Communication, Culture and Social Change: Meaning, Co-option and Resistance 9783030264697, 9783030264703

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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN COMMUNICATION FOR SOCIAL CHANGE

Communication, Culture and Social Change Meaning, Co-option and Resistance

Mohan Dutta

Palgrave Studies in Communication for Social Change Series Editors Pradip Thomas University of Queensland Brisbane, Australia Elske van de Fliert University of Queensland Australia

Communication for Social Change (CSC) is a defined field of academic enquiry that is explicitly transdisciplinary and that has been shaped by a variety of theoretical inputs from a variety of traditions, from sociology and development to social movement studies. The leveraging of communication, information and the media in social change is the basis for a global industry that is supported by governments, development aid agencies, foundations, and international and local NGOs. It is also the basis for multiple interventions at grassroots levels, with participatory communication processes and community media making a difference through raising awareness, mobilising communities, strengthening empowerment and contributing to local change. This series on Communication for Social Change intentionally provides the space for critical writings in CSC theory, practice, policy, strategy and methods. It fills a gap in the field by exploring new thinking, institutional critiques and innovative methods. It offers the opportunity for scholars and practitioners to engage with CSC as both an industry and as a local practice, shaped by political economy as much as by local cultural needs. The series explicitly intends to highlight, critique and explore the gaps between ideological promise, institutional performance and realities of practice. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14642

Mohan Dutta

Communication, Culture and Social Change Meaning, Co-option and Resistance

Mohan Dutta Center for Culture-centered Approach to Research & Evaluation (CARE), School of Communication, Journalism & Marketing Massey University Palmerston North, New Zealand

Palgrave Studies in Communication for Social Change ISBN 978-3-030-26469-7    ISBN 978-3-030-26470-3 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26470-3 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover image: Khandup Sherpa / EyeEm Cover design: eStudioCalamar This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

For Ma, Master of Arts (Philosophy), my first teacher, my anchor, my inspiration, For Debalina, Doctor of Philosophy (Communication), for our journeys of learning together

Preface: Journeys and Movements

Places that we travel to, where we locate ourselves, and from where we speak constitute our understandings of our life-worlds. My journey from Kharagpur, a mofussil town that housed the hallowed Indian Institute of Technology created by the Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and nurtured by my great grand-uncle Sir Jnan Chandra Ghosh, its first Director, to the bustling Kolkata in Eastern India, to Fargo, North Dakota, to study Agricultural Engineering and then Communication, to Minneapolis, Minnesota, to study Social Marketing under the guidance of Professor William D.  Wells and Ronald Faber at the University of Minnesota, to West Lafayette, Indiana, where I began my journey as Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at Purdue University, to the National University of Singapore in Singapore, and then to Massey University in Palmerston North, New Zealand, constitutes the various turns I seek to explore in my understanding of the relationship between culture and communication for social change. That how we come to understand a subject and engage with it shaped by our shifting positions is a lesson that continually emerged through these different journeys. Our journeys through different geographies situate us in different positions, both enabling us to see the world in certain ways and, at the same time, limiting the possibilities that we envision. Social change itself is a dynamic process and any study of change is situated amid our journeys as scholars and practitioners participating in processes of communication for social change. I have found my own conceptual understanding of social change move from a Marxist understanding embedded in the practice of Marxist cultural work as a ­participant vii

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in the Indian Peoples Theater Association (IPTA) to my training in the social-psychological basis of individualized social change in graduate school, to turning to socialist communication for social change processes in current collaborations with trade unions, activists, indigenous rights groups, and political parties. The work of communication intertwined with culture frames the politics underlying social change communication scholarship, embedding the social change processes in relationship to structures. The nature of culture and its various trajectories in communication for social change are the main topics of this book. My own thinking on culture and its meaning in social change communication has changed, shaped by my many experiences in academia, and, more importantly, in community, activist and academic partnerships across geographic spaces. The work of CARE, negotiating spaces within and outside institutions, has shaped my thinking. Cultural practices can both reify structures and be the very bases for bringing about changes in structures. The understanding of the role of culture and how it plays out are, therefore, the key elements in communication for social change. How culture is conceptualized and then tied to specific forms of communication for social change depict the range of theoretical positions that emerge in the literature. The book focuses on the role of dominant approach to culture in the context of neoliberal interventions. Culture here is treated as a resource that can be quantified and deployed toward generating profits. This treatment of culture as a resource will serve as a basis for discussing culture in the culture-centered approach (CCA), exploring convergences and divergences. I am excited to discuss the CCA, especially in the context of its engagement with structures through resistance. The positioning and locating of the work of the CCA was both an opportunity for exploring the possibilities of resistance to global capital across diverse sites in Asia, as well as for coming to understand the challenges to an emancipatory politics that emerged from culturalist claims (more on this in Dutta, forthcoming). Culture as a framework for whitewashing neoliberal capitalism, on one hand, props up celebratory stories of economic growth narrated in culturalist language, and, on the other hand, is the very site where meanings from the margins, filled with other imaginations, break apart oppressive structures. What do the celebratory stories of alternative modernity, that is, alternative capitalisms, albeit narrated in different forms and through accounts of different methods, erase? What cultural stories do we not listen to when we put forth hegemonic cultural ideas of modernity?

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For instance, what stories of modernity are actively erased in the cultural story of “Make in India?” What stories remain unheard in the “Singapore model?” What accounts of violence are strategically displaced in the narrative of reviving the Silk Route in the form of “One Belt, One Road?” To examine these questions about the framing of culture in communication for social change, we ought to attend to the ways in which structures constitute these conversations. The interplays between culture and structure form the foundation of how I see social change communication. Throughout the book, we will work through the many ways in which culture appears in communication for social change, connecting the concepts of social change communication with an exploration of the location of the social change communication work at the interfaces of academe, activism, and communities. The very articulation of culture is structured, situated within structures of meaning and meaning hierarchies, embedded within relationships of power. Power shapes how culture is conceptualized and incorporated into communication. Moving to Singapore to study culture, initially as an opportunity to exploring what it means to theorize from/in Asia and working with various communities at the margins of Asia, taught me to interrogate culturalist narratives of “Asian revival.” The “Asian century” that I was turning to, moving from the US Midwest to the crossroads of Asia, is a carefully constructed imaginary that is embedded within hegemonic structures, paradoxically reproducing some of the very same exploitative logics of these structures. Even as I sat in on conferences, conversations and workshops on the “Asian turn,” I increasingly became aware of the erasures that are written into this hegemonic construction of Asia, incorporating within it certain meanings of Asia that support elite logics and simultaneously erasing many other narratives of/from/in Asia that don’t fit within the branding strategy. For instance, the interplays of Han Chinese racism and British colonialism played out in the very definitions of Asia, by assumption working within the terrains of Han Chinese privilege, as if the imaginary of Asia was equivalent to Han Chinese thought that smoothly transitioned from British colonialism. I sat through conversations that equated Asia with Confucianism, with occasional references to the “argumentative Indian.” Being an Indian (that too, being an argumentative Bengali), educated in the US, with a US passport, I also became aware of my outsider status (and later as an argumentative Indian who did not value Han Chinese face-saving tactics), often having to negotiate various forms of implicit and explicit racisms; these racisms often within structures felt oppressive as, unlike the US, the prevailing culture of

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face meant that spaces for an Indian (where the raced marker is salient) academic (albeit with privilege) to talk about race was largely absent. Even as I shared these experiences of racism and what I saw as racist erasures on my Facebook, I negotiated the pressures from the system. My activist collaborator Sangeetha Thanapal was called in for interrogation for writing about Chinese privilege in the context of everyday structures of racism in Asia. Cultural work is political work, tied to the structural formations we negotiate. My academic journey over the year taught me to question my own position as an academic in my theorizing of social change communication. When challenged by the system for the ongoing work of CARE on poverty, I have had to look for meanings as anchors to continuing that work. At the same time, I became all too aware of the transformative power of meanings in challenging the structures and the erasures that are built into the organizing of structures. When audited with questions such as why the Center was hiring human rights activists who apparently had nothing to do with health communication or why the Center was screening documentaries on the displacement of the Dongria Kondh in Niyamgiri, I became all too aware of the ongoing necessity for the powerful role of cultural work and storytelling to intervene into the structures of global capital. More so, it became evident how the work of transformation has to begin at the heart of knowledge production at the Empire. To the extent that the hegemony of the #HealthCommunicatonSoWhite scholarship reproduced the behavior change models, with the customary nod to structural determinants, questions such as “What do human rights have to do with health communication?” can continue to work as tools of oppression and silencing. The Whiteness of the discipline, its imperial formations, and its capitalist roots, formed the basis of techniques of disciplining and erasure across the globe. How we form meanings, how we communicate these meanings and the stories we tell are the roots of the social change communication we envision. Shifting these very meanings through cultural work forms the basis of the hope that this book grapples with. It turns to culture as a space for this hope for socialist futures that dismantle the capitalist model of extraction that underlies global climate change, threats to sustainability, inequality, impoverishment, and large-scale expulsion of the poor from their sources of livelihood. Our interventions at the very sites of definitions are central to how we imagine the processes of social change and the very frameworks of social change we co-create. For instance, seeing health fundamentally as about

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human rights or as being fundamentally threatened amid the global land grab makes acceptable, and absolutely necessary even, certain ideas of what communication looks like in the realm of social change and health. It is my hope that as you read this book, you will examine closely the roots of meanings we inhabit in the social change communication work we envision, the ways in which these roots constrain us as we inhabit structures, and the imaginations that remain embedded in the cracks and fissures of hegemonic constructions. Communication for social change is after all about re-ordering the very structures of meaning that become normative, envisioning pathways of change through these re-orderings. I argue, at this juncture of global history, communication for social change is about doing the groundwork for seeding radical democracies that craft socialist futures. Palmerston North, New Zealand

Mohan Dutta

Acknowledgments

In Dutta Bari, I learned my earliest lessons of the possibilities of a moral economy, an economy embedded in familial, neighborhood, community, and party relations. To my nana, who held this collective together, your sacrifices and your sense of justice are my moral compass. From my Godaikaka who used to give part of his monthly income as a school teacher to the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPI(M)) and another part of his monthly income to filling out the insurance policies of many community members who struggled with poverty, to my didibhai, my eldest sister who spent a lifetime caring for aging parents, my family taught me the values of commitments that are located outside of and in resistance to the co-optive gaze of the market. Jethumoni, my eldest uncle who served from his youth in our local school, building it and then playing the role of Headmaster, was also an organizer with the CPI(M)-affiliated All Bengal Teachers’ Association (ABTA). Jethaima, notun-ma, ranga-ma, konema, monima, Ma, mishtima and kakima, you all held, as a collective, the relationships of love and celebration through your labor in the kitchen, your love, and your care for the community. To all my uncles, you inspire in how collectively you stand beside each other. To my aunts, boro pishi and choto pishi, your eternal care for our collective offers lessons in the power of care. I am grateful to my pishimoni who taught me the first lessons in performance and inducted me into the many performances of the Indian Peoples’ Theater Association (IPTA). To all my 18 siblings, you are my strength. Thank you to my eldest sister, didibhai, for living a life of sacrifice, showing for us the legitimacy of the moral models of livelihood. I am grateful for my nephews and nieces for the joy you bring to my life. As you xiii

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all stand by me as a collective, I learn again and again that my voice is deeply rooted in the bonds that connect us. Even as these elections suggest that the CPI(M) is practically at its electoral lows, I see the many triumphs of socialist imaginaries all across the globe. Any possibility of structural transformation is deeply rooted in relationships and bonds of solidarity. The year 2018 emerged in my life journey as a revelatory opportunity. While some of the earliest lessons of solidarity my father offered me as a union worker were within academia, these lessons were further reified as the work of Center of Culture-centered Approach to Research and Evaluation (CARE) came under scrutiny, being subject to audit and being closely scrutinized under the label of “mismanagement of funds.” What was a difficult time for my family and me, my colleagues and co-workers, was also a wonderful learning opportunity for coming to live in solidarity through friendships and commitments. While over the years, I have had multiple opportunities for standing in solidarity with colleagues whose academic freedom has been targeted, this was an opportunity for me to receive the gifts of solidarity. I am grateful to my colleagues, Gayathri Dorairaju, Malathi Vengadasalam, Amir Hamid, Zafirah and Halimah, for standing by me in their steadfast support. You undertook the work of this solidarity with your bodies, teaching the embodied nature of solidarity work. As a son of a foreman who ran the University Foundry at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kharagpur, I had known since childhood the vitality of class struggles within academia and the transformative role of class solidarity. In an academia where the solidarity work of non-academic staff often gets erased, I was taught by Halimah, Zafirah, Amir, Malathi and Gaya the very promise of solidarity. In an academia rife with opportunism and careerist shallowness, you are reminders of the very ethic of integrity. Malathi, special thanks to you for being the steady anchor amid adversity and for showing what it means to stand by until the end. Gaya, keep breaking down those walls. Let the system see the fire of an Indian woman with vision. Amir, keep dazzling with your gifts of artful dialogue. I am grateful to Ananth Tambyah, Anuradha Ramanujan, Nancy Flude, Andrew Quitmeyer, Gui Kai Chong, Ee Lyn Tan, Asha Pandi, Pauline Luk, Satveer Kaur, Anuradha Rao, Dazzelyn Zapata, Raksha Mahtani, Afreen Azim, Iccha Basnyat, Kenneth Paul Tan, Jeremy Fernando, Denisa Kera, and T. T. Sreekumar, who lent their solidarity in trying times. Thanks to the many colleagues who worked together at CARE in developing transformative interventions in authoritarian spaces, Abdul Rahman, Julio

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Etchart, Satveer Kaur, Naomi Tan, Sarah Comer, Daniel Teo, Jagadish Thaker, Kang Sun. To my students in the “Culture-centered approach,” “Qualitative methods,” “Introduction to Communication” and “Philosophy of Communication” modules, you have been active participants in generating a theory of social change. Institutions are both excellent resources that enable our work and present challenges that need to be addressed through our collective struggles as academics. I am grateful to my three academic homes, Purdue University, National University of Singapore and Massey University that have opened up a world of possibilities in studying social change communication work. I am grateful to the National University of Singapore for the support it offered in the work of CARE, and to the School of Communication, Journalism, and Marketing at Massey University for the ongoing support. The Provost Chair Professorship at the National University of Singapore and the Dean’s Chair Professorship at Massey University offered resources, for which I am grateful. Beyond my own space of work, the solidarity of Cherian George, Barbara Sharf, Teri Thompson, Debbie Dougherty, Karin Wilkins, Srividya Ramasubramaniam, Kakali Bhattacharya, Shampa Biswas, Reshmi Dutt-­ Ballerstadt, Devika Chawla, Heather Zoller, Shaunak Sastry, Ambar Basu, Mahuya Pal, Pauline Luk, Stephen Hartnett, Charles Briggs, Rob Logan, Dyah Pitaloka, Jagadish Thaker, Steven Wilson, and Gary Kreps has meant a world to me. Barbara Sharf journeyed with me through the many structural challenges, and for that, I am so very grateful. Beverly Davenport, Patrice Buzzannel, Robin Clair, Felicia Roberts, Josh Boyd, Steve Wilson, Glen Sparks, Howard Sypher, Charlie Stewart, John Greene, Bart Collins, Titilayo Okoror, Stacey Connaughton, Irwin “Bud” Weiser, Song No, I am so grateful to have had the opportunity to walk alongside you. I appreciate my colleagues Ted Zorn, Shiv Ganesh, Stephen Croucher, Doug Ashwell, Steve Elers, Susan Fontaine, and Jagadish Thaker for the great conversations and the support in setting up CARE at Massey. I am so grateful to my colleagues at CARE, Steve Elers, Terri Te Tau, Phoebe Elers, Breeze Mehta, Christine Elers, Mark Steelsmith, and Richard Torres. Thanks to Karin Wilkins, Pradip Thomas, Srinivas Melkote, Oliver Boyd Barrett, Dana Cloud, George Cheney, your work inspires. Thanks to Zaheer Babbar and Cherian Goerge for reading the manuscript and for dialoguing, which formed the basis of the revisions undertaken. Thanks also to two anonymous reviewers who offered vital insights into the literature and the openings for dialogue.

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In my journey, the sources of solidarity expanded quickly, drawing in friends outside of academia, who formed the very basis of my ability to face the structures and explore the meaning of resistance. I am forever grateful to my activist friend, Ms. Braema Mathi, the founder of Maruah, the only human rights organization in Singapore and former President of Association of Women for Action and Research (AWARE), the feminist civil society organization in Singapore. Braema collaborated with me on experimenting on some of the fundamental methods of social change and journeyed alongside in the interrogation by the structures. To my brother from another life, Harpreet Singh Nehal, I am ever grateful for your practical interventions that were integral to withstanding the structures and for the spiritual nourishment you offered in the midst of the most difficult days. Thanks also to the larger collective of activists, artists, and advocates, Samarendra Das, Nakul Sawhney, Jolovan Wham, Vanessa Ho, Sherry Sherqueesha, Seelan Palay, P. J. Thum, P. Satheesh, Janet Chong-Aruldoss, Eugene Thuraisingham, Remi Choo, Nicholas Harrigan, Sue Bradford, Tim Howard, Tame Iti, Sangeetha Thanapal, and Murdoch Stephens. Indranil Mandal, Ramprasad Das, Rabin Mandi, Sherry Sherqueesha, Sandhya Joena Shivani, Tony Gillespie, Tracy Robinson, Tanya Johnson, Tafor Bonu, James Gomez, Braema Mathi, Samarendra Das, you breathe life into our community collaborations through your love and labor. Indranil, you have been a sojourner in the everyday experiments with the radical possibilities of democracy, learning together the restructuring of development through the ownership of communication infrastructures by those at the very margins. Family has forever been a vital resource of love and learning. My maternal family, boro mama, mamoni, mejo mama, maima, chhoto mama, monima, boromashi, fulmashi, nomashi, chhotomashi, I learned some of the first lessons of Bengali culture and its fluid spaces by being with you. For as long as I can remember, my dida enjoyed every opportunity of bringing cultural conversations into her life, even as she struggled with health crises in her last years. I am grateful to my maternal cousins, who have been sojourners as we have experimented with cultures and performances. To my in-laws in Gauhati, Ma, Baba, thakuma, uncles and aunts, and the many siblings, you add much richness to my life. I am grateful for the support of Lalma didi, who has supported our family and been through us in our many journeys in Singapore. Thank you for the love with which you have cared for us all.

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I am lucky to have parents, Ma and Baba, who have shown the miracles of belief. That you don’t negotiate when you are being bullied, ­irrespective of the tactics being deployed to produce fear, they instilled me as a child. In them, in the midst of the greatest challenges, I have seen the steadfast commitment to standing by their beliefs. That your values matter and that you must stand up for them, irrespective of the consequences, this I have witnessed in how my parents have lived their lives. The challenges I experienced in the year offered important reminders of this power of belief. As my parents stood by me, forever asking me to believe, they themselves had to bear many of the pains we were collectively living through. Amid these pains, their lesson was consistent, “Stand by the values that guide you, and they will continue to stand by you.” Baba, you have taught me the very first lessons of Left politics, and inspire me with your life so full of kindness. This book is dedicated to my mother, a Master in Philosophy from Calcutta University, who taught me the alphabet and instilled in me strength by modeling the very meanings of strength and generosity. Ma, that book, gifted to you by Dr. Sarvapalli Radhakrishnan, the Philosopher-­ President of India, taught me to imagine education as nyaya (justice). Your unwavering faith in me gave me the courage to explore many different paths, and your moral philosophy of a just life inspires me every day to question this life that I live. I am lucky to be your son. To my brother Jyotisman, my sister-in-law Susmita, and my nephew Vihaan, knowing that you are here is a great source of strength and sustenance. Your presence is both comforting and re-assuring. To have you in Singapore and spend a few days together before we departed for New Zealand was another reminder of the power of our collective. Bhai, I am lucky to have a brother who is always ready to listen and be there through the many different colors of life although our approaches to life are often so different. Piu, your silent strength gives us as a family the power to face the many turns of life. Vihaan, your jethu loves learning from your spirit of care and wonder. To my children, Soham, Trisha, and Shloke, you teach me each day the meaning of love. Without being fully aware, you have become part of the joys and the trials of the social change communication work I have the opportunities to participate in. While you did not choose these struggles and the challenges we have faced as a family, you lived through them with full faith in our collective. I am grateful to you for being the eternal sources of the imaginations of possibilities, as well as for being the anchors when we collectively navigate structures. Shloke, your kindness and generosity

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of spirit are so full of promise. Trisha, your love for your father teaches me to believe in myself, even amid the most unforeseen of challenges. Soham, your everyday explorations offer great lessons on the priorities in life and the joys of discovery. To Debalina, my wife and partner, thank you for walking these many paths of learning together in wonderment. There is nothing more meaningful than chatting with you as we rush to get to school in the mornings and get our children ready, spar over ideas and find those spaces where we come to agree. You shouldered so much of the responsibility this year as we experienced as a family the hardships that came with the practices of challenging structures. You bore witness intimately to my many vulnerabilities even as I practiced the performance of a brave face. Your sense of justice and faith in me form the very foundation of the experiments with communication for social change I am able to embark on, particularly in the practical work of challenging structures. This book is because of you.

Contents

1 Introduction: A Framework for Communicating Social Change  1 2 Development, Dominance, and Communication 29 3 Marxist Social Change Communication 69 4 Culture and Social Change Communication 101 5 Technologies for Development and Social Change193 6 Culture-Centered Approach to Communication for Social Change239 7 Agentic Expressions and Socialist Futures283 8 Social Change Communication as Academic-­Activist-­ Community Partnerships327 References377 Index405 xix

List of Figures

Fig. 1.1 Fig. 6.1

A conceptual framework for social change communication Interplays of culture, structure, and agency

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: A Framework for Communicating Social Change

Communication for social change is constituted amid the vectors of globalization, both in producing large-scale political-economic transformations across nation states captured in globalization-as-development, and in constituting processes of activist participation that resist the marginalizing effects of top-down globalization (Dutta, 2012a, 2012b, 2015, 2018; Wilkins, 2014). Described as time-space compression in the accelerated movement of capital, goods, labor, services, and images across national boundaries (Harvey, 1999; Peet, 2003; Williamson, 1993), globalization has been accompanied by a dramatic shift in the ownership of capital and resources, consolidating resources and power in the hands of transnational capital (Harvey, 1999, 2001, 2005). The contemporary framework of globalization can be traced back to the post-World War II development interventions that sought to open up nation states to US-based transnational corporations, conceived in the ambits of Cold War politics (Dutta, 2006a; Dutta, Thaker, & Sun, 2014). Over the last four decades, the political and economic organizing of the globe has been reconstituted under the framework of neoliberalism,1 crystallized in the free market ideology, and marked by the financialization of global economies, minimization of state support for welfare programs, and minimization of barriers to free trade (Dutta, 2006a, 2019; Harvey, 2001, 2005; Pal & Dutta, 2008). The symbolic constructions and processes of social change communication have been at the heart of the neoliberal transformation of global economies, shaped by international financial institutions (IFIs) such as the © The Author(s) 2020 M. Dutta, Communication, Culture and Social Change, Palgrave Studies in Communication for Social Change, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26470-3_1

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World Bank (WB), International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Trade Organization (WTO) on one hand, and development agencies such as the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), Department for International Development (DfID), and Swiss Aid, on the other hand, referred to as the dominant institutions of social change (Dutta, 2007; Ganesh, Zoller, & Cheney, 2005; Pal & Dutta, 2008; Payer, 1974; Peet, 2003; Williamson, 1993). Social change, implying planned and directed strategic communication efforts carried out by the dominant global organizations, originated in the broader context of development. On one hand, these development communication programs framed within the ambits of social change have been integral to the promotion of free trade in the post-World War II climate, and subsequently in the reorganizing of local economies through IFI-imposed structural adjustment programs (SAPs) and poverty reduction strategies (PRSs) (Dutta, 2006a; Peet, 2003). On the other hand, reproducing this overarching development logic in the framework of modernization, newly liberated postcolonial nation states across the global South, marked as the “Third World” on the basis of the developmentalist ontology that defined these spaces as lacking in development, started establishing their own development agendas and creating strategic frameworks for development communication. What then has been the function of social change communication, described as planned social change communication, as conceived within the dominant order of political and economic organizing (Dutta, 2006a)? The very definition of social change communication implicitly as “planned” social change communication defines the parameters of what is generally discussed under the ambits of social change communication. As we will see in this chapter and the next, the definition of social change in the mainstream US- and Eurocentric communication literature has embedded within itself certain notions of what social change is and what it entails. The dominant literature on social change assumes change as individual-­ level transformation in knowledge, attitude, and behavior, with the impetus of change on improving individual behavior. Rooted in the war-military-intelligence interests of the US Empire, the managerialism that formed the basis of social change constructed individuals as change agents in the overarching pathway of development (Dutta, 2006b; Knafo, Dutta, Lane, & Wyn-Jones, 2019). This individualistic framework of communication for social change has circulated in the discipline from the roots of social change in the US, promoting capitalism and democracy in the Third World, to the neoliberal transformation of social change, driven by

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the allegiance to the free market as the solution to global problems. What then are the objectives of social change communication, as constituted within the prevailing logic of neoliberalism, articulated in the promotion of the free market? What are the theoretical, methodological, and practical implications of social change communication efforts as conceived within the dominant logics of development, conceived of as the global promotion of transnational capitalism? Any form of theoretical claim to an object of study is anchored within the overarching politics that constitutes it (Miller, 2004). That the knowledge formations we work with are shaped by the overarching political economies within which they come to take form therefore draws our attention to the claims that are backgrounded and/or erased. This dominant framework of social change communication will be interrogated for the assumptions it makes. These assumptions depict the general concepts of capitalism, technology, and democracy that shape how development has been historically constructed in communication. Our attention to these erasures and shadows of social change communication opens up the space for working through explicitly resistive forms of social change, embodied in the collectivization of struggles of the working classes, precariat, and large cross-sections of people across the globe struggling with poverty. In doing so, we will explore other less explored approaches to social change communication. How do these conceptualizations of social change communication converge with or depart from Marxist and participatory frameworks of social change communication? And most important, what are the transformative possibilities of social change when articulated as participatory communication grounded in community life directed at transforming the unequal social and economic policies of neoliberalism that constitute contemporary global inequalities? Many of the contemporary debates on communication for social change have emerged around the concept of culture (see the edited collection Servaes, 2007). The categorization of culture as tradition formed the basis of the earliest forms of social change communication literature (Schramm, 1964). This literature, mostly emerging from an applied setting where the role of communication was being studied in the realm of its effectiveness in generating social change, developed universal theories that placed social change as the solution to the problem of culture. The universal theories of growth thus developed worked on culture to modernize it. This modernization framework was racist and imperialist in its treatment of culture, with studies and theories located within this paradigm reproducing this

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racist logic. The postcolonial and decolonial critiques of communication for social change put forth the concept of culture as a site for alternative interpretations. The turn to culture first emerging out of the anti-colonial movements from the newly independent nation states in the global South entered into the ambits of global cultural development agencies such as the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), and later turned into a key tool for the global implementation of neoliberal policies. In this book, I offer a conceptual framework for closely looking at the ways in which culture has been erased, backgrounded, foregrounded, and catalyzed in the different threads that have flown through the different theoretical, methodological, and practical ways of doing communication for social change. Based on a framework that derives from my earlier work (Dutta, 2011, 2012a, 2012b) and in conversation with ongoing social change interventions, the book specifically delves into the various ways in which culture appears in the literature, in methods, and in applications of social change communication. The various modalities of knowledge formation, methodology, and practice in communication for social change are compared with each other, particularly attending to their treatment of the concept of culture. We are at a moment in the history and narrative of the discipline where calls to decolonize, de-westernize, and dismantle the hegemonic disciplinary configurations have foregrounded the vitality of building disciplinary anchors from elsewhere. The #CommunicationSoWhite piece published in the Journal of Communication drew attention to the Whiteness of the discipline of Communication. In response to the Whiteness of the award structures and editor selection processes of the National Communication Association (NCA), a Communication Scholars for Transformation (CST) movement emerged in/across the discipline that documented, interrogated, and created critical activist anchors for disrupting the hegemonic structures of the discipline (see, for instance, the timeline of the movement on the blog, and on my own blog for my responses to the Whiteness of the discipline). These conversations form the backdrop of the book, offering the impetus for recognizing the importance of activism within academia, resisting and transforming the knowledge claims reproduced within predominantly White academic structures. Mapping out the framework of social change as conceived from within the mainstream logics of development then offers an entry point for conceptualizing communicative processes that seek to resist the consolidation of wealth in the hands of the power elite, transforming the ontology of

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social change from the ambits of transnational hegemony to the collective politics of grassroots-driven structural transformations at local, national, and global levels that are attentive to inequalities in access to resources and communicative spaces. The theorization of structures, the frameworks of organizing of material resources, at local, national, and global levels, and the role of communication in challenging these structures forms the basis of the second half of the book, outlining the key tenets of a grassroots, community-based, participatory culture-centered approach (CCA) that is explicitly directed at achieving structural transformations through the framing of alternative economic and political structures that both interrogate the taken-for-granted assumptions of neoliberalism and offer transformative spaces for challenging these assumptions (Dutta, 2004a, 2004b, 2007, 2010, 2013). The CCA foregrounds the role of communication as an organizing framework for the ensuing neoliberal transformation of the globe, and attends to the transformative capacity of communication as an entry point to meanings, interpretations, frames, and discourses that create alternative rationalities of political, economic, social, and cultural organizing. Communication, as a “symbolic process whereby reality is produced, maintained, repaired and transformed” (Carey, 1989, p. 23), co-creates possibilities of change through co-constructions with disenfranchised communities that experience the effects of neoliberal change globally. The goal of this chapter is to offer first a map of social change communication efforts in the backdrop of the political and economic configurations of globalization, examining the role of communication for social change historically in achieving the hegemony of neoliberalism, both in the form of top-down development interventions and in the form of participatory development communication interventions, and the corresponding role of social change communication as a symbolic resource for transforming neoliberalism in Marxist and culture-centered frameworks of structural transformation. The ascendance of neoliberalism as a hegemonic narrative for structuring global economics and politics has been achieved through the strategic use of communication framed under the language of poverty alleviation, development, and social change, enabled through free markets and new communication technologies (DeSouza, Basu, Kim, Basnyat, & Dutta, 2008; Dutta, 2007). IFI- and government-funded international development communication interventions (primarily sponsored by the USAID and DfID) have served as instruments for opening up economies and for exerting pressure on local elites through processes of top-down cultural change, thus creating global markets for transnational

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corporations (TNCs) (Dutta, 2005; Gershman & Irwin, 2000; Millen & Holtz, 2000; Millen, Irwin, & Kim, 2000). In these social change efforts specifically directed at opening up targeted national economies to transnational capital, communication has been at the center stage. In other words, global social, political, and economic change processes under neoliberalism have been conceived and implemented through communication, opening up economies and resulting in the corresponding inequalities, while at the same time framing these processes in the language of poverty alleviation, economic growth, and development. Given this role of communication as an instrument for consolidating power in the hands of transnational capital through planned social change, how then can communication be leveraged as a symbolic resource for transformative social change, addressing the large-scale inequalities and deep-rooted poverty across the various sectors of the globe produced by neoliberal transformations, and inverting the very language of social change that has been integral to the hegemony of the neoliberal project? In theorizing about globalization processes, scholars draw attention to the modes of neoliberal governance that underlie the contemporary logics of globalization, played out in the promotion of free market economics, trade liberalization, minimization of tariffs and subsidies, and privatization of the public sectors (Harvey, 2001, 2005; Peet, 2003). These specific policies have been central to the political-economic organizing of nation states as mandated by the Bretton Woods Institutions, namely the WB, the IMF, and the WTO, and framed within the logics of the “Washington Consensus” (Peet, 2003). Scholars studying the economic effects of globalization point toward the increasing inequalities within and between nation states that have been brought about by the SAPs that typify neoliberalism (Gershman & Irwin, 2000; Millen & Holtz, 2000; Millen, Irwin, & Kim, 2000). Addressing these dramatic patterns of rise in inequalities is therefore deeply intertwined with shifting the symbolic resources that disseminate neoliberal values as the taken-for-granted universal markers of political and economic organizing. I will begin the chapter drawing on an overarching framework for categorizing the different approaches to social change communication (Dutta, 2007), comparing the different paradigms of social change and the role of communication within these paradigms. The comparison will focus on the similarities and differences between the paradigms, and situate the paradigms in the context of broader political and economic processes globally, attending to the relationship of communication for social

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change with neoliberal processes. Because there already exist excellent reviews of the overarching literature on communication and social change, the review offered here is a critical reading of communication for social change processes, attending to the erasures and co-optations, and simultaneously suggesting possibilities for transforming the vast inequalities that often go uninterrupted in the overarching social change communication literature. Specific attention will be paid to the conceptualization of communication, the goals of communication, the tools of communication, and the outcomes attached to the communicative processes in each of the paradigms. The comparisons of the different approaches to social change communication will offer the basis for theorizing, measuring, and developing practices of communication for social change (Dutta, 2007, 2010, 2013; Pal & Dutta, 2008). Building on a discussion of the various threads of theoretical tenets of social change communication, the review will offer entry points for theorizing social change communication that seeks to transform global neoliberal organizing, and offers entry points for structural transformations globally.

1.1   Theoretical Framework: Categorizing Social Change Communication Efforts The theoretical framework offered in this chapter as an organizing lens for understanding the different approaches to communication for social change is drawn from the article “Culture-centered approach to social change communication” and the book Communicating Social Change I had written earlier (Dutta, 2010, 2012a, 2012b), and is broadly defined on the basis of two orthogonal and intersecting dialectical tensions conceptualizing the level at which the change is designed and the process through which change is sought, forming a Cartesian coordinate system (Dutta, 2012a, 2012b). Essential to this framework for plotting the various forms and structures of development communication is the acknowledgment of the notion that development is a “politico-ethical” construction (Preston, 2012, p. 17). In drawing on and revising this theoretical framework for categorizing the various approaches to communication for social change, I will note that there are fluidities and overlaps in the characteristics of communication for social change projects. Whereas a project and a particular implementation cycle of communication for social change might fall within a specific categorization group, it is possible that the project

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changes its nature as it develops. Similarly, it is also possible that implementation projects often embody multiple approaches and strands of communication for social change, thus occupying hybrid positions. Having said that, it is important to maintain and examine the distinctions articulated here in order to clearly position social change communication interventions. Moreover, as social change communication practitioners and scholars, it helps us grapple with our position as we consider the framework offered here. Ongoing scholarship on theorizing communication for social change has offered some excellent extensions of the framework I introduced. For instance, in his extension of the framework, Tufte (2017) modifies the categorization of the different approaches I presented, particularly revising the placing of the participatory communication approach (more on this later). Moreover, Tufte’s analysis does an excellent job of juxtaposing the framework in the backdrop of the important theorizing in the work of Colin Sparks, finding parallels between the two approaches. Two special issues of key disciplinary journals, Communication Theory and Journal of Communication, attend to the overarching meta-theory of communication for social change. New initiatives at meta-theorizing communication for social change have taken the form of handbooks, such as The Handbook of Development Communication and Social Change edited by Wilkins, Tufte, and Obregon (2014). Special issues edited by Srinivas Melkote (2018) have offered new spaces for theorizing communication for social change. A thread that runs through these important analyses is the recognition of the growing resistance to hegemonic formations to different degrees, although these hegemonic formations are theorized explicitly to different extent in these collections. The framework of social change communication offered in my earlier work (Dutta, 2010, 2012a, 2012b) is revised here by specifically attending to the nature of the structure, the system of organizing resources and interpretations. The growing acknowledgment of resistance witnessed in the various threads of scholarship on communication and social change is given shape in this book in the form of conceptualizing communication as the basis for building alternative economic models. Moreover, in this revised version, I specifically attend to the way in which culture is conceptualized within the overarching project of social change communication. The nature of the structure is specifically theorized in the realm of the economic model that drives and in turn is reproduced by the projects of communication for social change. By looking at the overarching ideology

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that constitutes the agenda of social change communication, the nature of a social change communication project can be delineated. The location of a social change communication project within a particular ideology therefore shapes the form taken by that project. This discussion of the economic models tied to the nature of structures in social change communication is a break from extant theorizing of social change communication, as well as from my own earlier work on this subject. Because of the ways in which the terrains of power constitute the knowledge claims that are put forth, I argue here that the overarching economic models that have shaped the contours of knowledge in social change communication systematically erase or background the discussion of the economic models. The first axis of the categorizing framework captures the tension between the level at which the change is sought, mapping change efforts along a continuum from social change at the structural level to social change targeted at individual beliefs, values, behavior, and lifestyle. I have argued earlier that structures are systems and patterns of organizing societal resources, and therefore social change communication directed at structures explicitly challenges and seeks to change the prevailing logics of existing structures (Dutta, 2010). In such social change efforts, the problem lies in the structural configurations, and therefore change should be brought about by fundamentally making changes in the structures and the underlying values, meanings, interpretive frames and discourses that legitimize these structures. Structurally directed social change communication is transformative because it seeks to resist the status quo, offering to bring an alternative framework for organizing global resources. In contrast, individual-level social change communication efforts frame individual attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors as the loci of problem, and therefore seek to bring about changes by altering individual beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors, simultaneously leaving the status quo unchallenged. Social change is conceptualized as development in this framework, achieved through the incremental dissemination of positive behaviors. The hegemonic role of the US Empire in shaping the knowledge categories of social change communication has resulted in the individual-level status quo model as the universal framework through which social change communication has been visualized (Dutta, 2006a). The underlying capitalist hegemony served by this model has been strategically obfuscated. The underlying ideology of the status quo approach to social change communication is one of reproducing capitalist hegemony, based on the notion that individual level changes in attitudes and behaviors produce

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c­ itizen-­consumers that participate in the circuits of capital (Lerner, 1958). The promotion of behavior change programs has also served the promotion of capitalism (Dutta, 2006a, 2006b). Simultaneously, the capitalist propaganda that has formed the infrastructure of the knowledge industry in communication for social change has meant that the resistive and oppositional economic model to capitalism—socialism—has been systematically erased from the discursive spaces of social change communication knowledge. That the very sites of knowledge production in social change communication have been at the heart of this campaign to vilify and erase the articulations of socialist alternatives is a point that remains naturally missing from the social change communication literature. Even in my own work, as I have talked about resistance and structural transformation, I have largely omitted the discussion of what this resistance to capitalism meant. My movement to Singapore, and the location of the Center for Culture-centered Approach to Research and Evaluation (CARE) in Singapore, a Southeast Asian hub that serves as a prominent node in the US imperial propaganda across East, South, and Southeast Asia, formed the backdrop for the recognition that actively naming the sort of transformative resistance I was articulating in culture-centered projects as embedded within the socialist ideology was integral to reframing the change imaginary. This book therefore, is located as a recognition of the economic cartography of social change communication. It argues that the active erasure of the socialist imaginary has been at the heart of the hegemonic social change communication industry. In communication studies even more so than other humanities and social sciences (I argue this has much to do with the uncritical and utilitarian location of communication studies within the US intelligence-military apparatus), the faddish turn to culture amid the rise of neoliberalism and the fall of the Berlin Wall worked to constitute a framework of knowledge production that discussed cultural performances and micro-practices of resistance while simultaneously foreclosing the possibilities of revolutionary social change. Collective organizing as the basis of reorganizing economies in socialist principles remains largely missing from culturalist accounts. Recognizing this culturalist faddism, a number of criticisms appropriately call for the active focus on the universal reach of capital, working through this acknowledgment to craft socialist futures (Chibber, 2014). However, as I will argue in this book, this call to recognize the universal reach of capitalism often obscures that (a) capitalism itself is a cultural project, and (b) culture as a site for socialist imaginary

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offers powerful scripts for projects of social change communication. As we move toward building this argument about the socialist possibilities anchored in cultural narratives, we first begin by reworking the axes of status quo/structural transformation as capitalism/socialism. Therefore, whereas capitalism is the status quo economic model, socialism is the structurally transformative model. Moreover, throughout the book, I will attend to the political economy of knowledge production, suggesting that where we theorize from shapes the ways in which we interpret a phenomenon and constitute it amid practices. This is particularly salient in the work of communication for social change. Given my earlier point about the ideology of capitalism, and its later version of neoliberal capitalism, that has usurped the discourse and materiality of communication for social change, the articulations of social change emerging from hegemonic organizations therefore are tools of co-­ option. Recognizing the locus of theorizing as critical to deciphering the politics of communication for social change, I call for critical readings that attend to the ways in which communication, voice, power, empowerment, activism, participation, and social movements get deployed. The growth of social change industries as profitable resources and economic opportunities translates into the proliferation of sectors of civil society organizations, transnational capital, aid agencies, and global organizations (including many United Nations organizations) that co-opt the radical spaces of activism, movements, and social justice precisely to serve the agendas of capital (Bernal & Grewal, 2014). For instance, the seductive narrative of techno-revolution in the backdrop of the Arab Spring on one hand obfuscates the grassroots transformative politics of change practices by unions, worker collectives, and similar organizations, and on the other hand builds the market for global technology corporations that brand themselves as the agents of change. The transformative politics of Arab Spring, co-opted within the US imperial agenda, emerged as an opportunity for the reproduction of global neoliberal capital. Close interrogation of technology capital, imperialism, and social change delineates the uncritical celebration of techno-activism or digital activism (Waisbord, 2018) while simultaneously exploring the radical work of theorizing social change in resistance to global capitalism. The incorporation of digital activism as the logic for promotion of neoliberal technologies, training in digital activism led by imperial techno-capital, and creation of new techno-­ markets serves neoliberal capital, not dismantle it. Similarly, the narrow focus on networks, flows, and frequencies of digital posts without ­attending

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to the larger political economy feeds the logics of neoliberalism rather than disrupting it. Unfortunately, because of the hegemonic blindfolds that shape our disciplinary practices, much of the literature on digital activism superficially limits itself to analyzing hashtags and tweets, without engaging seriously with the possibilities of radical politics. The other axis in the Cartesian framework is constituted around the nature of the communicative process in the social change effort. In the traditional parlance of social change communication, experts play key roles in conceptualizing and planning development interventions directed at the target communities, with the root of development being understood through the lens imposed by the expert. In this top-down conceptualization of development, the knowledge exists with the expert, who must account for and explain development, as well as offer prescriptions for social change solutions through her/his understanding of development processes. In this sense, in top-down forms of development communication, change efforts are shaped by the expertise/knowledge of the expert, and the change comes from the initial efforts initiated by the expert (Lerner, 1958). The other end of the axis is occupied by community-­ driven grassroots social change efforts that emphasize the local participatory capacity of communities in participating in processes of change, foregrounding the agentic capacity of communities in determining the texture of change. Change here is conceptualized as being implemented through the involvement of community members in the change processes (Chambers, 1983, 1994a, 1994b, 1994c). Participatory in nature, the impetus for social change in grassroots social change emerges from within the community; the fundamental problems and corresponding solutions emerge through the participation of the community members in the processes of change. It is worth noting that culture itself takes different forms, depending upon the ways in which it is conceptualized in the context of communication for social change. I will suggest that specific conceptualizations of culture are implicated within the paradigm commitments of the social change communication efforts (Fig. 1.1). The intersections of the social change versus status quo and the top-­ down versus participatory axes of social change communication generate four different types of approaches to social change, also depicting the different histories and traditions of social change communication processes. In social change framed within the status quo through top-down processes of communication, the objective of the social change processes is to work within these structures, their rules and roles, thus keeping intact

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Status Quo

Participatory Development

Development Campaigns

Top Down

Grassroots

Culture-centered

Marxist

Social Change

Fig. 1.1  A conceptual framework for social change communication

their traditional systems of organizing (Lerner, 1958; Lerner & Schramm, 1967; Schramm, 1964; Schramm & Lerner, 1976). The dominant body of work on social change communication, also referred to as development communication, falls within this framework of status quo efforts that are based on top-down agendas as configured by outside agencies, funding agencies, Northern states, global civil society organizations, academic partners, and campaign/program planners (see Melkote & Steeves, 2001 for a critical interrogation of the dominant paradigm). Constituting the majority of social change communication initiatives, these traditional development communication campaigns locate the locus of problem in individual behaviors, and target them through communication technologies that are disseminated in the communities. This form of social change communication is capitalist, embedded within the ideology of liberal democracy. With inherent suspicion of the people and people’s movements, liberal notions of communication for social change are driven by experts, working alongside state actors, market, and civil society (Lippmann, 1922). The construction of the people, the popular, the public as irrational, as incapable of reasoned agency, is the basis of a liberal

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system of representative democracy, with the roles of news, media, policymakers, and other elites in shaping, guiding, and manipulating the public opinion. The work of communication designed by experts is to manage the people and public opinion through strategic deployment of mediated communication (Lippmann, 1922). Marxist conceptualizations of social change communication are driven by top-down understandings of dominant social configurations and the inequalities that are produced by these configurations, thus mapping out transformative opportunities for inverting these structures (Peet & Hartwick, 2015). In Marxist theory, the exploitation of labor through unpaid work is overturned through the participation of the proletariat in revolutionary processes, thus turning profit that sustains capital. Extensions of a Marxist analysis in the realm of development connect the capitalist formations of global economies to logics of imperialism, fostering the space for the articulation of dependency and world system theories that connect the question of underdevelopment to the prevailing logics of development (Peet & Hartwick, 2015). The enlightenment of the oppressed classes is then tied to the revolutionary processes of change that are directed toward shifting the ownership of capital into the hands of the proletariat. As opposed to the top-down understandings of social change processes in the literature, participatory communication processes working on social change foreground the participatory capacity of local communities in identifying problems and developing corresponding solutions (Servaes, Jacobson, & White, 1996). Challenging the top-down framework of development, participatory social change communication processes highlight community involvement as central to social change processes (Chambers, 1983). The vast body of work on participatory rural appraisal, community-based participatory research, and participatory development programs fall within this category as they center the decision-making capacity of local communities in developing technologies and interventions that fit within the existing configurations of the status quo, mostly focusing on delivering solutions within the existing structural configurations. As we will see later in the book, participatory social change communication processes have been integral to the neoliberal framework of global organizing, shifting the onus on local communities and simultaneously minimizing state resources that are directed toward addressing the needs of the margins. Participation within this framework is a tool for extending the reach of the status quo into communities at the margins.

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In contrast to the top-down conceptualization of social change as noted in the Marxist approach, the CCA foregrounds the participatory capacity of local communities to participate in processes of structural transformation, to draw attention to the inequitable structures that constitute the lived experiences at the margins, to identify cultural resources as enablers of social change, and to work through participation in bringing about changes to inequitable structures (Dutta, 2004a, 2004b, 2007, 2010). Whereas the culture-centered approach is sensitized to the structural locations of specific issues, it responds to these structural constraints through local grassroots processes of communication that are based on participatory processes of listening to community voices. Culture, as a site of meaning-­making, draws on values and interpretations passed across generations, and simultaneously resisted through everyday forms of participation. The emphasis of the culture-centered approach therefore is on creating local participatory processes in bringing about transformations in inequitable structural configurations in globalization politics. As opposed to the cultural participatory processes of neoliberalism that strategically obfuscate the struggles over structures, the CCA foregrounds structures as sites of transformation through local ownership of democratic and participatory processes. In the backdrop of the inequalities that constitute communities, the CCA offers an organizing framework for challenging the taken-for-granted assumptions of neoliberal organizing, bringing to the fore alternative rationalities of organizing economies and politics.

1.2   Culture in Communication for Social Change The concept of culture in relationship to social change communication is varied (Appadurai, 2013a, 2013b), starting from its treatment as a static barrier to social change, to its absence in theories of social change communication, to its treatment as a site for new capitalist transformations amid shifting geopolitics, to the role of culture as the basis for transformative social change. Within anthropology, the originary discipline that grappled with the concept of culture, culture was largely conceptualized as a characteristic attached to group, often geographically bounded, attached to tradition. This view of culture as a characteristic of a group is expressed in cultural values, beliefs, and norms, shared by the inhabitants of the community. Rituals, practices that mark the negotiations of “liminal” or “in-­between spaces,” form the descriptive tools through which cultures emerge as objects of study. Similarly, myths reflect the stories that are

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c­ irculated in cultures. Take the ethnographic account in Argonauts of the Western Pacific by Malinowski (1922), considered the first ethnographic text, where magic occupies a central place in the description of economic transactions. Consider, for instance, Evans-Pritchard’s (1937) Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic among the Azande, where the Azande world of beliefs is described in richness to account for magic. Magic is the ethnographic subject of the cultural accounts in the works of several anthropologists engaged in the depiction of what they term “primitive cultures.” From within these descriptive accounts of primitive or savage cultures emerged two lines of anthropological thought on culture. Whereas for one line of thought, cultural practices were to be interpreted from within the meaning formations in the culture, in the other line of thought, cultural practices can be evaluated by outside experts based on access to objective standards of knowledge and reason. The earliest concepts of culture in the ambits of social change communication appear in the Cold War climate, with culture being located elsewhere, as a marker of primitive or traditional societies in need for modernization programs of development (see, for instance, Daniel Lerner (1958), writing about modernization in The passing of traditional society: Modernizing the Middle East). Development, treated as equivalent to modernization, is set in opposition to culture as tradition. Traditional culture in this example reflects the overarching ideology of Cold War social science that saw culture as a characteristic of the other to be conquered through technologies of development that offered modernization. The notion of culture as the “primitive other” is evident in Weber’s (2013) account of culture as the site of magic, differentiating between magic and religion (referring to the protestant ethic as the basis of capitalism). Drawing on this distinction then, Weber offers an account of the Protestant ethic as the basis of capitalism, creating a framework for modernization theory that works on a trajectory of change from primitive forms of culture to modernization. Note here, and this is a key thread that forms the site of critical interrogation throughout the book, the juxtaposition of capitalism and modernization. Capitalism is modernization, and modernization is capitalism. The inevitable trajectory of modernization therefore is into capitalism. Communication for social change emerged from within this paradigm to offer a prescriptive pathway for social change through the introduction of new communication technologies and strategic communication messages, ultimately leading to the establishment of the capitalist order.

