Variety is a peculiar thing, and many among us have argued for clarifying what we value in this shared endeavor called communication. For a long time, for instance, we've debated whether communication constitutes a discipline or a field, with one suggesting regimented and somewhat closed knowledge, the other a porous sharing of knowledge and its transfer. Neither notion, of course, is that clear: A discipline does mean a way of thinking but it also suggests a regimen or punishment, and so debates over the value of disciplines - their placement, role and power - oscillate between a broad-based celebration of the capacity to think in rigorous, trained ways and a condemnation of the power of disciplines to enforce and police knowledge acquisition. The idea of the field has similar variation: While it too means a way of thinking or sphere of interest, it also denotes a battleground, a background, a simulation, or a range of competing contestants. No wonder, then, that we have not managed to move forward on whether communication is a discipline or a field when even the words themselves have such variable meanings.

But what if we were to abandon conversations about what we share -- not forever -- but long enough to track the matrix of the less central and not always consensual positions we inhabit? What if we were to agree to disagree so as to position ourselves as multiple interpretive communities -- groups that agree to process tacit knowledge so as to interpret the world in a like fashion with others - inside of one larger interpretive community called communication? All fields of knowledge are shifting coalitions, whose members agree at certain points to work together to wield resources, gain recognition, establish standards, and realize other strategic aims. But when those aims migrate - as they often do -- to the background of our ongoing lives as scholars, can we not take steps to celebrate our heterogeneity? Consider how communication might profit were we to better understand how certain ways of knowing amongst us rule in and out aspects of a phenomenon, how we differently determine what counts as evidence and in which ways, and how we make multiple judgment calls about the focal points worth thinking about and the kinds of research that count.

Celebrating our heterogeneity offers a way to talk about how we engage without getting snared by the differences with which we engage. Historically, disciplinary coherence was a goal easily in hand, by which practitioners of a given field of knowledge could readily identify its key tenets and know that all would agree. In search of unified explanations, intellectuals of the 19th and early 20th centuries in some sense had it easier than we do, for we can no longer rely on evident and coherent knowledge in any given field of knowledge. Rather, developments associated with globalization, an increased managerialism in universities, the intrusion of market considerations into the curriculum and a trend toward centralized university relations all render an insistence on disciplines existing in pristine isolation from each other a tendency of the past. Inquiry today takes shape in circumstances that are by and large porous, permeable, engaged, internally contradictory, unstable and dynamic, and we in communication need to address these attributes.

Celebrating our heterogeneity may get us farther than we've gotten till now, because we are not yet as like each other as many might assume or want. Years after the fact, many of us still smart from periodic rifts over difference and in the worst of cases longstanding antagonisms that implicitly separate us from each other. Our students do not always have a ready grasp of what communication is or could be. This dissonance has caused discomfort - and at times collisions -- between empiricists and interpretivists, quantitative and qualitative engagements with data, nomothetic and idiographic mind-sets, loyalists to the humanities and social sciences, administrative and critical researchers, even interpersonal and mass communication research settings. The thorns in communication's side have outlasted their usefulness, and as a broadly-scoped interpretive community, communication scholars have been on the defensive for too long.

I suggest that we take an offensive - and ultimately proactive - stance moving forward. By engaging more intently despite our different notions of what matters, we might begin to understand as much about how we share knowledge as about which knowledge we share, as much about the forms of our engagements with each other as about their contents. Such a focus has a long intellectual history, argued separately by Emile Durkheim, Michel Foucault, Nelson Goodman, G. Nigel Gilbert and Michael Mulkay, and Mary Douglas, each of whom argued that knowledge's development has as much to do with social forces - like integration, power, solidarity, notions of suitability - as with intellectual ones.

My hope is that by celebrating our heterogeneity we might turn our various sources of angst into strengths. By allowing that sometimes it makes sense to suspend the drive toward homogeneity long enough to connect better as members of one community, we might project ourselves onto the academy with cues for its future development.

Three separate characteristics of communication come to mind in this regard:

1. We span the university environment. Unlike most other so-called coherent disciplines, communication, as an interdisciplinary field of knowledge, pronouncedly draws both from the humanities and the social sciences, not one or the other. This brings into close quarters a slew of related assumptions: we employ both nomothetic and ideographic stances on how knowledge signifies, and in spanning so broadly across the university curriculum, we have multiple neighbors who seem peculiar to some of us but whom others of us understand all too well. History, psychology, political science, computer science, economics, literature and anthropology are but a few of the disciplines from which we draw. Though none of us is in proximate quarters with all of these neighboring fields of knowledge, collectively we boast an enviable understanding of the university environment, writ large. 
   
