POSITION: ICA President
Candidate: Jean Burgess, Queensland U of Technology
I am honoured to be nominated as president of the ICA. I have been a conference attendee or member for the entirety of my academic career, participating in and reviewing for several divisions including Human-Machine Communication, Popular Communication (now Popular Media and Culture), Communication and Technology, and Philosophy, Theory and Critique, and mentoring junior scholars as part of divisional and interest group activities. I contributed to convening the 2014 ICA regional conference in Brisbane and to the bid for the (originally planned) 2020 Gold Coast conference. I have had leadership and service roles as member and now chair of the ICA Outstanding Book Award committee, and on the editorial boards of ICA journals (Journal of Communication, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, and Annals of the ICA). I was inducted as a Fellow of the ICA in 2023. I would embrace the opportunity to give back to a community that has been so important to my career development, as well as that of so many colleagues, students and friends.
If elected, I would commit to working with the ICA Executive and our global membership on two main areas: first, to continue our ongoing efforts with respect to inclusion, diversity, and internationalisation; and second, to advance the global public role of communication scholarship in addressing the many technological, social and cultural challenges our societies are facing.
I would bring considerable experience in institutional leadership and field-building, as well as in collaborating across disciplines and with community, government and industry organisations. I am currently a Professor in the School of Communication, Queensland U of Technology (QUT), and Associate Director of the national Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society (ADM+S), which involves diverse social science, humanities and technical researchers. Before that I established and served as Director of the Digital Media Research Centre at QUT from 2015-2020.
My research has been primarily concerned with the social and cultural implications of technological change in the communication and media environment, and I have a strong interest in methodological innovation. I have had the privilege to collaborate and spend time with many talented and accomplished international colleagues in South America, Asia, and Africa, as well as Europe and North America. I know from experience how much we all have to learn from the distinctive clusters of disciplinary strength and diverse perspectives in each of these contexts, so I truly value ICA's status as an international association.
I first attended ICA in Montreal (2008) as a postdoc, presenting on what was, to our knowledge, the first ever international panel on YouTube at a major communication and media studies conference; 15 years later at the 2023 Toronto conference I found myself being part of cross-disciplinary, international ICA panels and roundtables convened by the association to respond to the rapid emergence and take-up of Generative AI. To me, this capacity to convene scholarly encounters among international colleagues with very different perspectives on society's most challenging problems is one of the ICA's most valuable characteristics.
For these reasons, while the annual conference presents increasing challenges of scale and accessibility, it will no doubt remain central to what we do. We need to continue to adapt and experiment with the format in consultation with our members, particularly those who face barriers to in-person attendance. Throughout the years of COVID lockdowns and travel restrictions, we learned to adapt to video presentation, and some of the advanced digital tools that enabled us to do that can enhance accessibility in other ways, including for in-person attendees, and to enable participants to present in their own languages. As we know from the history of communication technology, whatever we do to improve accessibility for one group also improves the experience for everyone. As president I would make it a priority to ensure that all ICA presentations follow best practice in universal accessibility and inclusion.
Our association is now very large, geographically distributed, and intellectually, socially, and culturally diverse. I recognise that a lot of work has already been done on internationalisation, and so I would be building on a position of strength. The regional conferences and hubs have been excellent, distributing and enriching the association's presence and enabling participation for more people in more places. These have often been inventively programmed around timely themes that are closely related to the concentrations of scholarship in the hosting location. I would like to highlight and promote these events more strongly to all our members, positioned as complementary and not secondary to the main event of the annual conference. Indeed, smaller conferences on shared topics may make it easier to bridge linguistic, disciplinary and methodological divides than larger ones do.
I would aim to make the ICA far more prominent as a trusted source of global expertise on topics relevant to our field, where communication scholars ought to be highly sought-after, but are too often overlooked by major media outlets and policymakers. Through our website and other communication channels, we have achieved a strong institutional presence. But we could do more to actively provide a platform for outreach, and to amplify and assert the value of our global membership's deep expertise. We could proactively generate media releases in response to major public debates, profiling relevant key experts from across divisions and countries, and we could refresh our social media presence by refining and building a more mainstream audience for our association-wide podcast series, drawing on the talents and skills of relevant divisions and their members.
Finally, as well as improving the ways we reach out, I'd like to consider whether and how it might be beneficial to bring the outside world in. This would require a careful conversation. In many national contexts, demonstrating impact and benefit is crucial to the sustainability of our research. Offering a platform to those directly affected by the work we do or the phenomena we study can be powerful and inspiring as well. On the other hand, working directly with industry can be an ethical minefield, government relationships can be fraught, and applied research with communities can take time and require care. I would like to convene internal conversations about these challenges, as well as to explore how and in what ways we might involve our external partners and communities in our conferences. We could also consider how best to highlight and reward quality scholarship that has had significant and positive public policy impact, or that has translated research outcomes into benefits for the community.