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This colonial structure driving the framework of social change communication derives from the larger colonial agenda of the study of culture. The theorization of culture is deeply rooted in the colonial enterprise. Anthropologists as information gatherers on culture were integral to the reproduction of the Empire. Employed by the imperial security apparatus, anthropologists gathered patterns of data on biological patterns, terrains, shared values, rituals, and practices to enable strategies of colonization. An analysis conducted by Michael Lewis (2002) of the Pacific Ocean Biological Survey, a study conducted by the Office of Security Strategic Services (OSS) alumnus and Smithsonian director, the ornithologist S.  Dillon Ripley, showed that the program, presented as study of migratory bird patterns, was integral to a biological weapons program. Directed by the Army’s Biological Warfare Center, the program studies the biological pathogens carried by migrating birds precisely as an instrument for mapping the potential pathways for developing strategic biological warfare strategies. Consider the cross-cultural anthropological seminar at Columbia University launched by Ruth Benedict in 1946 to study enemy cultures under the umbrella of the Office of War Information. Benedict secured $100,000 from the Office of Naval Research under the umbrella of Columbia University’s Research in Contemporary Cultures (RCC) project to map cultural spaces in Communist and pro-Communist societies. Anthropologists including Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson, and Jane Belo were recruited into the program to study the cultural features of pro-Communist societies. Later extended into funding from the RAND Corporation, RCC research was deeply embedded in the intelligence apparatus of the Empire. The linkage between early fathers of communication, US propaganda, and anthropologists is reflected in the Center for International Studies (CENIS) International Communication Planning Committee, the Ford Foundation’s internal grant program. CENIS housed or funded Cold War propagandists Harold Laswell, Paul Lazarsfeld, Edward Shils, Ithiel de Sola Pool, as well as noted anthropologist Clifford Geertz. CENIS researchers studying propaganda, information processing, persuasion, were single-handedly interested in the role of communication as a tool in the Cold War. They provided the research and technical support to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)-organized anti-Communist coup in Guatemala, doing the intellectual work for the production of reference materials, reports, and documentaries. The Cold War social scientists Max Milikan and W.  W. Rostow were integral to rooting the development

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framework into anti-Communist activities and US anti-insurgency program. Development communication, and its later version of communication for social change, is firmly rooted in the intelligence-military apparatus of the US Empire. Salient here is the interchanging relationship between the Ford Foundation and the CIA in funding anti-Communist projects, formulated into development communication. The Modjokuto project at CENIS was one such intelligence-military program that employed economists, anthropologists, and other social scientists to map Indonesian villages, on one hand to develop strategies of counter-insurgency and on the other hand to map the development trajectory of the villages in the context of the US-imposed model of capitalism and markets (Price, 2016). Note the backdrop of the project amid the geostrategic interventions planned by the US military-intelligence-industrial complex targeting one of the largest grassroots-based Communist Parties in Asia, the Partai Komunis Indonesia, PKI. The monograph published by Geertz, Agricultural Involution, offered a template of transformation of traditional village society through the penetration of the market and the capitalist framework. The depiction of culture is constructed within the overarching framework of modernization as a capitalist project, specifically anchored in the promotion of the US Empire. The thick description of the Balinese cockfight is the backdrop of an imperial project of US involvement in dismantling a democratically elected government, supporting a genocide that resulted in massacres of Indonesians suspected to belong to the Indonesian Communist Party, and in setting up new markets for expansion of US capital. Culture therefore has been a key companion to the social change communication project in propping up the US-driven model of capitalism as modernization. The backlash against the treatment of culture as a tool of colonial management emerged amid the non-aligned movement, as newly independent nation states sought to challenge the Cold War ideology. This radical turn to culture emerged amid the articulation of communicative rights made in the context of the New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO). This turn toward communicative rights, however, threatened the US capitalist interests in the media and communication industries, resulting in an active imperial campaign of delegitimizing the cultural turn in the arena of communicative rights. UNESCO adapted to these challenges by gradually navigating toward culture in development, which erased culture from its radical roots and reframed it instead in the logics of the emerging neoliberal hegemony. As the concept of culture evolved amid the turn to multiculturalism as an instrument of disseminating

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­ eoliberal policies, it was no longer looked at as a barrier, but rather turned n into a resource that can generate economic and development benefits (see, for instance, Yúdice, 2003). Cultural knowledge and cultural industries are treated as resources that can generate economic value. The incorporation of culture into development under the umbrella of the United Nations formed the basis of cultural development policies that specifically placed emphasis on the economic “value” of culture (McGuigan, 2005). Formulated as an economic resource, culture can now be measured, evaluated, commoditized, and introduced into capitalist circuits of profiteering. 1.2.1  Culture as Static The conceptualization of culture as a bounded system, with shared values, beliefs, and practices, forms much of the basis of the early theorizing of culture in communication (Lerner, 1958). Culture is located “elsewhere,” placed in traditional societies that are targets of modernization interventions. The depiction of static culture serves the bedrock for the social change communication intervention, with the work of communication directed at changing the culture under the universal scripts of modernization. The concept of culture emerges from the lens of the White academic located in the West studying the culture, needing to create boundaries around it, so it can be managed and controlled. Inherent in the conceptualization of culture is cultural management, deploying techniques for measuring aspects of the culture, quantifying these aspects/elements, and then incorporating them into techniques of management (Bauman, 2013). This role of cultural knowledge as the basis of colonial management forms the knowledge infrastructure of the Empire, with White anthropologists deployed, employed, and sustained by the colonial structure as tools for gathering cultural knowledge. The role of culture in colonial management forms the basis of the emergence of Cold War anthropology, with anthropologists deployed across the global South as intelligence gatherers, as instruments of the US security state. 1.2.2  Culture as Fluid The concept of culture as static is juxtaposed in the backdrop of the concept of culture as fluid. Culture as fluid is dynamic, seen as changing, and constructed through communication. The role of communication as constitutive of culture and as constituted by culture attends to the ongoing

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interplay between culture and communication. Culture is seen as everyday meanings, everyday practices, and stories circulated by members. Situated within contexts, culture is expressed through the participation and negotiation of members in everyday life. An ethnographic approach to culture depicts culture through “thick descriptions,” in-depth and richly detailed accounts of everyday lives and accounts. Similar to the concept of culture as static, ethnographic accounts of culture have often been incorporated into neocolonial management techniques, with anthropologists often working within the Cold War ideology. The concept of culture as fluid also, however, offers an opening for working with the notion of culture as the site of structural transformation. 1.2.3  Culture as Closed The treatment of culture as a closed system sees culture in terms of boundaries that define culture. Often conceptualized in terms of a community, culture is anchored in a geographically defined space. The study of culture then looks for shared values, shared meanings, and shared practices that are bounded within a space. Techniques of cultural measurement draw out specific characteristics of culture as a closed system to describe the culture and to incorporate it into processes of management. For instance, quantitative studies on cultural characteristics depict cultures and assign them scores on the basis of specific characteristics. A wide array of development projects are created around the concept of measuring culture and working with cultural categories. 1.2.4  Culture as Open The depiction of culture as open attends to the ways in which cultures interact with each other, transforming themselves through these interactions. The emphasis here is on the spaces of exchanges and flows between cultures. The communicative process creates opportunities of transformations, working through the interactions that take place between cultures. Concepts such as hybridity, cosmopolitanism, and mimicking are some examples that draw on the notion of cultural flows, built on the concept of culture as open. Reading culture as open serves as the basis for conceptualizing hybrid modernities, where specific forms of modernization are explained in cultural terms. In such accounts, modernization is taken as the capitalist formation of development built on technology and anchored

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in reason. Cultural depictions of modernization therefore offer accounts of the development of capitalism in societies that departed from the liberal model of capitalist growth based on the marriage of democracy and capitalism. 1.2.5  Culture and Structures In these various treatments of culture, the concept of culture is situated in relationship to structures, although structures remain mostly absent in discussion of culture in communication for social change (Dutta, 2010). Throughout the book, we will be engaging with structures, the forms of organizing and distributing resources, emergent in the rules, roles, and formations that constitute communication for social change. Structures are foregrounded in the analysis offered in the book, connected to the conceptualization of culture and to the formation of communication for social change. Noting that how we develop communication for social change has historically been situated amid dominant structures, constituted in the realm of power, we will explore the ways in which social change emerges as a transformative site for disrupting structures (Gunvald Nilsen, 2009). In disrupting structures, the very concepts of communication and social change need to be interrogated. That the concept of structural transformation points toward a role of communication anchored in socialist commitments becomes the basis for theorizing the various approaches to communication and explicitly making room for socialist articulations in communication for social change (Ware, 2019). The hegemony of the capitalist paradigm in communication for social change has meant that paradoxically the conversations on social change have been constituted in the logics of capital, with social change communication working precisely to serve the agendas of capital (Dutta, 2006a). 1.2.6  Culture and Meaning Culture offers the interpretive template through which cultural participants make sense of their everyday life (Geertz, 1973). Moreover, meanings are continually at work in the construction of cultures, with power configurations working to prop up specific meanings that serve the status quo. Perhaps, this theorization of culture as a site of meaning-making forms a key element in social change communication. By acknowledging the dynamic and active role of interpretive frames that form the textures of

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culture, social change communication scholarship can examine closely the ways in which meanings are deployed toward change processes. That meanings are in flux, and are situated within strategic uses of cultural tropes, offers the basis for examining the ways in which culture forms the basis of different threads of social change communication. Hegemonic social change communication efforts often deploy specific meanings in culture to construct particular economic models. Similarly, the cultivation of specific meanings as culture is often constituted within larger hegemonic logics. Along these lines, cultural meanings therefore also offer the basis for transformative politics of change. 1.2.7  Culture and Resistance In this book, we will particularly attend to the resistive role of culture. Of particular relevance is the resistive capacity of culture (Nilsen, 2010). Cultural interpretations, we will argue, offer templates for imaginaries that fundamentally imagine social, political, and economic processes in just, socialist, sustainable frameworks. In their imaginative capacities as alternatives to the extractive capitalism that has fundamentally transformed the globe, cultural resistance offers pathways for livelihoods that are embedded in the praxis of cultural life. Note, for instance, the resistive power of cultural imagination that constructs the river as a person. In Aotearoa, the Whanganui Iwi Deed of Settlement was passed into law, giving legal personhood to the Whanganui River (Hutchison, 2014). This law, drawing on Maori knowledge, fundamentally transformed how rivers are conceptualized in legal and policy frameworks, moving from being considered as property to a person with rights. The Eurocentric, colonizing ideology of anthropomorphism is resisted through the presence of Maori knowledge that sees the river in relational terms.

1.3   Interrogating and Disrupting Structures Situating communication in relationship to structures attends to both the overarching politics that constitute structures as well as the economic interplays in structures. Acknowledging the constitutive role of structures in shaping communicative processes and constructions, this book specifically seeks to situate communication for social change in its relationship with structures. Whereas the dominant approach to social change communication is embedded within the structures of liberal democracy, it is

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mostly silent about the very concept of structures. In other words, structures are marked by their absence in conversations on social change communication, with communication interventions focusing on strategies of changing individual behavior. Social change therefore is considered as an aggregate of individual behaviors, with methodologies of social change mostly focusing on changing individual knowledge, attitude, and/or behavior. The emphasis on modifying individual behavior translates on methodologies that examine individual behavior, mostly through self-­ reports or reports of past behavior. Forming the basis of the effects tradition in communication scholarship, the dominant framework is interested in strategic construction of communication with the goal of generating maximum effects. The absence of structures from the dominant theorizing of social change communication also translates into an approach to communication that focuses on developing the tools of “effective” communication, without attending to the ways in which power and control shape communication. The discussion of the Marxist approach in Chap. 3 seeks to offer a beginning point for correcting this omission, by specifically looking at the approach to communication for social change in Marxist and socialist contexts. Given the roots of communication, and particularly communication for social change, in the dominant paradigm within the US Cold War logic (more on this in the next chapter), a search of the literature demonstrates very little in terms of social change communication efforts in socialist and Marxist political economies. The robust body of critical communication scholarship does indeed bring in questions of power and control, situating these in the interrogation of the assumptions of the dominant paradigm; yet, the communication for social change literature is mostly silent about how social change communication has been conceptualized and implemented in socialist and Communist political economies. The disciplinary boundaries of Communication have systematically erased questions of socialist futures that commit to the equal distribution of resources in society. In the chapters that follow, we will conduct an overview of the approaches to social change communication, examining the ways in which culture plays out in these approaches. Each of these approaches will be situated in relationship to structures, examining how the conceptualization of culture is embedded within specific assumptions about structures. In the last two chapters, I will offer a review for the CCA as a conceptual net for fundamentally transforming the institutionalized structures of

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knowledge production that constitute communication for social change (see Thomas & Van de Fliert, 2014). The book will conclude with practical questions for interventions in academia, exploring the ways in which these questions connect to the broader politics of social change communication.

Note 1. Neoliberalism is a form of economic, political, social, and cultural governance that places the free market as the solution to problems of development. It organizes the global order on the premise of the free market, with everyday development resources being framed as commodities. The neoliberal ideology puts forth privatization of public resources as an overarching structure for managing development through growth.

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Dutta, M. J. (2005). Civil society and public relations: Not so civil after all. Journal of Public Relations Research, 17(3), 267–289. Dutta, M.  J. (2006a). Theoretical approaches to entertainment education campaigns: A subaltern critique. Health Communication, 20(3), 221–231. Dutta, M. J. (2006b). US public diplomacy in the Middle East: A critical cultural approach. Journal of Communication Inquiry, 30(2), 102–124. Dutta, M.  J. (2007). Communicating about culture and health: Theorizing culture-­centered and cultural sensitivity approaches. Communication Theory, 17(3), 304–328. Dutta, M. J. (2010). The critical cultural turn in health communication: Reflexivity, solidarity, and praxis. Health Communication, 25(6–7), 534–539. Dutta, M. J. (2011). Communicating social change: Structure, culture and agency. Routledge. Dutta, M.  J. (2012a). Culture-centered approach to social change communication: Structure, culture and agency. In S. Melkote (Ed.), Development communication in directed social change (pp. 53–79). Singapore: AMIC. Dutta, M.  J. (2012b). Voices of resistance: Communication and social change. Purdue University Press. Dutta, M. J. (2013). Communication, power and resistance in the Arab Spring: Voices of social change from the South. Journal of Creative Communications, 8(2–3), 139–155. Dutta, M. J. (2015). Decolonizing communication for social change: A culture-­ centered approach. Communication Theory, 25(2), 123–143. Dutta, M. J. (2018). Culturally centering social change communication: Subaltern critiques of, resistance to, and re-imagination of development. Journal of Multicultural Discourses, 13(2), 87–104. Dutta, M. J. (2019). Cultural imperialism and development communication for social change. In Media imperialism: Continuity and change (p. 245). Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Dutta, M. J., Thaker, J., & Sun, K. (2014). Neoliberalism, neocolonialism, and communication for social change: A culture-centered agenda for the social sciences. Global Media Journal, 1–13. Evans-Pritchard, E. E. (1937). Witchcraft, oracles and magic among the Azande. Oxford: London. Ganesh, S., Zoller, H., & Cheney, G. (2005). Transforming resistance, broadening our boundaries: Critical organizational communication meets globalization from below. Communication Monographs, 72(2), 169–191. Geertz, C. (1973). The interpretation of cultures (Vol. 5019). Basic Books. Gershman, J., & Irwin, A. (2000). Getting a grip on the global economy. In Kim, J. Y., Millen, J. V., Irwin, A., & Gershman, J. (Eds.), Dying for growth: Global inequality and the health of the poor, 11–43.

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Gunvald Nilsen, A. (2009). ‘The authors and the actors of their own drama’: Towards a Marxist theory of social movements. Capital & Class, 33(3), 109–139. Harvey, D. (1999). Time-space compression and the postmodern condition. Modernity: Critical Concepts, 4, 98–118. Harvey, D. (2001). Spaces of capital: Towards a critical geography. Edinburgh. Harvey, D. (2005). From globalization to the new imperialism. In Critical globalization studies (pp. 91–100). New York: Psychology Press. Hutchison, A. (2014). The Whanganui river as a legal person. Alternative Law Journal, 39(3), 179–182. Kim, J.  Y., Millen, J.  V., Irwin, A., & Gershman, J. (2000). Dying for growth: Global inequalities and the health of the poor. Knafo, S., Dutta, S. J., Lane, R., & Wyn-Jones, S. (2019). The managerial lineages of neoliberalism. New Political Economy, 24(2), 235–251. Lerner, D. (1958). The passing of traditional society: Modernizing the Middle East. Free Press. Lerner, D., & Schramm, W. L. (Eds.). (1967). Communication and change in the developing countries. East-West Center Press. Lewis, M. (2002). Scientists or spies? Ecology in a climate of Cold War suspicion. Economic and Political Weekly, 2323–2332. Lippmann, W. (1922). Public opinion. New York: Simon & Schuster Inc. Malinowski, B. (1922). Argonauts of the Western Pacific. New  York: EP Dutton & Co. McGuigan, J. (2005). Neo-liberalism, culture and policy. International Journal of Cultural Policy, 11(3), 229–241. Melkote, S. R. (2018). Communication for development and social change: An introduction. Journal of Multicultural Discourses, 13, 77–86. Melkote, S. R., & Steeves, H. L. (2001). Communication for development in the Third World: Theory and practice for empowerment. Sage. Millen, J.  V., & Holtz, T.  H. (2000). Dying for growth, Part I: Transnational corporations and the health of the poor. In Dying for growth: Global inequality and the health of the poor (pp. 177–223). Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press. Millen, J. V., Irwin, A., & Kim, J. Y. (2000). Introduction: What is growing? Who is dying. In J. Y. Kim, J. V. Millen, A. Irwin, & J. Gershman (Eds.), Dying for growth: Global inequality and the health of the poor (pp. 3–10). Miller, C. (2004). Resisting empire: Globalism, relocalization, and the politics of knowledge. In Earthly politics: Local and global in environmental governance (pp. 81–102). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Nilsen, A. G. (2010). Dispossession and resistance in India: The river and the rage. Routledge.

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Pal, M., & Dutta, M.  J. (2008). Theorizing resistance in a global context: Processes, strategies, and tactics in communication scholarship. Annals of the International Communication Association, 32(1), 41–87. Payer, C. (1974). The Debt Trap: The International Monetary Fund and the Third World. NYU Press. Peet, R. (2003). Unholy trinity: The IMF, World Bank and WTO. Zed Books. Peet, R., & Hartwick, E. (2015). Theories of development: Contentions, arguments, alternatives. Guilford Publications. Preston, P. (2012). Theories of development. Routledge. Price, D.  H. (2016). Cold War anthropology: The CIA, the Pentagon, and the growth of dual use anthropology. Duke University Press. Schramm, W. (1964). Mass media and national development: The role of information in the developing countries (Vol. 25). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Schramm, W., & Lerner, D. (Eds.). (1976). Communication and change, the last ten years—And the next. Honolulu: University press of Hawaii. Servaes, J. (Ed.). (2007). Communication for development and social change. SAGE Publications India. Servaes, J., Jacobson, T. L., & White, S. A. (Eds.). (1996). Participatory communication for social change. Sage. Thomas, P., & Van de Fliert, E. (2014). Interrogating the theory and practice of communication for social change: The basis for a renewal. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Tufte, T. (2017). Communication and social change: A citizen perspective. John Wiley & Sons. Waisbord, S. (2018). Revisiting mediated activism. Sociology Compass, 12(6), e12584. Ware, R.  X. (2019). Two projects of socialism. In Marx on emancipation and socialist goals (pp. 223–245). Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Weber, M. (2013). The Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism. Routledge. Wilkins, K. G. (2014). Advocacy communication. In The handbook of development communication and social change (pp. 57–71). John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Wilkins, K.  G., Tufte, T., & Obregon, R. (2014). The handbook of development communication and social change (Vol. 4). John Wiley & Sons. Williamson, J. (1993). Democracy and the “Washington consensus”. World Development, 21(8), 1329–1336. Yúdice, G. (2003). The expediency of culture: Uses of culture in the global era. Duke University Press.

CHAPTER 2

Development, Dominance, and Communication

As noted in the introduction, the mainstream framework of social change communication forms the bulwark of the communication discipline, and more specifically of the social change communication literature, with the earliest social change communication scholarship originating in instrumental applications of persuasion and World War propaganda, and forming the basis of the foundational disciplinary conversations (Katz, Cartwright, Eldersveld, & Lee, 1954). For instance, the edited collection Public Opinion and Propaganda: A Book of Readings brings together an array of social scientists representing political science, history, anthropology, sociology, economics, and psychology, and working on the question of influencing social behavior. Communication, conceptualized in the military metaphor, has been imagined as the instrument for the dissemination of ideas, values, and beliefs of those in positions of power. The military metaphor sees communication as an instrument in the war between opposing ideas/concepts, as a tool in the war between the good and the bad. For instance, the chapters in Public Opinion and Propaganda go on to outline the propaganda techniques of various actors in the World War and the then-emerging Cold War. At the crux of the military metaphor is the role of communication, conceptualized as the mass media, as tools for disseminating dominant ideas (Glander, 1999). The development communication framework emerged in the Cold War climate of deploying development toward serving the geopolitical agendas of the donor nation states, with development interventions deeply © The Author(s) 2020 M. Dutta, Communication, Culture and Social Change, Palgrave Studies in Communication for Social Change, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26470-3_2

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e­mbedded in Cold War ideology (Glander, 1999; Latham, 2010). As offered in the introduction to this book, much of the dominant framework of social change communication and a large proportion of the historical roots of communication as a discipline have been constituted under the broader framework of development communication, conceived as the strategic use of communication by development agencies such as the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Department for International Development (DfID) in promoting prosocial behavior change, and constituted within the overarching Cold War strategies of the US and the UK respectively (Dutta, 2012a, 2012b; Melkote & Steeves, 2001; Rogers, 1962, 1971, 1973). Embedded within this framework is the notion of growth-driven, market-based capitalist development as integral to recruiting nation states to the pro-capital, profree market, pro-­democracy framework of liberal capitalism.

2.1   Communication and Social Change Influence is a key feature of how communication is conceptualized in the military paradigm. The examination and deployment of influence under the ambits of propaganda was consolidated in the US under the Committee of Public Information (CPI). The CPI, created by Woodrow Wilson in 1917, set out to generate public support for the War and to address the problem of dissent domestically from the threats of socialism, anarchism, and labor unionism (Glander, 1999). The work of the CPI, or the Creel Committee, under the leadership of George Creel, created and disseminated strategic communication materials through new stories, films, educational instruction, and speeches. Academics, civil society, and instruments of the state collaborated closely in the articulation of communication as a tool of psychological warfare. This deployment of communication as an instrument of influence during wartime was juxtaposed in the backdrop of the repression of dissent through the deployment of the Espionage Act. Walter Lippman, one of the key architects of communication theory and regarded as one of the pioneers of the field, played a pivotal role as a nodal point in the CPI, working closely within the network to develop and disseminate strategies of psychological warfare (Trudel, 2017). A number of early communication pioneers were recruited into the war propaganda efforts, with Harold Lasswell, Hadley Cantril, and Paul Lazarsfeld among those who received major research grants to develop and synthesize the techniques of war propaganda. On the other side, propaganda as a tool for

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shaping human behavior was deployed by the Nazi government to shape its global image, carried out by Ivy Lee, who had earlier carried out the public relations activities for John D. Rockefeller. In the ambits of social change, the originary ideas of US-centric communication were tied to techniques of coercion, thus developing a “science of coercion” (Simpson, 1994). The World War II era saw the continued deployment of mass media toward behavior change, with the Office of War Information (OWI) and Office of Strategic Services (OSS) gathering a wide array of social scientists deployed toward intelligence gathering and intelligent message design (Glander, 1999). The questions of security and national interest shaped the framing of the work of social scientists interested in the deployment of mass media toward social change, catalyzing news reports, publications, radio, and film toward the agendas of propaganda. The Cold War period offered the basis of the development of communication concepts built around the fundamentals of strategic influence, marrying the agendas of capitalism and propaganda. The Cold War provided the climate for the rapid growth of Lazarsfeld’s Bureau of Applied Social Research, drawing on large sources of defense and strategic funding directed at growing US influence abroad. The imperial foundation of communication research tied to propaganda is well evident in the following framework offered by Lazarsfeld and Knupfer (1945): To use the media of communications most effectively they must determine what avenues of access are open to them; they must remove the art of producing effective propaganda from the realms of instinct and guesswork; they must anticipate and recognize propaganda which is antagonistic to their own purposes. None of them can be approached except by a rigorous discipline. If the promoters of the IA [international authority] accept this challenge, if they attempt to control the media of communications through achieving a high degree of effectiveness, science will have become the tool for social progress. (p. 466)

The progress of science is tied to propaganda, embedded in the deployment of communication toward achieving influence. The science of communication thus is very much a militarized model of communication occupied with strategic influence. The overarching agenda of US imperial influence globally emerging from the work of the Bureau became the basis for the fundamental tenets of the dominant approach to social change communication. Depicting its explicit commitment to growing the US

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influence abroad, the Bureau undertook a range of strategic influence projects under the Voice of America program, the RAND Corporation, and the US Department of Defense (DoD). 2.1.1  Knowledge, Development, and Change The formulation of development communication, communication for development, communication for social change (terms that are utilized interchangeably) is rooted in the production of development knowledge that universalizes the Eurocentric pathway of development as the normative and preferred route to development. Inherent then in the production of development knowledge is the marking of the “developed” and the “un/underdeveloped.” The role of knowledge of development is tied to the production of practices of development, tied to the strategies of US-driven development interventionism globally to produce markets for US-based capital. Rooted in modernization theory, the mainstream framework of social change communication conceptualized social change as a planned activity that would bring about development in traditional societies (Peet & Hartwick, 2015). Essential to the framework of modernization is the categorization of traditional and developed societies, offering a deficit-based framework to account for the underdevelopment of traditional societies. In other words, traditional societies are described as societies lacking in certain characteristics (of development, characterized as capitalism and democracy) that define a modern society. Industrialized societies of the West were defined as modern, developed societies, and development was marked as the linear movement of traditional societies to the markers of the developed, industrialized societies. The economist Bert Hoselitz launched the journal Economic Development and Cultural Change in 1952 to examine the social structural and cultural characteristics underlying the development process. The knowledge of development thus produced was actively deployed for the purposes of US propaganda and military interventionism in the Third World. The deep-seated relationship between Cold War US militarism and the production of development knowledge is evident, for instance, in the way in which the economic historian Walt W.  Rostow, one of the founding theorists of the modernization paradigm, was one of the key architects and defenders of the US imperialist invasion of Vietnam (Reid-Henry, 2012; Stevenson, 2017). Rostow’s (1960) The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto charted out the pathway of development from

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traditional societies that had limited production, primitive technologies, and a spiritual worldview; to pre-conditions for take-off where traditional methods still prevailed, but education started expanding, manufacturing plants started developing, mobilities increased, financial activities appeared, and the degree of commerce increased; to take-off where new industries rapidly expanded, the class of entrepreneurs grew, urban industrial employment increased; to the active drive toward maturity, where modern technology spread across the country, widespread technical and entrepreneurial skills resulted in innovative solutions to new and emerging problems, and economic growth outdid population growth; to high mass consumption, where the consumer goods and services industries prevailed, rise in real income allowed a large section of people to consume more than needed, and the nature of work changed to urban skilled and office work. Rostow’s categorization scheme was a universal scheme that placed countries in categories, mapped them in their trajectories of movements, and then offered prescriptive solutions for movement from tradition to modernity. Note in the title of the book its overarching ideological commitment in framing development as an antidote to Communism. The ontological mapping Rostow envisioned also became the basis for the overarching rationale for violent US interventionism in Vietnam he offered, arguing that the Vietcong was a barrier to South Vietnam’s take-off, therefore advocating for military intervention as a technique for applying psychological pressure, what came to be formalized as the Rostow thesis (Stevenson, 2017). Modernization theory formed the crux of the early development communication framework and practice, and continues to shape the landscape of development knowledge, albeit packaged in neoliberal narratives of individual freedom, self-help, and market-based participation. One of the earliest articulations of development communication emerged in the work of Daniel Lerner (1958), reflected in the book The Passing of Traditional Society: Modernizing the Middle East. Lerner reproduced the traditional-­ modern dichotomy that lies at the crux of the modernization paradigm, framing the role of mediated technologies as catalysts of modernization. Development communication efforts locate individual attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors as the locus of the problem, and therefore interventions are targeted at Third World societies within the top-down framework of persuasive communication interventions, with the goal of changing individual behaviors that are seen as barriers to the development of these societies. Lerner’s (1958) interest in the role of modern communication in transforming traditional societies into pathways of development was also

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reflected in works such as Wilbur Schramm’s Mass Media and National Development: The Role of Information in Developing Countries and Everett Rogers’ Diffusion of Innovations. Inherent in the modernization paradigm was the role accorded to communication as an enabler of change in the pathway of development. Whether it is the traditional framework of diffusion of innovations that conceptualizes development in terms of disseminating technologies of progress (seeds, fertilizers, dams, computers, fortified food, mobile phones, the Internet, etc.) or it is the social psychological framework of behavior change through persuasion (such as family planning, condom usage, immunization promotion, etc.), the messages of development originate from the senders in the developed world, and the target audiences are recipients in the underdeveloped world (Lerner, 1967, 1968; Schramm, 1964; Schramm & Lerner, 1976). Modernization became the framework for Westernization, carried out through the explicit agendas of Western funding agencies, primarily the USAID and DfID (Melkote & Steeves, 2001). The flow of communication from the sender to the recipient therefore is constituted within this broader agenda of seeking to bring about changes in the cultural patterns of target cultures that are seen as primitive and lacking in the necessary agency for modernization, understood in a linear framework of development that moves from a primitive state to a state of modernity. Such social change communication efforts are built on the implicit idea of linear progression from underdevelopment to development, conceptualizing local culture as a barrier to economic growth. The population must be stripped of the backward cultural characteristics in order to bring it in line with the logics of progress and modernization, achieved through the powerful role of the mass media as disseminators of modern technology (Lerner, 1967, 1968; Schramm, 1964; Schramm & Lerner, 1976). Culture here is seen as an antithesis of the universal values of development as modernization; the goal of social change efforts therefore is seen in terms of changing the culture and creating spaces for universal modernization, with communication playing a key role as a disseminator of modern values and beliefs accomplished through the mass media (radio, television, and increasingly, the Internet and mobile media). The universal markers of desire for development are scripted in terms of the materialist logics of development embodied in the reductionist thinking of the Western institutions of development communication, and this becomes the basis of communication for social change.

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Development communication was organized in the post-World War II climate, conceptualizing communication technology as an instrument of development, dissemination, and diffusion (Dutta, 2010; Melkote, 1991; Shah, 2011). Development emerged as a rhetorical trope to reposition the colonizing and imperializing forces of the West, primarily the US and the UK, offering a neutral-sounding language to assert Western hegemony in the post-World War II global climate dominated by Cold War aspirations and desires, and crafting spaces for countering the popular anti-colonial resistance movements that were emerging across the global South (Dutta-­ Bergman, 2006; Samarajiwa, 1987). Based on the principles of liberal democracy, development came to embody taken-for-granted West-centric assumptions about the desirable models of economic, political, social, and cultural organizing, and the universally prescribed pathways of growth formulated in linear trajectories of capitalist transitions as the basis for democratization. Capitalism was seen as intrinsic to the conceptualization of democracy, and democracy promotion initiatives funded by the USAID disseminated the values of capitalism through a variety of symbolic resources such as television programs, radio entertainment, and news programs. Communication technologies played a pivotal role in development, both as instruments of persuasion as well as instruments of organizing global political economy on market principles. Articulations of communication technology were framed in Western imaginations of liberal democracy, universalizing Western cultural assumptions through the technologies of dissemination and simultaneously erasing the possibilities of popular cultural participation grounded in subaltern rationalities in the global South.1 One of the key elements of the dominant framework of social change communication was the push toward opening up countries in the global South to transnational corporations (TNCs), located in the US and the UK. The precursor to the global promotion of neoliberalism therefore was a global development model that was very much like its successor in leveraging the power of the state to push for reforms in the recipient countries of the global South that would open up markets for TNCs based in the North. The various versions of social change communication knowledge, formalized into the structures of hegemonic institutions such as the Johns Hopkins University Center for Communication Programs (JHU/CCP), Ohio University, and the Center for Communication for Social Change, reflected the agendas of the development agencies (and the imperial nations constituting these agencies) as well as the foundations supporting

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them (Thomas and Van de Fliert, 2014). Located in the West/North, these sites of knowledge production maintained their dominance as spaces for producing development knowledge, while at the same time obfuscating the struggles with, ideas of, and processes of communication for development that were developing from the global South. Thomas and Van de Fliert (2014) offer a poignant example of the commercialization of knowledge of communication for social change, noting that once when they were preparing for the Communication for Social Change (CSC) awards at the University of Queensland, they received an email from the US-based CSC Consortium that “Communication for Social Change” is a trademarked term. They point to pitfalls of the “institutionalisation of CSC, its corporatisation and its enclosure within a steadfastly neoliberal logic” (p. 3). One exception to this Western hegemony of knowledge of social change as development was the Los Banos Center for Development Communication in the Philippines, although the funding structure and framing of development within the Center was very much constituted within the West-centric model, constructing communication in the realm of planned social change. The positioning of development knowledge within the agendas of development agencies and foundations ensured that the ideology underlining knowledge claims recirculated and normalized the notions of development as capitalist democracy. For instance, the Rockefeller Foundation’s funding of knowledge exercises around development (more on this later) replicates the Foundation’s agenda of offering a normative framework of capitalism as the secular theory of development. For instance, Waisbord’s (2001) “Family tree of theories, methodologies, and strategies in development communication,” funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, outlines the dominant and participatory approaches to development communication, and then wraps up with a framework for convergence between the two theories. This framework of knowledge construction, outlining the criticism, juxtaposing the criticism in the backdrop of the dominant theory, and then setting up a bridge between the criticism and the dominant framework co-opts critique into the dominant framework of communication for social change. Similarly, consider the critical work that forms the basis of an important critique of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and neoliberalism, edited by Inderpal Grewal and Victoria Bernal. The project emerged out of funding by the Rockefeller Foundation for a project titled “Democratizing Women: NGOs, Empowerment, and

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Marginalization in the 21st Century,” at the Bellagio Center in Italy in August 2004. Particularly worth noting in the production of the history of social change communication knowledge is the erasure of the histories of development processes constituted and emerging from the global South, and the strategic erasure of the past and present of communication as resistance to the imperialist hegemony of the global North/West. For instance, the Indian Satellite program (INSAT) launched the Kheda project across multiple villages in Gujarat, conceptualizing communication through satellite television as a method for disseminating development knowledge. The history, narrative, and framework of INSAT mostly remain erased from the knowledge claims of development communication and communication for social change. Similarly, in Singapore, the Asian Media Information and Research Center emerged as one of the earliest sites outside the West to articulate a role of development journalism in social change. The non-aligned movement (NAM) that emerged in the global South emerged as a space for mobilizing UNESCO with the New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO), challenging the Western imperialism of media flows, and suggesting community-grounded, democratically based, local frameworks for mediated development. These roles of development knowledge emerging from the global South mostly remain obfuscated and/or erased from anthologies of development and social change communication, with the strategic erasure of the theoretical framework of communication and development that emerged from NWICO, radically challenging the West/US-centric social change communication framework. The terrain of knowledge of communication and social change therefore is marked by erasures of the global South while simultaneously privileging the North/West as the articulator and producer of development knowledge. For instance, in the book Saving the World: A Brief History of Communication for Development and Social Change by McAnany (2012), NWICO gets a brief treatment (two pages), with the conclusive pointer to the death of NWICO and the consequent turn to participatory communication in development communication initiatives. Even as new terms such as participation, listening, and voice emerge into the neoliberal development model pushed by/from the global North as the “new development paradigm,” ironically the knowledge claims about communication and development that emerge from the global South are obfuscated, retaining the authoritative position of the global

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North/West as the producer of development knowledge. Even when sites of participation are opened up to the voices from the global South, the terms of participation in these sites are constituted within the agendas of the North, working hand-in-hand with transnational capital and with elite state actors. The representation of elite actors from the global South within the sites of the North works toward checking the list of participatory development metrics, while simultaneously obfuscating questions about the politics of participation within the global South. The new decade of sustainable development discourse reiterates and reifies this power differential in the production and flow of discourses and materials. While the burdens of developing sustainable practices in the backdrop of global climate change and calls to climate change adaptation are placed on the Third World communities in the global South, the knowledge of/ about sustainability is produced in the circuits of knowledge in the global North. The involvement of elite sections of the South in the managerial discourses of cultural management and sustainable development on one hand projects an image of cultural diversity while at the same time erasing the struggles of subaltern communities in the global South against displacement in the face of state-market-led development projects. 2.1.2   The Game of Expertise As noted in Chap. 1, the foundations for development communication are rooted in the role of the expert as the mediator of democracy (Lippmann, 1922). The suspicion of popular democratic participation forms the basis of the articulation of communication as mediated through expertise. The role of the expert here is to manage the participation of publics, and to direct participation toward outcomes that are designed by experts. The early roots of the liberal notion of democracy by expertise is traced to the framework of public opinion offered by Walter Lippman, that sees the public as unable to make meaningful and effective decisions, instead upholding the role of experts as intelligent information gatherers, informing policymakers by presenting information based on expertise. This model of expert-based decision-making forms the basic infrastructure of the neoliberal transformation of political economies (Newman, 2017). Experts work in  local-national-global teams in mediatizing governance that enables capitalist extraction and control. From think tanks to funded projects to academic departments to state departments, experts form the knowledge infrastructures of capitalist accumulation, formulated as

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­ evelopment. The privatization of public resources, erasure of labor rights, d large-scale land and resource grab, and minimization of state welfare have been actively promoted by experts. Terminologies of managerialism such as “public-private partnerships,” marketization of state services, and market-­based objectives of public welfare are imported into development, depicting the “roll out” of the market logic, complementing the roll-back of the state through the privatization of state services, removal of tariffs and trade barriers, erasure of welfare services, and prioritization of low inflation over unemployment (Prince, 2017). The game of expertise is located in the unmitigated hegemony of global capital, with experts playing the role of informing policy-makers in representative democracies. Note, for instance, in the depiction by Schudson (2008) of the analysis by Carey on the debate between Dewey and Lippmann on the role of expertise within the context of democracy: The rediscovery or the invention of the Lippmann-Dewey debate in the years 1986–1996 was part of an effort to locate a history for an American critical tradition. In a historical context, Marxism died in 1991, and it was, at best, on life support for several years before then as Eastern Europe came out from under the Soviet spell and sphere. In the absence of a believable Marxism, the vocabulary of the Frankfurt school, already sounding archaic, began to appear an increasingly poor fit with the American scene of ethnic, racial, and gender identity politics. Meanwhile, some thinkers, Carey among them, comfortable in American thought, convinced that there was a native intellectual tradition worth every bit as much, and more than the latest European imports, rejected the “sludge” of postmodernism, as Carey called it (1989b, p. 281) and sought to reclaim an intellectual heritage appropriate to the study of media in a democracy. (pp. 1040–1041)

The link between media and democracy is constructed in the unmitigated celebration of capital. Having declared the end of Marxism, Schudson then goes on to elaborate on the role of experts as sources of unbiased information for ruling elites. The Whiteness of the interpretive frame offered by Schudson erases the ongoing Marxist struggles and organizing practices across the global South, challenging the onslaught of neoliberalism. In declaring the death of Marxism, he fails to note the various movements across the globe deeply grounded in Marxist principles. Although Schudson goes at lengths to underscore the role of experts in democracy, he obfuscates the very location of expertise, especially in the US amid the very structures of neoliberal capital. Also note that Schudson is writing

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this in 2008 amid the early signs of the financial crisis that brought to bear the unsustainability of the neoliberal model of accelerated capitalist extraction. If anything, the past decade has brought to the fore the urgency of recovering democracy from the hold of experts in the unmitigated service of capital, depicting the ways in which expertise often works anti-­ democratically to serve the agendas of capital. Moreover, the failure of neoliberal capitalism foregrounds at this moment the relevance of imaginaries anchored in socialist visions. The hegemony of the neoliberal model of governance is embedded in the role played by experts in seeding it, normalizing it, and circulating it as the universal model for growth across the globe (Weisbrot, 2015). Think tanks, knowledge houses, academic centers and institutes funded by transnational capital actively generated knowledge claims of free market economics that made the unmitigated free market the universal desirable destination for governance. Experts, sitting on the various bodies of international financial institutions (IFIs), foundations, and aid agencies, orchestrated the neoliberal grab of global resources, offering models of privatization through economic prescriptions. The organizing framework of development interventionism, universalized as aggressive opening up of markets to transnational capital, has been shaped by over five decades of development expertise, with the knowledge of development playing the organizing role in the ideology. The concept of social change, anchored in the modernization paradigm, formulated and reproduced a theory of society that saw the linear movement from tradition to modernization through large-scale adoption of technology, capitalism, and the free market. Crises marked the anchors of structural adjustment programs and their later versions of neoliberal transformations, with IFIs dictating economic reforms in the form of weakening of public services and welfare, weakening of labor laws, and weakening of collective organizing, formulated on the basis of expert knowledge (Weisbrot, 2015). The ideology that neoliberal reforms would generate growth and alleviate poverty, largely devoid of empirical evidence, was historically and continues to be actively produced by experts, predominantly social scientists, funded by private foundations and imperial security interests, and networked into the capitalist-military-­ security apparatus (Glander, 1999; Latham, 2000). Experts of communication for social change are squarely located within this ideology of modernization, within the capitalist-military-security apparatus of the US Empire and complementary sites of transnational power, formulating

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strategies and tactics of communication that disseminate the modernization agenda (Gilman, 2003; Latham, 2000; Simpson, 1994). As noted elsewhere in the book, the violent undermining of democracies in the global South has often been orchestrated through the deployment of expert knowledge (Biglaiser, 2002). Expert knowledge, offering prescriptions of development on the logics of modernization, has pushed privatization, new technologies, and markets as the solutions to development, accompanied by prescriptions for militarization, the use of force, and the deployment of violence to bring about accelerated pro-market transformations. From the networks of economists at Chicago to communication experts creating development interventions, expert knowledge has been integral to the privatization of the globe. From the early variants of pro-market, pro-capital transformations prescribed as development to the later versions of structural adjustment programs to the aggressive neoliberal transformations, expert knowledge has worked monolithically in the development industry, developing methods, strategies, and tactics and tools of dissemination into target communities. The active and violent creation of crises forms the basis of expertise-driven neoliberal reforms introduced at an ever-accelerating pace. The technocratic strategies of governance work alongside police-military violence directed at producing sites of disciplining so that neoliberal reforms can be introduced, bodies can be disciplined, and practices of extreme exploitation can be mainstreamed (Seigel, 2018). 2.1.3  Power and Development Actors Power shapes the terrains of communication for development, determining the discursive space of/for development, and shaping the roles and relationships that mark up the terrains of development (Crush, 1995). Power is constituted at sites of articulation, embedded in the organizing frameworks of the development agencies, foundations, and IFIs that set the agendas for/of development, and integral to the structures that constitute the (re)production of development practices. Power shapes who defines development and who gets to be frozen as the passive target audience of development interventions. Power is constituted in the material domains of dominant development agencies in the West, dictating the overarching framework of development on the basis of theoretical frameworks of development articulated in the Western/Anglo-Saxon context, and tied to the funding that is offered

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by development agencies and f­oundations, pushing Western/AngloSaxon agendas as the truth of development. Power, in other words, shapes the contours of development communication. Moreover, the loans for development given out by the IFIs serve as mechanisms for reorganizing the politics and economics of targeted nation states, pushing the Wall Street agendas of market integration and financialization on these nation states (Cammack, 2004; Peet, 2003). Whereas the lines of power are easily identifiable in top-down diffusion of innovations interventions, these lines are strategically obfuscated in more participatory and community-based approaches to development, although they nevertheless often serve the agendas of the dominant development actors (development funders, foundations, agencies, and organizations). 2.1.3.1 Cold War, Empire, and Propaganda The history of communication for social change is constituted in the backdrop of and within the ambits of the Cold War, with communication being conceptualized as a tool for disseminating capitalism to the newly independent postcolonial states of the global South (Bah, 2008). The imperial notion of democracy as married to capitalism and the pursuit of the free market emerged as the bases for pushing the top-down framework of development into the global South/Third World, as an antidote to the growing influence of Communism across many of the newly liberated postcolonial nations of the global South (Dutta, 2006a, 2006b). In 1949, the Truman doctrine specifically laid out a policy framework for development as a US foreign policy strategy in its efforts to recruit developing countries to its side, and effectively combat Communism. Development in this sense was itself a Cold War propaganda strategy, serving the imperial interests of the US in the context of the ongoing global transformations. The work of communication science therefore is constituted in the ambits of propaganda (US), developing concepts and theories of communication strategy that would effectively persuade target populations (Dutta, 2010). Modernization theory, predicting a linear movement from primitiveness to development through the introduction of technology, offered the overarching ideology of development. The framing of capitalism and opening up of markets as development served the agendas of the US. The image of the self-serving, rational actor optimizing his/her choices through the mechanisms of a free market was at the center of the propaganda war car-

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ried out by the US, directed at building support for US values abroad and at countering the Communist surge across the newly independent postcolonial spaces of the global South (Amadae, 2003). The agendas of development were agendas of imperial expansion, with the work of social scientists (including communication scholars) established within this overarching framework of carrying out the expansionist military agenda of the US precisely as an anti-Soviet policy strategy (Bah, 2008). Communication interventions promoting new technologies of agricultural innovation and population control were married to the promotion of the free market. In other words, development was conceptualized by the USAID as the key tool for building global support for US and US-based transnational capital. Development aid programs promoting a particular technology were intrinsically tied to the promotion of the free market, serving the interests of US-based transnational corporations and the strategic geosecurity interests of the US development aid, and intrinsically tied to the goals of public diplomacy targeting the Third World, constituted within the ambits of strategic persuasion. The palette of development, dictated by development agencies such as the USAID, was anchored in the promotion of capitalism and a global market economy, with development serving as the gateway for the global penetration of transnational capitalism. The village was constructed as a category for development interventions, with these interventions being directed at winning the hearts and minds of rural populations against Communism, while simultaneously promoting the seductions of the free market. Development communication experts developing theories of communication sought to understand frameworks for communication that enabled most effective dissemination of technologies, markets, and democracies. The work of communication, embedded in a psychologized individual-level, knowledge-attitude-behavior framework, is directed at promoting individual change, generating development-oriented behaviors among the target audience. The framing of the individual as the source of solutions through participation in the market served as an antidote to the class consciousness of workers and peasant consciousness against structural inequalities. 2.1.3.2 Foundations and Propaganda Since the early years of development, foundations have played key roles in establishing the agendas for development communication, using the

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chador of development to reproduce US interests globally and serve as the instrument of neocolonialism (Parmar, 2015). More specifically, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Ford Foundation have orchestrated key conversations on themes of development and communication. The ­underlying interest of the Rockefeller Foundation in questions of development reflected the overarching interest of the Rockefellers with the power of communication as an instrument for manipulation of public opinion through persuasion (Parmar, 2015). It is worth noting that the conceptual framework of communication as an instrumental tool of persuasion reiterates throughout the works of Ivy Lee and Edward Bernays with the Rockefellers to silence worker protests at Ludlow, and then to generate positive public opinion in the backdrop of the massacre of the mine workers in Ludlow. In other words, privatized funding of strategic communication to spin the oppression of workers flows seamlessly from the development of communication interventions to persuade target audiences to change their beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors. In the intellectual framework created by the Rockefeller Foundation for the study of communication, the “engineering of consent” through communication was conceptualized as the primary goal and role of persuasive communication, with the work of scholars and practitioners of communication defined in the ambits of this instrumental logic (Parmar, 2015). In the mid- to late 1930s, the Foundation directed its attention to the study of propaganda in shaping public opinion, with specific interests in developing state surveillance capacities for detecting propaganda as well as in developing effective propaganda materials (Buxton, 1994). In 1937, the Rockefeller Foundation funded Hadley Cantrill’s Radio Research Project housed at Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs with a grant of $67,000 to study the effects and reception of radio messages, and with the goal of promoting cooperation between researchers and broadcasters. Directed by Harold Laswell, the research program focused on developing and fine-tuning public opinion research methodologies (audience surveys and focus groups) to develop conceptual frameworks for examining the needs of radio audiences, the patterns of radio listening, and the effects on radio audiences. Harold Laswell’s (1948) “message transmission” theory, “Who says what in which channel to whom with what effect,” aptly captures the overarching Foundation-­sponsored ideology of communi-

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cation as a tool for inducing change in the targeted receiver of the message, and reflects the conceptualization of communication by Rockefeller director John Marshall. The Institute for Propaganda Analysis funded by the Rockefeller Foundation became the site for sponsoring early communication scholarship directed at figuring out the strategies for leveraging media (radio) as tools for propaganda. The Foundation’s interests in mass communication research translated into a group of scholars, Harold Laswell, Robert Lynd, Lyman Bryson, and others, being brought together to formulate a systematic approach to the deployment of mass communication for strategic influence. The Ford Foundation, on a similar note, funded projects on communication that were inherently tied to the agendas of Cold War propaganda (Parmar, 2015). These foundations, as private sites for channeling money into the ambits of development, emerged as powerful spaces for shaping the development agenda in the interests of private industry. The work of communication embedded within the agendas of foundations was specifically constructed toward the promotion of the free market globally. Later versions of investments by the foundations turned to the questions of participation and empowerment, albeit framed and constrained within their overarching capitalist ideology. In the contemporary context of global capitalism, foundations such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Clinton Foundation have occupied the center stage of global policy-making through their funding of development programs, colonization of national programs, and instrumental role in shaping the knowledge and evaluation frameworks in development. The Gates Foundation, as one of the largest funders of development globally, with its funding portfolio much larger than most national governments and development agencies, works actively to shape the world in its vision of privatized solutions to problems of development. Techniques of scaling up, marketing, and effective management are incorporated into developing development solutions, to be delivered through the framework of the market. Salient here is the role of the Foundation as the hegemonic knowledge producer of/on/about development, formulated in the range of policy solutions, knowledge of policy solutions, frameworks of measuring and evaluating development, and the ways in which these frameworks are incorporated into policy conversations. Foundation funding shapes the global discourse on measurement of

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nation states, with the Foundation funded grants shaping the landscape and scope of the debate. Consider, for instance, the large-scale investment made by the Foundation in the collection of data on sustainable development goals, with Foundation-funded projects shaping the conversation on metrics, which subsequently shape the publications that emerge. These publications in key disciplinary journals set the terms of the debate and conversation on development goals, how to measure them, and how best to incorporate them. In shaping the knowledge agenda of development, the Gates Foundation promotes an entrenched logic of privatization, carrying out the propaganda that privatized solutions bring about ­ development. The hegemonic presence of the Gates Foundation on the global development landscape creates monolithic spaces of control, with the Foundation actively defining the pathways of development to be pursued by nation states, along the lines of privatized capital. Technodeterministic solutions to education, prevention, food insecurity, and development challenges are delivered through the mechanisms of the market. As a hegemonic development actor, the Gates Foundation has developed the monolithic voice of development, presenting and circulating communicative inversions, such as claiming that privatization and neoliberalism empower poor communities and alleviate poverty, on an unprecedented scale. Claims such as “neoliberal policies enable some of the greatest opportunities for upliftment of the poor” erase the ways in which the increasing privatization of the lifeworld of the poor has erased them from the commons and from their spaces of livelihood. Consider, for instance, voices emerging from ethnographic work with the poor that offer rich insights into the increasing hardships experienced by the poor as neoliberal policies have displaced them from their livelihoods, colonized the commons, and turned the commons into opportunities for transnational profiteering. In my ethnographic collaborations with Santali communities in the Eastern region of India, community members share their erasure from local and indigenous food systems, where fruits and forest produce belonged in the realm of the commons (Dutta, 2004a, 2004b). Propaganda such as “the free market has uplifted a phenomenal number of people out of poverty who are living better lives” are communicative inversions, where the very definition of the poverty line is so low that it is not

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sustainable, accompanied by the increasing inability of the poor to secure resources of basic living with the earning at the poverty line. The poverty line, the metrics around it, and the incorporation of it into the Gates discourse is driven by an overarching capitalist ideology, removed from the everyday experiences of the poor. Foundations working alongside consulting corporations and global forums such as the World Economic Forum (WEF) serve as the propaganda infrastructures of transnational elites. The WEF serves as the discursive site for knowledge generation on development, positioning itself as the hegemonic space where solutions to the challenges of poverty, inequality, and climate change are debated and solutions are presented by the global elite. Positioning the very elites that have profited from large-scale impoverishment of the poor and large-scale inequalities through the consolidation of wealth as the gatekeepers and problem solvers, the terrains of global challenges are shaped by global power and elite politics. The agendas of privatization paradoxically are put forth as the solutions to contemporary development challenges. The transnational media, working as mouthpieces of transnational capital, circulate the communicative inversions. Presenting a “happy picture of the world” as the global elites continue to usurp and consolidate wealth at a hyper-accelerated pace, the WEF then offers a celebratory rhetoric of the power of the market, technology, and expert-driven knowledge. Problems framed by the WEF, of sustainability, poverty, inequality, and climate change, are constituted within the logics of privatization, with managerial-technocratic solutions offered as the bases of philanthropy. Philanthropy, through its power of giving, retains its ability to influence and control the overarching framing while capitalists continue to evade taxes and circulate them through tax havens. The role of communication in the foundation-driven work mirrors the concept of communication as a tool of persuasion in the funding frameworks put forth by the development agencies. Essential to the conceptualization of development in the projects funded by foundations and development agencies was the notion of development tied to the agendas and opportunities for transnational capital. Development work specifically therefore set out to open up postcolonial spaces to transnational capital, shaping nation states in the image of market-driven development, and opening up free markets across the newly liberated states for transnational corporations based in the US.

