The individual/collective dimension of the trajectory

In 1989 Enrique Sánchez Ruiz and myself published a text that we assumed to be the product of a shared search for ways to advance in the “constitution of a scientific community that promotes better attention to the innumerable social problems that are articulated with communication in Mexico” (^{Fuentes Navarro & Sanchez, 1989, p. 6}). That text originated circumstantially in an invitation to collaborate with a chapter written in English for a book on the practical problems of “field research”³ (^{Narula & Pearce, 1990}), which we decided also to disseminate in Spanish, “thinking specifically of Mexican and Latin American colleagues as interlocutors” (^{Fuentes Navarro & Sanchez, 1989, p. 6}).

Our basic purpose was to argue that “the nature, orientation and possibilities” of communication research and social science research in general, are determined by “structural factors ranging from the level of development of the social formation being analyzed to cultural and ideological factors” such as the “general scientific culture in society and the professional ideologies of the research community” (^{Fuentes Navarro & Sanchez, 1989, p. 7}). And to synthesize a kind of hypothesis about our national case, we elaborated a formula that turned out to have a surprising heuristic value: the triple marginality, “which means that communication research is marginal within the social sciences, the latter within scientific research in general, and the latter in turn among the priorities of national development” (^{Fuentes Navarro & Sanchez, 1989, p. 12}).⁴

Two years later, under another fortunate formula in terms of its heuristic value, the process of development of a sociocultural framework then barely sketched as the foundation of a meta-research project on communication in Mexico that has lasted for more than three decades, took shape in a book. Completed in 1989, La comunidad desapercibida (The Unnoticed Community, ^{Fuentes Navarro, 1991}), sought to “present a general overview of the process of constitution in Mexico of a field of study,⁵ specialized in the generation of knowledge on communication”, a purpose inserted in turn in a double context: on the one hand as “one more step” in the personal professional-academic project and, on the other, as a contribution to the Comparative Study of Social Communication Systems in Brazil and Mexico, promoted by INTERCOM⁶ and CONEICC,⁷ following an initiative by José Marques de Melo (^{Fuentes Navarro, 1991, p. 15}).

This “descriptive exploration” of an incipient scientific community with comparative purposes between Mexico and Brazil, corresponding to the “communication research subsystem”, was the first major product of the broad and extensive collaboration established and maintained to date with outstanding members of the Brazilian academic community, especially with Maria Immacolata Vassallo de Lopes, and at the same time as the fundamental stimulus for the formulation, as a doctoral thesis, of a project that recognized from the beginning “the collective character of the process of constitution of the field itself” and that tried, “in addition to providing elements of comparison with the Brazilian counterpart, to re-enter in a praxeological way in the process itself”⁸ (^{Fuentes Navarro, 1991, p. 18}). Even before discovering the relevance of the contributions of Bourdieu and Giddens for the theoretical-methodological foundation of the analysis models of the structuring of communication research as an academic field, the practical reflexivity of knowledge through communication was adopted as a fundamental principle for this “exercise of the sociological imagination” (^{Fuentes Navarro, 1998, p. 339}).

The core theoretical-methodological reference

The final reflection of the work submitted in 1996 to earn the doctoral degree in Social Sciences at the University of Guadalajara, which was published for the most part as a book a couple of years later (^{Fuentes Navarro, 1998}) alludes, in effect, to an “exercise of the sociological imagination”, for:

This work has attempted to “grasp history and biography and the relationship between the two within society” in a concrete study in which the “distinction between the personal concerns of the milieu and the public problems of the social structure” (^{Wright Mills, 1961, pp. 26-27}) was self-reflexively attempted to construct in order to structure the field of academic communication research in Mexico (p. 339).

^{Wright-Mills (1961)} had written that:

What we experience in various and specific milieux, I have noted, is often caused by structural changes. So, to understand the changes of many personal milieux we must look beyond them. And the number and variety of such structural changes increase as the institutions within which we live become more embracing and more intricately connected with one another. To be aware of the idea of social structure and to use it with sensibility is to be capable of tracing such linkages among a wide variety of milieux. To be able to do that is to possess the sociological imagination (p. 30).

