Frank discussed healing, health, and narratives in the panel, "Narrating Our Health: A Discussion with Arthur Frank." Art's presentation is scheduled for publication in the theme book, Communicating for Social Impact, scheduled for release in 2009 (Hampton Press, coedited by Lynn Harter and Mohan Dutta).
• In "Regional Communication Scholarship for Social Change," Maria do Carmo de Souzo Reis, Adriana Machado Casali, and Claudio Cardoso from Brazil; Olga Leontovich and Irina N. Rozina from Russia; and Guoliang Zhang from Shanghai Jiao Tong University in the People's Republic of China discussed the history of and current communication initiatives within governmental and institutional programs to handle issues endemic to the specific regions they represented.
• In the first Fellows session, "Projections for the Future From Reflections on the Past: A New ICA Fellows Forum on Communication, I," Annie Lang, Jim Taylor, and M. Scott Poole (facilitated by Peter Monge) described and called upon the members of our field and our associations to design, use, and publicize in a more timely fashion dynamic communication theories and methodologies as well as how we add value to multidisciplinary collaborations. In part II of our Fellows' presentations, John Daly, Cindy Gallois, and Larry Gross spoke about pressing issues, such as medical concerns, and where our research has made and can make a tangible difference.
• Emily Russo and Sean Farnel (with Christian Christensen and Jeffrey P. Jones) discussed the surge of popularity in documentary films, describing this phenomenon as a movement that has prompted major changes in multinational corporations and environmental considerations in "Beyond Moore: Considering the Resurgence of Political Documentary Films."
• Michael X. Delli Carpini, Hope Cummings, and Russell Newman addressed issues in current media debates and multi-institutional collaborations in "Linking Scholars to Communication Policymaking: The COMPASS Experience."
• Susan Nosov, Daniel Cross, and Reisa Levine (facilitated by Katherine Baulu) linked the NFB work in creating and distributing community-driven projects, documentaries, and other media materials in "Engaged, Digital, Unique-Models for Community Media Initiatives."

Theme Sessions

Past President Ron Rice initiated the theme sessions and the idea of the theme book to capture cutting-edge thinking and interventions about varied topics. In keeping with this tradition, we hosted 13 Theme Sessions in Montreal that were scattered throughout the program.

On Friday, May 23, 2008, we had four sessions: "Preparing Students to Communicate for Social Impact in Jesuit Education," "Leading Communication Associations for Social Impact: CCA (Council of Communication Associations) Address the Future of the Field," "Re-Envisioning Research Methods to Communicate for Social Impact," and "When the Internet Reaches the Villages."

On Saturday, we programmed another four sessions: "Communications Scholars as Public Intellectuals: Challenges and Responsibilities," "Communication Innovation in Conflict, Collaboration, Deliberation, and Dialogue," "Top Papers Related to the ICA Conference Theme: Communicating for Social Impact," and "Documenting and Disrupting (Dis)ability Through Film: Communicating for Social Impact."

Our five Sunday theme sessions were: "Communication in Action: Scholarly Intervention at Local and National Levels," "Convergence and Collaboration: Communication Research, Activism, and Education for the Common Good," "The Social Impact of Networking the Poor for Development," "Communicating for Social and Occupational Change: Girls and Women in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math)," and "Communicating for Social Impact in Public Discourse."

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank many more people than I can possibly list in this column. Foremost, our local planning committee was chaired by Francois Cooren and included Jim Taylor, Andre Caron, Jamie McDonald, Emilie Pelletier, and others from the University of Montreal. Vahe Kerametian, Michel Giguere, and others from Le Centre Sheraton were instrumental in helping us with everything from presentational equipment in all of our session rooms through selection of local foods, whenever possible, for our receptions and meetings.

Rather than listing all of the people involved in the design and implementation of our eight preconferences, let me simply say that the work that these individuals did to develop exciting venues for our preconferences was incredible. Not only did every single preconference we offered this year meet its registration requirements, but many exceeded projected figures. More importantly, the comments that I and others involved in the 2008 conference planning heard about the content and format of these preconferences attested to the innovative character and ideas in each and every preconference. We hope to share some insights from these preconferences in upcoming newsletters.

I would like to thank our Division/Interest Group planners for 2008 for their creation of exciting panels and events for their members, our paper readers who processed 2,617 submissions, and our 2007-2008 ICA President, Sonia Livingstone, who handled all business meetings, details, and issues with such grace and style. Her Presidential Address, "On the Mediation of Everything," was thought-provoking, aesthetically appealing, and simply fun!

Finally, the program planners for our conferences change every year. However, the people who keep everything running, who respond immediately to questions and problems, and who oversee every aspect-from working with our conference volunteers in stuffing conference bags with programs and other items of interest to handling last-minute requests deserve our gratitude: Michael Haley, our Executive Director; Sam Luna, Member Services Director and designer of our conference programs and other artistic endeavors; Deandra Harris, Member Services Associate and Office Manager; Tina Zeigler, Administrative Assistant; and Mike West, Publications Manager. Working with them has been such a pleasure!

In closing, no ICA President operates alone. We carry forward initiatives of our predecessors and look for comments and advice from all of our members. I have been blessed to be surrounded by a superb group of associational leaders, staff members, and many, many others who have volunteered generously to participate in continuing and upcoming committees and task forces for the upcoming year. I look forward to getting to know our members more in the coming year and working on issues central to the 2008 conference theme and beyond.

As I've said before in these pages, one of my goals as president was to reinstate a content editor for the ICA Newsletter - various people have undertaken this role in the past, with much success, but this has lapsed in recent years. So, to add some intellectual and communication-related content of one kind or another, I'm very pleased that Mohan Dutta has agreed to undertake this role for the coming three years, now that he has completed his term on the publication committee.

Mohan and I have discussed various possibilities in terms of content, and he'll be inviting individual submissions and series of short pieces to enrich the newsletter. These might include conference reports from international conferences around the world, analyses of key communication policy issues (e.g. privacy in social networking, or advertising and obesity, or content regulation on the internet) and updates on controversies in our field (from open access publishing to the future of mass media, the state of play in the qualitative/quantitative divide, or perhaps the growth of world English - 'globish,' it's now being called!).

Well, I won't prejudge the possibilities here, as I hope members will send many good suggestions to Mohan. And I look forward to the outcome in August.

Welcome to ICA's first Annual Report!

Initiating an annual report - for the benefit of both members and interested others - provides me with the opportunity to announce that it's been a very good year for the association. The institutional basics of great conferences, strong publications, effective organisation, sound finances and growing membership - now over 4000 members worldwide - are all in place and have been for some time. This frees us to ask, what next for ICA and how should we get there?

Many such issues were discussed in Division and Interest Group meetings, at the Board of Directors' meeting, and informally in the corridors during the recent annual conference in Montreal. And of course, as we make positive advances, new issues continue to arise; thus lively conversations about ICA's priorities and future direction are unending!

Now that my presidency is complete, I'll take this occasion to review how ICA has moved forward over the past year, following the priorities I set out in my 2005 candidate statement of internationalisation, transparency, visibility.

Internationalisation

Making ICA more international has been a priority for the association for some years, for it has required some significant structural and cultural changes. I think there are good signs that ICA is, indeed, becoming more international - in its membership, its conferences and publications and, less tangible but not less important, in its awareness of diverse modes of scholarship world wide and its ambition to bring these together constructively. Our new journal just launched, Communication, Culture, & Critique, edited by Karen Ross, is an excellent illustration of this ambition.

In the past year, the internationalisation committee has been very active, initiating a Board policy on supporting regional conferences (several of which are to be held this and next year, in Mexico City, Melbourne and Budapest - check out www.icahdq.org) and proposing the Board decision that each Member-at-Large should nominate two candidates for ICA awards each year. The board also agreed, in January, that efforts to further internationalise the association would be an agenda item for division and interest group business meetings in Montreal. Further ideas as to how to advance this agenda are most welcome.

The composition of ICA's committees this year was roughly half US scholars and half from a wide range of countries, thus over-representing international scholars when compared with membership. This balance also applied to the awards committees but, notwithstanding the best efforts of the committees and without belying the excellence of this year's recipients, I note that it is still proving difficult to encourage an international spread of award nominations. Nominating excellent scholarship for ICA awards could and should be, I urge, something for all members to undertake every now and again.

Turning to publications, the publications committee this year debated styles for manuscript submission, recognising that conventions vary by country. Although it was agreed that APA would remain the publication style, it was made clear that for those unfamiliar with APA, style should not affect publication decisions. ICA's publisher, Wiley-Blackwell has an author assistance program now in place to provide, for a fee, editorial assistance in meeting language and style requirements. Most exciting, last year's decision to translate all ICA journal abstracts into French, German, Spanish, Mandarin, and Korean is now well established. These can be accessed from both the publisher's and the journals' websites.

I've been working to increase our links with other communication associations. The newly formed European association (ECREA) has now joined ICA, as has the Spanish Communication Association, and discussions are underway with the Asian Media and Information Centre (AMIC), among others. Following a request from the International Federation of Communication Associations, the Executive Committee has agreed to provide resources, both financial and in kind, to help its efforts especially to support the formation of new communication associations in developing countries.

Some members have noticed that I work down the corridor from the current president of IAMCR! I have taken this coincidence of presidencies (!) to clarify and extend our friendly working relations with IAMCR by negotiating a formal Memorandum of Understanding (members can see this on the members' only section of the website, under 'governance'). Approved in the January board meeting, this accords IAMCR honorary Association status in ICA, meaning for example that all IAMCR members can register for ICA conferences at the members' rate, as well as encouraging more informal collaboration between our two associations.

One long-hoped-for task is now coming to fruition, namely that the ICA website should be a resource by which to locate communication associations around the world, whether or not they are formally linked to ICA. The Internationalisation Committee and others have been collecting names and urls for as many associations as possible, and Sam Luna has done a fantastic job of linking them into an interactive world map on the website. The idea is that, if you are visiting another country, or want to find information about communication scholarship outside your own country, this would be a great place to start. The list of communication associations that we have so far, while growing fast, is nonetheless incomplete and anyone reading this is invited to add to the list if possible.

