Abstract
In this article, I argue that interdisciplinarity in the media and communication field encourages a focus on why the media and communication matter. It helps to draw scholarly attention to the need for theory development and critical analysis of the material and symbolic facets of mediated communication. Interdisciplinarity offers a pathway for resisting the hegemony of disciplinary projects and this approach encourages reflexive engagement among scholars within the media and communication field and beyond. The interdisciplinary pathway differs from a disciplinary approach because it can be open and responsive to the lived problems and experiences of social actors, examined from a variety of theoretical standpoints. For this reason, the interdisciplinary approach to the field means that while there is a need for an orientation to the problems to be investigated, it does not need to own a set of ‘disciplinary’ problems.
Keywords
Introduction
The organizers of a panel session at the 2015 International Communication Association conference put several questions to the panelists: what has the communication discipline contributed to the social sciences and what has been its impact on policy and social change? 1 The challenge was to rethink the relevance of communication research and its place and role in theory and praxis. The organizers asserted that communication research has numerous deficiencies as a discipline. These include the fact that ‘we’ have not developed our own set of disciplinary problems, that ‘we’ fail to return something of value to society, and that ‘we’ are not sufficiently interdisciplinary. I suggested in my comments that it is important to engage critically with the notion that there is a cohesive ‘we’ that self-identifies with a discipline of media and communication, especially when scholarship beyond the United States academy is considered. I argued that media and communication studies are inherently interdisciplinary, but that interdisciplinarity, in and of itself, is not an antidote to scholarly ‘lightness’ in this or any other area of research in the social sciences.
Who do ‘we’ think ‘we’ are?
Asking this question orients a consideration of the strengths and weaknesses of research in the media and communication field towards problematizing who is assumed to be identifying with research in this area. My early training and subsequent career have convinced me that the study of media and communication does not benefit from the project of building a discipline. I was trained in the communication field at Simon Fraser University in Canada. In the late 1970s, there was a debate about whether media and communication studies are best regarded as a discipline or a field. My teachers had been trained in economics, philosophy, psychology, and sociology and their research was variously informed by theories in those disciplines. They introduced their students to the ‘cannon’ of theory that they had come to regard as salient for media and communication research. This embraced Canadian, United States, and European scholarship as well as work by scholars in Asia and Latin America. The main emphasis was on critical engagement with disciplinary theory and empirical research. It was also on the importance of critical engagement with theory to ensure the social relevance of research in an interdisciplinary field of study (Melody and Mansell, 1983).
The Media and Communication Department at the London School of Economics where I work fosters a similar strongly interdisciplinary approach. It is engaged, not in a project of discipline building, but instead, in contributing to building a field of excellent and socially relevant research in an area that benefits from collaborative scholarship with specialists in their respective disciplines. Struggles for disciplinary recognition often favor work that only exceptionally challenges its own theoretical and epistemological premises. When disciplinary recognition is the principal driver as a result of pressures within universities to compete for students and financial resources, departments frequently start to mimic each other, innovating only on the margins. When competitive success is the main motivator, opportunities to engage in debate about how knowledge conventions are forged are at risk of receding into the background. Certain research questions, especially those challenging received views are at great risk of being marginalized by instrumental or dominant theories and methods (Mansell, 2012). I suggest that an important and obligatory question for media and communication researchers who tackle their subject area from both material and symbolic perspectives, is who is ‘we’? What are the conventions and understandings of power relations that enable ‘us’ to recognize ourselves and to draw distinctions between ourselves and others?
There are numerous ways in which recognition can be gained for an interdisciplinary field of inquiry. If, as I suggest, the field of media and communication studies is inherently interdisciplinary, it does not need a set of ‘disciplinary’ problems. Certainly, it needs an orientation and persistent consideration of where its core interests lie. Some may denigrate research on media and communication because of it does not benefit from widespread recognition as a discipline, but it is far more fruitful to focus on the vibrancy of inquiry in the field and to build upon this. The realities of the academy, especially in the United States, push towards a disciplinary orientation. This orientation has been exported around the world, typically in the form of instrumental or mainstream theoretical approaches. A strength of inquiry in this field, however, has long been its engagement with critical research; however, this is understood (Babe, 2015).
Claims to interdisciplinarity
What can an interdisciplinary field of inquiry into media and communication aspire to? How does it go about establishing knowledge conventions and are there substantial differences in the way regimes of power take hold? Perhaps interdisciplinarity is simply a different pathway where the same problems are encountered as those confronting the discipline builders. I suggest that the interdisciplinary pathway is different because it is more open and responsive to the lived problems and experiences of social actors. I take my department as an example to illustrate how it is feasible to differentiate an interdisciplinary approach from a disciplinary pathway.
