The History of Communication Studies across the Americas: An Introduction

History of Communication Studies across the Americas The History of Communication Studies across the Americas: An Introduction

Abstract

This special section investigates the history of communication and media studies across national and linguistic contexts in the Americas. It maps transnational entanglements that have shaped communication inquiry in the multiple forms it has taken in South and North America and the Caribbean. At the same time, the section's articles attend to political, institutional, and cultural dynamics that shaped the field in different national and local contexts. In so doing, the special section throws light on topics and regions that have received little attention in English-language literature, and draws attention to historic lines of hegemony, exclusion, resistance, and alternative traditions of research across the hemisphere. In this editors' introduction, we outline the origins of the collective effort, connect it to parallel projects in two Latin American journals, and introduce the outstanding essays that follow.

Resumen

Esta sección especial investiga la historia de los estudios sobre comunicación y medios en los diferentes contextos nacionales y / o lingüísticos de las Américas. Para ello, mapea los múltiples enlaces transnacionales que han dado forma a la investigación de la comunicación en sus vertientes norte y sudamericanas, así como en el Caribe. A la vez, los artículos de esta sección prestan atención particularmente a distintos contextos nacionales y locales. De esta manera, esta sección especial nos permite iluminar algunos de los temas y algunas de las regiones que han permanecido oscurecidas por la literatura anglofona, prestando especial atención a las líneas históricas de hegemonía, exclusión y resistencia, así como a las tradiciones de investigación alternativas que se han dado en el hemisferio. En esta introducción a cargo de los editores, señalamos los orígenes de este esfuerzo colectivo, lo conectamos con otros proyectos similares que se han dado en dos revistas latinoamericanas y, finalmente, introducimos los maravillosos ensayos que conforman esta sección especial.

Most of the essays in this special section have their genesis in a South-North collaboration begun in late twenty twenty-one. Earlier that year, the editors of this journal organized a virtual preconference for the meetings of the International Communication Association, "Exclusions in the History and Historiography of Communication Studies." The gathering was of a piece with the journal's mission to decenter the centers that have traditionally structured the historiography of the fields of media and communication studies- especially around geographical region, language, gender, race, and the legacies of colonialism. The preconference turned out to be one of those pandemic-era events in which limitations-we couldn't meet in person-afforded new possibilities. Latin Americans and other scholars who would have been unlikely to attend ICA participated in the gathering, and Zoom conferencing made simultaneous Spanish-English interpretation easier to pull off. That event led to a special section of this journal, with essays in Spanish and English. It also raised the question as to whether it might be productive to investigate the complex, politically fraught history of communication and media studies within the geopolitical context of the Americas writ large. That notion led to a second virtual conference in June twenty twenty-two, "The History of Communication Studies across the Americas." It was a collaborative effort by three open-access journals published in three different countries: History of Media Studies from the United States, MATRIZes from Brazil, and Comunicación y Sociedad from Mexico. Twenty-two scholars from eleven different countries participated, with simultaneous interpretation in Spanish, Portuguese, and English.

One of the main aims of the conference-and by extension this special section-was to promote communities of inquiry across regions and languages that had not often been in dialogue with one another. Professional associations in the Americas have facilitated some kinds of contact but limited others. As Raúl Fuentes Navarro discusses in his contribution to this special issue, the Asociación Latinoamericana de Investigadores de la Comunicación has provided forums and created networks that span Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking Latin America. The International Communication Association has historically done something similar for scholars from North America and Western Europe who publish in English, even as it has often furthered United States hegemony. Neither of those organizations has historically included the Anglophone (or Francophone) Caribbean in its ken. Additionally, national professional associations, particularly in the larger countries, have exercised their own kinds of centripetal force. The organizers of the twenty twenty-two conference asked if "the Americas" might provide a shared, if essentially contested, intellectual space for scholars from national contexts that have typically not been in conversation with one another. Was there interest in trying to develop a multi-layered map of the history of the field that traversed the region, South to North?

This "Americas" project is one of several recent collaborations dedicated to advancing North-South dialogue without erasing intellectual and geopolitical specificity. Several years ago, United States and German historians of the field edited volumes with global aspirations. More recently, an international group of critical scholars, many with ties to the Global South, have turned to history as a way of decolonizing the field and drawing out previously marginalized histories from around the world. Meanwhile, as the European Union has officially encouraged research collaborations with Latin America and the Caribbean, scholars have built bridges between the regions through collaborations among professional associations. One result was a joint editorial effort by ALAIC and the European Communication Research and Education Association, which published a volume on intellectual traditions of Latin American and European communication studies. Owing to significant sociocultural and linguistic similarities, there have also been multiple initiatives within Iberoamerican intellectual networks investigating shared histories of communication studies among Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking countries. Several of these networks have focused on the historical and contemporary gendering of communication research, including FEMICOMI (Análisis de los Roles Femeninos en la Investigación de la Comunicación en Iberoamerica [Analysis of Females' Roles in Communication Research in Iberoamerica], begun in twenty twenty-two) and IBERFEMCOM (Red Iberoamericana de Investigación en Comunicación y Feminismo [Iberoamerican Network for Social Justice Research in Communication and Feminism], begun in twenty seventeen). Other initiatives have opened complementary spaces for dialogue on the history and present state of communication studies across North-South lines in Iberoamerica.

These recent collaborations are set within a contemporary moment of belated reckoning with the structural exclusions, inequalities, and injustices that have helped constitute communication studies. Among the many fronts for the reckoning are the historiographies and collective memories of the field. We have yet to fully acknowledge, much less historically unearth, all the ways that gender, race, language, colonialism, geopolitical location, and institutionally sanctioned privilege have shaped formal and informal accounts of our field's pasts. Reversing these processes and recovering lost pasts requires multiple methodologies and theoretical frameworks-from feminism and transnational studies to the historical sociology of knowledge, critical race theory, decolonial/postcolonial thought, and other geopolitically informed critique, all of which are represented in this special section's contributions.