Transparency

I was partly inspired to stress the importance of transparency in my election statement because, when I first stood for election, so many people asked me - but how does ICA work, who does what, how is the money spent and, most important perhaps, I don't know how to get involved. So, working closely with the ICA office, we've put a lot of effort into the website this year to improve transparency, building on the big redesign of the website in the previous year.

The Board of Directors' meeting minutes are now posted on the members' only section of the website (under 'Governance'), along with the association's budget. We hope, too, that the redesigned website makes it easier to find out what all the committees do, what task forces exist, who won previous years' awards, and more.

Since transparency doesn't only mean putting the information online, but also means helping people find it, we've introduced a Frequently Asked Questions feature, both to address questions directly and to provide convenient links to different parts of the website. The FAQs on the ICA home page should aid both members and anyone else wanting to know more about ICA, including those who might join and want to learn more first. Do check these out on the home page and, if you wish to suggest an additional FAQ, let us know and we will add it. soon to be added is a further set of members only FAQs, designed to answer specific questions about governance and participation, such as how is ICA governed, how are divisions and interest groups established, what does the board do, and how are things decided - officers, conferences, budgets, and so forth.

Beyond letting people know what ICA is up to, for example via the FAQs and the production of this Annual Report, the purpose of transparency is to facilitate accountability of officer-holders to the membership and, further, to enable more people to become more involved so as to take forward improvements and new initiatives. To this end, Sam Luna has created a social networking facility on the website to make it easier to find colleagues according to member profiles and to hold discussions in division/interest group forums. This will be most useful if all members fill out their member profile on the ICA website.

Visibility

In my election statement, I expressed concern that, although communication is well established in many countries in terms of teaching, scholarship, publication and policy, it is not always as visible as we would hope to the wider public - both the general public and the specialist publics of other academic disciplines, funding organisations and policy makers.

Some of the initiatives noted above, in terms of internationalisation and transparency, will enhance the visibility of the association and, more importantly, communication scholarship - for example, the journal abstracts in multiple languages, the annual report and the links with other communication associations. The recent expansion of ICA awards, to recognise and reward excellent work in urban communication, communication research as a collaborative practice and as an agent of social change, and the award for those outside communication who have significantly contributed to it, should also aid visibility.

Coming soon is a newly enhanced ICA Newsletter, following the appointment as Content Editor of Mohan Dutta. He will be including short articles on, for example, research from all continents, current policy debates, major conferences, ICA award winners, and more - all to promote communication scholarship. Also, ICA continues year on year to expand its range of publications - this past year has seen the first book on the annual conference theme, entitled Participation and Media Production: Critical Reflections on Content Creation and edited by Nico Carpentier and Benjamin De Cleen; and it has seen the long-awaited appearance of the 12-volume International Encyclopedia of Communication, edited by Wolfgang Donsbach.

I know that my successors, now Patrice Buzzanell and, next, Barbie Zelizer, are keen to advance the visibility of communication scholarship over the coming few years. One difficulty is that publicity is expensive: for example, it would take significant resources to appoint even a part-time press officer to promote our activities and research, though this might be of great value. Another issue - perhaps also an exciting opportunity - is the question of open access publication, for this would make communication research much more widely and easily available but at a cost to the traditional publication business model and, it might be added, to a key source of revenue for ICA. This is a fast moving issue and is now very much on ICA's agenda.

Many of the foregoing, and many other, initiatives and activities are outlined in the pages of this Annual Report. The report includes accounts of the past year's work from all ICA's divisions, interest groups, committees and task forces, as well as reports from the Fellows, the Executive Director, and more. Further information, as always, can be obtained from the website and from the Office in Washington. Don't hesitate to ask.

Finally, I warmly thank all those who have worked with me over the past year or more, and I offer my very best wishes to ICA's new president, Patrice Buzzanell, and to all those who, I know, will continue to work hard to ensure this association offers its members, and the field of communication, its very best energies and ideas in the coming year.

Angharad Valdivia has been selected to become the new editor of Communication Theory.

Valdivia is a Professor of Communication, Media Studies, Latina/Latino Studies, Interpretive Criticism, and Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Illinois. She earned her BA from the University of California – San Diego in 1982, and her Ph.D. from UIUC in 1991.

Valdivia has been a member of ICA for over 20 years and an active member of the Feminist Scholarship, Popular Communication, Philosophy of Communication, and Ethnicity and Race in Communication Divisions. She currently serves on the editorial boards of seven journals, including Communication, Culture & Critique; Popular Communication; Cultural Studies—Critical Methodologies; Critical Studies in Media Communications; Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies; Journal of International and Intercultural Communication; and The Journal of Communication Studies. She was previously a member of the editorial boards for three other communication journals.

Her own research interests lie in the combination of gender and media culture with ethnic studies, especially U.S. Latina/o and Latin American ethnicities, in an approach that explores the tension between agency and structure. Her work has included field studies in Nicaragua, Peru, Chile, Spain, and Turkey. Valdivia has authored three books, edited or coedited five more, and published 70 journal articles, chapters, book reviews, and other publications. In addition, she has given 69 conference presentations in 11 countries, including 12 ICA conferences.

Valdivia will begin accepting paper submissions for Communication Theory in July. Her official editorship will begin January 1, 2009 and will continue until December 31, 2011.

Authors should submit their manuscripts through ICA’s electronic submission process at http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/ct. The manuscript document should provide complete contact information (address, telephone, FAX, and e-mail) and brief biographical summaries (full name, highest earned academic degree, institution granting that degree, and present academic or professional title) on the title page for each author. Manuscripts must conform to the specifications of the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, 5th edition, and authors should verify that the reference list is complete and in appropriate form. Additional guidelines for manuscript preparation may be found in recent issues of the journal. Communication Theory staff will process manuscripts in a prompt and professional fashion. In order to expedite reviews and ensure quality in the review process, some manuscripts will be forwarded to an associate editor who will serve as the action editor.

The ICA Board of Directors meeting was held Thursday May 22, 2008 at the annual conference in Montreal.  Highlights of the meeting are below.  The full minutes are on the ICA website in the member’s only section. 

* The budget for 2008-2009 fiscal year was approved.  The ICA budget is available to members on the ICA website.  The budget reflect the increase in membership dues beginning in October and the increase in conference fees beginning with the Chicago conference.

* The board approved the election late for the upcoming fall election.  The candidates for President-Elect-Select: Peng Hwa Ang and Francois Cooren, for Board Member at Large representing East Asia: Youichi Ito and Eun-Ju Lee, for Board Member at Large representing West Asia: Hassan Abu Bakar and Rohan Samarajiva, and for Student Board Member: Kerk Kee and Malte Hinrichsen.  The board unanimously approved the slate.  The election will be held in September, 2008.

* The board also approved the election of six new Fellows.  The six are Sandra Ball-Rokeach, Brant Burleson, Jesse Delia, Jon Nussbaum, Patti Valkenburg, and Barbara Wilson.  They received their Fellows certificate at the ICA annual member meeting on Saturday, May 24.

* The board approved the Publication Committee recommendation of the appointment of Angharad Valdivia as editor of Communication Theory. 

* In light of the new National Institutes of Health Policy on funded research, the board publications committee recommended a change to the ICA publication policy and manual.  After debated, the board amended the original proposal and passed the following:

* The NIH has recently passed the mandatory NIH Public Access Policy (http://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/NOT-OD-08-033.html) that applies to final peer-reviewed manuscripts accepted for publication on or after April 7, 2008.  Making published research funded by NIH accessible to everyone, including health care providers, patients, educators and scientists, helps advance science and improve human health. In light of this policy, the publication committee suggests the following guideline:

Given the recently announced U.S. National Institute of Health (NIH) regulations requiring that all journal articles resulting from research supported by the NIH be posted on their publicly accessible PubMED website within 12 months of publication, ICA journals therefore will have a policy permitting NIH grantees to forward electronic copies of such articles for posting on the NIH, after a 12 month embargo, from the date of publication in an ICA publication.  Similar policy regarding public access will also be considered for scholarship funded by other international organizations on a case by case basis.

* Approval of Mohan Dutta as Editor of ICA Newsletter:  The editor would be responsible for coordinating a series of articles and would recruit series and article authors to add content to the newsletter.  The appointment is for a three year term and the publications committee will be charged with finding the new editor at the conclusion of Dutta’s term.

* ICA President Elect Patrice Buzzanell presented her committee appointments for the coming year.  The list is available on the ICA website.

* Barbie Zelizer presented the report of the divisions/interest group task force which did not favor any significant change in the structure of ICA divisions and interest groups.  It did favor increasing the signature requirement for the formation of an interest group to 1% of the membership of ICA at the end of the membership years just prior to the time of a petition.  The Board concurred with the 1% requirement.  This recommendation will appear on the fall ballot as a proposed bylaws change.

Each year, ICA gives monetary awards to the top three entries for the Interactive Scholar to Scholar Paper/Poster Session. The committee that determines the recipients include three members of the Executive Committee from ICA. This year, Sonia Livingstone, Ron Rice, and Wolfgang Donsbach had the pleasure of participating on this committee. I would like to give a special thanks to Barbie Zelizer for coordinating this award committe.

