August 10, 2004
Interim Report to the Ford Foundation
Initiative on Communications, Culture, and Policy
Institute of Communications Research
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
April 1, 2003—July 31, 2004

Paula Treichler
Amy Aidman



Abstract

The Institute of Communications Research at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign developed its Initiative on Communications, Culture, and Policy to provide a forum for sharing insights into policy formation within an interdisciplinary academic framework. The study grant has supported collaborative in-depth exploration, research, and reflection on the field of policy studies and its relation to communication and culture. At the heart of the grant period's activities has been a briefing series at the University of Illinois that brought together experts, academics, and professionals from a variety of fields at our campus and elsewhere. Through presentations, readings, demonstrations, and discussions, we moved toward a view of media policy studies that can best be described as critical media policy. We gained knowledge about how policy is made and awareness of potential connections between scholarly research and the practical world of policy formation and practice. The grant has generated or strengthened a range of ongoing activities directed toward critical media policy across the campus and reinforced our vision of a critical media policy center with established connections to media scholars at other U.S. universities, international media scholars and practitioners, and media policy makers and activists in a range of institutions, agencies, and communities.

Statement of the Problem

Never before have media so pervasively defined the terms by which we understand the world. Our knowledge and comprehension of other countries and cultures, and of ourselves, are filtered through newspapers, radio, films, television, music, advertising, and the Internet. Media are a rich source of information, but they do not simply provide it: rather, they structure our ways of seeing, knowing and believing. To be responsible and effective citizens, knowledgeable consumers, and adept critical thinkers in the world today, we must understand modern media and the systems, institutions, and policies that produce and govern them. Through a complex network of interchanges, both producers and consumers share in the construction and consequences of the media.

Several problems flow from this reality. (1) The centrality of media to social, cultural, and political life in a democracy is not fully appreciated by consumers, policy-makers in general, media practitioners, or even scholars in the field of communication itself. (2) At the same time, media and communications policy, which establishes the rules under which media will be produced and consumed, remains an arcane, complicated, and highly technical field that repels all but the most determined inquiries. (3) Moreover, despite the growing recognition that modern human actors are connected and divided by ethnicity, nation, region, gender, race, language, and aesthetics, questions of culture are generally excluded from the public policy agenda.

The Institute of Communications Research, a leading doctoral program in Communications that is strong in both cultural and policy arenas of communications, is uniquely equipped to address these three problems: (1) to explore the role and understanding of media in a range of public policy areas; (2) to seek ways of illuminating the nature and importance of media and communication policy; and (3) to explore the current status of communication and media culture in policy studies. A fourth problem is that vast gaps exist between the scholarly world, the world of actual policy creation and implementation, and the world of citizens and consumers of media and communication. Thus we asked how to make our program not only an interdisciplinary focal point for research and analysis on media and media policy but also a broad teaching program designed to better promote students and citizens who are knowledgeable, literate, and critical about media.


Project Activities

In our grant proposal, we identified several areas of activity through which we would address these problems. The backbone of our study of public policy this year was a lively and highly successful series of policy briefing sessions on Communications, Culture, and Policy presented by more than 25 scholars, policy-makers, policy practitioners, and media activists to a core group of faculty, graduate students, and others. The primary goal of this collaborative, interdisciplinary umbrella group was to study and assess policy studies research, curricula, and initiatives on campus and around the country. Through overviews, theoretical position papers, histories, case studies, website demonstrations, scholarly readings, and policy documents, our core group of approximately 30 participants (representing a wide range of disciplines and policy interests) gained critical understanding of policy issues and debates. [See Appendix 1 and 2, descriptions of the briefing sessions and audience summary]

&bull We first invited a number of faculty and graduate students in the Institute and across campus to participate as core members of an interdisciplinary policy study group.
&bull We then educated ourselves about the state of public policy through a series of briefing sessions in which experts addressed a series of questions in their policy area: how has policy evolved, what are the major policy elements, who makes policy, who understands it, how does it draw on scholarly research, how is it implemented, what are its problems.
&bull In each case, readings and other materials were made available.
&bull We supplemented these briefings with several theoretical overview sessions to provide a large abstract picture of the ideas and ideologies on which policy—and specifically communication and media policy—rests.
&bull We rounded out this policy education with presentations of scholarly research on policy and of policy case studies in which knowledgeable scholars and practitioners described their work in greater detail, whether research, policy development, or policy implementation and intervention.

A second area of activity was to establish connections to ongoing policy-related projects on campus and in the community. Related to this was an interest in exploring policy development and implementation on the campus itself. In both cases, we decided to focus on building policy partnerships and projects in four areas of faculty and campus strength:

&bull Globalization and telecommunications policy
&bull Cultural studies and cultural policy
&bull Science, medicine and technology
&bull Media literacy and media analysis

Table 1 summarizes activities, outcomes, and documentation in these areas.

