Over the past years, ICA members, presidents, and staff have accomplished some wonderful work in making this association more international, accessible, and visible. I am very proud of having been part of this association since I was a graduate student in 1993 as I have been able to witness how it has positively evolved over the years.

My goal, should I be elected president, will be to build on these accomplishments by developing three main areas of action. First, I want to reinforce the international character of our association even further, especially by developing more links with regional, national and continental associations of communication. ICA regional conferences, as well as the Americas conferences, already constitute great initiatives that allow our association to reach out to scholars and students from countries that were traditionally underrepresented in our membership. This type of collaboration could be extended to regions of the world where we still need to make progress in terms of membership representation. I am thinking, for instance, of some South and East Asian as well as East-European and Latin American countries where the discipline of communication is well represented and extremely active.

Second, and in connection with the first point, I would like to reinforce the circulation of knowledge at the international level. As you know, ICA officially aims to "advance the scholarly study of human communication by encouraging and facilitating excellence in academic research worldwide." Having been the editor of Communication Theory, one of the five ICA journals, for the past three years, I know how challenging it can be for non-U.S. scholars to get published in English speaking outlets. One of my tasks, should I be elected, would be to initiate a task force whose agenda would be to reflect on possible ways to increase the accessibility and visibility of work that is traditionally underrepresented in our journals either due to the sources scholars rely on or due to the way manuscripts are written and organized.

Third, I would like to work on ICA's international visibility. Our association with the United Nations was a fantastic step toward this aim, but I think that other avenues could be explored to promote ICA in countries where we are holding our regional, continental and international conferences. To work toward this direction, I believe that we need to continue to network as much as possible with key representatives of various professional and academic organizations in different countries so that possible means of collaborations can be planned. A more assertive and proactive posture vis-à-vis the national or international press could also be developed. Such actions, and others to be determined, will contribute in making not only our profession, but also our association more internationally visible.

Professional experience

I am currently chair of the Department of Communication at the Universite de Montreal where I research and teach organizational communication, language and social interaction, and communication theory. I have also worked as a faculty member in two American institutions in the past: the University of Cincinnati from 1997 to 1998 and the University at Albany, SUNY from 1998 to 2003. My research focuses on the organizing properties of communication, as displayed, for instance, in logistic operations, board meetings, and mundane conversations in organizational settings. For the past three years, I have been conducting funded research on the organizational aspects of humanitarian interventions undertaken by Medecins sans frontieres ("MSF," also known as Doctors Without Borders), which led our research team to travel in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Jordan, Sri Lanka, and Niger. This experience and others have shown me how communication indeed matters, especially in life or death situations like the ones MSF staff members encounter during their missions.

In terms of publications, I have published three books, 26 peer-reviewed articles, 12 book chapters and six book reviews. My articles have appeared in such international journals as Communication Theory, Management Communication Quarterly, Quarterly Journal of Speech, Communication Review, Journal of Pragmatics, Human Relations, Organization, Semiotica, and Time & Society. I have also been the editor-in-chief of Communication Theory from 2005 to 2008.

Regarding my commitment to ICA, for the past 15 years, I have presented 30 papers in various divisions of the association, three of which were ranked top papers by the Organizational Communication division. I am also a member of two other ICA divisions: the Language and Social Interaction (LSI) division and the Philosophy of Communication division. From 2004 to 2007, I served as the LSI division chair. In addition, I organized three ICA preconferences that illustrate my commitment to interdisciplinarity: "Interacting and Organizing: A Dialogue Between Language & Social Interaction and Organizational Communication Scholars" in 2001; "A Dialogue on Dialogue: Examining the Normative and Descriptive Traditions" in 2005; and, more recently, "What is an Organization: Materiality, Agency & Discourse," an international preconference cosponsored by three ICA divisions (the Organizational Communication, LSI, and Public Relations division) in 2008. Further, I served regularly as a reviewer for the ICA Organizational Communication and LSI Divisions. Finally, I served as a member on the ICA Young Scholar Award committee in 2003 and as a member of the ICA Publication committee in 2004 and 2005. Moreover, I received the 1996 ICA Organizational Communication Division Charles Redding Award for the best dissertation in Organizational Communication, the 2002 ICA Young Scholar Award for to the most promising young scholar in Communication, the 2002 Best Article Award from the Organizational Communication Division of the National Communication Association (NCA), and the 2006 (Edited) Book of the Year from the Organizational Communication Division of the NCA. I was also invited to give keynote addresses at international conferences (in France, Germany, The Netherlands, and Italy) and to give lectures in various universities around the world (London School of Economics, UK; Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, CA, USA; Universite de Bordeaux, France; University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA, USA; and Universite de Lausanne, Switzerland). In terms of service, I currently serve on four editorial boards and am a regular reviewer for seven peer-reviewed journals.