Introduction

Abstract

This special issue draws on selected scholarship presented at the 2018 conference of the Australian and New Zealand Communication Association, held in July in Auckland, New Zealand. The conference theme, ‘Multiple realities: Fluidity, hybridity, and stability in global communication’ was deliberately provocative. We sought to elicit a range of responses to questions concerning how communication scholarship is responding to the kinds of developments Silvio Waisbord identifies in his forthcoming book, Communication: A Post-Discipline (Waisbord, 2019). Waisbord writes that communication is fragmenting and hyper-specialising; research clusters are rising; the digital turn affects every aspect of practice and scholarship; globalisation is catalysing ever increasing academic and student mobility, and fundamentally changing collaboration and publishing, with transdisciplinarity now being superseded by post-disciplinarity. Amidst the change and the challenges to traditional envisioning of disciplines and media, we also wished to ask: what remains unchanged? Where is the stability – or is the only constant, permanent evolution? What does fluidity and hybridity mean for our scholarship, publishing targets, and pedagogy? The collection of articles within this issue engages in different ways with the threat and promise of this dynamic and generative moment. Papers from two keynote speakers, Professors Terry Flew and Paaige Turner, lead this special issue. In the first article, ‘Digital communication, the crisis of trust, and the post-global’, Flew offers a wideranging account of the causes and outcomes of the growing suspicion of globalisation, social institutions, and the news media. ‘Trust matters,’ argues Flew, and offers compelling reasons for its current parlous state. Suspicion flourishes as political discourse fragments: Brexit symbolises a revolt of the hyper-located ‘somewheres’ against educated, mobile, elite ‘anywheres’; globally, multilateral trade agreements are rejected and internationalisation initiatives are reversed; ‘fake news’ has acted as powerful aversion therapy for publics that now have nothing but contempt for all experts; and the platformisation of the internet has challenged belief in its non-partisanship. The article does however end on a hopeful note, suggesting that as realisation of the interestedness of all digital platforms grows, popular trust in news may be rising again. Recognising the challenges of increasingly distrustful nationalist impulses, Turner trains a particular focus on internationalisation: higher education’s engagement with globalisation (the movement of people, ideas, services, and things across borders). Turner sets internationalisation in the context of a changing geopolitical system that is in many ways inimical to globalisation’s aspirational principles and which has led, within higher education, to sometimes outright suspicion and hostility towards transnational agreements. She also sets internationalisation within a disciplinary setting, arguing we have no choice but to internationalise the communication discipline, encouraging consideration of the ethical consequences of our choices, and urging us COMMUNICATION RESEARCH AND PRACTICE 2019, VOL. 5, NO. 1, 1–3 https://doi.org/10.1080/22041451.2019.1561393