In January 2016, 57 social change communication scholars, communication practitioners, and activists from across the globe participated in a three-day conference hosted by the Center for Culture-centered Approach to Research and Evaluation (CARE) at the National University of Singapore. The location of the conference in Singapore, positioned in the interstices of Eurocentric capitalist democracy and practices of authoritarian governmentality that foreground values of communitarianism and collectivism as modes of organizing, offered an opportunity to critically engage with the foundational theoretical concepts of social change communication, explore the erasures constituted in dominant constructions of social change communication, and foster entry points for listening to the voices of the global margins. The articulation of social change and communication from outside of the circuits of knowledge production in the West/North created openings for contextually situated theorization of social change, closely intertwined with the practice of social change communication (Dutta, 2015). Simultaneously, the global concentration of power in the hands of the transnational capital-state-civil society nexus emerged as a consistent theme throughout the conference, therefore calling for social change communication that interrogates the structures that constitute dominant notions of contemporary governmentality.
The local as a site for occupying communicative spaces where change is imagined, created, and carried out articulates imaginaries of social, cultural, economic, and political organizing that directly challenge global neoliberal hegemony and simultaneously frameworks of reworking the local. The theorization of voice, spatially located at the global margins, and explicitly resistive of the structures of neoliberal governance, offers a counter to the market-driven imaginary of trickle-down development. The attention to geography as an anchor for theorizing communication and social justice also meant that our conference organizing committee particularly paid attention to the representation of academic-activist voices from across spaces in Asia, proximate to our own site of theory building at CARE in Singapore. Therefore, the large majority of voices celebrated in this edited collection emerge from Asia, taking seriously the task of what it means to theorize communication and social change from/in Asia.
The concepts thus developed across the chapters demonstrate a deep commitment to context even as they seek to engage with the global trajectories of social change. Moreover, the conference emerged as a communicative infrastructure for a range of activist performances, including performances by the Dialita Choir, comprised of the survivors of the 1965 US-sponsored Indonesian genocide, performances by Lachmi Dyah Larasati remembering trauma to articulate health and healing through dance, and performances, activist workshops, and documentary screenings by dalit women farmers organized under the umbrella of the Deccan Development Society (DDS). For each of these activist performances, critically engaging and interrogating the logics of power and control that organize social systems offered the bases for theorizing social change communication from the margins of neoliberal capitalism. I co-performed a poetography with the photography and image artist Julio Etchart, who served as a research assistant at CARE for four years. The poetography sought to interrogate the organizing logic of the market that has colonized the Asian-global scape.
In the backdrop of the consolidation of communicative spaces in the hands of the power elite, conference themes grappled with the role of communication in disrupting these processes of resource consolidation. The positioning of the conference at CARE was meant to bring together new and critical thinking about the interplays of culture and communication for social change, particularly drawing on the complex history of Southeast Asia as a target of top-down social change communication interventions emerging from the West during the Cold War. This Cold War legacy was directly interrogated in the voices of the performers of the Dialita Choir who experienced physical, sexual, and cognitive violence and lost family members in the Indonesian anti-Communist purge, carried out with US sponsorship. The voices of the survivors of 1965 disrupt the communicative inversions that have been circulated in elite discourse. Particularly salient is the courage and tenacity of resistance that emerges in these voices amid various state-driven techniques of repression, which themselves are techniques learned and perfected by postcolonial elites in South and Southeast Asia from the colonial masters. The locally constituted narratives of resistance offer lessons for global principles of social change communication, building communication strategies and techniques that disrupt the now-perfected strategies of colonial expansion and capitalist exploitation.
Also salient was the theoretical anchor for positioning social change communication amid neoliberal global transformations, reflected in the hegemonic position of the āfree marketā ideology in spite of the evidence that points to the failures of market-based organizing processes in addressing contemporary global challenges. The voices of activists, community organizers, and participants from the margins of global production of knowledge create different entry points for the conversations on social change, connecting the theorizing of change processes to the contingencies, challenges, and fragmentations in the practices of communication for social change. The opening keynote with Professor Collins Airhihenbuwa brought to the forefront the role of culture as an anchor to health and healing. Encouraging social change communication scholars to closely study the role of culture, Professor Airhihenbuwa opened up an invitational space for alternative imaginaries of social change communication.
Theorizing Communication for Social Change
Theories of communication for social change conceptualize communication in specific logics. The dominant constructions of social change communication reproduce an overarching framework of liberal democracy, circulating the imaginary of civil society, working hand in hand with mechanisms of the state and the market in constituting communication for social change. In this backdrop, the chapters presented in this collection interrogate the notions of democracy and capitalism, inverting on its head the very notion that capitalism is a necessity for sustaining democratic processes and practices. The mostly US-generated body of scholarship on communication and social change that pushes the US imperial agenda on the global arena is interrupted by the voices from other geographic locales, disrupting the assumptions about neutral and universal social change communication. An emergent theme across the articles in this edited collection is one of voice in the backdrop of the increasing consolidation of communicative power in the hands of the power elite. Attending to the inequalities in the circulation of communicative processes and communicative resources, the essays in this collection point to the constitutive role of communication as voice.
