The future of Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies

ABSTRACT

With its beginnings marked by a challenge to a noncritical cultural history, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies is currently a mainstay within the communication discipline. Thinking about its future in terms of scholars whose work is currently challenging the field may help us think about where Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies was and is, and where it is going. The following seven special issue forum essays chart out new possibilities and remind us that “critical cultural” never attains permanency, that it is always in transition, and that living scholarship will continually redefine it and its stakes.

KEYWORDS:

• Communication
• critical
• cultural
• NCA
• field

Notes

1 Credit for shepherding the proposal for the Critical and Cultural Studies Division through the NCA approval process goes to Carole Blair, Barbara Biesecker, and Raymie McKerrow.

2 For a not extensive enough list of the early history of scholarship on race in the field of communication, in particular, see Lacy and Ono (2011). Michael G. Lacy and Kent A. Ono. “Introduction,” in Critical Rhetorics of Race, eds. Michael G. Lacy and Kent A. Ono (New York: New York University Press, 2011), 1–17. See, e.g., footnote 10, 14–5.

3 Paula Chakravartty, Rachel Kuo, Victoria Grubbs, and Charlton McIlwain, “#CommunicationSoWhite,” Journal of Communication 68, no. 2 (2018): 254–66.