Finally, we identified several ways to consolidate and disseminate our findings and insights, and put them to use. Among other things, we worked toward producing:

&bull Publication(s) and conference presentations
&bull a white paper and/or related reports
&bull a redesigned website
&bull an annotated bibliography and other materials for research and teaching
&bull an undergraduate course unit on media policy
&bull a graduate seminar on policy formation and intervention


Self-Study, Reflection, and Restructuring

During this past year the College of Communications and all of its units, including the Institute of Communications Research, have engaged in extensive self-examination and reflection. The Report by the Task Force on the Future of the College of Communications emphasized the Institute's strengths in communications policy, global media, political economy, screen studies, feminist and ethnic media studies, and health communication.

As we go about the formal process of strengthening commitments made in the process of self-examination during the next year, we will certainly take advantage of the knowledge and insights gained about public policy and about innovative models for teaching and reflecting on policy formation in the real world. We will expand and transform our media studies curriculum and major into a highly visible world-class program in critical media studies. We will also rethink and radically expand the commitment of our doctoral program to fostering progressive approaches to communication and media policy and to linking, in several specific domains, teaching and research activities to public engagement. By extending the period of the grant, we can better ensure that the findings and insights of this year's intensive self-study will be more fully integrated into the newly revitalized mission of the Institute and the College of Communication as well as contribute centrally to innovative curriculum and program development in media and communication policy on this campus and beyond. We will also more fully and creatively incorporate the project's findings and insights into our newly designed website (to be launched officially in early fall).

Deliverables

&bull a white paper documenting the design, activities, and learning outcomes of the planning grant period that will be published on the Initiative's website and disseminated in the Institute's Occasional Papers series;
&bull a final report documenting the initiative's activities to the Ford Foundation;
&bull a curricular package that will include an undergraduate course component on media policy and a detailed syllabus for a graduate seminar in communications, culture, and policy;
&bull a prospectus for a day-long symposium or summit on media policy;
&bull a set of papers collected from speakers on policy at the International Crossroads in Cultural Studies conference (Summer 2004);
&bull redesign of Institute website that highlights activities of Ford grant, policy resources and links, projects and initiatives in the U.S. and abroad;
&bull An annotated bibliography on communication, culture, and policy that includes videos, websites, and other resources;
&bull Documentation of activities generated by this seed grant, including those related to our four areas of concentration (See Table 1):

Globalization and telecommunications policy
Cultural studies and cultural policy
Science, medicine and technology
Media literacy and media analysis.

The final report and documentation materials are still in preparatory stages. As these are completed they will be uploaded to the new ICR web site. Ford will receive a final report in January 2005.

Project Outcomes/Impacts:

The Institute of Communications Research at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign developed its Initiative on Communications, Culture, and Policy to provide a forum for sharing insights into policy formation within an interdisciplinary academic framework. The study grant from the Ford Foundation supported collaborative in-depth exploration, research, and reflection on the field of policy studies and its relation to communication and culture. At the heart of the grant period's activities was a series of briefing sessions at the University of Illinois that brought together experts, academics, and professionals from a variety of fields at our campus and elsewhere. Through presentations, readings, demonstrations, and discussions, we moved toward a view of media policy studies that can best be described as critical media policy. We gained knowledge about how policy is made and awareness of potential connections between scholarly research and the practical world of policy formation and practice. The grant has generated or strengthened a range of ongoing activities directed toward critical media policy across the campus and reinforced our vision of a critical media policy center with established connections to media scholars at other U.S. universities, to international media scholars and practitioners, and to media policy makers and activists in a range of institutions, agencies, and communities.

1. Academic-Policy-Public Engagements. Our policy briefing sessions confirmed the assumption guiding our original proposal: that vast gaps exist between academic research (however critically relevant to policy decisions it may be), the acknowledged "policy establishment" (think tanks etc), the actual making of public policy (in Congress, for example), and the understandings of the public itself–the "consumers" of policy debates and "recipients" of policy decisions. We investigated a number of models through which this problem is being addressed—for example, the Carnegie Foundation's annual policy retreat at the Aspen Institute.

2. Curriculum. As we emphasized in our grant proposal, the Institute was founded to study communication from an interdisciplinary perspective and to foster the centrality of open media and inclusive communication to a democratic society. Thus we also wished to identify the specific ways in which a uniquely innovative, interdisciplinary doctoral training program like the Institute might contribute in positive and progressive ways toward bridging the serious gaps in the public policy process. In our conversations with these policy experts, therefore, we explicitly explored potential models for integrating knowledge and values about communication and culture into the domain of policy, for training young scholars to engage with and intervene in "real life" policy arenas, and for approaching complex policy problems in fresh ways. Our findings will inform our development of syllabi.