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2.2   Communication as Racist The idea of liberal democracy, intertwined with Eurocentric conceptualizations of capitalism and democracy, serves as the foundation of development communication theory (Dutta, 2010; Samarajiwa, 1987). The historical roots of communication in liberal democracy are founded on racist principles of governance, where the rights of recognition and representation afforded to the White/Western citizens are not accorded to its colonial subjects and slaves (Losurdo, 2014). Indeed, in his historical analysis of liberalism, Losurdo notes that many of the early proponents of liberal principles were themselves slave owners and supporters of the institution of slavery. In the early theorizing of liberty, slaves fell outside the domain of liberal democratic participation as they were not recognized as capable subjects. The marking of the “other” as incapable, primitive, and passive therefore constituted the basic premise of liberal democracy, where the rational subject with cognitive abilities existed in opposition to the primitive subject of the colonies. The White/Western master represented the universally desirable evolutionary point as well as the recipe for evolution for the colonized subjects, and this notion of progression from primitive states to states of modernity served as the foundation of liberal democracy, justifying colonial occupation as an enabler of the transition in forms of governance from primitiveness to civilization. In essence then, the colonization and oppression of the colonial “other” were premised on a racist understanding of the “other” as incapable of agency, thus necessitating colonial rule as a civilizing instrument (Wilson, 2012). The violence of colonial oppression was premised on the liberal justification of such forms of oppressions as altruistic missions of civilization. Depicting the colonial missions of England being driven by its love of liberty, Montesquieu (1989) writes in The Spirit of the Laws: If this nation sent colonies abroad, it would do so to extend its commerce more than its domination. As one likes to establish elsewhere what is established at home, it would give the form of its own government to the people of its colonies; and as this government would carry prosperity with it, one would see the formation of great peoples, even in the forests to which it had sent inhabitants. (p. 156)

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Liberal thought served as the very basis of colonialism, offering the rationale for colonial occupation under the guise of the civilizing mission. The primitiveness of the “other” served as the basis for colonial expansion, premised under the responsibility of giving the colony a liberal form of government and bringing about prosperity in the colony. The targets of the colonial intervention were depicted as primitive, with the description of the target culture as pagan. Culture emerges in the framework of liberalism as a description of the primitive “other,” residing elsewhere, in opposition to the civilized universals of modernity. The civilizing mission drew on liberal arguments to justify the oppression of colonies: Western civilization was presented as the universal terminus of evolution, which the colonized should repeat, copy and internalize. At the same time, continued colonial domination was dependent on the opposite idea, namely that the colonized should remain different. (Baaz, 2005, p. 45)

This depiction of the “other” as primitive evident in liberal discourse lies at the heart of communication theorizing, framed within the ambits of the post-World War II social sciences, and more specifically in the development communication work under the modernization agenda (Dutta, 2010; Shah, 2011). In this framework, communication emerged as a tool of development, directed at bringing about modernity/modernization into the Third World. Describing the racial liberalism built into early communication theorizing reflected in Daniel Lerner’s The Passing of Traditional Society, Shah (2011) makes the following observation: At the core of postwar racial liberalism in America was a cultural theory of race… In many ways, [The] Passing of Traditional Society viewed the Middle East through the lens of racial liberalism. For example, early in the book, Lerner quoted a prominent British Middle East scholar who claimed that “Islam is defenseless” against the “infusion of a ‘rationalist and positivist science’” of the Western culture. (p. 123)

Race emerges in the narrative of liberal communication theory as a marker of culture, as a site of tradition, as the object to be made over by

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i­nterventions of development. Modernization theory of development depicts the primitive cultural traits of the “other” that need to be civilized through the modernizing mission of positivist science. The rationality of positivist science is placed in the backdrop of and in opposition to the irrationality of Islam, with the role of communication being one of bringing about the transformation from tradition to modernization. Communication in this sense is seen as the harbinger of science. Lerner (1968) goes on to note that millions throughout the Middle East are yearning to trade in their old lives for such newer ways is what modernization promises to most people … the Western model of modernization exhibits certain components and sequences whose relevance is global. Everywhere, for example, increasing urbanization has tended to raise literacy; rising literacy has tended to increase media exposure; increasing media exposure has “gone with” wider economic participation (per capita income) and political participation (voting)… The point is that secular process of social change, which brought modernization to the Western world, has more than antiquarian relevance to today’s problems of the Middle Eastern tradition. Indeed, the lesson is that Middle Eastern modernizers will do well to study the historical sequence of Western growth. (pp. 45–46)

The Western model of modernization is juxtaposed in the backdrop of a primitive Middle East culture and is seen as an evolutionary advance over the traditional social organization in the Middle East. The universal appeal of the Western model of modernization then serves as the basis for the deployment of development communication programs, projecting the universal appeal of secular science-technology as the catalyst of development. The racism inherent in the liberal conceptualization of communication then gets carried out into the theorizing and application of development communication. The mass media as a form of communication were seen as instruments of development, with the functionalist notion that the diffusion of liberal mass media rooted in the Western model of liberal democracy would raise economic and political participation of targeted traditional communities, achieving the twin goals of democracy and capitalism. The earliest roots of communication theory, framed under the umbrella of communication for development, sought to systematically examine and apply the study of media-driven communication processes directed toward bringing about planned social change. These efforts of social change were

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almost always framed within the American notion of modernity, imposed top-down to bring about development in the primitive and backward cultures of the world. In this sense, the body of work in communication rooted in persuasion and behavior change reflects the racism of liberal thought, tied to the notion of bringing about development in the global South through the diffusion of the principles of liberal democracy. The development efforts of early communication theory and research were seeding the roots of neoliberalism, tied to the US-centric notions of democracy and capitalism as intrinsically interlinked and as quintessential to the project of development. Communication in development therefore was a globally constituted effort that was directed at reshaping global agendas around US-specific understandings of governance that were framed as global markers of desire. Solutions of agricultural growth and population control were both tied to the mission of spreading American values abroad. As a result, population control programs often worked hand-in-hand with trade liberalization efforts that sought to create pro­US spaces and open up markets to TNCs, a large majority of which were based in the US. Communication therefore was seen as a persuasive tool that would disseminate the free market agenda globally. The racialized construction of the Third World “other” in development discourse is markedly evident in the following depiction by Paul Ehrlich (1968) in his book The Population Bomb: One stinking hot night in Delhi a few years ago. My wife and daughter and I were returning to our hotel in an ancient taxi… As we crawled through the city, we encountered a crowded slum area. The temperature was well over 100, and the air was a haze of dust and smoke. The streets seemed alive with people. People eating, people washing, people sleeping. People visiting, arguing, and screaming. People thrusting their hands through the taxi window, begging. People defecating and urinating. People clinging to buses. People herding animals. People, people, people, people. (p. I)

The depiction of the Third World as an ancient space crowded with people works to mobilize the liberal discourse of population control. The racism in the portrayal emerges in the depiction of people publicly eating, washing, sleeping, defecating, and urinating, reproducing the colonial portrayal of a stinking and primitive Third World. This portrayal of the backward Third World is the bedrock of development communication, or communication for development (c4d).

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The racism of colonial discourse reproduces itself in the form of communication solutions that are framed within the agenda of population control, through an active collaboration between the representatives of Empire and the local elite, developing communication solutions to be deployed on the poor segments of traditional societies (Murphy, 2004). Controlling the population of the breeding Third World masses and teaching the Third World the practices of market-driven democracy are crucial to protecting US geostrategic interests, creating greater security for the US and creating global markets for US products. An array of behavior change interventions are mobilized under the broader framework of global development, drawing upon the racialized portrayal of the Third World “other” that needs to be controlled in order to ensure a secure space for the global North. This linkage between controlling population growth in the Third World and economic-geostrategic interests of the global North is evident in the following statement by Madeline Albright quoted in the annual report of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID, 1998): [I]nternational family planning also serves important US foreign policy interests; elevating the status of women, reducing the flow of refugees, protecting the global environment, and promoting sustainable development which leads to economic growth and trade opportunities for businesses. (p. 3)

Communication becomes a conduit for establishing the global hegemony of US-directed neoliberalism, creating spaces of strategic alliance and security for the US in its global war against Communism and later, terrorism, and working to organize the Third World by opening up markets for TNCs, facilitated by the secular rhetoric of development discourse. 2.2.1  Communication as Instrument of Violence The theoretical framework of development communication and the methodology tied to articulations of development is inherently violent, erasing community-based, locally constituted ideas of social, economic, and political organizing by pushing a linear model of development (Dutta, 2010; Fair & Shah, 1997). The explicit character of violence of development communication interventions is evident in the Cold War politics of development programs, often deployed alongside violent transformations

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­ romoted by the US. The interventions of the CIA often went alongside p the interventions carried out by the USAID. In newly liberated colonies such as Indonesia where the Communist and Socialist parties were organized collectively toward creating a socialist state, US intervention actively catalyzed military violence. The violence of development communication is rooted in the top-down framework of West/Eurocentrism (development as linear movement toward market-based growth-driven political-­ economic structure) that is taken for granted as the universal marker of global desire, erasing other ways of knowing by discounting them as unscientific and primitive and in circulating economically driven market-­ based understandings of development monolithically as the global framework of development. The framing therefore of communication processes under the assumptions of West-centric thought turns as universal the particular and culturally specific desires of liberalism (democracy and development tied to capitalism and the market), simultaneously hiding the culturally specific nature of these concepts. The funding for communication interventions under this framework is driven by the conceptualization of communication as a tool for disseminating the linear model of development, further serving the interests of the powerful actors/elites that control the economic resources (Cammack, 2004). Notions of democracy and capitalism as forms of governance are deeply tied to how communication is conceptualized, measured, and cast into a nomological network in the ambits of development. Democracy is shaped within the overarching expansionist agenda of global capital, with democracy promotion efforts playing out important functions in the global promotion of the free market, intertwined with the promotion of the economic rationality of capitalism (Dutta-Bergman, 2006). Along these lines, reductionism guides the disciplinary commitments of communication imagined in the liberal tradition, seeking to explain human communication behavior in terms of individual cognition, affect, and behavioral intention. The fundamental understanding of human nature as self-­interest seeking dominates the discursive space and erases alternative frames through which human nature, human relationships, and communities may be understood. Violence is constituted in the erasure of alternative understandings of meaning frameworks and in the erasure of subaltern ways of thinking, relating, and living. This violence is further embodied in the reductionist conceptualization of human beings and their relationships, reducing communication to the atomistic individual and his/her self-interest.

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More so, neoliberalism, framed through the narrative of development, continues to reproduce the circulation of communication knowledge in the ambits of military expansion. Communication, in the domains of persuasion, perception formation, crisis response, strategic campaign design, and formation of public opinion, plays an important role in military expansion and in the development of the national security apparatus (Giroux, 2008). Where subaltern communities resist the dominant narrative of development and stand up against the large-scale displacement unleashed by neoliberal development industries such as those in the extractive and production sectors, the military is deployed under the dominant narrative of development, justifying the deployment of violence as necessary for development. Communication as propaganda inverts the material violence perpetrated by the development narrative deployed by the state, serving as justification for the deployment of violence on subaltern communities. In other instances, such as in the realm of population control programs and their later incarnations of family planning, programs framed as empowering Third World women by given them choice often deploy violence through forced sterilization (Wilson, 2012). Also, communication solutions framed within the ambit of civil society promotion, nation-building, and democracy promotion continue to embody the expansionist agendas of neoliberalism, marketed under the framework of development communication and fostering global spaces of support for TNCs. The USAID, for example, utilizes its democracy promotion efforts to push the market logic in nation states in the global South, configuring democracy under the logic of the free market and utilizing the chador of democracy to push the global market interests of transnational capital; similar strands are witnessed in the pairing of social movements with communication for development and social change (Obregon & Tufte, 2017). Those forms of civil society organizations and elite networks are supported in global spaces that are supportive of the USAID/DfID/IFI agenda of pushing neoliberal economies. Violence is embodied in the very act of redefining the agendas of poverty, inequality, food insecurity under the ambit of transnational capitalism. The promotion of transnational capitalism is framed as a solution to poverty and food insecurity, antithetical to the actual effects of neoliberal reforms in the form of increasing inequality, poverty, and food insecurity in the poorer sectors of the globe (Harvey, 2005). Explicit forms of violence, such as in the case of Chile, through the support of the military, are vital to the neoliberal transformation. To accomplish the goals of liberal democracy, the

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performance of participation itself becomes an instrument of violence as a technology of communication. Development narratives rhetorically positioned as participation emerge as the façade for large-scale neoliberal operations that displace, oppress, and exploit the subaltern sectors and subaltern resources. Consider for instance the role of the USAID in supporting the dictatorship of Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier as the basis of securing US influence in the region, which later extended to supporting Duvalier’s son, Jean-­ Claude “Baby Doc” as the basis for securing support for US geosecurity and capitalist interests (Mullin, 2011). USAID democracy promotion initiatives, under extensive funding to organizations such as the National Endowment for Democracy and the International Republican Institute, promoted and funded the 2004 overthrow of the democratically elected government of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. The performance of “democracy promotion” orchestrated by the USAID served to actively transform Haiti into a market for US-based transnational capital. Similarly, USAID funding was a key player in the fraudulent November 2010 and March 2011 elections, excluding Haiti’s largest political party, Fanmi Lavalas, from participating (Weisbrot, 2011). The NGO culture has colonized the infrastructures and public spaces of Haiti, with funding largely from the USAID. The active role of the USAID in weakening the state and public resources is integral to privatization of Haiti to serve the agendas of NGOs and transnational capital, constituted within the broader logics of development and democracy. Worth noting here is the flow and accumulation of capital mobilized under the umbrella of aid, and concentrated in the hands of the NGO-based managerial and professional classes in the global North (Klarreich & Polman, 2012; Mullin, 2011). The deployment of epistemic violence through the erasure of local agency is constituted amid destabilization of democracy and the support for police-­ military violence to serve the agendas of the local-US elites (Mullin, 2011). 2.2.2  Communication as Hegemonic Inherent in the expansionist agendas of neoliberalism that seek to privatize globally dispersed resources and capture them under the principles of market economics are the articulations of markets in the language of development, drawing upon the power of the IFIs such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank (WB) to impose neoliberal programs in the global South through structural adjustment programs. The

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agenda of development is reconfigured to push economic reforms through the conduit of development aid and development programming; development thus becomes neoliberal development. In other words, development becomes the framework through which the free market economic framework is pushed down on the South, through complementary participation of indigenous and transnational elites. The hegemony of neoliberalism is accomplished through the language of development. In the example of Vedanta discussed later in this book, the mining operations in Niyamgiri are positioned as solutions to India’s development needs (Padel & Das, 2010). Countries in the global South taking development aid hardly had and have any choices in the structural adjustment programs that are imposed on them (Harvey, 2005). National economies are opened up through the imposition of top-down instruments of economic control. In these instances, the countries in the global South have limited choice, experiencing tremendous pressure from the IFIs. Furthermore, the opportunities for participation of the global South in discursive processes and spaces of neoliberalism are limited, thus also limiting the opportunities for recognition and representation among the subaltern sectors from the global South.2 The hegemony of neoliberalism is achieved through the further shrinking of discursive opportunities for participation of the subaltern classes in spite of the language of free market, openness, and increasing political opportunities for participation. Interrogating the erasures embodied in the rhetoric of development discourse in the context of Colombia, Escobar (2011) notes: The messianic feeling and the quasi-religious fervor expressed in the notion of salvation are noticeable. In this representation, “salvation” entails the conviction that there is one right way, namely, development; only through development will Colombia become an “inspiring example” for the rest of the underdeveloped world… Before development, there was nothing: only “reliance on natural forces,” which did not produce “the most happy results.” Development brings the light, that is, the possibility to meet “scientifically ascertained social requirement.” The country must thus awaken from it lethargic past and follow the one way to salvation, which is, undoubtedly, “an opportunity unique in its long history” (of darkness, one might add). (p. 26)

The depictions of the subaltern sector as lethargic, as reliant on natural forces, and as unproductive, work strategically to justify the political econ-

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omy of development projects that are then carried out as justifications for modernizing the subaltern sectors. In other words, the epistemological exercise of depicting the subaltern sectors as without agency works to justify the top-down campaigns that make the decisions for the subaltern sectors, deciding what is good for them, and utilizing the language of “doing good” to carry out the agendas of transnational hegemony, ultimately working to displace and erase subaltern possibilities and imaginations (Dutta, 2010).

2.3   Social Change as Diffusion of Innovations The conceptualization of social change communication as diffusion of innovations centers on the concept of technological innovations that are seen as bringing about development (Rogers, 1983, 1995). Societies are categorized as primitive and modern based on their relationship with new technologies, and social change thus is understood as the process of transformation of Third World societies from primitiveness to modernity through the introduction of innovations. The modernization paradigm of development centers the role of technology as the catalyst for change. Communication therefore is conceptualized as disseminating the technology in the target population. The framework of communication as information delivery, and persuasion is shaped within the broader goal of disseminating new innovations. The conceptual framework of diffusion of innovations depicts an S-shaped curve that explains the movement and adoption of a new technology in a social system. Communities then are conceptualized and segmented on the basis of the likelihood of adoption of the innovation. Whereas communication itself is understood as a vehicle for the dissemination of information, communication technologies themselves are subjects of studies of diffusion of innovations, examining the ways in which these technologies spread into a population. The diffusion of innovation paradigm was founded on the hybrid seed corn diffusion study by Ryan and Gross (1943). This study documented the process through which an innovation flows in a target community. In their study of the adoption of hybrid seed corn in two rural Iowa communities, Ryan and Gross (1943) observed that the adoption rate followed an S-shaped pattern over time; after the first five years of slow growth in the use of hybrid seed corn, the adoption rate “took off,” ­reaching 40% adoption within the next three years (Rogers, 1995; Ryan & Gross, 1943). Subsequently, the adoption rate started tapering off.

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The S-shaped adoption curve, according to Ryan and Gross (1943), was attributed to the different categories of farmers in the target community. Categorizing the farmers into different groups based on their location on the adoption curve, Ryan and Gross (1943) posited that farmers systematically differed in their orientations toward an innovation. The innovators were more cosmopolitan and owned larger farms than the later adopters. Suggesting the critical role of interpersonal networks in the process of diffusion, Ryan and Gross (1943) observed that the early adopters were more likely to hear about the hybrid seed corn from the salesmen, while later adopters heard about the innovation from their neighbors. Communicative strategies were subsequently developed for reaching individuals at different stages of the diffusion curve (Rogers, 1983, 1995). The knowledge gained from the diffusion of innovations work of Ryan and Gross (1943) was soon to be put to work by the federal government. The US Department of Agriculture harvested the knowledge gained from early diffusion of innovation work for spreading the adoption of new agricultural technologies (Rogers, 1983, 1995). Rogers (1995) eloquently pointed out that the diffusion of innovation studies were critical landmarks in speeding up the diffusion process of agricultural revolution. The successful diffusion of innovation studies were subsequently extended to the developing nations of Latin America, Africa, and Asia (Rogers, 1971, 1995). The US government saw it as a tool for expanding the American values of modernity (Rogers, 1983). Based on research primarily funded by the US Agency for International Development and private foundations, agricultural products, health interventions, and ways of living were exported from the US to other parts of the world (Rogers, 1995). Interestingly enough, not examined in much of the historical articulations of the diffusion work is the acknowledgment of the foundation of the international diffusion of innovations models in the early years of defense research in the US (Rogers, 1983). The United States Department of Defense was particularly keen on garnering support for the US among the newly independent nation states (Rogers, 1964). This support was critical in the Cold War era, and the techniques supplied by diffusion of innovations could be harvested for generating pockets of support in other parts of the world. Innovations offered the conduit for exporting American values elsewhere in the world and providing the insulation against Communist influence. The 1960s were marked by applications of the diffusion of innovations model in Third World countries in order to propel agricultural develop-

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ment in these countries (Rogers, 1995). Rogers (1995) points out that the number of diffusion of innovation studies grew dramatically in the 1960s. Largely sponsored by the USAID and several private foundations, diffusion researchers focused on spreading agricultural innovations such as seeds, agricultural equipment and fertilizers to the Third World nations (Rogers, 1995). The agricultural diffusion provided a template for spreading other innovations to Third World nations, including innovations in the domain of population control and health. Health-based diffusion studies have addressed issues related to drinking water, sanitation, and family planning, HIV/AIDS etc. Inherent in these studies of diffusion of innovations was the conceptualization of communication as a tool for spreading information about the innovation. The diffusion of innovations framework continues to dominate the overarching ideology of the USAID, although it is marketed in new terminologies of culture and participation (more on this later). Consider for instance the role of the USAID in funding US university programs in partnership with transnational corporations that push the agenda of development to build new markets for new agricultural products. In a recent example, the USAID funded the Agricultural Biotechnology Support Project II (ABSPII) that is a consortium of public, private, and civil society partners, headquartered at Cornell University and targeted at disseminating biotechnology-based crops in the global South through partnerships (see http://www.absp2.cornell.edu/). Framed in the language of supporting the food insecurity in the global South, the work of ABSPII then becomes one of leveraging local community partnerships to disseminate the agricultural biotechnology. As noted earlier, the diffusion of innovations framework offers the anchor to the framework of communication as dissemination funded by a collection of development agencies, private corporations, and foundations, and often carried out by partnerships of public universities, private corporations, and non-­ governmental organizations. 2.3.1  Social Change as Opening Up of Markets The diffusion of technologies in the development paradigm was intertwined with the US Cold War agenda of recruiting geostrategic spaces of support for its imperial agendas through development aid (Dutta, 2010). Diffusion of technologies of communication therefore was also the site for diffusing the ideology of the market, recruiting Third World nations to the US agenda of opening up global markets for US-based corporations.

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The Marshall Plan development doctrine, the precursor to the global diffusion of neoliberal governmentality, very much served as the vehicle for opening up Third World spaces as markets for US goods, products, technologies, services, and financial flows. The agenda of development in other words was closely tied to the agenda of corporate profiteering, enabling US businesses to generate profits in Third World nations. The framing of market interventionism as development offered the needed chador for US market promotion interventions across the global South. Programs of development, often framed as directed at uplifting the poor, are the gateways to the privatization of public resources, to the transformation of economies into market-based economies, and to the creation of opportunities for profiteering. Private foundations such as the Gates Foundation, working hand-in-hand with private capital, development agencies, and public sectors, invest into development programs that frame poverty as a problem of development, paradoxically to be solved through the integration of the poor into the market. The public relations, engagement, and outreach materials of communication for social change are directed at promoting a privatizing agenda, ironically in the very name of serving the poor, that systematically depletes opportunities for the poor and further impoverishes the poor through the colonization of the commons. Let’s take, for example, the problem of agriculture and food security as framed by the dominant development agencies as a problem of efficiency, technology, and market. The “Feed the Future” initiative of the USAID is pitched as a solution to global hunger and food insecurity. Depicting private partnerships as the key anchors to the initiative, a private engagement strategy outlines the following: Private sector partnerships are a fundamental component of programs to achieve development objectives under GFSS [U.S.  Government’s Global Food Security Strategy]. Partnering is a means to an end rather than an end in itself. Once countries identify their target value chains—including consultations with the private sector as a core driver for selection—partnership landscape analysis and subsequent strategy development should begin. The questions below outline how to identify both the pathways and the program areas in which private sector partnership can help achieve Feed the Future goals and objectives in any given country. The Market Facilitation and Partnership Prospecting questions can be used at the beginning of a country’s strategy development phase to identify the general areas where partnership should occur. The Partnership Design as well as the Sustaining Results

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and Monitoring questions can be used once a shortlist of individual partnerships has been approved for development. (Retrieved from https://www. feedthefuture.gov/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/GFSS_Technical Guidance_Private%20Sector%20Engagement.pdf)

The framing of food insecurity as a problem is tied to its privatization, with the private sector working in partnership with the USAID to identify the scope of the problem and the potential solutions. The framing of the solutions therefore is situated within the ambits of the privatizing agenda, narrated in the language of management, efficiency, and results. Similarly, problems such as agricultural adaptation to climate change, climate adaptive strategies, and resilience in food systems are tied to the overarching logic of privatization. For instance, the problem of climate change is tied to food security, to then offer privatized biotechnology as the potential solution. In doing so, the development agenda on one hand builds market opportunities for private capital, and on the other hand erases indigenous ways of livelihood, including agricultural practices. The large-scale transformation of global spaces has been achieved through the accelerated circulation of privatizing logics in global development. In the instance of Haiti discussed earlier, the USAID sought to restructure Haiti’s agriculture as a direct strategy for reorganizing the Haitian economy to create markets for US-based agro-capital (Cox, 1997; Farmer, 2006). In the early 1980s, amid the global neoliberal transformation being actively pursued by Ronald Reagan, the Caribbean Basin Initiative was launched to integrate Haiti into the world market through the agro-­ industry and export manufacturing, in turn opening up the agricultural system in Haiti, which was sustainable and self-sufficient until that point, to US-based agricultural commodities. Simultaneously, the USAID built its aid program around restructuring Haiti’s domestic food production toward export crops. Subsequent interventions by the IMF operating alongside the USAID specifically worked toward reducing import tariffs and removing agricultural tariffs. This resulted in cheap, heavily subsidized “Miami” US rice that started flooding the Haitian markets while Haitian rice production began to drop (Haiti Info, 1995). The orchestration of specific strategies of development as liberalization produced large-­ scale food insecurity by the direct attack on local food sovereignty and sustenance. Whereas Haiti produced the majority of its own rice until the 1980s, the top-down development interventions orchestrated by the USAID and IFIs transformed Haiti into the fourth largest importer of

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American rice. Worth noting in the targeted production of need is the market opportunity, with Erly Industries and its Rice Corporation of Haiti (RCH), with links into the US political establishment, profiting from the arrangement (Henriques, 1993). Food aid, set up within the neoliberal framework, worked to generate additional profits for agro-capital while contributing to the weakening of the local agrarian economy. Large numbers of farmers and farm workers, expelled from their rural livelihoods, formed the infrastructures of cheap and exploited labor in the special economic zones (SEZs), where the neoliberal reforms worked aggressively to attack unions, prevent minimum wage laws, and remove labor protections. Leading up to the direct US involvement in Chile to organize a coup that brought down the first democratically elected socialist government of Salvador Allende in the global South, US development interventions through democracy and civil society promotion fundamentally sought to cultivate a pro-market ideology among the bourgeoisie in Chile, opening the stage for global neoliberal interventionism, privatizing a wide range of public resources and turning them into sites of profiteering for transnational capital (Biglaiser, 2002). The model of direct intervention, including through the use of force, to promote the free market in the name of development, was later replicated in a range of US interventions, including in the invasion of Iraq in the form of Operation Iraqi Freedom, US intervention in Libya in the name of creating democracy, and most recently, in the US agenda in colonizing Venezuela, a resource-rich country that has served, since the leadership of Hugo Chavez, as an anchor of resistance to US colonialism. In the formulation of development as a framework for opening up of markets in the global South to US-based capital, note the role of development experts as the producers of knowledge. The overarching ideology of development as markets circulating from the USAID to the IFIs and deployed as the basis of restructuration is driven by expert knowledge of development. This knowledge works on the active production of the figure of the “other” in the global South that necessitates the development interventions.

2.4   Conclusion I am attending a conference on Asian development century in Singapore, the cross-roads of Asia. Having waited in much anticipation for the session on models of economic development, I am disappointed when the classic development pathway is thrown up on the screen as a model of Asian devel-

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opment. I am disappointed because I have been too immersed in the celebratory stories of the development turn that make great claims to the democratization of the development process. Yet, here I am, exactly on the other side of the globe, watching the presenter walk me through the stages of development. A roomful of thinkers and practitioners, who otherwise make various claims to the Asian century, are held captive to the seductive idea that poverty can be solved only if we figure out the catalytic messages that would move the poor along the pathway of economic development. Rostow is very much alive here in Southeast Asia. (Field Notes, 2015)

That Rostow is alive in Singapore is very much a part of the global story of capitalist modernization, connecting back to the Cold War period when Singapore signed up with US hegemony in its war against Communism, narrated alongside the turn of China toward neoliberalism with the economic liberalization since the 1970s. Amid the global ascendance of neoliberal hegemony, Singapore emerged as China’s “model,” running training programs for its mayors, politicians, and bureaucrats on the techniques of management. The arrival of the Asian century presented in global discourse then is very much the story of the global hegemony of transnational capital, grounded in its Eurocentric roots of capitalist modernity. The hegemony of capitalism as the foundation of communication for social change has now been manipulated to be branded in culturalist terms (more on this in Chap. 5). The seductive appeal of transforming backward communities through the tools of modernization finds great appeal in Singapore and Shanghai and Bangalore, depicted as the frontiers of the revolution in social change, mediated through technology and capital. In conclusion, the dominant development framework forms the foundation of ongoing practices of social change communication. Although criticisms and subsequent turns in the development structures suggest a movement away from the dominant paradigm, it is evident that the dominant paradigm continues to form a basic infrastructure of the social change communication industry. Although the rhetoric of social change communication has incorporated within it new sets of tools including culture and participation, the overarching tenets of social change as the basis of capitalist transformation of the globe are circulated with new zeal. In the next chapter, we will examine Marxist social change communication, attending to the threads that flow in Marxist approaches to social change. These threads offer the bases for examining closely the taken-for-granted ideas of capitalism that form the hegemonic ideas of development.

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Notes 1. The global South describes those geographic spaces across the globe that are marked as underdeveloped or developing, and are most often disenfranchised from global policymaking bodies such as the World Bank, United Nations, and International Monetary Fund, that serve as modes of influence of the West. The South therefore is marked in relationship to the West, constituted in a relationship of power as recipient of development interventions developed, implemented, and evaluated by actors in the West. 2. The erasure takes place at two interconnected levels. Whereas on one hand, nation states located geographically in the global South, marked as undeveloped or developing, are erased from global policy platforms, on the other hand, subaltern communities within these nation states are erased from national spaces of policy-making and program formulation dominated by elite experts. The erasure here is two-fold.

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Prince, R. (2017). Assuming everything, except responsibility: On blaming economists for neoliberalism. In Assembling neoliberalism (pp.  45–65). New  York: Palgrave Macmillan. Reid-Henry, S. (2012). U.S. economist Walt Rostow and his influence on post-­ 1945 development. The Guardian. Retrieved July 4, 2017, from https://www. theguardian.com/global-development/2012/oct/08/us-economist-waltrostow-development Rogers, E.  M. (1962, 1971, 1973, 1983). Diffusion of innovations. Simon and Schuster. Rogers, E. M. (1995). Diffusion of innovations. New York: The Free Press. Rostow, W. W. (1960). The stages of growth: A non-communist manifesto (pp. 4–16). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ryan, B., & Gross, N. C. (1943). The diffusion of hybrid seed corn in two Iowa communities. Rural Sociology, 8(1), 15. Samarajiwa, R. (1987). The murky beginnings of the communication and development field: Voice of America and the passing of traditional society. In Rethinking development communication (pp. 3–19). Schramm, W. (1964). Mass media and national development: The role of information in the developing countries (Vol. 25). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Schramm, W., & Lerner, D. (Eds.). (1976). Communication and change, the last ten years—And the next. Honolulu: University press of Hawaii. Schudson, M. (2008). The “Lippmann-Dewey debate” and the invention of Walter Lippmann as an anti-democrat 1985–1996. International Journal of Communication, 2, 12. Seigel, M. (2018). Violence work: State power and the limits of police. Duke University Press. Shah, H. (2011). The production of modernization: Daniel Lerner, mass media, and the passing of traditional society. Temple University Press. Simpson, C. (1994). Science of coercion: Communication research & psychological warfare, 1945–1960. Open Road Media. Stevenson, J. (2017). The cold warrior who never apologized. The New  York Times. Retrieved August 15, 2017, from https://www.nytimes.com/ 2017/09/08/opinion/vietnam-walt-rostow.html?mcubz=3 Thomas, P., & Van de Fliert, E. (2014). Interrogating the theory and practice of communication for social change: The basis for a renewal. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Trudel, D. (2017). Revisiting the origins of communication research: Walter Lippmann’s World War II adventure in propaganda and psychological warfare. International Journal of Communication, 11, 3721–3739. USAID. (1998). Making a world of difference one family at a time. Global Issues, 3, 33–35.

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Waisbord, S. (2001). Family tree of theories, methodologies and strategies in development communication. Rockefeller Foundation, 99. Weisbrot, M. (2011). Haiti’s election: A travesty of democracy. The Guardian. Retrieved from http://bit.ly/tyqog0 Weisbrot, M. (2015). Failed: What the “experts” got wrong about the global economy. Oxford University Press. Wilson, K. (2012). Race, racism and development: Interrogating history, discourse and practice. Zed Books Ltd.

CHAPTER 3

Marxist Social Change Communication

Fundamental to Marxist principles of social change is the conceptualization of the structural roots of global inequalities, attending to the ways in which inequalities are organized into class antagonisms and in differential access to the modes of production1 (Marx, 1970, 1975). That the oppression of the working classes is written into the organizing processes of contemporary capitalism is attached to the basic idea that profits driving capitalist interests are products of the unpaid labor of the working classes. Capital thrives on the exploitation of workers. To achieve social change therefore is to fundamentally transform the relationships under capital. Social change is conceptualized as a transformation in these modes of ownership, seeking to build forms of ownership in the hands of workers (Peet & Hartwick, 2015). Worker collectivization enables the transfer of ownership into hands of workers, with the value of the productive process being equally distributed among the workers. Therefore, the definition of social change is built on the principle that dominant social structures and social institutions that serve the agendas of capitalist power structures need to be fundamentally transformed in order to create social equity and social justice. Inequality becomes an entry point for theorizing social change, and the goals of change efforts are targeted toward addressing these inequalities through transformations in forms, sites, and frameworks of ownership of modes of production. The theorization of Marxist development works through the dialectics in capitalist production in order to transform patterns of ownership (Marx, © The Author(s) 2020 M. Dutta, Communication, Culture and Social Change, Palgrave Studies in Communication for Social Change, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26470-3_3

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1970). Class conflict transforms the patterns of ownership, with the revolutionary movement of the working classes bringing about the transformation in patterns of ownership. The work of development communication therefore is one of conscientization, raising the consciousness of peasants and workers, and organizing them into collective struggles for ownership of means of production. It is important to note that in Marxist thought the progression from pre-capitalist societies to socialist societies takes place through the pathway of industrialization and capitalism. For communication for social change, this transition to industrialization among pre-capitalist societies frames the work of communication as one of transforming societies through education and awareness, aligned with the modernization framework of development. Moreover, when considering inequalities in distributions of resources between nation states, the question of underdevelopment is framed within the context of the inequities in the distribution of resources across nation states as well as within nation states (regions, rural-urban, social classes). The underdevelopment of nations at the margins of development is produced by the very processes of development of the nation states that are considered as developed (Peet & Hartwick, 2015). Therefore, policies and programs that are driven by an underlying Marxist framework theorize about the underlying causes of social, political, and economic inequalities, and then work toward addressing these inequalities through changes in structures. Moreover, Marxist analyses point to the revolutionary role of socialist organizing in forming development states that are owned by the proletariat. In this chapter, we will first review development communication processes in the realm of socialist economies, and then examine the question of development flows in the realm of international politics. Whereas we will work through examples of development and communication in actually existing socialist states, we will also attend to the various pockets and movements of socialism within larger politics of nation states. In the broader literature in communication for social change, the history, framework, and processes of social change in Marxist development models is largely absent. The ideological formations of the communication for social change area within the discipline, as well as the broader contours of the discipline, situated within the US propaganda efforts, meant that the key tenets, lessons, and concepts of Marxist social change communication mostly remained erased in the discipline. Although inspired by a Marxist framework, critiques of the imperialist communication efforts of the US

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ignored the work of development communication being carried out in Communist economies. The large-scale demonization of Communism, Marxism, and socialism embedded in implicit disciplinary arguments meant that the framework of social change communication actively erased the actual work of transformative social change taking place through processes of collectivization and the subsequent pathways of development pursued by Communist states. The foundations of Communication as a discipline in the World War II propaganda structures and subsequent Cold War framework translates into the ideological biases in Communication scholarship that constitute the erasure of the actual work of communication in socialist development frameworks.

3.1   Key Tenets of Marxist Development In reviewing the key tenets of Marxist development, we will attend to the linkages these tenets offer to the conceptualization of development, and their approach to communication within the social change framework. Communication broadly is conceptualized in two key pathways: (a) as an element/instrument in raising public consciousness; and (b) as a framework for disseminating scientific information seen as essential to scientific planning. The work of communication is integral to the revolutionary processes that seek structural transformation as well as to the development implementation processes when socialist parties occupy power. 3.1.1   Communication in Socialist Revolutions Communication anchors the mobilizing processes of organizing communities of workers around political and economic oppressions. In this sense, communicative processes form the crux of socialist revolutions, forming the identities of organizing structures as they develop, generating shared meanings around the objects of change, and forming the collective infrastructures that bring together workers in building socialist alternatives. In describing the mass general strikes that formed the early catalysts of the Russian revolution, Rosa Luxembourg (2005) notes: Already in November 1902 the first genuine revolutionary echo followed in the shape of a general strike at Rostov-on-Don. Disputes about the rates of pay in the workshops of the Vladicaucasus Railway gave the impetus to this movement. The management sought to reduce wages and therefore the

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Don committee of social democracy issued a proclamation with a summons to strike for the following demands: a nine-hour day, increase in wages, abolition of fines, dismissal of obnoxious engineers, etc. Entire railway workshops participated in the strike. Presently all other industries joined in and suddenly an unprecedented state of affairs prevailed in Rostov: every industrial work was at a standstill, and every day monster meetings of fifteen to twenty thousand were held in the open air, sometimes surrounded by a cordon of Cossacks, at which for the first time social democratic popular speakers appeared publicly, inflammatory speeches on socialism and political freedom were delivered and received with immense enthusiasm, and revolutionary appeals were distributed by tens of thousands of copies. In the midst of rigid absolutist Russia the proletariat of Rostov won for the first time the right of assembly and freedom of speech by storm. It goes without saying that there was a massacre here. The disputes over wages in the Vladicaucasus Railway workshops grew in a few days into a political general strike and a revolutionary street battle. As an echo to this there followed immediately a general strike at the station of Tichoretzkaia on the same railway. Here also a massacre took place and also a trial, and thus even Tichoretzkaia has taken its place in the indissoluble chain of the factors of the revolution. (pp. 114–115)

The mass general strikes were driven by workers’ anger at the poor pay and the overarching economic situation. In these earliest strikes, the overarching strike emerged from disputes over pay, and emerged into the mass strike action. The large-scale turnout of workers at the mass meetings and the ongoing anger created the space for the rights to assembly and freedom of speech. Worth noting in this articulation is the role of the strikes and the mass actions in securing these communicative rights, depicted in the intertwined nature of communication in socialist revolutions. Drawing on this role of the mass strike, Luxemburg further notes that the economic struggle is the transmitter from one political centre to another; the political struggle is the periodic fertilisation of the soil for the economic struggle. Cause and effect here continually change places; and thus the economic and the political factor in the period of the mass strike, now widely removed, completely separated or even mutually exclusive, as the theoretical plan would have them, merely form the two interlacing sides of the proletarian class struggle in Russia. And their unity is precisely the mass strike. If the sophisticated theory proposes to make a clever logical dissection of the mass strike for the purpose of getting at the “purely political mass strike,” it will by this dissection, as with any other, not perceive the phenomenon in its living essence, but will kill it altogether. (p. 139)

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Note here the interplay of the economic and the political in the initiation of the strike. Whereas the strike on one hand emerges on the political ground that has been created, it itself serves as the basis of the political transformation. The work of communication here is one of conversations and group interactions among workers, through which they organize and come to form a collective identity. The basis of the unity in the mass struggle in this sense is communication. This notion of communication as constitutive of revolutionary struggle is situated in the backdrop of the role of communication in established socialist states. When socialist parties have come to power, communication serves the ongoing work of educating workers and citizens into the principles of socialist organization. Education forms a key part of the social change process in socialist states. It is accompanied by the use of communication through state media, posters, meetings, demonstrations, and performances. The arts and cultures are reorganized in socialist principles, carrying narratives that serve as the basis for education. The emergence of film as a powerful channel for communication is evident in the use of film in many socialist economies. Moreover, the principles of science, forming the basis of rationalist planning, are incorporated into the fundamental elements of communication. Socialist communication is embodied in the specific aesthetic characteristic of communication, with large symbols and images that are meant to convey the spirit of scientific socialism. 3.1.2  Development and Socialism The development framework of socialist organizing attends to the central role of the state as the site for development planning and intervention development (Peet & Hartwick, 2015). Marx (1867) saw development as an uneven, contradictory, and violent process that enabled capital accumulation through competition and exploitation. Socialist development, in contrast, conceptualized development as a resource distributed widely and equitably in society through the planned uses of technology. In socialist development processes, development is defined and managed by the state, working in the interests of the working classes, and through a dialectical process that is both cooperative and competitive (Marx, 1867). The role of development is envisioned in terms of technologies working to improve the lives, health, and wellbeing of everyone within a social system (Peet & Hartwick, 2015). Working class ownership and control of decision-­making

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processes of development is conceptualized as the basis of the organizing of development resources. Socialist development therefore foregrounds resource redistribution as the anchor to development policies and processes, attending to mitigating inequalities and securing access to basic resources of livelihood such as shelter (universal housing), food (universal food), and health (universal health). Nation states organized on the basis of socialist principles therefore demonstrate well-developed infrastructures for the delivery of these basic resources. The human development indicators across a range of socialist states reflect the significant role of universal basic welfare in guaranteeing fundamental health and wellbeing. 3.1.3  Development and Land Redistribution The social change work of Marxist revolutions and state formations has been driven by the collectivization of land; in some instances, constructing land as owned by the state as a collective resource, and in other instances, turning land-based struggles as the foundations of development. The Maoist social change framework was fundamentally anchored in agrarian reorganization through land redistribution and collectivization (Nolan, 1976). The collectivization of land meant that villages in China worked collectively on farms, collectively enjoying the outputs. Marxist social change processes in the global South, for instance, have focused on agrarian land redistribution, based on the notion that land redistribution brings about development. The redistribution of land in this sense is a way of creating structural equality in access, and generates conditions of productivity through the equalization of agricultural opportunity. Across Marxist social change processes in the global South, struggles of the margins have focused on transforming the patterns of land ownership. The Communist-led Telangana movement in Andhra Pradesh, India, between 1946 and 1951 was an effort to redistribute land through armed warfare. The strategic framework of direct agrarian democracy through armed resistance guides the ongoing Maoist struggles across the Eastern belts in India. In the post-Telangana period, as the mainstream Communist parties in India turned to parliamentary forms of governance through electoral contestation, land distribution emerged as a key strategy for development in states such as West Bengal and Kerala where the Communists came to power electorally. The work of development communication in these contexts focused primarily on raising the ­consciousness

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of the peasantry, organizing the peasantry around class identities, and securing access to development interventions that met the needs of agrarian communities. Strong measures of land redistribution along with participatory local governance ensured basic levels of access to economic and other development resources. 3.1.4  Development and Trade Unions In Marxist organizing of social change, workers collectively organize around class lines to secure development through their direct conflict with the owners of capital. In other words, development is realized directly in the class struggle of workers, through the collective ownership of means of production. The conditions of wellbeing and welfare are intrinsically tied to class conflict, with worker organizing in unions serving as the anchor for securing development. Across spaces of Marxist transformation, worker participation in mass-scale conflict actions such as mass strikes and protests played critical roles in securing worker hegemony. The collectivization of workers is seen as being integral to the securing of healthy working conditions and addressing the exploiting relationships that form the basis of capitalist organizing. Social change communication in union organizing foregrounds the conditions of work as integral to processes and frameworks of development, therefore seeking to transform detrimental working conditions. Communication is perceived as education and consciousness raising.

3.2   International Landscape of Development The in-depth examination of the relationship between imperialism and capitalism is a key contribution of Marxist theories of social change. In his theorization of imperialism, Lenin drew attention to the role that imperialism played in enabling the hegemony of capitalism. Capital needed its colonies to drive the production processes and the continual extraction of raw materials and labor. 3.2.1  Imperialism The relationship between capitalism and imperialism was developed conceptually be Lenin, who notes that the imperial project was the necessary fodder for capitalism. Imperialism fed capitalism through the acquisition

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of new land, capture over new resources of raw materials, the formation of new sites of labor exploitation, and the creation of new markets for the capitalist products of the Empire. The imperial conquest of new lands created opportunities for capital through the creation of new market opportunities. As the highest stage of capitalism, imperialism embodied the rentier relationships that form the basis of capitalist extraction. Imperial domination feeds the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of monopoly capitalists who govern through the techniques of imperial control. Monopolies, oligarchy, the striving for domination not liberty, the exploitation of an increasing number of small or weak nations by a handful of the richest or most powerful nations—all these have given birth to those distinctive characteristics of imperialism which compel us to define it as parasitic or decaying capitalism. More and more prominently there emerges, as one of the tendencies of imperialism, the creation of “rentier state”, the usurer state, in which the bourgeoisie to an ever-increasing degree lives on the proceeds of capital exports and by “clipping coupons.” (p. 120)

The structures of domination in imperialism feed the extractive nature of capitalism. Capitalist expansion in this sense is integral to the reproduction of the imperial project. In the context of contemporary global geopolitics, the nature of imperial relationships has changed, with new imperial axes. The global presence of the US Empire and its ongoing neocolonial interventions, including the most recent interventions into Iraq, Syria, Libya, and more recently, Venezuela, is accompanied by the rapid growth of the Chinese Empire, from the neocolonial domination in Xinjiang, to Chinese occupation of Africa, to the “One Belt, one Road” project that creates new sites of extraction under the language of development (Mohan & Power, 2008). Similarly, the ongoing Chinese colonization of Xinjiang is situated amid the extraction of resources, including petroleum and rare non-ferrous metals in recent years, forming the backdrop of indigenous activism. The material infrastructure of development is built on the mechanisms of extraction, placed together and managed to enable the extraction of resources. The colonization of indigenous land (mostly forests sitting on rich mineral resources) in the resource-rich Eastern region of India forms the backdrop of the colonial occupation of indigenous land and disenfranchisement of indigenous communities (Dutta, 2015). Central to the imperial framework is the role of academic capital, working

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hand-in-hand with strategic communication, to legitimize the reason for invasion. For instance, Harvard-based economist Ricardo Hausmann, who runs Harvard University’s Center for International Development, plays an integral role in collaborating with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in developing a blueprint for the imperial invasion of Venezuela and the subsequent economic transformation of the socialist economy to bring it in line with neoliberal colonialism. 3.2.2  Dependency Theory Development economists studying Latin America in the 1970s proposed dependency theory, observing that underlying economic conditions produced political, cultural, and social relations between nation states (Frank, 1967). Attending to the patterns of inequities distributed globally, they explained the ways in which the logic of development was constituted in and constitutive of unequal material relationships between nation states. The economist Andre Gunther Frank, trained in the modernization paradigm of neoclassical economics at the University of Chicago and then explicitly in modernization theory at the Center for International Studies under McClelland and Lerner at MIT, proposed that development aid created dependency and underdevelopment. In other words, the underdevelopment of Third World nations was a direct product of development aid and how that aid translated into trajectories for Third World nations. Dependency theorists noted that rather than exporting primary commodities and importing industrialized goods, Latin American nations needed to develop their own industrial production capacities, putting forth the import substitution model (Cardoso & Faletto, 1979). Marxist theory lays explicit emphasis on social structures and situates its transformative politics in the context of seeking to bring about shifts in these structures, emphasizing economic interventions that reconfigure the economic logics of resource extraction that form the basis of global capitalism (Peet, 2003). The World Systems theory emerged from within the frameworks of Marxist theory to examine the differentials in distributions of power underlying the categorization of the world into core, periphery, and semi-peripheral nation states (Wallerstein, 1979). The nation states in the periphery were subject to exploitation through the power and control exerted by nation states in the center, with resources and capital being extracted through the semi-peripheral states. Dependency theory suggests that underdevelopment is a precise outcome of modernity, with modernity

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being constituted under relationships of exploitation that extract resources from dependent economies (Frank, 1967). The resources extracted from dependent economies of the Third World are furthermore siphoned through the international banks back into the Third World country as development aid and with strong prescriptions for structural adjustment. 3.2.3  Imperialism and Media Marxist theorizing of global inequalities points toward the differential spaces of influence in the global distributions of power (Harvey, 2005), and these inequalities in distributions of power are intertwined with the inequalities in distributions of symbols, images, and texts (Schiller, 1971). Earliest studies of cultural imperialism depicted the ways in which media flows reflected global power differentials, with the flows of cultural symbols replicating the differentials in global power under US imperialism (Mattelart & Dorfman, 1975). One of the classics emerging from the analysis of ideological formations of cultural products in the context of the US imperial presence, “How to read Donald Duck,” put forth the argument that US privatized media culture, captured in its hegemonic media industries, shaped global cultural flows, depictions, and aspirations, thus cultivating global markets for commodities manufactured by US transnational corporations. In contemporary imperial flows of financial and extractive capitalisms, the circulation of communication reifies the inequities between spaces, legitimizing imperial invasions as logics of development through financial penetration and foreign direct investments. More specifically, the inequalities in distributions of the capacities to produce mediated images are tied to the inequities in distributions of power and material resources. Financial capitalism circulates powerful images of development, poverty alleviation, market integration, and opportunities for democratic participation to incorporate citizens as consumers into sites of profiteering. Mediated images produced by imperial powers and distributed globally as markers of secular and universal desires work toward serving the agendas of the Empire, necessitating the Empire as an altruistic intervention that brings growth and justice, disseminating the message of individualistic consumerism as the anchor for desire (Tomlinson, 1991). Imperialism therefore is seen in terms of its relationship to industrialization processes and to the growth of capitalism, connected to the mediated sphere through the one-way flow of images from imperial nations of the global North to the Third World. The differential distributions of power between global

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spaces underlie the inequitable discursive and political presence of different sectors of the globe, and the inequality in the flow of symbols and images mediates the distribution of resources and commodities across the globe. In the contemporary neoliberal structure of global organizing, the consolidation of power and the concentration of ownership in the hands of a small number of elite information communication corporations are juxtaposed in the backdrop of the global power and control of financial transnational capitalism (Fuchs, 2010). 3.2.4   New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO) The movement for the New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO) emerged out of the decolonizing struggles of the global South (Masmoudi, 1979). Newly independent nation states of the South sought to rework the fundamental terms of development and communication, particularly in terms of decolonizing the unequal flows of symbols and images from the North to the South. Systematic inequalities were observed in the production of information, control of communicative resources, coverage of issues, and the frames through which geographic locales were talked about (Masmoudi, 1979). That there exist vast inequalities in the production and distribution of information and news between the North and the South offered the basis for the struggle for communicative rights of the global margins. The NWICO campaign sought to build greater democratization and control of communicative spaces and information resources in the hands of the margins of the global order, as a direct intervention into the one-way imperialist news and information flow from the North to the South (Pickard, 2007). The framework of communication rights anchored the struggles for building equitable access to communicative resources, drawing on the salient idea that communication ownership shaped which voices are heard, which voices are foregrounded, which voices are backgrounded, and which voices are erased. After the strategic imperial politics of defeating the NWICO agenda that was an expression of Third World decolonial struggles in the communicative space, the global agenda gradually shifted to a new framework being pushed by the International Telecommunications Union, the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS). The transformation from NWICO to WSIS depicts the co-option by neoliberal ideology of the radical politics of communication, participation, and democracy that had

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emerged under the ambits of NWICO in the 1960s and 1970s, turning a radical politics of communicative justice from the global South into a transnational corporate libertarianism promising to deliver democracy through technologies of the market (more on this later).

