Article,
The Founding Parents of Communication: 57 Interviews with ICA Fellows. An Introduction
International Journal of Communication, (2012)
Abstract
Fifty-seven famous professors from all over the world talk about their careers, from their beginning to today. The interviews start with family background, early days, and professional dreams, before moving into the world of ideas. They look back to dealing with decisions over which graduate school to attend, main academic teachers, and the state of the discipline at the time, and then continue with both the intellectual and the institutional steps which led to fame and recognition within and, in almost all cases, even outside the field. Last but not least, all interviewees were asked about the discipline itself: What is communication all about? Is there a kind of core, although the discipline is highly diverse in methods, theories, and objects of study (Stanfill, 2012)? What is the reputation of the subject today? Is communication still seen as an '' academic Taiwan'' (claiming all of China as its own tiny island; Peters, 1986, p. 544), or, similarly unfavorably, as a stepchild that is tolerated by U.S. university administrators only because it helps to pay the bill for the departments they really care about? What about the '' rest'' of the world, and what about the '' big unknowns'' (Sonia Livingstone), such as China, for example, where they seem to open a new university every week? These interviews are not only a source for future historians of the discipline and a blueprint for junior scholars that strive for a professorship, but also a document of the early 21st century: Where did communication come from? What does the worldwide landscape of this fast growing academic enterprise look like today? And where do we go from here—let's say, until 2030?
