Jan Servaes (City University of Hong Kong) and Jim Anderson (University of Utah) have circulated a CFP seeking to address an apparent crisis in communication research. Aiming to publish in The International Communication GAZETTE, the crisis is rhetorically predicated upon questions such as “What has the communication discipline contributed to the social sciences? What has been its impact on policy and social change?” Citing, amongst other, the apparent lack of distinctive disciplinary problems, being insufficiently interdisciplinary, and old methods, they “plan to zoom in on the relevance of Communication Research and the need for a rethink of the place and role of communication research in theory and praxis.” So there certainly is much here
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Aphoristically, the world is richer than one method. This means Communication Studies should necessarily be eclectic in theory and method. This plurality allows us to undertake the creative collection and analysis of evidence to link it with theory. To do so well, one should not accept the division between theory and research, or even allow that kind of division of labor to emerge in the first place. This is because it allows theorists to speculate without empirical discipline and empiricists to produce findings that cannot meet rigorous epistemology criteria, and so these results do not contribute to a larger understanding of society and the economy. So everyone is an epistemologist, and everyone a field researcher.
Following this, faculty should know and understand the corpus of communication theory, not just their speciality within the field. This allows faculty to be conversant in several theoretical vernaculars, and so can express their ideas clearly to other branches of communication and media studies, and that they can be translated well, and that people can understand them. As an aphoristic analogy, communication researchers should speak multiple languages. But this is also attitudinal: There is a willingness to talk with and listen to one
Aphoristically, the world is richer than one method. This means Communication Studies should necessarily be eclectic in theory and method. This plurality allows us to undertake the creative collection and analysis of evidence to link it with theory. To do so well, one should not accept the division between theory and research, or even allow that kind of division of labor to emerge in the first place. This is because it allows theorists to speculate without empirical discipline and empiricists to produce findings that cannot meet rigorous epistemology criteria, and so these results do not contribute to a larger understanding of society and the economy. So everyone is an epistemologist, and everyone a field researcher.
Following this, faculty should know and understand the corpus of communication theory, not just their speciality within the field. This allows faculty to be conversant in several theoretical vernaculars, and so can express their ideas clearly to other branches of communication and media studies, and that they can be translated well, and that people can understand them. As an aphoristic analogy, communication researchers should speak multiple languages. But this is also attitudinal: There is a willingness to talk with and listen to one