We are 3 months away from our Conference in Singapore and we (ICA and the local organizers) are doing everything we can to make it a great event that you will remember for a long time. The program has now been finalized and you can already book your hotel and make flight reservations!

Let me give you some insights about the four plenary sessions, as well as the four miniplenaries, that have been scheduled.

Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht (Stanford U, USA) will be our first speaker with his opening plenary session scheduled on Tuesday evening. His keynote, titled "Infinite Availability: About Hyper-Communication [and Old Age]," will propose an interesting reflection on the dramatic increase of opportunities to communicate, a function of technical devices whose effects neutralize the consequences of physical - and sometimes temporal - distance. Gumbrecht is the author of the book The Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey (2003, Stanford U Press), which I think is a great contribution to the reflection on materiality and communication.

The second speaker, whose talk is scheduled on Wednesday, is Ien Ang (U of Western Sydney, Australia). Ang is one of the leaders in cultural studies worldwide and the founding director of the Center for Cultural Research (CCR) at her University (see her website: http://www.uws.edu.au/centre_for_cultural_research/ccr/people/researchers/professor_ien_ang). Her presentation, cosponsored by Singapore's Asian Media Information and Communication (AMIC) Center and ICA, is titled "The Transnational Communication of 'Racism': Migration, Media, and the Shaping of International Relations." Based on a series of attacks on Indian students in Australia, Ang's talk will show how the complex entanglement of cultural nationalism and transnational mobility is mediated through inherited discourses of race and "racism," in a time when (post)colonial power hierarchies are being unsettled in a rapidly changing world, especially in the Asia Pacific region.

Our third speaker, ICA president Barbie Zelizer (U of Pennsylvania, USA), will present the ICA presidential address, which is scheduled on Friday evening. Her presentation is titled "Journalism in the Service of Communication."

Finally, the Singapore conference will end with a closing plenary titled "New Media and Its Impact on Censorship" with (so far) two keynote speakers, Peng Hwa Ang (Nanyang Technological U, Singapore) and Joseph Chan (Chinese U of Hong Kong). Using examples from within and without Asia, this panel of distinguished speakers will explore how state and self-censorship are changing as a result of the interaction among traditional media, new media, state policies, and social formation.

In addition to these four plenary sessions, we also organized four miniplenaries, which are concomitantly scheduled on Thursday, June 24 at 1:00pm.

The first one, titled "Queer in Asia: Issues, Identities, and Communication," will address the situations of GLBT individuals and communities in Southeast Asia, and the role of media, old and new, in creating and potentially transforming matters. It will be chaired by Mark Cenite (Nanyang Technological U, Singapore) and will feature Alex Au (Yawning Bread, Singapore) and Audrey Yue (U of Melbourne, Australia). John Erni (Lingnan U, Hong Kong) and Larry Gross (U of South California, USA) will act as respondents.

The second miniplenary, titled "Im/material Principles, Material Practices: The Women's Movement and its Media in Asia," will present case studies of the women's movement's varied use of mediated cultural forms in the Philippines, China, Myanmar, and India. Presenters on this panel will work together to fill a gaping hole in our knowledge of feminist agency in Asia. They will be Lisa Brooten (Southern Illinois U Carbondale, USA), representing Myanmar; Sylvia Estrada-Claudio (U of Philippines), representing the Philippines; Dana Lam (AWARE, Singapore) representing Singapore; Hongmei Li (U of Georgia, USA) representing China; as well as Sunitha Chitrapu (Sophia Polytechnic, Mumbai, India) and Radhika Parameswaran (Indiana U, USA), both representing India. Radhika Gajjala (Bowling Green State U, USA) will chair this miniplenary panel.

The third miniplenary, titled "Urban Communication in Singapore in an Age of Globalization" and chaired by Gary Gumpert (Urban Communication Foundation, USA) will feature Singaporean representatives from Land Transport Authority, Public Utilities Board, and Urban Redevelopment Authority. All of these miniplenary speakers are from government agencies that are tasked with managing urban planning, water, and traffic in Singapore. They will explain how Singapore addresses the issues it faces and how a number of the solutions are being emulated by other countries around the world.

Finally, the fourth plenary session will be featuring four of our new ICA Fellows. Titled "Matters of Communication: Making a Difference with Research," it will be chaired by Linda Putnam (U of California-Santa Barbara, USA) and honor Robert T. Craig (U of Colorado, Boulder, USA), Barbie Zelizer (U of Pennsylvania, USA), Youichi Ito (Akita International U, Japan) and Sandra J. Ball-Rokeach (U of South California, USA). These four Fellows will present overviews of their work on the underpinnings of the discipline in interpersonal, intercultural, and mediated contexts. This panel will address ongoing challenges for us as communication scholars, and will pose questions about the future of our discipline in the international arena.

Hope to see you soon in Singapore!