3.3   Communist Frameworks of Development Communist frameworks of development emerged across the globe as revolutionary sites for resisting capitalism. Essential to these frameworks were principles of centralized planning, with the role of the state as central to the economy and to the distribution of resources/income. The Communist model of development was built on the notion that ownership of land, raw materials, and means of production by the state would enable the redistribution of economic opportunity. Economic growth therefore is tied to revolutionizing the processes, forces, and relations of production, with production processes intertwined with the ownership and distribution of income. The Russian and the Chinese models of development were built on the centralization of resources and planning processes of development. Development, conceptualized as modernization through state-driven processes of change, achieved social change through the redistribution of economic resources. Because of the key role in development processes played by the state, development was centralized, with centralized planning being a key element in the design and implementation of development. This relationship between distribution and planning is summarized in the following excerpt offer in The ABC of Communism (Bukharin & Preobrazhensky, 1969): The basis of communist society must be the social ownership of the means of production and exchange. Machinery, locomotives, steamships, factory buildings, warehouses, grain elevators, mines, telegraphs and telephones, the land, sheep, horses, and cattle, must all be at the disposal of society. All these means of production must be under the control of society as a whole, and not as at present under the control of individual capitalists or capitalist combines. What do we mean by ‘society as a whole’? We mean that ownership and control is not the privilege of a class but of all the persons who make up society. In these circumstances society will be transformed into a huge working organization for cooperative production. There will then be neither disintegration of production nor anarchy of production. In such a social order, production will be organized. No longer will one enterprise compete with another; the factories, workshops, mines, and other p ­ roductive

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institutions will all be subdivisions, as it were, of one vast people’s workshop, which will embrace the entire national economy of production. It is obvious that so comprehensive an organization presupposes a general plan of production. If all the factories and workshops together with the whole of agricultural production are combined to form an immense cooperative enterprise, it is obvious that everything must be precisely calculated. We must know in advance how much labour to assign to the various branches of industry; what products are required and how much of each it is necessary to produce; how and where machines must be provided. These and similar details must be thought out beforehand, with approximate accuracy at least; and the work must be guided in conformity with our calculations. This is how the organization of communist production will be effected. Without a general plan, without a general directive system, and without careful calculation and book-keeping, there can be no organization. But in the communist social order, there is such a plan. (p. 70)

In the Communist political economy, economic growth is embedded in the socialist planning process, with production forming the basis of distribution, exchange, and consumption. The planning process is driven by precise calculations that set specific targets of production, then allocating labor, raw materials, and machinery. The centrality of the production process in the socialist planned economy is constituted amid establishing targets for the production of material goods. Although the planning process is set both in the domains of physical units and money, money eventually becomes redundant as direct product exchange forms the basis of the circulation of goods. In Communist development, the work of communication is in raising worker consciousness based on the principles of scientific materialism. The planned economy is managed on the basis of instructions that are developed from numerical analyses, and that are then passed top-down, establishing specific targets as well as allocating raw materials, labor and machinery—the scientific principle of managing the economy. The international Communist movement flowed as a thread across movements, especially connecting the underdeveloped Third World, and emerging in the strategies of worker resistance across the globe. Both the Union of Soviet Socialist Republic (USSR) and China played important roles in the international Communist movement; moreover, central to the international network of Communist movements was the influence that anti-colonial struggles and the newly independent nation states in the global South had on each other. Meetings and assemblies of Communist

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parties held often in the global South emerged as sites of developing strategies of Communist resistance, theorizing strategies for the formation of socialist development, and connecting struggles against the forces of imperialism and capitalism. As we will see in this chapter, although the USSR and China appear as sites of powerful Communist interventions on social change, Communist movements in many of the nations in the global South, including India, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Cuba, played key roles in defining the pathways of socialist transformation. 3.3.1   Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) The development communication model in the USSR was based on a top-­ down framework of centralized decision-making, directed at the generation of products to meet the scientifically developed analysis of consumption needs. The model of development followed in the USSR placed the state as the driver and owner of development infrastructures and processes (Bukharin & Preobrazhenskiı ̆, 1921; Hanson, 2003). The state owned the means of production, shaping the distribution of resources in society. Agriculture was organized into collective farming, with state driving the farming framework. With industrial manufacturing owned by the state, manufacturing processes and organizing frameworks were shaped by the state. The various forms of development were constituted through centralized administrative planning. The state controlled forms of investment, and industrial assets were publicly owned. The economy was largely stable, with negligible unemployment and high job security (Hanson, 2003). The planning agency, named Gosplan, allocated state supplies among the various organizations and enterprises that were responsible for the production and delivery of goods and services in the economy (Ellman, 2014). The Gosplan connected the various production associations and institutes, thus creating a centralized roadmap for the economy. The Gosplan managed the economy through material balance that accounted for material supplies in natural units to balance the supply of available inputs with the targeted outputs. The scientific method shaped the planning process, with the targets of planning being determined by scientific agencies and planning organizations. The planning process involved developing methodological guidelines for gathering data in order to develop targets both in investment and production, working out the plan for the various sub-units to carry out and going through iterations to finalize it, passing down the plan to the relevant units and working it out

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at the unit level. Communication is integral to the process of planning, with both the gathering of information as well as in the dissemination of decisions. Education in the Soviet Union was intertwined with labor, with the everyday experiences of labor shaping the learning processes. The theoretical understanding of society and the world therefore was conceptualized as emerging from labor. In their depiction of the school education system in the Soviet Union, Bukharin and Preobrazhensky (1969) observe: The school of the socialist republic must be a labour school. This means that instruction and education must be united with labour and must be based upon labour. The matter is important for many reasons. It is important, first of all because of its bearing upon successful instruction. A child learns more easily, more willingly, and more thoroughly that which it learns, not from books or from the words of the teacher, but from the personal experience of what it is doing with its own hands. (p. 236)

Education is thus itself situated in the labor school, in the midst of the labor performed by teachers and students. This unification of labor with developing theoretical tenets foregrounds experiences as the basis for learning. This emphasis on experiential education is coupled with a turn to broad-based education that prepares workers for various forms of work so they can contribute to the economy. Rather than forming specializations into which education trains students, the emphasis on versatile abilities enables workers to fulfill the plans of the economy. The construction of labor as a natural part of everyday learning forms the basis of the labor schools in the USSR: [F]or communist society, the labour school is absolutely indispensable. Every citizen in such a society must be acquainted with the elements, at least, of all crafts. In communist society there will be no closed corporations, no stereotyped guilds, no petrified specialist groups. The most brilliant man of science must also be skilled in manual labour. To the pupil who is about to leave the unified labour school, communist society says: ‘You may or may not become a professor; but in any case you must produce values.’ A child’s first activities take the form of play; play should gradually pass into work by an imperceptible transition, so that the child learns from the very outset to look upon labour, not as a disagreeable necessity or as a punishment, but as a natural and spontaneous expression of faculty. Labour should be a need, like the desire for food and drink; this need must be instilled, and developed in the communist school. (pp. 236–237)

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The bourgeois structure of education where education is formulated in terms of preparing the individual for specialized knowledge-based roles is transformed through the incorporation of labor as fundamental to educational processes. The specialist schools of education are replaced by labor-­ based schools where labor is intertwined with everyday learning processes. The role of the worker in participating in labor is built into her/his training as a worker. The role of communication in the development communication framework of the USSR was one of raising consciousness of workers and educating them based on the scientific method. The realist aesthetic constituted how communication was constructed, with the most simple and realistic representations enabling maximum participation of workers. 3.3.2  China China’s Communist development model has been rooted in the concept of working-class ownership of the processes and sites of production. Moreover, the trajectory of Chinese Communism as it developed in the 1920s has very much followed the pathway of Chinese nationalism, with the question of Communism being seen as a pathway for China’s development. Socialism served as a real and organizing category for the nationalist revolution in China, with the central role of class as a foundation to the socialist revolution (Dirlik, 1974). Commitment to socialist goals was infused into the Chinese struggle for independence and sovereignty, thus being constituted in the path to emancipation drawn out in the framework of Chinese Communist development predating the liberalization of China under Den Xiaoping in 1970s. Speaking to this play between Communism and the development of Chinese nationalism, Dirlik (1974) observes that the character of Chinese nationalism was driven by a commitment to revolutionizing Chinese society; radical social transformation was woven into the goals of national development. The struggles against the imperialists were also struggles against the urban and rural elites that held the power and control in Chinese society. In the period from 1966 to 1976, the Cultural Revolution in China became the site for the revolutionary transformation of China, seeking to embed the principles of socialist development through the broader ­reworking of Chinese society. Central to the Cultural Revolution was the focus on eliminating capitalist and traditional elements from Chinese society, and grounding it in revolutionary hegemony. The Cultural Revolution

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emerged as a site for challenging the language of socialist development by politicizing at its heart the very meaning of the word development, anchoring it in the participation of peasants and working classes. Examining closely the logic of development defined in economistic terms, the revolution fundamentally sought to locate development amid revolutionary goals, redoing the anchors of development in social relations. Foregrounding social commitment as the basis for organizing society, the transformations sought to reinforce social relations as the basis of development, with the basis of these social relations in self-reliance at local and national levels. Development was thus to be relocated away from expertise and bureaucratization to people’s participation in development processes. One of the key features of the Cultural Revolution was the leadership that was consolidated in Mao, juxtaposed amid the strong revolutionary character of the grassroots. The commune system formed a key element of organizing the rural economy, with the work of agricultural labor being collectively distributed. The village emerged as a site of socialist organizing, with movement to the village depicted in revolutionary principle. Rural communities found access to educational opportunities, especially to middle school education, for the first time, and this contributed to economic development in rural areas. Similarly, the delivery of health to rural areas emerged as a key focus, with barefoot doctors deployed to the rural areas. Health care centers were established in rural communities, with farmers being given medical training, leading to large-scale improvement in health and life expectancy of the general population. Communicatively, the key messages of the Cultural Revolution were often carried through posters and slogans. Poster art formed a key resource in communicating the goals and objectives of the Cultural Revolution, as well as in recruiting popular support. These posters were used as a campaigning tool, also serving as the main source of information to be disseminated widely. Both the government and Red Guards used the posters for ideological education. The posters were often of large size, carrying slogans, poems, commentary, and graphics, and were posted on walls in communes and factories. Note here the top-down communicative structure of the posters although they were constituted within the context of seeking to catalyze grassroots protest, revolution, and participation among the peasants and workers. Slogans played key roles in organizing communities and in catalyzing large-scale revolutionary participation. As part of everyday life, slogans offered guiding anchors for revolutionary class con-

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sciousness. The realism in art and culture was tied to the broader framework of making art a part of proletarian life, open to the participation of workers. The Communist transformation in China reflected strong state interventions into the non-economic and economic sectors, with health, education, and retirement offering strong protections for the individual. The organizing of Chinese society into the communes and barricades in rural areas and into the units in urban areas socialized domains of care and cooperation. 3.3.3  Cuba The development model in Cuba followed the Communist framework, with an explicit emphasis on resisting the US Empire in its backyard, and offering an alternative framework of development grounded in sustainability (Rosset, 1998). In this sense, Cuba offered a model of socialist development that crafted its own trajectory while negotiating a relationship with the USSR. Cuba emerged as a sign and symbol of anti-imperial resistance, playing a key role in the non-aligned movement as well as a fulcrum of challenge against US imperial presence in Latin America. Although Cuba followed the revolutionary path, what was worth noting is its commitment to a Third World politics, especially in the leadership it offered to anti-colonial politics in the Third World. The planning-based economy translated into state ownership of agriculture and industries, with development projects carried out on the basis of scientific plans. A strong community education and communication element of the revolutionary movement ensured a strong national culture that committed itself to socialist politics. The development of a strong socialist infrastructure for the delivery of the basic necessities of life ensured that the health and wellbeing outcomes of Cuba were strong, with the country demonstrating a model of development that reached high human development indicators without being trapped in the cycle of growth. Amid the neoliberal transformation of the globe that foregrounded growth, Cuba offered an alternative model that placed emphasis on equal distribution of opportunities and a strong education and health infrastructure. The high quality of health care in Cuba was anchored in a robust medical education program that produced a large number of doctors who met Cuba’s health needs, and reached out beyond the borders of Cuba.

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Similarly, Cuba reached universal education, being able to create a free education system with high quality of education. Moreover, as part of its overall development mission, Cuba invested in building strong South-­ South networks, often sending out its doctors to countries in the global South to set up innovative community-based socialist projects of health and health care. Other initiatives included Cuba offering development assistance to Vietnam and other nations in the global South (Akhtar, 2006). The Barrio Adentro program for health service delivery was set up in Venezuela, strongly shaped by the presence of Cuban doctors working in community settings and through community-owned spaces of health and care. The nature of communication in Cuba was state-driven development-­ based, with communication infrastructures working primarily to disseminate development messages to the Cuban population. Newspapers and radio were the primary channels of communication. Media-based communication was complemented with various face-to-face channels of communication that were directed at disseminating messages. 3.3.4  Venezuela Amid the large-scale inequalities in distribution of wealth and power in Venezuela in the 1980s and 1990s, the socialist movement emerged as a site of hope. The people’s revolution was a response to the structural adjustment programs imposed by the World Bank (WB) and the large-­ scale privatization of the oil sector, inequalities, and impoverishment of communities. As a contemporary movement that developed as resistance to neoliberal policies often dictated through US neocolonial formations working alongside international financial institutions (IFIs), the Bolivarian movement led by Hugo Chavez organized communities of the poor and the marginalized around the principles of Chavismo under the banner of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV). Grounded in the principles of nationalism and state-led economy and named after Simón Bolívar, an early nineteenth-century Venezuelan and Latin American revolutionary leader, who led the Spanish American wars of independence in achieving the independence of most of northern South America from Spanish rule, the Bolivarian Revolution sought to create an inter-American coalition to implement Bolivarianism. Participatory and workplace democracies were key features of the revolution, with emphasis on communal property in the form of communal

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cities, communes, and communal councils. As the basis of “a socialism of the twenty-first century” that sought to redefine it by creating a popular base, communal councils were introduced with the purpose of generating public participation in the processes of drafting and implementing local policies. As expressions of popular power through which people self-­ govern, popular councils are territorial grassroots units that carry out the planning of areas such as education, health, and the like. During the Chavez years, the oil infrastructure was nationalized, enabling Chavez to create a wide range of public programs serving the marginalized and to build strong health infrastructures. Gradually a range of other industries were nationalized, with workers raising significant demands for nationalization and worker control of management and decision-­making processes. In the gradualist process of nationalization, Venezuela remained a mixed economy, with private sectors alongside increasingly nationalized sectors. The state carried out a number of programs to directly address the needs of the marginalized sectors. The Barrio Adentro program, for instance, was an innovative exemplar of social change in Venezuela, a model of community-owned health where the community ran the basic health and prevention services, working in collaboration with Cuban doctors. The program demonstrated a framework for socialist organizing of health. Venezuela under Chavez emerged as a Latin American model for the return of progressive politics, serving as the anchor to the “pink tide” that swept across Latin America. Another program, Mission Habitat, sough to construct thousands of new housing units for the poor, creating community-based and integrated housing zones that make available a full range of social services—from education to health care. Mission Mercal addressed hunger through a state-run company called Mercados de Alimentos, C.A. (MERCAL), that provided subsidized food and basic goods through a nationwide chain of stores, operating outlets in communities, including street-corner shops and warehouse stores, and 6000 soup kitchens. At its peak, the program employed 85,000 workers. Much of the communication work under Chavismo focused on development, sending in army for the purposes of addressing literacy, and disseminating health information to distant and rural communities. Under Mission Robinson, volunteer civilians and soldiers were sent to teach reading, writing, and arithmetic to the most undereducated and marginalized adult citizens, to give them regular schooling and lessons. In each of these aspects of the “socialism of the twenty-first century” or what is considered

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new socialism, the participation and voices of community life were intertwined with the overarching question of socialist redistribution. The many examples of community ownership of resources offered excellent frameworks for how development is carried out when designed and imagined from the subaltern margins. The current crisis in Venezuela under Maduro, brought about by the combination of international embargos, fall in oil prices, and macroeconomic challenges, has created the ground for a neocolonial US-led coup in Venezuela, with the US actively designing the regime change. In this backdrop, across the globe, voices of resistance have articulated the rights of Venezuelans to sovereignty, and offer spaces of solidarity in articulating a politics of social change. Yet, critical questions also emerge regarding the communicative inequalities in Venezuela and the possibilities for communicative equality. 3.3.5  Indonesian, Malaysian, and Vietnamese Communism In the struggles against colonialism in and across Southeast Asia, Communist movements played key roles, organizing large numbers of peasants, workers, and students in the struggles against colonial empires (Berger, 2004; Christie, 2012). The anti-imperial struggles were socialist in character, drawing large-scale popular support for policies of redistribution, grounded in the everyday participation of the margins of colonized societies, and simultaneously organized through leadership that was intertwined with the Communist Party in China. Local worker struggles expressed in large union movements across Southeast Asia were also the sites for voicing anti-colonial claims; worker rights were collectively organized in the resistance to the British Empire. The Communist movements developed indigenous characteristics that drew upon local cultural stories and forms, while at the same time aligning themselves along the USSR and/or Chinese lines. Particularly salient was the influence of the Communist Party of China on the movements emerging across Southeast Asia. Both the Malaysian and Indonesian Communist parties had developed strong presence across Southeast Asia, with active critique of colonialism forming the basis for articulating socialist anchors to the organizing of political economy. In other words, the key feature of Southeast Asian Communism was its role in anti-colonial struggles. Based on the theoretical argument that colonialism had proletarianized Indonesia, the

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Indonesian Communist party (Partai Komunis Indonesia, PKI) articulated an anti-colonial strategy that would form the basis of proletarian victory. The PKI, for instance, at the peak of its mass support in 1965 and before its mass-scale extermination by a US-backed genocidal army-­ military campaign, was actively participating in protests against the US presence in Indonesia, US influence in the region, and roles of US oil and mining companies as well as the Peace Corps in colonizing Indonesia. Participating in the electoral system, the PKI came fourth with 16% of the votes in the 1955 elections, and with nearly three million members. The participation of the PKI in the electoral process depicted the indigenous adaptation of Marxism-Leninism to Indonesia, where working through the state was seen as a framework for achieving the hegemony of the proletariat. The interlinkages between Marxist ideas and Islamic thought formed the basis of Islamic Communism as a key thread in Indonesian politics in the early 1960s. Similarly, in Singapore, the Communist movement was anchored in anti-colonial struggle. Key Communist leaders in Singapore worked and organized the labor sectors across the country, particularly reaching out to the port, transportation, and factory workers. The base of the Communist party was strong in Singapore, with extensive support from workers. Worker strikes and protests were both sites of socialist articulations as well as spaces for organizing the anti-colonial movement in Singapore. In 1947, in Malaysia and Singapore, there were above 400 worker strikes that had disrupted the production processes in the rubber plantations and tin factories. Amid the various strategies of British colonial repression, including the deployment of sedition laws, the Communist movement developed a strong foothold in Singapore, connected with the larger region. The rural support base of the Communist party in Indonesia and Malaysia was also reflected in the support the Communists drew in Vietnam, forming an anti-imperial and anti-capitalist base in Southeast Asia. The successful struggle against US imperialism, evident in the grassroots organizing, rural participation, and popular base of the Communist party in Vietnam spoke of its appeal as a vision for Vietnamese society. In the center of the Cold War, Vietnam emerged as a narrative of resistance to the twin forces of capitalism and imperialism. What was critical to the social change processes across Communist states in the global South was a unified platform for learning and exchange among movements from various parts.

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3.3.6  Indian Communism The history of Indian Communism is situated amid the anti-colonial struggles of India, with the Communists putting forth revolutionary principles for overthrowing the imperial British state. Much of the model of Indian Communism initially followed the USSR model, and later formed different strands that sought to embed the USSR and Chinese models of development in India. Integral to the development of the Communist movement in India was its embeddedness in the local context. The major Communist parties of India—the Communist Party of India (CPI) and the Communist Party of India (Marxist), the CPI(M)—participated in the democratic processes of India, achieving their hegemonic status in localized and state spaces through the electoral process. Principles of Marxist development planning have served as the bases of land redistribution programs in the global South, and especially in the Communist movement in India. Peasant-led movements and revolutions have been integral to laying claims on land and redistributing land to the dispossessed, with the global margins playing active roles in the struggles for land redistribution. In the Tebhaga movement in West Bengal in colonial India, large numbers of sharecroppers agitated for land reform, demanding ownership over land resources (Cooper, 1983). One of the key characteristics of Marxist movements has been the mobilization of peasants over the question of land ownership and control over land. Such movements have been driven by the notion that class formations in agrarian economies are fundamentally driven by the vast inequalities in the distribution of land resources. The ownership of land in the hands of the dispossessed has been integral to driving development processes. In the Indian state of West Bengal, the electoral hegemony of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) was both constitutive of and constituted by the large-scale development generated through land reforms. Both in the states of Kerala and West Bengal, where the Communist Party of India (Marxist) gained electoral hegemony through parliamentary processes, land redistribution accompanied by state-led development formed the key features of political economy. 3.3.6.1 West Bengal Particularly critical in the development programs carried out by the Communist Party of India (Marxist) in West Bengal was the deployment of agrarian reforms carried out alongside reforms in local governance. The

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agrarian reforms ensured large-scale redistribution of land, ensuring the ownership of land by a large section of the rural poor population. The gram panchayats in West Bengal played a pivotal role in carrying out the development projects, anchored in socialist principles of resource distribution, and embedded in strong village-level participation in  local governance (Echeverri-Gent, 1992). The panchayat system in West Bengal offered a strong exemplar of the important role of community participation and community ownership of development infrastructures and solutions, addressing the challenges of poverty. Yet, subsequent ethnographic work carried out by the Center for Culture-centered Approach to Research and Evaluation (CARE) in rural West Bengal since the mid-1990s depicted the gradual decline in the democratic and participatory decision-making processes in agrarian communities in rural Bengal. These participatory processes were gradually being captured by groups of powerful actors within village communities who combined their deployment of power with the use of violence, situated in the backdrop of increasing police violence in West Bengal and the turn toward elite-expert policymaking in the CPI(M). The ethnographic work we conducted in the villages in rural Bengal depicted growing anger and frustration against the politics of power and control deployed by the cadres of the CPI(M), accompanied by the disenchantment among the grassroots workers of the CPI(M) with a party that increasingly turned toward centralization and consolidation of power in the upper ranks. At the juncture of the large-­ scale defeat of the CPI(M) in the elections of 2011, two key events—mass protests against government-sponsored land acquisition in Nandigram and farmer protests against the forced land acquisition to enable a large-­ scale car manufacturing project—marked the loss of public support for the CPI(M). The growing protests of indigenous communities in Jangalmahal, a largely resource-deprived part of West Bengal, formed the backdrop of the electoral defeat of the Left Front in West Bengal. 3.3.6.2 Kerala The strong development indicators of Kerala are rooted in an active Marxist politics that created both spaces of political as well as economic transformation. The democratically elected Communist Party of India (Marxist) played a key role in enabling land redistribution, fighting actively the consolidation of land in the hands of the elite. This land redistribution program was accompanied by strong development-based programs that addressed education and health care. The development of schools offering

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quality education in Kerala was a key feature of the socialist organizing in the state, with the state reaching near complete literacy. Literacy programs developed by the CPI(M) were combined with strong science education programs that were directed at generating awareness in communities across Kerala and building the scientific spirit. Programs of health education and awareness played key roles in community outreach, with the CPI(M) playing an active role in shaping the science education programs. The grassroots organizing of the CPI(M) ensured the distribution and delivery of welfare, as well as opportunities for development programs to be carried out through strong community participation. The health care system in Kerala sought to strengthen a universal framework of health care delivery, focusing on delivering quality health care. The strong human development indicators in Kerala are reflective of the socialist planning in the state that sought to build a robust welfare infrastructure, accompanied by strong programs of science literacy and science education. In the communication sector, Thomas (2014) reviewed the public sector model of software in Kerala that treated software as a public good, enabling access and empowering local, state-funded secondary school teachers and students to define and build the informational pathways they wanted to engage in.

3.4   Social Democracies and Development The history of social democracy pre-date the history of Communism, with the earliest forms of social democratic parties being formed around the Second International, with political parties taking shape out of unions and mass movements of workers. Social democracies conceptualize the achievement of socialist goals through democratic processes, with roots in the age of revolution from 1789 to 1848 (Schmidt, 2016). In social democracies, political parties participate in electoral frameworks, and seek socialist outcomes through the electoral system. Although social democratic parties draw from their bases in the working classes, they often reach out to the wider spheres of the “the people,” “commoners” or the “Third Estate” (Schmidt, 2016, p. 6). In doing so, social democratic parties often form broader cross-class alliances, drawing their base from the wider category of “the people” rather than being confined to the working classes. Communication in social democracies is driven toward achieving the goals of redistribution through democratic processes of participation, seeking public support in achieving socialist outcomes, through processes of col-

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laboration with capitalists. The challenge for social democracies is on one hand creating frameworks for the redistribution of economic resources, and on the other hand embedding these redistributive mechanisms in democratic processes. The earliest forms of social democracies that worked in the West sought to work a compromise between socialism and capitalism in the 1950s to the 1970s, predating to the launch of the global neoliberal onslaught. The anchor in the politics of actual socialism in Soviet Communism pushed social democrats to pursue welfare capitalism, with significant welfare components. The role of the state here was defined in terms of its capacity to mitigate the market forces controlled by capital, and was one of redistributing the wealth that was generated. Built on the framework of Keynesianism, welfare capitalist states sought to play key roles in enabling the development of the state as a resource for redistribution. The neoliberal reforms globally placed strong pressures toward neoliberal reforms in social democracies; how social democracies negotiated these reforms point toward specific spaces of adjustments in specific contexts and other spaces of contestations. The ongoing role of the unions and worker organizing are salient sites of resistance to neoliberalism in social democracies. Simultaneously, as the neoliberal reforms were being implemented globally, many of the Communist formations and parties in the global South were turning toward social democracy. The various Left-based experiments in the global South turned to social democracy as they negotiated the ongoing neoliberal structures. For instance, the states of West Bengal and Kerala in India, discussed earlier as Communist states, manifested Communist rule through contesting the state-based elections held every five years. Participating in the democratic processes, the CPI(M) sought to implement a range of programs and policies that were democratic in character. The turn to social democracy in the Left spaces formed a strategic role in the negotiation of neoliberalism.

3.5   Interrogating Marxist Development The framework of Marxist development, in privileging the explanatory power of worker consciousness as the basis for organizing society, often framed the work of communication as emancipation. This emancipatory role of communication incorporates a top-down view of communication as an instrument for raising the consciousness of workers. The role of leadership, for instance in Communist movements, is in educating workers, in

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organizing them, and in dictating a framework for Marxist development. Be it in the form of the politburo, the principal planning committee of a Communist party, or in the form of expert technocrats pushing market-­ based individualizing technologies of development, the binaries between un(der)development and modernization as well as the basic conceptualizations of un(der)development and modernization remain intact. Noting this point, Cullather (2000, p. 643) observes: “As bitterly as Rostovian, dependency, and world systems theorists feud, they agree on fundamental assumptions encoded in the terms development and modernization.” What is shared between the Marxist and dominant models of communication for social change is the treatment of communication as an instrument of top-down dissemination based on a framework of modernization that sees the world in binaries, as contrast between traditional and dominant societies. 3.5.1  Marxist Explanations The conceptualization of social change in Marxist interventions, however, is based on a top-down notion of the absence of consciousness among the margins. The role of the vanguard/development communication expert therefore is one of raising the consciousness of those at the margins. The centralized planning models of Communist forms of governance therefore, on one hand concentrate power in the domains of the politburo, and on the other hand erase possibilities for grassroots participation in social change processes. Moreover, the framing of justice in the domain of economic access without attending to the question of access to communicative spaces for participation and voice delegitimizes the local participation of communities in change processes and change struggles, instead pushing for structures of control that limit the opportunities for expression. For instance, the participation of indigenous communities in organized resistance are explained in Marxist theory through the processes of organizing in terms of class and disenfranchisement, at the same time often erasing the cultural articulations and claims that are made as the bases of alternative development. The absence of communicative equality in the framework of Marxist development often contributes to the authoritarian party formations and development practices. The construction of experts within the processes of social change shapes the role of communication as sending directives. The erasure of opportunities for voice and communicative equality shapes

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the discursive space, turning Marxist processes of social change communication into top-down endeavors. The transformation from revolution to governing turns from grassroots participation to authoritarian rule. The strategies of authoritarian rule eventually contribute to the consolidation of power in the hands of party elites, as we see in the instance of China. Members of the politburo and those close to the politburo secure access to opportunities as the margins are erased. In instances such as the later economic liberalization of China, the political control of the party enables the enrichment of a party elite class. Simultaneously, worker protests, trade union movements, and forms of resistance are actively repressed. Even in democracies such as India where the Communist Party of India (Marxist) works through democratic processes, the absence of opportunities for large-scale participation led to the consolidation of elite power at district, state, and central levels, contributing to the dissatisfaction of party workers. When peasants, who formed the base of the CPI(M) because of its strong commitments to land redistribution, rose in protest against the party-led land grab in West Bengal, the CPI(M) lost the grassroots capacities to dialogically engage these voices and find ways of challenging the worldview of the party elites. The party elites bracketed the protests as biased or as planted by the opposition. 3.5.2  Social Distribution of Communicative Rights The Marxist framework of communication for social change shares with the dominant framework its largely top-down approach to communication, with the work of communication being one of educating the workers. Although in socialist revolutions, large-scale worker participation in mass strikes and protest processes is key to the revolutionary process, the early work of socialists is one of educating workers, raising awareness, and creating the opportunities for organization. For many mass strike actions and protest marches, worker participation in the actions is critical, and is simultaneously seen as made possible through revolutionary education of workers. Once a revolution successfully creates the conditions for a socialist state, the form of communication typically retains its top-down character. The example of Venezuela with socialism through popular participation embodied in self-governing participatory city councils, defined by Chavez as “twenty-first century socialism,” was a new kind of socialism that grappled with the questions of distribution of communicative rights. Direct popular participation in the planning of the budget and in the implemen-

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tation and control of basic resources such as education and health embodied the principles of popular socialism.

3.6   Conclusion In a nutshell, Marxist theorizing of social change communication points toward the inequities in the global distribution of resources, and the ways in which these inequities are tied to specific configurations in policies, programs, and systems of global organizing. Therefore, even as nation states serve as imperial powers that shape social change processes through their influence on the WB and International Monetary Fund (IMF), attention needs to be paid to transnational alliances that work. Transnational corporations (TNCs), national elites, and the powerful political actors across the globe continue to exert their power through the framing of economic policies that are conducive to their interests, while simultaneously working through the powerful role of imperial nation states in shaping global policies. It is in this backdrop that contemporary Marxist interventions envision consciousness raising and raising of class consciousness along the lines of universal calls for social justice as entry points for social change. In his excellent critique of the salience of cultural explanations of resistance in postcolonial and subaltern studies scholarship, Chibber (2014) draws attention to the universal explanatory power of class and dialectics, but at the same time, misses out the cultural narratives and rationalities that are offered at subaltern sites of resistance as bases for imagining alternatives to the march of neoliberalism. As I will argue in the next chapter and develop subsequently in the chapter on the culture-centered approach (CCA), while Chibber’s much needed critique offers a correction to the culturalist explanations that occupy post-structural readings of social change, the erasure of culture and the question of communicative justice at the same time misreads the anger, resistance, and articulations emerging from dispossessed communities across the global South, for whom culture often is a key site for making claims to community identity and autonomy, resisting the dominant ideas of neoliberal development. Moreover, the uncritical reproduction of colonial formations of knowledge production as universal science leave uninterrogated the very capitalist logics that underlie the contemporary reproductions of science on the global stage. The failure to acknowledge the transformative cultural knowledge held by subaltern communities disengages from a serious conversation on alterna-

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tives. As evident with indigenous social change movements across the globe, various forms of indigenous knowledge offer truly transformative bases for imagining socialist global politics. Maori movements for land for instance based on concepts of commons and collective ownership challenge the logics of capital by depicting its limits and by simultaneously marking off spaces of sustainability beyond the extractive reach of capital (Walker, 1984).

Note 1. This chapter on Marxist development communication, and specifically on socialist and Communist development processes, covers a subject that is largely missing from the development communication literature. This omission may be largely attributed to the Cold War roots of social change communication. The origins of social change communication in Cold War propaganda techniques resulted in the systematic erasure of knowledge on social change communication processes in economies that attempted to follow some version of the Marxist path. The hegemonic concepts of capitalism and market defined the anchors of the literature, and at the same time, concepts such as centralized planning, redistribution, and worker ownership of production processes were categorically absent from the social change communication literature. Although this chapter seeks to offer a corrective to that omission, much more in-depth study and analysis of communication processes in economies that sought to follow the Marxist framework is needed.

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Rosset, P. M. (1998). Alternative agriculture works: The case of Cuba. Monthly Review, 50(3), 137. Schiller, H. I. (1971). Mass communications and American empire. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Schmidt, I. (2016). The three worlds of social democracy. London: Pluto Press. Thomas, P. N. (2014). Public sector software and the revolution: Digital literacy in communist Kerala. Media, Culture & Society, 36(2), 258–268. Tomlinson, J. (1991). Cultural imperialism. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Walker, R. J. (1984). The genesis of Maori activism. The Journal of the Polynesian Society, 93(3), 267–281. Wallerstein, I. (1979). The capitalist world-economy (Vol. 2). Cambridge University Press.

CHAPTER 4

Culture and Social Change Communication

The critique of the top-down, US-driven, model of social change opened up the conversation on rethinking the role and nature of social change communication driven by the dominant development institutions. The work of Paulo Freire (1970) emerges as a key anchor for interrogating the logics of development imposed on communities that were often being targeted as passive audiences of development interventions. In his Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire (1970) interrogates and disrupts the hegemonic model of education as information dissemination. Instead he offers a problem-solving framework of education that is rooted in people’s own recognition of the challenges they experience situated in historical contexts. He notes: Problem-posing education is revolutionary futurity. Hence it is prophetic (and, as such, hopeful). Hence, it corresponds to the historical nature of humankind. Hence, it affirms women and men as beings who transcend themselves, who move forward and look ahead, for whom immobility represents a fatal threat, for whom looking at the past must only be a means of understanding more clearly what and who they are so that they can more wisely build the future. Hence, it identifies with the movement which engages people as beings aware of their incompletion—an historical movement which has its point of departure, its Subjects and its objective. (p. 84)

© The Author(s) 2020 M. Dutta, Communication, Culture and Social Change, Palgrave Studies in Communication for Social Change, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26470-3_4

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The hope for problem-solving education lies in the recognition of people’s capability to make sense of their lived situations and craft out pathways for addressing the challenges they experience based on this understanding. This recognition of human agency to make sense of circumstances in historical contexts is the basis for creating trajectories of social change that are anchored in people’s participation. The concept of the passive recipient of development messages is resisted through an interrogation of the banking model of education that sees education as the transfer of knowledge as a gift from the educator to the student who knows nothing. Friere’s education as conscientization draws on the concept of reflection as the basis of cultivating awareness of one’s social reality, and action as the participation in the process of changing the reality. Freirean ideas of social change offered important points of radical departure from the deficit model that inhabited development communication scholarship. Latin American communication scholars Beltrán (1976) and Bordenave (1976), trained in the diffusion of innovations framework of development communication, started raising questions about the taken-­ for-­ granted assumptions that reproduced themselves in the dominant development communication paradigm. In his book Communication and Development: Critical Perspectives, Rogers (1976) noted the innovation bias, lack of cultural understanding, and lack of participatory ownership in development communication interventions. For Rogers, the acknowledgment of the passing of the dominant paradigm led to calls for the acknowledgment of structures and new methods of network analyses. Dominant development institutions globally started responding to this emerging critique of development, with the United Nations (UN) declaring the World Decade for Cultural Development from 1988 to 1997. Robert Chambers introduced participation formally into the development paradigm through his conceptualization of participatory rural appraisal (PRA) (1994a, 1994b). Along the same time that participation was making inroads into the development conversation, the global political economy was being reorganized under the framework of neoliberalism, promoting free trade, minimization of tariffs and trade barriers, weakening of collective bargaining and labor unions, minimization of public welfare delivered by the state, and privatization of public resources. The mantra of neoliberalism was incorporated into the overarching dominant model of development as the mantra of development, pushed by international financial institutions (IFIs) through their loans to Third World nations. The ideology of the

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Washington Consensus, referring to the commitment of the IFIs and development agencies to promote the free market through structural adjustment programs (SAPs), positioned the market as the solution to problems of poverty and lack of access to resources among the global margins. The Third World therefore emerged as the target of poverty alleviation programs that pushed the free market as the solution to problems of poverty. Based on a trickle-down ideology, the overarching faith of neoliberal governance in the market transformed modes of governmentality across the globe, with neoliberalism being pursued in different forms. The power of the IFIs shape the transformation of global political economy, with multiple emerging nodes of capitalist control and extraction based on the principles of the free market, narrated in multiple cultural frameworks, albeit at its heart being propelled by Eurocentric notions of capitalist modernity. In his piece, The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism, Dirlik writes: Transnational capital is no longer just Euro-American, and neither is modernity just Euro-American modernity. The complicated social and cultural composition of transnational capitalism makes it difficult to sustain a simple equation between capitalist modernity and Eurocentric (and patriarchal) cultural values and political forms. Others who have achieved success within the capitalist world-system demand a voice for their values within the culture of transnational capital; the East Asian Confucian revival to which I referred above is exemplary of the phenomenon. Eurocentrism, as the very condition for the emergence of these alternative voices, retains its cultural hegemony; but it is more evident than ever before that, in order for this hegemony to be sustained, its boundaries must be rendered more porous than earlier, to absorb in its realm alternative cultural possibilities that might otherwise serve as sources of destructive oppositions…. (p. 48)

Culture and cultural articulations attained hegemonic position in global discourse precisely because of the economic dominance gained by East Asian economies, working on the Eurocentric principles of capitalism. The turn toward culture in other words is a byproduct of the hegemony of the Eurocentric model of capitalist extraction, now creating new opportunities for culturalist arguments. In the rest of this chapter, we will explore the turn to participation and culture in the dominant development paradigm.

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4.1   Critique of the Dominant Paradigm As the dominant paradigm expanded its global reach, critiques of the paradigm emerged from the global South, predominantly from Latin America. Scholars such as Beltrán (1976) and Bordenave (1976), who trained in the dominant paradigm under the tutelage of Rogers, returned to Latin America, worked on implementation projects, and experienced the limits of the dominant paradigm, focused solely on individual behavior change. There criticisms attended to the imperialist assumptions driving the dominant paradigm, driving the dichotomy between tradition and development. Noting the cultural biases that were built into development communication solutions, these scholars articulated the limits of the diffusion of innovations framework targeting the Third World with development solutions. They also interrogated the social and cultural contexts of innovations, pointing to relationships of power and international fields of influence (such as US influence on agriculture) that shape the nature of innovations being proposed (Beltrán, 1976; Bordenave, 1976). Bordenave (1976), for instance, interrogates the concept of the farmer as an independent decision-maker proposed in dominant persuasion-based frameworks of development, instead attending to the social structures, imperial agendas, and transnational inequalities that shape the agricultural choices available to farmers. He notes that “today we are aware that our countries, their economies, and their people—and above all, the farmers— are dependent upon decisions made for them by international forces, and that within our countries the rural areas occupy the lower level in a pyramid of vertical domination and frequent exploitation” (p. 138). Bordenave then draws on Freire to suggest that without “conscientization” (critical awareness of the social structure within which one is situated) and the building of horizontal lines of communication, technology transfer was unlikely to work. Bordenave also discusses the effects of innovations in terms of the likelihood, for instance, of agricultural innovations, to exacerbate the inequalities among farmers and/or to subject all farmers to domination by “forces foreign to their own interests” (p. 141). On a similar note, in an article titled “A farewell to Aristotle: Horizontal communication,” Beltrán (1979) outlined the strategic attacks launched by the communication organizations of the global North on Third World advocacy under the New International Information Order to create independent news agencies that balanced the information imperialism imposed by the North. Summarizing criticisms of the traditional model of

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c­ ommunication for social change, Beltrán notes that the unilinear model propagates transmission, is static in nature, and confuses communication with information. In addition, he notes the ways in which communication as persuasion works as an instrument of the status quo, as a propaganda tool that promotes mercantilism, and as an instrument for disseminating the ideology of capitalism, which in turn, produces alienation. In contrast, drawing from Friere, he proposes horizontal communication as an alternative, built on the concepts of free and egalitarian access to information, dialogue as a two-way flow, and participation as the right to emit messages, grounded in communication needs and communication resources.

4.2   Development Communication, Participation, and the Third World Development, narrated in anti-imperial struggles, was a site of contestation, a basis for nationalist imaginaries that are also deeply socialist. Consider the following articulation by the Guinean anti-colonial theorist and revolutionary Amilcar Cabral, in voicing resistance to Portuguese colonialism: [T]he necessarily repressive nature of the neocolonial State against the national liberation forces, the aggravation of class contradictions, the objective continuance of agents and signs of foreign domination (settlers who retain their privileges, armed forces, racial discrimination), the growing impoverishment of the peasantry and the more or less flagrant influence of external factors contribute toward keeping the flame of nationalism alive. They serve gradually to awaken the consciousness of broad popular strata and, precisely on the basis of awareness of neocolonial frustration, to reunite the majority of population around the ideal of national liberation. (p. 132)

Awareness of the oppressive nature of the colonial formation forms the basis for the popular mobilization of resistance. Participation is thus conceptualized in the ambits of the anti-colonial struggle, anchored in a deep-­ rooted recognition of the forces of neocolonial oppression. Impoverishment and exploitation are seen in relationship to the colonial occupation, and thus participation as resistance is directly targeted at dismantling the imperial apparatus. In contrast to the dominant paradigm of development communication and related to it both directly and indirectly, newly independent nation

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states in the global South started articulating their development agendas, anchored in an anti-colonial approach (see Cabral, 1979). Moreover, as the critiques of Eurocentric development communication interventions started proliferating, large development actors started calibrating their discourses, processes, and frameworks toward participation. Participation emerged in social change interventions directed at the Third World, offering a framework for local communities to offer their inputs into the development and dissemination of the development intervention (Chambers, 1988). 4.2.1  Participation and Power The participatory framework of communication introduced into the new development agenda sought to re-do development, challenging the top-­ down framework of communication as diffusion of innovations (Chambers, 1994a, 1994b; Chambers & Thrupp, 1994). The turn to participation inaugurated new processes, frameworks, and structures for carrying out development communication interventions. Consider the following depiction of the revolutionary “farmer first” framework offered by Chambers (1988): To put farmers first, and resource-poor farmers first of all, requires quiet personal revolutions. For these to occur, scientists and extensionists, like risk-prone farmers themselves, need a wider repertoire, and freedom to experiment and adapt. This freedom is contrary to the reflexes of normal professionalism and of normal bureaucracy. Much therefore depends on whether those in authority in agricultural research and extension encourage and allow their staff to work and experiment in the FF mode. If they do not, the 1990s will continue very largely to leave out the resource-poor farmers of the third agriculture; but if they do, and if farmer-first approaches and methods are adopted widely and well, the gains in production and well being should be great indeed. (p. 12)

The engagement with resource-poor farmers is constituted within the ambits of the expert class of scientists and extensionists. However, within a decade of its formulation as a radical alternative to the top-down development agenda, participation started being co-opted into top-down processes of free market promotion through development aid and structural adjustment programs. As the dominant development

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agencies turned their attention to participation, it was now shaped within the agendas of the market, embodied in the accelerated proliferation of World Bank (WB) projects of participation (Mansuri & Rao, 2012). In the development discourse, participation entered as a transformative register for communication for social change. Consider, for instance, McAnany’s (2014) depiction of the participatory paradigm as an alternative to the dominant paradigm of development: The participatory paradigm that emerged in the 1980s and has remained prominent until today has benefited from a turn in the general communication studies field toward a theory of active audience, where agency by individuals in the face of powerful media asserted itself. As well, the cultural turn in media studies fits with the concern of participatory discourse to take local cultural values (including religion) more into account in c4d projects. There has been a general value placed on dialogue, stemming from Freire in the 1970s, and of the role of people in their own development that has become a general theme even among large aid-giving institutions like the World Bank. (pp. 146–147)

The movement from top-down communication to participatory communication, however, erases the transformative work of participatory communication. The hegemonic structures underlying the global inequalities in distribution of resources that were being critiqued by the Latin American scholars are erased. McAnany’s articulation of participatory communication is constituted within the broader neoliberal logics of foregrounding individual agency in making sense of development, propping up participation as an entry point to circulate practices of self-help and empowerment without addressing the structural contexts of development. Participation and culture are the new tools of development interventions driven by IFIs. The audience turn depicted by McAnany shifts attention away from interrogating and resisting the structures of neoliberalism that constitute the overarching agendas of neoliberal projects, and the ways in which neoliberal projects deplete public resources and infrastructures. The notions of participation and culture are incorporated into neoliberal development interventions, increasing the effectiveness of these interventions. Structural adjustment programs imposed by the WB on the Third World make claims to being participatory by incorporating participation into program design and development even as they fundamentally deploy colonial formations to transform and co-opt Third World spaces.

