When Communication Became a Discipline argues that speech and journalism professors embraced the concept of communication between 1964 and 1982. They changed the names of their scholarly societies and journals and revised their academic curricula. Five “strands” of scholarship became and remain central to this transformation. Communication is not a traditional academic discipline, but its scholars convinced their colleagues to understand and embrace it. When Communication Became a Discipline presents an argument with historical evidence that illustrates scholarly creativity at its finest.

Communication studies is a fragmented field. As a result of its roots in various disciplinary traditions, it is built on fluid intellectual boundaries with no theoretical or analytical center. Should we worry about this state of dispersion or be concerned that the discipline does not meet the basic conditions that define an academic field of inquiry? Silvio Waisbord argues that communication studies is a post-discipline and that it is impossible to transcend fragmentation and specialization through a single project of intellectual unity. What brings communication studies together is an institutional architecture of academic units, professional associations, and journals, rather than a shared commitment to a common body of knowledge, questions, and debates. This should not, Waisbord argues, be a matter of concern. Communication studies is better served by recognizing dispersion, embracing pluralism, fostering cross-cutting lines of inquiry, and tackling real-world problems, rather than hoping to meet conditions which would qualify it as a discipline. Communication: A Post-Discipline is important reading for scholars and advanced students of communication studies, as well as anyone interested in the state of this fascinating and vital academic field.

Highlights the most important topics, issues, questions, and debates affecting the field of communication in the 21st Century.

In The Human Image in Helmuth Plessner, Pierre Bourdieu, and Psychocentric Culture, Isaac E. Catt offers a unique criticism of naturalistic reductions of humans to animals, to neuro substrates and to DNA. Catt explores a new interpretation of Plessner and Bourdieu, revealing the combinatory logic of semiotic phenomenology in both and their common problematic of communication. Through an emergent synthesis of philosophical anthropology and communicology, this book provides a basis for criticism of the failed mechanistic medical model in psychiatry, a fresh argument for reconceptualizing psychiatry as a human science, and for construction of a new ecological image of communicative being. Throughout the book, alternative attempts to transcend dualisms such as cybernetics, anti-anthropocentrism, and biosemiotics are revealed to risk reification of the very objects of their analysis. Scholars of communication, semiotics, philosophy, psychiatry, cultural studies, mental distress, and psychology will find this book of particular interest.

A brilliant work from the most influential philosopher since Sartre. In this indispensable work, a brilliant thinker suggests that such vaunted reforms as the abolition of torture and the emergence of the modern penitentiary have merely shifted the focus of punishment from the prisoner's body to his soul.

A provocative and eye-opening study of the essential role the US military and the Central Intelligence Agency played in the advancement of communication studies during the Cold War era, now with a new introduction by Robert W. McChesney and a new preface by the author Since the mid-twentieth century, the great advances in our knowledge about the most effective methods of mass communication and persuasion have been visible in a wide range of professional fields, including journalism, marketing, public relations, interrogation, and public opinion studies. However, the birth of the modern science of mass communication had surprising and somewhat troubling midwives: the military and covert intelligence arms of the US government. In this fascinating study, author Christopher Simpson uses long-classified documents from the Pentagon, the CIA, and other national security agencies to demonstrate how this seemingly benign social science grew directly out of secret government-funded research into psychological warfare. It reveals that many of the most respected pioneers in the field of communication science were knowingly complicit in America’s Cold War efforts, regardless of their personal politics or individual moralities, and that their findings on mass communication were eventually employed for the purposes of propaganda, subversion, intimidation, and counterinsurgency. An important, thought-provoking work, Science of Coercion shines a blazing light into a hitherto remote and shadowy corner of Cold War history.