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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: PGMC - Polity Global Media and Communication series
- Sprache: Englisch
How do the communication practices of governments, NGOs and social movements enhance opportunities for citizen-led change? In this incisive book, Thomas Tufte makes a call for a fundamental rethinking of what it takes to enable citizens' voices, participation and power in processes of social change. Drawing on examples ranging from the Indignados movement in Spain to media activists in Brazil, from rural community workers in Malawi to UNICEF's global outreach programmes, he presents cutting-edge debates about the role of media and communication in enhancing social change. He offers both new and contested ideas of approaching social change from below, and highlights the need for institutions - governments and civil society organizations alike - to be in sync with their constituencies. Communication and Social Change provides essential insights to students and scholars of media and communications, as well as anyone concerned with the practices and processes that lead to citizenship, democracy and social justice.
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Seitenzahl: 396
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Foreword (Silvio Waisbord)
Acknowledgements
1 Towards a New Social Thought in Communication and Social Change
A Call for a New Social Thought
Liberating Pedagogy in Rural Malawi
Mídia NINJA: Media Activists in Brazil
‘Noisy’ Activism and ‘Silent’ Community Work?
The History of Communication for Development and Social Change
Communication and Development and Social Change: Past Models
Revisiting the Epistemology of Communication for Social Change
2 Changing Contexts and Conceptual Stepping Stones
Societal Processes Influencing Communication for Social Change
Reclaiming the Political, Cultural and Mediatic
Development Paradigms and the Challenge of Pro-Poor Communication
Post-Colonialism and a Culture-Centred Approach
Media, Communication and Development
Towards a Critical Perspective on Communication for Development
3 Participation: A Project of Transformation
History of Participation: Discourses and Practices
Towards Citizen Power
Participatory Methodologies
Participatory Governance
Participatory Budgeting in Brazil
Participatory Communication
Reclaiming Participation as a Project of Transformation
4 Movements and Media, Communication and Change
New Practices, New Theory
Theorizing Social Movements
Los Indignados: Mobilizing for Social Change
Organizing for Social Change: From Collective Action to Connective Action?
Emancipatory Communication Activism
Mediapolis and the Symbolic Construction of Public Space
Contesting Horizontalism: Choreography of Collective Action
Constructing Shared Meanings, Identities and Narratives
Communication for Development and Social Movement Communication: Common Challenges
Notes
5 Cultures of Governance: Enhancing Empowerment and Resilience
Towards Global Cognitive Justice
Cibercultur@
Perceptions of Technology
Notes
6 Communication Movements
Communication Movements and Political Repertoires
The Dramaturgy of Social Change
Towards a New Grammar of Change
Notes
7 Invited Spaces: Institutions Communicating for Social Change
Perceptions of Development, Practices of Communication, Possibilities of Agency
Towards a Political Economy Analysis of the Communication for Development ‘Enterprise’
The Case of UNICEF
8 Towards a New Paradigm and Praxis in Communication and Social Change
Introduction
The Crisis of Development
A Citizen Perspective on Communication and Social Change
The Limits of a Representational Framework of Communication
Exclusion of Experience and the Shrinking of Public Space
Constructing a Civil Space of Potential and Possibility
References
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Global Media and Communication
Athique, Indian Media
Athique, Transnational Audiences
Chalaby, The Format Age
Flew, Global Creative Industries
Georgiou, Media and the City
Hegde, Mediating Migration
Mellor, Rinnawi, Dajani & Ayish, Arab Media
Orgad, Media Representation and the Global Imagination
Papathanassopoulos & Negrine, European Media
Tufte, Communication and Social Change
Communication and Social Change
A Citizen Perspective
THOMAS TUFTE
polity
Copyright © Thomas Tufte 2017
The right of Thomas Tufte to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2017 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press350 Main StreetMalden, MA 02148, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-1781-7
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Foreword
By Silvio Waisbord
Everything we knew about the nexus between communication and social change is up for grabs. Technological and social innovations constantly bring up new themes and questions and nudge us to rethink arguments about how and why communication matters for social change.
Even as more than half of the world does not use the Internet, digital technologies have upended traditional media industries and ushered in revolutionary forms of communication. The traditional divisions between interpersonal and mass, private and public, hierarchical and horizontal, one-way and multiple-way communication are no longer tenable. Digitalization has reshaped social interactions and deepened the mediatization of society. From reasonable debate to emotional discourse, the politics of voice are common despite concentrated economic power and elite politics. Just as digital technologies are used by power to enhance profit-making and surveillance, they are also utilized to monitor power and hold it accountable. The proliferation of communication platforms has spawned the disaggregation of the public spheres in multiple, parallel and scattered spaces.
