College of Liberal Arts & Sciences The University of Iowa School of Journalism and Mass Communication The University of Iowa
Hanno Hardt

A Conversation with
Hanno Hardt on
The Future of Critical Communication Studies:
A Festschrift

School of Journalism and Mass Communication
The University of Iowa

bookcoverOctober 18, 2003
Iowa Memorial Union, Iowa City, Iowa

Hanno’s latest book, Myths for the Masses, will soon be released by Blackwell Publishers. Earlier books and a more complete bibliography of Hanno’s work can be seen by clicking here. Hanno’s photography exhibits on the web can be viewed at http://skylined.org/hardt/ .

Program

Organization of the Proceedings

The paper titles and abstracts listed below preview four moments ("I," "II ," "III ," and " IV ") in a general, informal conversation on the future of critical studies and the role communication and mass communication plays in that future. While they appear to signify formal papers (many are on their way to formal publication), even a specified order, they are instead treated as clusters of ideas so that the “festival” spirit of a “ Festschrift ” highlights the style of intellectual conversation participants associate with Hanno Hardt. Accordingly, by announcing their interests through abstracts and paper titles, the 25 voices represented on the program intend here to have yet another conversation with Hanno, this time as an occasion to bring all generations of his students and colleagues together at once. This means that all who attend are free to join in the conversation, to broaden it into further explorations of our collective concern: the future of critical communication studies.

I. 8:30 - 10:30 a.m.

  1. Matthew A. Killmeier (Truman State University, USA), "On Borrowed Terms, Precedents and Rooting: Reflections on the Future of Critical Communication Studies." Critical communication studies in the United States is a minority endeavor. The need for engagement with American radical social ideas and theories as an important step to developing indigenous critical work remains wanting, particularly in an age when a critical confrontation of ideology is ever-more immanent. In order to engage in the future, American critical communication studies needs to indigenize criticality by shedding ahistorical and asocial themes. This paper prescribes a totalizing critique of culture as the breeding ground for both resistance and ideology, particularly in the deep-seated sites of propaganda, collective/popular memory, and atomization. By reappropriating its critical potential, communication theory would move beyond a mere mediating function to undertake active intervention into the actualization of the social.
     
  2. David Sholle (Miami University (Ohio), USA), "Adorno's Conception of the Subject for the Future of Critical Communication Studies." Cultural studies owes a great deal to the critique of modernity, having used the Cartesian cogito as a significant jump off point to interrogate the notion of the subject. By the end of the 20th century, critical cultural studies had been significantly influenced by accepting the poststructuralist "death of the subject," robbing in the process the critical dimension of dialectics in favor of the immediacy of the particular and the dispersion of forces. The future of critical communication studies requires the reintegration of the subject in a way that restores a dialectical focus on the limits of the present capitalist social formation, including its strategies for social change and the support of freedom. This paper contributes to such a project through analysis of how cultural studies remains torn between two unacceptable positions in regard to the subject: (1) the "populist cultural studies approach" that envisions the subject as an active agent but which fragments the subject into floating identities; and (2), an annihilating critique of the subject via poststructuralism, that mistakenly fights against and immobilizes the subject only to replace it with systems of structures, oppositions and differences without lives lived. Theodor Adorno's conception of the subject avoids both alternatives to revitalize the future of critical cultural studies through a dialectical conception of subjectivity.
     
  3. Slavko Splichal (University of Ljubljana, Slovenia), "The Principle of Publicity and the Right to Communicate." The principle of publicity was originally conceived as a critical impulse against injustice based on secrecy of state actions and as an enlightening momentum substantiating the “region of human liberty,” making private citizens equal in the public use of reason. Bentham favored a free press as an instrument for public control of government, in the interest of the general happiness. Kant favored free public discussion as an instrument for the development and expression of autonomous rationality. With the constitutional guarantee for a free press in parliamentary democracies, discussions of freedom of the press were largely reduced to the pursuit of freedom by the media, thus neglecting the idea of publicity as the basis of democratic citizenship. Yet a free press embodied in the property rights of the owners of the press may well fail to achieve either Benthamite or Kantian goals. The concepts of public service media and, to a lesser extent, the model of social responsibility of the press attempted recuperating these goals, but with very limited success. The discrimination in favor of the power/control function of the press clearly abstracted freedom of the press from the Kantian quest for the public use of reason. In democratic societies where the people rather than different estates legitimize all the powers, the control dimension of publicity embodied in the corporate freedom of the press should be effectively supplemented by actions toward equalizing citizens in the public use of reason.
     
