The Handbook of Global Interventions in Communication Theory

Yoshitaka Miike, Jing Yin, Yoshitaka Miike, Jing Yin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000536256
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Moving beyond the U.S.-Eurocentric paradigm of communication theory, this handbook broadens the intellectual horizons of the discipline by highlighting underrepresented, especially non-Western, theorists and theories, and identifies key issues and challenges for future scholarship.

Showcasing diverse perspectives, the handbook facilitates active engagement in different cultural traditions and theoretical orientations that are global in scope but local in effect. It begins by exploring past efforts to diversify the field, continuing on to examine theoretical concepts, models, and principles rooted in local cumulative wisdom. It does not limit itself to the mass-interpersonal communication divide, but rather seeks to frame theory as global and inclusive in scope.

The book is intended for communication researchers and advanced students, with relevance to scholars with an interest in theory within information science, library science, social and cross-cultural psychology, multicultural education, social justice and social ethics, international relations, development studies, and political science.

Part I HISTORICAL INTERVENTIONS

1 A Conversation on the History of Paradigmatic Dialogue in Communication Theory Brenda Dervin and the 1985 ICA Conference

CarrieLynn D. Reinhard

DOI: 10.4324/9781003043348-3

In 1984, Dr. Brenda Dervin was program chair for the 1985 annual meeting of the International Communication Association. She chose the theme “Beyond Polemics: Paradigm Dialogue” in Honolulu, Hawai‘i. She also coedited the two volumes Rethinking Communication (Dervin, Grossberg, O’Keefe,& Wartella, 1989a, 1989b) and, in 2005, wrote an article for The Communication Review reflecting on ICA’s division devoted to the philosophical underpinnings of communication studies, in which she referred to herself as a “rebellious ragamuffin” (Dervin, 2005). That was the Brenda Dervin I wanted to get to know in the interviews for this chapter.

When I first met Brenda Dervin, I was a cocky first-year graduate student at Ohio State University’s School of Communication. She taught the required qualitative research methods course, but I had been exposed to critical/cultural theories during my undergraduate years at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. So, I sat in the back, chiming in with my thoughts and doodling temporary tattoos on my hand to keep from fidgeting.

I would later come to see Dr. D—as she will always be to me—as Yoda to my Luke Skywalker as she became my PhD adviser. I knew we were outsiders in our department, but I never really thought of her as someone who should not be there. She was an academic, and to my young eyes, she had been everywhere, had published substantially, and was routinely honored. She even had a million dollar grant that I served as a research assistant for her. Dr. D was the type of academic I only knew about through media portrayals.

After I completed my doctorate, we continued to work on projects. Recently, we started talking about her career, and in doing so I have come to understand more why I have always felt a kinship with her. In my bouts with imposter syndrome, I have reflected on being from rural Wisconsin, where my father had a bachelor’s degree, but my mother would not finish college until after I did. I knew nothing of academia outside of what I saw on television, and what I saw never matched what I experienced or how I acted. Now, to know that she has felt the same way, despite all her accomplishments, has given me hope.

Thus, rather than simply present the questions and answers of our interviews, I am using these conversations to tell her story, hewing as close to her words as narratively possible. This story focuses on how paradigmatic dialogue became the theme for the 1985 ICA conference, but it goes deeper than that. The story presents a pioneer in her field feeling like an outsider, learning how to be an academic on the job, and reflecting on what she would have done differently given all that she has learned.

Even now, over a decade since I was her last PhD advisee, she still is my Yoda.

***

A Ragamuffin’s Itch

My life has not included a normal way of acting as an “academic.” But I am proud that I have not pursued a normative path. I am proud that my doctoral students did not pursue normative paths. I am proud that I have this itch.

A ragamuffin’s itch; let us put it that way. A ragamuffin’s itch.

I have always had an obsessive nature, even as a child, about dialogue. I was an orphan and unattended to until almost age seven. As an orphan, I chose to sit and listen to the people around me. As I did so, I realized, oh, he is really talking about the same thing as that person. Or, oh, they think they are talking about the same thing, but they are not. And so I was obsessed with dialogue from an early age.

