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.

This book offers a fresh set of innovative and creative contributions related to the role of communication in processes of change. Given the current fast pace of social-economic, political and technological change across the globe, and the central role of communication in this, there is a growing need to reconceptualize how we approach communication and change that provides entry points to help us expand and enrich our scholarly and practical work. This collection presents 14 concepts from a multi-disciplinary collection of internationally leading and emerging scholars, from 13 countries on 5 continents. They come together around three meta-topics: citizenship and justice, critiques of development, and renewing thought (from and for the margins). The short chapter format ensures that authors get straight to the nub of their ideas, providing readers — students, scholars and practitioners alike — with accessible, engaging and innovative ways to think critically about communication and social change, in new ways.

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.

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).

This book argues that future generations of modernity as a whole will shape participatory modernization whether Chinese modernization or Western modernization. The public discourse is inundated with the good and the bad modern events with the acceleration of globalization. This book debates that the biggest question in the twenty-first century is not who will dominate, touting a new world order upon us, but rather that it is the orientation of modernization that haunts our daily realities. This book explores the idea that life is not about living for an identity in any society, it is about the demands for dignity and safety. It goes further to state that there is also a demand for the power of being, and these three elements are beyond identities as modernization moves forward. Interdisciplinary in nature, the book uses theories, data, and philosophy as toolboxes to align with microrealities around the globe. Witnessing modernization and modernizing identities in China and in Australia beyond day by day, the author provides a more suitable, more realistic, and possibly, more nuanced perspective. This book will be of interest to professionals, students, academics, as well as businesspeople with China experience, interested in modernization and identity, the Chinese perspective, and the new generation of Chinese.

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.