State of the discipline communication studies in South Africa

This article is an abridged version of a longer report commissioned in 1999 by the National Research Foundation (NRF) on the State of the Discipline: Communication Studies. The study reports on the challenges facing the discipline during the post-apartheid, post-disciplinary era. The report deals with communication in general, but focuses on journalism and mass communication teaching. The findings examine how practitioners teaching the discipline responded, especially with regard to issues of megadisciplinarity. The article offers a series of recommendations aimed at both opening up the discipline organizationally, and creating more focus in terms of how practitioners can improve their engagement with the subject matter in the southern African context.