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The 57th Annual Conference of the International Communication Association (ICA, http://www.icahdq.org), there RCA and NARCA attended as ICA-affiliate organizations, took place in San Francisco, California, the USA, on 24-28 of May 2007, with over 2000 participants. The agenda of the conference managed to be placed only in the brochure of 256 pages! The conference urged the participants to discuss key-topics of communication and view a wide range of important questions within the theme of the conference “Creating Communication: Content, Control and Critique”.
The conference included preconference workshops, plenary and panel sessions, interactive paper sessions with over 160 individual poster presentations, reports and annual awards presentations. There were the following Division/Interest groups: Information systems, Interpersonal communication, Mass communication, Organizational communication, Intercultural communication, Political communication, International and Development Communication, Instructional and Developmental Communication, Health Communication, Philosophy of Communication, Communication and Technology, Communication Law and Policy, Popular Communication, Public Relations, Language and Social Interaction, Visual Communication, Journalism Studies, Intergroup Communication and some others. A foyer of Hilton hotel hosted an informal sitting room for communication of post-graduates and new-comers of the conference. Two-days sections preconference workshops might be its most interesting form. They took practically the whole day, unlike plenary and panel sessions, lasting 1 hour and 15 minutes with 15-minute breaks between them. This year, according to the agreement between RCA and ICA, a section Public Relations in Eastern Europe, Russia, and CIS: Six Years into the New Millennium was organized, headed by professor Katerina Tsetsura (University of Oklahoma, the USA).
Sonia Livingstone, professor from Great Britain, Department of Media and Communications of London School of Economics and Political Science, became a new president of ICA. With her coming ICA is going to continue international direction in its activity. New Executive Committee of ICA discussed trends of further collaboration for making the next agreement between RCA and ICA (September 2007). We will continue to receive journals of ICA, and have an access to information on ICA website, that has been done by professor S.V. Klyagin (RSHU, Moscow), also we will continue business meetings and organizing a panel sessions of RCA – NA RCA members in the framework of annual ICA conferences.
There was an exhibition of famous publishers of literature on communication, among which Blackwell Publishing, publishing journals of ICA (Journal of Communication, Communication Theory, Human Communication Research, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, and a new journal Communication Culture and Critique). Their novelty is 12-volume encyclopaedia on communication (the editor is W. Donsbach, Dresden University of Technologies). Publishing house Routledge Taylor & Francis presented books and journals of NCA, regional and other journals on communication. Besides, there were presented such publishing houses as Erlbaum Associates, Hampton Press, Oxford U Press, and also Sage Publication. Many ICA presidents published their books and text-books in this popular publishing house, which publishes such journals as Communicative Studies, European Journal of Communication, Journal of Business Communication, Written Communication, Discourse and Communication, Visual Communication and many others. Publishing house Marquette Books (www.MarquetteBooks.com) also presented their publications. RCA has drawn an agreement about publishing our new journal The Russian Journal of Communication with their director, professor David Demers.
The next ICA conferences will be held on 22-26 of May, 2008 in Montreal, Canada, and 21-25 of May 2009 in Chicago, Illinois, the USA.
On the site of RCA you can find some photos, taken by a participant of the conference Irina Rozina.
CONFERENCES
RCA invites partner and other interested institutions to joint preparation and holding conferences on a highly specialized communicative orientation. This year organization of such conference is realized together with the Culturology and Russian Language Department (Associate Professor Elena Yahontova), the Saint-Petersburg Institute of International Economic Links, Economics and Law, which played host to Communication–2006 conference in St. Petersburg.
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