The European Institute for Communication and Culture and the University of Colorado at Boulder will hold a conference in Boulder, Colorado on the relationship between communication policies and welfare politics. The need to re-think the purposes and possibilities of state intervention into areas such as access to the media, the promotion of technological literacy, the reinvigoration of “public service” media, the sustaining of cultural identity, and the provision of universal geographic coverage, are bases upon which communication politicise need to confront more directly the debates in welfare state theory and politics. Communitarian, neo-liberal, materialist, and “post-materialist” critiques of the welfare state raise many important empirical and theoretical questions about what roles governments can and should play to formulate and sustain progressive social policies in the realm of communication. The conference will address those themes.