2. We employ a wide range of methodological tools. Unlike the finite skill set of many so-called coherent disciplines, we cull an eclectic inventory of methodologies, analytical stances, and epistemological vantage points, which willfully - though not always -- cut across empiricist and interpretive barriers, quantitative and qualitative perspectives, descriptive and critical vantage points. Many of us strategically employ blends and mixes of formerly oppositional choices, sending earlier "either/or" statements to the morgue. Such mixing positions us all the better to understand, employ and critique research projects as they unfold across the curriculum.
   
3. We boast the acquisition of "knowledge of" and "knowledge for" in equal packets, twinning knowledge for knowledge's sake alongside knowledge for practical and/or applied purposes. With the latter including journalism studies, public relations, organizational communication, health communication and the various policy initiatives, we differ from the so-called coherent disciplines which for a very long time banned practical knowledge as anathema to intellectual enlightenment. Not only does communication activate what the U.S. pragmatic philosopher William James and following him the sociologist Robert Park called "knowledge about" and "acquaintance with," but we are oriented toward the world beyond the Ivory Tower in ways that are embodied by few other fields of knowledge in the university. Given the increasing pressures on the university environment to connect more fully with the real world, we remain ahead of the game that may soon be played across the academy.

These are not the only defining characteristics of communication, but they are relevant here because they anticipate the resolution of many challenges facing the academy at large, which has been wrestling with how to better situate disciplinary knowledge within the larger terrain of multiple intellectual and practical interests and agendas. In other words, communication leads other fields of knowledge in intuiting where the academy is going. Furthermore, it is central in a world being continually transformed by information technology. Isn't it time we figured out amongst ourselves how we variably connect on the inside so that we can do a better job at refracting our vision on others?

To be sure, I overplay here the distinction between us and the rest of the university environment, and I am not the first to suggest that we take seriously our aspirations, borders and modes of collective identification. In this, I follow a vigorous list of former ICA Presidents, all of whom broached the importance of self-clarification, among them Sonia Livingstone, who addressed the differences in thinking about how we position ourselves to the outside - as an interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary or cross disciplinary endeavor; Bob Craig, who elucidated what was at stake in thinking from anew about communication as a field or discipline; and Brenda Dervin, who tackled the question of paradigm shifts.

But I suggest that we seize this moment by accepting now that perhaps it is enough to do less. By celebrating our heterogeneity so as to encourage engagement and fuller understanding of our multiple collective selves, communication may be better situated to function as a model field of knowledge for the academy. We face an intersection in which the quirky attributes that have long tamped our ability to speak up - our newness, our applicability, our conceptual borrowing, our topicality, our proximity to technology, our practical/intellectual twinning, our indefinite core - are among the very traits that are becoming front and center for the academy as a whole. We have a target of opportunity, and we should use it energetically.

Celebrating our heterogeneity in effect pushes agendas that have already begun in ICA. It ranges from the obvious activities of actively listening to each other and respecting views different from our own to creating settings in which we can agree that certain aspects of our community matter, even if we do not agree about what those aspects entail. For instance, the initiative for cross unit sessions last year was a step in the direction of more engaged conversation across divisions and interest groups, and I am happy to say it will now be repeated with ICA President-Elect Francois Cooren's decision to make cross unit conversations the core of the theme divisions at the upcoming conference in Singapore. What better way to keep us talking to those whom we have not noticed or tended to forget? Indeed, Singapore offers us additional ways to accept the differences at the core of our community. Though substantial disagreement accompanied our choice of the conference venue, as an association we have agreed to honor that choice. As all of us prepare the final details on our submissions for the conference next June, those planning to tackle the practices and beliefs they believe need tackling should do so with respect and integrity toward those who think differently than they do.

I hope you'll take these ideas to heart and play them forward. Please see this column as an invitation to take part in the conversation; I invite those of you who see these ideas as relevant to respond in kind with your own contributions to the newsletter. Communication has a role to play in the academy, and celebrating our heterogeneity may bring us one step closer to realizing it.