The 2007 Paris conference at Unesco will be a special one: IAMCR will be celebrating its 50th birthday!
So the usual structure of the off-year conference will not be totally respected. The afternoon of the last day will be reserved for celebratory events - part assessment of the past, part strategies and scenarios for the future.
This article is from the November 2006 IAMCR newsletter. IAMCR
members can use their username and password to log into the site and download the newsletter as a PDF.
But the conference itself should be an occasion for all of us to assess
where our field of research stands. Hence the choice of the theme:
"Media, communication, information: celebrating 50 years of theories
and practices". We hope that many scholars will step up to the
challenge of such an important (self)evaluation process that is also an
exercise in style.
The French team working on the local organization is composed of
members from the Université Paris 2-Panthéon Assas, where the Institut
Français de Presse was instrumental in creating IAMCR, and Université
Paris 3-Sorbonne Nouvelle, where the continuous French interest in the
association has produced two vicepresidents. A collective of members
representing all the universities of Ile de France with communications
departments will compose the local scientific committee. The French
Communications Research Association, SFSIC, will lend its scientific
support. Translation in French, Spanish and English will be offered for
the plenaries and main events.
Paris as a world city should be up to the occasion, in style. For those
of you who haven't been there in the last few years, Paris Plage is
quite a communications occasion. You can imagine you are Walter
Benjamin and
gaze at others while being gazed at, along the river banks of the Seine
especially designed to this effect. The newlyopened Quai Branly Museum
will take you back to a primitive and pristine time when communication
and
information tools were shivering with creativity. The Cité des sciences at La Villette will transport you into
the future, with nano-technologies and their promises. While Unesco itself encapsulates a lot of the themes
and values IAMCR stands for in terms of culture, education and research.
We all should feel at home there, in a community of like-minded spirits. Come and join the celebration, in
your own style.
Divina Frau-Meigs
Josiane Jouet
Michael Palmer
Nathalie Sonnac
for the Paris 2007 Organizing Committee