CFP: ICA Preconference, "Historiography as Intervention"

Hey, I'm organizing a preconference for the Communication History Interest Group of the International Communication Association:

    —  CALL  FOR  PAPERS  —

Historiography as Intervention:
Communicating Across Geographies, Communities & Divides

ICA Preconference Sponsored by the Communication History Interest Group: Phoenix, May 23, 2012

Writing history is far from neutral. Recovering undocumented stories can reassess different groups’ actions and contributions. Counterhistories can denaturalize the present and challenge ideologies. The past provides tools, warnings, solutions and mistakes. Historiography can engage in contemporary struggles and change the way we see the world and its possibilities. This ICA preconference convenes communication scholars pursuing historiographic work and historians addressing communication-related areas. Some topics may be established and vibrant areas of historic inquiry; others may be neglected areas needing appraisal. Panels will address historic issues in communication scholarship, such as evolving theories and philosophies, and also stage engagements between related fields, such as medical historians and health communication scholars or political communication scholars and social-movement historians. The preconference will also feature invited speakers from both fields. Throughout, international and intercultural representation will afford insights from comparative histories of relevant topics, such as media policies or strategic interventions. Ultimately, this preconference aims to instigate intersections and encounters that can provoke collaborative interventions with issues facing our discipline, schools, communities, and countries.

Submitted papers should present historiographic methods and/or historic data, theories or subject matter within a framework of social intervention by providing tools, offering insight or communicating information. Work should be from or of interest to historians and communication scholars. Innovative proposals for transdisciplinary, multimodal or media-based presentations (e.g., interactive digital archives, documentary screenings, database tours) are highly encouraged. Potential topics include, but are not limited to, historiographic interventions through:

 • Demystifying moral panics

 • Recovering contributions, such as minority or female scholars

 • Counteracting contemporary stereotypes, such as racial technophobia

 • Raising ethical issues through representing a particular voice, perspective or agenda

 • Comparing methods, such as Foucauldean genealogy, Derridean hauntology or Hayden White’s discourse tropes

• Challenging dominant ideologies and fields of knowledge

• Rethinking newness; historicizing contemporary issues and conversations

• Staging interdisciplinary conversations, as with visual communication scholars and art historians, across the field of sound studies, or economics and communication infrastructures

 • (Re)making the past, (un)making the present, envisioning potential futures

 • Critiquing dominant narratives and concepts, such as convergence culture, network society, silent cinema’s “train effect,” the long tail, social media’s role in the Arab Spring, affective labor, excesses of postmodernism or textual studies, political economies of information, etc.

• Suggesting policy strategies and solutions

Send paper abstracts or project descriptions of 300 words by November 15, 2011 to D. Travers Scott, dscott3@g.clemson.edu. Authors will be informed of decisions by December 15, 2011. Papers are due May 1, 2012. The preconference will be May 23, 2012 at the conference hotel, the Phoenix Sheraton Downtown. The preconference is sponsored by the International Communication Association’s Communication History Interest Group and organized by D. Travers Scott of Clemson University.