The ALAIC-ECREA joint Task Force organised a panel at the IAMCR
conference, on the topic of "Academic Production Assessment:
Latin-American & European cross-fertilizations in Communication and
Media Studies".

Two of the papers of this session are now available online.

The Special Conference Session was convened by Fernando Oliveira Paulino
& Nico Carpentier, and took place on Monday 16 July 2012 (16:00-17:30).
The participants were Bart Cammaerts (LSE, UK), Gabriel Kaplún (UDR,
Uruguay), Aimée Vega Montiel (UNAM, Mexico) and Katrin Voltmer
(University of Leeds, UK). Also a statement from César Bolaño
(Universidade Federal de Sergipe, Brazil) was included.

The following papers are available for download:

1/Katrin Voltmer: "Is quality in the eye of the beholder? Objective and
subjective factors in evaluating academic production"
Download here as [pdf]:
http://www.ecrea.eu/index.php/archive/download/filename/paper_voltmer.pdf

2/Aimée Vega Montiel: "For the democracy of the systems of evaluating
academic production: convergences of Latin-American & European scholars".
Download here as [pdf]:
http://www.ecrea.eu/index.php/archive/download/filename/paper_aimeevegamontiel.pdf

See also here for the ECREA news item:
http://www.ecrea.eu/news/article/id/184

Special Session Abstract

The theoretical, methodological and empirical development of the field
of Communication and Media Studies is characterized by a diversity which
also has a spatial dimension. Although opportunities for global exchange
exist, academic communities are situated in the local, the urban and the
regional and function as imaginary communities, because of
institutional, financial and linguistic reasons. This regional diversity
is a significant asset to our field, but at the same time we should
avoid counter-productive processes of intellectual isolationism or
hierarchisation through the organization of creative dialogues and
exchanges.

The contributions in the ALAIC-ECREA panel aim to contribute to an
interregional dialogue, between Latin-America and Europe by emphasizing
the regional specificity and contextual embeddedness of theories,
methodologies and research traditions in Latin-America and Europe,
critically comparing the strengths and weaknesses, the abundances and
gaps, and then articulating these differences as opportunities for the
intellectual enrichment of both academic communities.

This panel topic fosters discussion and interregional dialogues on the
assessment systems in the communication and media studies field, such as
the evaluation of the peer-review system in academic production,
academic publishing and publication models and the validation and
endorsement of intellectual work. The models and systems designed for
measuring and assessing peer-review system in academic production
obviously reflect a country's political conditions and technical and
operational capacities, both current and potential. As evidenced by the
Latin American experience of academic assessment thus far, international
organisations can play a role in planning, critiquing or adjusting
systems of measuring and assessing academic production.

The purposes of academic production assessments and its uses will be the
topic of an extensive debate in the ALAIC-ECREA panel in Durban. The
advantages of specific approaches, methodologies, and instruments, as
well as the expected impact of assessments, will be discussed in order
to see how effectively a consensus can be reached for a joint academic
assessment statement between communication and media studies researchers
in Latin America and Europe.

It will be especially helpful to discuss and clearly define - in line
with each association's mission and vision - the preferred methodologies
and coverage of the academic assessment. Evenly crucial is the very
necessary alignment of these methodologies with the purpose and use of
academic assessment system. If the data provided by the assessments are
to be used to improve research, the instruments must reflect this.

Abstracts of the Presentations

The impact of academic assessment on publishing strategies
Bart Cammaerts

While assessment of academics in itself is a good thing, there is also
collateral damage induced by the way this assessment is conducted and
the way in which academic work is evaluated. The heavy emphasis on
star-quality peer-reviewed publications puts enormous pressure on top
journals and on individual academics to get 'into' these journals. While
it is often stated that a piece of work will be judged on its merits
rather than on where it has been published, senior academics at
departmental, school and university level do not want to take the risk
and rightfully or wrongfully insist on monitoring, managing and
sometimes shaping the publication strategies of their staff. This is
often a highly subtle process whereby academic staff also internalise
the requirements to comply and feel compelled to take strategic
decisions on where to publish what they write, maximising impact in
bibliometric terms. In the long run this could have a detrimental effect
on smaller specialised journals, edited collections as well as online
journals, all deemed un-REF-able in UK-terms. This de facto devaluation
of publications in such outlets during appointments, promotions and
research assessments also perpetuates and strengthens the stranglehold a
few large publishing companies have over academic publishing and over
access to academic knowledge. Criteria such as global impact, which in
itself is not wrong to aim for, does end up favouring publishers with
global reach, as well as the long standing top journals, which in every
field have all been bought up by publishing conglomerates and firmly
behind the pay wall. It also pushes academics to constantly aim higher
and carefully consider their publishing strategy in line with the
particular demands of the research assessment, whatever these are
perceived to be within every institution fueled by the ambitions it has.

