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Communication scholarship has not enjoyed the same kind of theoretical cohesion or ontological security as some disciplines. The field's intellectual «roving eye» and resistance to establishing a single core body of knowledge has inspired serial rounds of soul-searching and existential doubt among communication scholars, on one hand, and celebration and intellectual adventurism, on the other. The theme of the 2013 ICA annual conference thus raised an interesting question: For a field that is perpetually in flux and «decentered», what exactly is, or should be, challenged? How, and by whom?
The chapters in this collection, chosen from among the top papers presented in London, suggest that the challenges themselves are constantly being reinvented, broken down and reorganized. The communication discipline undergoes continuous change rather than following an orderly, stepwise path toward the neat, complete accumulation of knowledge. The chapters challenge familiar approaches, notions or assumptions in communication research and scholarship and reflect on the field's multifaceted and increasingly open character in an era of shifting social relations, formations and technologies.

Challenging Communication Research

Contents: François Heinderyckx: Foreword - Leah A. Lievrouw: Editor's Introduction: Challenge and Change in Communication Research - Anita Varma: The Ironic Incongruity of Canonical Common Sense in Critical Communication: The Case of Stuart Hall's «Encoding/Decoding» Model - Sean Phelan: Critiquing «Neoliberalism»: Three Interrogations and a Defense - David Karpf/Daniel Kreiss/Rasmus Kleis Nielsen: A New Era of Field Research in Political Communication? - Alex Balch/Ekaterina Balabanova/Ruxandra Trandafoiu: Normative Europe and the Roma Issue in the Romanian and Bulgarian Press - Udo Göttlich/Martin Rolf Herbers: Would Jürgen Habermas Enjoy The Daily Show? Entertainment Media and the Normative Presuppositions of the Political Public Sphere - Katharina Wolf: Beyond the Corporate Lens: The Use of Humor in Activist Communication - Adrienne Shaw: Representation Matters(?): When, How and If Representation Matters to Marginalized Game Audiences - Aram Sinnreich/Mark Latonero: Uncommon Knowledge: Testing Persistent Beliefs about Configurable Culture and Society - Katharine Sarikakis/Joan Ramon Rodriguez-Amat: iAuthor: The Fluid State of Creativity Rights and the Vanishing Author - Nora A. Draper: The New Reputation Custodians: Examining the Industrialization of Visibility in the Reputation Society - David J. Phillips/Brian J. Harding/Danielle Leighton: Possibilities for Queering Surveillance Infrastructure: The Case of the Quantified Self - Annie Rudd: The Unobserved Observer: Humphrey Spender's Hidden Camera and the Politics of Visibility in Interwar Britain - Gina Neff/Brittany Fiore-Silfvast/Carrie Sturts Dossick: Materiality: Challenges and Opportunities for Communication Theory.