Methodology of Communication for Social Change
The question of methods for social change communication introduced in this edited collection deconstructs the very logic of what we understand as communication for social change. The naturalized notion of social change communication as planned social change projects driven from US/West-centric sites of expertise, in collaboration with local elites, is disrupted through the re-turning toward the many geographies of social change communication outside of the knowledge circuits of the West. What these many geographies reveal about communication for social change is at once the displacement of the key methodological tenets from the Cold War development logic, and the possibilities of a āpolitics of hopeā that emerges from elsewhere, offering theoretical anchors for āpollutingā the concepts of the mainstream. In the wide range of manuscripts that have been assembled here, the received concept of social change communication is disrupted by a plurivocality of methods for the study of communication for social change.
How Do We Evaluate Social Change Communication?
The concept of evaluating social change communication is plurivocalized, creating anchors for depicting social change from diverse viewpoints, particularly attending to the creation of spaces for knowledge creation from the margins. What does social change mean for those at the margins? How do communities at the margins of global development understand the effectiveness of social change communication? From the largely quantitative focus on field-based experiments, with pre/post comparisons between experimental and control communities, that has served as the gold standard for the measurement of the effectiveness of social change communication, articulations of effectiveness of social change communication from the global margins are grounded in narratives that describe the social change process, its effects on the lives of community members, and the effects on societal and cultural processes.
Stories as Method
The shift to the voices from the global margins interrupts the quantitative reproduction of knowledge on communication for social change, instead offering narratives as bases for building the evidence base for social change. For instance, in the voices of indigenous communities threatened to be displaced by an extraction project, putting a stop to the land grab is considered as evidence for effectiveness. Similarly, in the voices of communities of food-insecure households, having enough access to food is considered as a measure of effectiveness. In this sense, community member narratives depict the workings of the social change communication effort. Similarly, the stories of marginalized community members coming together in a collective and having their voices be heard in a discursive space that systematically erases them is an anchor to alternative definitions of social change communication.
The Scholar-as-Activist
The scholar-as-activist interrupts the dominant location of the scholar within elite structures of grant-funded, public-private interventions achieved through partnerships between the state, global civil society, and transnational capital. The foundation of āacademic tourismā where the scholar āgoes in and out of the communityā to push an expert-designed intervention into the community is inverted by the articulation of activism as the basis of social change communication scholarship, deeply intertwined with the struggles of the local communities scholars reside in, and committed to transforming the politics of the local as it enters into the global (Hartnett, 2007, 2010). Activism, by its very nature, identifies the structural conditions that reproduce injustices and the material contexts of marginalization, intervening into these marginalizing practices through communicative performances (Frey & Carragee, 2007).
Where the social change communication scholar sits and how she/he is mobilized to work on social change communication are fundamentally inverted in articulations of communication for social change emerging from the global margins. In contrast to the invisible expert academic located in elite centers of expertise in the North/West, far removed from the everyday struggles of the subaltern margins, the body of the scholar is placed in the middle of struggles of subaltern communities, āintervening into discoursesā (Frey & Carragee, 2007, p. 7). Rather than developing communication interventions from elite positions of privilege based on targets defined by funding agencies, private foundations, and corporations, the notion of the scholar-as-activist reorients its commitment to the voices of the margins, seeking to cocreate communicative infrastructures for subaltern participation. The turning of the scholar into an activist-participant is itself a resistive turn, retheorizing āacademia as habitusā (Bourdieu, 1984).
Interrogating Power
That social change is constituted in fields of power is a theme that works through many of the chapters. To examine and participate in social change communication therefore is to interrogate the organizing logics of power that constitute institutions, organizations, projects, and sites of social change communication (Dutta, 2015, 2017). The academic locus itself emerges as a site of interrogation, questioning the logics that constitute academic knowledge production and practice. The authoritarian regimes and totalitarian structures of governance across Asia (and more specifically Singapore in the context of local projects carried out by CARE) therefore suggest critical anchors for interrogating power and its workings in relationship to universities as sites of knowledge production (see for instance Tan, Kaur-Gill, Dutta, & Venkataraman, 2017). For instance, after the conference ended, and during a time when CAREās advocacy project on poverty (#nosingaporeansleftbehind) in Singapore came under scrutiny, institutional- state structures pointed to the social change communication conference, placing it under surveillance and seeking to know the purpose of the conference. The notion of activism and its relationship with academia is interrogated through the question of the body. Claims to activism are grounded in interrogations of embodied relationships and risks to the body constituted in relationships with power. Radical chic articulations of activism that serve to posture market-friendly academic brands that sell the neoliberal model of education are juxtaposed amid questions of activism as a site for interrogating power.
The suggestion that the location of social change communication within academia is out-of-the-ordinary or unacademic became the basis for much of the communication work of CARE, seeking to retain the space for legitimacy for carrying out ...