Reflections On The International Association For Media And Communication Research

Throughout its 65-year history, the International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR) has sought to facilitate international exchanges and research collaborations among academics and journalists in the field of media and communication. ​ Created during a time of strong ideological tension following World War II in 1957 and with the support of UNESCO, the contributors to this edited collection highlight how the IAMCR and its members shaped the field of media and communications research. From its beginnings focusing on the mass media, including the press and journalism education, today the Association attracts researchers and practitioners who undertake critical analysis of contemporary media and communications, including online platforms and their governance. Consistent themes throughout the Association’s history have been its concern with human rights, law, culture and the political economy of the media and communication industries. Not content simply to understand developments in the media and communications field around the world, the Association’s membership has sought to ‘change the world’ through its published research and its participation in global, regional, national and local policy debate and practice. This volume is organised in four parts following an introduction authored by editors who are active members of IAMCR. Part I highlights eight prominent scholarly traditions of research which have attracted the interest of scholars from around the world as well as the way the Association has sought to be inclusive of early career scholars. Part II offers seven chapters which bring to light the political struggles of a membership seeking to engage in scholarship across the East – West divide and to contribute to global debates aimed at fostering an inclusive, fair and equitable international information and communication order through engagement with United Nations sponsored initiatives. Part III turns to accounts of the way members from selected countries and regions have contributed to the Association’s scholarly work. The last part highlights the significant scholarly and institution-building contributions of James Halloran, IAMCR’s President from 1972 to 1988 and other prominent contributors to the study of culture and the political economy of media and communications

This handbook comprises fresh and incisive research focusing on African media, culture and communication. The chapters from a cross-section of scholars dissect the forces shaping the field within a changing African context. It adds critical corpora of African scholarship and theory that places the everyday worlds, needs and uses of Africans first. The book goes beyond critiques of the marginality of African approaches in media and communication studies to offer scholars the theoretical and empirical toolkit needed to start building critical corpora of African scholarship and theory that places the everyday worlds, needs and uses of Africans first. Decoloniality demands new epistemological interventions in African media, culture and communication, and this book is an important interlocutor in this space. In a globally interconnected world, changing patterns of authority and power pose new challenges to the ways in which media institutions are constituted and managed, as well as how communication and media policy is negotiated and the manner in which citizens engage with increasing media opportunities. The handbook focuses on the interrelationships of the local and the global and the concomitant consequences for media practice, education and citizen engagement in today’s Africa. Altogether, the book foregrounds convivial epistemologies relevant for locating African media and communication in the pluriverse. This handbook is an essential read for critical media, communications, cultural studies and journalism scholars.

The Handbook of Comparative Communication Research aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of comparative communication research. It fills an obvious gap in the literature and offers an extensive and interdisciplinary discussion of the general approach of comparative research, its prospect and problems as well as its applications in crucial sub-fields of communications. The first part of the volume charts the state of the art in the field; the second section introduces relevant areas of communication studies where the comparative approach has been successfully applied in recent years; the third part offers an analytical review of conceptual and methodological issues; and the last section proposes a roadmap for future research.

The International History of Communication Study maps the growth of media and communication studies around the world. Drawing out transnational flows of ideas, institutions, publications, and people, it offers the most comprehensive picture to date of the global history of communication research and education. This volume reaches into national and regional areas that have not received much attention in the scholarship until now, including Asia, Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East alongside Europe and North America. It also covers communication study outside of academic settings: in international organizations like UNESCO, and among commercial and civic groups. It moves beyond the traditional canon to cover work by forgotten figures, including women scholars in the field and those outside of the United States and Europe, and it situates them all within the broader geopolitical, institutional, and intellectual landscapes that have shaped communication study globally. Intended for scholars and graduate students in communication, media studies, and journalism, this volume pushes the history of communication study in new directions by taking an aggressively international and comparative perspective on the historiography of the field. Methodologically and conceptually, the volume breaks new ground in bringing comparative, transnational, and global frames to bear, and puts under the spotlight what has heretofore only lingered in the penumbra of the history of communication study.

This book aims to feed into the critical debates about media, power and change through the respectful inclusion of a wide variety of critical approaches and traditions. This diversity is simultaneously structured and balanced by a deeply shared set of concerns, that are mobilised to defend core societal values including social justice, equality, fairness, care for the other and humanity. Critical Perspectives on Media, Power and Change raises questions about how the omnipresent media can contribute to the materialisation of these core values, and how it sometimes works against them. Rethinking social change, mediatisation and regulations are thus significant issues – explicitly addressed in this book. In addition the authors show how the role of the critical media and communication scholar merits and requires (self-)reflection; critical voices matter, but they also face structural limitations. This book was originally published as two special issues of Javnost – The Public.

This collection brings together ten of the most distinguished feminist scholars whose work has been celebrated for its excellence in helping to lay the foundation of feminist communication and media research. This edited volume features contributions by the first ten renowned communication and media scholars that have received the Teresa Award for the Advancement of Feminist Scholarship from the Feminist Scholarship Division (FSD) of the International Communication Association (ICA): Patrice M. Buzzanell, Meenakshi Gigi Durham, Radha Sarma Hegde, Dafna Lemish, Radhika Parameswaran, Lana F. Rakow, Karen Ross, H. Leslie Steeves, Linda Steiner, and Angharad N. Valdivia. These distinguished scholars reflect on the contributions they have made to different subfields of media and communication scholarship, and offer invaluable insight into their own paths as feminist scholars. They each reflect on matters of power, agency, privilege, ethics, intersectionality, resilience, and positionality, address their own shortcomings and struggles, and look ahead to potential future directions in the field. Last but not least, they come together to discuss the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on women, marginalized people, and vulnerable populations, and to underline the crucial need for feminist communication and media scholarship to move beyond Eurocentrism toward an ethics of care and global feminist positionality. A comprehensive and inspiring resource for students and scholars of feminist media and communication studies.

This edited volume explores blindness as a construct with which we the contributors engage as part of our social existence and/or academic research. Irrespective of eye conditions, or the lack thereof, blindness is an understanding at which we have all come to arrive. On the way to this conceptual point, which is in any case unlikely ever to be fixed, we have passed or visited many formative cultural stations. In the terms of autocritical disability studies (i.e. an explicitly embodied development of critical disability studies), these cultural stations include key moments in education and training; the reflective pursuits of philosophy, aesthetics, and cultural theory; literary works such as autobiography, novels, short stories, drama, and poetry; visual texts ranging from photography to postage stamps; technological developments like television, computer applications, and social media; value systems defined by family and/or religion; and the social phenomenon of hate and war. Each chapter in this volume engages with two of these cultural stations; some ostensibly if not profoundly positive or indeed negative and some that contradict each other within and across chapters. This book will be of interest to all scholars and students of disability studies, sociology, education, and health.

The last two issues of the 1993 Journal of Communication featured a discipline-wide self-analysis, collecting over fifty essays by giants in the field as well as many up-and-coming scholars. Now available in a single volume for courses in communications theory and practice, this collective reconnaissance of scholarship and research in the field makes a fundamental contribution to understanding the very essence of media studies. Representing a wide range of intellectual perspectives, Defining Media Studies incorporates the growing presence and significance of such technological media as the computer Net, virtual reality, and fiber optic telecommunication. Maintaining that such leaps in communication now help to define the parameters of media reality, the editors argue that these phenomena must draw the scholarly attention of media studies. The resulting volume of essays emphasizes this shift in the field, presenting insight into interfaces, telecommunications, the Information Society, media economics, "imagined communities", and many other issues, both old and new, familiar and not so familiar.