  4. Andrew Calabrese (University of Colorado, USA), "Communication and the Moral Economy." E. P. Thompson's influential essay, "The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century," reflects on the moral basis of popular protest. Thompson’s analysis provided something of an intellectual heritage in work advocating the idea of a moral economy, as contrasted with a more institutionally oriented conception of political economy. This paper begins with the premise that inquiry into the moral economy of popular communication about social injustice provides a valuable foundation for critically assessing contemporary transnational social movements. Moral economic reasoning enables us to examine the ends sought in the formation of what is called "global civil society." The paper concludes that the future of critical communication studies requires a moral economy of communication, not as a substitute, but as an essential complement, to the political economy of communication."
     
  5. Vincent Mosco (Queen's University, Canada), "Critical Communications Research and Communication Labor." In recent years communication companies have stepped up efforts to undermine and eliminate trade unions representing their workers. One of the primary tactics to accomplish this goal is to set up separate subsidiaries based around new technologies (e.g. cellular telephony, internet services) and prohibit their unionization thereby eliminating worker representation in high growth product and service areas. This paper reports on the case of Canada’s second largest telephone company, Telus, which set out to attack the TWU, Canada’s most militant communication union, by creating a union-free mobile telephone unit. The paper is primarily comprised of my submission to the Canada Industrial Relations Board on behalf of the TWU. It makes use of communication theory and research to argue that there are no grounds for Telus’ actions short of attacking the union and that the CIRB should prohibit it. The paper represents my third such intervention in recent years on behalf of Canada’s telephone unions, which won the first two cases, and demonstrates the ability of communications research to support the goals of working people in the communication industries.
     
  6. Marian Meyers (Georgia State University, USA), "Gender, Race and Class in Representation: A Feminist Media Studies Approach." Cultural studies, as van Zoonen notes, is the dominant theoretical approach underlying the field of feminist media studies. Both have grown out of Marxist theory, leftist politics and progressive political movements, and both have engaged in representational studies of popular culture to illuminate relations of power and exclusion. By drawing on both cultural studies and feminist theory, this study illustrates the representational tradition within feminist media studies while also indicating the need for cultural studies to draw on feminist theory’s conceptualization of the interconnection between gender, race and class in future studies addressing representation within popular culture. More specifically, this study examines the story the news tells about "crack mothers" through a narrative analysis of a newspaper series, exploring the major themes and character types from a perspective informed by critical cultural studies and feminist theory. The series’ focus was the battle to save the children of crack mothers. This narrative of redemption, viewed through the lens of gender, race and class, is one of the white, professional middle-class working to save women and children of the black underclass. The underlying paternalistic racism differs from modern racism and reflects the intersecting, multiple oppressions of gender, race and class.
     
