The Communication Manifesto

Silvio Waisbord

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781509532223
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Contemporary societies demand clear-minded, evidence-based ideas to address complex social issues. Communication scholarship has a rich trove of knowledge and experiences to help address such problems. In this passionately argued manifesto, Silvio Waisbord examines public scholarship in communication studies and its potential for contributing to the common good. He discusses the various ways scholars seek to serve the public as practitioners, experts, advocates, activists and critics, and underscores their significant contribution which has not, to date, been properly supported or recognized. Only by tackling academic institutional politics, he argues, will it be possible to strengthen public scholarship as central to the mission of communication studies. The Communication Manifesto is a roadmap to action and will inspire communication scholars and students to be public citizens, thereby connecting their work and expertise to the causes of solidarity, humanity and social justice.

1
Public Scholarship

What is public scholarship?

When I mentioned I was writing a book about public scholarship in communication studies, colleagues responded with a volley of concepts: action­oriented, action research, activist, advocacy, applied, committed, community-based, engaged, political scholarship, and public intellectualism. They were not wrong. Those concepts indicate various forms of public interventions, actions, and principles. They make a conceptual alphabet soup that refers to public scholarship. Public scholarship, however, is broader than those concepts. It is an umbrella term that covers scholars’ engagement with publics beyond academia.

Cleaning up conceptual brushes will help to clarify the meaning of public scholarship.

Public scholarship may be activist (Frey & Palmer, 2017) or advocacy depending on the motivations and the positions chosen by individual scholars or demanded by non-academic actors and partners, a topic to which I return below. Both concepts refer to taking specific, normative positions vis-à-vis any possible public issue: from improving digital access to strengthening news literacy skills. Yet not all public scholarship necessarily takes open normative positions in favor of certain ideals. Scholars also participate in the public sphere as scientific experts and accomplished practitioners who do not take open political stands on public issues. They passionately stick to their calling and expertise: designing surveys, reporting stories, creating storyboards, teaching code, leaving personal politics out.

Public scholarship can be “committed” and “community-oriented,” but the meaning of these concepts is not immediately clear. Scholars can be “committed” to various causes and principles – from science to socialism – even within the confines of academic scholarship. Likewise, scholarship can be oriented to different types of communities defined by geography, race, belief, practice, and so on. Community, a perennially ambivalent concept and normative ideal, can be virtuous or toxic, democratic or authoritarian. You may seek refuge in communities or run away from them.

Public scholarship can be “action research” and “applied” forms of knowledge, but it is not necessarily so. Communication scholars may intervene in other capacities that do not always involve research or applied competencies in the conventional senses. They also participate in various roles: trainers, advisors, strategists, community mobilizers, and so on.

Political scholarship is close to public scholarship, in the sense that the word “political,” as Roland Barthes (1972, pp. 172–173) put it, describes “the whole of human relations in their real, social structure, in their power of making the world.” Understood as denominating the realm of the public, “political” is another name for public scholarship, without necessarily being strictly partisan or allied with specific social forces. Also, one could reasonably argue that any type of scholarship is political because it implicitly or deliberately implies taking a position in the world about questions and problems, the purpose and the uses of knowledge, and the linkages between scholarly production and society.

Public intellectualism and its problems

“Public intellectual/ism,” a concept with a rich tradition in the history of ideas and the sociology of intellectuals, deserves lengthier attention for it has been the most common name for “public scholarship.” Public intellectuals are, in Russell Jacoby’s (1987, p. 5) definition, “writers and thinkers who address a general and educated audience.” On both sides of the North Atlantic, the Mount Rushmore of public intellectuals of the past half-century features a list of (mostly male and white) luminaries. An incomplete, arbitrary list includes Isaiah Berlin, Allan Bloom, Judith Butler, Manuel Castells, Noam Chomsky, Ta Nehisi Coates, Richard Dawkins, Michael Eric Dyson, Niall Ferguson, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Anthony Giddens, Germaine Greer, Stuart Hall, Bernard Henri-Lévy, Naomi Klein, Paul Krugman, Marshall McLuhan, Steven Pinker, Bertrand Russell, Jeffrey Sachs, Edward Said, Jean-Paul Sartre, Susan Sontag, Cass Sunstein, Cornel West, Howard Zinn, and Slavoj ŽiŽek.

Certainly, those in this motley crew of names have no obvious commonalities, other than being well-known people, with recognizable public presence as (mostly media) commentators on important issues of the day, and identified with various political, social, and cultural causes. “Public intellectuals” are individuals with academic credentials and/or positions who have a regular presence in the public, primarily in the news media as interviewees, op-ed contributors, and sources of news quotes. Some occasionally make movie cameos and feature in documentaries, and most regularly give presentations on lecture circuits and at book fairs. Some rub elbows with political and economic elites, with whom they interact in different capacities, and join in high-profile panels and meetings. Others are stellar figures of ideological positions, contemporary science, public campaigns, government policies, and so on. Some are well-known dissidents or spokes­persons identified with struggles against various forms of discrimination and oppression. They rub against the establishment: they are present-day incarnations of the intellectual maudit who exercises the right to use public reason against power. Many are known for speaking about their own particular academic expertise in a given field as well as a broad range of contemporary issues: nuclear politics, geopolitics, cultural crisis, development, globalization, war and conflict, nationalism.

