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