Towards an Institutional and Intellectual History of British Communication Studies (Top Paper in the Communication History Interest Group).

This paper describes the early stages of a project whose central aim is to plot the development of British Communication Studies and examine the various intellectual ideas and influences which have shaped its history. The term 'communication' is used to demarcate the whole area of study, in that it at least marks the boundaries of the accepted consensus as to what the area actually consists of at any one time. Within that area, however, the term has been subject to what Mattelart calls 'semantic scattering' (trans. Emanuel, The Invention of Communication, 1996, p. xiii) and the history of its usages involves reconstructing the attempts made to privilege particular meanings. The project also aims to engage with the idea of writing 'communication' history in a reflexive sense. This is an increasingly important area of the field, and as Nerone indicates, it is an area which reflects the academic diversity of 'communication':Looked at from an Archimedean perspective, communication history displays galloping theoretical incoherence. It is as interdisciplinary and eclectic as any neighbourhood of scholarship anywhere. None of its formations we've looked to have any real promise for establishing coherence. ('The Future of Communication History', Critical Studies in Media Communication 23, no.3, 2006, p. 262.)The project therefore will also offer itself as a case study in how an intellectual activity develops sufficient critical mass to be awarded the status of a branch of knowledge, so codified that it is recognised as sufficiently distinct and prestigious to allow the awarding of degrees. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]