Discipline and indiscipline in Latin American communication studies
Gabriel Kaplún

The different traditions that built the field of communication studies
in Latin America not only proposed problems and suggested ways to
address them, but also brought different ways of relating to the
academic world and the traditions of other regions. A first generation
of studies focused on the structures of media power-economic and
discursive structures gave way to another generation with a greater
emphasis on recipients, their cultures and subjectivities. On the other
hand, the field became the site of professional studies geared toward
for the exercise of professions, in a predominantly functionalist
perspective. And finally research dealing with social practices,
initially away from academia, focused on the search for alternative and
counter-hegemonic communication practices. These four traditions more or
less intensely talked among themselves, producing multiple crossings,
conflicts and hybridizations. Some of them were from the outset an
explicit link with European and American intellectual traditions. In
others, this was less explicit but no less important. Some were born and
maintained a greater disciplinary vocation within the scope of the
academic world and under a scientific heading. Others are geared more to
research social and political actors with transformative vocation, whose
ways of doing research are considered acts of "indiscipline" in
academia, by their dialogue with forms of knowledge not classified
within the scientific field. To evaluate the academic production that
comes from different intellectual proposals becomes a complex but
necessary challenge, especially for a dialogue between European and
Latin American intellectual traditions. Academic assessment is a complex
topic namely when discussed in the context of accreditation or
regulatory processes that have financial and legal implications, like
it's the case of many in Europe. Besides the difficulty of agreeing on
the instrument, scale and measures to be applied when we talk of such a
broad field as media and communication studies, another important
difficulty arouses if we bring into the debate the vocational and
professional oriented training provided by many of the schools in this
area, a fact that calls upon competences on the teachers side rarely
considered by more traditional academic assessment procedures. In this
talk we will try to present some of the main trends present in current
European assessment procedures, namely in southern Europe, and see how
they conflict or complement other more informal and sometimes efficient
assessment approaches.

For the democracy of the systems of measuring academic production:
convergences of Latin-American & European scholars
Aimée Vega Montiel
Download here as [pdf]:
http://www.ecrea.eu/index.php/archive/download/filename/paper_aimeevegamontiel.pdf

The contribution of Latin-American scholars to Media and Communication
Studies has been very significant in at least two
theoretical/methodological fields: communication policies and cultural
studies - with special emphasis on the convergence between communication
and culture. However, the dialogue and exchange with scholars from the
North are not usually in terms of equality but of hierarchy. Why?
Southern scholars communities do not actively participate in the
definition of the models and systems designed for measuring and
assessing academic production. Southern scholars are subjected to the
rules defined in other latitudes of the world - in latitudes where
different social problems and different scientific conditions for
research exist. The effects of this are evident in at least two
scenarios: the construction of the object of study, i.e., theoretical
and methodological definitions for research. The second is the influence
on the research agenda: there are many problems in the southern regions
that, not qualifying as a priority for organizations such as UNESCO,
become invisible. In this logic - the logic of the market-, that tends
to legitimate a few theories, methods and problems, competitiveness over
cooperation tend to be the rule of our production and organization. For
this reason, I firmly think IAMCR is the place where the convergence
between Latin-American and European scholars can take the form of
specific and practical actions to promote a more democratic field for
researchers. Some of these proposals will be discussed in my presentation.

Is quality in the eye of the beholder? Objective and subjective factors
in evaluating academic production
Katrin Voltmer
Download here as [pdf]:
http://www.ecrea.eu/index.php/archive/download/filename/paper_voltmer.pdf

Recent years have seen increased efforts to measure and objectively
evaluate the work of both individual academics and academic
institutions. League tables of universities, impact factor scores of
journals, publication profiles of scholars have become a key factor for
the success or failure in an increasingly competitive market. For most
of us evaluating the academic quality of academic outputs is part of our
professional life as reviewers for journals, conferences, funding
organisations etc. In this contribution I want to challenge the
assumption that academic quality can be measured objectively. I argue
that quality is a social construction that emerges from the discourses
of scholars of the academic community. However, the academic community
of a field, e.g. Communication and Media Studies, is itself fragmented
and hence applies different criteria for evaluating the quality of
academic production. Not only do different research paradigms -
positivist, hermeneutic etc. - imply different quality criteria;
national cultures have also developed specific ways of evaluating
intellectual outputs. I conclude by suggesting a deliberative approach
to academic evaluation that encourages dialogue between the evaluators.
By addressing the reasons for consensus or disagreement deliberative
assessment practices could help to overcome some of the weaknesses and
failures of the existing 'objective' methods of academic evaluation.

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