  7. Lisa McLaughlin (Miami University (Ohio), USA), "The Crisis of the Public Sphere and the Utopianism of Exhausted Energies." In Justice Interruptus (1997), Nancy Fraser offers a diagnosis of the consequences of the "postsocialist" condition, or what she describes as the cynical and self-doubting disposition of the post-1989 Left in the wake of the demise of "actually existing socialism." She argues that because the Left is now plagued by the inability to imagine possibilities for an alternative social order, it lacks a utopian vision in which to anchor progressive struggles for distributive justice. Fraser's postsocialist targets include radical democracy, multiculturalism, political liberalism, communitarianism, feminist identity politics, and Francis Fukuyama ("the end of history"). This paper, however, suggests that it is curious that Habermas's argument regarding "the exhaustion of utopian energies" is offered by Fraser as an apt phrase for diagnosing the "postsocialist" condition, when, more accurately, Habermas's political theory is a symptomatic reflection of this condition. Habermas’s "The New Obscurity and the Exhaustion of Utopian Energies" and "The Crisis of the Welfare State and the Exhaustion of Utopian Energies," both written by Habermas in the 1980s but prior to 1989, were continuations of his project to reconstruct Marxist theory so that it was based less in a productivist paradigm and more able to engage with questions of culture and the symbolic re/production of society. The result, however, was a formulation that departed from Marxism to the extent that it is difficult to describe Habermas's theory as Marxist at all. In more recent years, it has become increasingly difficult to define Habermas's work as a contribution to critical theory given his acceptance of the combination of liberal democracy with a capitalist economy as the largely immutable condition of a well-ordered society. Civil society, as he advises, can only transform itself and should not take action to transform the state or the economy. This paper provides a diagnosis of Habermas's "postsocialist" condition and suggest that his confinement of utopian thought to historical continuities and the circumstances of the present moment is an expression of the exhausted energies that Fraser ascribes to the "postsocialist" condition. One of the primary concerns of this paper, however, is Habermas's use of the feminist movement to provide evidence for his position that socialism is no longer feasible or desirable, that "lifestyle" and "identity," as opposed to political economic divisions, are now the main sites for social crises. In particular, Habermas's interest in the feminist social movement exemplifies a global or transnational civil society that has a "post-materialist" character. Following on transnational feminist groups' attempts to exert pressure for gender equity through the United Nations, the paper argues that Habermas's "postsocialist" interpretation of this movement is guided by his own normative preconceptions that disregard empirical evidence that would challenge his assumption that struggles in the public sphere are about definitions, rather than money or power.

