Working toward Change! Call for Solidarity!!

Professor Devika Chawla from Ohio University graciously sent me an email after having read my blog on "Eurocentric Disciplining," citing the piece that she and Professor Amardo Rodriguez co-authored, titled "Locating Diversity in Communication Studies" (Amardo was an assistant professor at Purdue and had left the department right before I joined the department here). Chawla & Rodriguez put forth the notion that the lack of diversity in Communication is fundamentally epistemological and ontological, privileging certain ways of knowing the world, and simultaneously foreclosing alternative visions of Communication that begin with worldviews that seek to de-center the status quo. They take to task what they identify as the paradigm of "inclusion, toleration, and accomodation, " and istead propose a new paradigm of "evolution, innovation, and confrontation."

I found this piece both thought provoking and inspiring...something I would like to use and cite in my own work. I also found this piece as an incredible ally to the work that we have been trying to do in our projects with the culture-centered approach. And yet, I wondered how I would have found this piece had it not been for Devika who found my blog and then thought of sending me this piece. You see, I have for a long time quit reading the International and Intercultural Comm Annual because of the ways in which I found the outlet to be incredibly parochial in spite of its focus on intercultural and international communication. And yet, that space had been beautifully disrupted by the Chawla & Rodriguez piece...

This sets up an important and incredible challenge for scholars working to disrupt the Euro-centered hegemony in Communication scholarship...If we are to really work toward making change in breaking down the boundaries of the field, we need to work in solidarity...citing each other, loving each other, and offering each other the nurturing that Chawla & Rodriguez talk about! It fills my heart with joy when I read pieces such as the Chawla & Rodriguez piece...It also gives me incredible hope for the future of our discipline.

At the cost of sounding functionalistic, let me note that I have found new media (FB, blogosphere, twitter...) to be an increadible resource for building such alliances outside of the traditional journal and conference spaces of the Discipline. Both journals as well as our conferences have become so sterile that it is difficult to locate works of others who are making similar arguments toward de-centering the status quo (and yet I am confident as I hear from many of you, that this de-centering is happening in major ways)...So I wrap up my blog today with a question for those of you that are reading this blog and thinking about the politics of change: How can we use social media as a tool for networking and solidarity building in working toward creating alternative epistemologies of Communication? Are there specific strategies that we can use to support each other through these platforms (in ways that projects of social change politics have leveraged resources in new media to work toward creating and reinforcing grassroots solidarities of change)?

The Haka, the Hurt, and the Work We Owe

The Haka, the Hurt, and the Work We Owe An Indian in Aotearoa reflects on resistance, complicity, and the solidarities we have yet to build Mohan Jyoti Dutta I watched the haka. I watched it several times, in fact. Each time, I tried to sit with what I was feeling before reaching for what I was supposed to think. Let me be honest about who I am in this conversation, because that matters. I am an upper caste, upwardly mobile Indian man. I am a professor at a university in Aotearoa. I carry the accumulated privileges of Brahminical socialisation, of English-medium education, of institutional access that was never designed for the communities I now write about and alongside. I say this not as confession but as orientation — because where you stand shapes what you see, and I have learned, through years of working with communities at the margins, that the refusal to name your own location is itself a colonial habit. The haka directed at Parmjeet Parmar did not offend me. It ...

Whiteness, NCA, and Distinguished Scholars

In a post made in response to the changes to how my discipline operates made by the Executive Committee of the largest organization of the discipline, the National Communication Association (NCA), one of the editors of a disciplinary journal Rhetoric and Public Affairs (RPA), Professor Martin J. Medhurst, a Distinguished Scholar of the discipline, calls out what he sees as the threat of identity (see below for his full piece published in the journal that he has edited for 20+ years, with 2019 SJR score of 0.27). In what he notes is a threat to the "scholarly merit" of the discipline, Professor Medhurst sets up a caricature of what he calls "identity." In his rhetorical construction of the struggles the NCA has faced over the years to find Distinguished Scholars of colour, he shares with us the facts. So let's look at the facts presented by this rhetor. It turns out, as a member of the Distinguished Scholar community of the NCA, Mr. Medhurst has problems with w...

The Substack and the Slur: How a Manufactured Crisis Toppled a Wahine Māori Political Editor

The Substack and the Slur: How a Manufactured Crisis Toppled a Wahine Māori Political Editor On the architecture of the Aotearoa culture-war machine, and the danger it poses to a democracy heading into 2026 There is a particular cadence to the afternoon on which the career of a senior Māori journalist at TVNZ is finished. It is unhurried. It begins with a tweet — in this case, a single image of a typed statement, posted by Maiki Sherman, the now-former political editor of TVNZ, on the afternoon of Friday, 8 May 2026, announcing that she had parted ways with the broadcaster. The post was terse, dignified, and final. As RNZ later reported , Sherman wrote that the scrutiny of the previous week had placed enormous pressure on her and rendered her role "untenable." The first wahine Māori to lead a major broadcaster's political team was gone. The story that finished her had not, ten days earlier, existed in any newspaper, on any wire, on any website you would consider mai...

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