journal of

COMMUNICATION
Journal of Communication ISSN 0021-9916

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Disciplines, Intersections, and the Future of Communication Research

doi:10.1111/j.1460-2466.2008.00402.x

It is an honor to open this special issue of the Journal of Communication on intersections. Debates about the nature of our eld have been extraordinarily productive, and to my mind, the navel-gazing we have reexively undertaken over the years has been inspiring and stimulating. A bit self-absorbed, perhaps, but it underscores our sensitivities as a relatively new discipline. We certainly cannot claim infancy at this point, but our eld is still in youthful adulthood, an opportune moment to scrutinize both our progress and chronic challenges. My argument is that the field of communication has a tremendous challenge ahead, now that we have grown in size and stature. We need to keep building the field, proving our value added on the scholarly scene but, at the same time, remain as broad and open to the offerings of other disciplines as possible. We need more coherence and more legitimacy if we are to strengthen the field, yet not at the cost of isolation, an enticing temptation for us as we build our own house. Navigating this complex terrain is exceedingly difficult, and so after a few forays into our various struggles, let me end with some practical solutions and questions we might ask ourselves moving forward. As preface, I should note that this article focuses primarily on communications as a field of inquiry in the United States. I focus on our intellectual lives, but primarily those pursued within the nuanced, idiosyncratic contexts of departments at North American colleges and universities. I regret any provincialism that results from this focus, but I am most familiar with communication studies in the United States, and always best to stay with what one knows. In the same vein, most of my examples, and view of the history of our field, are from the general perspective of media and audience studies.
Foundations and institutional struggles

Much has been written about the founding of communication, as a field or discipline, so I will not repeat these histories, anecdotes, and reviews. At this point, we have been treated to a plethora of volumes on the general intellectual history of the field (Rogers, 1994) as well as histories of particular ideas, technologies, industries, and practices (Nord, 2007; Peters, 1999). Among the more exciting projects have been those that bring together rigorous archival social history and the study of
Corresponding author: Susan Herbst; e-mail: susan.herbst@usg.edu
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communications media such as Henkins (2006) history of mail, The Postal Age. As Innis, McLuhan, and scholars of mass media who followed them know well, there has been signicant difculty separating our ideas about communication from the technological advance of media. Although this conation can be aggravating to those who try to map the eld, it is stimulating as well. And the truth is that other disciplines are in similar boats: Sociologists, for example, cannot cleanly separate the evolution of their disciplinary paradigms from real changes in institutions schools, families, courts, and the like. What is clear from so many works about the history of communication studies is that the field was stunningly interdisciplinary from the start. There were heavy hitters from multiple established disciplines with interests in commonBlumer and Merton from Sociology, Gallup from Marketing, or Laswell from Political Science. Regardless of their pedigrees, the underlying sensibilities of early media studies scholars were open and wide ranging. There was a wonderful disrespect (or disinterest?) in disciplinary constraints, as pioneers sought to understand the American communication environment. Because so many prominent, established academics were evaluating communication phenomena, they brought legitimacy with them. As a result, mid-20th century communication studies ourished and we made some real progress. But as that early generation of pioneers passed and the desire for communication schools and departments grew in the latter half of the 20th century, it was difficult for communications studies to make its way. On some campuses, communications as a discipline was readily accepted and entrance in a formalized way to the academy was smooth. On many other campuses, however, communication schools and departments lived in isolation. They were not understood and seemed mysterious to many social scientists and humanists, who thought communications was an industrial effort, training students in the practical arts of public relations and journalism True in part: We often send our students into these fields, and courses like media production are commonly found in our curricula. But we are legitimate basic researchers just the same, and the campus slights and isolation were not appreciated. Much of this has passed, but not all. It will only dissipate completely with the production of excellent research and writing, as more scholars across the established disciplines come to recognize our work and find it valuable. At this point there are many newer fields, so we look downright mature relative to areas like nanoscience or ethnic studies. There is no question that communication as a field didand indeed had to circle the wagons a bit in the late 20th century. Our foreparents argued for new schools and departments, where like-minded communication scholars could gather, create new curricula, teach what they deemed to be important, and train graduate students to go on and strengthen the field further in the United States and internationally. This is precisely what a new discipline must do, or at least had to do then, in a pre-Internet age and in the face of well-established colleges and universities generally resistant to change: For all the progressive political ideas one finds among faculty and administrators, universities are among the stodgiest of all organizations.
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Due to the ranks of tenured faculty, sensitivities of alumni, conservative budgeting and endowment protection practices, and a slew of other organizational features of universities, we just do not turn on a dime. So, to make a place in the 20th century academy was a challenge. It demanded compelling advocacy on the part of previous generations of scholars who built the departments we have, argued for those graduate fellowship lines, and so much else that we now take for granted. Inevitably, we see in hindsight, the fight for legitimacy demanded a sort of isolationism. If you argue that your field is important, unique, and adds particular value to the academy, it cannot simply be interdisciplinary or synthetic. Administrators are very wary of creating departments or schools for a synthetic cause; they need to see that a field really does stand on its own and therefore deserves its own protected resources and space. But moving away from the very real, if banal nature of campus politics and organizational sluggishness of universities, communication researchers had something to prove to the scholarly world. We were not just borrowing tools and ideas from established fields and applying them to media, to group communication dynamics, or to the nature of physician-patient relationships. We needed to prove that our work demanded its own journals, boldly intent on publishing communication scholarship. In addition to journals, we built organizations, hence the founding of the International Communication Association in 1950 and the renaming (and reenvisioning) of a national public speaking association into the National Communication Association. At midcentury, and for decades after, there was a recognition that the infrastructure characterizing established fields was vital for communication studies as well in its own march toward disciplinary adulthood and scholarly impact of the highest order. I note these general changes in order to underscore our tensions. On one hand, communication is a field born of other established disciplines. We cannot shed the borrowed notions from other fields because they are intellectually critical to us. And to prove to other fields that we matter, we have had to talk their talk to some extent. Yet, communication researchers have needed to downplay some of this heritage as well, to justify a new field. These conflicting dynamics, manifest in varying ways, have led to productivity and brilliant contributions but also to confusion, self-doubt, and even unfounded arrogance at times. We know who we aresort ofbut these forces are still not entirely aligned and may never be. The question is whether these contradictory tensions might affect the quality of our work.
Communications and postdisciplinarity?