3. Resources. The briefing sessions provided not only a foundation of books, chapters, journal
articles, and other resources including relevant web links but also ideas for real life case studies through which to teach different ways of translating between scholarship and policy formation, between understanding policy and policy intervention, and between consuming mediated communication and understanding its rules. This is work that will continue through the fall and will be reported to Ford. [See Table 1, Appendix 3, and Proposed Work Outline below]

4. External Funding. From our perspective, links with policy makers and practitioners (links
that once characterized the Institute, founded by Wilbur Schramm in 1947) are essential to make these ongoing policy conversations both significant and successful. The historical component of our self-study determined that our connections to outside agencies, along with our competition for external grants, were phased out in the 1970's. It may be recalled that external funding was often a source of controversy during the Civil Rights and anti-war movements of the 1960s and 1970s. When in the mid-1970s a large collaborative grant of ICR faculty member Charles Osgood was found to be partially funded by the U.S. Department of Defense (without Osgood's knowledge), the brief media scandal that erupted—ironic given Osgood's strong anti-war politics—was enough to prompt a re-evaluation of external funding. This coincided with James Carey's term as Dean of the College of Communication; the Institute's move away from external grants was partly a reflection of Carey's general wariness of agency-driven research, partly a reflection of the ICR's growing focus on the humanities and on long-term qualitative research projects for which little funding was available.
This grant from the Ford Foundation marks a reversal in this position. The Institute, the field, and funding opportunities in general are all very different now than they were even a couple of decades ago. Accordingly, we will now systematically tap sources of external funding for research and program projects, encouraged by securing this grant and by other subsequent sources of support. External funding, internal funding, and proposal development include the following (and see Table 1):

&bull a grant from the National Science Foundation
&bull the establishment of the Media Policy Fund
&bull collaboration with WILL-Radio on Media Matters
&bull support from Interim Chancellor Herman for media policy activities
&bull inclusion in a Title VI grant for Global Studies from the Department of Education and designation on the grant as a "Global Studies Center of Excellence"
&bull fellowship support for doctoral dissertations from FLAS (Global Studies, Latin American Studies), Japan Women's Education Foundation, Social Sciences Research Council, National Science Foundation, Fulbright Foundation, Wenner-Gren Foundation
&bull Proposals developed on intellectual property, propaganda studies, and health and medical journalism for the MacArthur Foundation, the Knight Foundation, and others

5. Diversity and Governance (representation, transparency, and accountability). Issues of
diversity are central to this project, specifically its aim to incorporate the large area of cultural identity and cultural diversity into policy discussions. Although several of our presentations addressed diversity explicitly, the broad field of policy appears to be dominated by white male academics and policy figures and their traditional concerns, ideologies, and methodologies. To open space for other voices and approaches requires continuous vigilance and intervention. On governance, see the next section.

Project's learning/self assessment agenda

Unquestionably, this formal exposure to public policy issues was a revelation for most of our participants. Unquestionably, too, this would not have happened without the Ford grant. This project provided an opportunity to learn about and discuss policy formation, research, implementation, and intervention. As our ongoing discussions and concluding assessment session made clear, we have forged a stronger commitment to broad engagement with public issues, to understanding policy's impact in everyday life, and to translating scholarship into forums accessible to policy-makers and the public. Moreover, as a leader in the field of communication studies, we will be able to influence others beyond our program, in part by employing models we learned about through this project to create significant opportunities for ongoing exchange between academics and policy makers.

While the Ford grant enabled us to accomplish much of what we envisioned, our work was overtaken by an administrative and educational self-study of the College of Communication and its constituent units (including the Institute) mandated by the higher administration of the campus. The review process dovetailed in several ways with the work we wished to do on the grant. The process of benchmarking our program against other programs, for example, provided us with several useful models for incorporating policy into communications programs. In addition, the review brought about a shared College-wide commitment to the study of mediated communication and media policy.

By extending the period of the grant, we can better ensure that the findings and insights of this year's intensive self-study will be more fully integrated into the newly revitalized mission of the Institute and the College of Communication as well as contribute centrally to innovative curriculum and program development in media and communication policy on this campus and beyond. Over the coming academic year, the Institute as a whole will expand and transform the media studies curriculum and major into a highly visible world-class program in critical media studies. We will also expand the commitment of our doctoral program to fostering progressive approaches to communication and media policy and to linking, in several specific domains, teaching and research activities to public engagement.