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</o:shapelayout></xml><![endif]--></head><body lang=EN-US link="#0563C1" vlink="#954F72"><div class=WordSection1><p class=MsoNormal>Greetings Colleagues,<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>What a wonderful and rich set of materials to read through, mull over, and add to our current discussions. Thanks to David Boromisza-Habashi for his organizing acumen, Tamar Katriel and Wendy Leeds-Hurwitz for their detailed comments, to Lydia Reinig, Saskia Witteborn, Gerry Philipsen, Trudy Milburn, David, Kristine Munoz, and Kris Acheson-Clair for their posts and all of you lurking out there for being involved! Like you, I have enjoyed and benefitted from this discussion.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>I am struck by Kris’s and Trudy’s comments, dancing at the borders of disciplines. While there, misunderstandings can easily develop, political agendas erupt, territories defended, but also untilled intellectual soil can be found. Hymes with Gumperz built EC explicitly at the borders of anthropology and linguistics, implicitly at rhetoric and communication. But it can be difficult ground to hold! I have always felt tied to multiple disciplines since I was an undergraduate with degrees in Anthropology, Sociology, and Communication. I have also felt EC is a wonderful place to be in order to “speak” to the same. Some years ago (1993), in a review in <i>American Anthropologist</i>, I cast EC as a “discipline with interdisciplinary relevance” and still feel that way (v. 93, p. 737). <o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>In an ICA handbook of largely EC studies to be published later this summer, chapters range from scholars in – using the department names of contributors’ affiliations - Applied Linguistics, Arabic Studies, Chinese Linguistics, Communication, Cultural Discourse Studies, Education, English, Folklore, International English, Journalism, Linguistics, Media & Communication Studies, Medical Humanities, Political Science, and Translation Studies. I am not sure what exactly to infer from the list. It indicates EC inflected scholars are housed in many different academic departments with each seeing some value in EC, perhaps a very good sign for us as we move forward. Given Tamar’s, Wendy’s, and Kristine’s comments concerning materiality, interdisciplinarity, technology/f2f, it is nice to point-out that the assembled chapters discuss various media (including cell phones, social media, radio, television) as sites as well as various means of F2F communication. <o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>Like Kris, I would be interested in seeing recent works we have produced perhaps as part of interdisciplinary teams and, if published, where so. That would give another indication of where some of us are headed. A team of scholars in Communication, Engineering, and Linguistics studying car-talk has recently published works in communication journals and also in the top journal in Ergonomic theory (<i>Theoretical Issues in Ergonomic Science</i>). There are surely others with similar examples and we would benefit from hearing about them.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>Like Kris and Trudy, I have also heard others from non-Communication disciplines (Anthropology and Linguistics are examples I would give) who think of EC within a time-warped-frame of “the mid-70s.” We have developed a bit since then (!) and can help others understand that, especially if we help each other know what has indeed been done. David’s annual bibliography on this site is a potent aid in identifying this sort of development. A project-based list might be helpful as well. Others?<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>The exchange so far has also invited me to think further about several concepts while focusing reflection upon actual “moments” of communication practice. Chief among those concepts is the set, “code, coding, encoding, precoding, decoding” and what that set means. The words are used as we know differently in different literatures, media studies, sociology, etc. Since Stuart Hall’s early work (1973), the encoding-decoding model has been popular in media studies, including its critique and revision (Wren-Lewis, 1983; Lewis, 1991). Hall’s 4-part, production, circulation, use, reproduction model of the process is well-known. I have resisted it – in terms of media studies a resistant reading – as such a model, as similarly in production and reception studies, as it becomes easily housed in a version of a sender-receiver model, not a very sophisticated view of communication itself. I am mindful of Dell Hymes’ explicit point in formulating the SPEAKING model (the 1980 version) where he discusses how “Participant” is a better concept, treating actors as participants in events, rather than starting with individual actions of a sender-hearer or sending-receiving, or of individuals as composers and interpreters of messages. Some literatures still struggle conceptually, I fear, in moving fundamental units of analysis from individuals to social processes or forms. This is a bit reminiscent of James Carey’s discussion of 1979 as well in urging conceptions of communication from acts of transmission to ritual events. In other words, our moves conceptually beyond the sender-receiver model to a constitutive view of communication moments are needed. Unlike the received view of encoding/decoding, a focus on “moments of communication practice” or performance-in-interaction help do this, I think. The interview of Robert Craig by David is one highly instructive read with this issue in view (Boromisza-Habashi, 2013).<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>Gerry Philipsen’s profoundly heuristic “speech codes theory” has helped and will continue to help us move further along various fruitful paths. Codes and coding practices provide a theoretical and experiential position from which complexities and perplexities (echoing David’s comments about coherence/incoherence) in communication practices can be explored. Indeed, as the late British sociologist of education, a scholar partly inspiring <o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>Gerry’s codes theory, Basil Bernstein pointed out, “codes are culturally determined positioning devices” (1991, p. 371). We have much to offer from this view of codes about the consequentiality of communication, about coding communication. Lydia’s field report reminds us, as does Bernstein, about class and locale, rural and urban moments and movements of communication practice, and what each brings into view as a form of social life. Inevitably active in such moments, we know, are meanings concerning identity, relating, feeling, as Lydia mentions. Coding involves momentary meaning-making, bids at cohering and developing that which is before us, where and who we are. Our views can complement and extend much of media theory in this regard.