The late 20th century saw a groundswell of desire for, and movement toward, interdisciplinarity across all fields. Natural scientists were at the fore of this movement without question, and on most good university campuses, life scientists had been working across boundaries for years quietly and without a big fuss. But when humanists and social scientists joined the chorus, interdisciplinarity became the mantra across the academy and is a part of most every strategic plan one sees for
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departments, colleges, and universities. I am not certain why the word is even used at this point, as it seems to have lost whatever meaning it once had. Most of the disciplines, even those with a strong dominant paradigm like Economics, are now internally diverse, in addition to borrowing the traditions of other fields. These days, an emphasis on interdisciplinarity is like saying you believe in thinking or analysis. It is a good thing and that is undeniable. We should be proud, in communication, that we were always interdisciplinary. Our founders emerged from a diverse set of disciplinesInnis from Economics, McLuhan from literary criticism, Lazarsfeld from Sociology, Mead from Psychologythe list goes on. But talk of interdisciplinarity feels stale and even a bit comical, given how overused and abused the term is at this point. As a result, some scholars have tried to invent new language to describe the conversation among disciplines, rethinking past, present, and future all the while. The result is something of a new morass. We no longer ask how or when interdisciplinarity emerged and whether we are interdisciplinary enough. The questions that arise now are whether there were really any justifiable disciplinary boundaries to start with, and what the nature of a discipline has to do withif anythingthe pursuit of knowledge. I recommend avoidance of the literature on interdisciplinarity and postdisciplinarity, which I findand I like to navel-gazedull and often pretentious, mindnumbingly boring, and not particularly useful. It is one of those metalevel areas that a critic of the U.S. academy might point to as more evidence of our decline and irrelevance to society. In any case, one of the clearer thinkers on the topic is the distinguished humanist Menand (2001), who explored these matters in an article titled The Marketplace of Ideas. His thoughts are worth quoting at length, and he writes: People refer to the new organizations of knowledge as interdisciplinary, but this seems mistaken. The collapse of disciplines must mean the collapse of interdisciplinarity as well; for interdisciplinarity is the institutional ratification of the logic of disciplinarity. The very term implies respect for the discrete perspectives of different disciplines. You cant have interdisciplinarity, or multidisciplinarity, unless you have disciplines. . . . Interdisciplinary scholarship or teaching simply means the deployment of professional expertise in two or more disciplines. That is not the same phenomenon as postdisciplinarity. (p. 13) Menand defines postdisciplinarity, which he believes evolved after an antidisciplinary period, characterized by fields like Womens Studies, which was unable to convince traditional departments to heed gender as lens for social analysis. Menand explains: Once the antidisciplinary stage had passed, the academy entered into a different phase which might be called the phase of postdisciplinarity. . [More often] it
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[postdisciplinarity] simply means a determined eclecticism about methods and subject matter. (p. 12) To my mind, Menands phrase determined eclecticism about methods and subject matter is helpful to those of us trying to wade through the discussions of inter-, multi-, anti-, and postdisciplinarity. It underscores the importance of agencya resolute, dogged attempt to see a question or problem from new perspectives. These efforts, hopefully rigorous, should apply to both research topic and methodology. Another useful definition of postdisciplinarity comes from Case (2001), writing on Feminism and Performance, who agrees with Menand on the collapse of disciplines: The term post disciplinarity, now in current usage, announces a different relationship to fields of study than the earlier term interdisciplinary might connote. We can imagine interdisciplinary as a term that signals a sense of a unified field, produced through the historical convergence of subcultures, social structures, and training practices. . . . Post disciplinary retains nothing of the notion of a shared consciousness, or of a shared objective that brings together a broad range of discrete studies. Instead, it suggests that the organizing structures of disciplines themselves will not hold. Only conditional conjunctions of social and intellectual forces exist, at which scholarship and performance may be produced. Scholars do not work within fields, but at intersections of materials and theories. (p. 150) Cases views are well-taken at this moment, when the disciplines do not hold as particularly sturdy intellectual baskets. Disciplinary borders are permeable, with tremendous, incessant, and urgent borrowing with attribution (a good thing), as well as borrowing without attribution (a naughty thing, discussed below). It is difficult to use the word interdisciplinary in this context, so postdisciplinarity does seems more fitting. But what does all this semantic wrangling mean for Communication Studies? It means quite a lot, given the historically permeable borders and openness of Communication as a discipline. In fact, it is somewhat embarrassing that we did not lead the discussion about inter- and postdisciplinarity because we have approached so many of our problems across subeldsmass media studies, health communication, organization communication, and all otherswith the very determined eclecticism that Menand describes. A lost opportunity, as we do have a unique position in the academy with much to say about the struggles of disciplinarity and the intellectual bankruptcy associated with narrow lenses and self-imposed intellectual constraints. We have, in fact, been a field characterized by intellectual freedom, and although that has had its burdens, this openness has served us well in the face of an often-staid constellation of established disciplines. The bottom line, then, is that we have been postdisciplinary, even before the term arrived on the scene. Our founders of midcentury felt an openness and sense of
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possibility, but we have nonetheless been timid in our proclamations, and have not powerfully articulated how it is we broke away from the confines of disciplinarity long ago. We have built our organizations and divided and named our subfields neatly. But we did not organize around the epistemological proposition of determined eclecticism. Had we done so, in my view, we would have climbed to legitimacy more quickly and with more force. We did our work and we did it well, but more metalevel articulation of what we were doingwith regard to disciplinaritywould have secured our place as leaders in the disruption of academic business as usual.
The dangers of postdisciplinarity