I think we could say that, if you are a lucky child and had an adult who cared what you thought about the world, they were doing dialogue with you. They would say to you, as you make an observation, how did you come to that conclusion? They would listen to your answer without judgment and would honor the results. They would essentially dialogue with you.

To me, being obsessed with dialogue was not an intellectual activity. It was an emotional response to the world I was thrown into at birth. A response where I was really seeing all sorts of things others were not. I think that the way in which I observed the world was different than normative from the very beginning. My teachers, when they observed me working in the world, saw me as having “special characteristics,” but they did not know what those characteristics were, and so they never fully helped me understand what my mind was doing. I got lots of praise for strange things, however.

At the same time, I started feeling negative reactions to injustices. If forced to be silent about an injustice that I considered to be wrong, I am anxious. And that, again, may have something to do with my childhood. I remember this little black boy in the second seat in the first row who had just been insulted by our fifth grade teacher. I was frantically looking around for somebody who, at least, was working productively to address this injustice so I knew I was not alone. It was something about being alone and seeing the world as unjust. When I did not feel alone, then I could rest. And dialogue can help you learn you are not alone.

I knew then that I was not going to spend a moment of my life allowing that little boy in the second row to be attacked because his skin was black. Even as a child, I think I was making a choice of how to spend my time on Earth.

I define dialogue as if we are talking together, and you make an observation of the world; now, I may disagree with you, or I may even agree with you. That does not matter. What matters is that now there are differences and similarities to be shared. Dialogue helps us share our experiences and interpretations of those experiences.

I think dialogue is when we bridge the gaps between us with this thing called communicating: both nonverbal and verbal language, and all the other things that are communicating. Dialogue occurs when we reach for a deeper understanding of the other, which may be the same as us or different from us, or that dichotomy may be irrelevant. Dialogue is about hearing another on their own terms, without positioning them as the other. They do not need you to understand them, except from their own interpretive framework. You listen—really listen—to them. Help them see that they are not alone.

So, I think I was just obsessed with dialogue. I still am, to this day.

When I was a child, there was no world but the male world. Everything was male. School was for men. We girls had to learn to cook, and the boys were off getting tough by playing football and getting smart by doing math. I somehow did well enough to attend Cornell University, where I majored in home economics and journalism. Why home economics? Because it was the only subject that my parents would allow me to major in, I being a female, as it would help me find a husband.

At Cornell, the one thing I knew I was good at was writing. I do not think I was otherwise a superior student of any kind. But people kept seeing things in me—at least, in retrospect, I realized they did. I did not know at the time what they were seeing in me, because I did not see it in myself. After graduating Cornell in 1960, I worked for the American Home Economics Association in a public information function, with a recommendation from the Dean of Home Economics. In my position, I traveled the country giving speeches. Here I am, 21 years old, wearing Jackie Kennedy mink hats and white gloves, and traveling the country giving speeches at black colleges to recruit black students to be in the Peace Corps. This was 1963, and President Kennedy had just announced the Peace Corps.

So here I have this incredible job, and I was married, but then he got a job and moved us to Milwaukee. There I worked for the Center for Consumer Affairs at the University of Wisconsin, again in a public information function for another nonprofit. I preferred working at nonprofits, even as a professor, and only worked for a profit-based business for two months. My husband then decided he wanted to go to graduate school, and I decided to as well, so we both went to Michigan State in 1965.

I actually went there for ecumenical reasons. For me, two meanings for ecumenical exist. One meaning refers to how it covers all these different contexts in which communication occurs: interpersonal, political, mass, and so on. That is what Michigan State was. The other meaning calls for covering all the contexts with the idea being that communication is something larger than any of those specific situated applications. And, of course, that other meaning of ecumenical is dialogic, that somehow we rise above any one specific individual context to understand more about what communication is and how communicating works.

So I went to graduate school with that obsession. If I had an important question driving my scholarship, it was always the foundational question: how do we serve humanity? But I was not fully prepared for what I experienced. I had to learn that the answer is not that we are supposed to persuade humanity to agree with the state, even state, even was often the unstated goal. I did not understand issues of power, structure, and agency. Even the idea of a field of thought or philosophy was alien to my being.

