Narrating the Field of Communication:Charting the Tides

We can speak of academic fields going through highs and lows, ebbing and flowing, signifying a recurrent pattern of coming and going or decline and regrowth. Building previous work on AANZCA’s history and analysis of the field of media and communication, in this paper I take up a dialogue with some of the core themes of Silvio Waisbord’s important book Communication: A Post-Discipline (2019). I do so not through direct debate, but indirectly through the question of what are we doing when we narrate the development of a scholarly field? In the case of media and communication, there is an expansive literature about the field, which Waisbord captures and reshapes, but alongside this is a problematic of field-formation that has its own discursive, rhetorical and metaphorical dimensions. This paper proposes the term ‘narrating the field’ as a focalizing idea with which to foreground these issues, allowing us to focus on the discursive dimensions of the problematic of field formation. This discursive practice ‘fixes’ fields in particular ways, establishing authority over a particular idea of the field. By attending to this discursive practice, I want to argue for greater awareness of the rhetorical dimensions of the way academic fields are discussed, which in turn have a direct bearing on relations of power and institutional capital. <br/>