Communication for social change is constituted amid the vectors of globalization, both in producing large-scale political-economic transformations across nation states captured in globalization-as-development, and in constituting processes of activist participation that resist the marginalizing effects of top-down globalization (Dutta, 2012a, 2012b, 2015, 2018; Wilkins, 2014). Described as time-space compression in the accelerated movement of capital, goods, labor, services, and images across national boundaries (Harvey, 1999; Peet, 2003; Williamson, 1993), globalization has been accompanied by a dramatic shift in the ownership of capital and resources, consolidating resources and power in the hands of transnational capital (Harvey, 1999, 2001, 2005). The contemporary framework of globalization can be traced back to the post-World War II development interventions that sought to open up nation states to US-based transnational corporations, conceived in the ambits of Cold War politics (Dutta, 2006a; Dutta, Thaker, & Sun, 2014). Over the last four decades, the political and economic organizing of the globe has been reconstituted under the framework of neoliberalism,1 crystallized in the free market ideology, and marked by the financialization of global economies, minimization of state support for welfare programs, and minimization of barriers to free trade (Dutta, 2006a, 2019; Harvey, 2001, 2005; Pal & Dutta, 2008).
The symbolic constructions and processes of social change communication have been at the heart of the neoliberal transformation of global economies, shaped by international financial institutions (IFIs) such as the World Bank (WB), International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Trade Organization (WTO) on one hand, and development agencies such as the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), Department for International Development (DfID), and Swiss Aid, on the other hand, referred to as the dominant institutions of social change (Dutta, 2007; Ganesh, Zoller, & Cheney, 2005; Pal & Dutta, 2008; Payer, 1974; Peet, 2003; Williamson, 1993). Social change, implying planned and directed strategic communication efforts carried out by the dominant global organizations, originated in the broader context of development. On one hand, these development communication programs framed within the ambits of social change have been integral to the promotion of free trade in the post-World War II climate, and subsequently in the reorganizing of local economies through IFI-imposed structural adjustment programs (SAPs) and poverty reduction strategies (PRSs) (Dutta, 2006a; Peet, 2003). On the other hand, reproducing this overarching development logic in the framework of modernization, newly liberated postcolonial nation states across the global South, marked as the âThird Worldâ on the basis of the developmentalist ontology that defined these spaces as lacking in development, started establishing their own development agendas and creating strategic frameworks for development communication.
What then has been the function of social change communication, described as planned social change communication, as conceived within the dominant order of political and economic organizing (Dutta, 2006a)? The very definition of social change communication implicitly as âplannedâ social change communication defines the parameters of what is generally discussed under the ambits of social change communication. As we will see in this chapter and the next, the definition of social change in the mainstream US- and Eurocentric communication literature has embedded within itself certain notions of what social change is and what it entails. The dominant literature on social change assumes change as individual-level transformation in knowledge, attitude, and behavior, with the impetus of change on improving individual behavior. Rooted in the war-military-intelligence interests of the US Empire, the managerialism that formed the basis of social change constructed individuals as change agents in the overarching pathway of development (Dutta, 2006b; Knafo, Dutta, Lane, & Wyn-Jones, 2019). This individualistic framework of communication for social change has circulated in the discipline from the roots of social change in the US, promoting capitalism and democracy in the Third World, to the neoliberal transformation of social change, driven by the allegiance to the free market as the solution to global problems. What then are the objectives of social change communication, as constituted within the prevailing logic of neoliberalism, articulated in the promotion of the free market? What are the theoretical, methodological, and practical implications of social change communication efforts as conceived within the dominant logics of development, conceived of as the global promotion of transnational capitalism?
Any form of theoretical claim to an object of study is anchored within the overarching politics that constitutes it (Miller, 2004). That the knowledge formations we work with are shaped by the overarching political economies within which they come to take form therefore draws our attention to the claims that are backgrounded and/or erased. This dominant framework of social change communication will be interrogated for the assumptions it makes. These assumptions depict the general concepts of capitalism, technology, and democracy that shape how development has been historically constructed in communication. Our attention to these erasures and shadows of social change communication opens up the space for working through explicitly resistive forms of social change, embodied in the collectivization of struggles of the working classes, precariat, and large cross-sections of people across the globe struggling with poverty. In doing so, we will explore other less explored approaches to social change communication. How do these conceptualizations of social change communication converge with or depart from Marxist and participatory frameworks of social change communication? And most important, what are the transformative possibilities of social change when articulated as participatory communication grounded in community life directed at transforming the unequal social and economic policies of neoliberalism that constitute contemporary global inequalities?