That study focused only on a specific “milieu”, in which both the researcher and his colleagues “esteem values and realize that they are threatened”, that is, they experience a crisis, “either as a personal concern or as a public problem” (^{Wright Mills, 1961, p. 30}). An attempt was made, then, to formulate the problem from the concern and to look to understand them -problem and concern- articulately in reference to factors of the “social structure”. Due to the method employed to do so, the research process resulted in the construction of a model (Annex No. 1), a representation that looks to objectify the problem while still subjectifying the concerns. The model represents an explanation, whose ultimate justification cannot be other than to support, in practice, the solution to the crisis experienced and, in this sense, the fulfillment of the “most general” objective of the work exceeds the limits of what can be contained in a few pages, indicated as a conclusion (^{Fuentes Navarro, 1998, p. 340}).

The entire above-referred study, as well as the academic-professional trajectory from which it emerged at the time, and its sequels, was also formulated as “a bid for the production of meaning”, which also implies a double level of analysis: that of the social practices of communication, and the one of the social practices of study of those practices (^{Fuentes Navarro, 2003}). Both levels, that of communication and that of meta-communication (^{Wilmot, 1980}), or that of research and meta-research (^{Fuentes Navarro, 2019a}) are understood specifically situated in contexts where the agents produce the meaning.

In short, this work is (subjectively) based on the conviction that, in a situation of crisis -not only of “paradigms” and “infrastructures” such as the one that the social sciences and university institutions in Mexico are going through- but also of crisis of the very meaning of critical and rigorous intellectual endeavors, trying to answer the question about the socio-cultural determinations of the academic field⁹ itself implies an effort to recognize them as systematically and deeply as possible in order to seek how to reconfigure the practices that structure the field, and this effort makes sense as long as the contrary is not demonstrated (^{Fuentes Navarro, 1998, p. 12}).

More than two decades later, such formulation maintains its praxeological validity, which from the beginning has been defined in terms of a search for comprehensions and explanations, and simultaneously of practical interventions, which turn the researcher into a “methodological device”, since:

The unity of the research process is neither in the “theory” nor in the “technique” (not even in the articulation or intersection between the two): it is in the person of the researcher, which in turn is socially determined by the system of social relations (^{Ibáñez, 1985, p. 218}).

Following ^{Ibáñez (1985)}, if: “the researcher is the true research machine”, and if “the conditions of possibility of this research machine are socially determined”, it follows that there is a need for “a continuous epistemological vigilance” (p. 218) on the part of the academic community to which the researcher belongs, socially responsible for his work, mediated by such a community.

The “academic field” as a construct and empirical referent

The doctoral thesis work, carried out between 1992 and 1995, sustained the intention of explaining how it is that in the sociocultural environment of Mexico, “in global transition”, within a national system of higher education characterized by strong internal and external tensions, academic communication research emerged in the seventies in some universities as a project articulated by utopia, went through the “crisis” of the eighties, paradoxically laying the foundations of its institutionalization, and faced, in the nineties, the challenges of its consolidation as a professionalized and legitimized academic practice.

Hypothetically, this multidimensional, complex and contradictory process of development of the academic field of communication in Mexico has been determined, in its most general scale in the last twenty-five years,¹⁰ by the coincidence of intense and extensive processes of change, on the one hand, in the conditions of the national academic market and, on the other, in the epistemological and theoretical-methodological frameworks of the study of communication. Thus, economic and political factors have converged with intellectual and cultural factors in the conformation of the sociocultural “scenario” in which Mexican communication researchers have constituted themselves as responsible and relatively self-conscious agents of the academic practices that in turn have structured the field (^{Fuentes Navarro, 1998, p. 26}).

In one of the “exemplary” works whose reading guided the development of this project, Homo Academicus by ^{Bourdieu (1988)}, the fundamental challenge of reflexive sociology is admirably synthesized in one paragraph:

What scientific advantage can there be in trying to discover what belonging to the academic field implies, that place of permanent struggle for the truth of the social world and of the academic field itself, and the fact of occupying a certain position within it? (p. xiii).

