Communication as social science (and more)

As often happens, I submitted my title before I knew what I wanted to talk about. I do want to speak about communication research as a field, but not only as a field of social science. To try to contain communication in actually existing social science would be to reduce it in unfortunate ways. But at the same time, as someone much invested in social science, I harbor hopes that communication research will be deeply and widely integrated into social science more generally. I believe that the intellectually serious study of communication should be transformative for the social sciences.