The Media and Communications Department at the London School of Economics and Political Science is a relatively new department established in 2003. There was research underway across the School with a focus on media and communication for many years before this, principally, but not exclusively, in the social psychology and sociology departments. A broad interdisciplinary network embracing scholars was fostered with disciplinary expertise in economics, geography, information systems, philosophy and linguistics, and law, as a precursor to the formation of a department.
Once formally established as a department, the idea that scholars in the department should retain their disciplinary expertise was maintained. Growing from a very small to a medium sized department enabled the inclusion of scholars with specialist knowledge in multiple disciplines and fields, currently including political science, science, technology and innovation studies, and gender studies in addition those mentioned above. Only a relatively small number of colleagues, including myself, have a doctorate in communication studies. We publish in communication journals, but we also publish in disciplinary journals.
A principle aim of the LSE Department of Media and Communication is to ensure that members of the department and students ground their work in disciplinary theory drawn from the social sciences and that we engage with, and critique, whatever the cannon might be, whether it originates in the United States, the United Kingdom, or elsewhere. We teach at the post-graduate level and we focus on global media and communication, political communication, policy and governance, communication and development, and data and society problems and issues. Theories of power, the public sphere and publics, globalization, mediation and mediatization, political economy, post-coloniality and cosmopolitanism, inform much of our work.
Members of the department engage in debate about what it means to ‘deWesternize’ the field of media and communication research. Diverse views about what this means in practice for teaching and research are under continuous discussion. Partly as a consequence of our interdisciplinary stance, students are accepted from disciplines across the social sciences. All our students must take and pass a qualitative and quantitative methodology course and a reflexive approach to empirical research is emphasized, informed by disciplinary expertise. Academic staff engage in mixed method empirical research and students are encouraged to do so as well in their research projects.
A focus on a set of core issues is a means of ensuring that the work of the department coheres as a field of intellectual inquiry. We converge around inquiry into processes of mediated knowledge construction – what are the shifting relations between knowledge producers and users in a mediated world? We investigate mediated political agency – what are the changing relations between the media and their forms, subjects, and modalities of political and civic agency? We examine cultures and identities – what do belonging and community mean on all scales from the local to the transnational? We investigate governing mediated environments – what roles do technologies, structures, and processes of media and communication play nationally and internationally? Cutting across these themes are comparative and transnational research problematics and attention to the ethical implications of undertaking engaged critical research and teaching. The starting point is critical inquiry into pressing social problems and the roles played by the media and communicative practice in a wide variety of contexts. The analysis of mediated experience is at the core of what is explored with the ambition of ensuring that normativity is connected to explicit, often contested, cultural, social, political, and economic values.
In the light of this interdisciplinary approach, I suggest that encouraging and provoking reflexive engagement among scholars and those working outside the university is more productive than a lament for the lightness of media and communication as a discipline. Achieving excellence in research in the field of media and communication is the goal of my department alongside achieving social relevance and impact through a variety of approaches to knowledge exchange. 2 An online media policy platform 3 and a think tank on journalism and society, POLIS 4 provide a means to highlight how research in the field of media and communication connects with the agendas of governments, non-governmental organizations, and United Nations agencies, as well as with the private sector.
When emphasis is given to questions about how, for instance, inequality and mediated life intersect, this shifts inquiry away from debate about whether the study of media and communications must acquire status as a discipline. I do not suggest that interdisciplinarity is a way to avoid the emergence of hierarchies of knowledge or the proliferation of theories, but it does help to focus attention on critical enquiry. This is because it ensures constant attention to the inquiries of others who may not regard the role of the media and communication as an important feature of cultural, social, economic and political change or of asymmetrical power relationships, but who are willing to engage in a constructive dialogue.
Conclusion
Interdisciplinarity in the media and communication field encourages a critical focus on why media and communication matter (Silverstone, 1999). It focuses scholarly attention on theory development concerning the material facets and the symbolic process of mediated communication that help to expose lived asymmetries of power at both the individual and the collective levels. The aim of interdisciplinary inquiry is to understand and critique the material and symbolic power of media – old and new.
Interdisciplinarity is not an antidote for the ‘lightness of communication research’, but it does offer a pathway for resisting the hegemony of a disciplinary project. It is a means of emphasizing research on pressing social problems and of ensuring that normativity in research in the field is explicitly related to values. It is a means of provoking forward-looking reflexive engagement among scholars within the media and communication field and beyond. It is a pathway that enables scholars to recognize themselves as having a common interest in social problem-solving and the way the media and communication are implicated in a way that is respectful of diverse traditions of critical scholarly research and teaching across the social sciences.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.