The answer posed by Bourdieu is twofold: “in the first place it is an opportunity to consciously neutralize the probabilities of error that are inherent in a position”, a point of view. “But, above all, it reveals the social foundations of the propensity to theorize or intellectualize, inherent in the very position of the academic who feels free to depart from the game in order to conceptualize it...” (^{Bourdieu, 1988, p. xiii}).

Participant objectification, a methodological principle that for Bourdieu is:

Undoubtedly the most difficult exercise that exists, because it requires the rupture of the deepest and most unconscious adherences and adhesions [of the researcher]... all that which he least pretends to know in his relation with the object he seeks to know (^{Bourdieu, 1989, p. 51}).

It refers to a fundamental epistemological condition: reflexivity, an “obsession” of Bourdieu’s, defined by ^{Wacquant (1992)} as the “inclusion of a theory of intellectual practice as an integral component and necessary condition of a critical theory of society” (p. 36). That is, it refers to an inescapable praxeological dimension. Consequently, in constructing the object of research “it is not a matter of proposing grand empty theoretical constructs, but of approaching an empirical case with the intention of building a model that does not need to be clothed in a mathematical or formalized form to be rigorous”, of linking relevant data in such a way that they function as a program of research that poses systematic questions; “in short it is a matter of constructing a coherent system of relations, which must be tested as such” (^{Bourdieu, 1989, p. 32}).

Three decades after having adopted such premises to analyze the constitution of the academic field of communication in Mexico (^{Fuentes Navarro, 1991}, ¹⁹⁹⁸) through the construction of heuristic models (^{Abbott, 2004}; ^{Velasco, 2000}), it can be verified that the fundamental questions, those that meta-research makes it possible to attend more and more analytically and to respond in increasingly convincing ways, have been present in much of the history of “communication sciences”, especially in relation to its theoretical identity, thought-out in various languages (^{Craig, 1999}; ^{Martín-Barbero, 1987}; ^{Martín-Serrano, 2007}; ^{Miège, 1995}; ^{Moragas, 2011}; ^{Nordenstreng, 2007}; ^{Pasquali, 1978}; ^{Sodré, 2014}; ^{Verón, 1987}; ^{Vizer & Vidales, 2016}; ^{Waisbord, 2019}).

And, also, that the interest in the search for international and transnational constants in the institutionalization of the study of communication has led to a wide proliferation of meta-investigative approaches (^{Averbeck-Lietz, 2017}; ^{Eadie, 2022}; ^{Gehrke & Keith, 2015}; ^{Koivisto & Thomas, 2008}; ^{Miike & Yin, 2022}; ^{Park & Pooley, 2008}; ^{Simonson & Park, 2016}). These and other recent contributions to communication meta-research were systematically reviewed by ^{Corner (2019)}, who highlighted in particular the expansion of historical work on communication study to include international contexts and “the examination of how teaching programs and research activity have contributed to institutionalize the area as one with a discreet, though much debated, academic identity” (p. 1).

The three factors highlighted by Corner are the diverse contexts in which the teaching programs originated, the historical links of research with professional practices, and the impact of new media on the recent history of both teaching and research. Meta-research thus contributes, finally, to “make us more aware of the various, and sometimes precarious, ways of institutionalization by which the study of public communication has developed, breaking the oldest academic and professional frameworks while continuing to draw on them” (^{Corner, 2019, p. 9}). The last part of this assessment inevitably recalls the “persistence of the denied theory” that ^{Martín-Barbero (1982, p. 101}) denounced in Latin America many years ago.

Likewise, the diversity of objects of knowledge that have been grouped under the term “communication” and the diversity of institutional arrangements to organize their academic study in different countries and regions have inevitably become the focus of attention for the “History” sections of major international academic associations.¹¹ Although “until now, most of the histories have been national, with a predominant focus on North America and Western Europe” (^{Simonson & Peters, 2008, p. 764}), recently a perspective has been strengthened that “helps us to see how the organized study of communication has simultaneously reflected, refracted and promoted transnational geopolitics, institutional patterns of education and professionalization and ways of knowing and acting” decisive in collective life (Pooley & Park, 2013, pp. 85-86).