Even with the best of intentions, determined eclecticism and the goal of moving past the disciplines have their hazards. It is of course very difficult to let go of the disciplines we grew up with as scholars because we allno matter our stated freedom of mindfeel comfort in having boxes to put things into, theories and methodologies included. But if we can (in our scholarly work at least) do precisely what Dostoyevskys Grand Inquisitor thought impossible and embrace real freedom and agency, possible pitfalls abound, and we should keep these in mind always. Just as postdisciplinarity demands a constant effort to go beyond our boxes and standard approaches, so does it demand that we be responsible scholars. Moving past disciplinary boundaries cannot mean sloppiness, a light touch, or avoidance of conventional scholarly standards. Far from it, a tenacious emphasis on excellence and rigor is mandatory, if we are to accept postdisciplinarity as our new path. Possibilities for inquiry abound in a postdisciplinary world, but there are attendant dangers. The first is the wheel reinvention problem, something communication researchers have long struggled with and tried to overcome. There are always new approaches to social, economic, political, mathematical, and natural phenomena, of course, and research into what people have said previously about our chosen problem is the first step in any project, whether a book, senior thesis, or a dissertation. The so-called literature review is the space we reserve for looking back and across: How did our own field view the problem previously and how have other disciplines seen it? Literature reviews run the gamut from superb and rigorous to superficial and incompetent, a function of the researcher and his or her talents. But the notion of a literature review changes immeasurably when we break out of the disciplinary constellation. There is a danger, if disciplines are left behind, that a sort of irresponsible, Wild West approach to literature reviews might emerge. If we are somehow past disciplines, how careful do we really need to be, in a brave new world? Very careful. Someone writing in my subfield of political communication cannot simply look to our own literature and Political Science, the usual places. Postdisciplinarity makes it incumbent upon the responsible author to turn with great energy to psychology, sociology, economics, or other fields where the problem might have been studied. In theory, this should be done even in our current, highly
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disciplinary world. But as we have all seen many times over, literature reviews often miss a body of work that might have altered the project in fundamental ways. Wheel reinvention is always a peril, but it takes on heightened import when one is trying to pursue truly responsible, valuable postdisciplinary work. Another danger of postdisciplinarity, also related to quality of the research we produce, is the issue of expertise in peer review. If one is, say, an editor of a journal and receives a postdisciplinary essay that defies our boundaries, to whom should it be sent for review? An editor does the best he or she can, but there is no question that discipline-busting articles pose tremendous challenges. Put one way: Just because the author uses a postdisciplinary approach does not mean the reviewers share the stance, and so the already-fraught peer-review process can become even more complicated. A vivid example of these types of perils comes from the new and often annoying literature called freakonomics. Few would argue against attempts to make economic principles and phenomena more interesting to the noneconomist, and economists have the right to study whatever they like, of course. But in trying to contribute insights about social and cultural lifesometimes interesting, sometimes just clever and amusingmany economists working in this area either ignore or avoid decades of research in psychology, sociology, anthropology, and a variety of other fields. Freakonomists sometimes take on intriguing questions and define the terms so narrowly that they fail to undertake a thoughtful, cross-disciplinary literature review at all. Perhaps this is not such a new phenomenon: Even before the rise of freakonomics, I had numerous debates with economists who were studying human nature and behavior, and them to at least have a cursory look at this or that part of the psychology literature. The response was typically a polite no thanks, paired with the argument that lab experimentation, quasi-experimentation, or field experimentation are so idiosyncratic and context bound that they could never really enhance an economic approach. The economic approach, some believe, is beyond context, enduring in its view of fundamental human nature and the calculus of the rational actor. Perhaps study by sociologists, psychologists, or anthropologists is irrelevant to what they need to do? One of the more searing critiques of freakonomics comes from Scheiber (2007), a senior editor at The New Republic. He focuses on a televisual study, undertaken by Steve Levitt, a practitioner of freakonomics. Scheiber notes: Not long after [a study of crime rates], Levitt conducted an exhaustive inquiry into Weakest Link, a game show in which contestants voted to remove a player after each round of trivia questions. Tallying the voting data revealed that contestants were discriminating against Latinos and the elderly but not blacks and women. (p. 5) He continues:

