The chapter, which describes diaspora communities as publics of global public relations, is part of a book published by the International Communication Association.
Vanessa Bravo, assistant professor in the School of Communications at Elon University, is one of the contributors to the just published book Communication and Community (New York: Hampton Press).
Communication and Community is the fifth book in a series based on issues and themes from the International Communication Association (ICA) annual conferences. This is not the conference proceeding, but an edited special volume where the editor selected 13 papers (out of about 400 presented in the conference in 2012) that strongly reflected the central theme of the ICA conference.
In the 2012’s ICA conference, which had an acceptance rate of 48 percent and an attendance of 2,162 faculty members, graduate students and researchers, the central theme was the interrelation between communication and community, hence the name of the book.
Communication and Community was edited by Dr. Patricia Moy, the Christy Cressey Professor of Communication at the Department of Communication of the University of Washington, in Seattle. She is also the editor of Public Opinion Quarterly and the editor-in-chief of Oxford Bibliographies: Communication.
Vanessa Bravo’s chapter is titled Studying Diaspora Relations in the Field of Global Public Relations.
It analyzes how diaspora communities, for the most part, do not fit the categorizations of publics developed so far by scholars in the field of public relations, given that diasporas (transnational communities formed by immigrants in a host country) are greatly impacted by contextual factors in the home country, in the host country, and within the diaspora community itself, and for those reasons cannot be placed in just one category of those typologies at a given time.
The chapter also uses two case studies to develop a typology of contextual variables to consider when an organization wants to build and develop relationships with a diaspora group.
The book Communication and Community will be available during the ICA’s 2013 conference in London, England, from June 17 to June 21, but is also available now for purchase through the ICA’s website at www.icahdq.org
Bravo joined the School of Communications in the Fall of 2011. She obtained her Ph.D. from the University of Florida and has published peer-reviewed papers in the journals Public Relations Review and Global Media Journal.