Along these lines, the search for adequate sociohistorical frameworks to ground a transnational investigation of the processes of constitution of the academic field of communication has gained strong momentum (^{Craig, 2015}; ^{Curran & Park, 2000}; ^{Löblich & Averbeck-Lietz, 2016}; ^{Löblich & Scheu, 2011}). And a similar search can be found in and on Latin America (^{Bolaño et al., 2015}; ^{Crovi & Cimadevilla, 2018}; ^{Crovi & Trejo, 2018}; ^{Enghel & Becerra, 2018}; ^{Fuentes, 1992}, ²⁰⁰⁶, ²⁰¹⁴; ^{González-Samé et al., 2017}; ^{León Duarte, 2006}, ²⁰⁰⁷; ^{Marques de Melo, 1992}, ¹⁹⁹⁸, ²⁰⁰⁷; ^{Orozco, 1997}).

Heuristic models of field structures and processes

Heuristics is, in Spanish, the “art of inventing”; it derives from the Greek heurisko, “to find out” (^{Moliner, 1992, pp. 11, 37}) and from there arises its technical meaning in scientific discourse, which ^{Greimas and Courtés (1983)} defined as follows:

A working hypothesis is heuristic if the discourse that develops it has the effect of producing and formulating a process of discovery... In a more general and vague way, a scientific attitude is sometimes qualified as “heuristic”: a structural approach, for example, which seeks first of all to grasp relationships, and thus obliges one to foresee the eventual positions of the terms of a category (terms whose manifestations are not evident at first sight) can, in this sense, be called heuristic (pp. 216-217).

In this way, the theoretical-methodological options chosen to guide the search for answers to the central questions of the research on the constitution of the academic field of communication in Mexico led to the formulation of two heuristic models. The first of them (“structural”) had the purpose of differentiating (and relating to each other) three modalities of academic practices: focused on the production, reproduction and implementation of knowledge on communication (Figure 1). The assumption of this model is that each of these modalities is subject to diverse determinations (both “internal” and “external”), and that they would have to be related to each other through a common nucleus of shared basic meaning, which would constitute what could be called “disciplinary matrix”, rather than “paradigm” (^{Kuhn, 1982}).

Source: ^{Fuentes Navarro (1998, p. 69)}.

Figure 1 Structures of the academic field of communication (First heuristic model) 

Knowledge production practices are encompassed under the term “research”, the institutionalization of which is divided into two aspects: “academic” and “applied”. Although the former (carried out in universities, subject to the rules of academic-scientific activity, and therefore public in its financing, objectives, procedures and results) is the one focused on in this work, the latter (generally carried out by specialized companies, subject to the laws of the service provision market and, therefore, private, confidential or even secret in its financing, objectives, procedures and results) cannot be ignored. In its two aspects, research practices are conducted as concretizations of logical, ideological, technical and ethical frameworks of the social sciences, to which they provide feedback.

Knowledge implementation practices are centered in the general field of the “profession” that operates social communication systems and are regulated by the market in which both institutions specialized in this function (“mass” media, advertising or news agencies, etc.) and individuals formally (university degree, college or professional association) or informally (recognized “experience”) qualified as competent in one of the multiple specialties of this branch of economic activity concur.¹² Professional practices in the cultural industries have been the primary referent of the academic field, especially in its reproductive modality of the instrumental knowledge that constitutes them.

The practices of reproduction of knowledge and of the agents that carry it operatively in the field of communication, considered as “professional training”, are those that mediate from the universities the conformation of the field in socio-cultural terms. To do this, academic practices articulate the scientific and professional levels, through institutional teaching and research programs. At this point, the traditional definition of the “three substantive functions” of the university institution (professional training or higher education, scientific and humanistic research, and service or university extension) and their integration are considered as determinants of the specific social insertion (function) of each institution.

The modes and degrees of articulation of the academic field (between “research”, “professional” and “training” practices, which in turn are structured in the scientific, professional and educational subfields), serve as parameters of external contrast of the consistent structuring of the academic field, by providing indications of its “adjustment” to the conditions of development of the social practices (and agencies) it takes as objects, and consequently, by granting recognition and legitimacy in varying degrees to the differentially institutionalized academic practices. But it is specifically in the modes and degrees of articulation between the scientific and educational subfields (and between the practices of research and professional training), where the parameters of the internal consistency of the structuring of the academic field are located, by means of a disciplinary matrix, which would consist not only of “generalizations, models and exemplars” as established by ^{Kuhn (1982, p. 321)}, but also and above all, in interpretative schemes, in a specific professional ideology, made up of systems of signification, valuation (moral and ethical rules) and power resources, which are the structural referent of the habitus and the agency of the subjects.

