Editorial

This special issue allows us to draw together some of the best scholarship from the 2015 Australian and New Zealand Communication Association conference around the theme of ‘Rethinking Communication, Space and Identity’. The articles collected here stand both as a celebration of contributions from the conference and as a challenge to rethink elements of communication scholarship.

A conference themed with rethinking scholarly practice calls on us to confront conceptual models that no longer quite work and theories that have been overtaken by changing empirical phenomena. On one level, we are used to such challenges in the communication field. Communication research is frequently described as heterogeneous, ready to embrace new ideas and orientations (Ayish, 2003), even derivative of other fields. In fact, we have become so diversified and expansive in our scope that Nordenstreng (2011) has worried ‘that the field runs the risk of both losing sight of its scholarly roots and embracing only the surface of the realities it investigates’ (195). So on another level, there is a greater challenge for those rethinking aspects of the field, to ensure that its roots go deeply enough into practice and theory. In our view, the articles here do just that, by re-engaging with some fundamental questions and by making claims about what ultimately matters in communication. They are focused less on identifying change or disruption in communication practice than thinking through the implications of change for communication theorists and professionals.

Our aim has been to bring together scholars who can help us to identify how the wood looks these days rather than fixate on specific trees. In particular, we would hope this issue allows scholars in a range of communication fields to reflect on common conceptual problems and theoretical tools. Some specific topics recur in the articles. For a number, their key task is finding ways to negotiate dualisms, whether discourse–materiality, medium–content, or open–closed systems. A number of articles refocus on the responsibilities and politics of communication actors. All of them are sensitive, as the best communication scholarship is, to the in-between, to the moments and processes of interacting where meaning is produced and learning happens. They are in other respects, though, as diverse as ANZCA is, ranging from political to organisational and professional communication and communication pedagogy, and they conceive of communication at all levels from the medium to discourse to social practice. We recommend them all to readers.