In the 30 years since the journal of communication inquiry (JCI)’s first issue, the journal has published many articles but to look at them as a whole is to see the historical evolution of critical and cultural studies approaches to communication. JCI will celebrate its 30th anniversary with the publication of its July 2004 issue.

The relationship between communication and society is difficult to track and is always changing. But for the graduate students in The University of Iowa's School of Journalism and Mass Communication who run and edit the JCI, that relationship can be explored through research.

Graduate students in the J-MC School brought JCI to life in 1974. They wanted a forum to explore communication and created one of the earliest, critically oriented communication journals in the country.

JCI is the only journal that is run by the students of the field. “That’s very unusual, especially for a credible, peer-reviewed journal,” Shayla Thiel, last year’s editor of JCI said.

The mission of JCI is to explore “communication phenomena within cultural and historical perspectives.” And that’s just what the publication does.

Past themes have been “Social Imagination in Media Research,” “Deconstructing the Popular” and “Communication History and Identity.”

JCI first published theorist Stuart Hall’s “Gramsci's relevance for the study of race and ethnicity” as well as “The problem of ideology: Marxism without guarantees” in 1986 and both have since been reprinted and cited extensively. Other well-known scholars such as Len Ang, Robert McChesney, Janice Radway and Edward Said have also had articles published in JCI.

Beginning in January 1998, JCI became a quarterly publication published by Sage Publications. In 2001, the journal became an affiliate of the Cultural and Critical Studies Division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communcation.

“Very few journals are around this long,” Thiel said of the 30th anniversary of JCI. To commemorate this accomplishment, the issue published in July 2004 will be “The Work of Hanno Hardt in Context.”

It will present the research of some of Hardt’s students. Thiel said Hardt was very important in the establishment of JCI as well as to the field of journalism.
By Kristina Rstom