Special Issue Call for Papers: Communication and Constitution: Exploring Classical and Emerging Topics

Guest editors:

Mariaelena Bartesaghi (University of South Florida, USA), François Cooren (Université de Montréal, Canada), Jimmie Manning (University of Nevada, Reno, USA); Thomas Martine (Audencia Business School, France) and Cynthia Stohl (University of California, Santa Barbara, USA)

Overview:

In his landmark 1999 article, Communication Theory as a Field, Robert T. Craig called for more dialogue between what he then identified as the seven traditions of communication (rhetoric, semiotics, phenomenology, cybernetic, socio-psychology, sociocultural theory and critical theory). This call was based on two principles: (1) the constitutive model of communication as a metamodel and (2) communication theory as metadiscourse. With his first principle, Craig invited us to acknowledge that each of these different traditions has its own way of thinking the world communicatively and that there is a real payoff in studying various phenomena as being communicatively constituted. With his second principle, he proposed that the communication discipline could be envisaged as a sort of metadiscourse, that is, a discourse about discourse by which we pursue the study of one of the most basic phenomena of our human condition: the act of communicating.

Almost 25 years later, this article can be said to have had a key influence on our field (e.g., Donsbach, 2006; Gardner, 2018; Shumate and O’Connor, 2010), as illustrated by the numerous research agendas that have implicitly or explicitly responded to Craig’s call. Consider for example, the Communication as Constitutive of Organization (CCO) approach (Putnam and Nicotera, 2009), which positions communicative acts as the basic building blocks of organizational processes. There is also the constitutive approach to interpersonal and family communication studies (Baxter, 2014; Manning, 2014), which shows that we co-create not only our relationships, but also our very selves in social interaction, as well as the communicative constitution of collective action (Bennett and Segerberg, 2012; Stohl and Stohl, 2011), which demonstrates how online and offline political activities are first and foremost enacted through a logic of connective action.

Echoing John Dewey’s (1916) pragmatist perspective on communication, all these approaches claim, in spite of their differences, that we should not only think of communication as something that happens in, say, organizations, families, or communities, but that these collectives should also be apprehended as constituted in communication (Bartesaghi and Castor, 2008; Couldry & Hepp, 2018; Livingstone, 2009; Taylor and Van Every, 2000). More broadly, recent developments on relational ontology (Condit, 2006; Cooren, 2018; Kuhn et al., 2017; Martine & De Maeyer, 2019; Murphy & Castro-Sotomayor, 2021; Richardson & Wilken, 2023) contribute to the advance of this constitutive view. Each of these approaches indeed illustrates how thinking relationally about the world amounts to acknowledging that any being or phenomenon is literally made of/constituted by relations (between humans, but also between humans and other-than-humans, as well as between other-than-humans themselves), a stance that obviously positions communication as the ideal discipline to address this type of ontological claim.

Against this background, this special issue of Communication Theory aims to address the following questions:

1. What does a constitutive understanding of communication mean for the study of classical and emergent topics, as are identities, ecosystems, sustainability, technology, gender, ethnicity, organizations, relationships, coalitions, power, authority, creativity, discrimination, domination, disability, among others?
2. How can a relational/constitutive perspective enable scholars to see empirical and theoretical linkages among the various subfields of communication. What do these linkages mean in practice?   
3. How are worlds communicatively constituted? That is, how is a phenomenon or even any state of being made of or constituted by communication?  
4. How might constitutive approaches place communication as a central action or activity by which topics/phenomena can be analyzed and explained? 
5. How can we make connections across theoretical traditions via embracing communication theory as a metadiscourse? And how might this shape how we think through our scholarship, especially in terms of theory/theorizing? 
6. How, in an increasingly globalized world, might scholars nurture and/or deconstruct the relations that constitute the various phenomena that we as communication scholars study? 

We especially encourage empirical and theoretical essays that position communication as an explanans (what does the explaining) and not as an explanandum (what is to be explained). In other words, and in keeping with Craig’s (1999) call, we are looking for manuscripts that show that the world as we know it, in all its instantiations, can be studied and explained relationally, that is, communicatively.

Scholars and researchers representing all the sub-disciplines of communication are encouraged to submit.

Deadline for the submission of manuscripts: November 10, 2024. All manuscripts will have to follow the journal submission guidelines.

References

Bartesaghi, M., & Castor, T. (2008). Social construction in communication: Re-constituting the conversation. Annals of the International Communication Association, 32(1), 1-39.  https://doi.org/10.1080/23808985.2008.11679074

Baxter, L. A. (Ed.) (2014). Remaking “family” communicatively. Peter Lang Publishing. https://doi.org/10.3726/978-1-4539-1399-4

Bennett, W. L., & Segerberg, A. (2012). The logic of connective action: Digital media and the personalization of contentious politics. Information, Communication & Society, 15(5), 739-768. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2012.670661

Condit, C. M. (2006). Communication as relationality. In G. J. Shepherd, J. St. John, & T. Stripahs (Eds.), Communication as... Perspectives on theory (pp. 3-37). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Cooren, F. (2018). Materializing communication: Making the case for a relational ontology. Journal of Communication, 68(2), 278-288. https://doi.org/10.1093/joc/jqx014

Couldry, N., & Hepp, A. (2018). The mediated construction of reality. John Wiley & Sons.

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Dewey, J. (1916). Democracy and education. An introduction to the philosophy of education. The Free Press.

Donsbach, W. (2006). The Identity of Communication Research. Journal of Communication, 56(3), 437-448. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1460-2466.2006.00294.x

Gardner, P. M. (2018). Diversifying ICA: Identity, Difference, and the Politics of Transformation. Journal of Communication, 68(5), 831-841. https://doi.org/10.1093/joc/jqy050

Kuhn, T., Ashcraft, K. L., & Cooren, F. (2017). The work of communication: Relational perspectives on working and organizing in contemporary capitalism. New York: Routledge.

Livingstone, S. (2009). On the mediation of everything: Ica presidential address 2008. Journal of Communication, 59(1), 1-18.  https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1460-2466.2008.01401.x

Manning, J. (2014). A Constitutive Approach to Interpersonal Communication Studies. Communication Studies, 65(4), 432-440. https://doi.org/10.1080/10510974.2014.927294

Martine, T., & De Maeyer, J. (2019). Networks of reference: Rethinking objectivity theory in journalism. Communication Theory, 29, 1-23.  https://doi.org/10.1093/ct/qty029

Murphy, P. D., & Castro-Sotomayor, J. (2020). From Limits to Ecocentric Rights and Responsibility: Communication, Globalization, and the Politics of Environmental Transition. Communication Theory, 31(4), 978-1001.  https://doi.org/10.1093/ct/qtaa026

Putnam, L. L., & Nicotera, A. M. (Eds.). (2009). Building theories of organization: The constitutive role of communication. New York: Routledge.

Richardson, I., & Wilken, R. (2023). The relational ontology of mobile touchscreens and the body: Ambient proprioception and risk during COVID-19. Mobile Media & Communication, 11(2), 312-327. https://doi.org/10.1177/20501579221117434

Shumate, M., & O'Connor, A. (2010). The Symbiotic Sustainability Model: Conceptualizing Ngo–Corporate Alliance Communication. Journal of Communication, 60(3), 577-609. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1460-2466.2010.01498.x

Stohl, C., & Stohl, M. (2011). Secret Agencies: The Communicative Constitution of a Clandestine Organization. Organization Studies, 32(9), 1197-1215.  https://doi.org/10.1177/0170840611410839

Taylor, J. R., & Van Every, E. J. (2000). The emergent organization. Communication as site and surface. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.