Silvio waisbord biography of rory gilmore

All work has limitations. In my most recent piece, I am trying to argue that interrogating the limits of Western perspectives in communication is not just something that some people in a corner of communication studies need to do: another task group, or interest group, or area of specialization. Typically, what we have done when people are interested in a given topic is create a narrow specialization.

This is something different. This is something that has to connect different ways that we think, rather than just the way we approach a specific subject of study. That is why I think many people are interested in this. For people coming from outside the Global North, this is natural because we had to read US and European scholarship, as well as scholarship produced in different parts of the world that looked at the Western scholarship through a critical lens.

I understood that an idea produced in Iowa in the s did not apply to my context in a very different country, in a very different community. Why or why not? What is missing?

Silvio waisbord biography of rory gilmore

How can I say it differently? What local knowledges can we use to reinterpret ideas that were produced in different contexts? That could be from France, China, the United States, but it happened that scholars based in a few Western countries had a tremendous role in defining theories and concepts and lines of work and questions that define communication studies.

I find it very helpful for interrogating where we are, whose questions we are asking, whose theories and concepts we are using, not because they are necessarily right or wrong, but because we need to ask those questions. Could you tell us a little bit about your goals as ICA President? How does your academic background — for example, your advocacy for de-Westernizing communication discussed above — inform your objectives for, or approach to, your presidency?

Silvio Waisbord] I bring everything we have been discussing into discussions about what the International Communication Association does. Are those institutional, economic, or power challenges? How do we address them en route to making ICA more inclusive? Much better. Still, there is always work that can be done, that needs to be done. That is one issue.

Our goal is to bring people together around questions about communication and fill-in-the-blank, whatever issue we want to tackle. It may be violence, or specific forms of violence, or a human rights issue. By doing that, we engage in public scholarship. What is going on around the world and the crisis of many universities has led to reflection within higher education.

How do we expand our reach? How do we engage in ways that are not just about the public intellectual model of circulating what we know, but also about enriching our work by engaging with the public, with activists, and with institutions outside of academia? Those two things are central to me in terms of future directions for ICA, and something I want the association to prioritize in different ways, like membership, participation panels, journals, etc.

There are all kinds of ways we can infuse what the professional association does with these goals. Silvio Waisbord] To me, it is important to develop your own voice or your own take on any of the issues that you choose to study. That is one of the most difficult and most rewarding aspects of doing academic intellectual work. It is not only important that you are recognized or admitted by your colleagues and your peers, though this ultimately is also central to what we do.

In graduate school you are taught, and you are expected at some point to develop, present, and defend your thesis, and you cannot avoid that. Still, along the way, we have to develop a sense of who we are when we are talking, thinking, teaching, and writing. Find that thing, and remind yourself of it, especially because not so many people will remind you.

We have to remind ourselves what is new, original, and exciting about what we are bringing to the table. This is not easy, but that is why we do what we do. It is important to have fun with it, even though it is hard work, and it can be frustrating and exhausting at times. It is a way of reminding ourselves that this is a great opportunity to do something that is true to us and our voice.

You can try that in your teaching, your writing, conference presentations, in research projects, and the way that you collaborate with different people. There is no single path in academia. You need to chart your own path. I think grad students should be aware of that. There is enough room in the discipline to build your own path rather than following exactly what somebody else has done.

You can follow those paths, but do not think that it is the only way it can be done. Without being overly optimistic, I think there is still room for doing that in academia — for charting your own way in this world. Admittedly, if you are in a situation of labor precarity, it is much more difficult to do this. Even if you have a tenure track position and eventually you get tenure, it is easy to lose track of your identity with all you are expected to do.

You have to work to hold on to it, because I think it is ultimately what sustains you and really makes you happy. Proposals range from changing reporting attacks and content practices in social media platforms to changes to legal frameworks to deter attacks and prosecute perpetrators. In this chapter, my interest is to review proposals, actions, and consequences in order to understand what works as well as the challenges for responding to digital hate.

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