Public intellectualism is different from public scholarship. It does not capture the multifaceted forms in which academics engage with publics. It is embedded in outdated and limited notions of publicity that do not capture multiple actions and sites in the public sphere, and the places of ideas in contemporary societies. The notion of “public” in “public intellectual” is tied to the old media order: a hierarchical, pyramidal structure which a few intellectuals could access to share their expertise and views about the world. Public intellectualism is basically mediated presence. It is grounded in a time when mass publicity basically meant media presence. As the central gatekeeper of public life, “the media” determined which ideas and intellectuals were public. Because the public was assimilated to “media publics,” public intellectuals were individuals who regularly appeared on the media (Posner, 2002). This order has collapsed largely owing to the unprecedented changes brought about by the digital revolution, namely the proliferation of public platforms and new forms of communication and information flows and action.

Another problem is that “public intellectual” is loaded with assumptions about a specific kind of publicity: media appearances. However, even if massive publicity in contemporary societies remains strongly tied to media presence, appearances in legacy news and digital platforms are only one manifestation of public scholarship. We shouldn’t make public intellectualism synonymous with media appearances. Even if “deep mediatization” (Couldry & Hepp, 2016) is a defining feature of contemporary societies, plenty of public scholarship takes place beyond the media. Communication scholars engage in public scholarship even if they do not have a prominent presence in the mainstream media, are go-to names for festival organizers, fill lecture halls, offer wisdom on public matters, or work with political actors: elites, think tanks, activists, or insurgents. Just as there is no media-centric public, publicity, and public sphere anymore (if there ever was), media-centric public intellectualism is inadequate to capture the multiple forms and spaces of public scholarship.

Another problem is that public intellectualism endorses a limited form of knowledge and competencies. It is attached to the value of the written word and the ability to articulate positions verbally in front of large audiences. Jean-Paul Sartre, an emblematic example of twentieth-century public intellectualism in the West, defined it as the politically committed writer turning words into actions. Public intellectuals possess admirable written and verbal skills (and charisma, in some cases) that make their media presence appealing, captivating, and/or popular. Furthermore, they reflect the celebrification of public knowledge, the star system of the public dissemination of ideas: a top-down system of idea production based on individual rather than collective forms of knowledge sharing.

In summary, the notion of public intellectualism is fraught with analytical and normative problems: it is outdated at a time of profound redefinition of the media and the public sphere; it is narrowly associated with skills dear to traditional scholarship; and it is premised on an individual-centered, hierarchical model of knowledge production and dissemination.

Public scholarship as public connections

So what is public scholarship? Aren’t essential acts of scholarship, such as teaching, writing, and, obviously, publishing, ways to make knowledge public? Isn’t all scholarship public insofar as it takes place in public arenas: classrooms, journals, conferences?

Understanding public scholarship requires clarifying the meaning of “public”: a central yet perennially ambiguous concept for communication studies and other fields of inquiry in the social sciences and the humanities. No single definition adequately captures the multiple approaches to the study of “public.” Library shelves are packed with literature that discusses “public” and adjacent concepts: publicity, public sphere, the public, public space, public media.

Although I cannot do justice to this rich and open debate within the space of this book, here I identify “public” with connecting individuals, institutions, and ideas. To make public is to connect with others, as Hannah Arendt (1958) argued. Public is the essence of the social, a way to foster social bonds and recognition with and by others; it is the construction of different communities. To make public means to make visible: to enlarge the sphere of action, to make issues common, to expose ideas to others. In contrast, privacy is about disconnection: being left alone, withdrawing into personal spaces, shutting others off, limiting the possibilities for external view and scrutiny. Being private means to be protected from intrusive, external gaze: to reduce, curb, and shut off engagement with the public.

From this perspective, I define public scholarship as the engagement of scholars with non-academic publics. It entails the diversification of knowledge and the amplification of the reach of intellectual production. It raises the visibility of ideas and produces different forms of knowledge that do not always fit conventional academic requirements: scientific rigor, theoretical grounding, data-driven, original contributions to the state of the art. It results in increased exposure of various forms of expression among various publics. Whereas scholarship is primarily concerned with making knowledge public among scholars, public scholarship is making ideas public among myriad publics.

Just like public life, public scholarship builds connections with and through institutions: the spaces where ideas become public. Theorists of public life (Habermas, 1989) and public communication (Garnham, 1990) have underscored the significance of the institutional architecture that sustains “the public.” The abstract idea of the public comes into existence in specific spaces: eighteenth-century coffeehouses and salons, nineteenth-century newspapers and union halls, twentieth-century public squares and broadcasts, and twenty-first-century social media. Just as publics congregate in physical and virtual spaces, spaces bring publics into existence. They are sites for establishing and cultivating connections. They build publics defined by legal status, nationality, market position, social markers, collective identities.

Scholarship and public scholarship operate in different institutional spheres. Scholarship primarily takes place in academic institutions: universities, professional associations, journals, books. Although it also takes places in virtual networks set up for research and teaching collaboration and exchange, belonging to universities and counting on a functional institutional infrastructure are fundamental aspects of academic life. Scholarship suffers when external forces, such as commercial imperatives, legal restrictions, and political pressures, unduly influence academic institutions.

In contrast, public scholarship requires expanding the institutional scope and the publics of academic work. It demands establishing connections with myriad institutions: the media, political parties, government agencies, international bodies, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), activists’ groups. “Going public” refers to taking one’s work beyond academic spaces by making ideas, findings, and expertise visible among various publics in different sites. Doing public scholarship entails different ways of engaging with publics. It demands going beyond the traditional publics of academic work: colleagues, students, manuscript and proposal reviewers, editors (as well as dear loved ones who listen to us with unpredictable, uneven levels of interest). It also includes bringing publics into academic spaces to discuss common interests and produce relevant knowledge with practical implications^*.

Public scholarship is as multifaceted as the public and public spaces. It takes place in many spaces in the institutional infrastructure of the public sphere: community associations, unions, media collectives, media, NGOs, government agencies, research institutions, foundations, schools. It is generally a collective ente...