Based on this first heuristic (structural) model of the research object, the analytical emphasis on research practices (scientific subfield) was defined, but without “cutting them out” from the academic field to account for their role as a “structuring structure” in it. Consequently, nine structuring processes were distinguished in the second heuristic model, operating on three different contextual scales: an “individual” one (which includes the processes of constitution of the subjects; formation/shaping of the habitus; and professionalization). Another, “institutional” scale (specifying social institutionalization, cognitive institutionalization, and scientific specialization); and a “sociocultural” scale (in which the processes of self-reproduction of the field, social legitimization and “assimilation/accommodation” of practices are distinguished) (^{Fuentes Navarro, 1998, p. 73}). At the same time, the nine processes are assumed to occur in specific social (economic, political, cultural) contexts (Figure 2).

Source: ^{Fuentes Navarro (1998, p. 73)}.

Figure 2 Structuring processes of the academic field of communication (Second heuristic model) 

In this framework of “structuring”, the central hypothesis of the thesis postulated how the agents faced, through “utopian continuity”, “academic institutionalization” and “intellectual autonomy” as objects of their main strategies, the corresponding social determinations: “disciplinary inconsistency”, “dependent development” and “university crisis”, and through these dynamics constituted the “academic field” of communication in Mexico.¹³

The results of this analysis were organized for presentation in four chapters, whose order goes from the more “structural” or “objective” manifestations of the structuring of the academic field of communication in Mexico to the more “subjective” ones: respectively, teaching and research programs; academic associations and “disciplinary articulation”; academic publications and the “communicational configuration”; and finally, the “cognitive configuration” (^{Fuentes Navarro, 1998}).

Dissemination, appropriation and corroboration in the field of the field model

In February 2022, Google Scholar¹⁴ documented 195 citations to ^{Fuentes Navarro (1998)}, approximately 12% of the 2 344 total citations registered in the author’s “profile”, distributed in a relatively homogeneous way by year. If twenty-seven self-citations are extracted from the sum, the remaining 168 refer to more than one hundred authors, most identified as “communication researchers” in Mexico, twelve other Latin American countries or Spain, and a few as analysts of other academic fields, such as mathematics education or tourism. Up to this point, the “presence” of the proposal on the field in the field can be understood as “discrete and constant”, although not particularly influential.

Nevertheless, the key issues of the “field” have been taken up again, with or without reference to ^{Fuentes Navarro (1998)}, in a suitable number of books published in Mexico, which are worth reviewing,¹⁵ such as the one edited in ^{1988 by Sánchez Ruiz}, La investigación de la comunicación en México. Logros, retos y perspectivas (Communication research in Mexico. Achievements, challenges and perspectives), and the 1995 book coordinated by Galindo and Luna, El campo académico de la comunicación: hacia una reconstrucción reflexiva (The academic field of communication: towards a reflective reconstruction). Fuentes Navarro’s participation in both books, with chapters based on advances made before and after the doctoral thesis, raised some useful questions for discussion, but undoubtedly, he benefited more from the dialogue with the other participants, whose contributions were extensively incorporated in the thesis and its sequels.

Without the term “field” in the title, but with the objective of exposing “how much progress has been made in Mexico in the analysis and research of the different fields of communication”, ten years later, Lozano edited a volume published by CONEICC: La comunicación en México. Diagnóstico, balance y retos (Communication in Mexico. Diagnosis, balance and challenges) in which, among other “updated and critical diagnoses on the most varied topics” (^{Lozano, 2005, p. 17}), Fuentes Navarro analyzed the available bibliography on the conformation of the field of communication “and its conditions of development as an academic-social project in Mexico”, published in the decade 1995-2004. To organize this review, he used the models of the “three subfields” (Figure 1) and the “nine structuring processes” of the field (Figure 2). In conclusion:

… it can be said that, in Bourdieu’s terms, the academic field of communication in Mexico still has serious deficiencies in terms of the conquest of its relative autonomy, an inseparable key to its legitimacy, academic and social; that its gradual consolidation has as an inescapable condition the resolution in practice of disjunctions such as those characterized by some of its members; and finally, that in a context of accelerated changes in the external conditions of development, there is also much to reorient and reinterpret, self-reflexively, in terms of the internal constituents of the field (^{Fuentes Navarro, 2005, p. 46}).

