ICR Initiatives

The Institute of Communications Research received a grant from the Ford Foundation's Division of Knowledge, Creativity & Freedom to study communication, culture, and policy--more specifically, to organize an interdisciplinary conversation on campus over a 15-month period about these three areas and how they intersect (or fail to intersect). A goal of the project has been to identify policy-related faculty, units, and initiatives on campus, hold a series of introductory "briefings" on different policy arenas, and produce a campuswide policy resource directory and an annotated reading list to post on the project website.

List of Speakers, 2003-2004

The Illinois Initiative, founded by Bob McChesney and Dan Schiller, is designed to build a knowledge base about global information and communication policy and contribute to forming a worldwide community of scholars and other experts on these topics. One component is a program to host international media policy scholars, journalists, and activists.

The Media Matters radio show features host Bob McChesney in conversation with a variety of guests. The show is broadcast on WILL, 580 AM, on Sundays from 1 to 2 pm Central Time. Taped shows are available on the Media Matters website. Listeners may call with comments or questions.

Bob McChesney is a research professor in the Institute of Communications Research and the Graduate School of Information and Library Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

The ICR is the host of the Karin and Folke Dovring Scholars Program in the Analysis of International Propaganda and Persuasion in War and Peace, a $500,000 bequest to the Institute from Dr. Karin Dovring to support research and teaching in the analysis of propaganda. In addition, Professor Bruce Williams proposes to organize a campus conference on persuasion and propaganda that would bring together academics from both UIUC and around the world who are working on the relationship between democratic politics and the new media environment. The conference will revisit a series of influential seminars funded by the Rockefeller Foundation in the 1930s that wrestled with the central international crises of that time—the rise of fascism, fears about the effectiveness and antidemocratic implications of World War I propaganda and concern about the indifference of many Americans to events overseas. This will be a collaborative effort with the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania.

Ethika.org is an independent, non-profit, international organization created by faculty and doctoral students from the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA. Ethika.org provides an informative and stimulating interdisciplinary forum for persons wishing to share their knowledge and insights with a broad, diversified audience.

This site publishes Aesthethika, an online, bilingual journal, twice a year. The journal seeks to articulate a variety of knowledges, methodologies and perspectives to understand and interrogate the complex interplay of culture, subjectivity, discourses and politics, and their expression in all forms of human life.

The Champaign-Urbana Community Wireless Network (CWN), funded by the Soros Foundation's Open Society Institute, is developing wireless technology to be used around the globe with a focus on developing nations. Urbana-Champaign is the testing ground for this technology.

Sascha Meinrath, a PhD. student in the Institute of Communications Research, was a co-author of the grant along with David Young, a programmer from OJC Technologies in Urbana. Meinrath, Young, and others have been developing cutting edge wireless technology in Urbana for over three years.

The Community Wireless Network is building a high-speed communications network that promises to support publishing and city-wide Internet radio broadcast by citizens, a community-owned local telephone service, and bandwidth sharing.

Interfacings is a new online publication created by the graduate students of the Institute of Communications Research at the University of Illinois.

This open, peer reviewed periodical is devoted to contemporary interdisciplinary approaches to media practices. Original manuscripts that examine the frontiers of the field of media studies from a qualitative, critical perspective are welcomed.

The Institute cooperates with the University of Illinois College of Medicine in the Medical Scholar's Program, an ambitious and innovative program of study that enables highly qualified students to enroll in the College of Medicine at Urbana-Champaign and simultaneously pursue a second degree, usually a PhD, in an academic unit on the UIUC campus. Distinguished from other joint MD-PhD programs by the depth and breadth of participating PhD fields, the MSP offers, to our knowledge, the only formal MD/PhD combination in the US, perhaps anywhere. Recent graduates are in residency programs at the University of Chicago and the University of New Mexico. Currently, the ICR has three MD/PhD students.

The ICR serves as administrative home for the campus' interdisciplinary concentration in Cultural Studies and Interpretive Research directed by Norman Denzin.

ICR cooperates with the Gender and Women's Studies Programin offering a graduate minor.

The Crossroads in International Cultural Studies Conference, organized by Norman Denzin, was held at UIUC June 25-28, 2004. The conference attracted scholars from all over the world while fostering contacts and the exchange of ideas and providing an open forum for lively, critical debate about contemporary society. The conference was supported by many units across campus, including the College of Communications, Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities, Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory, Center for Democracy in a Multiracial Society, Department of Kinesiology, and Latin American Studies and Caribbean Studies.