BlueSky Workshop: The Future of Communication Graduate Study

Session Submission Type: Meeting

Abstract

The question of the future of graduate studies is a topic of discussion inside academia and without. The narrative of the declining market for PhDs has been circulating in non-academic media (e.g, the New York Times, The Atlantic). While the market for Communication and Media Studies PhDs is stronger than for many other disciplines, universities are changing. Funding is being cut and many universities are hiring fewer tenure-track faculty and more adjuncts.

These economic changes are not the only, or even necessarily most important, reasons to revisit how we do graduate education in communication and media studies programs. However, they have sparked an important set of questions within departments and among colleagues. Should we be minting new PhD students within a constricting market? Are terminal MA’s useful or exploitative? Should graduate programs train students for careers outside of academia? Or is the latter simply knuckling under to the pressures of neoliberalism?

This panel focuses on these questions, bringing conversations that have been happening within departments and universities into a broader forum. The panelists assembled have all tackled these issues in one form or another and are actively engaged in shaping the future of graduate education in their respective departments and schools. By brining them together, the panel aims to place a conversation about the future of communication graduate programs on the “front burner,” highlighting and debating competing visions of graduate education, as well as trading stories from the trenches, discussing challenges and successes in current grad programs, with an eye to the future.

As the questions outlined above suggest, thinking through the curricula of our graduate programs is far more than a pedagogical task. The way we plan, adapt, and implement graduate education is deeply entwined with political and ethical responses to economic pressures within the academy and beyond. It is also entwined with institutional cultural pressures to replicate new generations of scholars in our and our forebears’ image (a generational, “lifespan” model).

The panel will address this through an exchange among panelists and the audience. It draws together a variety of different experiences and perspectives on graduate education in the U.S., including someone currently drafting a new graduate program, a recent PhD, the former chair of a large department at a public university, and the director of an interdisciplinary humanities MA program. The moderator is director of a large communication program. We begin the conversation with the U.S. with an eye to the way that shifts in the U.S. may impact non-U.S. models.

Each participant will prepare a short position/problem statement, which will be posted online for workshop attendees. At the conference, each participant will present highlights of this position statement, after which the moderator will sum up the issues and move into questions from the moderator and chair and from the audience. The goal of the discussion is to define common problems in graduate education in communication at this time and to propose possible directions for thinking about graduate education in the future.

Workshop is open to any conference participant, with no prior registration needed.

Sub Unit

• Sponsored Sessions

Chair

• Jennifer Petersen, U of Virginia

Participants

• Sarah Banet-Weiser, U of Southern California

• Sharon Strover, U of Texas - Austin

• Avi Santo, Old Dominion U

• Christopher Ali, University of Virginia