"After the game is before the game," goes a famous German football adage. The same is true for ICA conference planning. Once the last conference attendee has left the hotel, and after just a few days of recuperation, ICA leadership and headquarters routinely gear up to plan next year's annual conference. By the time you read this column, we will already have held our ICA25 Planners' Orientation meeting with all division and interest group conference planners. In the process of planning an ICA conference, one of the first tasks that needs to be done (once contracts are signed for the venue) is to settle on a conference theme. Drafting the theme call is perhaps the most glamorous job of the incoming president-elect.
The 2025 ICA conference is set to take place in scenic Denver, Colorado (USA) from June 12 to June 16. Originally planned for 2021, the conference had to be moved to virtual cyberspace due to the continuing pandemic. The Denver conference will likely resonate with the many burning questions of our time, such as climate change, military conflicts, democratic backsliding, and global injustice. As a field, we are well-positioned to provide meaningful answers to these challenges. Therefore, framing the 2025 conference around one or more of the world's acute problems seemed super-evident.
However, just like the world around us, academia itself is being disrupted on multiple fronts, perhaps with unprecedented consequences. We continue to discuss the growing impact of generative AI on research practice, the increasing precarity in academic employment, mounting pressures for publications and grants, and a mental health crisis among researchers. Across disciplines, there are signs that research is becoming less likely to be disruptive – that is, to break with the past in ways that push knowledge in new directions.
The 2025 ICA conference will be the perfect place for reflecting on these current trajectories, as well as the discipline's and association's past and future. The ICA, which was originally founded in 1950 as the National Society for the Study of Communication, will celebrate its 75th anniversary at the 2025 Denver conference!
This is what I love about the upcoming conference theme, ICA@75: Disrupting and
Consolidating Communication Research. The theme offers a valuable opportunity to critically reflect on our field of scholarship and the role of ICA in shaping it. The theme sessions will not only honor the institutions, thinkers, and ideas that contributed to the foundation of the discipline but also engage in a thoughtful examination of the field's development, including the paths it has taken and those it has overlooked. By doing so, these sessions will provoke necessary discussions and problematize the field's evolution. Additionally, some theme sessions will look ahead and explore new directions for research in terms of subject matter, epistemology, and methodology.
ICA particularly welcomes contributions speaking to three important aspects of the theme: (1) communication studies as a transformative and stabilizing force in society; (2) communication scholarship as a research practice that can be both revolutionary and consolidating; and (3) communication studies as a disrupted and, hopefully, resilient discipline. In all of these contexts, elements of disruption and consolidation are not necessarily antithetical but may productively be framed as a dialectical relationship. Please see here for the full call for submissions to the 2025 ICA conference theme.
I firmly believe that the 2025 theme properly addresses the diverse stakeholder communities within the association. There are several ways in which sessions submitted either to the theme itself or to any of ICA's 33 divisions and interest groups can address the conference theme. Here are a few examples:
Regarding the first aspect of the theme, sessions may focus on strategies for increasing the visibility and impact of communication scholarship in public conversation. They may also explore the relationship between scholarship and advocacy, which can sometimes be troubled. Furthermore, sessions may identify obstacles to public scholarship and discuss ways to overcome them.
Regarding the second aspect of the theme, panels may reflect on historical
trajectories of communication scholarship that have disrupted other fields of research and where communication studies have been disrupted by other disciplines. Other sessions may shed light on research-driven disruptions of prevailing modes of communication inquiry that originate from the Global South.
Regarding the third aspect of the theme, sessions may focus on the political economy of scholarship and its impact on the discipline's ability to generate original knowledge. Discussions could also explore the implications of generative AI for communication research. Furthermore, panels may want to address the increasing demands for "productivity" placed on researchers and the resulting mental toll it can take. Alongside examining the structural conditions of academic labor, the goal of these sessions could be to identify strategies for consolidating the research environment, promoting resilience, and developing effective coping strategies.
There is, of course, a lot more potential here. We are confident that the 2025 conference theme will generate a significant stream of theme sessions that celebrate and problematize communication studies as a discipline and ICA as the field's most central association. I say "we" because I am incredibly fortunate to work with an international theme committee that includes many of the discipline's intellectual leaders, including Yariv Tsfati (U of Haifa), David Boromisza-Habashi (U of Colorado Boulder), Magdalena Saldaña Villa (Pontificia Universidad Católica), Karin Wahl-Jorgensen (Cardiff U), Herman Wasserman (Stellenbosch U), and Weiyu Zhang(National U of Singapore). I would like to use this opportunity to thank them in advance for their invaluable service and contributions to ICA 2025 in Denver!
I look forward to receiving many submissions to the 2025 ICA conference theme. Please feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions about the theme and planning process.