ICA Pre-Conference: Disrupting and Expanding Engaged Communication Scholarship

Thursday, June 12, 2025, 9 AM - 4 PM

You are invited to participate in an ICA pre-conference on “Disrupting and Expanding Engaged Communication Scholarship” on Thursday, June 12 from 9:00 am - 4:00 pm. Registration information will be available soon. Preconference participants should submit a short statement about their research to http://www.aspenengaged.org/submit no later than March 3, 2025. See below for more information about the preconference and submission guidelines.

Pre-Conference: Disrupting and Expanding Engaged Communication Scholarship

This pre-conference invites participation from engaged scholars across our discipline to share resources, discuss best practices, and workshop projects-in-progress. The first Aspen Conference on Engaged Communication was held in the summer 2002 in Aspen, Colorado. The motivation for that meeting was to bring together scholars who were committed to using organizational communication research to address societal issues and solve practical problems. At the time, it was a niche conference, but the convictions that united attendees then and since reach beyond the boundaries of organizational communication. Engaged scholarship is less of a niche today with compelling and meaningful engaged scholarship happening across the entire field. Throughout our discipline, scholars collaborate with partners beyond the boundaries of the university to apply, mobilize, and extend communication theory and research to address problems in our communities. This pre-conference seeks to bring together the global community of engaged scholars to learn from one another and bolster our international network. 

Submission Guidelines

Engaged scholarship is interested in working with and improving the social worlds in which we live. Change can involve disrupting the status quo and consolidating resources and practices to create more desirable outcomes. This pre-conference aims to explore how our research practices can disrupt current conditions and reconfigure them for prosocial outcomes. 

Pre-conference participants are asked to submit short statements (500-1000 words) describing a current project and considering how the engaged work they are doing relates to the conference theme of disruption and consolidation. We welcome projects at all stages of development, as we hope to center ongoing challenges related to engaged work, including but not limited to: 

• entering the field 

• relationship building 

• creating participative spaces 

• disseminating engaged products 

• measuring impacts 

In previous conferences, the most interesting conversations about engaged scholarship have centered on problems that people have encountered or are encountering in their work. In the spirit of engagement, the pre-conference is designed to be highly participatory and interactive. It will be organized around a series of breakout and plenary sessions that focus on participant projects and allow for the exchange of resources, high-density feedback sessions on ongoing projects, and networking across the global community of engaged scholars. The pre-conference will be held offsite at a location to be announced.

 Keynote Speakers & Case

Integrating Engaged Scholarship into Curricular and Social Practice Activities: Exemplars from Chinese Universities

Researchers within and beyond the communication discipline increasingly recognize the importance of engaged scholarship and the need to bridge the gap between theory and practice – a critical knowledge production problem (e.g., Barge & Shockley-Zalabak, 2008; Van de Ven, 2007). In the past two decades, the range of engaged communication works has been greatly extended (e.g., peacebuilding, Connaughton et al., 2017; sustainable development challenges, Easter et al., 2021). However, possibilities of engaged scholarship in non-western sociocultural contexts such as China are less frequently discussed. The idea of engaged scholarship is not a new one to Chinese scholars though. In fact, heavy emphases have been placed on bridging the research-practice gap, so much so that the following slogan − “Research papers should be written on the soil of our land” (meaning that all scholarly initiatives should be conducted with the goal of solving real problems in the society) – has become a popular saying among Chinese academics. More importantly, Chinese higher education’s focus on social practice activities – a mechanism that integrates service learning, community-based learning, internships, academic training and capstone projects – offers not only unique opportunities for engaged scholarship in Chinese contexts but also potential implications for the international community. In this presentation, we discuss possibilities of systematically integrating engaged scholarship into curricular and social practice activities using exemplars from several Chinese universities (e.g., projects on poverty in rural China, development in ethnic minority communities). Specifically, we examine how faculty and students collaborate with local community members, government agencies, business professionals, and media platforms to advocate for and promote positive social change, the process of which, if properly documented, analyzed, and theorized, may contribute meaningfully to both research and practice. In so doing, we seek to respond to Dempsey and Barge’s (2014, p. 682) call for “the articulation of robust models and practices of engaged scholarship that enable academics and their partners to jointly pursue ideas and topics that are of mutual interest and benefit.” At the end of the presentation, we discuss how “learning outcomes,” “engaged scholarship,” and “impact” could be (re-)considered interconnectedly in different cultural contexts (Boyer, 1990, 2019; Sandman, 2008).

References

Barge, K. J., & Shockley-Zalabak, P. (2008). Engaged scholarship and the creation of useful organizational knowledge. Journal of Applied Communication Research, 36(3), 251–265. https://doi.org/10.1080/00909880802172277

Boyer, E. L. (1990). Scholarship reconsidered: Priorities of the professoriate. Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.

Boyer, E. L. (2019). The scholarship of engagement. In L. R. Sandmann & D. O. Jones (Eds.), Building the field of higher education engagement: Foundational ideas and future directions (pp. 15-25). Routledge.

Connaughton, S. L., Linabary, J. R., Krishna, A., Kuang, K., Anaele, A., Vibber, K. S., Yakova, L., & Jones, C. (2017). Explicating the relationally attentive approach to conducting engaged communication scholarship. Journal of Applied Communication Research, 45(5), 517-536. https://doi.org/10.1080/00909882.2017.1382707

Dempsey, S. E., & Barge, J. K. (2014). Engaged scholarship and democracy. In L. Putnam & D. Mumby (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of organizational communication: Advances in theory, research, and methods (pp. 665-688). Sage.

Easter, S., Ceulemans, K., & Kelly, D. (2021). Bridging research‐practice tensions: Exploring day‐to‐day engaged scholarship investigating sustainable development challenges. European Management Review, 18(2), 9-23.https://doi.org/10.1111/emre.12443

Sandmann, L. R. (2008). Conceptualization of the scholarship of engagement in higher education: A strategic review, 1996–2006. Journal of Higher Education Outreach and Engagement, 12(1), 91-104. https://ojs01.galib.uga.edu/jheoe/article/view/520/520

Van de Ven, A. H. (2007). Engaged scholarship: A guide for organizational and social research. Oxford University Press.

 The Aspen Engaged Communication Scholarship Conference is made possible in part thanks to the generous support of the following organizations.