10:30 - 4:45 a.m. Break

II. 10:45 a.m. - 12:45 p.m.

  1. Ted Glasser (Stanford University, USA), "A Role for Discourse Ethics in the Reconstruction of Professionalism in Journalism." Notwithstanding the limits of any purely procedural approach to ethics, Jürgen Habermas's discourse ethics highlights the importance of a genuinely public discussion of contested norms and thus imposes certain limits on the domain of knowledge professionals can claim for themselves. More important, discourse ethics relocates professionalism by positioning the claims of practitioners as one of many voices in a larger debate about the roles and responsibilities of the press; thus discourse ethics politicizes professionalism and professional ethics by denying professionals any exclusivity--i.e., any privileged claims--in the resolution of questions concerning norms of conduct.
  2. Barbie Zelizer (University of Pennsylvania, USA), "On Accommodating Journalism's Regard for Facts, Truth, and Reality in Critical Cultural Studies." Journalism prides itself on a respect for the facts, truth, and reality. Yet what happens when these god-terms for the practice of most kinds of journalism become the focus of inquiry that insists on their relativity and subjectivity? This paper considers the odd twinning of cultural studies inquiry with the study of journalism, showing how originary premises in both arenas have rendered the two uneasy bedfellows, despite the fact that each has much to profit from a more solid and fruitful convergence. More specifically, the paper extends on early warnings from Hanno Hardt, who cautioned about the problems that would emerge from an uncritical adoption of British cultural studies into the American context. This paper argues that the uneven attention to journalism in cultural studies derives in part from that problematic.
  3. David Tetzlaff ( Connecticut College, USA), "Understanding Stories and Being Honest About the Truth." Stories produced in scientific or journalistic practices express stable conceptions of truth or falsity. Yet stories can pass a fact check and still mislead us. Furthermore, stories that contain a number of specific "lies" (e.g. "Roger and Me") may still present a powerful case for a larger truth. The paper argues that we must become more skillful at working through these conditions by examining connections between the mechanisms and politics of narrative through several working hypotheses. (1) Because human beings understand their world through narrative, primarily through the process of telling stories they come to "own," concerted political action depends on the ability to understand the world through a narrative frame -- a discourse that, in Jameson's terms, includes hermeneutic depth and makes historical connections. (2) All narratives have trajectories, points of view, implicit opinions. Though necessarily distortions of “the truth,” they also organize. (3) Science and other pseudo-scientific pursuits such as journalistic reporting can only make themselves understood by producing narrative structures that undermine their claims to objectivity and the presentation of truth. (4) This is not, in and of itself, a case of ideological deception, a practice that can and should be reformed. We have to tell stories to make our thoughts socially useful, so that is what we do. (5) More subjective or poetic notions of the true and the false permit perhaps more relevant terms and categories for evaluating the real-world values of different stories, a direction pointed to by philosophical positions like deconstruction, which argues that all discourse falls to equivalent value on the score of "truth" vs. "falsity." One discourse is as good as the next. (6) A primary theoretical agenda for critical communication research is to plot out a middle ground between the too-easy binarisms of both empiricist science and post-structuralism, to create new theoretical and critical vocabularies capable of interrogating expressions of false consciousness as narratives that advance the power of scientists (including " scientific Marxists") or other objective investigators.