Just like communicative transformations, social change is everywhere. Noisy, messy offline and digital activism attests to the vitality and unpredictability of politics. Organized publics mobilize to express demands and redress inequalities. Participation is not confined to specific, time-bound moments such as elections and referenda, but is a fixture of everyday life. Citizen participation and social mobilization facilitated by digital networks have shaken up the institutional architecture of liberal democracy and authoritarian regimes. The gradual incorporation of consultative mechanisms and citizens into public debates and policy-making in several countries attests to democratic governance in flux.
Significant advances in human rights in the past decades, too, reflect positive social changes. Even in a deeply unequal world, social movements have succeeded in several areas, such as women’s and children’s rights, political representation, cultural pluralism, sexual diversity and communication rights. In past decades, progress in girls’ education, global public health and poverty reduction offer glimmers of hopes about social justice.
Amid progress, reactionary backlash often rears its ugly head. Recurrent episodes of xenophobia, racism, sexism and political persecution are symptomatic of deep-seated forms of hatred. Intolerance is not exclusive to one corner of the world. The politics of hate and bigotry have no borders. Globally, large segments of the public stubbornly refuse to recognize diversity and human rights and cling to old orders. Governments of various ideological stripes resort to assorted tactics to curb or eliminate dissent. Opportunist demagogues whip up intolerance by appealing to the worst angels of our nature.
Against this backdrop, it is clear that no gain on the side of social justice is ever secured. Blowback is always a possibility. Excessive optimism is unwarranted.
This mixed picture of social change comes as no surprise. As a long line of progressive activists has contended, the betterment of the human condition is not a straightforward, sure-footed process. It is dotted with ups and downs, steps forward and backwards. Actions in support of emancipation are bound to run up against established powers and nostalgia for a world of social hierarchies and privileges of class, race, ethnicity, gender, nationalism, sexuality and religion. Sepia-tinted sentiments dangerously infuse resentment and reactionary politics in a world of rapid, constant changes.
Understanding the multiple dimensions of fast-moving social and communication transformations is challenging. The complexity and chaos of contemporary global societies make it difficult to produce neat and comprehensive accounts. Making sense of academic dispersion and turbocharged changes demands a panoramic view and considerable intellectual heft.
This book gets us closer to a better comprehension of scholarly debates about communication, collective action and social change. Thomas Tufte offers a valuable roadmap, packed with insightful, sophisticated and provocative ideas. He is a voracious reader and a thoughtful interpreter of debates and developments. The book deftly walks the reader through a dense theoretical maze – from modernization to post-colonialism. It exhibits a cosmopolitan sensibility that nimbly swings from Europe to Latin America to Africa, and taps into Tufte’s vast research experience that blends academic analysis and ethnographic work in the global South.
The book connects scattered literatures in order to build a fresh argument. Doing this is not easy considering that ‘communication and social change’ includes myriad lines of research – from digital insurgency to community dialogue, from aid/development programmes to information campaigns, from social movements to media criticism. Making sense of this intellectual smorgasbord demands familiarity with different bodies of research. Tufte takes a bird’s-eye perspective to make sense of a fuzzy field that overlaps intellectual and disciplinary traditions. He is not interested in repeating complacent, dogmatic approaches or rehashing tired debates about theoretical models and research paradigms. Instead, he brings together studies around the notion of citizen-driven changes, and shows that, time and time again, citizens are the protagonists of communication actions responsible for progressive change.
Tufte makes a call to put communicative citizenship at the centre of the analysis. Communication is another word for debate and collective action; it is not synonymous with information, public relations, branding, and the kind of ‘magic thinking’ common in the aid industry. The book provides plenty of examples showing that mobilized citizens and critical communication drive changes. It reminds us to be sceptical of ‘silver bullets’ that capture the ever-fleeting attention of aid agencies, corporate philanthropy and non-governmental organizations. Citizens are the true agents of change as they express demands, outline actions, criticize power, pressure governments and international agencies, draft proposals and so on. Yet the analysis does not offer a sentimental view of citizenship. Rather, it proposes a sober, clear-eyed view of when and why citizen participation makes a positive difference. Espousing an agency-centred view of communication and social change is essential, but we should not ex ante praise collective action. Not every form of participation necessarily contributes to progressive changes. Citizens can come together to achieve virtuous changes or push progress back. However, as Tufte shows, long-lasting, progressive social transformation necessarily demands citizenship.
In sum, the book makes a persuasive, evidence-based call to scholars, students, agencies and practitioners to focus on how communication processes articulate citizenship and positive social change. Tufte challenges us to think critically and to find analytical bridges between various streams of communication research. This is necessary to comprehend multiple dimensions of social change and inform practice.