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The co-option of participation by the WB on one hand enables the Bank to make claims to participation, while disseminating the overarching Bank agenda of privatization, incorporation of public services into privatized frameworks of management and public-private partnerships, and minimization of tariffs and taxes (Mansuri & Rao, 2012). In other words, the performance of participation in social change projects is constituted within the pre-determined agendas of the dominant development actors, with participation mostly serving as a tool for achieving the pre-­determined goals of the Bank while simultaneously enabling the weakening of public sector resources and services. Participation designed as a tactical tool renders critique and resistance impossible while incorporating claims to horizontal communication into neocolonial interventions pushed by transnational hegemony. Amid the erasure of socialist discourses in the backdrop of the decline of the Soviet Union and the turn to liberalization in China, this participatory turn emerges as a site for laying hegemonic claims to a new development order that is transformative and plural, simultaneously obfuscating the neocolonial forces of transnational capitalism that underlie it. This critique of participation as a functional tool for communication for social change, and specifically of the co-option of the “communication for social change” label is powerfully captured by Thomas and Van de Fliert in their book, Interrogating the Theory and Practice of Communication for Social Change: The Basis for a Renewal: In fact, the language of participation has been co-opted and eviscerated of its original meanings that Freire and others have given it. Instead, participatory models of social change have now been adapted to and integrated within behavioural change communication. One can argue that the vast majority of projects related to CSC, a modicum of participation grafted into top-heavy communication flows has not led to any significant empowerment. (2014, p. 11)

The role of participation in Bank projects becomes one of branding top-­ down Bank projects as democratic and as connected to community voices. Amid the large and widespread criticisms of the Bank emerging from across the global South, the Bank’s turn toward participation serves as a powerful tool of manipulation, “communicatively inverting” the Bank’s top-down agenda of wealth consolidation in the hands of transnational capital as a democratic process grounded in the participation of

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c­ ommunities. Similarly, Wilkins and Enghel (2013, p. 168) critically interrogate the Living Proof campaign funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, noting that the participatory empowerment tools pushed by the campaign serve the neoliberal agenda, suggesting that “the irony of the programs designed for the public good being privatized through foundations dependent on personal wealth gained through communication industries’ profits needs to be explored.” 4.2.2  Civil Society: NGOs and Neoliberalism The construct of civil society has been an integral component of neocolonial expansionism. Imperial interests of promoting capital and the ideology of the free market have been incorporated into the structures of support for civil society, taking the form of democracy promotion efforts that align with the local elite to open up markets to transnational corporations (TNCs) (Dutta, 2005). The façade of democracy promotion has enabled the imperial forces of the US the UK and Canada to destabilize democratic elected governments, popular movements against the penetration of capital, and socialist struggles for self-governance across the global South (Dutta, 2005). As I have demonstrated elsewhere, US democracy promotion efforts in the form of promoting and supporting civil society often worked to co-opt and undermine people’s democratic participation in electoral processes. Within the US, community mobilization, community organizations and grassroots organizing are often co-opted to serve the agendas of corporatized political campaigns and capitalist organizations (Walker, 2014). Professional grassroots mobilization firms work with corporations to mobilize the grassroots to generate support and participation, actively building a favorable public opinion climate that supports the corporation. For instance, the grassroots mobilizing PR firm Capitol Advantage positions itself as an organization that enables citizens to speak out effectively through civic participation, offering consulting services to private clients in mobilizing stakeholders in legislative and electoral contexts. It deploys a mix of software, datasets, and offline grassroots organizing to generate privatized impact (Walker, 2009). The role of public affairs consultants is to organize the grassroots within dominant agendas of clients, thus influencing the policymaking process through top-down community advocacy. The birth of the neoliberal experiment in Chile is constituted amid the US imperial strategy of dismantling the democratically elected socialist

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government of Salvador Allende, instead propping up the dictatorship of Pinochet. Critical here is the mediating role of civil society as a structure serving the interests of the local and global elites, with funding infrastructures embedded in the imperial promotion of market capitalism. Also worth noting is the interplay of civil society and violence in the birthing of the neoliberal project, embodied in large-scale imprisonments and murders of socialist workers and activists, paradoxically under the name of promoting freedom. Similar US democracy promotion by the US in Indonesia forms the backdrop of the mass-organized genocide of progressives, union organizers, and Communists in 1965. Networks of non-­ governmental organizations (NGOs), as organizing structures that are often operated by the local elite, are integral to the dissemination of the neocolonial formations, often with direct funding from development agencies. NGOs form the infrastructures of global capital, working through the development agencies and structures of nation states—the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the Department for International Development (DfID), Canadian Aid, the Australian Agency for International Development (AusAID)—to open up markets to transnational capital. Also salient here is the role of global organizations such as the UN in reproducing neocolonial hegemony. This neocolonial logic formed the foundation of the NGO networks and actively worked to open up newly decolonizing nation states of the global South to capital, ultimately paving the way for the global neoliberal transformation. Within the communication for development paradigm, NGOs are seen as the sites of participation, as the solution to the top-down frameworks of communication and development. Obfuscating the imperial role played by NGOs, this framing of NGOs and participation incorporates participatory processes into the structures of hegemonic development organizations. Funded by these organizations, NGOs emerge as sites for delivering services to the poor, the marginalized, and the disadvantaged. Highlighting the role of NGOs, McAnany goes on to articulate: What is clear is that NGOs have proliferated in the last two decades as alternatives to governments and large donor agencies, and many of these organizations have made participation part of their mission. These many small, grassroots NGOs are one of the vehicles by which participation is most easily accomplished. (p. 147)

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Participation placed in the hands of civil society is positioned as an alternative to state provision of resources, establishing the overarching hegemony of privatization. The turning of participation into a tool for small, grassroots NGOs is also tied to the overarching roll-back of public infrastructures and public welfare, instead putting forth narratives of empowerment and self-help. In their critique of the imperial formations served by NGOs, INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence describe the “non-profit industrial complex.” They depict the ways in which the non-profit industries, based on the private funding that supports them, work toward keeping and reproducing the capitalist structures. NGOs are worked into the language of professionalization, with bureaucratization of tasks amid the overarching managerial ideology that sees social change as projects to be designed, managed, and evaluated. The managerial logics incorporated into NGO work placed a managerial class in the hierarchies of NGOs, diverting money into managerial salaries in the global North, while communities in the global South that are targeted as recipients of interventions struggle with securing access to the fundamental resources that have been organized and allocated in their names. The neoliberal dogma of self-help on one hand is deployed to limit support for struggling communities, while on the other hand the funds are channeled into supporting salaries of the managerial elites largely located in the North. One of the areas where the neoliberal role of NGOs becomes prominent is disaster relief. As witnessed in disaster relief operations across the globe, the disaster emerges as a crisis that serves as the basis for accelerated neoliberal interventionism. The performance of disaster relief, with NGO staff flying in from outside, works as a site of privatizing public resources, turning the work of relief into a managerial activity driven by NGO experts from the top, flown in from sites of global capital in the North. This privatized funding of relief work is juxtaposed in the backdrop of targeted and systemic weakening of states and state infrastructures in the global South, through neocolonial SAPs pushed by IFIs. The South in the North (where communities of color reside, mostly in poverty) is similarly systematically weakened through neoliberal governmentality, with targeted weakening of public infrastructures and public resources. Also consider the organizing role of NGOs in managing participation, cultural expression, and conservation practices within the broader logics of sustainability. Sustainability has been strategically incorporated into the symbolic communication repertoires of transnational capital. Efforts at

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sustainability, funded and managed by transnational corporations, often work as communicative inversions, materially inverting the actual practices of extraction that threaten the environment. In doing so, sustainability NGOs, often located in the networks of power in the global North. The relationship between imperialism and NGOs is evident in the recent example of Brazil, where the democratically elected, socialist politics of the Left with a strong base in the workers’ movement has been systematically dismantled by the NGOs, often operated by the middle classes, funded by the US. Critical to the infrastructure of the campaign has been the planting of disinformation by the local elite class, with active US support. Digital media have been actively mobilized with the manufactured narrative of corruption to demonize the leaders of the Left, Dilma Rousseff and Lula, leading to the rise of the far-right Bolsonaro (Brasilwire, 2019; Dominguez, 2016). Salient in the active destabilization of socialist popular democracy and the paving of market opportunities for US-based transnational capital is the role of the US-based human rights NGO Human Rights Watch that actively collaborates with the agendas of the US state (Dominguez, 2016). As evident in Chile, Brazil, Venezuela, and Ecuador, critical to the politics of imperially orchestrated regime change targeting progressive democratic governments across Latin America is the role of the global-imperial corporate media, circulating imperial narratives that form the architecture of the disinformation campaigns. 4.2.3  Communication for Development and Neocolonialism The formulation of communication for development and social change (CDSC), framed within the interests of hegemonic actors, reflects the interests of the status quo. Note in the development and social change agenda the formulation of social change communication in dialogue and collaboration with development. As noted earlier, communication for social change in this hegemonic worldview works in unison with the development agenda. This strategic coupling systematically erases the resistive and transformative politics of communication for social change that seeks to dismantle the very development institutions that it sees theoretically as the sites for perpetuating oppression, colonialism, and exploitation. In depicting Sen’s capabilities approach in the context of CDSC, Jacobson (2016), for instance, depicts participatory communication within the context of the goals set by dominant actors, stating that “social and economic development must rely to a considerable extent on participatory

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c­ ommunication processes whether these processes are run by town governments, regional farming groups, or school systems” (p. 802). Although Jacobson goes on to discuss the Freirean work on participation, the terms of participation are articulated in the ambits of dominant actors. As exemplars of participatory communication, PRA, social mobilization, and media advocacy are offered. As noted earlier, although PRA discusses empowerment as an anchor to participation, the goals of participation are set within the dominant development agenda. Similarly, social mobilization refers to a process developed by the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) that engages multiple stakeholders toward addressing health challenges. Jacobson notes that sometimes participation involved empowering local groups to participate in decisionmaking, and at other times it is a tool for managing health campaigns. Although in the third area of participatory capacity, media advocacy, influencing public policy through “countermessages within hegemonic media spaces” is discussed (p. 803), the discussion is devoid of attention to structures, and particularly neoliberal hegemony. More so, the media advocacy element of social change is contextualized in a climate of “strong current of antidevelopment messaging.” Such an articulation that equates media advocacy for social change as working against anti-development fails to recognize the ways in which the development agenda itself and the tools of development are deployed to disempower, erase, and exploit subaltern communities. The capabilities for communication for social change therefore are very much embedded within the broader agendas of hegemonic power structures, foregrounding the importance of critical interrogations that closely examine the roots of participation and the sources that control the sites of participatory communication. Similarly, consider the introduction to the Journal of Communication special issue on Communication, Social Movements, and Collective Action edited by Obregon and Tufte (2017). In their introduction to the special issue, distinct from and departing from the title of the call, social movements as collective action are set in the ambits of communication for development and social change, as dialogic anchors to the specific formulation for communication for development and social change. Note here, in the simultaneous and concurrent placement of development and social change, the hegemonic agenda of the social change communication industry that sees communication in the ambits of development. Consider the introductory essay in the special issue where the editors articulate a research agenda:

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As social movements constantly evolve due to multiple social, political, and cultural dynamics, these changes produce new questions to understand the complexity of communication dynamics in social movements. In practice, over the past few years, we have seen new partnerships between movements and other stakeholders such as governments, the private sectors, and NGOs. A broader spectrum of social actors has emerged simultaneous to the latest wave of social movements across the globe, a new discourse around activism and social movements has gained prominence, and new ways of collective action have surfaced among established stakeholders in this field. (p. 638)

Particularly salient in this frame is the construction of social movements, activism, and collective action within the neoliberal language of stakeholders and partnerships. Movements are incorporated into stakeholder-driven relationships that bring them in collaboration with states, private capital, and civil society. The tri-partite tools of neoliberal governmentality that work through partnerships, state, private sector, and civil society (consider the neoliberal buzzword public-private partnerships) can now also incorporate movements and the communicative lessons learned from them. Movements, equated with bottom-up communication, are placed in dialogue with top-down communication strategies of hegemonic development actors, with an imaginary of partnerships that sees these relationships working together. The resistive capacity of transformative social change that forms the basis of activism and social movements is reformulated as bottom-up communication and participation that lends itself to be co-opted into the hegemonic structures of development agencies. In such uncritical reformulation of movements, activism, and collective action, communication is an instrumental tool shaping a research agenda in “CDSC focused on social movements, collective action, and communicative practices as core elements of social change” (p.  638). Obregon and Tufte (2017) go on to note: Parallel debates in both research and practice: social movement-based initiatives that emerge in response to perceived power inequalities and disenchantment with the status quo, and institutionalized experiences of CDSC that seek to mobilize social actors within existing social and political structures. These formerly parallel tracks have increasingly converged, and at times, may overlap in ways that prompt theorizing about their implications for the CDSC. (p. 638)

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The parallel tracks between social movements and CDSC, and the convergence between social movements and CDSC are configured within institutional logics of CDSC. In order to accomplish this institutionalization of CDSC, the authors construct social movements as responding to perceptions in power inequalities and disenchantment with the status quo. Note, in the articulations of perceptions and disenchantments as the conceptual bases of social movements, that systematic erasure of the structural injustices, the materiality of structural inequalities, and the inequalities in the very formations that the hegemonic institutions occupy. For social movements to thus be palatable and converge-able within the institutionalized CDSC paradigm, they become responses to grievances that can be managed within the CDSC framework, contributing to the effectiveness of the framework. In other words, communication for social movements, incorporated into the hegemonic structure of thee CDSC, makes CDSC more effective. This notion is well-captured here: Arguably, there may be little difference between the mobilization of actors in institutionally driven and grassroots social movements … Historically, media and communication have played a fundamental role in the emergence and development of movements and processes of resistance, change, identity, and transformation linked to the notion of “change from below.” However, initiatives led by UN agencies and coalitions of key players in development sectors also show that movements led from “above” may equally leverage the role of communication, including new digital platforms, to engage and mobilize multiple stakeholders toward a common goal. The Scaling Up Nutrition Movement (SUN Movement Secretariat, 2014), which seeks to address malnutrition globally, and the Global Polio Eradication Initiative are illustrative examples. (p. 639)

Note how the resistance of social movements is folded into top-down interventions constituted within the neoliberal architectures of the UN. The example of the Scaling Up Nutrition (SUN) Movement captures the neoliberal governmentality that goes unchallenged in the proposed fusion between social movements and communication for development and social change. It emerged from a World Bank idea, which was based on several initiatives by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and promoted by the UN. As an exemplar of the public-private partnerships framework, the SUN Movement, established in 2010, represents the interests of TNCs in the agro-food sectors (SUN, 2015). With representation of over 160

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c­ompanies by 2016, including TNCs such as PepsiCo, Unilever, Mars, and General Mills, the movement incorporates corporate pledges that are carried out by initiatives such as food fortification and reformulation, education programs, and infant and school feeding programs that seek to improve access to nutritious foods and improved micronutrient profiles for people living in developing countries. The emphasis of SUN is on food fortification activities and on behavior change, keeping intact the intake of processed and packaged foods, and the unhealthy structures of food production, packaging, and distribution. Solutions in the forms of products create new opportunities for the private interests. The SUN Movement also houses the SUN Business Network, a private structure directed at generating profits. Note here the intersections of private capital, private foundations, and IFIs in pushing a privatization agenda in addressing malnutrition while simultaneously obfuscating the structural, political-­ economic conditions and deep inequalities that constitute malnutrition. Rather than addressing the commoditization of food that lies at the heart of malnutrition and inaccess, the SUN movement as a neoliberal formation pushes more commoditization. That for Obregon and Tufte (2017) the communication strategy of the SUN Movement is an exemplar of an effective top-down program addressing malnutrition used in a comparative framework with social movements speaks to the neoliberal trope that underlies the stakeholder-based, neutral concept of communication. Social change offers the new language for hegemonic communication interventions that continue to push the behavior change agenda. As evident in the social change communication summit (discussed in depth in the next section) funded by a number of hegemonic actors including UNICEF and the Johns Hopkins Center for Communication Programs (CCP), the amalgamation of social change communication with behavior change forms a new lexicon. Activism and advocacy are brought under the umbrella of behavior change communication. Population control programs embodying the eugenicist Malthusian logics are reworked into narratives of family planning and contraceptive choice. The language of choice and market access often obfuscates the underlying racist agenda of targeting the populations of communities of color with interventions of population control. Consider the following depiction of the impact of mass media programming, documented by Family Planning High Impact Practices: Mass media programming in reproductive health can influence individual behaviors by providing accurate information, building self-efficacy, and pro-

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moting attitudes and social norms that support healthy reproductive behaviors. This brief describes the evidence on and experience with mass media programming in family planning. The distinguishing characteristic of mass media programs, relative to other social and behavior change (SBC) interventions, is that they reach a large audience—often national in scope—with consistent, high-quality messages, primarily through TV and radio (e.g., public service announcements or advertisements, talk shows, or serial dramas). Some mass media programs also use ancillary print materials. (https:// www.fphighimpactpractices.org/briefs/mass-media/)

Inherent in the depiction of the evidence for the success of family planning programs is the hegemonic logic of media as instruments of power. Mass media are seen as tools for disseminating widely and rapidly the messages of family planning. The Family Planning High Impact Practices structure partners with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the global organization CARE that positions itself as fighting poverty, USAID, Population Council, and Family Planning 2020 (FP2020), among other groups. One of the partners, FP 2020, describes its origins as follows: The UK Government and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, in partnership with UNFPA, national governments, donors, civil society, the private sector, the research and development community, and others from across the world came together at the London Summit on Family Planning to support the right of women and girls to decide, freely and for themselves, whether, when and how many children they have. The Summit called for unprecedented global political commitments and resources that will enable 120 million more women and girls to use contraceptives by 2020. (https:// www.familyplanning2020.org/about-us) To achieve these goals, the London Summit on Family Planning called upon partners to work closely together across a range of areas, including: • Increasing the demand and support for family planning • Improving supply chains, systems and service delivery models • Procuring the additional commodities countries need to reach their goals • Fostering innovative approaches to family planning challenges • Promoting accountability through improved monitoring and evaluation

The language of empowerment and choice is embedded within the hegemonic agenda of pushing family planning interventions, measured in terms of increasing the demand and support for family planning, improv-

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ing the supply chain, and developing innovative approaches and commodities for reaching goals of family planning. The language of choice and the right of women and girls to decide freely is formulated within the population control targets set by the hegemonic actors. Note here the overarching goals that are set by elite private actors, donor agencies, and imperial development agencies. As I have demonstrated in my analysis elsewhere, imperial development agencies such as the USAID see population control as an economic, geostrategic, and political interest. Controlling the populations of the Third World is seen as development, as the solution to addressing poverty, obfuscating the large-scale inequalities in distribution of resources that underlie poverty. The FP2020 website links to the UNFPA document, The power of choice. The document (p.  23) situates choice within the context of the challenges of having large families: Countries with high fertility typically face challenges in providing education for children, health care for all and employment opportunities for young workers. A dearth of jobs in rural areas can drive many young people to migrate to cities that already lack job possibilities. Countries with fertility rates of four or higher are expected to see their urban populations grow rapidly in the years ahead.

Inherent in the ideology produced by UNFPA, USAID, and the World Health Organization (WHO) is the placing of structural challenges of inequalities and of inaccess to educational and employment opportunities on large families. The dearth of jobs is framed as a product of high fertility rates, obfuscating the structural inequities and neoliberal policies that underlie the lack of opportunities for accessing education and employment, especially among the poor. In a section titled, “A legacy of large families,” the reader is told: Persistently high fertility means that the increase in the number of younger people in the years ahead will make it harder for countries to ensure access to quality education and health care, and for economies to generate sufficient opportunities to productively engage the many young people entering the labour market. (p. 30)

Note here the causal logic that is explicated in the document, depicting the large population of the Black/Brown masses as the underlying causes

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for difficulties in accessing education, employment, and income-­generating opportunities. The high population of these high fertility countries also limits the capacity of the economies to productively engage youth in the labor market. Strategically erased from the discursive space are articulations and acknowledgment of structures. The racist ideology of family planning as development is rife with the imageries of dark-skinned peoples that form the visual apparatus of the document. Juxtaposed on the backdrop of the image of a dark-skinned family, the section on “A legacy of large families” opens with the following statement: Of 43 parts of the world with fertility of four or more births per woman today, 38 are in Africa. Outside Africa, Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine, Timor-­ Leste and Yemen have fertility of four or higher, and are exceptional in that they have experienced conflict or crisis in the past few decades. (p. 28)

The strategic framing of population growth and high fertility as the causes of conflicts and crises in Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine, Timor-Leste, and Yemen strategically erase the roots of these conflicts in neocolonialism, violent occupations, and ongoing oppressions carried out by colonial powers. Consider, for instance, the countries of Afghanistan, Iraq, and Yemen, the conflicts in each one of which have been fundamentally generated by neocolonial invasions, occupation, and establishment of neoliberal policies to enable resource extraction by imperial powers and aligned transnational capital. Similarly, consider the example of Palestine where the conflict is a direct product of settler colonialism and the apartheid techniques of Israeli occupation. In the backdrop of the systematic murders of Palestinians carried out by Israeli forces, the high fertility rate of Palestinians is a protection against being wiped out. Note how the threat of the highly fertile Palestinian population as a source of conflict works hand-in-hand with the genocidal policies of the Israeli state in Palestine. 4.2.4   Sustainable Behavior Change Communication Sustainability is the new buzzword driving the social change communication industry. The dominant paradigm has been framed within the language of communication for behavior change, while incorporating participation into the ambits of behavior change. Consider, for instance, the International Social and Behavioral Change Communication Summit 2020 organized by the partnerships of Johns Hopkins CCP, UNICEF,

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Soul City (the entertainment education program), and Social Change Factory, among many others. Here’s an overview of the summit: The Social and Behavior Change Communication (SBCC) community has the ability to unleash transformational change around some of the world’s most pressing challenges, including poverty, gender equality, protecting the planet and ensuring that all people enjoy health, peace and prosperity. At the 2020 SBCC Summit, we will harness this power as people from across the globe come together to examine the most recent evidence and innovations, build on our diverse methodologies, debate our way forward and highlight successes and challenges. We will explore the vast potential and diversity of our field—across disciplines, development priorities and geographies, and in tandem with other development actors—to accelerate action towards achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Together, we will imagine and chart a path towards a future where our collective strength is magnified to address issues ranging from migration to Ebola, from gender discrimination and violence to infant mortality, from malaria to the climate crisis and access to justice. (https://sbccsummit.org/wp-content/ uploads/2019/06/SBCC-Framing-Document_finalwlogo.pdf)

The description above captures at its heart the neoliberal rationality that drives the social change communication industry. The statement is rife with communicative inversions that are reflective of the larger development communication paradigm. Located within the hegemonic structures of UN organizations, development agencies, and academic structures located within the US colonial hegemony, the behavior change paradigm offers individual behavior change as the solution to what it defines as “pressing challenges” in the domains of poverty, gender equality, peace, climate change, and health. How exactly does behavior change communication address poverty or climate change is not really spelt out. However, the underlying assumption of individualism and behavioral modification reproduces the overarching neoliberal ideology, keeping structures intact. The seduction of social change is sold on the promise of transformation, although close interrogation of the rhetoric depicts its parochial framing within an individualistic framework. The structures of global capital, financialization, and oligopolies are kept intact while discourses of change promise their achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The framing of the SDGs is the new branding opportunity for an entire industry of change practitioners that profit from the market for change. Social change itself is a market, with specific SDGs offering oppor-

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tunities for needs to be addressed through the professional class of social change communicators. Note also the juxtaposition of justice within this framework where access to justice is constituted in the ambits of individual behavior. Consider, moreover, how the document depicts social change communication as a field: Standing on a foundation of evidence, SBCC has evolved over many decades, applying and evolving best practices and fostering innovative models. It draws from an array of disciplines, including communication, psychology, anthropology, sociology, media development, neuroscience, behavioral economics, human centered design, market science, community engagement, participatory media, social marketing and advocacy. There is significant strength in this diversity as it is applied to tackle the complexity of health and development challenges. What is common across SBCC disciplines is the science—a focus on theories, systems-thinking, a rigorous application of our approaches and a commitment to use evidence-based practices and embrace innovation.

The array of disciplines and their combination into the social change communication field offers key insights into the formation of the field. Social change and communication for social change, seen from the perspective of the organizers, is an amalgamation of an array of disciplines including the neoliberal threads of behavioral economics, design, market science, and social marketing. Note in the statement the ways in which advocacy, participatory media, and community engagement are rolled into combinations with the neoliberal social sciences that are particularly designed to serve the status quo. The professionalization of social change communication is the key element of the social change communication industry, with the generation of knowledge of social change communication itself constituted within logics of the market. Participation and engagement ­incorporated into the realms of behavior change communication are tools of the neoliberal status quo. That the framing of social change communication is offered by actors such as the CCP offers key insights into the politics of knowledge described as social and behavioral change communication. CCP, located within Johns Hopkins University, is a center with a history embedded within the imperial project, with funding from the USAID.  Historically, USAID funding served to perpetuate the capitalist agendas of the US, creating

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new markets for US-based TNCs through tools of behavior change communication presented as methods for disseminating population control and agricultural technology (Dutta, 2006b; Dutta & Basnyat, 2008a). Embedded within the Cold War agenda, the behavior change communication programs run by CCP reflected the propaganda logics of the Empire. These logics continue to be reproduced in SBCC, albeit packaged in the languages of participation, sustainability, and advocacy. This professionalization of social change communication is antithetical to the democratic politics of socialist change to be discussed in the next chapter. Part of the politics of grassroots-driven social change communication resisting capitalism is to mark, resist, and dismantle professional SBCC efforts that prop up the neoliberal status quo and co-opt participation. 4.2.5  From Information to Entertainment The transformation from top-down communication to participation was accompanied by the transformation in the modality of delivering development (Storey & Jacobson, 2003). One of the conceptual changes in the modality of development communication was the change in the form of development interventions, from communication as information to communication as entertainment. Entertainment-education (E-E) programs were thus offered as alternatives to the dominant development paradigm. Salient to the crafting of E-E was the notion that the framing of communication as entertainment offered greater opportunities for audience engagement with development issues. The turn toward entertainment, married to claims to participatory communication, positioned communication for social change as a new paradigm, presenting a rhetoric of development as participation in opposition to development as top-down diffusion (Dutta, 2006a). Although E-E and its later incarnations incorporated the rhetoric of participation, the programs, their objectives, and structures were determined through ­top-­down processes, and framed within the overarching agendas of dominant development institutions. An often cited example of this genre of participatory development projects is the Radio Communication Project (RCP) in Nepal that used E-E along with participatory communication strategies to diffuse the agendas of family planning as determined by the funding agency and the campaign planners (Storey & Jacobson, 2003). Although the RCP presented the façade of participation, its conceptualization of participation was incorporated within the family planning

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agenda promoted by the USAID, working in collaboration with local elite managers and implementers (Dutta & Basnyat, 2008a, 2008b). The performance of participation in the RCP was formulated within the overarching structure of participation as a tool for the dissemination of the intervention message. Similarly, the radio soap opera Taru sought to create awareness about the value of gender equality, small family size, reproductive health, and caste and communal harmony in the northern Hindi-speaking region of India (Harter, Sharma, Pant, Singhal, & Sharma, 2007). Various forms of entertainment such as folk performances were used to prime the audiences to the drama and to create awareness about it. These folk performances, framed as forms of participatory communication, covered the issues that would appear in Taru, and were used to form radio listening clubs. These clubs were later involved in putting together participatory performances on self-identified issues that emerged from within the groups. Note that the structure and framework of participation in this instance was framed within the ambits of dominant development institutions, with local community participation emerging as a tool to be incorporated for message dissemination. In other words, E-E was used along with participatory principles, strategies, and tactics to carry out the broader agendas of development. In each of these instances, the theoretical literature draws upon cultural studies arguments about audience message reception to suggest the polysemic and plurivocal nature of E-E, simultaneously obfuscating the strategic and imperial agendas within which E-E is constituted. Paradoxically, the very framing of targets audiences of E-E programs as recipients, albeit dynamically engaged with the content, reflects the one-way process of communication written into E-E.

4.3   Neoliberalism and Market Hegemony The ascendance of the ideology of neoliberalism in the 1970s saw the further consolidation of the market-based ideology that was central to the development interventions being promoted by development agencies such as the USAID and DfID, and IFIs such as the World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Trade Organization (WTO) (Dutta, 2006a, 2006b). In this sense, the IFIs served as the instruments of the powerful nation states in pushing the agenda of the free market as one of development through structural adjustment programs,

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tying in development assistance to market restructuring of nation states. The development assistance interventions pushed by the USAID historically were structured to push privatization and to pry open markets, marrying free market interventionism and geostrategic diplomacy to development communication campaigns on family planning, agricultural innovations, and the like. In other words, essential to establishing the hegemony of the global project of neoliberalism was the role of development interventionism, framed as development strategies for incorporating nations into the global free market. Poverty was framed as a development problem, crafted in the language of poverty alleviation (later to be adopted by Communist states such as China in their transformation to liberalization), and paradoxically, neoliberal interventions of free market integration, weakening of public resources, and weakening of unions were imposed top-down as solutions to poverty. Technologies pushed by the USAID and the WB were methods of incorporating Third World nations into the global free market. Development is the buzzword and the strategic tool that enabled the rapid rise of free market governmentality, giving free market interventions the rhetorical sheen and legitimacy necessary for promotion of the market. 4.3.1  Foundations, Markets, and Social Change The role of private foundations in the social change conversation continues to be critical, with foundations playing key roles in setting the agendas of development and social change, albeit under the new languages of culture, participation, and participatory technology-enabled communication that reproduces the dominant modernization framework of development communication, dressed up in the new language of participation and empowerment (Dutta, 2011; Parmar, 2015). Social change has been incorporated into the business and marketing models of change management, with foundations offering prescriptive knowledge about the best practices of social change. The earliest theoretical formulations of communication as instruments of propaganda serving the US Empire and transnational commercial interests was realized through the formative role played by the Rockefeller Foundation in shaping the agenda for communication. The study of communication, constituted in the ambits of Cold War propaganda therefore was shaped within instrumentalist logics of imperialism, with the ideology of democracy as capitalism fundamentally shaping the conceptualization of communication as a persuasive tool.

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The work of communication as persuasion in development and social change was then precisely formulated under this logic of promoting US interests abroad, opening up markets, and promoting pro-market values across the newly independent colonies across the global South. The precursor to neoliberal hegemony was the intertwined work of foundationand USAID-sponsored projects that sought to open up the global South to market capitalism, both as a geostrategic interest as well as to serve the commercial goals of US imperialism. This interflow between foundations and development agencies such as the USAID is an ongoing feature of the development landscape. Consider, for instance, the current appointment of the Obama-era USAID administrator Rajiv Shah as the President of the Rockefeller Foundation, depicting the revolving door between development agencies and private foundations. Shah had also worked at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, shaping the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), which is a joint venture by the Gates and Rockefeller foundations, and is a framework for pushing biotechnology-­ based neoliberal agriculture under the seductive narrative of addressing food insecurity in Africa. The work of foundations lies in propping up neoliberal capitalism, and more neoliberal capitalism in accelerated forms, as the solutions paradoxically to the problems that are fundamentally rooted in the accelerated expansion of neoliberal capitalism. Consider the following description of new forms of capitalist solutions to sustainable development goals offered by Shah, framed under the narrative of “Impact investment”: The math is simple: The cost of solving the world’s most critical problems— poverty, hunger, disease, inequality, climate change—runs into the trillions of dollars. Yet the world’s philanthropic funds, even when combined with the global development and aid budgets of governments, add up to only a fraction of this funding need. How do we close this gap? Currently, more than $200 trillion in private capital is invested in global financial markets. Together, we must find innovative and catalytic solutions to mobilize private capital to close this widening gap between those with hope and prosperity, and those without. Collaborative, catalytic investment is essential to fill the development-financing gap and help address pressing global challenges. (https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/announcing-rockefeller-foundationimpact-investment-new-j-shah/)

Note here the fundamental communicative inversion of neoliberalism, offering neoliberal solutions to the very problems that are deeply rooted

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in neoliberal governmentality and its global hegemony. For Rockefeller, poverty, hunger, inequality, disease, and climate change are the sites of capital investments, projected as new market opportunities, serving the agendas of capital. Inequality and climate change, problems that have witnessed accelerated growth because of aggressive neoliberal policies enabling land, resource, and public infrastructure grab, are paradoxically framed as sites for “innovative and catalytic solutions” that “mobilize private capital.” The solution to the widening gaps therefore is placed in the hands of the global capitalist class that have systematically orchestrated these inequalities through the colonization of political and economic processes. The alignment of capital, private interests, and foundations forms the infrastructure for the industry of social change. The projection of foundations as the solutions to global challenges forms the communicative architecture of the social change landscape. Critics of neoliberalism are roped in as foundations are projected as solutions to the very problems they have orchestrated. Consider, for instance, the cover of the technology magazine Wired that presents the Harvard medical anthropologist and once-critic of structural forces that threaten health, Paul Farmer, alongside Melinda Gates, in a section titled “The human element” focused on “Designing global health.” The section notes: Paul Farmer and Melinda Gates have a lot in common. They’re both Duke University alums, and they’re both devoted to improving health around the world, especially in places with few resources. As cochair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Gates is particularly dedicated to empowering women and girls, which in turn benefits the health and prosperity of entire communities. Farmer splits his time between Boston (where he runs the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School), Haiti, and Rwanda. He’s founding director of Partners in Health, an international nonprofit that delivers health services to the rural and urban poor in a dozen countries. (https://www.wired.com/2013/11/2112g atefarmers/)

Evident in the depiction is the power of elite networks in the social change industry. The camaraderie between Farmer and Gates and the ensuing conversation depicts the fluidity between critiques of structures and the neoliberal co-option of such critiques into an overarching framework of developing solutions. Consider similarly the fluid movement from Partners

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in Health, the organization run by Farmer, to World Bank, of the co-­ founder Jim Yong Kim. The neoliberal hegemony of social change management is reproduced and funded by foundations, shaping the framework of development and social change thought, and further shaping the construction of conversations on development communication. Even as critiques of the top-down framework of development started echoing across activist and civil society spaces across the global South, participation emerged as the new regime of communication for social change. What is salient in the strategic emergence of participation in foundation-driven work is its incorporation of participation as functional tools of development and market promotion. Consider the organizing logics of the Communication for Social Change Consortium (CSCC) funded by the Rockefeller Foundation: Founded in early 2003 as a nonprofit organization, the Consortium builds upon work that began in 1997 at the Rockefeller Foundation as a special grant-making exploration. Since our founding, we have worked through advocacy, research, publications, teaching and training to enhance the practice of communication for development and social change with a special emphasis on participatory approaches such as public and private dialogue leading to community-based decision-making and collective action leading to long-term social change. We have grown into a network of committed practitioners and scholars who believe that communication must be bottom-up, empowering, and based upon principles of tolerance, equity, justice, and unleashing the voices of the previously unheard. Among our partner organizations are many of the UN agencies, international NGOs, foundations, international aid organizations and divisions within the World Bank, IADB and universities in the North and South. (http://archive.cfsc.org/index.html)

The organizing logics of the CSCC become apparent not only through the funding mechanism from Rockefeller; further consider the networks of partner organizations from the WB, international aid organizations to the UN agencies, embedded within neoliberal hegemony. The neoliberal ideology of development agencies (although the names of these agencies are not made clear) work alongside IFIs, brought together under private philanthropic funding. The neoliberal buzzword “public and private” is drawn upon within the context of community participation, community-­ based decision-making, and collective action leading to social change. The very ambits of social change are constituted within the organizing logics

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of philanthro-capital. A fundamental communicative inversion is the seeming sponsorship of collective action leading to social change from within the ambits of the hegemonic center of global capita, Rockefeller, with a long history of power and control in suppressing people’s participation and dissent. Terms such as “bottom-up,” “empowering,” “justice,” and “unleashing the voices of the previously unheard” make up the façade of philanthro-capital, with grassroots incorporated into the logics of neoliberal hegemony. The Rockefeller Foundation has convened conversations among social change communication practitioners and academics on culture, participation, and social change, shaping the conversation on development. Note the following depiction of the role of the Foundation in the book edited by Hemer and Tufte (2005a, 2005b): Since 1997 the Rockefeller Foundation has hosted a range of meetings and seminars seeking to articulate a global dialogue upon key challenges in the field, and calling for a stronger social change agenda in many development challenges (Rockefeller Foundation, 1999). This has raised substantial debate on the fundamental question of how to define social change. From 2004 the Communication for Social Change Consortium has continued this series of meetings and seminars. Recent meetings in this forum have debated the key competencies required and drafted what may become a generic Master programme in communication for social change. (p. 19)

The landscape of the debate on development and effectiveness of the techniques of social change communication is controlled by the Foundation. That the many theorists of social change participate within the ambits of the Communication for Social Change umbrella speaks to the hegemonic role of the Foundation in shaping social change knowledge. The ­buzzwords of culture and participation have framed the conversations of many of the participants at the consortium, captured in the edited collection, Media and Glocal Change: Rethinking Communication for Development. Worth noting in the edited book is its acknowledgment of the problematic of neoliberalism and the simultaneous articulation of neoliberal solutions of technology-driven innovations, market-based solutions, technology-­driven democracy, decentralized individualized ownership of resources through participation in the market, and privatization of public resources as the overarching solutions proposed by the participants. Consider the grand narrative of globalization as emancipation in the opening chapter by Eriksen:

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Globalisation is, in other words, not merely another word for the growing transnational economy. It is true that it is largely driven by technology and economic interests, but it must be kept in mind that it encompasses a wide range of regular events that are not in themselves technological or economic. Take the human rights discourse, for example: in the course of the second half of the twentieth century, the ideas and values associated with human rights have spread from educated elites worldwide (and not just in the West) to villagers and farmers in areas which until recently seemed both remote and exotic to the Western eye. The rapid dissemination of human rights ideas is, in fact, probably one of the most spectacular successes of globalisation. (p. 27)

Paradoxically, under the framework of a culturally situated, ethnographic account that is pitched in the collection, the uncritically reproduced frame is one of the gifts of neoliberal expansion. Reproducing the racist ideology of the diffusion of innovations framework discussed earlier, globalization is sold here as an instrument for bringing the enlightenment ideas of human rights to remote and exotic spaces. In addition to reproducing an uncritical modernist ideology, the narrative conveniently erases the very human rights violations that are folded into the instruments of globalization. The very language of globalization is situated amid the business interests of transnational capital. Eriksen then goes on to note: For a variety of reasons, globalisation creates the conditions for localisation, that is various kinds of attempts at creating bounded entities—countries (nationalism or separatism), faith systems (religious revitalisation), cultures (linguistic or cultural movements) or interest groups (ethnicity). For this reason, a more apt term, coined by Roland Robertson (1992), could be glocalisation. Let me now move to a general description of some features that the “glocal” identity movements of the turn of the millennium seem to have in common—the rudiments of a grammar of identity politics. (p. 28)

Culture, constructed in the realm of bounded identities, is cast in the realm of the local, as a response to or product of globalization. The term global thus introduced, and this forms the framing for the chapters of the book, frames the local as the realm of identity, as a product of the global political and economic forces. Although the collection sets itself up with an acknowledgment to critiquing neoliberalism, it reproduces the hegemony of neoliberal capital through the celebration of its inevitability. The

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production of the terminology of the “glocal” draws from the language of transnational business. The terrains of unequal practices remain unchallenged even as a new language of local-global connections, networks, and democracies is centered in the discursive space. What this example elucidates is the overarching role of foundations in the context of the problems produced by neoliberal transformations as sites for suggesting solutions, and further co-opting these solutions into the hegemonic framework of neoliberal governance. Foundation talk as a form of communicative inversion (Dutta, 2015) on one hand positions social change as resistance to the hegemony of neoliberal governance, and simultaneously co-opts local community participation and cultural formations as instruments for further disseminating the neoliberal model of governance driven by the free market and directed toward consolidating power in the hands of transnational capital. The key role of foundations in development work is one of framing the practice of as well as the knowledge of development, pushing a privatized agenda in framing the structures and processes of social change communication. Emerging languages of corporate-led development, public-private partnerships, and corporate social responsibility (CSR) programs drive the dominant agenda of development, directed toward resource consolidation through accelerated cycles of exploitation. The hegemony of foundations in the social change context is reflected in the overarching logic of turning public services into the hands of the private sector. Large global foundations such as the Gates Foundation and the Clinton Foundation emerge on the global landscape as the deliverers of development. Across the global South, development has been privatized into the networks of foundations and private partnerships that are increasingly the owners and deployers of development interventions across the globe. Examples of social innovations such as the micro-credit program of the Grameen Bank are propped up as pathways for poverty alleviation, pushing forth a self-help, empowerment-­based model of development that upholds the market logic. 4.3.2  Participation as Neoliberal Tool The 1980s marked the entry of participation in development communication, with participatory processes serving as methods for strategizing and implementing development programs, incorporated into the strategic frameworks of the IFIs (Mansuri & Rao, 2012; Tufte & Mefalopulos, 2009). Even as the World Bank was formulating and imposing SAPs on

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nation states of the global South, utilizing the strategy of connecting financial assistance to free market promoting interventions, participatory communication strategies emerged as the key tools in the interventions promoted by the Bank (Dutta & Rastogi, 2016). Participation, as a neoliberal tool on one hand, privatized public resources, placing ownership in the hands of communities as privatizing initiatives directly targeted at weakening the state, and on the other hand emerged as a tool for co-­ opting community agency. Participatory processes are constituted within the ambits of projects defined by funders. Consider, for instance, the following depiction of the participatory process offered by Mansuri and Rao: Say a project wants to improve the collective management of a forest by setting up a community-managed fund that provides financial incentives for individuals to cooperate by compensating them for income lost by limiting their harvest. The fund would be far more effective if a traditional leader was present who was in complete agreement with the aims of the project, was considered honest and beyond reproach, and had the authority to enforce agreements made between individuals and the fund. The fund would also be more likely to succeed if the community had evolved a method by which promises were rendered credible because each individual believed the promises made by every other individual, based on long-term ties and a strong belief that violating promises would result in ostracism from the community. Ideally, the fund would introduce enough additional incentives within this favorable cooperative environment to sustain cooperation during periods of change and vulnerability. In the absence of an authority figure or strong long-term ties within the community, the fund would degenerate into a haven for rent-seekers, creating a failure. (pp. 65–66)

Note the terms of participation defined in the project, constituted within the overarching logics of the donor agency. The Bank, as a donor of a project on collective management of a forest sets up the objectives and boundaries of the project operationalized as forest management. Participation thus is situated within the narrow confines of management, and measured in terms of its effectiveness. Similarly, the collection of projects offered as examples in the collection assembled by Mansuri and Rao work within pre-determined objectives, structures, evaluation tools, and structures of management. Moreover, worth noting is the limits imposed on participation. As a managerial tool set within the confines of the WB, participation does not seek structural transformation or radical change, but is confined to the overarching contours of a project to be managed.

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The overarching ideology of the participatory framework discussed in the ambits of the Bank within the capitalist project becomes evident in the Bank documents describing the participatory processes in spaces such as Indonesia, where radical sites of participation have been systematically erased through state-sponsored genocide. Here’s Mansuri and Rao: In the past decade, with the rise of a robust democratic order and a concerted effort to decentralize the political and fiscal authority of state and district governments, the authority of village leaders in Indonesia has been increasingly questioned. But, as recent survey data demonstrate, the spirit of gotong royong has by no means disappeared. It has been so deeply institutionalized that not abiding by it is seen as a violation of a communitarian ethic, which remains part of the foundation of what it means to be a good Indonesian. A 2004 survey of the Second Urban Poverty Project evaluation shows that levels of participation in public goods construction remain high, at 47 percent, with 59 percent of those respondents saying they participate primarily because of “tradition” or “obligation.” This high level of participation has real consequences: communities in Indonesia contribute 37 percent of the cost of village public goods. Indonesia has thus successfully introduced a communitarian ideology that facilitates the spirit of cooperation at the local level, improving the capacity for collective action. (p. 72)

4.3.2.1 Colonialism and Participation Cooke (2004a, 2004b) offers a critical history of community participation, noting the roots of participatory processes in colonial management and administration. The formation of action research is traced back to the work of John Collier with the Bureau of (US) Indian Affairs, directly drawn from the British colonial strategies of indirect rule, which incorporated certain basic forms of autonomy to colonized communities as a strategy for maintaining the power and control of colonial rule (Cooke, 2003a, 2003b, 2004a). The turn to community-based participatory research is constituted within the overarching neoliberal transformation of communities amid the privatization of public resources, with communities being operationalized as individualized sites for delivering solutions constituted within the overarching logics of the market. Cooke (2004a, 2004b) suggests that many of the contemporary forms of workplace and community participation have their roots in managerial Organizational Development (OD) strategy, the goal of which is to co-opt worker resistance by incorporating workers into organizations as partici-

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pants in their self-management, changing worker attitudes to ensure they take responsibility for their own management, and ultimately working to serve organizational hegemony. The interconnected threads between OD and participatory action research depict the ways in which the management of participation, constituted within the dominant structures of development agencies, incorporates interpersonal relations, group dynamics, and empowerment to serve the goals of development agencies (Cooke, 1998). Particularly salient in the analysis offered by Cooke is the role of participatory processes in planned ideological change, working to bring about change through the very processes of participation. Participation is mobilized to unfreeze existing attitudes, to move these attitudes, and to refreeze them, just bringing about change as planned by the change agent. Noting this co-optive role of participation, Cooke (1998) observes: Like other technologies, participatory processes are never value free or neutral in their application, but also not necessarily value or interest specific. That is, these technologies can be used to promote values or interests other than those for which they were invented. Thus, from a radical perspective, participatory processes may still be necessary, but they are no longer sufficient in themselves to identify what is happening as radical. Participatory interventionists, whether they currently see themselves as managerial, radical or both, would consequently have to be prepared to recognize themselves as essentially technocratic, and the use of the vocabulary of empowerment as potentially deceptive, and even self-deceptive. (p. 10)

Empowerment thus historically has entered into participatory management change interventions as a top-down tool to meet the pre-defined objectives of the change agents, removed from the overarching socio-­ cultural contexts, and incorporated into the ideological agendas of those paying for the change process. Devoid of their radical possibilities for transforming structures by being driven toward interrogating and disrupting them, participatory processes have very much served as tools for achieving the goals of the planners of social change. The thread of participation as a management tool becomes evident in various forms of participation including participatory action research, participatory rural appraisal, and community-based participatory research. For most of these participatory projects, participation is designed as a tool for promoting individual-level change, with the terminology of empowerment being deployed to promote self-help tools for individual

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ownership of individual behaviors. These behaviors are often pre-­ determined by the donors, with specific objectives being mapped out for individual-level change to be incorporated through the participation of individuals in the change process as empowered consumers. Culture works hand-in-hand with participation, with cultural sensitivity incorporated into participatory programs, the participatory design supporting the cultural sensitization of behavior change interventions (Dutta, 2007). 4.3.2.2 Participation as Self-Help This framing of participation and empowerment as instruments for hegemonic control emerge as key elements in the neoliberal transformation of the IFIs. Participatory communication interventions developed in the ambits of the Bank were embedded within the broader ideology of self-­ help, and were deployed as strategies for directly attacking the state, state-­ driven planning models, and state-run public welfare programs. For the WB proponents of participatory development, building community-based participatory programs emerged as strategies for incorporating communities and securing community buy-in into Bank-driven projects (Mansuri & Rao, 2012; Tufte & Mefalopulos, 2009). The conceptualization of participation as a mechanism for incorporating the individualized consumer into the tools of the market translated into individualized projects that flexibly reproduced notion of empowerment. In an analysis of the poverty reduction strategy papers (PRSPs) circulated by the IMF and WB as new hegemonic structures of global development, Dutta and Rastogi (2016) attend to the ways in which these strategy papers reproduce the neoliberal notions of development, albeit formulated as participation: Participation, therefore, is linked with particularly top-down expectations, the civil society and people of the client country are conceived to participate only in ways that further the legitimacy of the prescriptions of the Bank. The objective, nature and structure of participation are formulated within the free market logic accepted as universal knowledge by the Bank. Rather than creating opportunities for voices of local communities to be heard and to be recognized in processes of knowledge production (Dutta, 2015), participatory processes are constituted within the ambits of the Bank and its defining market ideology. As is evident from the thematic analysis, Beyond [document spelling out the PRS] expects the civil society of client states to participate in disseminating information about PRS performance of their governments, with the function of civil society framed within the surveillance functions of the Bank. In this manner, under the rubric of participa-

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tion, Beyond seeks to further propagate its development expertise, accepted uncritically as universal knowledge, and does not endeavour to accommodate people’s perspectives on PRS performance as a part of PRS monitoring. Rather than being driven by the articulations from the grassroots, the PRS process emerges as a structure for incorporating the grassroots within donor-driven agendas and simultaneously co-opting the grassroots as sources of data gathering. The power of the Bank is reproduced and extended through the performance of participation. (p. 223)

What is important to note here is the continuity between the SAPs pushed by the IFIs and the new version of PRSPs constructed in the language of participation. What is salient in the construction of the PRSPs is their role in catalyzing privatization and wealth extraction to serve transnational capital. The loans given out by IFIs continue to serve as strategic tools for cultivating dependence and forcing neoliberal policies, positioned through participatory processes that are controlled by the IFIs. 4.3.3  Privatizing Participation Participation thus, co-opted into the dominant frameworks of the IFIs, offered a democratic brand appeal while fundamentally turning community voices into instruments for disseminating the neoliberal ideology. In the context of development communication interventions under neoliberal restructuring of development, participatory projects build in mechanisms for seeking community inputs into development projects and utilizing community channels for the dissemination of the development agenda. E-E programs such as the ones discussed above incorporated ­listener clubs, discussion forums, and letter writing initiatives to make them participatory. Worth noting in these interventions is the reification of the top-down agenda, albeit reformulated in participatory discourses. For instance, when women in a radio listener group discuss an issue, the selection and framing of the issue is driven by the top-down agenda written into development. Elite local actors, in the form of civil society organizations (CSOs), emerged into the participatory landscape in carrying out empowerment, self-help, and micro-credit programs, funded by IFIs. The nature of participation itself is privatized, defined within the overarching ideology of transnational capitalism. Similarly, participation and community engagement are incorporated into local CSR projects carried out by TNCs, often through the very co-­ optation of participation to serve the greenwashing agendas of TNCs.

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Community participation framed as sustainability through the formation of community-based projects communicatively inverts the unsustainable practices of extractive industries that threaten the environment. Consider, for instance, Exxon Mobile’s community engagement activities that promote clean water access, paradoxically amid its extractive practices that threaten water systems and broader ecologies. Consider the following depiction of community water projects installed in Indonesia in the communities in which Exxon Mobil operates: For example, ExxonMobil’s affiliate in Indonesia, Mobil Cepu Limited (MCL), launched a community-based water program to reduce the incidence of waterborne diseases and promote healthier living in the Cepu Block area of Indonesia. During the dry season, many residents in this area lack reliable access to clean water. To help manage the program, the community established a committee responsible for managing the budget, constructing and monitoring water facilities, and handling distribution of water. One example is in the Ngasem Village, where a new water tower serves as the key source of potable water that is distributed to community households through an installed pipeline network. So far, the program has benefited more than 25,000 community members in 17 villages. (https://www.exxonmobil.com.sg/en-sg/environment/water/water-framework/engagestakeholders-in-the-development-of-sustainable-water-solutions?parentId= 85adca28-9a53-4ee9-8e7f-fe59df86ac94)

Local communities in Indonesia not only emerge as sites of resource extraction but also as sites of narrative extraction. Under the guise of community participation and community empowerment, the community is constructed as the recipient of a clean water project funded, managed, and overseen by Exxon Mobil. The framing of participatory budgeting and participatory management offer the appearance of participation, while consolidating participation in the realm of privatized consumption. The realm of participation is defined by the privatization of water served by Exxon Mobil, simultaneously communicatively inverting the threats to water systems posed by extraction. Community members, cast as recipients, are constituted within the power hierarchies of Exxon Mobil. Although the term participation forms the zeitgeist of neoliberal development interventions, with references to the radical imaginary offered by Freire, critical interrogations depict the ways in which participation emerges within the imperialist framework of development to disseminate the overarching agenda of privatization of public resources. Communities

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at the global margins in the South have very little say over the overarching processes of decision-making that are pushed on the nation states in the global South as part of the debt repayment programs funding privatized extraction, which serve as the bases for large-scale privatization, wealth consolidation, and opening up to transnational capital. Here’s Cooke (2004a): Greater impact on people’s empowerment—in terms of, say, their right to life through healthcare, water and education—is made by the decisions taken by the Bank and the IMF on debt repayment that can be made by an infinity of face-to-face participatory events which have no power over debt. And, bluntly, one of the reasons why the debt accumulated was through loans to corrupt and criminal regimes kept in power to sustain a particular world order. Loans were also made by private sector banks to private sector organizations in the Third World. When these creditors defaulted, Third World governments were forced to take the debts on. In an otherwise neo-­ liberalizing world, private sector debt is nationalized and its repayment extorted from individual, poor, taxpayers (e.g., Chossudovsky, 1997). (p. 43)

Participation is used alongside the language of capacity building to drive privatized projects of change. Paradoxically, inherent in the notion of capacity building is the portrayal of the local community in the global South as without capacity, and therefore a target of capacity building interventions. Participatory experts are then brought in to institute and build local capacities in participation, in data gathering, and in developing strategy, as a form of communicative inversion that is designed to catalyze participatory local decision-making. LaHatte’s (2015) analysis of capacity building interventions in Haiti points toward the marking of the Haitian body in deficit, as an individualized collection of traits that are inherently deficient and therefore in need of the capacity building interventions. Obfuscating the structural contexts that constitute inequalities, capacity building interventions are designed as forms of citizenship education that teach and redesign the subaltern margins into active citizenship, incorporated into participatory forums and communicative infrastructures that are pre-determined by neoliberal elites as the appropriate platforms for what “count” as participation. LaHatte (2015) notes that “positioned as a technical, apolitical solution to development’s intractable failures, capacity building is part of the broader neoliberal development agenda that has come to dominate development practice. Within this agenda, capacity building occurs through education,

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training, human resource development (HRD), and new managerialist activities all aimed to instil ‘good governance’ and ultimately increase development effectiveness” (p.  2). Funded by the hegemonic development actors from the WB, IMF to USAID and AusAID to TNCs, the infrastructure of capacity building is based on the production of deficits in the global margins, which then serve as the bases for the dissemination of technologies of participation in the form of technical assistance programs. In the backdrop of disasters, incorporated into neoliberal governmentality as crises, participation is formulated as privatized solution to the lack of basic infrastructure, absence of state-driven services and resources, and erasure of the state from spaces of disaster relief. The disaster emerges in the neoliberal landscape as a site of profiteering through technologies of disaster relief (Schuller, 2012). Describing the biodiversity projects that were set up by NGOs within the broader context of Exxon Mobil’s establishment of the Papua New Guinea Liquefied Natural Gas (PNG LNG) project, West (2016) notes: In July 2011, a few years before the gas and its revenues began to flow, an American big international nongovernmental organization (a “BINGO”) that focuses on environmental conservation visited the Eastern Highlands Province with representative from Exxon Mobil. The BINGO brought these Exxon representatives to Goroka to hold a series of meetings to discuss the administration of a proposed Biodiversity Offest Fund to be associated with the PNG LNG project. Let us return to the comments the BINGO employees made to the Exxon employees while they were sitting with five internationally graduate-trained national ecologists and two American board members of PNG IBR [a local NGO in Papua New Guinea that worked with local students to secure them opportunities for training in science and anthropology]. First, the comments centered on capacity, focusing on the idea that people in Papua New Guinea did not have the ability to manage large amounts of money, had an almost “bank-speak” tone to them, as if we were all, jointly, discussing the lack of certain forms of “development” in Papua New Guinea. Almost immediately, the one BINGO employee who had previously worked on Papua New Guinea switched to a voice of having-­ been-­there authority. He described “most people in Papua New Guinea” as living in “pre-capitalist societies,” not understanding money, and having a “cargo cult mentality.” He sets his authority by using the term “cargo cult”—a term generated and popularized by anthropologists that has become one of the most frequently used bits of rhetoric for people attempting to show the lack of modernity among people in Papua New Guinea. (pp. 67–79)

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West then goes on the depict the ways in which the active construction of Papua New Guinea society as savage or pre-modern by anthropologists, aid agencies such as AusAID, and BINGOs works to mobilize customary land, orchestrating land alienation under the premise of poverty alleviation and development, as well as alienation from natural resources and biodiversity. As communicative inversion, the portrayal of indigenous culture as corrupt and incapable of managing itself makes up the pathway for the corrupt theft of indigenous land and natural resources by transnational capital, enabled through the nexus between knowledge, development, and international civil society. Note here that the depiction of indigenous society as incapable of knowledge makes up the rationale for the expertise of the BINGO, with most of its money absorbed in global networks of managerialism, far removed from the everyday contexts of community life. The global networks of NGOs in transnational capitalism works thus to project its expertise from a distance, absorbing the money allocated to development, sustainability, and conservation to support the salaries of a managerial class. The turn to expertise amid the global acceleration of the participation industry produces and circulates an international professional-managerial class of NGO experts. Participatory processes are carried out by networks of credentialed local and international consultants, flying in and out of communities to carry out development projects dictated by the WB. McGuigan (2005) draws our attention to this industry of experts as instruments of neoliberal governmentality: Somewhere between the higher reaches of theory and the lower reaches of popular culture on the ground is the role of expertise in a neo-liberal frame. In their diatribe against neo-liberal discourse, the late Pierre Bourdieu with the aid of Loic Wacquant identified two types of expert. First, there is “the expert” proper employed in ministries, company headquarters and think tanks whose task now is to come up with technical justifications and scenarios for neoliberal policy decisions that are actually made on ideological rather than spuriously technical grounds. Second, “there is the communication consultant to the prince”, who is not only your run-of-the-mill spin-­ doctor, but a much grander type as well. The consultant may be “a defector from the academic world entered into the service of the dominant, whose mission is to give an academic veneer to the political projects of the new state and business nobility” (Bourdieu & Wacquant 2001, p. 5). Bourdieu and Wacquant’s exemplary instance of such a figure is the British sociologist, Anthony Giddens, theorist of “the Third Way” and ideologue for neo-­

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liberalism in social democratic clothing at home and abroad—Tony Blair’s own Dr Pangloss. Bourdieu and Wacquant argue that what they call “NewLiberalSpeak” is a “new planetary vulgate”. Certain words are repeated continually, such as “globalisation”, “flexibility”, “governance”, “employability”, “underclass”, “exclusion”—words that are difficult for any of us to avoid using. Other words are not so proper in polite company—indeed they are virtually unspeakable—and include: “class”, “exploitation”, “domination” and “inequality”. (p. 233)

Note in the critique offered by Bourdieu and Wacquant, and taken up by McGuigan, the role of the expert as the instrument of the capitalist project in neoliberalism. Critical here is the role of the expert as the public relations instrument of transnational capital, generating knowledge claims to promote the agendas of privatization and commoditization, cloaked in what the authors call “neoliberal-speak.” In other words, the very work of expertise as knowledge generation is integral to the public relations function for transnational capital, creating the academic veneer for projects of extraction and exploitation. The work of expertise in shifting the language also does the cultural work of erasing the sites of resistance and challenge to the status quo. Concepts such as voice and listening, incorporated into the hegemonic structures of neoliberal capitalism, are positioned as opportunities for democracy and paradoxically presented as potential avenues for challenging neoliberal formations. Consider, for instance, the construction of public relations as a structure that enables the circulation of the voices of the marginalized, offered by Edwards (2018): [P]ublic relations used for social action also has the potential to facilitate voice and, in this capacity, it can contribute to the vitality of deliberative systems. It represents a resource for voice as process, adding a strategic dimension to the use of communicative artefacts—online and offline texts, films and videos, posters, events—through which narratives can be constructed in ways that enhance their visibility. It also helps to realise voice as value when used to create ‘spaces of appearance’ for marginalised groups and prompt active, responsive listening on the part of organisations. (Edwards, 2016, p. 321)

The narration of public relations as a tool for voices of the marginalized where they can appear and be recognized obfuscates the fundamental questions of ownership, power, and structure. That public relations activi-

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ties are the fundamental tools for building neoliberal hegemony and for circulating the communicative inversions is obfuscated, instead framing public relations activities as resources for voice, positioning them on some equal opportunity landscape. The very question of the ownership and control over resources for narratives is erased in the articulation. The case study offered by Edwards of voice initiatives obfuscates the questions of broader political economy within which voice projects are carried out. The example that Edwards (2016) works through in discussions of public relations as deliberative democracy erases conversations on ownership of these communicative infrastructures. When we closely examine the funding (United Kingdom Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council) of the project Edwards reports from the site, Digital Economy ‘Communities and Culture’ Network+ (http://www.communitiesandculture.org/), the question of ownership becomes salient. The project, framed as a catalyst for digital transformations, is placed within the broader question of digital engagement. Here’s an excerpt from the abstract of the grant application: The impacts brought on by the convergence of digital technology, culture, and practice raise real questions around how and what communities and cultures might/could/should be understood. Indeed, when our everyday experiences are seen in conjunction with the industrial, social, on-the ground and policy responses to the digital economy, it is clear that digital technologies are changing forever how we understand and engage in community and culture. Despite the speed and intensity of digital transformation that has marked our lives on every level, it is vital that we do more than simply react to it if we are to understand, and shape, changes that are determining culture and community in profound ways. (Hosted at https://gow. epsrc.ukri.org/NGBOViewGrant.aspx?GrantRef=EP/K003585/1)

What is explicit in the application is the overarching narrative of convergence that brings culture, community, and technology together. The hegemony of the neoliberal order forms the taken-for-granted assumptions guiding the project, situating the digital economy amid the interplays of policy and privatization. Digital technologies are invested with the magical powers of changing communities and cultures. The engagement with communities and cultures is situated amid the taken-for-granted norms about acceleration and intensity of the digital transformation. One of the many projects funded under the umbrella of Digital Storytelling for Development foregrounds, for instance, digital storytell-

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ing skills that are taught to community members. These digital storytelling skills are then incorporated into frameworks of community engagement within the context of urban redevelopment. The nature of digital storytelling as a tool is located within the dominant agendas of engagement, with the contours of engagement constituted within the broader agenda of urban redevelopment. The community demands that emerge from the digital storytelling such as demands for parks and pathways are situated within the overarching agenda of community redevelopment; simultaneously, the project does not really explore pathways that result from these digital stories into community organizing efforts on implementation. In this sense, the digital stories as outcomes of engagement are very much located within the structure, adding to the diversity of narratives in the multicultural structure without creating structural opportunities for community members to organize and bring about transformations. The participatory processes, framed as empowerment, treat communities as sources of data to be incorporated into project narratives. The project refers to the work of the team in India working with a local NGO called VOICE gathering digital stories and creating an archive for these stories. The labor of the community contributes to the archive, and beyond that, does not demonstrate pathways for structural change (see, for instance, Frohlich et al., 2009). Similarly, Macnamara (2016) offers the concept of listening as a framework for organizational responses, positioned as an antidote to hegemonic forms of organizing. Reifying the absence of interrogation of structures that are observed in conversations on participation, the question of ownership and control over listening resources remains obfuscated from the theorization of listening. When organizational listening is offered as a transformative solution to capitalist excesses, it is worth noting that the control over such frameworks and infrastructures of listening are retained by those in power: transnational capitalist classes. Listening, in such instances, becomes both an intelligence gathering tool as well as a tool for perpetuating the organizational agenda.

