A new addition to the Palgrave Studies in Communication for Social Change series, this book sets the stage for subsequent books by identifying and analysing the current gaps in the field. It critically reviews the theory, practice and strategies of Communication for Social Change in relation to occurring structures, policies and discourses.

A new addition to the Palgrave Studies in Communication for Social Change series, this book sets the stage for subsequent books by identifying and analysing the current gaps in the field. It critically reviews the theory, practice and strategies of Communication for Social Change in relation to occurring structures, policies and discourses.

Proposes situating theory and practice within contexts of power, recognizing both the ability of dominant groups to control and the potential for marginal communities to resist. Contributors from communication and anthropology explore the global and institutional structures within which agencies construct social problems and interventions, the discourse guiding the normative climate for conceiving and implementing projects, and the practice of strategic interventions for social change. Examines early and emerging models of development, power dynamics, ethnographic approaches, gender issues, and information technologies.

"In this book, the authors address one, some, or many of the following: documenting, studying, analyzing, constructing, and deconstructing the role and place of development communication scholarship and practice in directed social change. Importantly, this volume attempts to re-conceptualize and re-operationalize the real meaning and goal of development today and then proceeds to look at development communication scholarship and practice in terms of its fit and niche within a more appropriate goal of directed social change." --Publisher's website.

Drawing on the culture-centered approach (CCA), this book re-imagines culture as a site for resisting the neocolonial framework of neoliberal governmentality. Culture emerged in the 20th Century as a conceptual tool for resisting the hegemony of West-centric interventions in development, disrupting the assumptions that form the basis of development. This turn to culture offered radical possibilities for decolonizing social change but in response, necolonial development institutions incorporated culture into their strategic framework while simultaneously deploying political and economic power to silence transformative threads. This rise of “culture as development” corresponded with the global rise of neo-liberal governmentality, incorporating culture as a tool for globally reproducing the logic of capital. Using examples of transformative social change interventions, this book emphasizes the role of culture as a site for resisting capitalism and imagining rights-based, sustainable and socialist futures. In particular, it attends to culture as the basis for socialist organizing in activist and party politics. In doing so, Culture, Participation and Social Change offers a framework of inter-linkage between Marxist analyses of capital and cultural analyses of colonialism. It concludes with an anti-colonial framework that re-imagines the academe as a site of activist interventions.

This book explores how community radio contributes to social change. Community radio remains a unique communication platform under digital capitalism, arguably capable of expanding the project of media democratisation. Yet there is a lack of in-depth analysis of community radio experience, and a dearth of understanding of its functionality as an actively transformative tool for greater equity in society. This project combines the theoretical positions of the political economy of communication with a citizen’s media perspective in order to interrogate community radio’s democratic potential. By presenting case studies of two radio stations in Melbourne and Lospalos, and applying multiple research methods, the book reveals community radio’s amplification of media participation, communication rights, counter-hegemony and media power — in effect, its distinct regenerative voice.

The book covers the trajectories and trends in social change communication, engaging the key theoretical debates on communication and social change. Attending to the concepts of communication and social change that emerge from and across the global margins, the book works toward offering theoretical and methodological lessons that de-center the dominant constructions of communication and social change. The chapters in the book delve into the interplays of academic-activist-community negotiations in communication for social change, and the ways in which these negotiations offer entry points into transformative communication processes of social change. Moreover, a number of chapters in the book attend to the ways in which Asian articulations of social change are situated at the intersections of culture, structure, and agency. Chapters in the book are extended versions of research presented at the conference on Communicating Social Change: Intersections of Theory and Praxis held at the National University of Singapore in 2016, organized under the umbrella of the Center for Culture-Centered Approach to Research and Evaluation (CARE).