Acknowledgments
Writing a book about communication and social change today is like running a marathon where the ‘finish line’ keeps moving and you can never really reach the end. We are living at a time of continuous and profound change in society. Technological, political and social transformations constantly influence citizens’ everyday lives and in particular their opportunities to engage in social change processes. Understanding these processes, and the role of communication herein, was at the core of this book project.
I have often felt that, and experienced how, governments and the organizations involved in international development cooperation contain a degree of inertia at their core, in the way they communicate to and with their constituencies. This has often limited and constrained the opportunities and abilities of citizens to participate in social processes influencing their own lives. At the same time, non-governmental organizations and social movements in particular have seemed to offer a more dynamic space for citizens to claim voice and visibility and engage in social change processes. However, as this book shows, the equation is not that simple.
This has in many ways felt like a seminal book for me to write. I have long experience of work as a researcher, consultant and co-director of the Ørecomm Centre for Communication and Glocal Change, as well as in teaching and lecturing in many countries and contexts. With this book, I have tried to pull together my research interests and lines of experience to offer my take on how to understand the current challenges facing, and opportunities for, successful citizen-led processes of social change. The world has changed a great deal since Andrea Drugan at Polity first contacted me back in 2011, and many people have helped me understand these changes and translate them into the analytical debates and insights offered in this book.
I would like to thank my co-director at Ørecomm, Oscar Hemer, for having read and commented on the full manuscript, but also for our many valuable debates about communication and social change over the years. Likewise Colin Chasi, with whom I have kept up an ongoing and inspiring dialogue throughout these years. Teke Ngomba, Morten Giersing and Leo Custodio have all read sections of the manuscript. All their comments were thoughtful and constructive, challenged me on my analysis and perspectives, and helped me improve the manuscript. In the process I have also had valuable student assistance from Sara Gevnoe Rasmussen, Charlotte Marie Hermann and Carlos Manuel Moraleda Melero.
Many other students and colleagues have been both helpful and inspirational. Numerous lectures given, doctoral courses taught and conference presentations offered across Latin America, Africa and Europe have offered me opportunities to broaden my perspective and enrich my analysis. This process has in particular involved students and colleagues at the University of Tirana, Albania; Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona; the University of Johannesburg; Moi University, Kenya; Universidad del Este, Paraguay; Universidade Metodista and ESPM, both in São Paulo, Brazil; Universidad del Norte, Colombia; and Universidad de Aguascalientes, Mexico. The entire argument about contesting ethnocentrism and criticizing the Western concept of development, which I make in this book, has grown out of my constant exposure to many different realities and ways of thinking. My thanks to all of you who were part of this ongoing dialogue.
In the world of organizations carrying out practical work on communication and social change, I found a lot of expertise on, and many insights into, how to translate concepts and approaches into practice and how practice can and must influence research. My year-long collaborations with Femina HIP in Tanzania, ADRA Denmark and ADRA Malawi, Soul City in South Africa and UNICEF, with Rafael Obregon in particular, were all extremely important parts of the process of writing this book. Numerous conversations, interviews and focus group discussions with citizens throughout the countries I have worked with helped to remind me of the need to ground the debates about communication and social change in the everyday lives of people, in the realities of people living and organizations working at community level.
Writing this manuscript also required silence and space for reflection. A month-long stay with Víctor Marí Sáez at the University of Cadiz in 2012 produced excellent discussions and time for immersion. The latter was also possible during a similar stay at the Danish Institute in Rome in 2014. Two shorter stays at Klitgården in Skagen in 2014 and 2016 offered similar opportunities for immersion, as have numerous stays in Birte’s safe havens in Sejrobugten and Portugal. My thanks to all who helped carve out these quiet spaces for me to reflect and write.
In pulling this all together as a book manuscript, thanks are also due to the anonymous peer reviewers, for their comments, and not least to the great and patient team at Polity – from the initial collaboration with Andrea Drugan to the further work with Elen Griffiths, Ellen MacDonald-Kramer and their colleagues in the production team. A special thanks goes to Andrew Mash, who read and reread all the drafts of the manuscript prior to its final submission to Polity, showing me the hard way just how difficult it is to write perfect English.
A special mention must go to Roskilde University and Malmö University, the two universities that constitute the institutional base for Ørecomm, which Oscar and I have co-directed since its inception in 2008. For many years Ørecomm constituted my home base for engagement and reflection in the field of communication and social change. I wish to thank the core Ørecomm team in recent years: Marie, Norbert, Jonas, Nina, Yuliya, Anders, Micke, Hugo, Ronald, Kathrine and Tobias, who all contributed to the realization of the Ørecomm Festivals and Symposia held in 2011–16. The Centre has been a base for international debate with researchers, practitioners, artists, students and consultants interested in understanding and engaging with communication and social change from a citizen perspective. This interest and commitment I have also found at my base at the University of Leicester. Thanks to all of you who have taken part.