The criteria for this award included significance for the field strength of conceptualization and method, data analysis (or equivalent) and interpretation, and finally, style and presentation. The first three of these criteria were assessed ahead of time because the committee read all of the top ranked papers that had been submitted from divisions/interest groups for the Scholar to Scholar session. The fourth criteria, style and presentation, was assessed during the poster session. The 1st place award recipient receives $500, the 2nd place award recipient receives $250 and the 3rd place award recipient receives $100. I am pleased to report the recipients of these awards:

1st Place: Experimental Evidence of the Knowledge Gap: Message Arousal, Motivation, and Time Delay
Maria Elizabeth Grabe, Indiana U, USA
Narine S. Yegiyan, Indiana U, USA
Rasha Kamhawi, U of Florida, USA

2nd Place: Defoe's London: The Emerging Bourgeois Public Sphere and the Changing World of an English Merchant
Juraj Kittler, Pennsylvania State U, USA

3rd Place: Leni-Riefenstahlization of U.S. Politics? The Visual Legacy of the Bush Administration - A View From Abroad
Marion G. Mueller, Jacobs U - Bremen, GERMANY
Carola Betzold, Jacobs U - Bremen, GERMANY
Friedrich Kauder, Jacobs U - Bremen, GERMANY
Johannes Loh, Jacobs U - Bremen, GERMANY

In addition, we introduced a new award this year, the Best Visual Display Award, which was designed by our 2008 President-Elect-Select Barbie Zelizer. This award was designed to look at all of the posters in the Scholar to Scholar session with regard to aesthetic appeal and display of research. The committee was composed of Patrice Buzzanell, Purdue University; Karin Becker, Stockholm University; and Gianpietro Mazzoleni, University of Milan.

The criteria for this award included clarity, flow between sections, relationship of text to image, and visual appeal. The recipient of this award receives $100. The recipient of this award for the 2008 ICA Conference is:

Best Visual Display: "I Didn't Do Anything Important": A Pragmatist Analysis of the Oral History Interview
Kathleen M. Ryan, U of Oregon

I'd like to extend my appreciation for all of our Scholar to Scholar participants for 2008!

The International Communication Association presented seven prestigious research awards to eight communication scholars at its annual business meeting in Montreal on Saturday, May 24. Christina Slade (Macquarie U) chaired the ICA Research Awards Committee, which selected the winners. The 2008 honorees included:

• Philip N. Howard, Outstanding Book Award
• Cynthia and Michael Stohl, Outstanding Article Award
• Dale Kunkel, Applied/Public Policy Research Award
• Hee Sun Park, Young Scholar Award
• Yong Jun Shin, James W. Carey Urban Communication Award
• Arvind Singhal, Communication as Agent of Change Award
• Barry Wellman, Communication as Open Field Award

The 2008 Outstanding Book Award-for a book published in the past 2 years and distinguished by its importance to the disciplines represented in ICA for the problem it addresses, and for its quality of writing and argument, and quality of evidence-went to Philip N. Howard, Assistant Professor of Communication at U of Washington, for his work New Media Campaigns and the Managed Citizen (Cambridge University Press, 2006). "New Media Campaigns and the Managed Citizen stands out in the literature on the impact of technology on the U.S. political culture," said the Outstanding Book Award Subcommittee of the ICA Research Awards Committee. "It synthesizes a series of studies, providing extensive empirical and critical analysis with innovative methodology. "It presents compelling arguments of the institutional significance of technology in organization of political campaigns and its culture and makes important theoretical contributions. Drawing upon a wide range of literature and scholarly traditions, the book is refreshing for its substantive relevance to many areas represented in the ICA and to its members as scholars and citizens."

Cynthia and Michael Stohl, both at U of California - Santa Barbara, were selected to receive the 2008 Outstanding Article Award for their paper "Networks of Terror: Theoretical Assumptions and Pragmatic Consequences" (Communication Theory, 17(2)). The award recognizes an article published within the past 2 years in a refereed journal that is distinguished by its coherence of argument, quality of conceptual development, and effective use of evidence, especially one that promises to be influential over time. "'Networks of Terror' is timely, conceptually sophisticated and yet lucidly-written, and provides fresh understandings of networks," said the Outstanding Article Award Subcommittee. "It transcends subdisciplinary boundaries by providing clear insights into what is a broad communication issue and by being international in its scope. This article really represents communication scholarship at its best. It is theoretically sound, empirically substantiated, but also practically oriented. In other words, it really demonstrates how communication studies can be concretely relevant to address vital and urgent questions like terrorism in our contemporary world."

The Applied/Public Policy Research Award, which recognizes a scholar or group of researchers who have produced a systematic body of research in communication studying a particular applied or policy problem for the betterment of society during the previous 2 years, went to Dale Kunkel, Professor of Communication at the U of California - Santa Barbara. "Over 25 years, Professor Kunkel's research has had real impact, ranging from empirical assessments of media content that have informed federal policy through direct contributions to legislation such as the Children and Media Research Act," reported the Applied/Public Policy Research Award subcommittee. "His work has also been influential in reports to federal agencies, corporations, and foundations. Kunkel has substantially promoted public awareness of media issues implicated in human development, while advancing policy and regulatory structures in the best interests of children."

For the Young Scholar Award, given for a body of work following receipt of the Ph.D. that contributes to the field of communication and shows promise for continued development, based on the work's conceptual foundations and argumentative clarity, its rigor, and the recipient's productivity, the Awards Committee selected Hee Sun Park, Assistant Professor Communication at at Michigan State U. Hee Sun Park has firmly established herself as one of the top young scholars in the discipline, having won major research awards for her articles and publishing in our top journals," wrote Tamara Afifi, chair of the Young Scholar Award Subcommittee of the ICA Research Awards Committee. "She has published 20 articles since 2007 to the present. She has also become well known for her knowledge and use of advanced statistical techniques, which further contributes to the quality of her work."

In addition, three more awards were given to their inaugural recipients this year. The James W. Carey Urban Communication Award was given to Yong Jun Shin, a doctoral student in Mass Communications at the University of Wisconsin, in recognition of his dissertation, "Interaction Between Urban Politics and Communication Ecology: With the Case of a Local Low-Income Housing Policy." "The research project investigates the impact of mass media and Internet-driven alternative media on low-income housing policy, programming, and civic participation in a U.S. local urban community," said the subcommittee. "This work in progress is innovative and ambitious, and is based on a strong theoretical and historical foundation in both communication and urban studies."

Arvind Singhal, Professor of Communication at the University of Texas - El Paso, was selected as the winner of the 2008 "Communication Research as an Agent of Change" (CRAC) Award, which recognizes research that has a demonstrable impact on practice outside the academy, with clear benefits to the community. "Singhal's work reflects a model of how communication concepts can be used for delivering important societal issues to those publics which do not have access to scientific knowledge and its meaning in everyday life," said the CRAC subcommittee of the ICA Research Awards Committee in selecting Singhal. "This work is a model for knowledge transfer from academia to a wider public. He has played a pivotal role in applying theories to real world contexts, producing significant social changes through his work on the diffusion of innovative ways to assess media effects in developing countries. He additionally represents our discipline in important national and international agencies."

Barry Wellman, S.D. Clark Professor of Sociology and Director of NetLab at the University of Toronto, was selected to receive the 2008 "Communication Research as Open Field" (CROF) Award. The Award, of which Wellman is the inaugural recipient, recognizes researchers who have made important contributions to the field of communication from outside the discipline. "Barry Wellman's work has been very influential in media and communication research and his work on networks is becoming increasingly relevant to communication scholarship across a range of sub-disciplines," said the CROF subcommittee of the ICA Research Awards Committee. "The contribution of Wellman to media and communication scholarship is reflected in the numerous references to his work across a range of media and communication studies. Social network analysis has been used in media and communication research and has inspired numerous established and younger scholars; he has contributed to the field of communication by bringing his sociological sensibilities to the study of communication and information technology."

ICA solicits nominations for these awards through the Newsletter each spring and makes the presentations at the annual conference. The awards competition, now in its ninth year, draws numerous nominations in all categories each year.

Sandi Smith, Professor of Communication at Michigan State University, was selected to receive the prestigious 2008 B. Aubrey Fisher Mentorship Award. The Award recognizes outstanding scholars, teachers, and advisors who serve as role models in those capacities and who have had a major impact on the field of communication, by virtue both of their own accomplishments and those of their former students.

"Sandi's enthusiastic mentorship has impacted the field of communication through her students' achievements," said Franklin Boster, Chair of the Fisher Mentorship Award Committee. "Her advisees have gone on to academic positions and continue to produce and publish high quality research. In turn, her advisees have taken Sandi's model of mentorship and applied it to their own advising relationships.

"Sandi's influence as a mentor has impacted both the academy and the nation's public health through her students," Boster added. "Two of her students worked for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to lead national health campaigns. She reaches out far beyond the call of duty and sees the health, happiness, and the scholarship of all students in her department as her cause. She is truly selfless."

Smith is Director of the Health and Risk Communication Center and Professor in the Department of Communication at Michigan State University where she teaches courses in persuasion, communication theory, and interpersonal communication. Her research interests parallel these course topics and have been funded by private foundations and governmental agencies.

Dr. Smith was presented with the Award on May 24, 2008 during ICA's 58th Annual International Conference in Montreal, Canada.

At the 2008 ICA Annual Members Meeting in Montreal, Canada, on May 24, 2008, the ICA Fellows added six new members to its ranks. Fellow status in ICA is primarily a recognition of distinguished scholarly contributions to the broad field of communication. The primary consideration for nomination to Fellow status is a documented record of scholarly achievement. Secondary consideration is given to such criteria as service to the International Communication Association and socially or professionally significant service to other publics such as business, government, education, etc.

The 2008 ICA Fellows are:

Sandra J. Ball-Rokeach, Professor of Communication, Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs, The Annenberg School for Communication, University of Southern California.

Sandra Ball-Rokeach is coauthor with Melvin DeFleur of the canonical text Theories of Mass Communication along with half a dozen other authored, coauthored and edited books on media violence, audiences and social structures. Her work on the Great American Values test is well known throughout the social sciences. She has pursued various research studies on how media influence the values and behaviors of their audiences, social groups and societies. In short, she has been a prolific scholar in our field. Sandra's current research examines urban communication flows and the manner in which urban citizens use networks and mass media to connect themselves to their communities, both local and global. This work on communication infrastructure reconceptualizes the traditional view of social structure into a new perspective emphasizing the role of communication structure. The hallmark of these studies, as with all of her research, is that it is theoretically rich and empirically carefully conducted. She is a model of the behavioral research stream in our field. Sandra has given considerable service to the communication discipline as coeditor of Communication Research in the 1990s, as chair of the mass communication division of ICA, and as a member of many ICA committees. Sandra has received both Fulbright and Rockefeller Fellowships and is an elected Fellow of the American Psychological Association.