Both in the Communication Research Yearbooks of CONEICC, published since 1994, and in the books annually edited by the Mexican Association of Communication Researchers (AMIC) since 2002, and of course in the journals and other editions of several Mexican universities, there have appeared multiple contributions on relevant aspects of the field’s problematic and analytical proposals that, explicitly or implicitly, argue about disjunctions, conditions or perspectives on its constitution.

The volumes edited by Chávez and Karam, El campo académico de la comunicación. Una mirada reflexiva y práctica (2008) (The academic field of communication. A reflective and practical outlook), and by Méndez Fierro and Vizcarra, Huellas compartidas. Ensayos sobre el campo académico de la comunicación en Baja California (2009) (Shared Traces. Essays on the academic field of communication in Baja California), are eloquent examples of the increasingly widespread willingness in the country to develop a well-founded and informed discussion on the development and future of the academic field. In both cases, the initiative and most of the authors identified “in some way with the Network for Studies in Communication Theories (Red de Estudios en Teorías de la Comunicación, Redecom) and the Towards a Possible Communicology Group (Grupo hacia una Comunicología Posible, Gucom)” (^{Chávez & Karam, 2008, p. 9}).

This was the case, in the first of the aforementioned books, of Gómez Vargas, Galindo, Rizo, Soto, Figueroa, and three collectives with institutional curricular references: Serrano, León and González from the Autonomous University of Baja California (UABC), Macías and Cardona from the Intercontinental University (UIC), and Chávez, Covarrubias, Gómez, Rocha, Uribe and Zermeño from the University of Colima. This book closes with “an exercise of systematization of information authored by Gerardo León on a large body of bibliographic material related to the academic field of communication” (^{Chávez & Karam, 2008, p. 14}), explicitly conceived as a continuity of the “General bibliography of the academic field of communication in Mexico (1986-1994)” elaborated by Fuentes Navarro and included as an annex in the book by ^{Galindo and Luna (1995)}. Although the exercise by ^{León Barrios (2008, p. 436)} is subtitled “A ten-year balance of his production”, it actually covers twelve years (1996-2007) and includes 119 documents.¹⁶

The book coordinated by ^{Méndez and Vizcarra (2009)} materializes the intention of “collectively take stock of the institutionalization processes of the communication academic field in Baja California”, through nine essays written by 14 authors, all of them professors and researchers from the uabc in Mexicali, Tijuana and Ensenada, and from the Iberoamerican University at Tijuana: Ortiz, Ortega, Méndez, Espinosa, Paz, Vargas, Soto, Gutiérrez, Morales, González, León, Serrano, Calderón de la Barca and Vizcarra. The final chapter is a “reasoned compendium” that, as a subsequent stage to an “exploratory documentary analysis on the research and analysis projects that are developed in our field” in Baja California, updates and delimits the documentary universe to the realm of research peer-reviewed journals, “in order to deepen the descriptive analysis of the socio-scientific production on communication and culture in this state, in light of the current debate on the topics and approaches developed in the Mexican and Latin American academic scene” (^{Vizcarra, 2009, p. 227}). Subsequently, Vizcarra published in two individual books (2014, 2020), broader research reports on Estudios sobre Comunicación en Baja California. Referencias documentales 1943-2014 (Communication Studies in Baja California. Document references 1943-2014), and La producción escrita sobre comunicación y sociedad en Baja California: sistematización documental 2000-2019 (Written output on communication and society in Baja California: document systematization 2000-2019). At another public university in the north of the country, the Autonomous University of Coahuila, efforts have also been made and products have been published to rescue document references on the field on a regional scale (^{Carabaza et al., 2011}).