  4. Bonnie Brennen (University of Missouri, USA), "Lockouts, Protests, and Scabs: A Critical Assessment of the Los Angeles Herald Examiner Strike." The essay argues for a critical labor perspective for the future of critical communication studies. It offers a case study of the Los Angeles Herald Examiner strike, 1967-1977, to identify how a critical labor perspective offers historically grounded, politically informed, and culturally situated analyses of media practices and uses. The decade long strike analyzed here highlights the devastating economic consequences for both the newspaper and The Guild, but it also offers important insights into the development of labor and news work in American journalism. For the academy, the remarkable point is that such a momentous strike was virtually ignored by media historians, itself a lesson that provides a cautionary tale for the future of media history as critical history. Substantively, this essay focuses on the political and cultural implications of class conflict, read through the power struggle between Los Angeles Newspaper Guild members and the Hearst-owned Herald Examiner over issues of identity, work and economic benefits.
  5. James F. Tracy (Florida Atlantic University, USA), "The News About the Newsworkers: Representation of the 1965 Guild Strike against the New York Times." This paper is an analysis of the print news coverage of the American Newspaper Guild’s strike against the New York Times in 1965. The study is grounded in a critical understanding of class as historical and lived experience within a shifting socio-cultural hegemony that seeks to illuminate the for-profit news media’s routinized representation of newsworkers in a strike waged against commercial journalism’s most celebrated bastion of “truth.” The essay further seeks to interpret workers’ attendant concerns and actions over the introduction of labor-displacing technology to the workplace, a chief concern for which the strike was waged. Throughout the coverage patterns of representation that have similarly characterized the depiction of strikes against non-journalistic industries by the capitalist press emerge in the visual and verbal print discourse of New York papers and their peers across the United States.
  6. James Lewes (USA), "Resistance in Blogs: Sites of Critique as Sites of Resistance among the Ranks in Iraq." Against the backdrop of the American war on Iraq, this paper offers a critical analysis of resistance within the ranks of the military as an opportunity to expand the range of criticality in communication studies. It argues that critical communication studies misses an important opportunity on the meaning of emancipation when it offers a wholesale critique of a particular institution, in this case, the military. Always, there has been an undercurrent of resistance within the ranks, contrary to stereotypes of widespread patriotism and associated notions that identify the military with the establishment. This paper demonstrates a promising line for the future of critical studies through an examination of an Internet "Blog" wherein we can find expressions of resistance to the American war in Iraq. Such expressions turn out to be consistent with earlier studies of resistance among the American military in Vietnam. The paper concludes with an argument that redirects critical cultural studies to pockets of resistance in seemingly conservative, establishment arenas.
  7. Gene Costain (University of Central Florida, USA), "Walking an Ideological Tightrope: Journalistic Resistance During Periods of Political Upheaval." This paper links Quebec journalist's attempts to win more professional autonomy and editorial control to the decline of the Canadian labor beat. The demise of the labor beat provides a unique prism for examining how a journalism practice can be marginalized during a period of hegemonic change. This paper also deals with the power of critical research to deal with how ideological change can affect politically sensitive journalism practices. During the turbulent 1960s and 1970s, Quebec reporters and some of their English Canadian counterparts led a nascent effort to question the liberal foundation of their practices and what they saw as their diminished role in the political process. Some of the Quebec journalists, and to a lesser extent the labor reporters, wanted a debate about how they lived and expressed their practices during a time of acute political upheaval. Both groups faced similar struggles and their response provides a glimpse of the limits of some journalism practices in a capitalist society. This paper also deals with what journalists can accomplish when they question the clearly staid and limiting social scientism of the journalism ideology and ask that the rhetorical promises of a pluralist society be fulfilled.

