The Communication Imagination: The Field of Media and Communication in Contemporary Times

Convenors: Professor Terry Flew and Associate Professor Steven Maras

Recent scholarship has pointed to the need to rethink our ideas of the scholarly field of Media and Communication, and highlighted the difficulties of drawing on any unified or monolithic idea of the area. This has broader implications on the ways Media and Communication sits and acts within the humanities and social sciences, its relations to other disciplines, as well as relations to external stakeholders in government, industry, civil society and the professions, and with students and the university sector.  

In his 2019 book, Communication: A Post Discipline, Silvio Waisbord used the idea of a communication imagination to help encourage new imaginings of the field (if we accept that characterisation) and what it can do. This post-conference tackles the challenges of what Waisbord terms the ‘patchwork’ of communication studies, in the context of the late Jürgen Habermas’s insight that the capacity to communicate across difference is both part of the ‘unfinished project of modernity’ and a condition of social cohesion and interpersonal understanding in diverse societies. But is also poses the question of whether communication is simply a ‘meeting place’ for a disparate array of projects, or whether the field affords a distinctive perspective on contemporary issues.  

In this post conference we will revisit Waisbord’s analysis of the disciplinary architectures we work through. We do this in the context of challenges associated with trust, misinformation and social cohesion. We will examine the issues that arise in attempting to establish or re-establish the value of the field in contemporary times.  

This pre-conference seeks to address three themes through three inter-linked sessions: 

• Session 1: Identify some of the primary challenges impacting on the institutional architecture of the field. These include where the field sits within universities, its relationship to particular professional fields, and how digital technologies and AI have transformed our objects of knowledge, methods, and relationships to pubic policy.  

• Session 2: Workshop new ways of articulating, narrating and explaining the field to key audience groups. This includes the skills and forms of knowledge that arise in our taught programs, how our teaching and research relates to particular industries, occupations and professions, and our engagement with government agencies.  

• Session 3: Investigate what ‘communication’ problems are, what they look like, and how they are constituted within varied communities. We will do this through a dialogue involving First Nations and non-Indigenous scholars around debates on ‘social cohesion’ and its relationship to communication as a social practice.  

Flew, T. (2024). The Rise, Fall, and Rise Again of Communication as a Disciplinary Signifier in Australia: After the “Cultural Turn” and the “Digital Turn.” Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, 54(2), 129–142. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/00472816231163772 

Maras, S. (2026). Narrating the Field of Communication: Charting an Unstable Territory . In P. Bilić, & T. Allmer (Eds.), Rethinking Media and Communication: A Critical Sociological Lens (pp. 359–382 ).  Brill. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004748545_018 

Paterno, D. (2017). Media (other than), film, and communication (whatever that is). Communication Research and Practice, 3(3), 233–247. https://doi.org/10.1080/22041451.2016.1262226 

Penman, R. (2012). On taking communication seriously. Australian Journal of Communication, 39(3), 41–63. 

Waisbord SR .(2019). Communication: A Post-Discipline. Cambridge, UK: Polity.  

Waisbord SR. (2020). The Communication Manifesto. Cambridge, UK: Polity.  

Waisbord, S. (2025). The cosmopolitan imagination: a call for global communication studies. Journal of Communication, 75(6), 411–420. https://doi.org/10.1093/joc/jqaf043 

On sociological imagination:  

Mills, C. W. (2000). The sociological imagination. Oxford University Press. 

Scott J .(2005). Sociology and its others: Reflections on disciplinary specialisation and fragmentation. Sociological Research Online 10(1). Available at: https://doi.org/10.5153/sro.1055 

Urry J .(1981). Sociology as a parasite: Some vices and virtues. In Abrams P, Deem R, Finch J and Rock P (eds), Practice and Progress: British Sociology 1950–1980. Taylor and Francis, pp. 25–38.