There are little windows in the university teaching cycle – one after marking/exam boards but before everyone flees the country and another after their return and before the hoards descend – and in these interstices the year’s academic conferences flourish.
Hence I spent Sunday to Tuesday at the end of June/early July at the first Radical PR conference in Stirling University, Scotland before taking the not-very-much sleeper to London so I could catch the last two days of the PARN/Intercape conference on professional ethics at Kingston University. Not used to this business-model of travel and meetings, I wimped out of the third leg, the ICE meeting in Lincoln. But it isn’t just guilt at broken promises that prompts me to write this – I had such a fascinating week of tremendous variety and promise, it’s worth sharing.
The Radical PR conference grew out of conversations between leading PR academics like Jacquie L’Etang of Stirling, David McKie at Waikoto, NZ, Jesper Falkheimer from Lund, Sweden, Magda Pieczka from QMUC, Edinburgh and Jordi Xifra from Girona University, Spain. They recognised that a group of dissident scholars has emerged in recent years who are challenging and expanding the rather narrow systems-based approach which dominates the debate on the PR field. The effects of critical theory, social theory, post modernism, chaos theory, critiques of propaganda and changes in methodology as well as research topics have been explored by a growing number of PR academics. While we often cite each other’s work and embrace at conferences, we had not become an Entity. Importantly, this was an international conference, with representatives from Australia, New Zealand, US, Norway, Sweden, Spain, Poland, Columbia amongst other countries. The text books in the field create a kind of ‘Planet US’ orthodoxy in which PR history starts with PT Barnum (as Rob Brown, from Salem University pointed out); but other countries have their own histories, as UK and other European scholars have shown.
So it was exciting to all be in one room, realising that there was enough critical mass to become Something. Needless to say we spent half the time discussing What exactly we might be and do and – most importantly – what we should call ourselves. Some unease at the 70s’ connotations of ‘radical’ led to more heat than light and we seem to have ended up where we started – but taking the pretty route to get there. A concrete result is the establishment of a strong website (www.radicalpr.org) which will form an important nexus for all our divergent ideas and activities, as well as creating possibilities for joint research projects and information exchange. A less concrete outcome is the desire from the participants not just to swap stuff but to make a difference, to contribute to change. The Panglossian view taken by many texts misses the complexity and contradiction of PR’s role in the world, not only of communication but also economics, ideas and social change.
As well as admiring our navels (sorry, practicing reflexivity) we heard a lively range of views, demonstrating precisely the range of issues with which PR scholars are engaged – such as Christine Daymon’s (Curtin University, Australia) plea for more reflexivity and humanity in PR research methodologies to explore how the human dimensions of PR production and consumption, Rob Brown’s (Salem, Mass) splendid revisionist ‘meta-theoretical’ overview of PR history, embracing complexity, dramaturgy, and the liminal possibilities between the sacred and the profane; Oyvind Ihlen’s (Oslo University, Norway) call for reclamation of rhetorical theory into PR discourse; and Paul Elmer’s (University of Central Lancashire, UK) personal and sociological exploration of the role of body image in constructing norms in PR work. These were the papers which most spoke to me and my interests, but other important contributions included papers on the language used to manage Mattel’s 2007 Product Recall crisis and the scapegoating of Chinese manufacturers; CSR policies in Columbia; the occupational culture of PR in Mexico; private/public PR debates in cocoa production in Ghana and Nigeria; a deconstruction of concepts of community as deployed by developers in Australia; an analysis of activist-corporate partnerships and an exploration of the language used by PR practitioners to describe their own experience at work.
The whole event was splendidly organised and catered (and chauffered) by Jacquie L’Etang and her husband Deek, who ensured lively social space as well as serious exchanges. There is a real change taking place in the discourse around pubic relations – and Radical PR is likely to play a major role in leading this change.
Spent a somewhat sleepless night on the train to London (mixture of excitement at the glamour of the idea (very 39 Steps), if not the reality, and waking every time my bed changed speed. Arriving in Euston in pyjamas is … odd.
To Be Continued…..
Filed under: Conference reports
