IAMCR - International Association for Media and Communication Research

 Download PDF - Newsletter April 2007, vol. 17/1 (4.21 MB) - You must be logged in as a member to download the most recent newsletter.

President's Column: Media, Communication and Information – IAMCR’s Future

We meet 23-25 July 2007 to celebrate IAMCR's 50th Anniversary. The conference theme is Media, Communication, Information: Celebrating 50 Years of Theories and Practices. We have our local conference organizers – Divina Frau-Meigs, Josiane Jouet, Michael Palmer, and Nathalie Sonnac – in Paris to thank for their very hard work. We have UNESCO to thank for providing the venue for the conference (see www.iamcrparis2007.org/conference_uk.html). This year we emphasise, in particular, the new theoretical spaces that are emerging through the original and innovative approaches being developed by our members. We will be welcoming nonmembers to this conference and I hope they will want to join us in a constant process of renewal. IAMCR renewal is essential in a world mediated ever more intensely by media, communication networks and the production and consumption of information of all kinds.

While we celebrate all that IAMCR members have achieved over the years, we need to tackle the challenges of the future as well. IAMCR can celebrate the fact that it has persistently maintained its commitment to interdisciplinarity, but I think it is important to review this concept and ask questions about what kind of interdisciplinarity, to what end and for the benefit of whom? I raise this because it has become fashionable to talk about interdisciplinarity and to presume that IAMCR is special in part because of this emphasis and in part because of the international reach of our membership. Today, however, ICA’s remit is “to advance the scholarly study of human communication by encouraging and facilitating excellence in academic research worldwide”.What then specifically are the goals of IAMCR? What will differentiate us in the future from ICA as it pursues its own approach to internationalism? ICA’s remit refers to the ‘critical evaluation’ of research; in what sense can IAMCR claim to be different? IAMCR’s description of itself reads as follows:

“IAMCR is the worldwide professional organisation in the field of media and communication research. Its members promote global inclusiveness and excellence within the best traditions of critical research in the field”.

These are not just issues of wording. As we continue to build IAMCR’s membership base, what is it that we can say that is convincing so that more and more early career researchers will join us? It may be that IAMCR creates an attractive and complementary space for theorybuilding, empirical research and practice because it attracts those who seek to unveil the contradictory ways in which the media and communication are implicated in social struggles in which power, its reconfiguration and redistribution are central. If we want our membership to continue to grow, I think we will have to find ways to make IAMCR a meeting place that is considerably more inclusive than it is today. Although it need not be so for
all of IAMCR’s members, it seems to me that IAMCR members foster a deep awareness of the need to challenge mainstream conceptions of the role of the media in society, conceptions that so frequently become ‘naturalized’ in the rhetoric that supports imaginings about the empowering capabilities especially of new media.

Insofar as this is the case, as we celebrate our past, I suggest that we need to turn our minds to how we can support a distinctive and critical interdisciplinarity; one that favours inclusivity, not only of the knowledge bases that emerge in the wealthy countries, but also those emerging elsewhere. Critical scholarship raises questions about which practices and actions are consistent with, or divergent from, sets of (often themselves contested) principles. Whatever our position as researchers, our answers to these questions ultimately inform our ideas about how we ‘should’ conduct research in the media and communication field. If we want our association to be more inclusive than it is today, we need to orient ourselves in a way that acknowledges the political nature of the project in which we are engaged and of the research conducted in its name. While our association as a whole takes no political position, our members certainly can and do. Your commitments of this kind are those that will shape the direction of IAMCR in the next 50 years.

As we approach this celebratory time in Paris, I want to say how proud I am to serve as President and to pay a special tribute to the work of all our Past Presidents, Vice Presidents, Secretaries General, Treasurers, members of the International Council and Working Group Chairs, all those who have served along-side them in various capacities – and not the least - to our enthusiastic members at large. I also want to thank all the current officer holders of IAMCR for their support in huge numbers of ways – particularly during a year that has been a testing one for me in my home institution.

Since I was elected, many of you will know that we have struggled to find a sensible way to manage the operational aspects of IAMCR. My President’s messages have been filled with endless detail about membership databases. We owe Bruce Girard and Alvaro Mailhos a huge vote of thanks for the hours and hours they have spent to bring our new website and membership database online, the latter which you will see by the time we arrive in Paris!

My good wishes to all,

Robin Mansell

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 Download PDF - Newsletter April 2007, vol. 17/1 (4.21 MB) - You must be logged in as a member to download the most recent newsletter.