Many of the contemporary debates on communication for social change have emerged around the concept of culture (see the edited collection Servaes, 2007). The categorization of culture as tradition formed the basis of the earliest forms of social change communication literature (Schramm, 1964). This literature, mostly emerging from an applied setting where the role of communication was being studied in the realm of its effectiveness in generating social change, developed universal theories that placed social change as the solution to the problem of culture. The universal theories of growth thus developed worked on culture to modernize it. This modernization framework was racist and imperialist in its treatment of culture, with studies and theories located within this paradigm reproducing this racist logic. The postcolonial and decolonial critiques of communication for social change put forth the concept of culture as a site for alternative interpretations. The turn to culture first emerging out of the anti-colonial movements from the newly independent nation states in the global South entered into the ambits of global cultural development agencies such as the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), and later turned into a key tool for the global implementation of neoliberal policies.
In this book, I offer a conceptual framework for closely looking at the ways in which culture has been erased, backgrounded, foregrounded, and catalyzed in the different threads that have flown through the different theoretical, methodological, and practical ways of doing communication for social change. Based on a framework that derives from my earlier work (Dutta, 2011, 2012a, 2012b) and in conversation with ongoing social change interventions, the book specifically delves into the various ways in which culture appears in the literature, in methods, and in applications of social change communication. The various modalities of knowledge formation, methodology, and practice in communication for social change are compared with each other, particularly attending to their treatment of the concept of culture. We are at a moment in the history and narrative of the discipline where calls to decolonize, de-westernize, and dismantle the hegemonic disciplinary configurations have foregrounded the vitality of building disciplinary anchors from elsewhere. The #CommunicationSoWhite piece published in the Journal of Communication drew attention to the Whiteness of the discipline of Communication. In response to the Whiteness of the award structures and editor selection processes of the National Communication Association (NCA), a Communication Scholars for Transformation (CST) movement emerged in/across the discipline that documented, interrogated, and created critical activist anchors for disrupting the hegemonic structures of the discipline (see, for instance, the timeline of the movement on the blog, and on my own blog for my responses to the Whiteness of the discipline). These conversations form the backdrop of the book, offering the impetus for recognizing the importance of activism within academia, resisting and transforming the knowledge claims reproduced within predominantly White academic structures.
Mapping out the framework of social change as conceived from within the mainstream logics of development then offers an entry point for conceptualizing communicative processes that seek to resist the consolidation of wealth in the hands of the power elite, transforming the ontology of social change from the ambits of transnational hegemony to the collective politics of grassroots-driven structural transformations at local, national, and global levels that are attentive to inequalities in access to resources and communicative spaces. The theorization of structures, the frameworks of organizing of material resources, at local, national, and global levels, and the role of communication in challenging these structures forms the basis of the second half of the book, outlining the key tenets of a grassroots, community-based, participatory culture-centered approach (CCA) that is explicitly directed at achieving structural transformations through the framing of alternative economic and political structures that both interrogate the taken-for-granted assumptions of neoliberalism and offer transformative spaces for challenging these assumptions (Dutta, 2004a, 2004b, 2007, 2010, 2013). The CCA foregrounds the role of communication as an organizing framework for the ensuing neoliberal transformation of the globe, and attends to the transformative capacity of communication as an entry point to meanings, interpretations, frames, and discourses that create alternative rationalities of political, economic, social, and cultural organizing. Communication, as a âsymbolic process whereby reality is produced, maintained, repaired and transformedâ (Carey, 1989, p. 23), co-creates possibilities of change through co-constructions with disenfranchised communities that experience the effects of neoliberal change globally.
The goal of this chapter is to offer first a map of social change communication efforts in the backdrop of the political and economic configurations of globalization, examining the role of communication for social change historically in achieving the hegemony of neoliberalism, both in the form of top-down development interventions and in the form of participatory de...