12:45 - 1:30 p.m. - LUNCH BREAK

III. 1:30 - 3:30 p.m.

  1. Kuan-Hsing Chen (Institute of Literature/Center For Cultural Studies, Taiwan), "Asia as Method." The essay posits "Asia as method" as a call to transform ourselves as well as the existing knowledge structure. It is organized as a series of dialogues. The first dialogue concerns the question of the "West," as it is rehearsed in the postcolonial discursive strategy and gesture in Naoki Sakai's "Modernity and its Critique", Dipesh Chakrabarty's "Provincializing Europe", Neil Garcia's pioneering study of Filipino gay history, and Ashis Nandy's Intimate Enemy. Their dialogue pinpoints an understandable but unnecessary obsession with the question of the West, as well as an imaginary Asia as a potentially shifting reference point. A second dialogue demonstrates what can be gained from this shift through an engagement with Partha Chatterjee's recent theory of "political society," grounded in emergent practices in India. Employing the "pre-modern" notion" min-jian " that still operates in Mandarin Chinese speaking places, it is now rediscovered as a contemporary living space that intersects but somehow stands apart from an imposed concept of "civil society." By analyzing how "civil society" has been "translated" as "min-jian society," this second dialogue regards such a "translation" as a means to re-investigation and to the organic re-shaping of characteristics of that encourage the concrete emergence of local society and modernity. The third dialogue theoretically formulates "Asia as method," via Misogugi Yozo's "China as method." Here, Yozo's historical ontology claims for theory a "base-entity" ( ji-ti ), a conceptual move that connects with earlier attempts to develop a "geo-colonial historical materialism" whose "ontology" is evolutionary and multi-referential. The combination of "ji-ti" and "geo-colonial historical materialism" portrays Asia as a method that evolves and differentiates "base-entity," suggesting that Asian locales mutually define reference points for each other, and, with them, each other's subjectivity. In this, the "self" transforms. Therefore, "Asia as method" ceases to look at "Asia as object" and, instead, to "Asia as media" of transforming knowledge production including the production of ourselves. The future of critical studies in Asia is thus positioned to develop Asia as the driving media for rediscovering but also transforming the self.
  2. Fabienne Darling-Wolf (Temple University, USA), "On Developing Global Critical Communication." This essay broadly considers the state of critical communication theory in an increasingly global capitalist environment. As critical communication theory inherits the important emphasis on difference, it articulates a variety of blind spots within our more global theories. Yet solutions to these blind spots have not proven adequate for dealing with the complex developments of global capitalism. The essay first reflects on the particularly critical need in our current historical moment to develop a "global" theoretical reach that transcends diverse and multiple forms. It then addresses the evolution of critical communication theory in cultural environments outside the United States and Western Europe. The essay concludes that individuals at least partially culturally located in such environments might be in a particularly powerful strategic position to contribute to the development of global critical communication. The significance for critical communication studies is a double-edged critique of globalization requiring, on one front, a deconstruction of the term "globalization" that currently obscures the process and intent of capitalist convergence actually taking place, and, on the other, a critical, historical re-reading of the rhetoric of difference for advancement toward a justly globalized identity-formation
  3. Yung-Ho Im (Pusan National University, Korea), "Problematics of the Modern and the Postmodern: The Reception and Indigenization of Critical Communication Studies in Korea." The failure to indigenize imported social theories in Korea affords valuable theoretical insights for the future of critical communication studies. Since Korean society has evolved out of a mixture of pre-modern, modern and postmodern elements, attempts to rigidly graft modern and postmodern theories onto Korean society have ensured that both theories remain unfinished projects in Korea. This paper argues that contributions from both camps, particularly the project of enlightenment from modernity and the approach to subject formation from postmodernism, are still possible and imperative modes of indigenizing social inquiry in Korea and elsewhere. Theorizing the social still requires comprehensive structural analyses and constructive ideals of progress, as well as insights into subject formation that grant social agency to individuals. The future of critical communication studies thus hinges on its ability to identify and transcend the false dichotomies of modern vs. postmodern in order to more flexibly confront present social dilemmas and realize ideals still worth imagining. Among those ideals are the emphasis on an emancipatory interest, a concern with the diagnosis and resolution of social problems, and the unity of theory and praxis. The future of critical communication studies rests in their reconciliation with postmodern insights, but through the cultural experiences of particular societies. Ultimately, critical communication studies must indigenize both modern and postmodern theories to answer specific concerns and problems facing a given society today. The Korean example illustrates the requirement of Indigenization.
  4. Patrick Daley (University of New Hampshire, USA), "Ending the 'Silence in These Evil Times' by Listening to the 'Common People': The Public Sphere in 18th Century Portsmouth, New Hampshire." A vigorous democracy needs critical discourse through debates accomplished in a political culture. Only in the context of a political culture does argumentation make sense and have utility. This paper takes the position that exploring the origins of the public sphere in a variety of locales is a way to develop an understanding of the history and the state of political culture. To that end, the paper explores the origination of the bourgeois public sphere in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, during the 18th century. Using documents at the American Antiquarian Library (Worcester, Massachusetts) and the Portsmouth, New Hampshire, Athenaeum, the paper describes the advent of a competitive newspaper environment in 1765. Here, cultural differences, class antagonisms, and political differences were manifested in the press and articulated in the taverns and town meetings with a zeal and vitality all but absent in today's political atmosphere. Thus this paper suggests ways in which critical communication studies may examine the depoliticization of contemporary American society.
  5. Myung Koo Kang (Seoul National University, Korea), "The Expressive Public Sphere and Participatory Access Media." In Korea, public access media developed out of a democratic impulse, an attempt to provide a space in which alternative perspectives could be heard. However, a failure to interrogate the production process associated with public media access has limited its usefulness both as a space for alternative voices as well as its role in the development of community sensibilities. This paper attempts to provide a reconceptualization of public access media as the expressive public sphere. Through this conceptualization one is able to highlight the relationship between access media and democracy, an expressive space in which communication intervenes both as an impetus for and solidifier of local community. In this way, the paper helps to point out the connections between communication, community and democracy. For the future of critical communication studies, the paper recommends a redefinition of communication as the actualization of the social, linked to the praxis of democracy.
  6. Sheldon M. Harsel (RMIT University, Australia), "Comparing Media; Comparing Communication." Attempts to establish both descriptive and normative categorization systems for comparative mass communication research date from, at least, the middle of the last century. Despite criticisms, and with modifications to encompass the post-colonial period, these analytic models have endured because of their cognitive utility. They have not, however, easily absorbed more recent historical developments or advances in communication theory. This paper attempts to incorporate some of those considerations and posits the need for both etic and emic considerations in comparative mass communication studies.