Brant R. Burleson, Professor of Communication, Purdue University.

The major focus of Brant Burleson's scholarly work has been on the role that communication plays in the provision of social support. His early work was concerned with the role that individuals' cognitive complexity and perspective taking skills played in promoting a variety of social interaction outcomes. More generally this seminal work explores the conditions under which comforting is expressed in different cultures by and towards different kinds of people. Brant has shown that social support has variable manifestations in a plethora of important relational and applied contexts. Further, he has demonstrated how and why recipients of comforting interpret and react to it in distinctive ways and, how, in turn, these produce various health-related outcomes and coping strategies. Brant has published over 100 articles in leading communication and related social science journals. His 2003 Handbook of Communication and Social Interaction Skills (with John O. Greene) is a monumental work in this domain of communication research. Brant edited the ICA Communication Yearbook from 1995 to 1997 and has served on the editorial boards of Journal of Communication and Human Communication Research. He also edited the influential Progress in Communication Sciences book series from 1989 to 1991. In multiple studies he has been ranked among the top 25 most prolific researchers in the field of communication.

Jesse G. Delia, Professor of Communication, Vice-Chancellor for Academic Affairs, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Jesse Delia has published more than 60 important scholarly articles animated by the constructivist perspective. His early research in language and speech production was innovative, trend setting, and launched a tradition of studying children's communication practices in larger contexts that brought together interpersonal and mediated communication settings. His work on cognitive complexity and constructivism represents one of the major lines of work in the field. One of many generalizations growing out of this extensive research program is that individuals who construe others in more complex ways are better able than their less complex counterparts to devise messages that take into account the perspectives of others, which in turn, is associated with the production of more sophisticated and effective messages. Jesse's work also has been influential because it stimulated interpretive research throughout the entire communication field. It became the foundation for research on comforting and social support, on message design logics, and on person-centered communication, among others. Jesse is a pioneer of the communication field who helped to set the standards for social science research during its first great growth period. Jesse's published history on the field of communication and ICA has been required reading for new doctoral students for years. Jesse has been a deeply involved member of ICA's Interpersonal and Small Group Communication Divisions. He is the recipient of many ICA top three paper awards, received the NCA Career Achievement Award, and was the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship.

Jon F. Nussbaum, Professor of Communication, Pennsylvania State University.

Jon Nussbaum is a pioneer in the study of intergenerational communication and communication across the life span. What makes Jon's career so significant is his leadership in carving out new domains of scholarship by expanding the horizons of health, family, and interpersonal communication. Prior to the 1980s very few scholars focused on communication with the elderly. Most scholars treated it as an audience-level variable that had no theoretical value for the field. However, as knowledge accumulated about communication across generations it became apparent that adolescents and the elderly were not simply different communication targets. Jon's work began to generate fundamental constructs that depicted patterns of communication across generations, ones that contributed to development of an arena of communication study on the life span. Although initially aligned with interpersonal communication, communication across the life span now infuses research in health communication, media studies, and technology. Jon's early research spurred this work and led to the development of this arena of communication studies. Jon has served ICA as editor of Journal of Communication and more recently as ICA President. He also has represented ICA well to the larger academic community as President of the International Society of Language and Social Psychology, and as a Fellow of the American Psychological Association.

Patti M. Valkenburg, Professor of Child and Media Research, University of Amsterdam.

Patti Valkenburg's main area of scholarship is youth and the media. She has published more than 50 articles in English and another 17 in Dutch peer reviewed journals in the areas of media ratings, advertising effects, children's attraction to programs, media and fear, parental mediation, media and creativity, and responses to news. Her latest and most influential work deals with youth and the Internet. Valkenburg pioneered a comprehensive, interdisciplinary research program on the social implications of the Internet, including computer games, exposure to sex, identity games, online communication, and parental meditation. Her research is highly original, demonstrates exceptional application of methodological skills, and provides extremely valuable, empirically grounded new understandings into the role of various media in children's lives. Valkenburg's service contributions to the discipline are exemplary as well. She has been Chair of ICA's Instructional/Developmental Division and most recently was founder and chair of a new Interest Group on Children, Adolescents and the Media. She has been a member of several ICA committees including the Nominations Committee and the Research Committee. Patti was the first communication scholar to be awarded a major grant (five-year, 1.25 million Euro) by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research, a highly competitive award given only to the most outstanding scholars. Patti was also honored in 2006 as the most prolific communication scholar in Europe.

Barbara J. Wilson, Professor of Communication and Head of the Communication Department, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Barbara Wilson has established a distinguished line of research on children and the media as represented by more than 50 published articles and three books, including her highly praised 2002 book Children, Adolescents, and the Media. Much of her research has been guided by the theoretical framework of information processing which assumes that changes in cognitive skills during development have profound effects on children's emotional reactions to media. Her work has focused on the identification of content themes, production techniques, and types of characters that produce adverse responses in children, such as fright and distress. She has studied these across different kinds of programming, including television news and family situation comedies with respect to targeted events, like kidnappings and displays of weapons. Her work is noteworthy for careful conceptualizations, often novel methods, and elegant analysis and has enlarged our understanding of the developmental differences in how children make sense of and react to television portrayals. Barb has served ICA well as chair of the Instructional/Developmental Communication Division, as a member of several ICA committees, and as board member on most of ICA's journals. She has also represented the communication discipline well in outside venues. She has garnered more than three million dollars in grants to fund her research, and has been invited to address many diverse audiences around the world, including oncologists, broadcasters, teachers, parent-teacher associations, criminal justice professionals and school superintendents.

If you participated in the 58th Annual Conference of the International Communication Association: Communicating for Social Impact, we hope your experience was a positive one and valuable to your continuing research. As you know, ICA members are the top communication scholars in the world. We are sure you will agree that the research presented at the conference was of a very high caliber!

Now that the conference has passed, we have a special invitation for you! If you presented at the conference or one of the preconference seminars and would like to expand on your conference experience, we invite you to visit the Division forum for the Division under which you presented and post comments on or solicit questions about the research.

If you are an ICA member and a member of the Division, you have the ability to add new topics and make comments on others. It's very easy: simply log in to MyICA (the "Members Only" section of the website) and select the forum from the drop-down list on the lower right section of your MyICA page, (just above the list of your sections). If you have a project on which you would like to invite collaboration, post to the RESEARCH COLLABORATION forum. The link for that forum is found just under the drop-down list.

Check it out now! Here's the link to sign-in.

http://www.icahdq.org/login.asp

We would like your feedback!

The conference survey is now up. If you attended the conference, we'd like your feedback! The survey responses help shape future conferences. The link to access the survey is:

HTTP://www.icahdq.org/cgi-shl/TWServer.exe?Run:CONFSURV08

If you haven't already done so, please take a few moments to give us your thoughts on the conference.

Congress of the Americas II

Finally, the InterAmericas Council has opened registration for the Congress of the Americas II (II Congreso de las Americas), to be held October 8 - 12, 2008. ICA is one of the cosponsoring groups and is lending a hand, providing the registration site. The theme of this conference is: "Exploring Media Convergence, Public Communication, and Intercultural Communication." All submissions relate to the following areas: mass media (Internet, television, radio, and so on), journalism, public relations, advertising, public communication, corporate communication, political communication, public opinion, media law, cultural studies, semiotics, photography, visual design, and communication technology.

Come and enjoy the blending of cultures, the joyful mixing of languages, and the shared focus on communication scholarship among professional colleagues and hemispheric friends.

Go to http://www.icahdq.org/conferences/othercalls/congressoftheamericas.asp for more information and to access the registration site.

To receive continuously updated information about the CONGRESS OF THE AMERICAS II, please email Sam Luna at sluna@icahdq.org to be added to their mailing list.

This month, we welcome our newest Student Board Representative Michele Khoo and bid farewell to our outgoing Representative Rebecca Hains. At the recent ICA conference in Montreal, Rebecca, Mikaela, and Michele were able to discuss the future of graduate student interests at ICA. We also were privileged to meet several graduate students from diverse areas of the world. In doing so, we were able to gather information regarding emerging issues for students from a variety of backgrounds. Over 200 graduate students attended the Graduate Student Reception and enjoyed drinks, food, and socializing.

Rebecca Hains, Assistant Professor at Salem State College, has completed her 2-year term as an ICA Student Board Representative. During her tenure, she advocated for the interests of graduate students in the U.S. and abroad. In the future, Rebecca will continue her participation in the Feminist Division of ICA and her valuable research about children and media. Although we will miss Rebecca, we are honored to have been represented by such a committed scholar and look forward to her future contributions to the field of communication.

As this year progresses, we are very interested in hearing your ideas, thoughts, and concerns about the future of graduate student interests at the ICA. As always, feel free to contact either Mikaela (mmarlow@uidaho.edu) or Michele (Michele_khoo@pmail.ntu.edu.sg) with your concerns. Also, if you are interested in becoming involved in the Student Affairs Committee or another area of participation, please contact us.

In the final section, please find a letter of introduction by our newest member, Michele Khoo.

Dear Members of ICA,

Thank you for giving me the opportunity to serve ICA as the incoming Student Board Representative. I hope to work with all of you to bring about greater interaction between students and faculty members.

Being a Singaporean, it is also very exciting to know that we will be hosting the 2010 I.C.A. conference. I am looking forward to welcoming all of you to our beautiful city-state of Singapore. I would love to hear from you. Stay connected!

Warmest regards,

Michele

The University of Oklahoma announces the following appointments:

• Ryan Bisel (Ph.D., University of Kansas), Assistant Professor;
• Norah Dunbar (Ph.D., University of Arizona), Associate Professor with tenure.

