What is the Global Context of Global Communications Research?

• In Event: Transformations in Global Communication Research (ICA Roundtable)

Abstract

Global communication as a field suffers from incoherence born out of scholarship pegged as “global” when merely being situated outside of North American contexts. We need to move beyond these historical operationalizations of “global” toward a coherent focus on Global Context, as foundation for understanding the structures, capitals, and influences of communication as industry, as process, as policy, as identity, and as normative. I support explicating political processes and economic conditions within scholarship on communication and transformation. My questions: what makes communication research “global?”; and how can clearly conceptualizing “global” help us to understand critical political and social communication transformations?

Author

• Karin Gwinn Wilkins, U of Texas - Austin