3:30 - 3:45 p.m. Break

IV. 3:34 - 5:45 p.m.

  1. Bob Craig (University of St. Thomas, USA) and Beverly James (University of New Hampshire, USA), "Studying Ideology in Visual Communication: Combining Semiotics and Symbolic Interactionism in a Program of Critical Research." Ideology critique remains a key project for critical communication studies, one that can be enriched by combining semiotic analysis for studying "texts" with symbolic interaction for studying production, texts and reception. This multi-method approach to a series of related research topics allows the researcher to address multiple levels of ideology from its institutional inception, support and formulation in production, to its textual form, content and meanings, and to its reception within the complex socio-cultural context of individual reception. The paper recommends such an approach to ideology for the future of critical communication studies.
  2. Rüdiger Scheidges (Berlin, Germany), "Hanno Hardt, Photographer: A Permanent and Obstinate Contributor to the Family-Album of Mankind." Hanno Hardt's photography values the notion of the Gemeinschaft , by revealing commonly shared values rather than modern frictions. Through mainly people-oriented pictures, this photography produces documents of lived experiences, as visual narratives of people whose sometimes better pasts insert themselves into contemporary realities. It often highlights predominantly older people, people in old settings, both as remnants of the past -- folios of remembrances. Hardt therefore has a strong sense for manifestations of the lost and the bye goners in our Gesellschaft . Rather than a romantic series of backward-looking portraits, a Verklärung , or a collection of visual golden slumbers, Hardt's photography sympathetically portrays the old people of rural Iowa, rural Slovenia, rural East Germany, rural Croatia, and small-town Italy to tell the story of surviving ties in an otherwise anonymizing world.
  3. Ana Garner (Marquette University, USA), "Oral Histories: The Intersubjectivity of the Subject as Audience." Oral histories allow us to focus on the intersubjectivity of the subject, thereby revealing the full complexity of the communication process. Focusing on the intersubjectivity of the subject, in turn, allows us to begin to examine the socialization process that is part of communication in practice. Intersubjectivity also speaks to the means by which the larger culture impacts its members and their individual identity formation processes. As we begin to gather a more complete and complex picture of the role communication plays in lived lives, our understanding of the audience moves beyond mere questions of how audiences negotiate texts, into the incorporation of texts into their lives. Consequently, oral history is an appropriately critical arena within which to articulate an intersubjective approach to social change, suggesting that the future of critical communication studies should adopt more nuanced and more complex oral histories that explore the dialogic process that unfolds between the individual living within a culture and the communicative texts she encounters.
  4. Anantha Babbili (Middle Tennessee State University, USA), "Identity and Academia: A Foreign Student Looks Back at the Iowa Tradition." The question of how an intellectual tradition intersects with personal identity has been important in the development of critical communication studies. This paper explores that intersection through particular trajectories articulated by émigré scholars whose experiences have influenced the American mind. Specifically focusing on non-Western perspectives, the author takes the Iowa School of communication studies during the late 1970s and early 1980s as an occasion to evaluate and analyze the learning experience as a formation of migrant identities, institutional dogmas, personal encounters and inner struggles. While ostensibly a retrospective piece, the paper suggests that communication studies cast a critical eye on education in communication as a cultivator of identity formation and cultural contradiction.
  5. Ed McLuskie (Boise State University, USA), "Recovering Theory in an Age of Declining Expectations for the Future of Critical Communication Studies." The concluding decade of the 20th century saw communication studies legitimize "theory" with the establishment of a journal in its name ( Communication Theory ) precisely at a time when critical intellectuals had set the stage for theory's decline. Within the first three years of the 21st century, public intellectuals typically associated with critical versions of theory became silent. The thesis of the paper is that "theory" progressively narrowed its range and depth during the 1990s, displaying instead a preference for topic and site rather than approach or perspective as a signature of critical-cultural studies. Critical studies faces the continuing intrusion of an abstracting methodologization, often in the name of the culturally concrete. The paper asserts a trend that can be labeled "the decline of theory," regardless of preferences for the nature of the theoretical enterprise as such, regardless of otherwise promising but eclipsed efforts to recover theoretical legacies for the future of critical communication studies. The paper argues that that future of critical studies must be read through its ambivalent relation to theory, an ambivalence whose history reflects enclaving and legitimizing practices within the academy that are, today, accelerated by discourses proceeding under the banner, "cultural studies."

6:00 p.m. ADJOURN

6-8 Dinner at the Iowa Memorial Union (Please note: Seating is limited and by reservation only. Please call Frank Durham early to reserve a place.)

8-until After-hours seminar at George's Buffet (bar), 312 E. Market St.

Contact information:

Program: Ed McLuskie, emclusk@bigfoot.com or emclusk@boisestate.edu -- tel. +1 (208) 426-1927

Local Arrangements: Frank Durham, frank-durham@uiowa.edu -- tel. +1 (319) 335-3362