And the following promotions:

• Patrick Meirick (Ph.D., University of Minnesota) promoted to Associate Professor with tenure;
• Claude Miller (Ph.D., University of Arizona) promoted to Associate Professor with tenure.

Bob McCann (USC) and Howard Giles (UCSB) had their research featured in April/May issues of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Orange County Register, the San Diego Union-Tribune, the AARP Bulletin, and the Capital Times, to name a few.  McCann also appeared as the sole guest on a one-hour National Public Radio morning show devoted to age diversity and intergenerational communication in the workplace. Additionally, McCann was the recipient of the 2008 "Golden Apple" Teaching Award, an honor bestowed by the University of Southern California's Marshall School of Business full time, first year MBA class on its favorite professors.

Andrea Pitasi (www.andreapitasi.tk), ICA Life Member, was appointed
Ambassador of the GLOBALSHIFT UNIVERSITY based in California.To contact him: andrei.pitasi@gmail.com. GSU is a new university inspired by Ervin laszlo's system theory applied to the key challenges mankind is facing for example about   Global Warming, Poverty and Health Risk.

Longtime FSD member Meenakshi Gigi Durham's new book The Lolita Effect
(Overlook Press) was released this month.  The book focuses on the media's sexualization of young girls from a critical feminist perspective. Described by Publishers Weekly as "well-written and well-researched" and by Booklist as "provocative and erudite," the book is written for general audiences yet based on media theory and research. It would be suitable for adoption in undergraduate classes in gender and media, youth and media, and related topics. Durham is Associate Professor of Journalism & Mass Communication at the U of Iowa. More information about the book is at www.lolitaeffect.com.

Ethnicity & Race in Communication

Hello All,

It was great to see so many of you in Montreal, and I’m looking forward to meeting more ERIC folks in Chicago next year!  This year’s program was very invigorating, and the panels I visited, including the interactive paper session, had great research to share.  As we move forward from this year’s conference on to the next (yes, already!), we have several exciting things to think through.  I’ve listed them below as sections, so please read through.  Both have deadlines attached to them, so please make sure to note the dates.  Minutes from our business meeting will follow.   

Cross-unit theme panels for 2009 (Deadline August 1, 2008)

One of the most exciting announcements is that next year’s conference will have 27 extra cross-unit panels that address the conference theme of ‘key words in communication’.  Barbie Zelizer, President-elect of ICA, wants units to propose several panels that cross at least four divisions/interests groups.  Her expectation is that we would interrogate how each area approaches a particular concept or ‘word’ in the field.  To give you and idea, her example of such a panel was one that might look at how the word ‘public’ is approached by several different areas, like philosophy of communication and public relations divisions.

Because these are limited to one panel per division/interest group, and only chairs and program planners can propose them, we please ask that you e-mail us at k.silva@neu.edu and M.Georgiou@leeds.ac.uk by August 1, 2008 with ideas and suggestions for these panels.  This will provide us with much needed time to put the proposal together. 

Elections (Deadline, July 1 2008)

We will be holding elections for Vice-Chair and Secretary this year.  I will be stepping down as Chair after the ICA conference in 2009, with Myria taking over as Chair, vacating the Vice-Chair position.  Kevin Dolan will be stepping down as secretary at the same time.  These elections are important because the executive board represents the membership at ICA.  Currently ICA is encouraging all divisions to make an additional effort to internationalize. As a division that deals with issues of identity, it is very important, as many of members pointed out at the Montreal board meeting, that we take a lead in this call to diversify. Because of this, it would be especially good if we had continental representation on our board.  To this end, I would like to encourage nominations from underrepresented regions, including the African continent, Asia and Latin America.  This is not meant to exclude others, but is a call for wider representation.  In addition, please remember that the
  Vice-Chair position is a four-year commitment to ERIC and ICA (2-years as VC and 2-years as Chair), including two years of program planning for the conference.  The secretary position is a two-year commitment.  Both positions require attendance at ICA conferences.

If you are interested in running for either one of these positions, please e-mail to me a brief bio and a candidate statement by July 1, 2008.

Please don't hesitate to contact me with any questions.

Kumarini Silva, Chair
k.silva@neu.edu

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Mass Communication

Dear ICA Mass Communication Division Members,

I hope this e-mail finds you well, and for those of you who attended the conference, suitably recovered.

Thanks to all of you who participated in our numerous sessions to help make this a very successful conference! However, we have one more important piece of business that requires our attention.

It is time to elect a new vice-chair and a new secretary for our Division. The duties of each of described below:

Vice-Chair (2-year term): Primary responsibilities include running the paper competition (in year 2) and supporting the chair in various duties (e.g., writing Newsletter updates). The vice-chair term is followed by a 2-year term as Chair. The Chair's key duties include programming in year 1 of the 2-year term, attending the board meeting, running the dissertation award competition (every other year), and generally managing the business of the Division.

Secretary (2-year term): Primary responsibilities include taking minutes at the business meeting at the annual conference and assisting with the various administrative tasks associated with running the Division. There is no expectation of continued service beyond the 2 year term.

If you would like to nominate someone, it would be helpful to check with that person first to see if the nomination would be accepted. Self-nominations are also welcome.

Each nominee must prepare a statement (max of 300 words) for the ballot.

Please submit your nominations to me (nabi@comm.ucsb.edu) or to Dave Roskos-Ewoldsen (droskos@bama.ua.edu) by JUNE 30. Personal statements will be due shortly after.

If you have any questions, please let either Dave or me know. Thanks so much, and we look forward to seeing some nominations soon!

Best wishes,
Robin Nabi, Chair
nabi@comm.ucsb.edu

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Visual Communication Studies

Dear VCS members:

It was great to see so many of you in Montreal, and those of you who couldn’t make it were dearly missed and deprived of another superb conference. The latter applies a fortiori to our Division Chair Marion Müller, who again managed to put together a wonderful program but then in the end could not enjoy the fruits of her efforts due to an urgent back surgery.
Having attended all but one of the sessions of our division I was truly impressed by the high quality of the presentations and the high level of involvement of the audience. Many first-timers and occasional visitors have commented very favorably about the quality of scholarship they encountered at our sessions and hopefully they will decide to join our ranks. Many thanks to all reviewers, session chairs, panel or round table organizers, paper and poster presenters.
Hardly back into the swing of things at our demanding institutions we have to start thinking and planning for next year’s conference in Chicago. For starters here are a couple of issues for which I would like to solicit your input:

Reviewing and review criteria:
Many of you have volunteered to review papers and we hope that you are willing to do this again. There will be a box that you can thick when you submit a paper indicating that you are prepared to act as a reviewer, but even if you do not plan to submit a paper at next year’s conference we would encourage you to volunteer (just sent me an email message with your details and some background information if this is your first time). Reviewers may also come from outside the ICA as long as they have specific visual expertise.
Those who already reviewed for the division are also invited to share their experiences with using the different criteria for review: Do they all make sense for every kind of paper? Do they cover the essential aspects of visual scholarship? I will also look at the criteria that other divisions are using to possibly suggest some changes. If we want to make changes this needs to be done very soon.

Preconference ideas
Our division had some excellent preconferences in the past and it would probably be a good idea to have one in Chicago. So we need to start thinking about both the theme and the format. Given that next years conference theme is ‘Key Words in Communication’ it was suggested at the business meeting by Arvid Kappas to go for ‘Key Visuals’ as the theme for a pre-conference, a roundtable and /or an exhibition. The Key Words theme refers to Raymond Williams book called ‘Keywords’ (1976) which is a collection of miniessays on the shifting meanings of a hundred or so words like Art, Alienation, Anarchism, Behavior, Bourgeois, Bureaucracy, Imperialism, Wealth, Work, Technology, etc. We can easily think of visuals that refer to these concepts. In any case it would be good to try to link the theme of the preconference to subject matter that may attract people from other divisions and thus point at the central role of the visual in virtually all strands of research. Key Visuals may pr  ove to be just the answer, but I would welcome some intensive discussion and concrete ideas around this topic.
As to the format, I attended the preconference organized by Communication History where they had a whole series of 5-minute introductions by different specialists in the field around one theme (the history of new media) to fuel a plenary discussion and this worked very well. Could this be a format we would like to consider or are there other (more visual) ideas?

New On-site and Off-site formats
The Key Words theme of the Chicago conference explicitly intends to stimulate cross divisional activity. To that aim Barbie Zelizer the incoming ICA President-elect plans to free up the space of a full plenary session and allocate up to 27 parallel sessions on themes that run across at least FOUR divisions and interest groups with speakers from EACH of them. Concretely this means that we as a division can initiate ONE of such sessions, and hopefully be involved in many more that are organized by other divisions. This session will not be deducted from the space allocated to our division, but comes on top of that! So it is important that we make use of it. It is also important to note that proposals of this type don’t go via the normal submission channel but can ONLY be made by Program Planners or Division Chairs. So you would need to send ideas for such sessions to me or Marion well in advance, say September at the latest, so we can explore with you the possibilities for cross  -unit collaboration and thus increase our visibility in ICA.
Also discussed in the business meeting were some other ideas regarding alternative formats for next year ranging from exhibitions and workshops on the visual and the digital, to ‘walking’ presentations in the city and other off site activities. Such initiatives may not only add some icing on the cake but also may provide us with more space to show and discuss our visual scholarly work. The ICA conference planning team seems to encourage this ‘thinking outside the box’ (read: the Marriott) but again we need to be able to discuss all these (wild) ideas with them at a very early stage. Everyone who has useful contacts in the Chicago area in this respect is invited to explore them asap.

So that’s it for now, let’s keep in touch!

Luc Pauwels, Vice Chair
luc.pauwels@ua.ac.be

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Communication History

Members of the Communication History Interest Group of ICA:

Greetings.  It is now a little more than 3 weeks after the interest group’s first-ever ICA conference as a bona fide interest group, and we have some things to take care of.  And that means it's time to employ the 5-point enumerated list of items.  Please read to the end.

