On behalf of the Editorial Board of Communication Research and Practice, I am sad to inform our journal community of the passing of our second Editor-in-Chief Professor Colleen Mills on 11 August, 2022, age 66, in Christchurch, New Zealand.
Colleen was Professor of Management in the Department of Management, Marketing and Entrepreneurship at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand. Colleen was a former President of the Australian and New Zealand Communication Association (ANZCA) and a member of its Executive since 2002. She will be deeply missed by her many academic friends around the world and within ANZCA for her advocacy for organisational communication and her stewardship of this journal.
In 2018, Colleen took over the Chief Editorship of Communication Research and Practice from Founding Editor Terry Flew who managed the set-up of the journal from 2014, with the first issue published in 2015. Together with the ANZCA Presidents between 2013 to 2016 – Terence Lee, Diana Bossio and Donald Matheson – Colleen was part of the discussions around setting up the journal going back to meetings with Routledge at ICA conferences. An issue that Colleen had raised was how to boost the citations for work in the journal, in order to ensure that both leading and emerging scholars were submitting papers. She was particularly pleased to see it achieve Q1 status in the SciMAGO Journal Rankings in Communication in 2020, seeing this as vindicating the decision by ANZCA to commit to this new journal. Over the past few years, she had been working tirelessly behind the scenes to chart the next phase of Communication Research and Practice’s growth.
Colleen was particularly important in building links between the International Communication Association (ICA) and ANZCA. She served as an ICA Board Member-at-Large from 2016-2019 and was recently elected Internationalisation Officer for the Organizational Communication Division.
A collegial and selfless colleague, friend and mentor are the words I would use to describe Colleen. There is no doubt that all of our lives have been enriched by her presence. For us in the broader discipline of Communication, she has passed on a journal that has reached greater heights. I hope to honour this legacy going forward.