Constituted and Constituting Exclusions in Communication Studies
History of Media Studies, (2022)DOI: 10.32376/d895a0ea.d2f41c66
Abstract
Despite their explosive growth during the past decades, the sciences dedicated to communication are largely marginalized in the academic communities worldwide: Typically, their publications are not read, their theories ignored, their curricula not proposed in prestigious universities. The stigma these “fragmented” disciplines suffer from has important and interesting consequences for their development and beyond, for the contemporary understanding of the role of scientific knowledge in society. How does invisibilization affect the identity of our discipline(s) and of the researchers who inhabit it? What does it say about the intervention of social values into supposedly “neutral” scientific fields? The analysis of this partly documented situation relies upon a discursive approach requiring historical resources and, at the same time, a precise attention to heterogenous experiences that do not “fit” in historically situated normative academic frames. The approach shows how constituted and constituting exclusions of communication studies are linked by fundamental questions about where science “is” and what it “does,” epistemologically, practically, and politically. Identifying and acknowledging the power of sociocultural categories in structuring scientific practices leads us to put the authority, usefulness, and legitimacy of contemporary science in its proper intellectual, institutional, and sociocultural place.