Academic traditions in communication: Expanding the field and redrawing the boundaries. ECREA 2018 special panel report

Abstract

The main conference topic for the ECREA conference in Lugano addressed the many ways in which centers, cores and peripheries, and also mainstreams and alternatives are dealt with in academic media and communication research. The premise of this panel was to apply this general outline of the conference for academic introspection and to recount the many shifting centers and peripheries of communication research over time and discuss the redrawing of the contours of our expanding field. Less than two decades back, the question what the main subjects of media and communication inquiry were would have highlighted the centrality of (already slowly declining) mass media as the main pillars alongside journalism and public communication. Since then, the very notion of mediated communication has become less clear and has expanded to nearly all areas of the human experience and encompasses a variety of technologies, tools, platforms and intermediaries for communication.