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While the game show did provide a pure setting for observing discrimination, there was no reason to think we could extrapolate from Weakest Link contestants to, say, hiring and promotion decisions, where discrimination often intersects with economics. Set aside the fact that the logic governing Weakest Link votes may be completely different than the logic that reigns in the typical HR department. The bigger problem is that most hiring and promotion decisions dont take place in a Hollywood studio before a national TV audience. Levitt is charmingly, almost painfully, self-effacing when you mention these reservations. Theres no question I have written some ridiculous papers, he says. By way of explanation, he draws an analogy to the fashion industry: haute t-a-porter. Sometimes you write papers and theyre less couture versus pre about the actual result, more about your vision of how you think the profession should be. And so I think some of my most ridiculous papers actually fall in the high-fashion category. (pp. 56.) The usefulness of high fashion aside and with regard to the narrowness of economists, I am generalizing a bit of course. There are many fine economists who are interested in the empirical world and highly respectful of what thousands of noneconomic social scientists (and even humanists) have contributed. But the tendencies of the field, and most certainly of the freakonomics subfield, are to avoid a tip of a hat to other disciplines. Freakonomics is a truly brilliant creation, in facta subfield that defines itself in a manner that can often successfully escape peer review by those who have studied the phenomena previously. Only freakonomists can review freakonomics papers because they are the only reviewers who are entirely comfortable with the approach. By taking freakonomics to task, I am pointing out the dangers of postdisciplinarity with regard to peer review and quality. Freakonomics is a postdisciplinary subfield. It relies on some economic concepts, but tries to move beyond the conventional techniques and approaches, and foray into other disciplines chosen problems. Nothing wrong with this in theory; freakonomics certainly fits Menands determined eclecticism characterization. But, ironically, by going beyond conventional economic approaches, it may create an isolated island of scholars who talk primarily to each other, with the occasional popular book, article, or Web site.
The promise of postdisciplinarity

