Conference Theme

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Politics, culture, and technology are matters of communication. But if communication matters for all these questions, isn't it, paradoxically, because it also doesn't matter?

Indeed, communication is, in many respects, im/material because it constitutes the very nexus where the material and immaterial dimensions of our world meet with each other. If we live in a world of artifacts, technologies, bodies, and sites, we also live in a world of principles, passions, ideas, meanings, and values. Although both material and immaterial aspects of this world intertwine with each other, it seems crucial not to reduce one to the other, making the study of communication essential to understanding what could be called the spectral or even ghostal nature of our experiences and exchanges.

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Communication is indeed spectral or ghostal because our interactions consist of making present what could have remained absent from a debate, a discussion, a conversation, and so on.

If communication matters, it is therefore because interactants can, for instance, position themselves as speaking in the name of specific identities, collectives, principles, and values, that is, so many figures or topics that, through their representation or staging in their conversations, can influence the way an interaction evolves and how a situation is defined. Inversely, communication is also spectral because of all the topics that can be marginalized, excluded, disqualified from our debates and discussions, an effect of absence that has to be worked out and/or resisted for another next first time.

This theme allows us to think about the relationship between communication and im/materiality in general. Communication scholars have often been accused of downplaying the role that materiality plays in our lifeworld, but are there ways of remaining faithful to our object of study while exploring this question meaningfully?

Things such as justice, equity, freedom, compassion, happiness, hatred, friendship, intelligence (just to name of few) are often presented as having an immaterial, incorporeal, intangible, insubstantial, impalpable, abstract dimension; however, we also know that they have to be embodied, incorporated, materialized, or concretized in order to be experienced and communicated. Communication therefore becomes this dislocated locus where abstracts figures can incarnate themselves while others are warded off.

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The conference theme has relevance across the repertoire of ICA's divisions and interest groups.

We can, of course, think of the obvious connection between meaning and materiality, which could lead to interesting questions in Global Communication & Social Change, Instructional/Developmental Communication, Intercultural Communication, Intergroup Communication, and International Communication (for instance, how we tend to attribute different meanings to similar objects or practices or, inversely, how different objects or practices can mean, more or less, the same thing).

We can also explore the status of principles, relations or themes such as compassion, friendship, justice, health, power and truth, and analyze how they incarnate or embody themselves in our conversations, debates, campaigns, laws, media and regulations (a topic that could be of interest to scholars studying Children, Adolescents and the Media; Communication, Law & Policy; Health Communication; Interpersonal Communication; Journalism Studies; Language and Social Interaction; Mass Communication; Organizational Communication; Philosophy of Communication; Popular Communication; Public Relations; or Political Communication).

We can also explore the relationship between practices, uses, and technologies or between hardware and software (Communication and Technology; Information Systems), but also the question of virtual worlds or representations (Game Studies, Visual Communication Studies), gender and im/materiality (Feminist Scholarship; Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Studies), ethnicity and im/materiality (Ethnicity and Race in Communication), as well as how the questions of materiality and immateriality have been historically addressed in our field (Communication History).

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All these potential topics (and others to be found) could help us better understand the constitutive role communication plays in the technological, cultural, and political aspects of our lives.

If we do not have to choose between idealism and materialism, communication studies appear perfectly equipped to materialize research agendas that can do justice to the hybrid character of our experiences, encounters, and relationships. Between presence and absence lies the world we live in, a world where matters of communication count precisely because they don't, effacing themselves to reconfigure it for another next first time.

See you in Singapore!