Goals and Vision Statement for Candidacy for Second Vice President of the
National Communication Association
In the final song of the operetta Candide, the title character advises the ever
optimistic Dr. Pangloss to “Let dreamers dream what worlds they will/Those
Edens can’t be found.” But nevertheless he advises us all to “make our garden
grow.” This expresses my view of NCA’s past and future: there is much we have
done well but much that remains to be done. In our first century, we have
established sturdy scholarly and pedagogical practices and standards while
negotiating a continuous evolution in our professional identities.
Last year’s Opening Plenary Session prompted me to formulate my goals for the
future NCA as “utopian moves toward greater inclusion and accessibility.” Let me
begin with the concept of “inclusion.” It often focuses on making spaces for
historically excluded groups of people, whether such exclusion occurs on the basis
of identity, professional roles, perspectives or methodologies. There is a genuine
sense in which the discipline of Communication—and hence NCA—is already
more inclusive than most academic organizations. But our very inclusiveness has
also led occasionally to divisive quarrels, such as those between humanists and
social scientist, between theorists and practitioners, and between Communication
and its allied fields.
And yet, we are still optimally positioned to be the leaders in interdisciplinarity
through our shared recognition of ways in which we all inhabit intersectional
positions in our word-making and our world-making. We need to put our
philosophies of openness and inclusion into practical, material work and not
assume that the mere existence of the various caucuses, for example, is sufficient
by itself to accomplish this goal. The recent work of the Intercaucus Council and
the 2014 Cross-Caucus reception, as well as the Opening Plenary session in 2014,
provide us with excellent examples of how to put different groups of people into
meaningful work (and play!) with each other. We have been doing such work for
many years; now we need to make such work more visible and programmatic.
Similarly, without undoing the important traditional divisions, caucuses, and
sections, we must find ways to cross boundaries defined by professional and
career-based identities. Graduate students increasingly find that they need to
consider alternatives to the traditional academic path into the tenured
professoriate. Accordingly, we need to put traditional scholars in contexts with
those working both outside the academy and within less traditionally represented
academic contexts, such as community colleges, elementary and secondary
schools—places that have only recently been imagined as valuable and satisfying
places for our graduate students.. We need more panels populated by teachers
from all educational contexts and in panels and programs that seek to coordinate
and collaborate in work across the life-span of students and citizens.
The 2014 Opening Session raised for discussion issues that can serve as an
example of work around inclusion we need to be doing, in addition to the work we
are already doing, such as addressing microagresssions and other negative speech
acts that have emerged in some of the social and global events, in particular those
of the last few years. Teachers, scholars, and practitioners must work in concert
with each other to examine the roots of such communication problems and to
collaborate with each other and with our local and larger communities on
solutions. Performers need to work with skilled social scientists in our midst to
find ways to mitigate these hostile speech acts. Rhetorical scholars need to
collaborate with health scholars/practitioners to create messages that will do the
work of persuasion and will offer ways to imagine different discourses. We are
already doing valuable work in that direction, but we need to do more and make it
more visible to audiences beyond !
ourselves.
These complexities of “inclusion” as a goal have parallels in the goal of
“accessibility.” To most of us, the word denotes making spaces accessible in
physical and sensory dimensions, but, of course “access” is a more abstract and
broader concept than that. Spaces are emblematic of both existing and aspirational
philosophies of access, but they are not the only markers. Programming, costs,
location, and attitudes towards difference all contribute to issues of whether NCA
members—and those we might want as members, but who do not find NCA an
accessible “place”—find our meetings, services, and programs “accessible” in this
broader sense. Access to knowledge, to opportunity, to places of making, doing,
and changing is equally important. We need to continue to explore and dismantle
barriers to access, whether they be literal and material, or ideological, political,
social, and cultural.
To return to the opening quotation from Candide, we might engage in what Jill
Dolan, Jose Esteban Munoz, and others call “utopian performances”: How might
we envision the “Edens” of inclusiveness and accessibility within NCA? Even if
they “can’t be found,” I would aspire, if elected, to “make [those] gardens grow.”
I believe that my academic and administrative background has well prepared me
not only to pursue these particular goals but, more generally, to lead an
organization as large and varied as NCA. As my CV notes, I have served as chair
of my department for five years at Ithaca College and then subsequently as
coordinator of an interdisciplinary program in cultural studies for six additional
years. I have been involved in two major program reviews in my department, a
particularly useful experience for helping NCA address its Strategic Plan
initiative.
I have also served on the all-college tenure and promotion committee for eight
years (twice as chair), broadening my knowledge of the challenges younger
faculty are facing today. I served on the college’s faculty development committee,
working with programs for mid- and late-career faculty. And finally, I have edited
two national journals, one sponsored by NCA, the other for an international
interdisciplinary organization, and have co-authored or co-edited three books. All
of these experiences, I believe, strengthen my candidacy for the position of Second
Vice President of NCA, and will help me balance the daily demands of the role
with visionary aspirations.
Bruce Henderson
Ithaca College