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.