But surely the most extensive project of this kind is the one coordinated by ^{Portillo (2016)} for AMIC, because it covers the entire country, in five regions studied by ten researchers (Guadarrama and Valero the Central region; Fuentes Navarro, Padilla and Flores the Central-West region; León Barrios the Northwest; Hinojosa and Chong the Northeast; and Echeverría and Karam the Southeast region). This work, subsequent to and complementary to the definition of communication research programs of the same Association, edited a few years earlier by ^{Vega (2009)}, helped to identify the persistent inequality of conditions and resources and the various ways of institutionalizing communication research practices valid during the first decade of the 21st century in Mexico; the processes of regionalization that differentiate the horizons of development and participation in the “field”, but also the prevalence of the principles of academic collaboration “above the competitive impulses that seem to be supported by the environment of culture and institutional policies” (^{Fuentes Navarro, 2016, p. 11}).

The one included in the book coordinated by ^{Portillo (2016)} can be considered the most updated analytical review available on the production of knowledge in the academic field of communication in Mexico. ¹⁷ Although “the results point to the concentration of production in a few cities, to fragmentation and disarticulation”, Portillo points out that “another” phase of collaborative work opens up, “that of a more qualitative analysis”:

... that allows to problematize the constitution of this academic community through its production, emphasizing the most recurrently addressed topics, the type of works produced, the connections, the fragmentation and forms of articulation of researchers, as well as the structural conditions in which they work, accounting for government policies that encourage, or not, certain types of scientific work (^{Portillo, 2016, pp. 16-19}).

On the other hand, among the 617 articles published in Comunicación y Sociedad since 1987 (^{Gómez et al., 2022, p. 3}), at least thirty-eight signed by Mexican authors contain analyses of some or several dimensions of the academic field. Without that cut of authors’ nationality, five years earlier the count of articles on “academic field”, in its two subcategories of “Epistemology, theory, methodology”, and “Institutionalization, academic production”, reached the sum of 51 (24%) of the 209 texts published between 2004 and 2016 in issues 1 to 26 of the New Epoch of the journal (^{Gómez et al., 2017, p. 32}).

Outline of a possibility for the future

The account so far deployed, inevitably incomplete and biased, as a reinterpretation of a previously interpreted field and as an exercise of academic reflexivity, may lead to insist on the importance of making statistics and history compatible as fundamental methods of meta-research (^{Fuentes Navarro, 2019a)}, and of cooperative rather than competitive practices in the meta-communication processes constitutive of a scientific community committed as such to its socio-cultural environments, whose crises and “multiple disarticulations” are increasingly eloquently manifested.

Hopefully, in this framework, some sharable sense could be found and systematically verified about data referring to the academic field of communication in Mexico such as those cited in the commemorative panel of the 40th anniversary of the AMIC (^{Fuentes Navarro, 2019b}): in a corpus consisting of 6 066 documents (844 books and 5 222 chapters and articles in academic journals), published between 1979 and 2018, the 40 years of existence of the Association, it can be observed a steady increase in the proportion, which is already located close to 20% of the total, of research dealing with communication research itself, whether in terms of the processes of its institutionalization, academic organization and linkage, or in relation to its epistemological, theoretical and methodological development. To speak of meta-research in communication in Mexico is to speak of a growing collective effort to contribute analyses and reflections to the academic field itself that could be debated and shared, something that, nevertheless, still happens in a small proportion. And it seems evident that this limited capacity for collective learning would be even less if it were not for AMIC and very few other institutionalized instances, constantly aware of the contextual conditions of the field.

In the face of growing public questioning and the demagogic delegitimization of scientific and academic practices still so precariously institutionalized in Mexico, which reduce to Manichean stereotypes the increasingly complex science-society relations, inside and outside the academy, a consistent resource could be the strengthening of a critical communicational perspective, articulated with meta-research processes, with empirical evidence not only statistical and broad-scale methods not limited to historical interpretation, always discussed and evaluated collegially. Assuming the future viability of institutional, peaceful and democratic procedures in the country, this would be one of the most productive axes of development of the “field”, to come in the following years.