Converging in Parallel
[Format | Schedule | Participants | Location | About]

Canadian communication policy has shifted. New media are no longer new; convergence has come and gone and even come again; policymakers are chipping away at facet after facet of the emerging networked mediascape. But what role should Canadian communication researchers play in this policy environment? How can our work inform, influence, and shift the agendas of policymakers in Canadian jurisdictions-indeed, should it at all? And just whose work is at issue, as a new generation of communications researchers, activists, and decision-makers begins to take its place in Canadian institutions?

Converging in Parallel: Linking Communications Research and Policy in Emerging Canadian Scholarship is a day-and-a-half conversation among emerging Canadian communications policy researchers and stakeholders with an interest in these questions. It takes place as an informal conference-workshop on Thursday, November 9, 2006, and Friday, November 10.

TParticipants are persons in the early stages of their communication policy careers: graduate students, new faculty members, and scholars only beginning to explore communications policy as a research domain; government policy, regulatory, and agency staff, industry stakeholders, and non-governmental and civil society actors with limited professional experience in the communications policy sector.

Workshop participants have provided short answers to a question related to their stated research interests. Those answers are posted on this Web site. At the workshop, each participant will take just 5 to 8 minutes to defend the position they have taken. This is designed to leave substantial room for conversation and dialogue. Panels will stress comments, questions, and discussions and will be organized with an eye to mixing academic speakers with respondents speaking from a policymaking, industry, or civil society stakeholder role.

The workshops are supplemented by two public events, to which all are welcome. The first is a public panel bringing together experienced members of the policy community to talk about the role of research and the academy in Canadian communication policy. The second is a public keynote from an American scholar active in communication policy research in the U.S. context, who will talk about what insights can be gleaned from our countries' different experiences on this matter.