Challenging Communication Research

The International Communication Association conference, the 63rd in the series, was held in London during June 2013, and the 13 selected papers look critically at communication research as it is currently conducted. They challenge core concepts; public and personal discourses; communicative action and agency; and documents, evidence, and materiality. Among specific topics are a new era of field research in political communication, normative Europe and the Roma issue in the Romanian and Bulgarian press, the fluid state of creativity rights and the vanishing author, Humphrey Spender's hidden camera and the politics of visibility in interwar Britain, and challenges and opportunities for communication theory. Annotation c2014 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR (protoview.com)

Leah A. Lievrouw (PhD, the University of Southern California) is a professor in the Department of Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is author of Alternative and Activist New Media (2011), which received the 2011 best book award from the Communication and Information Technology section of the American Sociological Association. She is co-editor with Sonia Livingstone of the four-volume Benchmarks in Communication: New Media (2009), and The Handbook of New Media (2006).