1) REVIEWING:  We need paper reviewers for the 2009 conference in Chicago.  Please e-mail me (park@lakeforest.edu) if you are willing to review paper submissions for the Communication History Interest Group (CHIG) this coming fall.  Simply write:  “I am willing to review papers this year,” or words to that effect.

2) CHAIRING/RESPONDING: We also need chairs/respondents for the 2009 conference in Chicago.  To do this, simply tell me if you are willing to be a chair and/or respondent for the 2009 conference.

3) LEADERSHIP:  Dave Park will be the chair of the CHIG through the 2010 conference in Singapore.  Jeff Pooley will be vice-chair through the 2010 conference, and then chair through 2012.  Later this summer, we will have an election for secretary of the interest group.  Next year, we will run an election to find our next vice-chair, who will serve for two years as vice-chair, then two years as chair.  It is NOT too early to express interest in serving the interest group as vice-chair and/or secretary.  We encourage any interested members to contact us to discuss what these jobs involve.

4) PRE-CON IN 2009?  Our pre-conference this year—-The Long History of New Media—-was a great success. We thank those at McGill University (Jonathan Sterne & Jennifer Marleau), New Media & Society (Nick Jankowski & Steve Jones), and Sage Publications (Mila Steele) who helped make the pre-conference a success. If you have any ideas for a pre-conference in Chicago in 2009, please do contact Dave Park (park@lakeforest.edu) and/or Jeff Pooley (pooley@muhlenberg.edu) about those ideas.  We will need to get in touch with ICA very soon with any pre-conference possibilities, so please do not take your time with this.

5) CROSS-DIVISIONAL SESSIONS IN 2009:  The 2009 conference will be themed around the idea of “Keywords,” and incoming president Barbie Zelizer is very much dedicated to making the 2009 conference a place where cross-divisional theme sessions can function to break down some of the walls between divisions and interest groups.  In particular, President Zelizer is interested in programming sessions wherein the sponsoring division has members of other divisions discuss how they understand a term (a ‘keyword,’ if you will) differently from the others.  If anyone has any ideas about how the CHIG might put other groups into motion along these lines, please do contact Dave Park or Jeff Pooley with those ideas.

There is much more to discuss, but I want to keep these messages relatively short.  Look for more news in the coming weeks.

Thank you,
Dave Park, Chair & Jeff Pooley, Vice-Chair
park@lakeforest.edu
pooley@muhlenberg.edu

CALLS FOR PAPERS/ABSTRACTS

Call for Papers for the first conference of the Network Intercultural and International Communication: "Between Babel and 'Earth City': Barriers of Intercultural and International Communication." October 30 - November 1, 2008, Technische Universitat Ilmenau (Thuringia). Deadline: August 11, 2008. Please contact Dr. Liane Rothenberger (liane.rothenberger@tu-ilmenau.de) for further information.

Call for Papers: Dialogo special issue: Latina/o Sexualities. Dialogo is a bilingual magazine published by the Center for Latino Research at DePaul University that is dedicated to publishing research and the creative works of scholars, artists, community organizers, and students. Our aim is to provide effective links between the academic community and the larger Latino communities in Chicago and the U.S. We strive to publish useful information of interest and importance to our communities. For more info on Diálogo see http://condor.depaul.edu/~dialogo/. Lourdes Torres, Guest Editor. Dialogo is seeking articles, essays, art work, photography, fiction and poetry by scholars/activists/students around the topic of Latina/Latino sexualities. The steady emergence of new writings, performances, media, virtual communities, and activist groups bear witness to the importance of how Latina/o people love and express themselves sexually.  Articles are invited on any aspect of this experience. Also invited are interviews with activists, artists, community leaders/organizers, educators, and other individuals working on issues concerning Latina/Latino sexualities. Submissions due August 25, 2008.  For further guidelines and other questi ons please contact Lourdes Torres: ltorres@depaul.edu or managing editor Maria Ochoa: mochoa@depaul.edu.

Special Issue of Asian Journal of Communication: "Hybridization of Reality: Re-Imagining Communication Environment in Korea." Guest Editors: Hye-ryeon Lee (U of Hawaii at Manoa); Hyoknam Kwon (Chonbuk National University); Eungjun Min (Rhode Island College). The concept of hybridity enables us to explore broadly the impact of new times on the social and political landscape of modernity. At first, one can incorporate foreign elements while it maintains its identity and recognizes the differences. Those elements and the idea of difference then go through the process of naturalization or neutralization within the body of the host culture. Koreans have appropriated global goods, conventions and styles, including music, cuisine, cinema, and fashion, and inscribed their everyday meaning into them. Now their version of glocalized consciousness is appropriated by neighboring countries (i.e., HanRyu: Korean Wave), which has already been appropriating global popular cultural forms to express their local sentiment and culture. This issue aims to improve our understanding of the role of communication in the making of hybridities in Korea through various communication practices such as journalism, interpersonal and organization relations, PR and advertising, media production/reception, international/intercultural relations, cinema, and internet. Please submit manuscripts by email in Microsoft Word format no later than September 1, 2008 to: Professor Eungjun Min (emin@ric.edu or ejmin57@hotmail.com for Hanmail users). Manuscripts will be double-blind reviewed. More information about submission guidelines can be found at www.informaworld.com/rajc. Click “Instructions for Authors.”

November 6-8, 2008. Call for Papers: "Politics 2.0: Politics and Computer-Mediated Communication". 12th Meeting of the "Computer-Mediated Communication" division of the German Communication Association (DGPuK),  in Ilmenau, Germany. The conference will explore the relationship between politics and computer-mediated communication (CMC) from two main perspectives. From the perspective of political communication research, the conference will focus on the influence of CMC on politics and the political process and what role it will play in the future. From a media politics viewpoint, the conference will discuss and analyze the significance of politics for the format and regulation of CMC, both now and in the future. Read the detailed call for papers on the conference website:
http://www.tu-ilmenau.de/cvk2008. Please submit relevant extended abstracts (between 4,000 and 6,000 characters including spaces) in electronic form (Word or PDF) to Jens Wolling (jens.wolling@tu-ilmenau.de) by July 31, 2008. Authors will be notified of the results of the anonymous review process by September 22, 2008. Conference languages will be English and German.

The Communication Review solicits papers in the interdisciplinary field of
media studies. We particularly encourage historical work, feminist work, and visual work, and invite submissions from those employing critical theoretical and empirical approaches to a range of topics under the general rubric of communication and media studies research. The Communication Review also functions as a review of current work in the field.  Towards this end, the editors are always open to proposals for special issues that interrogate and examine current controversies in the field.  We also welcome non-traditionally constructed articles which critically examine and review current sub-fields of and controversies within communication and media studies; we offer an expedited review process for timely statements. Please direct your papers, suggestions for special issues and queries to Tatiana Omeltchenko, Managing Editor, at to3y@virginia.edu. For more information about the journal and submission guidelines, pleasesee the journal’s website at http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/titles/10714421.html.

Call for papers: American Journal of Media Psychology Special Issue: "Measuring Individuals’ Cognitive Structures in a Mediated Context." Researchers with interests in such areas as cognitive processing, social cognition, social perception, schema research, and framing within the context of media, are invited to submit papers to the American Journal of Media Psychology for a special issue that focuses on methodological approaches that detail the procedures by which cognitive components and structures are identified and measured in such fields as advertising, marketing, political communications, and related areas. A manuscript submission is expected to detail a theoretically based methodological approach for the measurement of cognitive components and structures and provide empirical data that tests the approach used by the author(s). The deadline for submissions is September 1, 2008. The American Journal of Media Psychology is a peer-reviewed scientific journal that publishes theoretical and empirical papers and essays and book reviews that advance an understanding of media effects and processes on individuals in society. Submissions should have a psychological focus, which means the level of analysis should focus on individuals and their interaction with or relationship to mass media content and institutions. All theoretical and methodological perspectives are welcomed.  For instructions on submitting a manuscript, please visit: http://www.marquettejournals.org/submissionguidlines.html. Researchers who intend on making a submission to this special issue are encouraged to contact Dr. Michael Elasmar, Editor, American Journal of Media Psychology at elasmar@bu.edu and discuss their anticipated approach to this topic.

 
Chinese Journal of (CJoC)
Launching in 2008, Chinese Journal of Communication (CJoC) is a new venture of scholarly publication aimed at elevating Chinese communication studies along theoretical, empirical, and methodological dimensions. The new refereed journal will be an important international platform for students and scholars in Chinese communication studies to exchange ideas and research results. Interdisciplinary in scope, it will examine subjects in all Chinese societies in Mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Macau, Singapore, and the global Chinese diaspora. The CJoC welcomes research articles using social scientific or humanistic approaches on such topics as mass communication, journalism studies, telecommunications, rhetoric, cultural studies, media effects, new communication technologies, organizational communication, interpersonal communication, advertising and PR, political communication, communications law and policy, and so on. Articles employing historical and comparative analysis focused on traditional Chinese culture as well as contemporary processes such as globalization, deregulation, and democratization are also welcome. Published by Routledge, CJoC is institutionally based at the Communication Research Centre, the School of Journalism and Communication, the Chinese University of Hong Kong. For more information and submission instructions, please visit http://www.informaworld.com/cjoc.

Journal of Children and Media is an interdisciplinary and multimethod peer-reviewed publication that provides a space for discusion by scholars and professionals from around the world and across theoretical and empirical traditions who are engaged in the study of media in the lives of children. Submissions: Submissions should be delivered as an email attachment to Dafna Lemish, Editor at: lemish@post.tau.ac.il. Manuscripts must conform to the American Psychological Association (APA) style with a maximum length of 8,000 words, including notes and references. The manuscript should be accompanied by an abstract of up to 150 words, biographical information for each author of up to 75 words each, and up to 10 keywords. For further information please visit: http://www.informaworld.com/jocam. 