4.4   Culture and Development Until the 1980s, with the emergence of postcolonial nations, the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) emerged as a site of contestation between the domains of trade and culture, with the non-aligned movement emerging as a key actor in pushing for the recog-

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nition of cultural diversity and in resisting the economic monopoly over cultural spaces exerted by imperialism. US imperialism in this context played a key role in sabotaging the anchoring of culture as pluralities. The turn toward culture in UNESCO in the 1980s, post the New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO) deployed the conceptualization of culture in the realm of economics, formalizing culture as an economic output that can be traded in global markets (Garner, 2016; Nederveen Pieterse, 2015). The UN-UNESCO World Decade for Cultural Development was launched in 1988, and culminated in the Intergovernmental Conference on Cultural Policies for Development in Stockholm in 1998. The conversations in this decade laid the foundations for the framework of cultural development that would become formalized at UNESCO. The concept of cultural diversity put forth by the UN World Commission on Culture and Development as “the right of a group of people to follow a way of life of its choice” formed the basis of the turn toward the concepts of voice, empowerment, and participation. The report Our creative diversity incorporated culture as an anchor to the conceptualization and practice of development, elucidating in depth the role of culture over ten substantive chapters in a wide range of areas from state and pluralism to gender and development to media regulation to culture and the ­environment, tourism, and heritage. The report was translated and circulated widely, forming an infrastructure of development knowledge. Note here the emphasis placed on culture as a tool for explaining development: The time had come to do for “culture and development” what had been achieved for “environment and development”. This conviction was widely shared. Just as the Brundtland Commission had so successfully served notice to the international community that a marriage of economy and ecology was overdue and had set in motion a new world agenda for that purpose, so, it was felt, the relationship between culture and development should be clarified and deepened, in practical and constructive ways. … We want [the report] to inform the world’s opinion leaders and to guide its policymakers. (UNESCO, 1995, pp. 8–10)

The organization of the report is built around the incorporation of culture as a tool to enable and perpetuate development. The report goes on to note: At one extreme of modernity, promotion of creativity is seen as essential for industrial productivity and innovation. A new kind of organization for man-

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aging creativity, known as the “entrepreneurial conglomerate”, for example, has come into being during the 1980s. … At the other end, where tradition meets modernity, a process of “hybridization” is well under way. Many Latin American Indian populations are seeking deliberately to master both modern technological knowledge and cultural resources, despite strong movements against “Westernization”. … They are combining traditional healing techniques with allopathic methods … adapting to their own ends democratic changes in the economic and political spheres, and aligning their traditional beliefs with Christian movements that generally have a more radical approach to the promotion of modernity. Many tribal communities in India have age-old technologies and practices in such diverse areas as hill-top agriculture, medicine and health care, community education and socialization. On the surface, their attitudes appear to be to be anti-modern. But a closer look reveals that through a complex process of assimilation they are absorbing and using modern technology and political systems as a path to power and betterment. Society’s ritual base is modernized to fit into and serve its political and economic ends. In this way they help, in unobtrusive and effective ways, to bring together the instrumental and constitutive roles of culture. (UNESCO, 1995, pp. 78–79)

Analyzing the report, Garner (2016) notes the reworking of the orientalist ideology into a dialogue between tradition and modernity. Culture as tradition is set in opposition to the technological advancements of modernity, equated with economic growth. The turn to culture is then offered to account for the spaces where tradition accommodates modernity. The desired forms of Westernization are accommodated through the process of hybridization. Rather than express meanings of resistance to the technologies of capitalism and growth, the sanitized forms of culture recognized as difference/tradition are accommodative of and dialogic with capital. As I have argued elsewhere, this notion of culture as cultural sensitivity offers the template for tailoring development to tradition, and in the process, strengthening its reach and effectiveness. In opposition to the NWICO articulation of culture as a site of resistance to neocolonialism, the cultural development turn sought to offer culturalist explanations for the emerging neoliberal model of development. Hemer and Tufte (2016) observed: With the focus shifting from the development state to the local community, communication became more than simply an instrument for persuasion and

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individual behaviour change; it was increasingly regarded as a process of democratization and empowerment and hence an end in itself. The monolithic model for modern development was challenged by the plurality of culture-sensitive alternative development, or dismissed altogether, as in the post-development debate mentioned above (i.e. Escobar 2012 [1995]; Rahnema & Bowtree 1997; Ferguson 1990; Illich 1991). Although top-­ down diffusion models for behavioural change prevailed, participatory communication became the new buzzword, if not the new paradigm, at the turn of the millennium. (pp. 15–16)

The cultural turn is analogous with culturally sensitive development, conceptualizing development in local cultural terms. The community is the axis through which local participation takes place to bring about development. As a monolithic entity, the community is constructed as a repository of culture, and the goal of development was driven by culture, expressed in local community participation. (Although culture, community, and participation—key concepts that are also reflected in the CCA—appear here, I will argue later the distinctness of the two approaches, with the culturally sensitive approach focused on developing solutions that keep the existing power structure intact.) On one hand, the theorization of development turned to culture as a framework for enhancing the effectiveness of development interventions, incorporating culture into the conceptualization, delivery, and evaluation of development. On the other hand, culture, conceptualized in terms of identity and captured in commoditized forms, entered the logics of neoliberal capital, now being formalized, measured, and delivered through the “culture industries as development” framework. Culture emerged as the new site of measurement, management, and control in the development framework (Cicerchia, 2016). New terminologies around culture industries, arts hubs, and heritage sites, commoditized into networks of global tourism, emerged as sites of profiteering, pursued by public-private partnerships and promoted by nation states as profitable resources. Moreover, culturalist explanations, devoid of structures, put forth concepts of culture and voice realized through neoliberal techniques of technology, market, and democracy. The radical and transformative agenda of NWICO was co-opted into the neoliberal formulation of development, treating culture as a marker of identity to be formulated into development interventions.

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4.4.1  Culturalist Explanations Culturalist explanations of social change processes portray cultural differences to locate communities in relationship with development interventions and processes (see, for instance, Nederveen Pieterse, 2001). Both earlier development theories in the modernization paradigm and the next generation frameworks of culture and development suggest cultural essences that drive understandings of and responses to development. The emphasis on cultural capacities of development takes an ethnographic approach to development, offering culturally situated explanations for the local responses to development processes. Primarily putting forth an anthropological perspective to development, culturalist explanations examine the cultural constructions of development, the cultural responses to development, and the situated meanings that recipients make of development. Through these culturalist explanations, development interventions are turned toward the ethos of community life, having been tailored to fit the needs of community life. The framework of cultural sensitivity drives development, with the role of development interventions in creating culturally tailored development interventions. Culturalist accounts, for instance, offer frameworks such as development-from-below, as explained by Tufte and Hemer (2005): “Among the main potential new agents of social change in a global context, as part of what Appadurai calls ‘grassroots globalization’ or ‘globalization from below’ (1996, 2001), are the transnational advocacy networks, or TANs, which form an increasingly important part of the NGO world that in turn plays an increasingly crucial role in international development cooperation” (p.  16). Note here the hegemony of neoliberal rationality in the cultural turn, propping up NGOs and transnational networks that serve as agents for perpetuating the free market ideology. Vulgar critiques of Marxist political economy, devoid of the interrogation of structures, serve as culturalist explanations of context and difference. Context, unhinged from its location amid structures of development, is explained through references to culture and difference, offering celebratory accounts of the market as a tool for emancipation. The dominant power structures and configurations that drive the development framework are kept intact, and at the same time culturalist logics are introduced to enhance the effectiveness of development. Similarly, descriptions of culture are offered to generate alternative narratives of both capitalism and globalization. Turning to Asian cultures, for

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instance, serves the basis for depicting Asian capitalism, drawing on narratives of Asian values and cultural practices. Culture, depicted in capitalist logics, serves as the basis for mapping pathways of modernity elsewhere. These pathways of modernity, although projected as alternatives to neoliberal globalization, converge with and assimilate into the large project of capitalism and industrialization. Consider, for instance, the following analysis offered by Nederveen Pieterse (2011): If modernity and capitalism are not singular, if there are multiple lead-ins to modernity and several forms of early capitalism, if there are diverse traditions of enlightenment too, two possibilities emerge. There are multiple paths to modernity or, in view of different histories and geographies, there are multiple modernities. The former view is uncontroversial; multilinear evolution has been the mainstream view since the 1940s. Therborn adopts this view (1995), although in later work he speaks of ‘entangled modernities’ (2003). But the case for multiple modernities and capitalisms is strong. If the lineages of modern ways (urbanism, industrialism, enlightenment) extend much further back in time than in the Eurocentric script, and are geographically wide apart and culturally diverse, and there are likewise early forms of capitalism in different regions, it is more plausible that these would generate diverse modernities and multiple capitalisms than that they would yield a single modernity and a single capitalism. (p. 158)

Note here the conceptualization of culture to offer frameworks of modernities from elsewhere, propped up as alternatives to neoliberalism. The different geographies and histories of these modernities point toward different forms of capitalism. The notion of modern ways is captured in urbanism, industrialism, and enlightenment, thus situating the notion of the modern very much within the structures of capital. In other words, modernity is synonymous with capitalism. Culture as a site for conceptualizing multiple pathways of modernity is embedded within the articulation of capital. References to culture as development draw on culture to offer examples of specific forms of capitalism that are presented in different contexts. Concepts such as “melange modernities,” “bricolage modernities,” and “hybrid modernities” are deployed to depict the cultural flows in spaces such as Southeast Asia, very much constituted within the hegemonic narrative of capitalism (Nederveen Pieterse, 2011). Culture thus emerges as a category for the depiction of the development of capitalism outside of the Eurocentric center, producing thus accounts of capitalism

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that are specifically located in diverse spaces and contexts. Culture is very much incorporated into the hegemony of capitalism, as a site for narrating multiple accounts of capitalism, drawing on references to the past to do so, and turned into an apologia for transnational capitalism. Here’s an example of the cultural modernity incorporated into the logics of capital (Hemer, 2005): If we are to address global modernity—or rather modernities in the plural— and imagine global change, I would argue that the post-colonial dimension is a necessary supplement and corrective to post-national globalization discourse. Re-focusing on modernity certainly does not imply a return to the modernization paradigm, which equated modernization and westernization. Cultural globalization in the sense proposed here could rather be defined as the de-westernization of modernity, what Chakrabarty means by provincializing Europe—that is, the task of exploring how European thought, which is now everybody’s heritage and affects the whole world, may be renewed from and for the margins (2000, 16). I further suggest that the arts may be the common ground where these different yet perfectly compatible discourses can best communicate. As demonstrated by the ­evidence of post-colonial literature, global modernity took on a plural form in art before being articulated in theory. (pp. 61–62)

Culture as a supplement to globalization discourse keeps the materiality of neoliberal capitalism intact, only strengthening it by expanding its explanatory range through the incorporation of culture. Cultural globalization is conceptualized as a way for reconfiguring frameworks for establishing the hegemony of European thought from the margins. For Hemer, Europe is now everywhere (taken as a given), and the question of culture now helps explain how this European heritage that is now universal, as everybody’s heritage, may be “renewed from and for the margins.” This fundamental communicative inversion reaches out to culture as a conceptual tool to further the colonizing agenda of European hegemony. 4.4.2  Culture and Authoritarianism This form of referencing the past to account for contextually rooted accounts of capitalism emerges as a thread in multiple Asian authoritarianisms, where references to the past as an anchor to cultural differences serve as the basis for various forms of authoritarian control while simultaneously enabling capitalist extraction. More recently, in the articulations of the

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Hindutva right, the references to and mapping of Indian trade routes in Southeast Asia emerge as the basis for putting forth neoliberal policies ushering in privatization and the free market, decked up in culturalist narratives (see, for instance, Routray, 2016). References to a capitalist and open Indian past with free trade routes offer a cultural narrative of Hindu capitalism, suggesting that free trade was part of the Indian (read Hindu) cultural character until it was disrupted by Islamic invasions and later socialist interventions in a newly independent India (see, for instance, Sanyal, 2008). To be in touch with the soul of India then is to “return to” free market capitalism. Even as unsophisticated culturalist explanations prop up capitalist solutions as alternatives to neoliberalism, articulations of resistance to the neoliberal model are dismissed. In an article titled, “Globalization North and South,” here’s Nederveen Pieterse (2000a, 2000b): Globalization evokes much anger and anxiety in the South and tends to be experienced as yet another round of northern hegemony, another round of concentration of power and wealth. The common metaphor for ­globalization in the South, in the slipstream of 200 years of weary experience, is imperialism or neo-colonialism revisited. Analytically, this is mistaken: imperialism was territorial, state driven, centrally orchestrated, and marked by a clear division between colonizer and colonized; and none of these features apply to contemporary globalization. Contemporary accelerated globalization is multidimensional, non-territorial, polycentric, and the lines of inclusion/ exclusion are blurred and run between middle classes and the poor North and South. Imperialism was multidimensional but ultimately driven by a single-minded intentionality. Unlike imperialism, globalization involves multiple intentionalities and criss-crossing projects on the part of many agents. (p. 132)

What is dismissed as mistaken critique of imperialism is the resistance across the global South to the neocolonial project. The unfounded and conceptually superficial reference to globalization obfuscates the political and economic forces of neoliberalism embedded in transnational capital, and driven by the neocolonial forces that shape the agendas of the development agencies, foundations, and IFIs. The multidimensional, non-­ territorial, and polycentric globalization that Nederveen Pieterse refers to is very much embedded within the territorial powers of the neocolonial nation states that shape the landscape of contemporary geopolitics. That the US and increasingly, China continue to carry out imperial policies that

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force free market principles on Third World nations and continue to create new sites of displacement and dependence is erased in the celebratory articulation offered here. While indeed the politics of neoimperialism being carried out by China in Africa as well as along the Silk Road offers an additional site of imperial extraction beyond the neocolonial role of the US, both Chinese and US geopolitics in the global South are shaped by imperial desires and in turn are constituted within the profiteering agendas of transnational capital. The call issued by Nederveen Pieterse is therefore a cultural call, noting the absence of experiences from the South in social science discourses of the North, to be addressed by inclusion of stories of cultural capital from the South. Having declared the death of localism and alternative futures grounded in the local and castigating these in the realm of conspiracy theories, he notes: The world of the 1970s is no more. Then the momentum of decolonization was still in motion, the Nonaligned Movement was strong; the Eastern bloc provided a counterbalance and global alternative scenarios such as the New International Economic Order seemed to make sense. In the 1990s none of these conditions prevail. During the last 20  years globalization has coincided with a new period of hegemony of finance capital, in the wake of the recycling of petro-dollars and the ensuing debt crisis, resembling in some respects the turn-of-the-century epoch of Hilferding’s finance capital. Open space is shrinking. De-linking as an option was overtaken by the new international division of labour in the 1970s and localism or building alternative enclaves has little future in the 1990s. This is why the ‘new protectionism’ is a loser strategy. Countervailing power now is located in the diffuse realm of ‘global civil society’, of civic organizations and NGOs, local and international. … An alternative explanatory framework may run as follows. Our is not a world of simple modernity or simple capitalism that exists in varieties of more or less, further or earlier, differentiated along a single-track path … There is recognition of multiple ‘cultures of capitalism’ even among advanced industrial countries. There are different modes of regulation among different forms of national capitalism varying according to historical antecedents and cultures of capitalism—statist in European continent, Manchester liberalism in Britain, free enterprise in pioneer America, statist in Japan. (pp. 132–135)

The triumph of capitalism marks the story of global geopolitics where the alternatives are narrated as alternative capitalisms, erasing from the discur-

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sive space multiple empirical examples of resistance to capitalism that exist in the global South at the time of the writing of the article (from the Zapatista movement to the La Via Campesina movement). The pronouncements of the death of Third World movements such as the decolonizing movements of decolonization embodied in the non-aligned movement serves as the basis of culturalist arguments of capitalist difference, very much embedded within the triumphalist narrative of neoliberalism. Nederveen Pieterse conveniently ignores the various movements of localism and de-linking embodied in collective struggles of communities in the global South and South in the North (such as the World Social Forum), expunged and displaced from their sources of livelihood. The caricature of the movements of de-linking obfuscates the powerful global linkages and networks built by de-linking movements that offer empirical examples of alternative economic organizing. Culture is offered as a category for explanatory difference that serves capital, offering multiple examples of forms of capital. The little future for de-linking movements, proposed in what appears to be a propaganda for capital declaring its uncontested hegemony, fails to anticipate the strong resurgence of the local, of socialist alternatives, and of localized movements that seek to hold financial capital accountable across the globe. In setting up the case for cultural modernities as alternative capitalisms, Nederveen Pieterse relies on examples of the newly industrialized economies (NIEs), or the Tiger Economies, ignoring the theoretical arguments and empirical evidence that point to these NIEs being strongly shaped by neoliberal models, and aggressively pushing neoliberalism through state-driven authoritarian control. Similarly, examples of China, the Silk Road, and the Asian Development Bank as alternative forms of development punctuated in the language of capitalism obfuscate the influence and flow of neoliberal policies within these structures. 4.4.3  Culture as Sustainable Development The move toward culture signaled the development industry’s incorporation of sustainability, in the backdrop of the increasing threats of climate change and global social movements against climate change (Wiktor-­ Mach, 2018). Culture entered into development as a measurable site for generating growth, particularly amid the financial crisis. Cultural measurement and investment thus turned to extracting characteristics of culture in

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reductionist frameworks, to be deployed toward generating profits. Cultural development offered a metric for measuring culture’s contribution to economic growth. Simultaneously, the emerging discourse of climate change in global development networks positioned sustainability as the new buzzword of development, as the precursor to the turn to sustainable development goals. As sustainability emerged as a theme for development in emerging conversations that started attending to the relationship between development programs and ecosystems, culture became a key resource in mapping out sustainable development, and in linking the new managerial logics of development with the top-down objectives of sustainability. Measurable forms of culture are connected to measurable indices of sustainability, constituted within the overarching logics of privatization and capitalist solutions (Isar, 2017). Drawing on the definition of sustainability from the World Commission of Environment and Development, Servaes defined sustainable development as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (p. 5). Under the umbrella of sustainable development, Servaes draws our attention to a wide range of development issues including food security, rural livelihoods and management, natural resource management, poverty reduction, equity and gender, and information and communication technologies (ICTs). In an extensive review of what Servaes and Lie (2013) describe as sustainable social change communication, an overview is offered of the dominant, dependency and underdevelopment, globalization and localization, culture and multiplicity, and participatory communication approaches. Lie and Servaes (2015) point toward the notion of sustainability in social change communication to put forth a framework that connects local practices with development, integrating political-­ economic and socio-cultural frameworks. The framework of locally based development as sustainability is integrated with a conceptual articulation of resilience and community ownership in the backdrop of environmental changes. Narratives of local community participation and community engagement are incorporated into digital cultural products storying sustainable CSR programs run by the major energy TNCs. Creative digital productions, produced from creative digital hubs such as Singapore, communicatively invert the climate-threatening, ecosystem-disrupting practices of TNCs through corporate CSR stories packaged as digital documentaries placed on social media, circulating propaganda that positions extractive TNCs as sustainable corporations.

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The articulation of culture as key to sustainable development underscores the role of culture as a tool that enables development (Wiktor-­ Mach, 2018). Rather than interrogating the organizing logics of neoliberalism that accelerated processes of resource extraction, production, and exchange in the last four decades, posing unprecedented threats to the environment at an increasing pace, the sustainability conversation in development discourse keeps intact the hegemonic power formations by foregrounding culture as the solution to development (Rayman-Bacchus & Radavoi, 2019). In the backdrop of widespread threats to the environment and global climate brought about by the unregulated growth of capitalism (Liverman, 2009), dominant structures in the mainstream started articulating a new narrative of sustainability, reflected in the UN’s SDGs (Baur & Schmitz, 2012; Servaes, 2015). The transformation from the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) to the SGDs reflects the emerging acknowledgment within the dominant development paradigm of issues of sustenance and human-nature relationships, albeit constituted within the ambits of the market. The emergence of sustainability in the dominant discourse marks a turn in the agendas of dominant institutions toward questions of inequality, poverty, climate change, environmental pollution, the effects of the accelerated systems of neoliberal wealth consolidation (Dutta, 2015). That the World Economic Forum (WEF) as the mecca of the transnational capitalist class positions itself as the driver of the conversations on challenges of sustainability speaks to the uses of the term and its overarching logic within the neoliberal paradigm. In summary, this turn toward sustainability emerging from global sites of power and control such as the World Economic Forum, the World Bank, and other IFIs, very much keeps intact the status quo, consolidating power in the hands of the elite while simultaneously framing sustainability as a business response to the changes in the broader environment. The interest therefore in these mainstream accounts of sustainability is to deploy images of green branding and green performance to drive new business, create new markets, and continue the ongoing attacks on the environment and on people through unsustainable business practices, albeit framed now as cultural response through participation. Global consulting companies, positioning themselves as knowledge producers in transnational economies, generate prescriptive solutions about sustainability, always with an eye toward working through sustainability to generate profits. This turn toward sustainability is evident across neoliberal univer-

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sities and the academic rankings market as well, as capitalist knowledge organizations such as the Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) rankings incorporate sustainable development goals as metrics for measuring impact. The capitalist structure underlying these new rankings of impact is evident in the partnerships with the capitalist publishing organization Elsevier and Vertigo Ventures, a capitalist organization that consults with increasingly privatized universities on rankings. The identification, gathering, and reporting of impact data is then incorporated into neoliberal decisionmaking structures, connecting the measures of impact to privatized strategies for reproducing knowledge. The turn toward SDGs in the universities thus is constituted within the ambits of transnational private capital, with data being gathered by capitalist organizations. Worth noting in this new game of impact is the absence of academics and community practitioners from the discursive space. Moreover, the power to define the discursive objectives and discursive terrains is retained in the hands of dominant state-civil society-­transnational capitalist actors. In the new narrative of SDGs, sustainability as cultural practice serves as an anchor for guiding capitalist production, projecting images of environmental consciousness and environmentally accountable practices to enable corporate profiteering, branded as “green economy” and paradoxically tied to the paradigm of growth while at the same time reproducing the inequalities in global divisions of labor (Lamphere & Shefner, 2015; Liverman, 2009). NGOs emerge in these discursive sites as collaborators of/with transnational capital, participating in greenwashing corporate practices through corporate-funded projects (Munshi & Kurian, 2005, 2015). States, reshaped in the neoliberal narratives of economic growth, deploy culturally sensitive strategies to disseminate the top-down model of development, albeit constituted in the ambits of enabling the privatization of resources and the creation of new markets for transnational capital. Culture is treated as identity in this body of work, situated in relationship to globalization processes, but not articulated in relationship to the political-economic framework of neoliberalism or to the local-global structures of organizing that are the sites of disenfranchisement globally. For instance, in the book, Media and Glocal Change: Rethinking Communication for Development edited by Hemer and Tufte (2005a, 2005b), scholars theorizing culture and social change conceptualize culture as “‘identity’–national, religious or ethnic” (p.  17), devoid of the structures of neoliberal flows and transformations of local communities

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amid top-­ down, expert-led, political-economic transformations. Glocalization, drawing upon the concept offered by Robertson (1992), is offered as a framework for examining the ways in which the global frames the local, and connected to the theorization and practice of social change communication. Concepts of intercultural dialog and understanding offered in the edited volume are largely constituted within the dominant understanding of development, albeit recrafted to incorporate critiques of neoliberalism. Culture, for instance, is incorporated into the domain of technology, seen as finding opportunities of expression mediatized through technology, thus ironically creating new logics for market penetration, albeit framed as dialog and understanding.

4.5   Extracting Culture Culture, as a resource, is extracted from its everyday forms, and is incorporated into the circuits of capital through instruments of marketing and persuasion. Cultural symbols form the foundations of networks of capital, circulating images of commodities that are attached to culture. Much like the extractive industries in raw minerals, the strategic and systematic removal of culture from its spaces of everyday life and its incorporation into the logics of capital enable the generations of profits. Cultural practices and forms, lifted from their everyday sources of livelihood, are incorporated into the logics of capitalism, presented as modernization. The turning of culture into a brand, a relic of modernization, circulated through the modernizing tools of advertising and public relations, enables the generation of profits. Even as culture is removed from its everyday sites, communities at the margins struggle with living their everyday cultures. In this sense, neoliberal development works through the deployment of culture as a profitable resource. McGuigan (2005) draws on Rifkin to note (p. 234): “Marketing is the means by which the whole of the cultural commons is mined for valuable potential cultural meanings that can be transformed by the arts into commodifiable experiences, purchasable in the economy.” Further on, he observes: “The culture, like nature, can be mined to exhaustion”. (Rifkin, 2000, p. 247)

These cultural meanings extracted from their everyday contexts become the basis for generating economic opportunities. The turn toward measur-

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ing cultural practices, cultural resources, and cultural heritages, working within the neoliberal structures of global capital, colonize culture as a relic, a branding tool to be transacted in the global free market. For instance, the global emergence of local crafts and textiles as sites of transnational circulation is also tied to the extreme exploitation of weavers in rural communities who struggle to maintain their livelihoods. Worth noting, for instance, is the incorporation of Indian cultural works by the Hindutva forces into the global narrative of India and into the sites of profiteering, even as indigenous communities and cultures in India struggle with their livelihoods amid the large-scale land grab. Indigenous art and culture emerge as relics on conversations on cultures even as indigenous communities struggle to live in their homes in the forests, expelled from these spaces by development, urbanization, and mining projects. The paradox in the recognition of cultural practices as resources by UNESCO often lies precisely in the neoliberal policies within which such practices of recognition are constituted, catalyzing the large-scale land grab and development projects that fundamentally threaten and erase indigenous cultures. The principles of cultural extraction are formalized and adopted within the hegemonic circuits of cultural studies. This is evident in the emergence of concepts of branding, strategizing, marketing, and measurement as the guiding anchors into a certain dominant section of cultural studies, formalized in the form of cultural policy, cultural governance, and cultural politics. Consider, for instance, The Cultures and Globalization Series with Arjun Appadurai, Craig Calhoun, Mike Featherstone, Achille Mbembe, Stuart Hall, and Anthony Giddens among its celebrity advisory board. The fifth book in the series is titled Cities, Cultural Policy, and Governance, with the following introduction by the editors Anheier and Isar (2012): We also observe a resurgence of the metropolis, where the local, national, regional and global crystallize (Sassen, 1994). It is in this sense as well that, along with Scott (2008a, 2008b) and other students of urban geography, we suggest that we live in a new metropolitan age: the world is undergoing massive urbanization; the number of megacities is increasing, particularly in the Global South, and well-established cities such as London and New York have experienced a renaissance of a kind few would have expected even as recently as in the 1980s. That these cities, along with others, such as Shanghai, Singapore, or Sydney, have become ‘global’ players hardly seems

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surprising. What does stand out, however, is that these cities and others, such as Cairo, Lagos, Mexico City or Mumbai, have gained considerable influence and stature in cultural terms. They appear to have seized the opportunities offered by a globalized world better than the countries in which they are located. What is more, they appear better managed than their nation-states and seem to function more efficiently, even when their nation states are unstable and have serious governance deficits. They are also become significant actors in terms of culture. (pp. 1–2)

The imaginary of the neoliberal city offered here works precisely on the incorporation of culture into the city. The resurgence of the city as a hub of global capital, directly networked into the flows of global capital, is tied to the cultural power and influence of the city. The celebratory narrative of culture in the city appeals to the managerial techniques, efficiency, and networked character of the cities, juxtaposed in the backdrop of what are set up to be nation states that are unstable and with serious governance deficits. Note here the depiction of the state as backward and full of ­deficits, reproducing the neoliberal narrative of governance that circulates the tools and language of audit and efficiency, while culture is located in the city networked with capital. Although the introduction makes a passing reference to the inequalities and uneven patterns, these are subsumed within the broader narrative of globalization as a marker of modernity that plays out in the city in the form of immigration, cultural hybridization, multinational corporations, international NGOs (INGOs), and flexibility. Culture is extracted into a commodity that circulates in global networks of capital through the nodes of globalized cities. The extraction of culture into instruments of profiteering is reflected in the chapter on city branding by Kong (2012): City branding, as defined by marketing experts, is a strategy of identifying valuable assets that a city has to offer, developing these assets and delivering their value to attract investors, visitors and talent (van Gelder and Allan 2006). Creating favourable images of a city is a powerful factor in being able to appeal to and draw target groups. However, merely cultivating and conveying positive images of a city is not enough in city branding. A brand also implies ‘a promise which must be kept if customers are to be satisfied…’ (Henderson 2007: 263), thus emphasizing that a city brand must also deliver the value it promises and fulfil the expectations of its target audiences. City branding is often carried out to raise the city’s profile as a tourist destination or favoured place for business or residence, ultimately resulting

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in economic gains for the city (Mommaas 2012). It has also been used as a tool for regeneration and countering negative images in cities that have suffered a crisis, such as New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina (Gotham, 2017), or New York after September 11 (Greenberg 2008, pp. 87–88).

Culture, extracted into brand identity, reduces cities as spaces into commoditized objects that lend themselves to flows in the global networks of capital. Devoid of theoretical engagement with the question of culture, cultural characteristics are superficially incorporated into categories that can be transacted in the circuits of global capital. Vacuous claims of culture, turned into images of the city, are placed within circuits of capital, incorporated into techniques of audience segmentation, audience targeting, and cultivation. Key to the extractive nature of city branding is the economic appeal of the brand, as a resource for generating profits. The emptiness of the neoliberal framework put forth here in capturing a city’s culture and promoting it becomes powerfully evident in the depiction of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, with city branding serving to ­generate profit post-crisis. Hurricane Katrina as crisis emerges as an opportunity for city branding, which forms the basis of the large-scale neoliberal transformation of the city, taking advantage of the crisis to extract new sites of profiteering. Culture thus serves the neoliberal opportunism of post-crisis urban regeneration, creating new markets for capitalist profiteering. 4.5.1  Cultural Measurement The measurement of culture is a key anchor to the development industry, formulated under UNESCO initiatives of culture as economic development (Cicerchia, 2016; MacDowall, Badham, Blomkamp, & Dunphy, 2015). Measuring culture enables culture to be commoditized and incorporated into the circuits of profiteering. Culture, defined as “cultural capital,” is formulated within the overarching logics and flows of capital, as a driver of profits through exchange in the marketplace (Rifkin, 2000). Cultural indicators that are thus developed, through the leadership of UNESCO, are constituted in the realm of opportunities for capitalist extraction offered by them, making culture count so it can generate profit. This turn toward culture as a commodity to be exchanged and to be the driver of profit is a paradigm shift from the articulation of the NWICO as a space for resisting the onslaught of capital.

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Consider, for instance, Mercer’s (2005) definition of culture as ecology that is often drawn upon in articulations of cultural measurement: In many areas of both the developed and the developing worlds the subsidised and community sectors are absolutely crucial to the health of the commercial sector and the latter, in turn, feeds back resources to the former. Film, broadcast television, theatre, publishing and the music industry are all crucially reliant on the creative talent pools generated by the community sector for example. Collecting and heritage institutions are also increasingly reliant on the subsidised, independent and community sectors for inputs of expertise to ‘add value’ (in much more than the purely commercial sense) to their own work. This is the delicate nature of the cultural ecology, which, like all ecologies, requires an appropriate strategy for research, evaluation, intervention and management. (p. 5)

The language of ecology is invoked to offer a monolithic and homogeneous depiction of culture in the realm of the economy. Culture, depicted in the language of the cultural sector, is tied to the commercial sector, with the notion of culture as a category being implicitly tied to profit and the health of the profit-making industries. The community sector is defined within the context of and in relationship to the commercial sector. The analogy of culture and ecology is invoked to incorporate culture as a site to be surveilled, measured, mapped, and managed. The goals of research and evaluation in this sense are constituted within the larger agenda of managing culture, locating it within an instrumental logic. Cultural capital offers its promise of profits through the colonization of the lifeworld. McGuigan (2005) notes: “The goal of cultural capitalism is to commodify human relationships tout court, catching them young, cultivating and servicing their every need, deploying something called R (relationship) technologies” (p. 234). This operationalization of culture as a commodity is further evident in the following depiction of culture as value incorporated into the value production chain by Mercer (2005): Value Production Chain Analysis enables the identification of strengths and weaknesses at every stage of product and service—and value—development from the moment of conception or creation through the production process, marketing and distribution to the moment of demand and consumption. It assesses strengths and weaknesses, that is, from ‘’supply-side’ to ‘demand side’ and provides a diagnostic framework for policy and interven-

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tion as appropriate. It is, in principle, as attentive to the enabling conditions for actual creativity and production in the cultural field (the supply side— including infrastructure, training, funding) as it is to the opportunities for participation and consumption of cultural products and experiences (the demand side). For purposes of evaluation and indication for policy and planning the value production chain also provides the basis for an analysis of the input-throughput-output process for performance assessment. (p. 6)

The process of cultural creation is constituted within a hegemonic framework of capital, paradoxically in a narrative that discusses contextual difference and variability. This parochial framing of culture within the managerial logics of the market turns it into the object of strength and weakness analysis, with the mapping of demand and supply. Participation is depicted as incorporation into the logics of the market, through the consumption of cultural products. Whereas on one hand this hegemonic framework of cultural capital co-opts culture into the overarching logics of the market as an instrument of “economic vitality and diversity” (pp. 8–9), on the other hand it colonizes the lifeworlds of cultural participation that actively resist and de-link from these colonizing logics of culture as capital. The operationalization and measurement of culture drives the market-­ based logics and policies driven by nation states, developing cultural industries incorporated into plans for attracting and promoting global capital (McGuigan, 2004, 2005, 2016). This is reflected in the turn to accommodating neoliberalism evident in the UNESCO document published in 1996, Our creative diversity. The neoliberal colonization of culture framed both creativity and diversity in the overarching principles of privatization and market orientation. The measurement of culture is intertwined with the development of a strategic framework for cultural strategy and management. Strategic plans for cultural development are put forth through the reduction of culture into hegemonic metrics which can then be turned toward achieving development metrics. The drive toward cultural indicators therefore is constituted in an underlying economic logic that colonizes the conceptualization, practices, and everyday habits of culture. This colonization of cultural lifeworlds is accompanied by the large-­ scale adoption of audit systems propelled by neoliberal logics, anchored in deep suspicions of public resources and bureaucracies organizing these public resources. Culture now can be measured, cultural processes can be audited, and cost-benefit analyses can be carried out through public-­ private partnerships, with large transnational private knowledge sectors

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specializing in measurement, audit, and evaluation. The drive toward measurement in order to generate evidence becomes the neocolonial instrument for on one hand scripting cultural practices, and on the other hand, erasing and excluding a wide array of practices that don’t lend themselves to the techniques and technologies of measurement. The formalization of culture thus into the economic rationality pushes culture out of the domain of everyday practices of negotiations of competing articulations to a homogeneous entity measured on the basis of indicators selected by those within the dominant structure. In other words, the turn to cultural studies of development paradoxically is a turn toward the commodification of culture, constituted within the overarching organizing framework of neoliberal governance, and simultaneously separated from the everyday practices of negotiations, interrogations, disruptions, and change. This incorporation of culture into the politics of neoliberal management is powerfully evident in the UK labor government’s turn to neoliberalism with the “third way,” deploying the language of evidence-­ based policy to privatize public resources and lifeworlds. Cultural ­measurement, management, and evaluation emerged in the British Labor Party’s modernization agenda, incorporated into the logics of capitalism. 4.5.2  Creative Cities and Neoliberalism Richard Florida’s “creative class” offers a category that has been widely adopted by cities as a recipe and a strategic framework for neoliberal management. Culture tied to creativity in development forms a new site of capitalist development, forming the basis of strategic frameworks embedded in the logics of generating profits. Cities identified as creative spaces are reorganized into neoliberal tools, with spaces privatized into sites of creative profiteering. For a wide range of urban regeneration, urban planning, and urban development projects, the marking of urban spaces as the creative city forms the basis of strategies of displacement, incorporation, and zoning. Essential to these strategies of creative city formation and restructuring are the strategically planned erasure, evacuation, and displacement of the poor from their spaces of livelihood. McGuigan (2005) notes: The connections between “market-oriented economic growth” and the development of conditions favourable to “elite consumption practices” in de-industrialised cities are especially significant from the point of view of

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cultural policy. Civic boosterism, toy town architecture, “postmodern” festival and spectacle, generally, are very congenial to the professional-­ managerial class (Harvey 1989). It is interesting to note how this very process has recently been stated explicitly as a “novel” policy recommendation for city governments in Richard Florida’s (2002) managerialist new class thesis—“the rise of the creative class” as the motor for urban development and growth. In spite of his guru status, however, it may be argued that Florida is merely advocating what has been going on anyway in comparatively successful places like Wellington, New Zealand (Volkerling 2004), not least, it should be added, with regard to the movie business. (p. 231)

The co-option of cities as sites of profiteering is integral to the creative cities framework proposed by UNESCO, turning cultural practices into commodities to be exchanged in the global free market (McGuigan, 2005). Boosting the image of cities as sites of cultural production, projects of urban regeneration, and cultural sites of seducing the middle and upwardly mobile managerial-professional classes. The framing of cities as the natural sites of creativity serves the neoliberal agenda of positioning creativity as a strategic tool for profiteering, tied to global economic production, financialization, and transnational capital flows. Creativity emerges as an anchor to branding cities in global flows of capital, positioning them as sites of profiteering (see, for instance, Kong & O’Connor, 2009, for discussion of the creative city as an example). Cities as sites of creativity are pitched as attractive destinations for the flows of global capital, incorporating the projection of cosmopolitan culture into profit networks. Proponents of creative cities construct creativity in the disciplinary image of the market (see, for instance, Kong, 2000, 2009, 2012). In Kong’s discussion of Singapore as a creative city, drawing out the state’s economic planning into the creative clusters in the city, the repression of art and resistive creative practices is erased. Singapore, imagined as an exemplar of an Asian creative city, is creativity devoid of resistance and dissent, carefully manipulated into high-end market-based appeals of a cosmopolitan audience. Creativity, constructed in the realm of cities, is parochially tied to the reproduction of creative processes and products as instruments of profit-­ making, formulated as the creative industries and tied to their exchange values. The framing of culture within the ambits of the creative cities structure monolithically defines the parameters of culture within the agendas of the status quo, and formulates culture in profitable terms that

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reproduce the status quo. The definition of cultural industries as the basis for profiteering guides the strategies and tactics of creative cities management, with managerial objective-making, strategy, tactics, and evaluation tied to profiting out of culture. The urbanization of culture and positioning of cultural products in urban spaces is integral to the brand positioning of cities as investment destinations, tourist attractions, financial hubs, and cosmopolitan headquarters for transnational capital. 4.5.3  Culture and Post-Ideology The ascendance in Communication scholarship of Cultural Studies between the 1970s and the 1990s accompanied the rapid proliferation of the neoliberal ideology, from the coerced neoliberal revolution in Chile to the neoliberal experiments being adopted across Asia to the neoliberal turn in the Pacific to the deployment of invasions to install the neoliberal project, such as in the case of Iraq. The rise of neoliberalism offered new market opportunities for cultural studies to be crafted into the narrative of the market, offering culturalist explanations for social change and ­colonizing the radical position of transformative politics within neoliberal formations. The market, articulated in the frameworks of cultural studies from globally diverse places, was paradoxically constructed as the site of difference, de-westernization, and decolonization. Decolonization, separated from the roots of anti-colonial struggles resisting imperialism, was co-­opted into market-promoting structures of global capital, with the celebratory rhetoric of the “Asian turn.” The fall of the Berlin Wall marked triumphalist claims in the academe about the death of ideology, with clarion calls for the post-ideological formation. Cultural Studies celebrations of post-ideology often turned to cultural accounts, devoid of engagement with political-economic structures, and in many instances, embedded within the neoliberal formation. The post-ideological moment offered the momentum for the reconfiguration of cultural studies as cultural research, with culture being constructed in functionalist terms to enable smart city planning, urban reconstruction, and creation of new development projects that are culturally smart. The notion of cultural smartness, thus embodied in the logics of the global free market, redefined the relevance and market positioning of cultural studies as an extractive instrument accelerating the global penetration of transnational capital, narrated in the language of development. The global diffusion of cultural studies, especially to places such as Australia and Singapore where the neoliberal formation achieved hege-

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monic status meant that cultural studies was being invented in the narrative of the market. Consider, for instance, the depiction of “Mode 2” industry-engaged humanities research by Cassity and Ang that draws upon the notion of the knowledge of cultural studies engaged with the logics of capital. Cassity and Ang (2006) go on to describe, as an example, one linkage project funded by the Australian Research Council: In a similar vein, Realms of the Buddha: Museums, Cultural Diversity and Audience Development was a collaboration between the University of Western Sydney and the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney’s largest art museum. Combining multicultural studies, Asian Studies, and Buddhist studies with curatorial and museum education, researchers studied the development, implementation, and reception of an ambitious exhibition of Buddhist art that took place in Sydney during 2002. From the viewpoint of Gallery staff, the research was useful because it showed how they could attract new audiences, especially from Asian migrant communities, who are not yet regular customers. For their part, the academic investigators were interested in the difficulties that art museums face in a multicultural society. Theorising the exhibition as a cross-cultural event, they set out to i­ nvestigate how it managed to draw new audiences and contribute to a better understanding of Buddhism as a social, spiritual, and cultural force in Australia. Thus, the research was easily judged ‘useful’ and ‘relevant’. However, unlike Contested Sites, Realms of the Buddha did not result in further collaboration between these particular partners—perhaps indicating that a less productive synergy was achieved between academic and industry interests. (p. 8)

Erased from the conversation is a critical interrogation of the neoliberal transformation of Australian scholarship, the colonization of Australian academe by market forces, and the role of market forces in defining industry engagement. Moreover, the narrow framing of engagement in terms dictated within the framework of the industry erases the transformative capacity of engagement as a site for generating alternative articulations. The terms of industry engagement under the “linkage projects” go unchallenged as academics are encouraged to incorporate their cultural knowledge to meet the market needs of the industry. The authors then go on to prescribe greater engagement among academics with the industry: “But for partnerships to work, humanities researchers need to think beyond conventional lines and develop new skills. One historian felt that he was ‘thrown in the deep end’, and spoke of the need to become skilled in ‘people management’, in dealing with contracts, at accommodating dif-

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ferent agendas and timetables, as well as in translating between different discourses” (p. 10). Note the hegemony of the managerial logic in establishing the terms for the humanities. New spaces for market promotion in the arts and museums and city marketing projects have created new openings for cultural studies, reinventing the spaces of strategic communication such as advertising, public relations, and marketing in culturalist terms. Divorced from the radical possibilities opened up by cultural imaginations, cultural studies formulations based on claims to post-ideology serve as the enablers of market forces. In a post-ideological world, cultural studies’ claims to de-westernization in Singapore, for instance, served as anchors for justifying the authoritarian state’s repressive use of techniques of control to enable capitalist accumulation, couched in claims of communitarianism and “Asian values.” “Asian values” emerged as culturalist tropes that lent credibility to the techniques of repression and control of dissent being deployed across authoritarian regimes in Asia to enact their power and control. For instance, culturalist depictions of the church and the market in Singapore position cultural studies as difference, constructing market-driven church consumption as Asian difference. 4.5.4  Cultural Sustainability The notion of culture as sustainable development is further extended in the concept of cultural sustainability, where sustaining culture is seen as a development strategy. Cultural sustainability is offered within frameworks of cultural policymaking as a tool for perpetuating existing cultural logics, often through the arts, heritage, and a wide array of culture industries (Loach, Rowley, & Griffiths, 2017). The protection of traditional cultural forms is incorporated into techniques of management. The sustainability of culture through the arts and established culture industries is framed as integral to the health of society. The positioning of culture as a source of sustainability constructs culture within the dominant societal configurations, framing culture as a resource for perpetuating existing configurations (Dessein et al., 2015). Consider the notion of cultural sustainability developed by Kong (2009). Kong posits: Conventional wisdom about cultural sustainability emphasizes the ability of culture to “forge a productive diversity for the human species” as well as to “nurture the sources of cohesion and commonality,” recognizing culture to

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be “the glue of similarity (‘identity,’ literally) that grounds our sociability.” In turn, social sustainability calls for systems, structures, and programs that allow “our participation as autonomous yet social beings” (I JECESS 2008). Social sustainability suggests healthy social interaction, protection of the vulnerable, and respect for social diversity. (p. 3)

Note in the depiction of cultural sustainability the hegemonic deployment of culture to work within the formations of power in society, working toward the maintenance and reproduction of social cohesion. Culture constructed in terms of identity is framed in the language of similarity, simultaneously erasing culture as a site of contestation, struggle, and resistance. Sustainability emerges as a strategy deployed by the state-market nexus to maintain the existing cultural formations that keep the power structures intact, working toward creating diversity that is productive, as seen by power. The depiction of culture as a glue of similarity frames cultural sustainability in the realm of maintaining social cohesion that keeps the structure intact. Worth noting in this hegemonic notion of cultural sustainability are the voices of culture’s margins that see dominant culture as the site of oppression, erasure, and ongoing racism. Kong then goes on to describe cultural sustainability in Singapore, foregrounding the state’s management of creative spaces, and simultaneously erasing the ways in which this model of creative space management erases the systemic cultural exclusions and disenfranchisements experienced by minority Indian and Malay communities in Singapore. Kong’s articulation of cultural sustainability also obfuscates the ways in which this sustainability is maintained through the labor of migrant construction and domestic workers, who are systematically erased from the hegemonic cultural space in Singapore For instance, the Esplanade cultural space discussed by Kong as a site of Singapore’s cultural management is built with migrant labor that remains obfuscated from the discursive space, simultaneously erasing questions of migrant worker rights and protections in the realm of production of spaces of cultural sustainability. Rooting cultural sustainability in overarching economic logics in the comparison of Singapore and Shanghai, Kong observes: In both Shanghai and Singapore economic growth bolsters interest in artistic products and serves as encouragement to the cultural/creative class. Furthermore, official interest in and support of the creative industries has served as an added impetus to artistic activity. Simultaneously, as old manu-

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facturing spaces (in Moganshan Lu) or old residential space (in Wessex Estate) become available with economic restructuring, they are taken over by the art and creative class and have evolved as organic expressions of changing urban cultural and economic interests. Indeed, they belie a certain depth and soul not quickly or easily observable in these rapidly transforming cities, which are more commonly associated with commerce than culture. (p. 20)

Sustainability is thus embedded within the neoliberal logics of the market. Culture is sustainable to the extent that it is disciplined within hegemonic methods of control and is simultaneously a site for generating revenues. 4.5.5  Cultural Intelligence Multiculturalism, defined as a feature of the globalizing marketplace, needs to be effectively managed by the intercultural experts of transnational capital. Cultural concepts thus are incorporated into the training programs of transnational corporations, transnational NGOs, churches, and the military. The market-based seduction of culture is epitomized in the emergence of cultural intelligence (CQ) as an instrument for neoliberal hegemony, incorporated into corporate training programs, recruitment strategies, and mechanisms of evaluation that are adopted by transnational capital (see Dutta & Dutta, 2017 for a critique of CQ). The concept of CQ developed in Cultural Intelligence: Individual Interactions Across Cultures to guide culturally adaptive organizational practices, has emerged as a centerpiece in cross-cultural management in globalizing workplaces (Ang & Van Dyne, 2008; Earley & Peterson, 2004). Earley and Ang (2003) define CQ as “a person’s capability to adapt effectively to new cultural contexts” (p. 59). Treating the individual managerial subject as the unit of analysis and decision-making, the concept focuses on capturing the ability of individuals to adapt to diverse cultures. The success of the organization in global markets depends upon the success of individual managers/employees to serve as experts in cross-cultural settings, drawing on the notion that the culturally intelligent manager in able to competently negotiate cultural differences. Cultural difference therefore is constructed as a category to be managed effectively through the deployment of intelligence. Consider the following depiction by Van Dyne, Ang, and Koh (2009), who state that “cultural intelligence is an important individual capability that is consis-

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tent with contemporary conceptualizations of intelligence: the ability to adapt and adjust to the environment” (p. 235). CQ is defined as a universal marker of the ability of the individual to gauge cultural scripts and adapt communication practices to the different cultural cues, and is tied intrinsically to notions of survival skills in the global context. The growing popularity of CQ in the cross-cultural management literature and practice is evident in the two centers on CQ: the Cultural Intelligence Center (CCQ) based in East Lansing, Michigan, and the Center for Leadership and Cultural Intelligence based in Singapore. Generating CQ-related academic studies, assessment tools, training programs, trade publications directed toward practitioners, and undergraduate and graduate learning materials, the Centers have served as knowledge resources for Bank of America, Cargill, International Air Transport Association (IATA), London School of Economics, Medtronic, People to People Ambassador Group, Stanford University, and the US Department of Justice. Applications of the concept of CQ have extended beyond the workplace and management of multicultural teams to include classroom interactions, study abroad programs, faith contexts, cross-border strategic alliances, and international marketing, branding, and consumer behavior. Although the key CQ concepts were published and discussed in academic journals and then offered in CQ-based business coursework, the scope of CQ today extends to multicultural training and evaluation in multinational corporations that operate across global boundaries. Building on the logic of the individual as the basic unit of analysis, Earley and Ang (2003) proposed the concept of CQ to account for the individual ability to communicate effectively in another culture. CQ is conceptualized as a trait-level characteristic that captures the capacity of the individual to function effectively across different cultures, reflecting his/her adeptness in functioning in situations of cultural diversity (Ang & Van Dyne, 2008; Earley & Ang, 2003). Subsequent CQ theorizing and research has proposed a four-factor model of CQ; situated it in a nomological network (Ang & Van Dyne, 2008; Earley & Ang, 2003); conceptualized the antecedents of the construct (Shannon & Begley, 2008); examined the effects of CQ on international assignment effectiveness, leadership effectiveness of top-level executives in international settings, success for expatriates, adjustment in multinational teams, and success in multicultural collaborative teams; and developed assessment tools, case studies, and training programs for effective cross-cultural management through the production and surveillance of culturally intelligent employees.

