[eccr] Preconference: History of North American Mass Communication Research

How Healthy is the Historiography of North American Mass Communication 
Research?: Ferment in the Field's History

Wednesday, November 16. 8:30 am - 4:45 pm, Boston, Massachusetts
Annual Meeting of the National Communication Association (U.S.A.) 
(www.natcom.org)

Seminar Leaders: David Park, Lake Forest College, and Jeff Pooley,
Muhlenberg College

Rationale: "Strictly speaking," James Carey has written, "there is no 
history of mass communication research." This pre-convention seminar is 
organized around a single question: Why have the histories of the study 
of North American mass communication--the published accounts of its 
origins and development--been so often airbrushed and Whiggish, 
historiographically naïve, and thinly sourced? The narratives that 
exist have appeared most frequently in annual review essays and 
especially textbook capsules, and these tend to emphasize the 
progressive unfolding of a new science. Even the work that challenged 
this progressivist narrative in the 1970s remained thoroughly 
presentist in other ways. The main approach has been to combine thin 
and error-ridden biography with a superficial gloss of ideas, with the 
accent on "destined for greatness". Most of the existing history of the 
field ignores external intellectual, social, political and economic 
influences. In particular, the revealing institutional history of the 
field has been neglected. The bulk of the history has been written by 
active participants in the field, often central figures with their own 
legacies at stake. Much of the literature, as a result, comes off as 
origin myth, as an all-too-usable account of the past. This is made 
strikingly clear when this history is compared with the extant 
historiography of other fields. Much of the stronger history that has 
been written recently has failed to register in the field's 
consciousness, in part because those who do work on the field's history 
are scattered, isolated from one another (with almost no 
cross-citation), and outside the field's main currents. This 
preconference is intended, in part, to reduce that isolation-to gather 
together scholars with overlapping interests in the history of mass 
communication research.

Participants: All scholars with an interest in the history of mass 
communication research are encouraged to submit completed papers or 
extended abstracts (2-3 pages) by September 15, 2005. Send submissions 
to David Park, Lake Forest College, 555 N. Sheridan Rd., Lake Forest, 
IL 60045-2399 or email an electronic copy to (park /at/ lakeforest.edu). Plans 
are underway to publish selected papers in a special issue of a leading 
journal.

Issues to be explored:
Participants in the pre-conference are invited to submit papers or 
abstracts that
a) address, explain, and/or comment upon the state of the existing 
historiography; or
b) provide new, substantive histories of specific episodes or 
developments in the field's past; or
c) reflect on the field's institutional history; or
d) consider the field's history as it overlaps and intersects with 
cognate fields like the sociology of culture, social psychology, 
political science, or cultural studies

----------------
ECCR-Mailing list
---
To unsubscribe, send an email message to (majordomo /at/ listserv.vub.ac.be)
with in the body of the message (NOT in the subject): unsubscribe eccr
---
ECCR - European Consortium for Communications Research
Secretariat: P.O. Box 106, B-1210 Brussels 21, Belgium
Tel.: +32-2-412 42 78
Fax.: +32-2-412 42 00
Email: (info /at/ eccr.info)
URL: http://www.eccr.info
----------------