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 ...

The Suit Walks the Corridor

The Suit Walks the Corridor At ten past nine on a Monday the corridor on the top floor of the administration building fills with the sound of expensive shoes. The carpet up here was laid in the last refurbishment and still gives slightly underfoot, the way a good hotel lobby does, and the doors along it close with the soft, well-engineered thud of a German car. Along this carpet, in the direction of the lift marked Executive, comes the suit. It comes in navy and in charcoal, in the odd daring pinstripe, in the female version too, a tailored jacket over a silk shell, and heels that announce themselves on the tile of the lift lobby a full three seconds before the person arrives. The suit carries a flat white from the good cafe, the one that closed the student cafe to open, and a lanyard that swings with the confidence of a thing that opens doors. The suit passes the framed founding professors, who were photographed in gowns and look, at this distance, like a row of disapproving pe...

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...

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