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Earley and Ang (2003) conceptualize CQ as a multidimensional construct that includes metacognitive, cognitive, motivational, and behavioral dimensions, all of which are reflections of intelligence at the individual level and are predictors of effectiveness, adaptation, survival, and success (Ng, Van Dyne, & Ang, 2012). For example, studies done by Templer, Tay, and Chandrasekar (2006) show that global recruits who are motivated to explore and learn a culture different from theirs do well on cross-­ cultural adjustment. Knowledge about this individual-level trait then becomes the subject of neoliberal governance. Effectiveness of experts in managing cross-cultural relationships is attached to the development of adequate CQ criteria for identifying, training, and developing high CQ managers for global markets, and rewarding these managers through institutional structures of neoliberalism. Ng et al. (2012) note that “foreign professionals with higher metacognitive CQ and behavioral CQ were rated by their superiors as more effective in meeting performance expectations at work” (pp. 41–42). CQ researchers argue that in addition to other individual qualifications, CQ should also be taken into consideration when hiring people for offshore jobs and organizational setups. They offer the rationale that in organizational settings, team building and ­decision-­making are integral to the work culture. An expatriate manager who is not conversant with the ways in which other domestic team members function can risk communication breakdown and dissidence. The effective management of risks to neoliberal structures posed by communication breakdown and dissidence is accomplished through the development of knowledge about CQ in guiding hiring decisions and in creating a knowledge base for the training, development, and evaluation of experts that carry out the agendas of neoliberalism in cross-cultural global settings. Foregrounding this emphasis on individual-level measurement, Cooper, Daucett, and Pratt elucidate that assessment of behavior is the key to navigating conflicts, fostering cohesiveness, and attaining goal centeredness in multinational organizations. According to the authors, this assessment of behavior is embedded in the knowledge of cultural norms of belief and attitudes, and the competence to decipher these norms. Any failure in assessment could lead to conflict and breakdown of information in the organization. The individualization of CQ is evident in the following situational depiction of cognitive CQ: For example, a Western business executive with high metacognitive CQ would be aware, vigilant, and mindful about the appropriate time to speak

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up during meetings with Asians. Those with high metacognitive CQ would typically observe interactions and the communication style of their Asian counterparts (such as turn-taking), and would think about what constituted appropriate behavior before speaking up. (Ang & Van Dyne, 2008, p. 5)

Worth noting here is the articulation of CQ as a manifestation of individual ability to scan cultural environments for stimuli and to entrepreneurially channel the knowledge of the stimuli to achieve organizational effectiveness. CQ, as a constitutive element in neoliberal organizational management of culture and difference, embodies and perpetuates the West-centric notion of individual ability and efficacy, serving to produce individualized forms of expertise embodied in global managers. Embodying this individualistic narrative, Ramirez offers that high CQ individuals have higher versatility, which could lead to better conflict resolution: Versatility helps to explain how culturally intelligent individuals are able to adjust from one cultural situation to another by utilizing cultural awareness and selecting the most appropriate behavior as well as how someone with a strong conflict resolution ability to select the most appropriate strategy based on what is needed…. (p. 49)

Janssens and Brett (2006) extends this concept of appropriate strategy into explaining what makes up an efficient global team, suggesting that in order for global teams to function productively, CQ needs to be conceptualized as a fusion model of collaboration which would seek to iron out the highly contextualized versions of what it means for cultures to work as a team. Koh, Joseph, and Ang (2009) put forward a few aspects of CQ such as goal-oriented approach, cultural adaptation, task-centered planning as primers for achieving competency in cross-cultural navigation. In the same note, to understand the importance of CQ and employee performance in an organizational setting, Amiri, Moghemi, and Kazemi conducted a survey adopting the CQ scale developed by Ang, Van dyne, and Koh (2006), reporting that a positive relationship exists between CQ and employee performance. 4.5.6  Culture and the Neoliberal Market Culture is deployed toward the promotion of neoliberalism through the framing of cultural knowledge as the basis of humanizing the market.

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Discourses of multiculturalism and cultural sensitivity are introduced as the basis for building in inclusive markets. Moreover, cultural arguments are positioned as radical critiques of critiques of neoliberalism, deployed to discount the critiques of neoliberal market expansionism as Eurocentric. The claims to cultural knowledge and difference therefore bolster neoliberal market expansionism in non-Western spaces by discounting the critiques of the market as embedded in Eurocentric assumptions. Consider, for instance, the market-driven celebrations of the gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender (LGBT) movement in Singapore under the umbrella of the Pink Dot. The Pink Dot celebrations, promoted as celebrations of love, are a gala performance of queer difference, sponsored and funded by businesses, and until the recent ban by the Singapore state on international funding of local participation and protest, funded by some of the major global financial corporations such as Merrill Lynch. The positioning of Pink Dot as resistance is embedded within the global flows and logics of queer capitalism, incorporated into the strategic positioning of the authoritarian Singaporean state as a queer Asian capital, attracting the large financial flow of queer finances, products, and markets. What is erased in the celebration of Pink Dot as resistance is the role of authoritarian repression in Singapore in silencing resistance and the explicitly resistive aspects of queer organizing in Singapore that actively disrupt the hegemonic spaces of capitalism. Moreover, the uncritical celebration of market forces as sites of emancipation fail to seriously account for the various forms of marginalization that are inherently written into the market. The framework of pragmatism as a site of social change, emerging mostly from within the context of East Asian capitalist development states, fails to take into account the structurally transformative spaces of social change. Within the context of Singapore’s authoritarian capitalism, for instance, pragmatism as a strategy for change both accommodates state control and perpetuates its utilitarian market logic, paradoxically co-­opting the very possibilities of structural transformation within a superficial narrative of change. Appeals to pragmatism under the guise of activism leave intact the structures of oppression, erasure, and silencing, while working collaboratively with structures to perpetuate the instrumentalist ideology. Also, such appeals to pragmatism positioned as the “only workable” strategies amid authoritarian capitalism both erase and undermine the spaces, practices, and politics of transformative resistance that are articulated and embodied by collectives.

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4.6   Post- and Alternative Development The important and critical readings of development, especially the analysis of development built on the modernization paradigm as intrinsically racist, has opened up the space for labels such as “post-development” and “alternative development.” Whereas the label “post-development” assumes an “after” of development, the label “alternative development” creates invitational openings for ideas of development that interrogate and critique the dominant paradigm. Escobar’s (2011) Encountering Development offers a vital critical reading of development, depicting the ways in which development discourses have embodied racist and colonial ideas, with the basic tenets of modernization tied to the racist understanding of societies that are labeled as traditional. Post-development anchors the interrogation of the fundamental assumptions of the modernization paradigm, the overarching ideology that guides it, and the practices that are then carried out under the framework of development (Esteva, 1985, 1987, 1991, 1992; McGregor, 2009). Drawing from post-structural analyses, post-­ development offered the umbrella for ideas of poverty alleviation and progress that constituted development, attending to the features of development that dispossess people of their lands, cultures, and ways of life. Carried out as deconstructions of development texts, post-development analyses attended to the ideologies of power and control that were written into the hegemonic frameworks of development. Through close reading of development texts and practices, they depict the ways in which the promises of development are embedded in the ideology of market promotion and neocolonialism. In the conceptualization of post-development, a global order is invoked to decouple development from the nation state. Sidaway (2007) notes: In recent decades, this coupling of nation and development has become less stable. The apparent crisis of national development in many postcolonial states (fractured by insurgencies, national disarticulation and the breakdown of hegemonic national projects) is one aspect of this. But the partial unravelling of national development is much wider; embodied in subtly reworked articulations between territory, accumulation/development and sovereignty. (p. 357)

This discounting of the nation state at the peak of the neoliberal transformation of the globe erases the vital roles of nation states as instruments for enabling capitalist accumulation and control. Nation states, both existing

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neocolonial nation states such as the US and the new neocolonial nation states such as China, work through their influence on capital flows and development projects to shape the contours of extraction. Although the global movement of capital calls on collaborations with local elite that profit individually from the flows of capital, the direction of exerting power and control are linear, producing specific effects of marginalization among the poor in colonized spaces. The IFIs continue to work as the vessels of neocolonialism, working alongside neocolonial nations to colonize, force privatization, and produce neoliberal reforms. Transnational corporations in the global landscape continue to be located in the global North, deploying the powers of the imperial nation state in shaping and materializing development, working through the structures of the international financial institutions. In setting up post-­ development in terms of networks and bounded spaces, Sidaway does away with the narrative of the socialist state, having declared the end of socialist anti-colonial resistance. In such post-development articulations, collective resistance against neoliberal structures and the reworking of the postcolonial state as a socialist structure owned by the people are erased, with references to postcolonial sovereignty as graduated sovereignty folded into differentiated relationships with the global free market through spaces such as export processing zones (EPZs). Here’s Ong (2004) discussing graduated sovereignty: Ong (2000): In the course of interactions with global markets and regulatory agencies, so-called Asian tiger countries like Malaysia and Indonesia have created new economic possibilities, social spaces and political constellations, which in turn condition their further actions. The shifting relations between market, state and society have resulted in the state’s flexible experimentations with sovereignty. Graduated sovereignty refers to a) the different modes of governing segments of the population who relate to or do not relate to global markets; and b) the different mixes of legal compromises and controls tailored to the requirements of special production zones. (p. 55)

Note here the construction of sovereignty in the realm of accommodation and compromise with global capital/markets, having declared the death of postcolonial socialist movements. The accommodation of the Southeast Asian states to global capital marks the narrative of the inevitable triumph of global capital, albeit with differentiated forms of accommodation to global capital/market. Whereas the graduated sovereignties are marked by

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their boundaries that constitute who is included and who is excluded, networked into the logics of global capital, the state and the role of imperialism in shaping state policies remain untheorized. Marxist critiques of post-development analyses point to the romanticization of local communities that is often embodied in post-development discourse, accompanied by articulations of development solutions that communities often seek as necessary resources of life. Moreover, the skepticism and critique of Western models is seen in Marxist analyses as wholesale rejection of the enlightenment ideals, which form the anchors to socialist transformations of relationships of production and ownership. This point is cogently articulated in Peet’s (1997) chapter, “Social theory, postmodernism, and the critique of development” in the edited collection Space and Social Theory: Here the problem with postdevelopmentalism lies in its totalizing criticism, which too readily assumes that democracy and emancipation are exclusively Western, which fails to realize the positive sides of those aspects of Western experience that do, actually, realize (pale versions) of such principles, which denies the Third World what the First World already has. Yet we need to look carefully at modernity’s accomplishments: the fact that development has yielded productivity, has enabled back-breaking labor to be performed by machines, has yielded consumption above basic needs, does a give a margin of safety against natural catastrophes, and so on. Western science has demonstrated its positive power in improving material living standards, albeit at great environmental and social expense. Indeed, it is exactly the need for greater material security in Third World countries that empowers Western images and developmental models. Drawing on this tradition, development practice involves a real quest for improving the condition of the masses. There should be a struggle to reorient this practice rather than dismissing the entire developmental project as a negative power play. We need, therefore, a discriminating analysis which shows how potentials came to be misused, restricted, exploitative, environmentally dangerous. In other words, we need to replace the critical category “modernism” with the more discriminating, equally critical category “capitalism”. (p. 82)

Other critiques similarly reduce post-development analyses to homogenous treatment of development in binaries. Nederveen Pieterse notes: “Apparently this kind of essentializing of ‘development’ is necessary in order to arrive at the radical repudiation of development, and without this anti-­development pathos, the post-development perspective loses its foundation” (2000a, 2000b, p. 183). Worth noting in the critique offered by

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Nederveen Pieterse is the reduction of critique offered in post-development analyses to an anti-development pathos, without engaging the critiques in relationship to the overarching structures of development, the neocolonial structures of development, and the extractive logics that underlie development. He notes: The quasi-revolutionary posturing in post-development reflects both a hunger for a new era and a nostalgia politics of romanticism, glorification of the local, grassroots, community with conservative overtones. There are conservative elements to the communitarians. Post-development reflects anti-­ intellectualism in its reliance on deprofessionalized intellectuals and distrust of experts, while on the other hand it relies on and calls for ‘complex discursive operations’. (p. 364)

Note that the wholesale discarding of post-development criticisms is based on the framing of local community participation and ownership as ­posturing and nostalgia, erasing the ongoing community movements and initiatives in the global South that demonstrate the strength of local as a site for implementing alternatives to the neoliberal model of privatizing everyday life. Ironically then, Nederveen Pieterse goes on to equate post-­ development criticisms with neoliberalism, obfuscating the fundamentally socialist and anti-capitalist spirit of much post-development discourse and practice. He frames the community participation-driven approaches to knowledge generation as anti-intellectual because of the critiques such community-led models offer to expertise-driven professionalized development models. The solution then that Nederveen Pieterse offers is a culturalist solution packaged as cultural hybridity rooted within capitalist logics, incorporated into the discourses of sustainability and cultural accommodation in hegemonic development through the reproduction of capital. The alternatives to neoliberal globalization are alternative models of Asian and European capitalisms. The alternative capitalisms that Nederveen Pieterse (2004) puts forth, for instance, draws out the opportunities for dialogue between East Asia and the European Union. He gives examples of state-­ led capitalism of Southeast Asia as alternatives to free market capitalism, characterized by large government intervention and relative egalitarianism (which is not supported by empirical evidence). He notes: It follows that as a heading ‘alternative development’ no longer makes much sense. It made sense in the 1970s and 1980s when there was a clear break

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between mainstream development and ‘another development’. ‘Alternative’ as a heading made sense when the relationship between mainstream and alternative was more or less static, not fluid as it is now. Now mainstream development has opened up and several features of alternative development—the commitment to participation, sustainability, equity—are being widely shared (and unevenly practised), not merely in the world of NGOs but from UN agencies all the way to the World Bank. (Pieterse, 2000a, 2000b, pp. 369–370)

He frames this incorporation of participatory concepts and concepts of equity into the WB as examples of reflexive development. Alternative development as a site for interrogating, resisting, and disrupting the logics of global capital is framed as not being relevant in the contemporary context, having been incorporated into the IFIs, including the WB.  Also worth noting here the positioning of NGOs as the anchors to carrying out the work of participation, sustainability, and equity, backgrounding the role of NGOs as the very instruments of the neoliberal transformation of communities through the dissemination of frameworks of privatized self-­ help and empowerment (Bernal & Grewal, 2014). Here, co-optation is framed as a necessary pathway to progress: This kind of pessimism, while understandable [referring to critiques of the participatory development models as co-optation], seems somehow illogical: what reason is there to assume, short of a fundamental shift in human nature, that the creativity that has given rise to alternatives in one context will not find different avenues of expression, no matter the circumstances and indeed prompted by them? That emancipation can be successful should not be held against it although it often is, as if a Sisyphus task were a seal of purity. Of course, Kothari views co-optation not as success but as capitulation, but doesn’t the record look much more varied? Co-optation, besides being logical in view of the way the development field is structured, may be desirable if it means a greater chance that once-marginal views are implemented. There is cause to regret co-optation mainly if one regards alternative development as a position external-to-the-system; but this kind of island mentality is as sterile as delinking, as a national development strategy. Governments and NGOs are factually interdependent in terms of agenda setting and funding. The entire field is changing including government organizations. (p. 359)

The discrediting of critiques of the participatory turn in neoliberal institutions is integral to the rhetoric of change in the dominant institutions. At

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the time of the writing of this article, IFIs were in the midst of pushing aggressive neoliberal strategies globally in the form of participatory projects. The participatory poverty reduction strategy papers for instance incorporated participation at the local level in pushing large-scale reforms in privatization, opening up to the free market, and weakening of labor unions. The argument that the incorporation of participation into the neoliberal institutions would somehow lead to greater likelihood of marginal views to be implemented is a communicative inversion, while in reality the language of participation offers a democratic face to the neoliberal policies pushed by the WB and other IFIs. Similarly, the language of poverty alleviation serves as a communicative inversion that enables the WB and other IFIs to push policies that enable the free flow of capital and extraction of resources. Amid the widespread criticisms of the IFIs as instruments for enabling large-scale global inequalities, poverty alleviation as a communicative inversion gives legitimacy to the IFIs. 4.6.1  Cultural Hybridity The culturalist turn to development therefore offers hybridity as a conceptual formation to explain globalization, depicting it in the language of cultural flows, intermingling, and pluralism. The earliest articulations of hybridity in the context of development emerged in the work of Nestor Garcia Canclini. Culture, marked by tradition, placed in conversation with development as modernization, resulted in hybrid spaces. These hybrid spaces were therefore conceptualized as the ongoing sites for interactions between tradition and development. Let’s return to one of the key proponents of cultural hybridity in development studies, Nederveen Pieterse (2015): Diversity and hybridity enter in management and business studies as variables in the knowledge economy, creative economy, and cultural economy. This goes far beyond the marketing and the world product ad campaigns of Coca-Cola and Benetton; it concerns conception, design, engineering, and every aspect from research and development to production to marketing. Richard Florida celebrates diversity as a feature of creative dynamic cities. Diversity and hybridity enter into accounts of the global economy as a cosmopolitan sphere and a condition of “globality” in which firms must organize into project teams that scout for talent and combine diverse skills from across the world, from engineering to regulatory regimes and law to local cultural savvy, in order to compete. (p. 97)

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Cultural hybridity constitutes the creative capacity of capital, equipping it with the ability to penetrate markets. Hybridity is interchangeable with the cultural economy, entering into the circuits of capital through its incorporation of the different forms and practices of culture. The cycle of capitalist production and exchange incorporates hybridity into it in generating a profitable system. Hybridity, as a celebration of diversity, is an enabler of commoditization and capitalist extraction. Entering into the global flow of the economy, hybridity is a powerful tool that brings together various forms of cultural differences, incorporated into the pathway for generating profits. The globality that Nederveen Pieterse envisions here is a neoliberal globality that draws on the mobility of the managerial-professional classes to generate various sites of profiteering across the globe. 4.6.2  Indigenous Organizations, Alternatives, Inequities Another site where the turn to culture has been a key force in reorganizing capitalism is in the indigenous turn to capitalism, constituted within the structures of recognition of global neoliberal organizations. This indigenous turn, in the name of redistributing economic decision-making in the hands of indigenous communities, has often consolidated power in the hands of indigenous elites, co-opting indigenous participation as an instrument for consolidating the reach of neoliberal governance. This has happened amid unprecedented levels of colonization of indigenous land and displacement of indigenous communities from their sources of livelihood. Indigenous organizing of resources are often positioned as alternative imaginaries of working “with” resources, often through ideas of shared ownership grounded in the family, sub-tribe, community, and the broader collective; the overarching framework through which such organizing is recognized, however, is a privatized framework. It is argued that how indigenous organizations are formed, the principles underlying these organizations, and the ways of bringing and distributing resources offer alternative imaginaries to organizing. In New Zealand since the 1980s and more aggressively in the 1990s, for instance, the “New Zealand experiment” has served as the site for trying out neoliberal reforms with zeal, so that these reforms in the form of structural adjustment programs can then be tried elsewhere (Smith, 2007). The claims to Maori rights of recognition constituted within this neoliberal experimented have framed recognition in the narrow principles of the market.

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In this backdrop, it may be argued that organizing of resources under collective logics and grounded in Maori principles in New Zealand provide examples of indigenous organizing as an alternative to neoliberalism, often working within the spaces that are opened up with the neoliberal move to decentralization (Bargh, 2012, 2013). With activism that resulted in a move toward resolving historical breaches of the Treaty of Waitangi, a wide range of government-recognized tribal organizations have emerged as spaces for organizing the returned assets. Moreover, alternative forms of organizing emerge in Maori Land Trusts and Incorporations that are increasingly successful in managing business enterprises on Maori land. Economic development arguments are engaged by tribal organizations, who shape the conversation on ownership and distribution of resources. Indeed, the formation of these indigenous organizations as sites of economic decision-making depict the ways in which neoliberalism may be engaged to create anchors for claiming indigenous rights (Smith, 2007). Situated within the neoliberal framework, these spaces of resistance and alternative imaginaries of organizing might be seen as reproducing capitalist logics, serving to benefit a small group of indigenous elites (Rata, 2011). Referring to this as “neotribal capitalism,” Rata argues that these Maori formations draw on the language of biculturalism to reproduce capitalist power and control, while simultaneously reproducing inequalities. In this critique, power is consolidated in the hands of the tribal elite, reproducing capitalism, and doing so in the language of indigenous rights, while existing and entrenched inequalities are left intact and/or exacerbated (Rata, 2010, 2011). The treaty recognition process is transformed amid the neoliberal reforms to recognizing the incorporated tribe rather than all Maori (Rata, 2011). The critique suggests that the turn to indigenous capitalist structures has reproduced the neoliberal ideology, also paradoxically disenfranchising large proportions of indigenous communities that constitute the poor and working classes through the privatization and weakening of public services in education, health, and welfare. In this backdrop, it is worthwhile to explore the extent to which treaty claims emerge as opportunities for claiming Maori rights, the distribution of these rights among all Maori, and the ways in which these rights translate into material opportunities for Maori that are systematically disenfranchised. What the critique offered by Rata fails to account for is the overarching structure of Eurocentric colonialism and its later variant of neoliberalism, albeit embedded in a Western concept of the free market and individual property rights, and the ways in which the colonizing spaces

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of this structure have shaped and constrained Maori claims to recognition. That the very openings to making claims to recognition are formulated within the politics of neoliberal structures promoting privatization, efficiency, and audit cultures points to the overarching power and control of the colonial structures. Globally, the construction of indigeneity within the mechanisms of neoliberalism has enabled the penetration of private property and market mechanisms. How then can the notion of indigenous culture work toward transformative and resistive goals that fundamentally interrogate the hegemonic formations of capitalism? This question is raised by Maori activists who foreground the role of indigenous ­knowledge in fundamentally interrogating the overarching meaning structures of capitalism (see the excellent collection by Bargh, 2007). Alongside the strong economic organizing of Maori enterprises, the political engagement of Maori organizing fundamentally shapes the nature of the New Zealand political economy. These economic and political forms of organizing, often at the sub-tribe level, form the basis for ongoing Maori protests and struggles to shape how resources are owned and utilized. Various forms of Maori political organizations, representing Maori voices, engage the political process, often providing inputs to the parliament through collaborations with the Waitangi Tribunal and courts. Bargh (2012) offers the example of the Iwi Chairs Forum, an umbrella organization that brings together some of the larger tribal organizations as a space for shaping policy. The roles of spaces such as the marae (traditional meeting space) and the Iwi Chairs Forum for participation of the Maori margins and for challenging the neoliberal status quo offer critical anchors for theorizing indigeneity as a basis for transforming neoliberal capitalism. 4.6.3  Asian Turn and New Imperialisms As seen earlier in this chapter, the culturalist explanation of development serves the neoliberal model, with culture now positioned in an explanatory role to argue for difference. Rather than interrogating and resisting the neocolonial and capitalist hegemonies established through the large-­ scale dissemination of neoliberal policies, these culturalist explanations offer accounts of cultural difference to account for different modes of capitalism that are now equated with accounts of modernity (see Nederveen Pieterse, for instance). What is salient about these culturalist explanations is their shallow reading of culture and capitalist transformations, devoid of

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empirical analyses that map out the spread of neoliberalism across the globe in different geopolitical contexts, and the actual location of these so-called Asian modernities within a hegemonic capitalist framework that is by its very nature Eurocentric. Here’s Dirlik: Much of the talk on “alternative modernity” in China and abroad is premised on differences in history and culture, which is seemingly reasonable, but also ignores that these alternatives, such as they are, are severely limited by their entrapment within a global capitalist economy, which bears upon it all the hallmarks of its origins in Europe and North America. There is, ­however, a different way of grasping “alternative,” in terms of socialist alternative to capitalism, which understood “alternative” not in terms of different pasts but in terms of different futures: alternative economic, political, and social forms to those prevailing under capitalism. (2008, p. 7)

To the extent that the “Asian turn” is a claim to replication of the capitalist model, albeit drawing on Asian pasts, paths, and location-specific methods, they work under the hegemonic formation of neoliberal modernity. Many of the examples of alternatives offered by the proponents of the Asian turn work precisely within the structures of capital, and ironically as sites for narrating celebratory stories of capital. Consider, for instance, the depiction of Asian capitalisms that are offered by Nederveen Pieterse as exemplars of alternative cultural modernities, strategically obfuscating the fundamental ways in which the rapid and accelerated emergence of these Asian Tigers was enabled by the global diffusion of neoliberal policies. For instance, in the example of the Asian economy of Singapore, critical theorists working in the context of Singapore draw on empirical evidence to document the influence of neoliberalism as an overarching ideology that shaped Singapore’s capitalist expansion. Within this context then, the state-driven model of capitalist expansion foregrounds the powerful role of the state as the enabler of accelerated capitalist extraction—not as an example of difference, but as a catalyst driving development toward the homogeneous neoliberal outcomes reflects in the transformations in the US and Europe. Singapore, as an extreme example of a neoliberal state, is able to adopt and model neoliberalism in ways that are more neoliberal than the practice of the ideology in its birthplaces in the US and Europe; this transformation is enabled by the total power held by the Singapore state on its subjects, the erasure of protest and dissent, and the absence of vocal sites of resistance to the hegemony of the state.

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Similarly, consider the movement configured in “Asia as method,” suggesting expanding the meeting points beyond the Western sites in New  York, London, or Paris to include Seoul, Kyoto, Bangalore, Singapore, Shanghai, and Taipei. The precise configuration of the sites of meeting and therefore the anchors to knowledge production on one hand relies on the capitalist logics of centering urban nodes of flows of financial and technology capital, and on the other hand erases the very spaces of resistance and collective organizing within the many Asian spaces that are increasingly and continually incorporated into and displaced by the capitalist logics underlying neoliberal hegemony. Chen notes: The potential of Asia as method is this: using the idea of Asia as an imaginary anchoring point, societies in Asia can become each other’s points of reference, so that the understanding of the self may be transformed, and subjectivity rebuilt. On this basis, the diverse historical experiences and rich social practices of Asia may be mobilized to provide alternative horizons and perspectives. This method of engagement, I believe, has the potential to advance a different understanding of world history. (p. 213)

The suggestion that inter-Asia comparisons can offer the bases for alternative theorizing from Asia and somehow bypass the logics of global capital obfuscates the overarching logics of capital flows that constitute the trajectories of development across spaces in Asia (including roles played by development agencies, foundations, IFIs, and transnational capital). This particular framing of an Asian imaginary erases the accounts of collective resistance organized within and across spaces in Asia, disrupting the logics of global capital, both locally and globally. The call to imagining Asia as an anchor point for inter-referencing is oblivious to the global forces of capital and neocolonialism, including the roles of IFIs, global foundations, and global development agencies in the ongoing reproduction of erasure and marginalization within Asia. The world history that is advanced in such a framework of inter-referencing conveniently obfuscates the role of Empire (such as say the US in constructing Singapore as the frontier in its fight against Communism) in diffusing the global hegemony of capitalism, the conflicts within Asia that emerge from these different locations of alignment with the neocolonial enterprise, and the collective resistance to Empire that seeks to disrupt both the centers of capitalist power in the Empire as well as in Asia.

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In examining the underlying principle that anchors “Asia as method,” consider the following articulation by Chen: I wish to clarify a political motive of Asia as method—the use of Asia as an emotional signifier to call for regional integration and solidarity. In reality, due to historical constraints and current local differences, the general mood does not justify using Asia in this way quite yet. Nevertheless, the globalization of capital has generated economic and cultural regionalization, which has in turn brought about the rise of Asia as a pervasive structure of ­sentiment. As a result, both a historical condition and an emotional basis exist for new imaginings of Asia to emerge. (pp. 213–214)

Chen’s call for regional integration and solidarity draws on what he refers to uncritically as a “pervasive structure of sentiment” that is rooted in global capital. This emotional basis for new imaginings that Chen suggests, the hegemony of global capital in Asia, leaves behind large numbers of Asians, often working through and in resistance to the perpetuation of oppressive practices in a wide range of Asian contexts. The internal colonizations, dispossessions, and displacements that are continually produced within Asia are carefully erased in this narrative call for solidarity. That these so-called spaces of theorizing within these structures of inter-referencing are often dominated by Han Chinese intellectuals whose imagining of Asia connects to references to Confucianism, while at the same time erasing large parts of Asia from the conversations. Any serious conversation on Asian solidarities has to carefully attend to the differences, inequities, and structures of oppression in the reproduction of global capital within Asia. Chen makes a suggestion toward this in his Epilogue, sharing the heart-rending story of his friend Harinder Veriah, who dies in a hospital in Hong Kong because of negligence resulting from Han Chinese racism. From this call, Chen offers an invitation to self-reflexivity among Han Chinese scholars. What he, however, erases in this call to self-­ reflexivity among Han Chinese is the voice of scholars from minority communities in Chinese majority societies such as Hong Kong and Singapore that have been systematically resisting Han Chinese racism, categorizing it, naming it, introducing terms such as “Chinese privilege” to theorize it (Thanapal, 2015), and facing state oppression for doing so. For instance, for minority scholars in Chinese majority Singapore, to talk about Han Chinese racism is a potential invocation to the colonial sedition laws. The erasure of these scholars of color keeps intact the racist space of Han Chinese privilege, protecting the spaces for Han Chinese articulation

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while keeping silent the struggles of minority scholars voiced by them. That the Chinese occupy the hegemonic spaces for reflecting on Han Chinese privilege perpetuates Han Chinese racism and privilege over discursive spaces, while discursively erasing the struggles of other Asian minorities in these spaces that are fixed in the subject position. Such a reworking of the Asian imaginary would need to begin with interrogating the very racist formations of Han Chinese privilege.

4.7   Conclusion In conclusion, the neoliberal turn to culture has incorporated culture as a site of profiteering. Culture, conceptualized in the framework of development as a category to be profited from, is incorporated into development planning and interventions. Cultural development on one hand extracts culture from its everyday sites of performance, and on the other hand introduces it into the networks of global capital as a commodity to profit from. The rise in formalized frameworks of cultural recognition in hegemonic structures of neoliberalism is often tied to the extraction of culture, its measurement, and circulation in the financial networks of global capital. Culture, incorporated into the structures of global capitalism is shaped as a tool for promoting the market and simultaneously, occupying the spaces of radical critique. The co-optation of resistance and struggles of resistance within the overarching logic of the free market erases opportunities for decolonizing capitalist neocolonialism. The framing of culture in the language of alternative modernity mimics Eurocentric capitalist structures with cultural twists, while simultaneously obfuscating the Eurocentric roots of these structures. The deployment of culture within hegemonic formations of indigenous turn or Asian turn keeps intact the forces of the global free market.

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CHAPTER 5

Technologies for Development and Social Change

The turn to culture and participation reworks the techno-determinism of the dominant development paradigm in the language of participation. Technologies themselves are offered as participation outcomes, with the notion that communities acquiring new communication technologies are more democratically equipped through their ownership of the technologies. The technology fetish of development places technologies as integral to the development process through the creation of democratic opportunities. In this chapter, I will argue that the turn to technology itself as empowerment is a communicative inversion, one that strategically inverts the community and participation-depleting role of technologies. Technology is constructed within the neoliberal narrative of global social change as the enabler of culture and voice, as a tool that empowers and catalyzes the marginalized to participate (Hemer & Tufte, 2012). The emergence of studies of networked activisms for instance offers a celebratory reading of technology, depicting the way in which technology catalyzes change through the creation of networks of flows of articulations and affect, captured in the catchphrases of Facebook revolutions and Twitter uprisings. Whereas the political, social, cultural and economic contexts of movements are erased from the discursive space, a technological reading foregrounds the networks and linkages. This techno-deterministic framing of social movements places technologies at the heart of movements, placing the capacity of technologies to create connections as sites for the articulation of voice, thus constructing voice in the realm of technology. © The Author(s) 2020 M. Dutta, Communication, Culture and Social Change, Palgrave Studies in Communication for Social Change, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26470-3_5

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Technology defines the parameters for the expression of voice and frames the possibilities for voice. The notion of voice narrated from the margins is incorporated into the dominant agendas of global social change, very much constituted within the neoliberal agendas of creating new markets for information and communication technology (ICT) corporations. Empowerment thus is turned into a quality of the technology, as a branding tool for transnational technology corporations, creating new markets globally through the seduction of technology. As what I call “fundamental communicative inversion” (Dutta, 2015) throughout this chapter, the problems that have been brought about through the accelerated penetration of techno-capital are now positioned as the challenges for more techno-capital. The neoliberal vision of technology frames technology as the elixir to the problems of development. Techno-libertarians such as Peter Thiel, the founder of PayPal and one of the initial funders of Facebook, construct the freedom of technological innovation as the solution for humanity, set in opposition to politics and to democratic processes. In a meeting of techno-libertarians at the Cato Institute, notes Thiel: I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible … A better metaphor is that we are in a deadly race between politics and technology. The future will be much better or much worse, but the question of the future remains very open indeed. We do not know exactly how close this race is, but I suspect that it may be very close, even down to the wire. Unlike the world of politics, in the world of technology the choices of individuals may still be paramount. The fate of our world may depend on the effort of a single person who builds or propagates the machinery of freedom that makes the world safe for capitalism.

Democratic processes, seen as obstacles to the techno-fixes that are needed to address global grand challenges, need, therefore, to be bypassed. Note the entrepreneurial vision that is inherent in the accelerationist worldview, that the solution to the pitfalls of techno-capital is accelerated and expansionist movement into more techno-capital (Land, 2017). Notes Land: The point of an analysis of capitalism, or of nihilism, is to do more of it. The process is not to be critiqued. The process is the critique, feeding back into itself, as it escalates. The only way forward is through, which means further in … As blockchains, drone logistics, nanotechnology, quantum computing, computational genomics, and virtual reality flood in, drenched in ever-­

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higher densities of artificial intelligence, accelerationism won’t be going anywhere, unless ever deeper into itself. To be rushed by the phenomenon, to the point of terminal institutional paralysis, is the phenomenon. Naturally—which is to say completely inevitably—the human species will define this ultimate terrestrial event as a problem. (https://jacobitemag. com/2017/05/25/a-quick-and-dirty-introduction-to-accelerationism/)

In the ideology of accelerationism that percolates through the imaginary of technology in development, catalytic investments into technologies and human integration with computing intelligence form the basis of addressing the current global challenges by working through them. Further consolidation of capital holds solutions to the problems posed by capital. Inherent in this vision is the very anti-democratic principle of liberalism that places the hegemonic power of experts and capitalist classes in positions of power and control. The evolutionary framework that forms the basis of this linear narrative, seeing technology as converging with human aspiration, fails to recognize the many possibilities of alternative cultural, economic and political organizing across the globe, including in the robust organizing of indigenous movements across the globe, that both disrupt and dismantle the linear techno-narrative. In this chapter, we will begin by examining the overarching framework of technology in the contemporary context of communication for social change. In doing so, we will closely examine the rhetorical devices that are strategically used to position technologies to the problems generated by the accelerated globalization through the penetration of neoliberal policies. Ironically, the seduction of technologies as solutions to the problems generated by unregulated neoliberal policies opens up new sectors of investment, privatization, and market flows. Rather than critically interrogate the problems that are tied to the wholesale adoption of a techno-­ deterministic ideology, the market-driven framework of development pushes new technologies, branded in new appeals of problem-solving. The  chapter will wrap up with the interrogation of the new frontiers of techno-determinism.

5.1   Technologies and the Development Frontier The seduction of technology is placed at the core of the new development frontier, what might be termed “development 2.0.” This new development frontier, much like its earlier epoch, is embedded in a top-

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down dissemination of the technologies of development embedded in elite logics and simultaneously equipped with the new language of culturalism (as shown in the previous chapter), participation, community, sustainability and empowerment. Erasing the anti-colonial critique of the development framework that interrogated the monolithic obsession with the technologies of development that erased livelihoods and cultural practices, culture is incorporated into the techno-deterministic ideology to articulate a new phase of development. In this new phase of development, technology is intertwined with democracy, participation, poverty and sustainability. Moreover, new narratives of technology depict a futuristic account of what is defined as the “fourth industrial revolution” by the global elite (the term itself being coined by the World Economic Forum founder, Charles Schwab, and first put forth in the elite circles of the World Economic Forum). The discursive sites of the World Economic Forum, global foundations, such as the Gates Foundation and Clinton Foundation, and global development agencies circulate the narrative of privatized technologies as the solutions and futures of global development. Salient, for instance, in the conversations of the global elite at the World Economic Forum are the techno-deterministic celebrations of new apps, blockchain solutions, and digital networks that would solve climate change, poverty, and inequality. Systematically erased from these conversations are the roles of techno-deterministic formulations on one hand, expanding the global reach of capital and, on the other hand, expelling communities from their spaces of livelihoods. 5.1.1  Technologies of Democracy Technologies are projected as solutions to the problems of inequality and poverty. Terms such as technology impoverishment and the digital divide are circulated to establish technology-based solutions to development. Technologies, framed as tools for promoting democracy, reflect the hegemonic dominant paradigm of development communication, repackaged as empowerment and participation. Technology is seen as bringing about empowerment through its diffusion to rural and impoverished ­communities. Consider, for instance, the example of Storybank, a digital storytelling technology disseminated to rural India as a tool of empowerment (Jones, Harwood, Buchanan, & Lalmas, 2007):

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The community was chosen because it already has an active community information-sharing culture. Our local partner, Voices, with funding from UNESCO, established Namma Dhwani (‘Our voices’) in 2000. Programmes are made at the ICT centre and distributed in several ways—for example, via cable to people’s televisions and specially adapted radios; and, on tape to be played to ‘self-help’ groups (where the interests range from micro-finance to health). There is a Dalit community (consisting of the lowest caste members) on the outskirts of the village—their access to technology is much more limited but they also receive community broadcasts via loudspeakers placed in the trees. The programme types range from audio only, audio with synchronized power-point style slide visuals through to full audio-video presentations. (p. 257)

Empowerment is defined as the telling of stories, captured within “Voices.” Worth noting in the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) funding of the project is the location of the project within the neoliberal umbrella of “self-help” groups, translating empowerment to self-help. The framing of the self-help groups is constituted within the agendas of the neoliberal structure, examining issues such as micro-finance and health, defined within the logics of individual ownership. Although the excerpt makes a passing reference to inequalities within the community, with a reference to the dalit (untouchable) community, it leaves unexplored the power dynamics and challenges to the voices of the marginalized within the community. The questions “What happens to the stories after they are told?” “How does the community mobilize around the stories to achieve change?” “How do the stories transform structures?” remain unexplored. Moreover, amid the large-scale locally constituted global protests against inequalities, entrenched differentials in power and the consolidation of wealth and opportunities in the hands of transnational elite, proponents of the techno-deterministic model of social change attribute the emergence of the protests to the role of technology, ironically reproducing the neoliberal order while simultaneously obfuscating the very neoliberal changes that are the sites of struggles (Bennett, Segerberg, & Yang, 2018; Freelon, McIlwain, & Clark, 2018; Tufekci, 2013). The technology is invested with magical powers, with analyses of Twitter and Facebook feeds depicting the network flows of protest articulations (Agarwal, Bennett, Johnson, & Walker, 2014; Bennett et al., 2018; Tufekci, 2013). The narrative of democratization, on one hand, becomes the basis for the dissemi-

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nation of technologies and the creation of markets (consider the involvement of private technology corporations in teaching protest technologies, Avina, 2013), and, on the other hand, the justification for imperialist interventions (Prashad, 2012a, 2012b). The Director of Citizenship and Community Affairs for Microsoft Middle East and Africa, Avina, notes: Finding the means to promote the democratic transition process in this largely autocratic region has been a critical challenge. According to Julian Roche, vice president of MHC International Ltd, a CSR advisory service, “As trust in governments has declined … the demand for greater transparency, disclosure and non-financial reporting continues to increase.” 25 IT companies have been very active in this space, providing software and applications which augment transparency, improve the performance of government, and augment the interface between government and society. Google, IBM, Nokia, Samsung, and others have all sponsored innovation events in the region to foster the development of applications relevant to promoting economic growth and democracy. Microsoft has built an E-Government Gateway in Egypt which provides more than 80 government services to citizens. 26 New services which further promote transparency and open government are under development for this E-Government Gateway and will further help increase government social interface and legitimacy. In some instances, software donations coupled with IT Architectural support have provided the technical foundations for the work of important Arab Spring initiatives. The Tunisian National Commission for the Investigation of Human Rights Abuses and Violations was equipped by Microsoft with a state of the art, tailored, e-justice case system to manage the hundreds of cases of violence and property damage which occurred during the revolution. The Moroccan Constitutional Reform Commission was similarly supported during their political transition process. (p. 84)

As noted in the article, Avina’s role involved supporting organizations, government ministries, development agencies, and international and national non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to use IT effectively to meet development needs. The excerpt succinctly narrates the incorporation of the techno-deterministic framework as the overarching umbrella for conceptualizing protest within the ambits of techno-capital. With technology corporations seeing protest politics as a site for performing corporate social responsibility through democracy promotion, protect is incorporated into the logics of transnational capital. The concept of democracy crystallized in the techno-capitalist worldview is closely tied to capitalism and to the creation of market opportunities. Improving trans-

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parency, augmenting interface between government and citizens and generating engagement are formulated within the broader goal of promoting economic growth and creating business opportunities. The example of the work of Microsoft in equipping specific civil society sectors with technological capital is both corporate social responsibility (CSR) as well as an opportunity for creating new business (such as the E-Government Gateway in Egypt). Note here the techno-deterministic ideology in the roles attributed to Wael Ghonem, the then head of marketing for Google Dubai, who then founded an NGO, Wanadat, and Kha lid Elhasumi, Microsoft’s Country Manager in Libya. Similarly, the academic Zeynep Tufecki discusses her role employed as a programmer for IBM while starting to follow and participate as an observer in digital activist movements. The US democracy promotion agenda in the Middle East, through the promotion of technologies of democracy, was constituted under the umbrella of promoting the free market (Bardhan & Wood, 2015; Snider & Faris, 2011). Specific technologies and platforms, promoted as technologies of democracy, were formulated within the neocolonial agenda of turning the Middle East into open markets for US-based Transnational Corporations (TNCs) and commodities. Specific United States Agency for International Development (USAID)-based programs were overtly integral to the promotion of the ideology of the free market. Civil society in the Middle East emerged as sites for carrying out the technology-based democratization programs run by the USAID (Bardhan & Wood, 2015). The framing of democratization in Libya, for instance, offered the justification for US intervention in Libya to serve its geostrategic and transnational capitalist interests (Prashad, 2012a, 2012b). Also worth noting is the neocolonial deployment of empowerment through technology precisely as the tools of neoliberalism. Technology corporations leverage the market opportunities through cooperation with transnational civil society in the business of promoting democracy and funded by global development agencies such as USAID. The hegemonic forms of US imperialism continue to reproduce themselves through new imperial interventions, promoting themselves as harbingers of the technologies of economic freedom and democracy. Inherent in these neocolonial interventions is their extractive purpose of creating new market opportunities for transnational capital. For instance, the current US imperial invasion of Venezuela is grounded in the technology of neoliberalism, similar to the US imperial invasion of Chile. Nation states in the global South that threaten the neoliberal model are targets of such invasions, which range from training and collaborating with local econo-

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mists on the neoliberal model, to funding civil society groups to perpetuate the neoliberal model, to the strategic support of coups. Protests in the global South are funded through neocolonial techniques that seek to promote the market. Intrinsic to the promotion of neocolonial interventions is the role of academic capital, as evident in the role played by Milton Friedman and the “Chicago Boys” in the US involvement in Chile and the most recent involvement of the Harvard economist Ricardo Hausmann, Director for the Center of International Development at Harvard University, who has been proposing US invasion as the solution for Venezuela’s socialist “crisis” (Rawal-Jindia, 2019). Technologies of democracy within the hubs of global capital in the South often deploy the narratives of participation and engagement precisely to erase, co-opt, and displace. Consider, for instance, the turn to e-governance and e-participation led by a middle-class professional-­ managerial civil society in Bangalore, often funded by large information technology companies that were in the business of acquiring land in urban development projects. The turn to e-participation in Bangalore discursively used the language of participation to move the vibrant contestations of development that were playing out in the realms of peoples’ participation, particularly the participation of the poor in the digital space, thus effectively erasing the claims to land, space, and sites of development from the poor. The turn to digital as participation foreclosed the debates on development and the contestations of development, erasing the robust politics of development in which the poor participated. Moreover, the turning of land and other resources as commodities that were digitized and, therefore, transacted online, on one hand, removed the poor from the spaces of laying claims on land and, on the other hand, incorporated land as a commodity in digitally connected global networks. The turn to participation thus worked precisely to erase the democratic opportunities of participation among the poor, further enhancing the reach and hold of IT capital, transforming the urban spaces into sites of capitalist extraction through the rhetoric of participation. Techno-deterministic narratives of social change espouse the introduction of technologies in the Third World as the harbinger of democracy, public participation and community mobilization, simultaneously obfuscating the questions of power and control exercised through technologies, the capitalist nature of technology ownership and commoditization and the authoritarian goals served by transnational technology corporations (see for

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instance Punathambekar & Mohan, 2019). The deterministic framing of digital technologies as the sites of politics is uncritically reproduced: Indeed, most online platforms have been sites where everyday uses and creative expressions have, at times, intersected with and reshaped the political in new and unpredictable ways. The 2007 lawyers’ strike in Pakistan, the anticorruption movement in India in 2011–12, the Shahbag protests in Bangladesh in 2013, and the mobilization on anti-Muslim and anti-Tamil sentiment in Sri Lanka over the past decade are but the most prominent and recent instances when the defining role of digital and mobile media technologies and practices in the political domain have become apparent. (p. 7)

The platform fetish projected into the depiction of the digital isolates the technology from its broader context, from the politics of neoliberalism and everyday organizing against it. Consider similarly the following depiction of a technology-based voice project, Africa’s Voices, which worked with local radio stations in eight Sub-Saharan African countries, funded by the UK Department for International Development and Economic and Social Research Council. The project is depicted here by Srinivasan and Lopes (2016): A commitment to valuing voices must adjust to technology and big data developments while guarding against these undermining tendencies in a digital age. This involves, in part, gathering harder to reach voices: because they matter to inclusive citizen engagement. It also involves gathering harder to analyse data, such as voices in local languages, with multi-formats (audio, text), framed in real interpersonal and social dynamics, whose meanings are linked to local contexts. An innovative approach to voice implies thinking about new ways of analysing these more complex voices, often combining human knowledge of encoded meanings and subjectivities with computational approaches that help manage large volumes of complex data. And finally, there needs to be an ethical commitment away from extracting and ‘scraping’ data to collaborating with locally meaningful spaces for ‘voice’. (p. 160)

Participation is formulated as engagement toward inclusive citizenship. Big data and computational approaches are connected to the expressions of voice, albeit constituted within the ideological structures established by Department for International Development (DfID). Missing from the articulation of community voice are articulations of structures. The ideol-

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ogy of inclusive citizenship is driven by the goal of including citizens in the forms of engagement dictated by the structure, obfuscating the anchors to transforming structures. Moreover, such fetishized framing of technologically determined politics in the global South erases the strong social movements and activist organizing among subaltern communities that do not register on the digitally mediated platforms. The largely middle-class nature of digitally mediated movements, such as the anti-corruption movement in India remains erased from the discursive space and fails to critically interrogate the complicity of these movements with neoliberal governmentality. The questions—who has access to participatory spaces of technology, who is able to participate in these spaces, and what is the nature of the participatory change processes on technologically mediated platforms—are critical questions. For movements on the Left, the techno-fetish translates into the celebration of platforms at the cost of the erasure of the broader contexts, politics and structures that constitute organizing. That much of the movement organizing takes place in everyday communities and interactions, in forming and sustaining identities of resistance, in the coming together of subaltern communities in face-to-face interactions and communicative spaces outside of the logics of capital often escapes the Whiteness of the techno-obsessed Cyber-Left at global sites of technological privilege in the North (Wolfson, 2014). The techno-fetish unwittingly replicates the logics of the very modernization paradigm that lies at the crux of the neoliberal transformation of the globe, with an ideology that places capitalist technologies (yes, these technologies, including Twitter and Facebook, are the technologies of capital) as the solutions for resistance, contributing to expanding the markets for techno-capital. Furthermore, the Whiteness of the techno-fetish violently erases the voices, narratives, and everyday work across subaltern spaces in the global South where the violent project of techno-capital is being resisted, dismantled, and alternative logics are being put forth (Ness, 2016). Scholarship on networked movements, for instance, attends to the ways in which networks of information communication technologies catalyze change through the creation of opportunities of participation, recognition and representation, privileging the networks and simultaneously erasing the broader contexts of the protests, the organizing of the Left in streets and communities, the organizing work of traditional unions and Left ­parties, the demands for fair wage through traditional techniques of Left protest, such as strikes and walkouts and so on. Protests and activist move-

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ments thus enter seamlessly into the logics of planned social change interventions carried out by powerful transnational development agencies, foundations and corporations, often clandestinely (Obregon & Tufte, 2017). Protest politics emerges on a seamless continuum with neoliberal development communication and social change, converging on the centering of strategic communication (Obregon & Tufte, 2017). For United Nations agencies, Rockefeller Foundation and USAID, technologically mediated protests are incorporated into strategic communication for social change. Social change interventions embedded in this logic espouse the dissemination of technologies as mechanisms for democratizing public spheres and spaces of participation. In attending to the catalytic role played by technology in voicing and mobilizing social change, this body of work strategically obfuscates the role of technology promotion discourses in opening up new market opportunities for transnational technology and telecommunications corporations. 5.1.2  Technologies and Poverty The framework of information communication technology for development (ICT4D), positioned as the solution to challenges of global development through access to opportunities for information and participation, is constituted within the individualizing and market-driven logics of neoliberalism. The incorporation of the global poor into new digital technologies framed as empowerment generates new market opportunities for technology capital. The technologies for communication for development, on one hand, suggest market-based technologies as tools for delivering development through the enabling roles of technologies as instruments on empowerment and, on the other hand, build in new markets for global technology corporations, framed in the narrative of development. Education, healthcare, employment, entrepreneurial opportunities, new market access, empowerment, voice, democracy—these are all enabled by new technologies for development, with technologies serving as instruments for development. Consider, for instance, the UNESCO report on poverty and information communication technologies that discusses a wide range of projects on ICTs delivered to communities in poverty with the goal of ­empowering them. Here’s a summary of the depiction of technology in the lives of the poor, depicting the “Nimma Dhwani” program in India:

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Young people in particular expressed many aspirations other than employment and education, many of which can be summarized under the idea of empowerment. Young people feel they are growing up in a world where they expect to be literate (whereas many of their parents are not), to be knowledgeable and educated, to move beyond restrictive family and community norms in order to lead more autonomous lives, and to have a higher status within their communities. ICT centers fit these aspirations particularly closely, both because of the modern and prestige associations of media and new technologies and skills and because the ICT centers themselves tend to be perceived as free spaces in which people can develop autonomy and confidence.