Because I was a ragamuffin. I was an upper middle class child financially, but I was a lower middle class child intellectually. The school I went to was called an upper middle class school, but we learned nothing, and I mean absolutely nothing, intellectually. I was badly trained. I was a ragamuffin, and I do not know whether we could say there was any school of thought that guided me—other than my obsession with dialogue and my need to work for justice.

Once, the Dean of Communication at Hawai‘i, as we were walking across the Hawai‘i campus, very politely said to a colleague who had just come up to meet me, “She’s uneducated but very, very smart.” I think that was a kind statement. I was uneducated. I am not anymore. I think if I was with him now, he would be pleased. I pushed myself to get educated. I do not know whether I needed to—but I did.

I think when one is a ragamuffin, one thinks one is not eligible for what one is doing, and you worry you are being treated that way.

At the time, the idea of othering was outside the world of my experience. My experience is that I somehow was less than others, and that was the appropriate description. My brown friends also were inferior, because they were not white or American. But I would not have called it “othering.” I understood it as they were culturally different. They would have understood it as they were not up to par. Being a female and a ragamuffin, I also was not up to par.

I remember the first week at Michigan State; we were reading one of the first handbooks on the nature of communication that contained an entry on what predicts communication differences in receivers of messages. I can vividly remember on the right-hand page, two-thirds of the way down the page in about the 200s, it said women are more persuadable than men. Evidence shows dot-dot-dot. I was the only female in the seminar room. I alone sat up, in a total surprise, after learning that I was “more persuadable” than men. Not a single male questioned it.

My way of coping with this lesser status was to totally ignore it. I just kept plugging on with my studies, but I think my eyes opened as I toddled along. Being thrown in with the third world because I was rejected by the first, I got to know all these people who read Marx. When suddenly you have to read Marx because your best friend is “a Marxist,” you learn about power, structure, critical theory, and so on. So I began to learn about critical scholarship and the critical truth, and I do not know whether it opened my eyes about myself, but it certainly did open my eyes about the world.

Who would have predicted that this ragamuffin kid would go to graduate school? Yet, I soared in graduate school as the first female, which was a happenstance condition, not of my making. Who would have predicted that? And there I was, extraordinarily good at something, unexpectedly to me and to the rest of the world. I received my doctorate in 1971. It was all quite surprising to me. I did not receive the recommendations my male classmates did, so my first university job was Assistant Professor in the School of Library Science at Syracuse University.

I soared into attention in the field. I received a U.S. Office of Education grant in 1974 to study the information needs of urban residents. This grant came after the work I had done with Bradley Greenberg at Michigan State on how the urban poor engaged the mass media, my dissertation on low-income Black adults and their information needs, as well as work with other marginalized groups. Here I was, focusing on injustices in my research.

But, I was a ragamuffin. Yet, if one understands communication communicatively as Richard Carter—who became my most important intellectual mentor—put it in some of his articles, everyone would know that a ragamuffin sees the world informatively. Ragamuffins, outsiders, others—we are not a danger to you, but people who might open some doors to see the world differently.

Richard Budd was president of ICA at that time. When he was planning his ICA plenary in 1976, he chose me as the respondent. For one year, they were going to take the top three thinkers, the top three papers of the entire conference. He selected me as the respondent to those papers.

My first official role at ICA was as a member of the 1974-1975 Nominating Committee. I remained active in ICA for years, as I was elected Member-at-Large to the ICA Board of Directors in 1977 and then as a Member to the ICA Executive Committee and Board in 1983.

So, I gave the response, which Carter, sitting in the audience, loved, because essentially...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Series Editor’s Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Editors
• Contributors
• Introduction: Global Interventions in Search of Communication Theory in Human Diversity
• Part I Historical Interventions
• Part II African Interventions
• Part III Asian Interventions
• Part IV Latin American Interventions
• Part V European Interventions
• Part VI Diverse Interventions
• Index