International Journal of Strategic Communication is issuing a call for papers for its fourth and subsequent issues. The journal provides a forum for multidisciplinary and multi-paradigmatic research about the role of communication, broadly defined, in achieving the goals of a wide range of communicative entities for-profit organizations, non-profit organizations, social movements, political parties or politicians, governments, government agencies, personalities. For communication to be strategic is has to be purposeful and planned. The aim of the journal is to bring diverse approaches together with the purpose of developing an international, coherent and holistic approach to the field. Scholars in a broad range of communication specialities addressing strategic communication by organizations are invited submit articles. Articles are blind-reviewed by three members of the editorial board, which consists of 34 scholars from 15 countries representing a broad array of theoretical and methodological perspectives.Submissions are electronic via the journal's website at ijosc@lamar.colostate.edu. Manuscripts should be no longer than 30 word-processed pages and adhere to the APA Publications Manual. For more information, contact editors Derina Holtzhausen, University of South Florida, dholtzha@cas.usf.edu or Kirk Hallahan, Colorado State University, kirk.hallahan@colostate.edu.

Feminist Media Studies. Authors in North America, Latin America, and the Caribbean: submit to Lisa McLaughlin, Editor; e-mail: mclauglm@muohio.edu. Authors in Europe, Africa, Asia, and Australasia: submit to Cynthia Carter, Editor; e-mail: cartercl@cardiff.ac.uk.

Education Review of Business Communication. Mss. info: http://www.senatehall.com/business_communication/index.html.

 
Journal of Communication Studies, National Council of Development Communication. Soliciting research papers, abstracts. E-mail: Shveta Sharma, communication@jcs@yahoo.com.

 
Hampton Book Series: Communication, Globalization, and Cultural Identity. Jan Servaes, Hampton Book Series Editor, c/o School of Journalism and Communication, University of Queensland, Brisbane QLD 4072, Australia. Phone: +61 (7) 3365 6115 or 3088. Fax: +61 (7) 3365 1377. Email: j.servaes@uq.edu.au.

 
Manuscripts. Subject Matters: A Journal of Communications and the Self. E-mail: subjectmatters@londonmet.ac.uk.

 
Submissions. Journal of Middle East Women's Studies (JMEWS). Info: Marcia C. Inhorn, Director of the Center for Middle Eastern and North African Studies, U of Michigan, and Mary N. Layoun, Chair of Comparative Literature, U of Wisconsin, Editors. Web: http://iupjournals.org/jmews/.

Communication Review. The Communication Review solicits papers in the interdisciplinary field of media studies. We are interested in papers discussing any aspect of media: media history, globalization of media, media institutions, media analysis, media criticism, media policy, media economics. We also invite essays about the nature of media studies as an emergent, interdisciplinary field. Please direct papers to Andrea L. Press and Bruce A. Williams, Editors, Media Studies Program, University of Virginia. Email: alp5n@virginia.edu, baw5n@b.mail.virginia.edu. For more information about the journal and submission guidelines, please see the journal's website at http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/titles/10714421.asp.

Call for Manuscripts - The Journal of Native Aging & Health publishes articels that address Native aging, health, and related issues. All theoretical and methodological approaches are welcome. Original research and studies should apply existing theory and research to Native Americans, Alaskan, Hawaiian, Islanders and First Nations Peoples, or should illuminate how knowledge informs and reforms exiting theories and research on Native populations, aging, and health. No material identifying the author(s) should appear in the body of the paper. The paper must not have appeared in any other published form. Each submission should include a separate cover page with the name of the author(s); present academic title or other current position; academic department and university (if appropriate); and complete address, telephone number, and e-mail address (if available). The submission also must include a single-paragraph abstract of no more than 120 words on a separate page. Manuscripts, abstracts, references, figures, and tables must conform to the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (2001, Fifth Edition) guidelines. Contributors are encouraged to be familiar with the Manual's guidelines for avoiding bias in language used to express ideas int he manuscript. By submitting to JNAH, authors warrant that they will not submit their manuscript to any other publication without first withdrawing the manuscript from consideration by JNAH, that the work is original, and that appropriate credit has been given to other contributors in the project. Reports of the original research and papers may not exceed 25 pages (including references, tables, figures, and appendixes). Copies of submissions will not be returned to the author(s). Send four paper copies of complete papers to Pamela J. Kalbfleish, Editor, Journal of Native Aging & Health, School of Communication, University of North Dakota, 202A O'Kelly Hall, Grand Forks, ND 58202. Along with your paper copies, include a disk with your submission in Word document format or attach an electronic copy of your manuscript to an e-mail sent to the editorial office. Questions may be directed to the editorial office via e-mail at yearbook@und.nodak.edu, telephone 701-777-2673, or fax 701-777-3955. Ordering Information: To order a copy of the Journal, contact: Dr. Pamela J. Kalbfleisch, Editor, Journal of Native Aging & Health, School of Communication, University of North Dakota, Box 7169, 202A O'Kelly Hall, Grand Forks, ND 58202. $25.00 a copy / $40.00 year subscription.

 
Journal of Marketing and Communication Management. The Managing Editors, JMCM, Department of Marketing and Communication Management, University of Pretoria, Pretoria 0001, South Africa. Info: http://www.jmcm.co.za. E-mail: Professor C H van Heerden, nheerden@hakuna.up.ac.za, or Professor Anske Grobler, anske@postino.up.ac.za.

 
Submissions. Participations: Journal of Audience and Reception. Info: http://www.participations.org/.

 
Essays. Bad Subjects: Iraq War Culture Review Essays. Email: Joe Lockard, Joe.Lockard@asu.edu. Info: http://bad.eserver.org.

 
Proposals. Alternatives Within the Mainstream II: Queer Theatre in Britain. Info: Dimple Godiwala-McGowan, Senior Lecturer, York St. John College (U of Leeds). E-mail: DimpleGodiwala@aol.com.

 
Deadline extended. Papers. Journal of Middle East Media (JMEM), Center for International Media Education (CIME) at Georgia State U and the Arab-U.S. Association for Communication Educators (AUSACE). Mohammed el-Naway, Senior Editor, Department of Communication, One Park Place South, 10th Floor, Georgia State U, Atlanta, Georgia 30303, USA. E-mail: jouman@langate.gsu.edu.

 
New Journal - Communication for Development and Social Change. A new journal, Communication for Development and Social Change, is seeking papers that will present empirical research, theory, and practice-oriented approaches on subjects relevant to development communication and social change. Authors may submit inquiries and manuscripts electronically to Jan Servaes, Department of Journalism and Communication, University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia, at j.sarvaes@uq.edu.au.

  
December 15, 2008. Call for Papers. Quinnipiac University and the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) Health Academy announce the first annual PRSA Health Academy Paper Competition.  The purpose of the competition is to encourage applied research of value to public relations professionals.  The winner of the competition will present his/her paper at the PRSA Health Academy Spring Conference to be held in Washington, DC in late April or early May, 2009. In addition, the winner will receive a $150 cash award and will be reimbursed for transportation and lodging costs. 
Papers might address such issues as hospital public relations, pharmaceutical public relations, medical public relations, health policy, health management, medical device manufacturing public relations, insurance public relations, or current trends in healthcare.  Papers may be submitted by professionals, doctoral students/candidates, or faculty members of any rank.  Papers may be solo-authored or co-authored.  (Cash and reimbursement will be provided to lead author.)  Papers should be between 15 - 30 pages (including references), double-spaced, in Times New Roman 12-point font including references.  Papers should be prepared using APA style.  Papers may be reports of original research or essays.  Papers will be judged by a panel of reviewers including academics and members of the PRSA Health Academy Board.  Among the factors judges will consider:  usefulness of the paper to working professionals, clarity, writing quality, and contribution to the public relations body of knowledge. 
The deadline for submissions is December 15, 2008.  All papers should be submitted electronically in Microsoft Word and sent to Dr. Kurt Wise, APR, Chair of the Public Relations Department, School of Communications, Quinnipiac University (kurt.wise@quinnipiac.edu).  Identification material should not be included in the body of the paper.  Identification of authors and contact information should be included only in e-mail messages and cover sheet.  The winner will be announced February 1, 2009.  All questions should be directed to Dr. Wise. 

 
CONFERENCES

July 3-6, 2008. The International Society for Interpersonal Acceptance and Rejection and the School of Primary Education, University of Crete, Greece, have the pleasure to officially announce that the 2nd International Congress on Interpersonal Acceptance and Rejection will be held in Rethymno town on the island of Crete (at the University of Crete), from July 3rd - 6th, 2008. For more information, please visit the Congress website: www.isipar08.org or contact Prof. Elias Kourkoutas, President of the Organizing Committee, at hkourk@edc.uoc.gr.
 
NCA Summer Conference 2008: Methods and Measures for Communication and Cognition Research. July 10-13, 2008. Inn & Conference Center, University of Maryland, College Park and Adelphi, MD.

Contact Name: Dr. Deborah A. Cai
E-mail: debcai@umd.edu
Phone: 301.405.6524
Website: http://www.ou.edu/csc/indexCSC.htm

July 10 – 13, 2008. NCA 2008 Summer Conference: "Methods and Measures for Communication and Cognition Research." Inn & Conference Center, College Park, Maryland. Methods for studying the cognitive activity of communicators are changing rapidly. Technological advances and cutting-edge statistical methods are now available for studying cognitive processes, yet communication scholars are only beginning to become familiar with and make use of these advances. This conference is designed to provide an opportunity for you to become familiar with these tools by having scholars present and demonstrate the latest developments in technology and statistical methods, introducing researchers to new possibilities for studying social cognition and communication. For more information about the conference and registration, please visit the Communication and Social Cognition Summer Conference website: www.ou.edu/csc/conference.htm

 
The 11th International Conference on Language and Social Psychology (ICLASPXI) will be held in Tucson, Arizona, July 16-20th, 2008. ICLASPXI will offer innovative scholarly exchange, shared meals, receptions, and the opportunity to experience the beautiful Sonoran Desert. Distinguished keynote speakers include: Howard Giles, Chris Segrin, Bonny Norton, Jon Nussbaum, and Tadasu Todd Imahori. We invite you to submit a proposal for presentation (deadline February 1st, 2008). Proposals should be sent in electronic form (single file: .txt, .rtf, .pdf, or .doc format) to Jake Harwood at jharwood@u.arizona.edu. Please put "ICLASP 11 submission" in the subject line. See our Association website for additional information regarding paper and panel submissions (WWW.IALSP.org).

