Posted By Silvio Waisbord, ICA President-Elect (George Washington U)
The theme for the 2024 Gold Coast conference is "Communication and global human rights." By choosing this topic, I hope that we can take stock of the contributions of communication scholarship to the study of human rights; to foreground current research and practice; and to outline future directions for communication studies.
Human rights remains a contentious issue and moral language that appears across communication studies. Several areas of specialization explore several theoretical and empirical questions: linguistic, historical, legal, epistemological, and political dimensions; rights movements and counter-movements; narrative about rights violation and repair; large-scale persuasion and information campaigns; institutionalization and enforcement of rights in communication and media policies. Altogether, these lines of inquiry lay out wide-ranging research agendas, as well as theoretical and empirical questions and arguments, with significant implications for scholarship, education, and public engagement.
Given its global dimensions, human rights fosters conversations that bring together insights from around the world. It is woven into fundamental questions of our times, such as overlapping crises (e.g. climate/environment, health, migration, food insecurity), entrenched global inequalities, armed conflicts, threats to public safety, and social exclusion and hate.
Communication is central to contemporary global human rights in many ways. It is manifest in public debates spurred by the mobilization of "rights" movements as well as political/cultural backlash; efforts to raise public awareness about the significance of rights, especially given violations of human rights and the tragic failure of inter-government institutions, states, and other actors to enforce rights; the evidentiary claims of human rights reporting, based on both standardized and contested communication practices; the use and critique of human rights as a discourse applied; conflicts over the balance between speech rights with other rights such as privacy and safety; debates over whether human rights is a universalist project embedded in western principles and globalist projects, or an inspiring political, moral and legal framework sensitive to difference, inclusivity, localization, and reappropriation.
I have invited experts on these issues to serve as co-chairs: Kari Anden-Papadopoulos (Stockholm U), Tanja Bosch (U of Cape Town), John Erni (Education U of Hong Kong), Gerard Goggin (U of Sydney), Ella McPherson (Harvard U), Kerry Moore (Cardiff U), and Pradip Thomas (U of Queensland).
We welcome submissions for papers and panel proposals. Here is an illustrative sample of themes:
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Speech/communication rights of individuals and groups in organizations
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Advocacy for the rights of citizens, especially marginalized groups
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Media coverage of human rights
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Human rights as a core principle of communication, media, and information/data policies
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The communicative practices of governments, corporations, and the non-profit sector regarding the rights of citizens, employees, clients, and other publics
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Human rights in collective memory and social identities
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Personal and collective digital storytelling and visual communication related to human rights causes and campaigns
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Communicating health rights
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The language of human rights in public diplomacy
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The distortion and hijacking of human rights concepts and narratives;
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The communicative strategies of critics of human rights
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The vulnerability of privacy rights amid digital surveillance
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The uses of digital technologies in the documentation of human rights conditions
The conference will include the usual special sessions as well: interdivisional panels, sessions from all 33 of ICA's division and interest groups, escalator sessions, Blue Sky workshops of various sorts and, of course, the social events we all know and love (we've got some great things planned for Gold Coast!). Submissions will be accepted during the months of September and October, as usual, even though the conference is later in the calendar than is typical for ICA (see Laura's article for those details). I look forward to seeing everyone's ideas and submissions for ICA24 and to seeing you all in Australia.
https://www.icahdq.org/blogpost/1523657/490809/President-Elect-s-Column-2024-Conference-Theme
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Tom Mankowski
ICA
Washington DC
United States
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