Dangers aside, real postdisciplinarityapproached responsibly and with great intellectual rigor and creativityis a beautiful thing. We have seen some wonderful examples of it, even before the term came into common usage. Laqueurs (1990) brilliant intellectual history of sex and gender, Making Sex or Lotts (1993) equally groundbreaking history of minstrelsy, Love and Theft, come to mind. These books and others by imaginative and creative scholars demonstratewithout metalevel, self-absorbed carrying-on about what they doingjust how much can be learned by
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bringing the full force of multiple disciplines to an old subject, and as a result, developing a view that defies all previous approaches. When one does truly highquality postdisciplinary work, the phenomenon can never be studied with a narrow disciplinary lens again, as its very essence is changed, often profoundly. It is no coincidence that these two books come to us from a literary critic and a cultural historian. Literary criticism and history are fields that seem to veer more naturally toward interdisciplinarity and postdisciplinarity, with the social sciences lagging behind. On the other end of the intellectual spectrum, the conglomeration of fields we now call the life sciences has long been postdisciplinary as well, if quietly so, bringing together scientists who study life from botany, zoology, cell biology, genomics, and a variety of other fields. And a newcomer to the scene, nanoscience, is revolutionizing the study of our world, changing the field of physics forever. Nanoscience is the manipulation of matter at the atomic level, an approach that stretches across multiple areas of inquiry, and is having tremendous impacts (through chip design and development) on electronics, health care, energy sustainability, and national security, among other phenomena. The application of nanoscale science to medicine has been particularly impressive, as researchers develop tools to prevent and combat illness through the creation of microchip technology for insertion into the body. The social sciences, while certainly interdisciplinary, have not been pushing boundaries as hard as either humanists or scientists, and so this is a time of opportunity for fields like ours that have a long history of openness, as discussed above. But we have a fair amount of work to do if we are to join the discussion of postdisciplinarity with any force. The obstacles are less intellectual than institutional, and the National Academies taxonomy is a good example of the challenges we face. The National Research Council (NRC) of the National Academies collects data that enables rating and ranking of doctoral programs in a variety of disciplines. As most university professors and administrators know, data are collected during a lengthy period and rankings appear periodically, with the last publication of ratings and rankings in 1995. The compilation of data for new national rankings is ongoing for the next report to be released in 2008 (for information on the rankings and methodologies, taxonomy, see http://www7.nationalacademies.org/resdoc/ project_scope.html). A taxonomy, by design, is meant to solidify boundaries of the disciplines but has unintended consequences of fighting against interdisciplinary. Disciplines are defined, departments compete against their peers, one tries to boost ones rankings to better place graduate students at peer institutions, and so forth. But as Hall and I have argued elsewhere (http://insidehighered.com/views/2006/01/05/hall), interdisciplinary and applied fields, no matter their import, are often excluded in taxonomies as they fall through cracks of the established disciplines. With huge, extraordinarily expensive projects like the NRCs, one wonders if there is really ever a chance for either rampant interdisciplinarity or postdisciplinarity, no matter how attractive in theory. We have created departments and colleges but also ratings and
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rankings systems that reify and concretize divisions and disciplines. The incentives for prestige, for placing our students, and for garnering resources in our home institutions are discipline driven. It is simply not clear where the more concrete and truly significant rewards for postdisciplinary work reside.
But what is to be done in communication?