Finally, I wish to dedicate this book to Laura, Anna and Pernille. Without your patience, support and smiles, this book would never have been written.
Leicester
6 December 2016
1Towards a New Social Thought in Communication and Social Change
A Call for a New Social Thought
The French sociologist and theorist of new social movements Alain Touraine makes a powerful call for ‘a new social thought’ in his book Thinking Differently (Touraine 2009). Touraine abandons the ‘exhausted evolutionism’ of the dominant discourse and seeks to recognize that the subject should be based on the right of all individuals and groups to be recognized and respected:
The most profound thing about the social thought we inherited was the positivistic conviction that modernity meant the elimination of … any kind of reference to the consciousness of actors. We were taught to content ourselves with two principles when it came to analyzing behaviours: the rational pursuit of self-interest or pleasure, and the fulfilment of the functions required by the perpetuation and evolution of social life. (Touraine 2009, 5)
Touraine’s call for a new social thought is a timely commentary on the dominant neoliberal development discourse, which increasingly seems to be incapable of respecting the rights and needs of every individual and group to be recognized and respected, but instead allows market logic to determine who is heard, who can voice their concerns and who is empowered to act.
There is a growing questioning of the dominant Western model of economic growth. A highly detailed example of this critique comes from the French economist Thomas Piketty. His book Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Piketty 2014) questions the ability of a capitalist economy to prevent inequality. The critique of the neoliberal economic model is much broader, however, as reflected in the post-colonial critiques of Western development paradigms (Escobar 1995; Bhabha 2004; Fanon and Markmann 1952; Mbembe 2001) and seen in the emergence of new ways of conceiving development, such as the ‘Gross National Happiness Index’ in Bhutan (Ura, Kinga and Centre for Bhutan Studies 2004) or the notion of ‘Buen Vivir’ in Latin America, which emphasizes sustainability and ecology as elements of a good life (Silva 2011).
The idea of this book is to approach contemporary studies of communication and social change within this wider call for a new social thought (Touraine 2009, 92) that is embedded in a sociology of the subject and agency. This is a sociology that recognizes at the outset the potential power of active sense-making and the action of the individual. Furthermore, it places this sense-making and action within the domain of the collective. What is proposed in this book is a notion of the subject that is radically different from the dominant paradigms within communication for development.
I propose a ‘citizen perspective’ on communication for social change that is embedded in this broader sociological call for a new social thought. This opens up opportunities to revisit the concepts of modernity and development, and the ideas of individual action and of social movements. It will require a deeper analysis of the underlying cultural models that influence local processes of deliberation and activism. However, a citizen perspective is first and foremost a proposition for a notion of the subject that opposes functionalist approaches to processes of change, and consequently to communication for development and social change. As Touraine argues, we ‘have to get away from anything that defines sociology as the study of social systems and their functions … the most important thing is that the behavioural conformity is no longer imposed by particularity of a culture of society, but by the way everyone is constructed as a subject who has universal rights as well as an individual being’ (Touraine 2009, 8).
This approach enables communication for development scholars to take an often neglected step back from analysing the particular strategies for communication implemented by specific organizations and social actors, and instead embed and review the communication practices and relations between subjects and institutions from a much broader social and cultural perspective. Only then can we start to construct a deeper and less instrumental understanding of the relation between communicative practice and social change. For many within the field of communication for development, this is more about ‘unlearning’ established perspectives on strategies of communication, loosening up and becoming more open to seeing communication as a fundamentally social, relational and dynamic process.
Emerging questions
In reviewing the changing character of communication practices between citizens and institutions, a number of concrete questions emerge:
How do scholars and practitioners understand and conceptualize development, agency, participation, media use and communication practices?
How are today’s young citizens making use of the digital media? What synergies are sparked between old and new media and communication practices?
How do institutions communicate with their constituencies? To the degree that they are pursuing social change objectives, what notion of social change informs their communicative practice?
What outcomes are the social movements achieving? Can they sustain their mobilizations beyond the short term?
How, if at all, are social movements and their communicative practices influencing the ways in which United Nations agencies, governments, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and other stakeholders communicate with citizens?
Have the massive civic engagements and their multiplicity of demands influenced the global development debate? If so, what novel notions of development are we seeing?
