‘Race matters’ in applied communication research: past, present, and future

Social issues have worked to stimulate communication scholarship since the inception of the discipline (Orbe & Allen, 2008). From the start, the focus of the Journal of Applied Communication Research (JACR) has been to feature communication research that examines social issues in situ (Hickson, 1973). Over the years, JACR has championed scholarship that – through productive theoretical frameworks – provides practical guidelines to specific communication-based problems (Eadie, 1990). This 2022 special issue follows this tradition. Specifically, it is designed to present an academic space that highlights applied communication research that centralizes race – and through intersectionality, other salient aspects of identity – in meaningfully insightful ways. As such, it features engaged research that centralizes race as both a theoretical anchor and powerful point of praxis. ‘Race matters,’ as an ideological concept, was first introduced by West (1993). The insightful duality of the phrase emphasizes the saliency of race (race as noun, matters as verb) as well as the breadth of topical diversity related to race (race as adjective, matters as plural noun). Given this, ‘race matters’ serves as an appropriate marker for a special issue designed to engage the social construction of race, especially as the saliency and far-reaching effects of racism continue to manifest across the U.S. and global communities. The communication discipline has not escaped the effects of white supremacy and racism. While critiques from scholars of color have been documented over the years (e.g. Daniel, 1995), recent discourse confronting the field of communication for its lack of representation of scholars and scholarship from people of color has reached new heights. It was prompted, in part, by an analysis that found that scholars of color continue to be severely underrepresented in publication rates, citation frequency, and editorial roles throughout the field of communication (Chakravartty et al., 2018). This study – highlighted through the hashtag #CommunicationSoWhite – sparked unprecedented conversations regarding issues of diversity, inclusion, equity, and access on multiple levels throughout the communication discipline. At the core of this discourse is a compelling argument that ‘publication and citation practices reproduce institutional racism’ (Chakravartty et al., p. 257), the result of which is knowledge production that reinforces whiteness as the norm, and consequently, severely limits our ability to fully understand the salient role that race plays in communication processes. Recent