Communication: Views from the Helm for the 21st Century

Judith S. Trent has assembled an outstanding selection of essays reflecting the diversity that the field of communication studies has become at the end of the twentieth century. These essays are the outgrowth of convention presentations by scores of leading researchers-scholars who participated in the 1996 San Diego convention of the National Communication Association.This assemblage of essays (59 in all) are divided into seventeen chapters comprising an introductory chapter from the bridge, as it were, of Trent's ship of researchers followed by sixteen discrete chapters which chart the waters of communication studies today. There is little or no looking back to the origins of this professional association of educators which was founded in 1914 as the National Association of Academic Teachers of Public Speaking. Rather, this text views where the academic discipline of communication studies is today as a way of charting the directions the field may take into the twenty-first century."Communication: Views from the Helm for the Twenty-First Century" admirably showcases the most recent trends and directions in communication studies including health and relational communication; political, group, and organizational communication; media, performance, gender, and cultural studies; as well as intercultural, rhetorical, and political communication.From this reviewer's perspective - which may be a deck or two below the bridge - the view might have been enhanced by a broader inclusivity. For example, the gender chapter needed a more diverse view with a stronger focus on gay, lesbian, and transgender areas of inquiry and the area of environmental communication received no consideraton whatsoever. Also marginalized were such areas as debate and forensics, ethics and religion, and freedom of speech and law. While granting that some of these latter areas such as debate and forensics have their own textual history and other areas may be small and specialized, some researchers in these areas of communication studies may feel left back ot the dock. In sum, however, communication studies desperately needed a solid text with a comprehensive view of the discipline to provide to senior level college students as well as to graduate students new to the field. This is such a text. It has been and will continue to be used in my teaching of our introductory course of graduate studies at California State Univesity, Los Angeles. And I most highly recommend it to other instructors who are teaching similar courses.