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>The concept of coding, in other ways, has been defined as “converting information from one communication system or form or code into another.” This idea invites us to ask how codes are active in moving from one system/form to another. This could help us address at least some issues of temporality, of movement, of transitioning from one place to another, rural to urban and back again, technical to/from political, etc. An in-progress dissertation at UMass by Nimrod Shavit is examining how computer coders manipulate codes, among other things, to program better versions of civic, democratic life. This sort of work demonstrates a transitional quality of codes and may prove quite valuable in connecting materiality of technology and embodied action to socio-political processes as well as cultural variation.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>This connects nicely with Saskia’s attentiveness to spatiality, place, locale. Some readers of this board may be aware of Tema Milstein’s (2011) works concerning the ways communication mediates relations between peoples and places, including how the expressive moments or performance of pointing and naming connect people to nature. Others, Eric Morgan and Trudy Milburn in particular have worked similarly in developing EC studies of culturally distinctive means of dwelling in places with trees, water, and nature’s resources (e.g., Gilberts and Milburn, 2011; Morgan, 2003, 2007).<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>Gerry’s view of “cultural communication” has given us concepts to track movement from codes to conversation, within and between codes, and communities since its early formulations: “Cultural communication is the process by which a code is realized and negotiated in the communal conversation” (Philipsen, 1990, p. 249). Not only the realization of a code, he writes, but its conversational uses, not only structure but process, not only meanings shared but perplexities unshared. Coding, precoding, encoding, decoding, writ large, spiritually in the wind and materially in the technology, all are in view in our EC community, in its various moments. There is much here I wish I could include, but I have gone on too long already… I feel lucky and blessed to be part of this! <o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>References<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>Bernstein, Basil. (1981). Codes, modalities, and the process of cultural reproduction: A model. Language in Society, 10, 327-363.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>Boromisza-Habashi, David. (2013). Which way is forward in communication theorizing: An interview with Robert T. Craig. <i>Communication Theory</i>, 23, 417-432.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>Gilbertz, Susan and Trudy Milburn. (2011). <i>Citizen Discourse on Contaminated Water, Superfund Cleanups, and Landscape Restoration: (Re)making Milltown, Montana</i>. Cambria Press.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>Hall, Stuart. (1973). Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse. Birmingham, England: Centre for Cultural Studies, University of Birmingham, 507–17.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>Lewis, Justin. (1991). <i>The ideological octopus</i>. Routledge.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>Milstein, T. (2011). Nature identification: The power of pointing and naming. <i>Environmental Communication: A Journal of Nature and Culture</i>, 5(1), 3-24.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>Milstein, T., Anguiano, C., Sandoval, J., Chen, Y., and Dickinson, E. (2011). Communicating a “new” environmental vernacular: A sense of relations-in-place. <i>Communication Monographs</i>, 78 (4), 486-510.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>Morgan, E. (2003). Discourses of water: A framework for the study of environmental communication. <i>Applied Environmental Education and Communication</i>, 2(3), 153-159.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>Morgan, E. (2007). Regional communication and sense of place surrounding the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. In B. C. Taylor, W. J. Kinsella, S. P. Depoe & M.S. Metzler (Eds.), <i>Nuclear legacies:</i> <i>Communication, controversy, and the U.S. nuclear weapons complex</i>. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>Philipsen, Gerry. (1987). The prospect for cultural communication. In L. Kincaid (ed.), <u>Communication Theory: Eastern and Western perspectives</u> (pp. 245-254). New York: Academic Press.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>Philipsen, Gerry. (1989). Speech and the Communal Function in Four Cultures. <u>International and Intercultural Communication Annual</u>, <u>13</u>, 79-92.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>Philipsen, Gerry. (1992). <u>Speaking Culturally</u>. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>Philipsen, G. (1997). A theory of speech codes. In G. Philipsen and T. Albrecht (Eds.), <u>Developing communication theories</u> (pp. 119-156). Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>Philipsen, G. (2002). Cultural communication. In W. Gudykunst and B. Mody (eds.), <u>Handbook </u> <u>of International and Intercultural Communication</u> (pp. 51-67). Sage.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>Wren-Lewis, Justin. (1983). The encoding/decoding model: criticisms and redevelopments for research on decoding, <i>Media, Culture and Society</i>, vol. 5, 1983, pp. 179-197.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>Professor of Communication<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>Department of Communication<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>University of Massachusetts Amherst<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>Amherst, MA 01003 USA<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p></div></body></html>