This first chapter offers a critical review of the main lines of research on social change- and social justice-oriented media and communication practices. This book has grown out of an interest in the interdisciplinary field that deals with the role of communication in processes of development and social change, but is written at a time when this discipline is almost drowning in its own success. A prolific research interest has emerged around the dynamics between media, communication, civic engagement and social change. It is being approached from a variety of perspectives, many of which have evolved in parallel with each other – but with only limited cross-fertilization.
With the objective of challenging the impermeability of this ‘silo thinking’, this book identifies and discusses how each of these fields contributes to a deeper academic insight into the relations between media, communication, civic engagement and social change. First, however, this chapter retrieves key developments in the field of communication and social change from the silos with which it has traditionally been associated. As a first step, let us visit two locations where citizens engage in communicative practices that offer examples of the different dynamic relations that exist between practices of communication and processes of social change.
Liberating Pedagogy in Rural Malawi
On a hot afternoon in the south-eastern corner of Mulanje, Malawi, a group of farmers, mostly women, has come by bicycle or on foot to a ‘difficultto-access’ deep rural site, a wall-less school building on the outskirts of a village some 50 kilometres by dirt road from the nearest town. The meeting has been arranged by ADRA Malawi, an NGO that works with dialogic communication, using face-to-face communication to enhance processes of empowerment that enable local communities to advocate for their rights, hold their local governments accountable and improve their livelihoods. ADRA Malawi is a national NGO but part of the larger Adventist Development and Relief Agency (ADRA), which has national organizations across the globe. One of the development programmes run by ADRA Malawi is ‘Action for Social Change’ (ASC). It receives the bulk of its support from the governmental bilateral Danish International Development Agency (DANIDA), which supports ASC through ADRA Denmark.
Assisted by the training facilitated by ADRA, community-based groups gain insights into their potential role as civil society actors and are enabled to hold dialogues with the relevant authorities and advocate on issues that affect them. ADRA complements this community-based work with the radio dramas it produces for a national audience, which are broadcast in the early morning before the farmers go off to their fields. The television drama ADRA produces is not relevant in this area, where nobody has a television, but is instead directed at the more urban populations it also works with.
Characteristic of ADRA’s work in East and Southern Africa, and in Malawi in particular as the pioneering country in this respect, is the strong strategic use of media and communication as a way to inform, engage and mobilize, as well as raise awareness of and advocate on citizen-driven issues pertaining to the development themes of HIV/AIDS and livelihood/food security. ADRA Malawi has made an explicit and strategic effort to work with both mass media, in the form of radio and television programming, and interpersonal communication, in the form of community dialogue sessions, in its efforts to deal with these development challenges.
The farmers I meet are organized in a so-called REFLECT group, which stands for ‘Regenerated Freirean Literacy through Empowering Community Techniques’. The communication principles practised in these groups originate from the Brazilian adult educator Paulo Freire, whose ideas of a liberating pedagogy have been widely used and incorporated into education policies around the world, and become a strong strand of thinking in the field of communication and social change. Freire’s ideas have travelled far, from his work on literacy and a bottom-up liberating pedagogy in Brazil in the 1950s and early 1960s, to work focused on participatory communication led by the Institute for Development Studies in Sussex in the 1980s. The REFLECT methodology was later spread further by Action Aid, and is now widely used by many development NGOs.
Since 2011, ADRA Malawi has incorporated the creation of REFLECT groups into its community-based work with rural communities, building on its work since the early 1990s, but now with an explicit long-term development goal of strengthening ‘a vibrant, locally rooted civil society in Malawi which can be a dynamic actor in social, political and economical development processes in areas of livelihood/food security and health’ (Action for Social Change: ADRA Malawi Programme 2010). Thus, although communication practices and the strategic use of media platforms are central to its work, the overarching agenda is advocacy and social change in the areas of health, food security and livelihoods more generally.
What I witness on an afternoon in August 2012 is a group of local villagers meeting at one of its regular assemblies to discuss the challenges faced by group members, taking turns to draw problem trees, identify possible solutions and, facilitated by an ADRA ‘community facilitator’, formulate strategies to deal with these challenges (see figure 1). The group members seem very confident with each other, and also with the ADRA community facilitator, who is from the region and regularly rides his motorbike out to the village to participate in the meetings.
Figure 1. REFLECT group at work in a village in southern Malawi
Source: Thomas Tufte
Central to pursuing the group’s programme goals is a training methodology built around the REFLECT pedagogical and operational methodology. This helps ADRA enhance the capacity of local communities to organize themselves, and communicate and advocate on core issues relevant to stakeholders in order to achieve improved services, better prices and – at the end of the process – improved livelihoods.
