Narrating the Field of Communication: Charting an Unstable Territory

What is at stake in the naming and description of fields? This chapter argues that a re-conceptualisation of the question of the naming and description of fields is an important task for the critical sociology of media and communication. This chapter proposes the term ‘narrating the field’ as a focalising idea with which to foreground these issues. For the purposes of this chapter, it allows us to focus on the discursive dimensions of the problematic of field formation. By attending to this discursive practice, I want to suggest that the critical sociology of media and communication can productively bring different framings to it. Situating the narrating of the field as an object of analysis promotes awareness of the rhetorical dimensions of the way academic fields are discussed, which in turn have a direct bearing on relations of power and institutional capital. This chapter tackles the ‘problematic’ of field formation through a meta-critical lens, guided by the critical sociology of John Urry and sociological dramatism of Kenneth Burke. In the discussion that follows I focus on the work of three prominent narrators of the field: Hanno Hardt, John Durham Peters and Silvio Waisbord.