Communication Studies Without Frontiers? Translation and Cosmopolitanism Across Academic Cultures

Silvio Waisbord
2016 International Journal of Communication   unpublished
This article discusses the translatability of communication scholarship in the context of globalized academia and research traditions. The notion of translation is useful to reflect upon the globalization of academic cultures in communication studies. The globalization of academic cultures confronts matters that translation studies have long recognized: the clash between dogmatism and difference, language slips and gaps, and the possibility of (mis)understandings. Although globalization invites
more » ... scholars to broaden perspectives, it does not necessarily promote the rapprochement of epistemic communities in communication studies or the values of universal, de-Westernized, and cosmopolitan scholarship. We may hope communication research includes a plurality of global voices, but we still lack a clear path to overcome different understandings about quality standards, conceptual languages, and epistemological premises. Between Fragmentation and Globalization The field of communication studies is pulled in different directions-with constant fragmentation of research interests and increased connectivity among scholars around the world. Fragmentation intensifies centrifugal tendencies that drive inward-looking scholarship and deepen divides in communication research. Globalization, instead, sets conditions for bringing closer traditions of communication scholarship and expanding intellectual horizons beyond geographical and academic divisions. Located at the crossroads of the humanities and the social sciences, the field developed as the result of the layering of disciplinary traditions and lines of inquiry concerned with issues broadly identified as "communication" in the United States 1 I am grateful to Paolo Sigismondi and the three reviewers for their careful reading of previous drafts and insightful comments and suggestions.
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