The inbuilt logic of ADRA’s work with REFLECT is the assumption that synergies can be created between development challenges such as HIV/ AIDS prevention, food security and improved livelihoods. ADRA’s work with REFLECT also contains a component focused on building ADRA’s capacity to become part of and further support the development of a vibrant civil society in Malawi. Finally, the work on REFLECT and community orientation is linked to ADRA’s development of dynamic national and local media platforms that can enhance the social processes articulated at the community level.
The important question is therefore: is ADRA succeeding in communicating for social change? What I observed on that afternoon, and what I have seen repeatedly in ADRA’s work over a decade, is the unfolding of a gradual and expanding awareness-raising process that is enabling communities to articulate demands and engage in collective action. Numerous results have been achieved, such as successfully holding the local government accountable for rebuilding a broken bridge, negotiating better subsidies on fertilizers, and achieving better facilities for voluntary counselling and testing for HIV and AIDS. Less visible, but fundamental, is what Paulo Freire called the process of ‘conscientization’ or, for want of a better phrase, the awareness-raising process that led to processes of collective action, mostly at the community level.
ADRA has replicated this type of work in several hundred similar communities across the region. These efforts have been linked closely to processes of organizational development, from the formation of community-based groups to registering as formal associations and establishing networks at the local, regional, national and even international levels. All this has been complemented by ADRA’s strategic use of the mass media to engage all relevant stakeholders in ‘national conversations’ around the topics that emerge from community dialogue sessions in the villages.
Although it is not possible to deconstruct fully the processes of change, or the institutional objectives guiding these processes, one key lesson to learn from this example is that at a time heavily influenced by social uprisings and social movements, and their ability to articulate social change, and at a time when new technologies are attributed significant roles in some of these social change processes, we must remind ourselves of community-based efforts to communicate for social change. These are efforts that do not make headlines in the media, and are often considered ‘silent’ vis-à-vis the criteria for visibility in the public sphere. They are therefore less visible, less ‘noisy’ and not as articulate as some of the more recent social uprisings. However, they are possibly achieving more concrete development results, and thus social change outcomes that equal or surpass some of the many social movements across the globe that are mobilizing and communicating their way to achieving social change.
Having flagged the merits of this community-oriented practice of communicating for social change, let us contrast this with an illustration of how media activists in Brazil work to enhance processes of change through mediated citizen responses to current development challenges.
Mídia NINJA: Media Activists in Brazil
It is a warm day on the sertão, the dry, rural outback of north-east Brazil, in October 2013. In the city of Juazeiro, the local university is organizing a panel on ‘New Media and Social Movements’, and that same evening a new journal on communication and social change in rural settings is to be launched. I have been invited to sit on the panel and to join the editorial board of the new journal. Yet another bottom-up communication initiative is emerging in Brazil, a country known for its 10,000-plus community radio stations and vibrant civil society; but also for being the sixth-largest economy in the world and for some of the most powerful media institutions, such as Rede Globo, the world’s largest producer of television fiction, and Veja, a weekly magazine with one of the world’s largest print runs. Furthermore, Brazil is a country with more than 100 postgraduate degree courses in communication, more than 15 doctoral programmes in communication and 4,000–5,000 participants in the annual national assemblies for researchers and students of communication. In many ways, Brazil is a world leader in community media presence, print media volume, fiction media output, and media and communication research. However, because it is all produced in Portuguese, it achieves limited distribution in the Anglo-Saxon world.
The small city of Juazeiro lies in the region where, some fifty-five years earlier, Paulo Freire used his liberating pedagogy and participatory communication to teach literacy and raise critical awareness among landless peasants. That time marked a moment of change in the history of Brazil, when conflicting visions of development in the country led to clashes between power holders and the people, which ultimately resulted in a military coup and more than two decades of military dictatorship (1964–85).
This colossal nation is once again experiencing conflicting visions of development. In June 2013 protests were sparked by increases in bus prices in São Paulo, but soon spread to more than 400 cities across Brazil to articulate a nationwide rebellion and give voice to a set of complaints that fundamentally questioned the ability of power holders to provide social justice, health and education for all. The rebellions emerged in the period preceding and during the mega-event of the FIFA World Cup, which was held in twelve cities across Brazil in June-July 2014, but also contained references to and critiques of the Rio Olympics, held in 2016. Massive demonstrations were organized to protest against corruption and the mismanagement of public funds, the eviction of citizens and violations of human rights.
One of the activists, Thiago Dezan, was also on the panel in Juazeiro. Thiago is a tall, pale young man, then aged 23. He is from the provincial city of Cuiabá but lives in Rio. He seemed more focused on his iPhone than on the several hundred students in the audience. Demonstrations in Rio and São Paulo the night before had resulted in mass arrests, and he had been awake most of the night, communicating with fellow activists.