The examples above underscore the tensions we face. Good scholars are naturally drawn to discipline busting, and junior communication researchers are still sometimes raised in the discipline-defying manner of our foreparents. But for all the talk about, and real value of, interdisciplinarity and postdisciplinarity, the path is unclear. Professional risks abound for the postdisciplinary scholar, and those must be weighed by any young person seeking a career in the academy or those who hope for their work to be seen by a wide readership. For scholars of communicationno matter their subfieldopportunities exist, but our challenge is to keep boosting the authority of the field, as a field, without joining the forces that block postdisciplinarity. How might we build our field in ways that make it a model of openness and courage while protecting the notion that there is still a place for a distinctive field of inquiry called communication? I believe there are many approaches that enable us to walk this tightrope, and let me close with a few possibilities. First, we do need to publish in the best noncommunication journals, no matter the temptation to always send our prized material to the communication journals we ourselves have toiled to create. Let us spread the wealth, by bolstering the content of our fields journals, but also contribute to other disciplines, no matter how difficult. I have done both, and there is no question that publishing in rigorous peer-reviewed journals or volumes of other fields is far more challenging than talking to your own folks. Move outside the comfort zone of your subfield, and you do quite often get clobbered: Not everyone talks our talk or likes our ways. That is fine, but it demands a strong stomachharder for senior, established faculty than our junior colleaguesto take heat from anonymous reviewers who do not hold back. But what does not kill you makes you stronger. And while we may read widely, not everyone does, so publishing in the best journals of other fields enables you to bring to them the contributions of communication scholars. The second path we might take is to find our place in the most influential publications we can, read by academics but also by policymakers, journalists, corporate executives, and educated citizens far from the academy. I rarely see books by communication scholars reviewed in The New Republic or grouped together for a lengthy review in The New York Review of Books. Are we even trying to participate in these forums? Do we write editors with suggestions or volunteer our labor to them? Until communication scholars are front and center in these more popular venues, we will be hidden. Ironically, what we studyorganizational communication, public opinion, media content and effectsare of tremendous interest to the elite movers and shakers in American culture who are avid readers of these more
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popular nonacademic magazines. They will simply not come to us and we cannot wait to be discovered. We need to bring our books, reviews, and ideas to the editors of literary and political magazines, if we are to gain the influence we seek in the American world of ideas. A third avenue is to encourage more peeking into the black box of the review process in communication, so that we can learn about ourselves and our biases. Again, this calls for tremendous honesty and swallowing of pride, if it is undertaken boldly. The best example I have ever seen of such openness in a discipline was a project pursued by Thelen (1997), former editor of the Journal of American History. Thelen received an article to the journal from a distinguished historian of the U.S. south, Joel Williamson. It was a bold article inspired by Clarence Thomas U.S. Supreme Court nomination hearing and explored lynching, race, gender, and the practice of historical research. Thelen sent the article out for review in a normal fashion, to a varied group of top historians, and the process displayed academic conict at its best. With the permission of all, Thelen published the original Williamson article and the reviews, in their full, unedited glory, never intended for publication. What results is a window into the complex nature of the review process, of course, but more so, a soul-searching forum about the nature of historical work as currently practiced. I highly recommend a look at this wonderful experiment in self-exposure; it is precisely the sort of forum communication scholars could use to further our discipline and ask the hard questions about what we do. Do we ask those hard questions often enough? I do not think we do, in large part because of our legitimation fears: If we question ourselves and our field, do we risk hard-won disciplinary status? Perhaps, in the eyes of some. But in any case, a grownup field that has reached maturity should ask itself whether we need all our journals. Are they of the highest quality? Should some of our subfields be combined? Do we train our students to be like us? Or do we push them to do things we feared and stretch into the brave new world of postdisciplinarity? To my mind, these are the questions we face as a field today. We have status, we have infrastructure. At a few institutions, we even have vast resources. But are we courageous enough to lead unique efforts in postdisciplinarity? If Lazarsfeld and our other visionary founders were with us today, I believe they would applaud anti- and postdisciplinary communication studies, as a path to understanding the cultural, social, political, psychological, and economic phenomena that surround us. In fact, they would be leaders for the cause, and perhaps our calling at this point is to do just that, with the rigor and imagination that has so long characterized our wonderful area of inquiry.
References
Case, S. (2001). Feminism and performance: A post disciplinary couple. Theatre Research International, 26, 145152.

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Henkin, D. M. (2006). The postal age: The emergence of modern communications in Nineteenth-Century America. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Laqueur, T. W. (1990). Making sex: Body and gender from the Greeks to Freud. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lott, E. (1993). Love and theft: Blackface minstrelsy and the American working class. New York: Oxford University Press. Menand, L. (2001). The marketplace of ideas. In (American Council of Learned Societies Occasional Paper No. 49, pp. 123). Retrieved February 2007 from http://www.acls.org/ op49.htm Nord, D. (2007). Communities of journalism: A history of American newspapers and their readers. Champaign: University of Illinois Press. Peters, J. D. (1999). Speaking into the air: A history of the idea of communication. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rogers, E. M. (1994). A history of communication study: A biographical approach. New York: The Free Press. Scheiber, N. (2007). How freakonomics is ruining the dismal science. The New Republic. Retrieved February 2007 from http://www.tnr.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20070402&s= scheiber040207 Thelen, D. (1997). What we see and cant see in the past: An introduction. Journal of American History, 83, 12171220.

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