Figures , Formations , and Flows

Whatever else it is, communication research is gendered work. This has been true since its inception as an academic field, and in its commercial, civic, and educational wings as well. The specific gendering of its work has varied across time, region, and institution. But across all contexts, gender and affiliated relations of difference have been constitutive forces in the (re)production of the field. This chapter supports those claims by developing and demonstrating a conceptual framework for investigating the gendered history and contemporary enactment of communication studies. In principle, this framework is applicable to other academic fields and forms of knowledge work as well. It arises out of theories of gendered work and organization, which we advance toward a new way to understand the evolution of the field. Specifically, we argue that the complex array of people, ideas, institutions, roles, relations, efforts, and affects that converge(d) into a global assemblage of communication and media studies is a gathering animated and propelled by gender relations. The chapter proceeds in four sections. We begin by taking note of how gender has already found purchase in the historiography of communication studies, noting both advances and limitations (see also Thiele, this volume). We then offer a compact summary of gendered work and organization theory, observing specific capacities that promise to illuminate the formation of the field. Next, we develop those capacities into an overarching framework of figures, formations, and flows. This model provides a post-humanist heuristic for tracing the gendered organization of the field— a potential we show in the final section by revisiting a key juncture in the history of communication study—media research in the U.S. from the mid-1930s through the mid-1950s. There we focus on Columbia University’s Bureau of Applied Social Research, offering a new way to understand an iconic institutional location and providing cues for further such reformulations of the history of the field.