How Healthy is the Historiography of North American Mass Communication Research?: Ferment in
the Field's History

Wednesday, November 16. 8:30 am - 4:45 pm, Boston, Massachusetts
Annual Meeting of the National Communication Association (U.S.A.) (www.natcom.org)

Pre-conference Leaders: David Park, Lake Forest College, and Jeff Pooley,
Muhlenberg College

"Strictly speaking," James Carey has written, "there is no history of mass communication research."
This pre-convention seminar is organized around a single question: Why have the histories of the
study of North American mass communication--the published accounts of its origins and
development--been so often airbrushed and Whiggish, historiographically naïve, and thinly
sourced? The narratives that exist have appeared most frequently in annual review essays and
especially textbook capsules, and these tend to emphasize the progressive unfolding of a new
science. Even the work that challenged this progressivist narrative in the 1970s remained
thoroughly presentist in other ways. The main approach has been to combine thin and error-
ridden biography with a superficial gloss of ideas, with the accent on "destined for greatness".
Most of the existing history of the field ignores external intellectual, social, political and economic
influences. In particular, the revealing institutional history of the field has been neglected. The
bulk of the history has been written by active participants in the field, often central figures with
their own legacies at stake. Much of the literature, as a result, comes off as origin myth, as an all-
too-usable account of the past. This is made strikingly clear when this history is compared with
the extant historiography of other fields. Much of the stronger history that has been written
recently has failed to register in the field's consciousness, in part because those who do work on
the field's history are scattered, isolated from one another (with almost no cross-citation), and
outside the field's main currents. This preconference is intended, in part, to reduce that isolation-
to gather together scholars with overlapping interests in the history of mass communication
research.

Participants: All scholars with an interest in the history of mass communication research are
encouraged to submit completed papers or extended abstracts (2-3 pages) by September 15,
2005. Send submissions to David Park, Lake Forest College, 555 N. Sheridan Rd., Lake Forest, IL
60045-2399 USA or email an electronic copy to [log in to unmask] Plans are underway to
publish selected papers in a special issue of a journal.

Issues to be explored:
Participants in the pre-conference are invited to submit papers or abstracts that
a) address, explain, and/or comment upon the state of the existing historiography; or
b) provide new, substantive histories of specific episodes or developments in the field's past; or
c) reflect on the field's institutional history; or
d) consider the field's history as it overlaps and intersects with cognate fields like the sociology of
culture, social psychology, political science, or cultural studies; or
e) trace the field's interaction with other national research fields