Thiago is a key member of Mídia NINJA, a network of media activists and citizen journalists committed to giving voice to and a fairer representation of ordinary citizens in the mediated public sphere. They are present at protests and demonstrations with their cameras and smartphones, and they film and then post and disseminate their images and messages online. They also actively seek to prevent Globo from filming and transmitting, out of a conviction that it is misrepresenting events. Fundamentally, Mídia NINJA represents an alternative vision of how to represent ordinary citizens in the media and voice their struggles.
Mídia NINJA has been highly successful at making many of the street demonstrations and grassroots activities visible through active and efficient online networking and dissemination. These were fully integrated into the vast and diverse network of social movements that erupted into the massive demonstrations of June 2013, and gradually developed and continued to demonstrate their discontent during preparations for and the progress of the World Cup. Mídia NINJA’s role was strategic in the sense that it worked consistently to gain maximum coverage for trusted activists in the network in order to secure visibility for the demonstrations and other street events. The growing national network also ensured that the nationwide dimensions of the uprisings were communicated and disseminated online. Thus, when Thiago Dezan attended the seminar in Juazeiro, his participation ensured visibility for Mídia NINJA’s role in the social movements, and provided an opportunity to network and show solidarity with local social movements mobilizing around the same set of causes.
‘Noisy’ Activism and ‘Silent’ Community Work?
Taken together, the NGO-facilitated liberating pedagogy in rural Malawi and the media activism by discontented urban youth in Brazil represent the variety in citizen responses to contemporary development challenges – responses that have media and communication practices at the heart of their strategies.
Mídia NINJA, which arose from within the Brazilian social movements, is just one example of the newer forms of social movement media experience. It converges with the more classic, community-based, communication for social change type of work carried out by ADRA in rural Malawi, work I consider to be equally innovative and just as able to articulate collective action and social change.
ADRA is an example of an NGO-driven process articulating community mobilization and collective action. Mídia NINJA, on the other hand, is a more multipolar and even fragmented process of social groups and movements connecting in networks and organizing through communication. Their dynamics, orchestration and organization of mobilization and social movements, as well as their use of social media and their overall communicative approaches, highlight a whole new way of both organizing and communicating for social change. Both are examples of the communication practices for social change that this book analyses in detail, bringing empirical insights into dialogue with new and relevant theory on communication for social change. Many questions guide this dialogue between theory and practice. Most notably: how can communication researchers, planners and practitioners conceptualize, strategize and act out their ways to social justice and social change? To answer such questions, I draw on and seek to connect the many parallel debates found in the social movement-based activism, on the one had, and the more institutionalized experiences led by NGOs, CBOs and even by governments, on the other.
Although different in many ways, a common denominator can be found in their explicit critique of policies and of negative social impact on ordinary people. The groups’ demands have also been quite similar, as seen in the struggles for social justice, human rights and inclusion in governance processes. A multitude of citizens, many young, but not all, took to the streets in numerous countries across the globe to contest political dictatorships, financial crises and mass unemployment, producing a global wake-up call around the societal costs that many decades of autocratic leadership and neoliberal development have produced.
This plethora of agency has in many cases been ‘noisy’ in the sense of attracting attention, and although often slow at the beginning, ended up being highly visible in the public sphere. It has been focused on activism outside of established institutions and achieved what can be seen as spectacular results, not least the overthrow of presidents in Tunisia and Egypt. This ‘noisiness’ has also been seen in the expressions of mass popular outcry – of which the examples are many beyond Tunisia and Egypt, and include Iran, Greece, Spain, Thailand, Chile and Brazil, as well as Hong Kong and South Africa, to mention just a few. Less noisy in this sense, however, and more embedded in existing civil society organizations and structures, are the far greater number of examples of agency that can be found in ongoing ‘development work’ on the ground, of which the Malawi case is one example.
One of the key challenges of communication for social change today, as a field of both theory and practice, lies in recognizing and exploring the common challenges of the ‘noisy’ activist social movements often seen in cities, and the more ‘silent’ community work of civil society organizations, often seen in rural areas. The latter are well known for their long-standing work on communication for development and social change. This arena has been instrumental in the development of key concepts and theories dealing with communication and social change, and is today centrally placed in the field of communication for development. The concepts and theories in this field, however, are being challenged by the creativity, performance and media dynamics seen, for example, in the social movements in Brazil.
