GETTING TO PHILCOM, CHANGING YOUR CLOTHES

摘要

I arrived in the United States in the mid-1990s to a job at New York University. I went looking for cultural studies and links to the left, and found them via Social Text. Then I was asked to become director of graduate studies in my department (of cinema studies). Despite its name, the department had been home to some notable dissertations about radio and TV, and so in my new role I felt obliged to go looking again at domains of knowledge across the academy and the country that might relate to the interests of our dozens of graduate students-and myself. By chance, Tomas Lopez-Pumarejo invited me onto an International Communication Association (ICA) panel, which turned out to be within the Philosophy of Communication Division (PHILCOM). I asked around New York about these bodies. The few people in cultural and media studies who had heard of the ICA (or the study of communications as such) said they thought PHILCOM was where the leftists hung out.