About this Research Topic
Drawing inspiration from Dutta and Pal’s (2021) conceptualization of the Global South as a space of neoliberal extraction we aim to bring together scholar-activists working with communities from traditionally designated Global South spaces, as well as North-South spaces (for example, zones of extraction of labor, recreating South-like conditions within the North), with the goal of leveraging communication and allied theory to enact structural change. We hope to engage scholar-activists working with traditionally marginalized and underrepresented communities across the globe, including but not limited to: (1) indigenous communities and communities of color experiencing environmental racism, (2) those affected by criminalizing and erasing state policies of mass incarceration, immigration, labor and healthcare, (3) communities in the crosshairs of socio-economic oppressions at the intersection of race, caste, class, gender, or (4) research that points a reflexive lens at Eurocentric, neoliberal academia in its Global South extractions.
Some examples of questions/issues we hope our scholars will examine include (but are not limited to) the following:
• How do settler colonial erasures of voice affect healthcare access for indigenous communities? How can communication and allied scholarship stand in solidarity and assist in the move towards equitable access to healthcare?
• What are the communicative inversions which operationalize precarious immigration as the new mass incarceration? (Communicative inversions are conceptualized by Dutta (2011) as “the use of communication to shift symbolic representations to signify the opposite of the material formations that communication seeks to represent”. For example, a communicative inversion surrounding migrant labor in Singapore is that the laborer returns to their home country with greater social mobility, when in fact, the worker remains in a vicious cycle of poor health and debt.
• What are the communicative erasures of human rights through pinkwashing in the context of occupied territories such as Palestine and Kashmir?
• How do neoliberal academic structures silence through inclusion? What is the role of DEI tokenism in recreating pockets of extraction among scholars of color?
• How can communication scholar-activists effectively operate from precarious labor positions, navigating the maxim that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house”? Lorde, A. (2018).
Foundational to this call is a demonstration of scholarship emerging from community-based contexts that go beyond extractions of data, to engagement and a movement towards structural transformation, whether in legal, political, educational, or social contexts, among others. We anticipate a focus on critically centered scholarship and welcome qualitative, quantitative, as well as mixed-methods research. This issue aims to create a space for dialogue between the peoples, scholars, and communities of the Global South, and a call to the communication discipline to establish tangible connections between theory and praxis in extractive contexts.
Finally, in addition to individual or co-authored work, this call is unique in that provides an opportunity to create a collaborative prospective piece with Global South scholar-activists, particularly those operating from a marginalized space with a deficit of research allocations for conducting funded research but have valuable reflexive contributions to make about community-engaged research. In the spirit of solidarity, we envision a prospective, reflexive tone for this collaborative piece with short narratives which will then be featured as a co-authored work by the journal editors, in consultation with the scholars.
Some examples of questions/issues we hope our scholars will examine include (but are not limited to) the following:
• How do settler colonial erasures of voice affect healthcare access for indigenous communities? How can communication and allied scholarship stand in solidarity and assist in the move towards equitable access to healthcare?
• What are the communicative inversions which operationalize precarious immigration as the new mass incarceration? (Communicative inversions are conceptualized by Dutta (2011) as “the use of communication to shift symbolic representations to signify the opposite of the material formations that communication seeks to represent”. For example, a communicative inversion surrounding migrant labor in Singapore is that the laborer returns to their home country with greater social mobility, when in fact, the worker remains in a vicious cycle of poor health and debt.
• What are the communicative erasures of human rights through pinkwashing in the context of occupied territories such as Palestine and Kashmir?
• How do neoliberal academic structures silence through inclusion? What is the role of DEI tokenism in recreating pockets of extraction among scholars of color?
• How can communication scholar-activists effectively operate from precarious labor positions, navigating the maxim that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house”? Lorde, A. (2018).
Foundational to this call is a demonstration of scholarship emerging from community-based contexts that go beyond extractions of data, to engagement and a movement towards structural transformation, whether in legal, political, educational, or social contexts, among others. We anticipate a focus on critically centered scholarship and welcome qualitative, quantitative, as well as mixed-methods research. This issue aims to create a space for dialogue between the peoples, scholars, and communities of the Global South, and a call to the communication discipline to establish tangible connections between theory and praxis in extractive contexts.
Finally, in addition to individual or co-authored work, this call is unique in that provides an opportunity to create a collaborative prospective piece with Global South scholar-activists, particularly those operating from a marginalized space with a deficit of research allocations for conducting funded research but have valuable reflexive contributions to make about community-engaged research. In the spirit of solidarity, we envision a prospective, reflexive tone for this collaborative piece with short narratives which will then be featured as a co-authored work by the journal editors, in consultation with the scholars.
Keywords: Community-based, Scholar-Activism, Global-South, Marginalized communities, Communication theory for social change
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