It is my belief that as the situation unfolds following the apparently ‘noisy’ peaks of the current waves of protest, the underlying social movements from which these often spring are increasingly being faced with classic challenges well known from the long-term and more silent development work of civil society – the challenges of organization, sustainability, legitimacy, strategic thinking and funding. This situation invites comparative analysis and the posing of similar questions to both processes of social change, including an inquiry into how each conceptualizes social change, and the role of media and communication practices in their social change processes.
The vast social uprisings as well as the long struggle for development even in remote rural Malawi are affected by a profound globalization of economies, politics and social relations. We are witnessing a gradual unfolding of cosmopolitan values and realities, and the transnationalization of social networks and civic engagement. All this is combined with a deepening process of mediatization that is influencing the logics of communication in the everyday lives of both systems and subjects. This is a general trend, but its processes vary significantly from the high end, in the connected countries of Europe, to places such as the villages in Mulanje or many other similar regions found across not only Africa, but also Latin America, where access remains a huge challenge. In this context, how can the ‘new social thought’ that Touraine calls for emerge and place ordinary people at the centre of contemporary visions and practices of development? The fact is that the examples from Malawi and Brazil both work to achieve exactly that.
The global wave of activism which the world has experienced, combined with developments in new digital media, have brought powerful dynamics into the equation of relations between citizens, the state, government, the media and the private sector. They have sparked a long list of questions that many, especially younger, scholars are grappling with today. It seems to be the technological innovations and the condensed moments of insurgency involving visible and immediate transformations that are catching the eye of the social scientists.
As my example from Malawi indicates, a lot of work on the ground – community work, social work and work in rural areas on health, agriculture, environmental issues, peace and education – is where much of the development and social change takes place. These processes, however, appear currently to be at the margins of the fashionable focus on social movements and citizen engagement. To reiterate my metaphor: the noisy, mainly urban process of transformation is gaining a lot of attention, while the quieter process of transformation, less visible and often in rural settings, captures far less attention but is definitely making noise in its own way. While research into social movements tends to concentrate on the peaks of mobilization and contestation, development research and communication for development research have traditionally been far more oriented towards the slow, less noisy and difficult-to-see-or-grasp processes of change.
Many current citizen-driven practices of media and communication are embedded in this dilemma between wishful optimism and a belief in fundamental changes happening in the immediacy of contemporary collective action, on the one hand, and recognition that fundamental social change requires long struggles in order to challenge power structures, cultural practices and the socio-economic realities of everyday life, on the other. This has been seen in many social uprisings of recent years, such as in Egypt in 2011, Brazil and Turkey in 2013, but also in the student uprisings in South Africa in 2015. Nick Couldry was therefore expressing timely scepticism in mid-2011, a time of intense upheaval across the world, when he wrote: ‘Much is made of the use of social media in, say, times of political protest, but political upheavals are poor guides to wider change, since they are precisely exceptional. Entertainment and the basic necessities of holding things together may be a much more useful guide’ (Couldry 2012, 19).
What cuts across from the farmer in the REFLECT group in rural Malawi to Mídia NINJA’s media activism in Brazilian street demonstrations is their concern to position ordinary citizens in processes of social change, and claim their role as actors in social change processes. This book shares this concern and is particularly focused on exploring the role of the media and communication practices used during the positioning of ordinary citizens in contemporary social change processes. A notion of the subject that opens up space and generates attention for the ordinary citizen to be recognized as a fundamental social actor in processes of change became highly visible in the social uprisings that swept the world, but is also notable in the less spectacular community work for social change. Exploring some of the spaces that were opened up and how communication played a role is at the heart of this book. First, however, let us take a step back to explore some of the roots and past trajectories of communication for development, which will help us to understand the current challenges for the field.
The History of Communication for Development and Social Change
The well-known story of the history of communication for development and social change is the story of two competing paradigms – the paradigm of ‘diffusion of innovations’ (Rogers 1995) and the participatory paradigm (Freire 2001). In the multiplicity of communication approaches that have been applied to development over the years, these two main schools have dominated and still coexist as the main conceptual orientations in the practice of communication for development. On the one hand, the diffusion model is based on Everett Rogers’ diffusion theory of the early 1960s, but encompasses a broad range of strategies all of which aim to resolve the problem of a ‘lack of knowledge and information’ (Rogers 1995). These strategies are primarily expert-driven. They have external change agents as their drivers and little or no room for participatory processes. The essence of these approaches is linear, monologue-like communication in top-down processes.
On the other hand, there is the participatory model based on Paulo Freire’s liberating pedagogy from the 1960s, but renewed in the context of the post-development development paradigm (Escobar 1995). This school of thought brings the issues of globalization, transnational networking, new media and governance into the thinking on strategic communication, and these issues help to determine the objective of strategic communication. Rather than