September 5-6, 2008. "Representing Islam: Comparative Perspectives." International Conference, University of Manchester. We invite single-paper and full-panel proposals. We anticipate proposals on topics emanating from the fields of Political Communication, Communication Science, Media Studies, Film Studies, Cultural Studies, Sociology, Social Psychology, Translation Studies, Sociolinguistics, and Modern Languages. An edited volume based on selected conference papers will be published.
Accommodation and meals will be provided on campus by the University of Manchester. The conference fee will be discounted for students.

September 17-19, 2008. Conference on Media, War and Conflict-Resolution, sponsored by The School of Communication Studies, and the Program of Peace and Conflict Studies at Bowling Green State University, Ohio. Features top scholars and journalists, including Richard Rhodes, Chris Hedges, Robert Parry, Daya Thussu, Andrew Hoskins, Richard Keeble, Sara Maltby, Oliver Boyd-Barrett. Full conference fee includes meals. For full details visit http://scs.bgsu.edu/mwcrConf/index.php. There may still be space for a small number of additional papers. If you would like to submit an abstract for peer review, email Dr.Oliver Boyd-Barrett (Director, School of Communication Studies) at oboydb@bgsu.edu or Dr. Ellen Gorsevski (Department of Communication) at elleng@bgsu.edu.

OTHER OPPORTUNITIES

Sexuality Studies: A book series by Temple University Press. The coeditors of Sexuality Studies-Janice Irvine and Regina Kunzel-are currently soliciting book manuscripts. The series features work in sexuality studies, in its social, cultural, and political dimensions, and in both historical and contemporary formations. The editors seek books that will appeal to a broad, cross-disciplinary audience of both academic and nonacademic readers. Submissions to Sexuality Studies are welcome through Janet Francendese, Editor in Chief, Temple University Press (janet.francendese@temple.edu). Information on how to submit manuscripts can be found at: http://www.temple.edu/tempress/submissions.html. Initial inquiries about proposals can also be sent to: Janice Irvine, University of Massachusetts, Department of Sociology. irvine@soc.umass.edu; or, Regina Kunzel, University of Minnesota, Departments of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies and History rkunzel@williams.edu.
 
The IABC Research Foundation is offering a grant for US $50,000 for Research on Communication Department Structure and Best Practices. Proposal guidelines can be found on the Research Foundation website http://www.iabc.com/rf/. The IABC Research Foundation serves as the non-profit research and development arm of IABC (International Association of Business Communicators). The Foundation is dedicated to contributing new findings, knowledge and understanding to the communication profession, and to helping organizations and communicators maximize organizational success. Through the generosity of donors, corporate sponsors and volunteers, the Foundation delivers original communication research and tools not available in the commercial marketplace.
 
The Canadian Journal of Communication (CJC) is a quarterly peer-reviewed journal committed to publishing outstanding scholarship in communications, media and cultural studies, journalism, and information studies. CJC is looking for theoretically innovative and methodologically challenging original manuscripts, in English or French, for immediate peer-review. To submit an article for peer-review go to the CJC website http://www.cjc-online.ca and click on the "submit" button. Articles for peer-review should be approximately 6,000 to 8,000 words in length. In addition to the traditional peer-reviewed article the CJC will develop innovative forms and formats for discussions of current practices including: media reviews, research overviews of current projects, and polemical commentaries. These submissions are shorter in length and may be either more descriptive or experimental in tone. Please direct ideas and inquiries to editor@cjconline.ca. For information on book reviews please contact our book review editor, Leslie Regan Shade, at review_editor@cjconline.ca. Info on CJC: Kim Sawchuk, Editor, CJC, editor@cjc-online.ca.
 
Visiting doctoral fellowships. The Media Management and Transformation Center (MMTC) at Jonkoping International Business School, Jonkoping University, Sweden, in the field of media business and media economics for advanced doctoral students. Dr. Cinzia dal Zotto, Research Manager, Media Management and Transformation Center, Jonkoping International Business School, P.O. Box 1026, SE-551 11 Jonkoping, SWEDEN. Info: http://www.jibs.se/mmtc. Email for more information: cinzia.dalzotto@ihh.hj.se.

NCI Fellowship in Health Communication and Informatics
The Health Communication and Informatics Research Branch (HCIRB) is accepting Cancer Research Training Award (CRTA) applicants for a Paid Fellowship Opportunity. HCIRB contributes to the reduction in death and suffering due to cancer by supporting research and development of a seamless health communication and informatics infrastructure. Through internal and extramural programs, the Branch supports basic and translational research across the cancer continuum. This CRTA fellowship offers outstanding training opportunities in health communication. The CRTA fellow will be a welcomed member of a team of passionate scientists, psychologists, and health communication researchers. Appropriate to the fellow’s interests, participation and leadership opportunities are offered in Information Technology projects, marketing and dissemination, health trends survey design and analysis, peer-reviewed journal articles, and travel to national meetings and conferences.

Master or bachelor level degree, preferably in health communication, health informatics, public health, or related field; strong organizational, planning, problem solving, and project management skills; excellent interpersonal skills; ability to work independently and creatively. Applicants must be U.S. citizens or resident aliens; be available 40 hours per week, for a six-month minimum. Some flexibility in work hours is allowed. The fellowship is renewable for up to two years and is based on demonstrated progress by mutual agreement among the fellow and supervisor.

For more details including how to apply: http://dccps.nci.nih.gov/brp/about/docs/HCIRBCRTAFellowship.pdf

UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND
Department of Communication
Two Assistant Professor Positions in Public Relations

The Department of Communication at the University of Maryland invites applications for two tenure track positions in public relations at the rank of assistant professor, starting August 15, 2009, to help with the growth of its public relations track. The Department of Communication offers a specialization in public relations at the B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. levels.

The University of Maryland is a "Top 20" ranked major public research university, located within the Washington DC/Baltimore metroplex, five miles from the District of Columbia and a major world city with concentrated research, public policy, cultural, and artistic resources. As the flagship university, The University of Maryland's academic programs are sought after as partners for a wide variety of federal government communication initiatives.

Successful candidates will have expertise in public relations theory, writing, and campaigns; be able to engage in scholarly public relations research; and, teach courses in public relations principles, campaigns, writing, communication theory, and/or research methods. Candidates must have a Ph.D. at the time of appointment and the clear potential to establish a strong, active research program and conduct graduate advising. Teaching experience, preferably at the university level, is highly desirable. Professional public relations experience is desirable.

For best consideration, interested candidates should submit a complete application by October 1, 2008. The application materials should include (a) a letter of application that describes research interests and other qualifications, (b) a curriculum vitae, (c) one letter of recommendation, (d) the names, addresses, e-mail addresses, and telephone numbers of three additional references, and (e) sample(s) of recent research. Salary commensurate with experience. Application materials should be sent to:

Linda Aldoory, Ph.D., Associate Professor and Chair,
Public Relations Faculty Search Committee
Department of Communication
2130 Skinner Building
University of Maryland
College Park, MD 20742-7635

Questions regarding this announcement may be addressed to Professor Aldoory at (301) 405-6528 or email laldoory@umd.edu. Information about the department is available on the department's Web site at http://www.comm.umd.edu.

The University of Maryland is an equal opportunity, affirmative action employer. Minorities and woman are encouraged to apply.

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UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT DAVIS
Department of Communication
Associate Professor, Professor, Department Chair
Social Interaction/Mediated Communication

Seeking individuals whose research interests are primarily concerned with the development of theories that elucidate the fundamental processes subserving social interaction and/or the social and psychological impact of the media. Applicants must
have a program of theory development and research that explicates communication processes in face-to-face and mediated social interaction contexts and/or a theory-driven research program focused on explaining the effects of media or communication technologies upon individuals and society. This research program
must comport with the Department’s quantitative behavioral science orientation and affiliation with the Division of Social Sciences. Tenure-track position to begin 1 July 2009. Candidates will be expected to teach upper-division classes and graduate
seminars. Seeking applicants who can assume immediately the Department Chair role.

Chair, Search Committee
Department of Communication
One Shields Avenue
University of California, Davis
Davis, CA 95616

Email: labyrns@ucdavis.edu (Lesley Byrns, Office Manager). TEL: 530/752-1291

The Department offers the B.S. and M.A. in Communication. (A doctoral program
proposal is currently under review.) For further information about the Department of
Communication at UCD, please visit our website at http://communication.ucdavis.edu. To ensure full consideration, applications must be received by 1 OCTOBER 2008. Position is open until filled.

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WESTERN MICHIGAN UNIVERSITY
Director, School of Communication

The School of Communication at Western Michigan University invites applications for the position of Director beginning July 1, 2009. Qualified candidates must hold a Ph.D. or appropriate terminal degree, possess a record of excellence in research/creative activities, teaching, service appropriate for tenured appointment at senior rank, and have administrative experience.  WMU is an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Employer consistent with applicable Federal and State law.

To learn more about the position, the school, the university, and the community please visit http://www.wmich.edu/communication/newdirector.

Review of applications begins on September 15, 2008 and continues until the position is filled. To apply online, visit http://www.wmich.edu/hr/careers-at-wmu.htm and include a letter of application and a current curriculum vita. Additional supporting material should be sent to Director Search Committee Chair, School of Communication, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, MI 49008-5318: For more information, contact joseph.kayany@wmich.edu or 269.387.3139

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