Note here the juxtaposition of empowerment and technology; empowerment is framed as the consumption of technology, incorporating specific elements of community voice to frame the neoliberal narrative of technology. The framing of technology as seduction is constituted within an aspirational narrative of transformation, working alongside the overarching narrative of neoliberal aspirations in transforming India. The construction of the consumption of the technology itself, as empowerment, on one hand, reproduces the hegemonic techno-deterministic narrative of technologies of modernization and, on the other hand, incorporates the technology under the new narratives of empowerment and participation. Separated from questions of education and employment, which are critical to the context of poverty, the desire for the technology as a commodity that indicates status reproduces the neoliberal ideology. Rife with jingoisms of autonomy and freedom, the technology acquires under the UNESCO programs an emancipatory spirit, incorporating the “user” into the circuits of aspirational technology commodities. Moreover, the Nimma Dhwani program is a UNESCO-supported project carried out by the NGO MYRADA, which runs a wide range of poverty alleviation programs, such as micro-credit programs with women’s self-help groups and water management programs, including programs funded by the World Bank. The self-help program carried out by MYRADA reproduces the neoliberal logic through placing women’s economic participation within financial markets, constructing self-help as an instrument for generating new markets that are incorporated into capital. The neoliberal logic of self-help is well evident in the following statement by Ramesh Ramanathan, vice-chairman of Sanghamitra (an MFI promoted by MYRADA): “Today, microfinance is a market opportunity. It is

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no longer just about doing social good. We need to look at this as an industry.” What is salient here is the intersection of technology and corporatized civil society in the delivery of poverty alleviation precisely to create new opportunities for transnational capital, cultivating new sites of desire and aspiration. The technology of micro-credit organized women as market participants in self-help groups, which then form the basis of the technology-­based communication interventions. This link between the overarching neoliberal ideology and the technologies of empowerment is left erased in the articulation of techno-development, replete with voices and aspirations cast in the neoliberal ideology. Also worth noting is the celebration of community agency, albeit constituted within the overarching neoliberal framework of market participation. Projects of technology-enabled participation are constituted amid the neoliberal transformation of metropolitan sites in the global South as spaces of rapid capitalist accumulation through the transformation to digital and e-governance spaces (Benjamin, 2010). Projects such as e-­participation, e-deliberation and e-transactions, on one hand, create spaces of elite capture under the language of participation, and, at the same time, erase the participatory decision-making capacities of the poor in urban spaces through everyday politics. Projects of e-engagement, often funded and created by transnational information technology (IT) companies in metropolitan cities, often remove decision-making processes about land acquisition, for instance, from the contours of everyday politics where the poor participate, and, instead, through the displacement of decision-­making into digital spaces, secure power and control in the hands of the elites and middle classes. In doing so, IT sector-sponsored e-deliberation projects on land acquisition and building special economic zones fundamentally erase the participatory opportunity for the poor through the very language and framework of participation. Urban public funding, which historically used to be directed toward building welfare infrastructures for the poor residing in slums, has been channeled into public-private partnerships to attract capital and technology. This linkage between digital decision-making platforms and the erasure of the poor from these platforms is made by Benjamin (2007): The point here is the relationship between the activities of big business and especially IT, Bio-Tech in amassing land, and their influence on public policy. This point is reinforced when we consider the ‘urban’ version of Bhoomi. Promoted and implemented via the ‘E-Governments Foundation’, this

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foundation is funded by Nandan Nilekani the CEO of Infosys … The Elite’s Civic Reform 17 is GIS based land management system that digitizes land parcels and assigns a code used for property tax purposes. This is complemented by the effort to introduce ‘North American’ norms and styles of parcel addressing. Significantly the database is maintained by the EGovernments Foundation rather than with the State Government on an argument that the latter does not have the technical expertise. The CEO of the Foundation mentioned in a talk that this database is not kept at the local municipal body in case the elected body uses this for ‘regularization’ purposes. The essential feature here, like in the Bhoomi Program, is to reinforce the ‘marketable’ title of land, and when inter-linked to an electronic data base, can allow as the CEO mentioned: ‘To sit in New Jersey in the US, and via my laptop, check out a property in one of the towns in the outskirts of Bangalore.’ (pp. 16–17)

Technologies such as geographic information system (GIS) mapping and e-land management work as new tools of colonization that use the narrative of participation to carry out large-scale displacement, precisely to enable the mega-industrial parks. The public expenditure on these parks to attract capital is then turned into large infrastructure projects that are given away to technology-based transnational capital at very low rents, with water and electricity often supported by public expenditure. The example of lifestyling India’s metros that Benjamin offers depicts the techno-fetishist Singapore model that drove the rapid urban transformation in Bangalore. Accompanied by the “Singapore” fetish that catalyzed the large-scale displacement through digital participation, opportunities for investment and projects were created for a large array of private and state-own Singapore corporations in Bangalore. The notion that new communication technologies, such as the Internet will leapfrog development, ushering in new opportunities for liberty and economic growth, replicates the imperialist impulse of the dominant development paradigm, “derives from the 19th century’s idea that technological progress will ultimately free people from all natural and social constraints” (Alzouma, 2005, p. 351). Devoid of the social, political, economic and cultural contexts that constitute the challenges of development, the leapfrogging narrative paradoxically replicates Eurocentric ontological domination even as it frames the technology in culturalist language (Alzouma, 2005). Also, the technology-driven discourses of development often reflect the agendas of the professionalized, managerial domestic elites who stand to profit the most through technology-driven

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interventions funded by international development actors, and those who control the rewards attached to computer and Internet use. The turn of social change communication scholarship to technologies props up technologies as the catalysts for change, reestablishing as empowerment the very neoliberal ideology that is often the target of social change movements. Even when technology is incorporated into activist alliances and social movements, it is only a tool in the movement, constituted within the broader context of movement organizing processes, situated in the backdrop of the growing inequalities, impoverishment and marginalization brought about by techno-centered, market-based global governmentality (Dutta, 2013). While some movements at some points do indeed catalyze new communication technologies to network, build alliances and get the message out, at other points and other movements build their resistance work outside of the realms of technology, networking through offline spaces and through traditional structures of organizing. Face-to-face organizing through formalized structures that challenge neoliberal policies are backgrounded in network analyses of Twitter feeds and Facebook posts. For instance, in the techno-optimism Finally, the techno-­ optimistic narrative of technologies enabling unprecedented opportunities for global democracy and participation present an unempirical techno-­ optimist view of technologies and social change, while, at the same time, obfuscating the everyday processes of social change across communities in the global South that take place “outside of” and “in resistance” to the neoliberal expansion of technology. The strategic obfuscation of subaltern struggles across the globe against the very commoditizing processes that place profit-driving technologies as mediatizing instruments serves to reproduce the neoliberal agenda through technology-based market logics. 5.1.3  Technology as Networks of NGOs The ideology of the network forms the architecture of techno-­development as well as the imaginary of the Cyber-Left (see Wolfson, 2014). The theoretical construct of the network as horizontal connections between nodes of articulation offers the basis for the seamless movement between the spaces of Occupy and Tahrir Square on one hand, and the power ­structures of the United Nations (such as UNICEF), the neocolonial formations of USAID and DfID, the private foundations (such as Rockefeller and Gates Foundation) and private corporations (consider corporations that sponsor techno-mediated projects of social change). The nodes that connect these

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networks are the non-governmental organizations (NGOs), particularly the international NGOs (INGOs) and transnational NGOs (TNGOs). Networks thus bring to life the emancipatory power that is attributed to NGOs in bringing about social change. Close critical readings of these NGOs make visible their funding structures from within the sites of power in neoliberal governance, often with interpenetrating interests of corporate control. Non-governmental organizations form the infrastructure of the neoliberal transformation of the globe (Schuller, 2009). They offer career and market opportunities for the social change communication industry, moving in and out of networks of capital and creating opportunities for mobility for the bourgeois. The funding structures that support NGO networks are often embedded within the structures of neoliberal governmentality, deploying the languages of protest and movements to serve neocolonial expansion. In my ethnographic collaborations with indigenous communities in Jangalmahal in West Bengal in eastern India, I have listened to many such stories of co-optation of indigenous participation through networks of NGOs, embedded in power. In one instance, Santali community members depict the workings of a collaborative relationship between a local and a TNGO to deliver a women’s empowerment program that served as the façade for the theft of indigenous land. Here’s an account from my field notes: Anil had shared the story of an NGO from Switzerland that was funding a women’s empowerment program through a collaboration with a local leader, businessman, and goon. This local businessman had terrorized the community with his henchmen, and also formed his business on the smuggling of rice and food items meant for distribution through the public distribution system (PDS). When Anil shared this story with me, I wanted to learn more. So he brought me to meet members of the majhi marwa, the elders of the village. The elders shared how a group of White women and men had come, accompanying Mr. Sahoo and promised they would be building a women’s program, where women would be running their self-­ help groups. Mr. Sahoo wanted the common property land to develop the project, and the elders signed off the land. The empowerment project disappeared after two years, and the trips of the White men and women started dwindling. When I visited the site along with Anil, Mr. Sahoo had built a private school on the land.

The ideology of the network connecting the Swiss gender-based NGOs with projects of empowerment in indigenous communities in the global

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South are built on the movement of capital, incorporated into oppressive structures of land grab under the garb of women’s empowerment. The ideology of transnational networks of gender empowerment operates precisely through the expulsion of indigenous communities in the global South from their spaces and sources of livelihood. The imaginary of the network imposed from elite sites of power in the global North collaborate with corrupt structures of power in the global South, removed from the everyday experiences of the margins in the global South, to reproduce the structures of oppression and exploitation. The networked technology of NGOs works on the promise of delivering development from a distance, through expert knowledge at the global centers of capital, turning the local into the target audience or recipient of the social change communication effort. The language of networks offers frameworks of participation and engagement, mediated through NGO networks in carrying out top-down strategies of development that uphold the neoliberal order. Here’s an excerpt from my conversation with Dr. Ambar Basu on the industry of social change reflecting on my attendance of a Public Affairs conference (Dutta & Basu, 2018): Most participants in the forum are these MBA-consultant types, mostly trained at Ivy league U.S. institutions. These consultants are mostly my own kind, brown skin, dark hair, dark eye lashes, and with a British-imitating accent produced by the typical convent-educated education that is a signifier of this social class, my social class, an upwardly aspiring class of the middle and upper middle class in the global South. They are talking about micro-­ enterprises, micro-lending programs, bottom of the pyramid innovations and new technologies. To one of these groups collaborating with the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) to bring fortified rice to Bangladesh, I ask, “So have you traveled to Bangladesh? Are you conversant in Bengali?” I am met with blank looks, suggesting that the question I am asking is illogical. After all, why do these teams of experts, with knowledge of social marketing and social change, need to travel to Bangladesh to develop solutions for Bangladeshis? (p. 84)

The industry of public affairs communication for social change works through the generation of problem configurations for which commoditized solutions are then developed and disseminated. Based on my sharing of this experience, this is the conversation that ensued between Ambar and I:

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Ambar: You are suggesting that we, brown skin elite/professional classes are complicit in the production of subalternity? Mohan: This is a salient point, how we are complicit from our own class privileges in reproducing the margins. A perfect example of this is Mohammed Yunus, the Nobel peace laureate and his Grameen Bank, offering up a neoliberal imaginary of self-help, gender empowerment, and self-reliance, the perfect imagery for the World Economic Forum’s version of social change. Nowhere are the dissenting voices of the women who are harassed by debt collectors or who fall into the debt trap to be heard. In the postcolonial condition, the color of the new colonial manager/bureaucrat/professional is often Brown, located in transnational networks of global flows, trained in global elite Universities as part of an upwardly mobile social class within postcolonial spaces. Decolonizing C/communication is also then about interrogating the Brown spaces of class/colonial privilege we occupy as scholars/NGO workers/experts, trained in the vocabulary of and collaborating with our White masters, often using the narratives of culture, hybridity and postcoloniality. Our postcolonial engagements with projects of uplifting the subaltern margins are themselves colonial sites that constitute erasure and violence. (p. 84) The recognition that the ideology of networks that organizes NGOs is based on the neoliberal logics of funding offers openings for critical readings of techno-networked narratives of civil society. Technologies are placed in these networks as nodes of empowerment, projected as bringing about transformative possibilities. Yet, these technologies work in many instances as the very tools of expanding the reach of techno-capital. As a communicative inversion, the very language of emancipation is incorporated into the oppressive forces of networked techno-capital. Through the deployment of an emancipatory rhetoric, techno-capital seeks new markets for its expansion. 5.1.4  Technology as Culture One of the key strategies underlying the neoliberal co-optation of technology is the incorporation of technology into the realms of culture, community, and engagement. As we have noted earlier, funding of

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technology-based projects is often framed within a broader anchor of culture and community. Community engagement thus becomes a feature of the technology. Culture, equated as community, forms the anchor to various forms of engagement programs delivered through technology. The technology then is positioned as the platform for enabling culture, for the expressions of cultures, and for the management of difference. Culture as difference emerges into the technological imaginary as a resource to be managed through technologies. Articulations of identity are presented in the realm of technology, attending to technological spaces for expressions of culture. Technology in this sense becomes culture, conceptualized as the expression of culture. 5.1.5  Extraction as Development Technologies of large-scale extraction are positioned as the solutions to development, tied to the promise of generating growth (Dutta, 2015). Extractive technologies are paradoxically placed as the new frontiers of development, with TNCs in the extractive sectors often working with nation states under the umbrella of PPPs to carry out the extractive operations. Various forms of communicative inversions are created and reproduced to offer justification for the extractive industry. The mining TNC, Vedanta, for instance, draws upon the name of the Hindu sacred teachings to position itself as the solution to development through mining, pitching its mining operations targeting sacred land that belongs to indigenous communities experiencing chronic poverty as a pathway for development. Through a variety of strategic CSR programs, Vedanta positioned itself as a development actor, empowering communities in poverty, indigenous communities, and specifically girls and women. As part of its CSR, Vedanta created a “Save the girl” campaign with the Bollywood/Hollywood beauty ambassador Priyanka Chopra and partnered with the private television network NDTV.  Even as it pitched itself as a development actor, Vedanta fundamentally erased the participatory opportunities for decision-­ making among the Dongria Kondh through various forms of manipulative techniques and collaborating with the state in the deployment of violence. Critical questions, such as how is growth distributed, who profits from growth, who is erased because of the growth-driven framework of development remain erased. The large scale threats to the environment and to people’s livelihoods posed by the extractive industries are erased as seamless articulations of growth circulate promises of poverty alleviation.

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Consider for instance the narrative of mining development offered by transnational mining corporations. In these narratives of development, the displacement of the poor is framed as a natural aspect of helping the very poor through the creation of jobs and employment opportunities. The seduction of mining development lies precisely in its promise of development, to be achieved through the displacement of communities (often indigenous communities) residing in spaces where the extractions are planned. Initiatives of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and community building are often presented as the public relations tools of mining development, constructing a narrative of benefits brought about by extraction, while simultaneously obfuscating the erasure, violence and displacement that are written into mining development. Moreover, the extraction of mining development is intertwined with the global flows of profits and mining revenues in global networks, often moving unpaid taxes into global tax havens. The environmental costs and damages caused by the extractive industries often go unaccounted for, with environmental reports and audits being influenced. Similarly, bypassing environmental regulations, extractive industries often operate through multiple layers of shell corporations, moving their revenues across global boundaries, with limited accountability. Consider, for instance, the Singapore operations of the mining transnationals BHP Billiton and Rio Tinto that were being investigated by Australian tax authorities for tax avoidance by multinationals (Soh, 2016). Tax incentives offered by Singapore where Rio Tinto has said it pays a 5% tax on its Singapore operations compared to a corporate tax rate of 30% in Australia are key incentives for capital investment in Singapore. 5.1.6  Technologies of Tailoring New communication technologies gather large amounts of data from the digitization of a wide array of human behaviors, incorporating these data into the development of message tailoring systems. Tailoring works on the principle that the data gathered will offer powerful insights into human behavior, thus guiding the development of effective messaging techniques that are responsive to the gathered data. The industry of technology-­ driven tailoring operates on the ability to gather, categorize and use large amounts of data at an accelerated pace. The case of Cambridge Analytica that led to the US and global concern regarding the role of big data in deploying digital platforms for influenc-

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ing through the dissemination of fake news also points to the corporate and state actors that systematically participate in deploying digital platforms as tools of influence (Cadwalladr & Graham-Harrison, 2018). Also of relevance is the revolving door between academic experts, think tanks, data harvesting corporations, communication targeting (messaging) corporations, private interests, political interests and the police-military-­ defense structures of nation states (Cadwalladr & Graham-Harrison, 2018; Mullins & Nicas, 2017). Academics working with “big data” on audience profiling and effective messaging have been employed by a range of powerful actors, including defense, military, government and private corporations (see, for instance, Annalyn, Bos, Sigal, & Li, 2018; Matz, Kosinski, Nave, & Stillwell, 2017; as some examples of academics with various linkages with positions of power and utilizing the mypersonalitybased app that gathered the Facebook data). What is worth noting in the analysis of power is the convergence between the overarching strategy of harvesting big data on a large scale for mass persuasion based on audience segments that forms the basis of the digital manipulation techniques deployed by corporations such as Cambridge Analytica currently under scrutiny and the routinized techniques of manipulation through messaging that responds to big data profiling incorporated in behavioral insights, decision-making and influence utilized by governments across the globe (Cadwalladr & Graham-­ Harrison, 2018). Consider, for instance, the linkages between Aleksandr Kogan, the Cambridge academic involved in the digital influence work with Strategic Communication Laboratories (SCL), the parent company of Cambridge Analytica, and Michal Kosinski and David Stillwell at The Psychometrics Centre at Cambridge. Both Kosinski and Stillwell share their scholarship with various behavioral insights teams, behavioral influence centers, military and defense organizations in deploying the big data insights for persuasive influence (Matz et al., 2017). Kosinski, for instance, lists the Ministry of Defence, Singapore, Malaysian National R&D Centre in ICT, Kuala Lumpur, and Google LaunchPad, San Francisco, as some of the sites for his invited lectures (see his CV hosted at https://www. michalkosinski.com/curriculum-vitae). Kosinski and Stillwell are also ­collaborators with David Chan, the Singapore psychologist who heads the Behavioral Sciences Institute at Singapore Management University (SMU) in authoritarian Singapore. In other words, the techniques of strategic communication on digital platforms through the capturing of big data that are deployed in nudge

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interventions adopted by governments are the same techniques deployed by political forces seeking to influence elections, as evidenced in the examples of the US elections that led up to the victory of Trump and the Brexit vote (Jachimowicz, 2017). What is termed as the domain of undue influence through the dissemination of “fake news” in one instance is depicted as legitimate nudging based on behavioral insights. Take, for instance, the notion of voter suppression carried out by the Trump campaign (Green & Issenberg, 2016), based on the notion that behavioral insights were deployed to plan and circulate strategic information (in this case, identified as disinformation) to prevent Clinton voters from voting. The technique of nudging deployed here for voter suppression is the other side of the nudge techniques adopted by the Obama administration to boost voter turnout. 5.1.7  Nudge Economics Nudge economics, emerging from the tenets of behavioral economics, is the new entrant in the social change communication landscape (Thaler & Sunstein, 2008). Adopted in the US and UK amid the renewed commitment to neoliberalism in the aftermath of the financial crisis, nudge economics offered a new tool to policymakers and private industry, promising to generate behavioral insights on the basis of the harnessing of large-scale data, and in doing so, guide people to rational decisions. Driven by experimental designs, nudge economists point to the techniques of designing environments and stimuli that would steer citizens to making smart behavioral choices. Inherent in the framework of nudge is the turning of behavior into data to generate smart insights. The smart insights are controlled and interpreted by experts who then collaborate with policymakers to create nudging environments and stimuli. The “choice architecture” created by nudge planners are embedded in elite decision-making, without information on the architecture design available to communities. The power of the decision-maker constructs the choice architecture, which will apparently lead the subjects of the voice architecture to rational decisions. Nudge economics works through the harnessing of data to incorporate insights into human behavior into the design of solutions. Consider, for instance, the insights offered by behavioral economists on the cognitive capacity of the poor that offer the evidence that being poor leads to having limited cognitive capacities, and, therefore, limited ability to save (Mani, Mullainathan, Shafir, & Zhao, 2013). In the introduction to the article, the authors note: “A variety of studies point to a correlation between pov-

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erty and counterproductive behavior. The poor use less preventive health care (1), fail to adhere to drug regimens (2), are tardier and less likely to keep appointments (3, 4), are less productive workers (5), less attentive parents (6), and worse managers of their finances (7–9).” This turn to cognition in making sense of poverty and the choices of the poor then individualizes the solutions to poverty, incorporated into the design of solutions that work around this limited cognitive capacity of the poor. Solutions thus proposed keep structures intact while offering to address the problem of poverty. The article wraps up with the following suggestions for policymakers: This perspective has important policy implications. First, policy-makers should beware of imposing cognitive taxes on the poor just as they avoid monetary taxes on the poor. Filling out long forms, preparing for a lengthy interview, deciphering new rules, or responding to complex incentives all consume cognitive resources. Policy-makers rarely recognize these cognitive taxes; yet, our results suggest that they should focus on reducing them (11). Simple interventions (41) such as smart defaults (42), help filling forms out (43), planning prompts (44), or even reminders (45) may be particularly helpful to the poor. Policy-makers should further recognize and respond to natural variation in the same person’s cognitive capacity. Many programs that impose cognitive demand on farmers, for example, from HIV education to agricultural extension services (which provide farmers with information about new seeds, pesticides, and agricultural practices) should be carefully timed. At the very least, as our results suggest, they should be synchronized with the harvest cycle, with greater cognitive capacity available post-harvest. One recent study illustrated this with fertilizer. Farmers made higher-return investments when the decision was made right after harvest as compared with later in the season (46). The data suggest a rarely considered benefit to policies that reduce economic volatility: They are not merely contributing to economic stability—they are actually enabling greater cognitive resources. (p. 980)

Note the ways in which the proposed solutions keep the structures intact, with solutions for policymakers in nudging the existing solutions. Solutions such as simplifying interventions, smart defaults, planning prompts and reminders keep the overarching structures that constitute poverty intact. Poverty turned into a problem for national-global elites to work on leaves intact the underlying material and communicative inequalities that form the basis of poverty.

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The undemocratic nature of the nudge design processes, informed by expert economic planning rather than through the transparent availability of information and the accessibility of decision-making structures to the poor, enables policymakers and planners to carry out their planning by turning the poor into subjects under observation, as subjects of interventions by experts through the dissemination of expert knowledge. Also worth noting is the communicative inequality built into the concept of nudge, with experts holding the power to study, script, codify and create policies targeting the poor. The poor emerge, therefore, as targets of interventions, albeit couched in the language of keeping autonomy and choice intact. The appeal of nudge to authoritarian regimes from Singapore to the Modi regime in India is precisely situated in this power of nudge to shape and construct social change, with the tactics of nudging opaquely invisible from public view and deliberation. Rather than placing the evidence for the design and the relevant information in the public for public deliberation, nudge works precisely through techniques of making these strategies of control invisible, presented in the language of autonomy. Consider, for instance, the demonetization in India imposed by the right-wing Modi government. The implementation of demonetization was presented as an exemplar of design to nudge behavior, promoted as the catalyst for India’s transformation into a digital economy and the basis for addressing corruption. The authoritarian implementation of the intervention led to large-scale disenfranchisement of the poor, weakened the access of the poor to basic infrastructures, such as health, which, in turn, resulted in deaths, and had a negative impact on India’s large informal economy. That demonetization failed as an experiment is tied to the arrogance that behavioral insights offer to policy-makers, equipped with teams of consultants and other experts. The lack of accountability and democratic participation also translates into the perpetuation of the ideology of behaviorism. Moreover, the opaque nature of the implementation of demonetization also underlies criticisms of the deployment of ­demonetization as a strategy for enriching capitalist interests aligned with the ruling elite (Himanshu, 2016). The arrogance of nudging is often based on science that has limited external validity, unable to take into account the wide range of factors that change in people’s everyday lives. For instance, conclusions on behavioral insights are generated through controlled experiments that manipulate a certain condition while keeping everything else constant. The everyday reality of life, however, does not lend itself to variables that may be con-

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trolled. Similarly, the kinds of outcomes measured to test the cognitive capacity of participants or their decision-making are framed by expert researchers. Yet, the implementation of nudge solutions extends beyond the limited experiments to making large-scale population-level interventions, failing to account for the everyday contexts of negotiations. 5.1.8  Technologies of Human Biology The development future projected in techno-utopian discourse is one where artificial intelligence (more on this later) meets with human biology to produce an advanced human race. The evolution of the human species is constituted in its amalgamation with artificial super-intelligence, contributing to the ability of the human spirit to transcend the animal condition and become immortal. The future of the human race is thus imagined into the incorporation of computational capacity into human evolution, resulting in the evolved human species of the future. The pursuit of computational power in the context of evolution is seen as producing states of immortality of a certain class of transhumans, who endowed with the super-intelligence, rule over others. The Whiteness of the Silicon Valley and the techno-libertarians makes evident the racist ideology underlying the technological imaginaries of transhumanism, seeking to produce a more intelligent, evolved human category that is superior to and, therefore, rules over the rest. At the forefront of technologies of transhumanism are corporations such as Ambrosia Medical that inject customers with the blood plasma of young adults with the promise of extending life (Haynes, 2017). Ambrosia offers transfusions of human plasma harvested from young adults over two days at 1.5 liters each time (the operations of Ambrosia have been brought to a halt with a new Food and Drug Administration (FDA) warning issued in 2019; At the time of writing this update, the website https://www. ambrosiaplasma.com/ is no longer active). According to the 2017 report in The Guardian, plasma costs $8000 per transfusion and is primarily offered to a Silicon Valley customer base with a median age of 60. Technologies such as cryopreservation form the frontiers of life extension research. Saul Kent, the multi-millionaire founder of the Life Extension Foundation, seeded the idea of Timeship as a center for not only cryopreserving human bodies but also as a space for housing the technologies, human capital, and resources for life extension research. Here’s the mission statement from the Timeship webpage:

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Timeship’s mission: to conquer ageing and eventually death. Timeship will also be a scientific think tank and the world’s center for the cryopreservation of the DNA of endangered species; human DNA, stem cells, and tissue samples for medical research; organs for transplant; and human patients traveling to the future. (http://www.timeship.org/timeship.html)

These innovations in expensive, life-extending technologies of health and wellbeing are situated in the backdrop of large-scale disparities at local, national and global levels in access to the basic forms of health care. The techno-fix proposed in the futuristic technologies of human biology, on one hand, obfuscate the very inequalities in access to basic health care and, on the other hand, exacerbate these inequities through the reproduction of a eugenicist worldview anchored in the notion of the superiority of a specific group of human beings. Furthermore, these inequities in material access to technologies of health and wellbeing (including who deserves to be preserved for the future) are predicated on communicative inequalities in distributions of infrastructures for voice. 5.1.9  Technologies for Climate Change New technologies form the frontiers of climate change solutions (Whyte, 2017). The technologies are packaged as solutions to the problem of anthropogenic climate change, with foundations, development agencies and academia investing in these techno-solutions. At the frontier of this techno-utopianism is the faith in the power of a technology fix in reversing the adverse effects of climate change. Worth noting in this techno-­seduction is the very communicative inversion of the role of technology and accelerated capitalist forms of techno-extractions at the heart of climate change. The existing capitalist structure and relationship of profiteering through control over nature is left intact. That minerals extracted through exploitative and oppressive labor practices form the architecture of the technology revolution offered as a fix is strategically erased from the discursive space (Taffel, 2015). The adverse environmental and labor impacts of extraction to feed the technology industries are left outside of the discursive space. Moreover, the questions about inequalities built into techno-solutions to climate change, including racialized and classed inequalities in access to climate change, remain uninterrogated. In the midst of water shortages that are being experienced across the globe, these inequalities become visible, only as signals to the large-scale inequalities that are on the horizons,

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further entrenched by the capitalist model of climate change solutions. Consider similarly amid the global food shortages the ways in which the turn to the techno-cooption of indigenous crops and farming forms the basis for new colonialisms in climate adaptive agriculture. The university has been reworked into an instrument for the reproduction of the ideology of techno-fixing, where technology, removed from its political and economic contexts, is positioned as the “fix” to the problem of climate change (Rhodes, Wright, & Pullen, 2018). State-funded grants, positioned to incentivize industry under the ideology of public-private partnerships, which then are propped up as solutions to climate change. Sponsorships of culture industries, cultural performances, and digital cultural installations to draw attention to the crisis of climate change are constituted within and reproduce the ideology of transnational capital (Maxwell & Miller, 2017). Consider, for instance, the funding of digital projects that are positioned as techno-anchors to climate change. The project, titled “Spatial Dialogues: Public Art and Climate Change,” is a collaboration between a University with private corporations, Fairfax and Grollo, and funded by the Australian Research Council linkage grant (http://spatialdialogues.net/). The linkage grants connect universities to private capital, in this instance, constructing the relationship under the communicative construction of dialogue, public art and climate change. The website of the project has the brand names of RMIT University, Fairfax Media and Grocon at the bottom. Fairfax Media is the largest listed media business in Australia, with a range of multi-platform assets all the way from print and television to video on demand and digital. Grocon is a privately owned development, construction and real estate company. The resulting cultural artifacts draw attention to the problem of climate change by combining digital (video and sound art) with installations, sculptures and performance, materialized on large screens, bringing in ­artists from across the Asia-Pacific. The convergence of screens, digital artifacts, cables and digital equipment to project the impact of climate change in urban spaces obfuscates the energy and raw materials that go into such digital productions, as well as the wastes they generate (Miller, 2017). Moreover, the incorporation of private techno-capital into the production of digital cultural objects designed to draw attention to climate change communicatively inverts techno-capital as the solution to climate change. In Greenwashing culture, Toby Miller (2017) documents the energy, raw materials and wastes that form the input-output mechanisms underlying

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the digital industries. Digital networks are supported by energy grids, which often are sustained by coal-fired power. Wireless connectivity consumes up to 90% of the energy consumed by mobile telecommunication networks. The large-scale attacks on the environment by digital technologies, networks, clouds, and data are communicatively inverted through strategic communication interventions. Critical in these communicative inversions is the role of academia in seeding and circulating vacuous ideas under new clusters, funding aggregators and knowledge hubs. That the knowledge generated is in the service of global capital is hidden by the PR—speak pitching climate change solutions, smart cities and new digital frontiers. The techno-utopian vision of climate change solution leaves the underlying capitalist structure and its extractive culture intact. Erased from the discursive space are the very extractive relationships and threats to the environment implicit in the new modes of technological production. That the so-called clean technologies that are projected as solutions are themselves based on extractive relationships that threaten nature and ecosystems is erased from the discursive space. Similarly erased are the displacements, erasures, violence and labor exploitation that are built into the production of new technologies for addressing climate change. The new technologies cover up the indigenous communities that are displaced on an ongoing basis from their livelihoods to fuel the extractive technologies that serve these industries. Noting the catalytic forms of colonialism that are brought about by anthropogenic climate change, notes Whyte (2017): Colonially-induced environmental changes altered the ecological conditions that supported Indigenous peoples’ cultures, health, economies, and political self-determination. While Indigenous peoples, as any society, have long histories of adapting to change, colonialism caused changes at such a rapid pace that many Indigenous peoples became vulnerable to harms, from health problems related to new diets to erosion of their cultures to the destruction of Indigenous diplomacy, to which they were not as susceptible prior to colonization. Indigenous peoples often understand their vulnerability to climate change as an intensification of colonially-induced environmental changes. (p. 154)

The reading of anthropogenic climate change from an indigenous worldview de-centers and dismantles the technology-driven framework of climate change solution. Noting the deep inequalities and unequal burdens

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of climate change borne by indigenous communities becomes the basis for articulating an indigenous worldview of climate change solutions (more on this in the section on the culture-centered approach (CCA)). The placing of indigenous worldviews at the centers of climate change conversations often foregrounds the roles of techno-capital as the very underlying threads that cause climate change, instead pointing toward the urgency of developing infrastructures for voice grounded in communicative equality. Even as the margins in the South experiencing climate change start going under water, these infrastructures for voice offer the basis for radical activism that fundamentally dismantles the capitalist greed underlying climate change.

5.2   Digital Frontiers of Technology Technology constitutes the new frontier of development, ironically circulating the old tropes of techno-determinism narrated in the story of the digital. The appeals of big data, data-based planning, data-based mapping, intelligent planning, and smart cities are embedded in the promise of the digital as a site for transforming the landscape of development. The digital is seen as an opportunity for the efficient and effective planning of development spaces, incorporating the unruly, distant, and hard-to-manage sites of underdevelopment and dispossession into the global networks of financial capital. Digital connections form the basis of financialization, the  flow of financial transactions in networks that commoditize a wide array of everyday resources, turning them into privatized objects. Through the digital frontiers, technological fixes are offered to the problems of underdevelopment. 5.2.1  Digital Technologies of Development Digital technologies form the infrastructures of development planning and implementation. Often, the digitization of participation, governance, services and programs forms the very basis of the promise of development. A wide range of digital programs, offered under the umbrella of digital democracy, e-engagement and e-participation are offered as solutions to development, projected as addressing the gaps in the delivery of development services and solutions. Government programs and governance is placed on digital platforms, often under narratives of greater efficiency, effectiveness, and pace of delivery of solutions. The digital emerges as a site for the pedagogy of the citizen into active citizenship, constituted in

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the forms of participation desired by the state for its effective functioning. Worth highlighting in this framing of democracy is the role of technology in disciplining participation within the agendas of hegemonic structures. The digital mapping and incorporation of the citizen form the basis of the digital citizenship initiatives across the globe. Subjecthood, tied to citizenship, is increasingly consolidated in the hands of fascist majoritarian forces that deploy the trope of citizenship to disenfranchise large numbers of citizens. Consider, for instance, India’s universal identity card, named as the Aadhaar card, that has been constructed and put forth as the marker of citizenship, constructed as the basis for the access of individuals, families, and communities to resources, welfare and state services. The digital technologies of the project mark and reproduce the inequalities of digital access, working through the circuits of public-private structures to include and exclude subjects. Bodies that deviate from the normative necessities of the digital identification project, with fingerprints that don’t lend themselves to the technologies of capturing. For instance, with digital fingerprinting, toiling bodies of workers that labor through the hand don’t lend themselves to being captured by the digitizing technology. New digital innovations, such as virtual reality simulations, are framed in the language of development, while fundamentally enabling the reach of transnational capital. Consider, for instance, the large-scale virtual reality innovations being experimented with by the Asia-Pacific mining giants Rio Tinto and BHP Billiton. In their offices for the Asia-Pacific located in Singapore, the mining corporations are launching new virtual reality simulations that model their large-scale industry operations at mining sites. The extractive power of mining is copied from the material sites of extraction to digital spaces, enabling simulation, planning, and forecasting. The mining giant BHP Billiton launched digitalization in its Singapore office as a way for moving trade-related documents, whether in shipping or trade finance, to digital platforms. The promise of digitalization is positioned as a solution to paper movements and errors, coordinating between various customers and financial institutions. The language of building transparency, efficiency, and improved governance serve as the basis of digital development. Digital solutions, such as the internet of things (IoT), are incorporated into the behavior change agendas of hegemonic development, articulated in the language of public-private partnerships. Through PPPs, investments into digital technologies are positioned as opportunities for bringing about development, automated through machines installed at global sites of development in the South. The placing of hardware for gathering data into the everyday lives of the poor in the global South offers the gateway

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for data gathering, gathering and consolidating large amounts of data from the global South to be incorporated into the networks of knowledge production, intervention development, evaluation and profiteering in the global North. The IXO Foundation leverages this market for techno-­ solutions to development, positioning itself as a digital platform for s­ olving challenges of sustainability. The white paper published by the foundation introduces the term “impact economy” and argues: The Impact Economy is valued at trillions of dollars annually. The problem is there is no good data to back up this claim. However, all recent analyses confirm growing trends in capital flowing towards addressing the world’s greatest social, environmental and economic sustainability challenges. These challenges are increasingly seen as opportunities to open up new markets and to generate new forms of economy—for instance, based on renewable energy using sustainable, exponential technologies. Investment portfolios with higher environmental, social and governance (ESG) ratings have shown to outperform other investments. For the allocators of large, long-term capital, including sovereign wealth and government pension funds, the question is not whether they can afford to invest responsibly, but rather if they can afford not to? Ordinary people also want to make a difference. A 2017 survey by Morgan Stanley revealed that millennials are leading the sustainable investing charge, with 86% believing that their investment decisions can make an impact. In this paper, we refer to all investments and funding that have sustainability and social considerations, as Impact Investments.

Sustainability is turned into an investment opportunity, with the digital data-based solutions provided by IOX as the basis for driving intelligent and profitable business decisions. Sustainability is constituted in its relationship to profit and investment effectiveness, with the work of data being one of guiding development, shaping development solutions, predicting development outcomes, and measuring the effectiveness of development investments. The language of “impact” is configured within the broader agendas of neoliberal governance. The document goes on to note: All impact investments need verified impact data, to prove that value has been delivered, to get evidence for results and to improve how impacts are achieved. Verified impact data should also increase accountability and reduce inequalities and injustices by ensuring that the right goods and services are delivered to the right beneficiaries. The Impact Economy is primarily driven by economic exchanges of financial capital for impact data. Impact Investors

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pay for impact data. Higher-quality, verified impact data should therefore be more valuable. In many cases, impact data exchanges also yield rich information that can be used for other purposes, such as business intelligence, impact results management and investment analytics. The secondary marketplace for big impact datasets provides largely untapped opportunities. (pp. 3–4)

The realm of digital technology offers market solutions for turning development into a site of profiteering. The impact economy circulates impact data that can be financialized, turned into investment intelligence and decision-making. Data on development behaviors, thus privatized, offer new market opportunities for profiteering. Development emerges as a site for generating untapped opportunities for data capitalism, supporting extractive opportunities for business intelligence, results management and investment analytics. Intrinsic to this network of data colonialism is the construction of development as the basis of the market for privatization. The need in the global South, layered over images of brown and black bodies, forms the basis of an entire industry of data analytics and digital innovations, built on the turning of the bodies and behaviors of individuals, households and communities in the global South into data. 5.2.2  Digital Exclusions Although digital solutions are positioned as the catalysts of inclusive development, inherent in their formulation is the raced, classed, gendered ideology of privatization. The language of inclusivity is paired with economic growth, with the premise that inclusivity is mediatized through digital platforms. Such a seamless narrative of digitally mediated inclusivity systematically erases the racialized, gendered, classed that are built into the technologies (Noble, 2018). Noble (2018) depicts the ways in which algorithms reflect racialized logics, perpetuating marginalization through their practices of constructing racialized stereotypes. Search engines, for instance, embody racist ideologies, perpetuating communicative practices of marginalization through the circulation of stereotypes. Through her analysis of Google’s search engine, Noble depicts the racist infrastructure that makes up the algorithms, calling them “algorithms of oppression.” The prejudice that are built into the search engines as platforms then reflect the raced structures that constitute inequalities, and, in turn, shape the domains of information on race. The logics of Whiteness underlying the formations of digital technologies constitute the infrastructures of

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information, data and, therefore, knowledge. The recognition that data are not neutral and are, instead, constituted within raced structures disrupts the techno-deterministic fetish with technologies as catalysts for inclusion. Similarly, in the context of India, digital infrastructures reproduce the communicative spaces of hate targeting dalits (those marked as lower caste) and Muslims (George, 2016). This work of targeting takes place through the active placing of hate, funded by capital. The digital Islamophobia industry in the US and Europe generates profits through this reproduction of hate, catalyzing a politics of exclusion both online and offline. The online emerges as a communicative resource for exclusions offline, mobilizing mobs to actively exclude minorities. 5.2.3  Digital Extraction and Exploitation Digital industries, rhetorically sold as solutions to sustainable futures, are built on material infrastructures that are fundamentally extractive and exploitative (Qiu, 2017). These extractive structures work through the expulsion of the subaltern from their spaces of livelihoods, forced into labor on the mines where digital minerals are produced. Similarly, digital technologies, such as the iPhone, communicatively inverted as clean technologies, are produced through the ongoing exploitation of labor, creating working conditions under surveillance that are fundamental threats to health and wellbeing. Similarly, data centers, network infrastructures and cables are built on exploitative labor conditions, with migrant and refugee workers often working to build these infrastructures at low wages, without health protections. Recognizing these communicative inequalities that serve as the basis for the exploitations anchors communication for social change that turns toward listening to the voices of workers at the margins of digital economies, foregrounding the exploitations that form the infrastructures of digital economies. The presence of voices offers transformative openings for collective organizing. 5.2.4  Smart Cities Another techno-deterministic solution put forth in the context of contemporary postcolonial development is the concept of the smart city, portrayed as the solution to the problems of traditional development and simultaneously as the new frontier of development. The discursive construction of “smart” offers intelligent and effective solutions, pitched as

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ways of solving the problems created by the traditional forms of development. The imaginary of the “smart city” is captured in the reproduction of the “Singapore model” of development as it moves across spaces globally and, specifically, across spaces in the global South. The cultivation of brand Singapore is a mobilizing device for urban restructuring and privatization, constructing resources in the framework of the capitalist state. The state, formulated as an instrument for attracting capital, works on the smart city as an efficient and investment-friendly space for the movement of financial capital, information technologies and commodities. The infrastructure of the smart city thus is organized around its positioning as a node in the flow of financial and technology capital. Images of sustainability and green economy are superimposed on the smart city to narrate specific forms of market logics. Technology is positioned as the vehicle for enabling sustaining futures, with the individual citizen participating as a smart consumer of green products. The mechanism of the market delivers individualized solutions that enable sustainable livelihoods. The consumption of sustainable livelihoods and eco-friendly spaces is thus a seduction of the smart city, constituted through the large-­ scale colonization of farmlands, forests, and rural spaces. The d ­ isplacements produced by smart cities through their digital technologies of land acquisition form the bases of the infrastructure projects that inundate smart cities. In this sense, “smart” development is development 3.0, having leapfrogged the problems with traditional development and its upgrade to communication technologies. The digital enables the development model of postcolonial utopia to address all the challenges typically associated with development, from climate change to resource accumulation. Smart cities are efficient and sustainable, with digital technologies forming the basic infrastructure of the cities, thus enabling smart planning. Technology works as a mechanism for monitoring and streamlining data and shaping decision-making. From Singapore to India to China, the smart city is propped up as the technology-based solution to problems of climate change, inequality, and rapid urbanization across the globe. Salient to the smart cities narrative is the superimposition of the cultural. Culturalist accounts of the nation, placed alongside the smart transformation, enable the return to hegemonic concepts of the civilization incorporated into a burgeoning xenophobic nationalism catalyzed by digital platforms. The seduction of the digital is also the nostalgia of the past, representing a golden past that is captured through digital spaces and reworked into renewed aspirations for the future. Digital simulations of

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the past incorporate it into the futuristic planning of smart lifestyles. Once the lives and livelihoods that are rendered as the past can be digitally captured, they are simulated into the virtual simulations of the future. In various parts of Asia, Smart City (SC) projects are built on the premise of a returning Asian glory; the Asian SC is an ode to the Asian century. Narratives of decolonization superficially projected on the SC depict urban futures outside of the West, uncritically reproducing the very Western techno-fetishism that forms the infrastructure of neoliberal capital (see, for instance, the framing of decolonization in Kong’s (2018) articulation of the ideology of the smart city in the Urban Studies Annual Lecture 2017, hosted on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= SVTaChMuZKs). In Kong’s articulation of a decolonizing framework of the SC, uprooted from its anti-colonial roots, and empty in its materiality, the decolonized city is communicatively inverted into the handmaiden of global data-capital, and in the example of Singapore (Tan, 2012), authoritarian control that creates the stability and market conditions for global data-capital to thrive. The SC promise is built on empty rhetoric, strategically weaved together as a collection of futuristic images, narrative accounts and advertising slogans (with each city wrapping itself up in futuristic taglines, vying for the SC tag), folded into simulations that seek ever-new sources of capital. The symbols that float through the simulations are devoid of materiality and yet are the anchors to seducing capital in the form of investments. In these seductive appeals to investors, mediators, and consumers (primarily in real estate projects), SC technologies of the future neatly fold into participatory democracy and sustainable systems. The investment opportunities for capital are built on speculated simulations, projected as promises into a future, written over erased (and actively involved in the erasure of) presents (such as in the active and violent work of expelling subaltern communities from their spaces of livelihoods that are turned into the sites of SC projects). The futuristic premise of smart cities sells rhetorical constructions of continuous innovations, themselves often based on the premise of iterative and cyclical learning through feedback mechanisms; intelligent machines that learn from the data they process build continually progressive simulations. Smart cities are constructed as intelligent because they operate on data loops, assimilating, filtering and interpreting big data to offer ongoing innovations. Underneath the advertising that is often uncritically reproduced in the literature, there is often little substance to what actually is being delivered as smart. This hype is reflected in the academic literature as well, often coming out of think tanks, state-­

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sponsored advisory groups, and projects funded through public-private partnerships, propping up the propaganda of the SC (see, for instance, Kong & Woods, 2018). Consider, for instance, the paradox in what is offered as a critical application by Kong and Woods that puts forth a “fourth space” that they claim is emancipatory, enabling equitable access and rebalancing power, a template of what they call “smart urbanism” based on the pillars of “digital space, data are/and power, and participatory governance” (p.  681). Ironically, this so-called fourth space packaged as “critical” and “decolonizing” is deployed to sell the SC propaganda packaged by the authoritarian regime of Singapore: When implemented for the benefit of all, digital technologies and the data they produce can lead to co-constructed urban spaces and, ultimately, more participatory—or decolonised—forms of urban governance. Thus, whilst smart urbanism has been criticised for providing a ‘powerful tool for the production of docile subjects and mechanisms of political manipulation’ (Vanolo, 2014: 883), fourthspace recognises the emancipatory potential of digital technologies, and correlates political power and governance with the degree of voluntary engagement with the project of urban inclusiveness. This is recognised in Singapore, where Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong noted in 2014 that, whilst the government was responsible for creating a ‘smart’ framework and infrastructure for citizens to contribute to, ‘the participation of the whole nation is vital to make Singapore an outstanding city in the world to live, work and play’ (cited in Housing and Development Board, 2016). (p. 697)

The celebratory rhetoric of emancipation, digital participation and engagement in the “fourth space” erasure conveniently the various techniques of repression used by the Singapore government to control and silence digital dissent. That the smart framework so proposed on the basis of participatory government is constituted amid ongoing curtailment of freedom of speech and freedom of assembly in Singapore is erased. Kong and Woods then go on to offer examples of the technology-based engagement of the aging population in Singapore in the context of smart futures, oblivious to the significant and entrenched challenges of aging, the inequalities experienced by the elderly and the underlying structures that produce and sustain this inequality. When read against the grain of the actual spaces of participation and democracy, the SC narrative obfuscates techniques of repression that form its hidden infrastructures. Certainly salient are the ongoing displacements

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and expulsions of rural subaltern populations to make space for SC. That SC don’t automatically emerge in a vacuum is a reality that is often erased in the simulations that seem to work on empty palettes. Across various parts of Asia, including India and globally, protests among subaltern communities in the backdrop of the SC project to be rolled out is a salient feature. Take the example of the SC Dholera, projected on the Indian discursive imaginary as a frontier of development (Datta, 2015). In the context of the actual smart city projects, subaltern resistance forms the basis of reclaiming space, for challenging the SC rhetoric, and for challenging the very basis of SC implementation. The Dholera SC project is a site of contestation, with ongoing and sustained resistance put up by farming communities residing in the region against the grabbing of their land. Under the umbrella of the Jameen Adhikar Andolan Gujarat (JAAG) or Land Rights Movement Gujarat, farming communities have organized to protest the land grab, foregrounding their imaginaries of sustainable livelihoods. Their notion of sustainable livelihood, tied to subsistence farming that sustains them, is paradoxically under threat by the SC project that offers the seductions of sustainability and ecological balance. Through protests, placards, posters, and marches, the farmers resist the land acquisition. They attend, in large numbers, the environmental impact assessments that are nationally mandated, ensuring their voices are heard. The new and accelerated legal structures that were introduced in Gujarat to fast-track land acquisition, bypassing the national policy framework on land acquisition, are now being scaled up for implementation nationally. The organizing of farmer and community protests against the SC project is also a model for resistance to be scaled up, as a model of solidarity and resistance. These spaces of resistance, rather than sidebars to be erased by a monolithic and accelerating discourse, offer important anchors for counter-­imaginaries. The ideology that technological fixes would offer anti-dotes to neoliberalism is disrupted through subaltern organizing that foregrounds the capitalist organizing of new communication technologies. 5.2.5  Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the Fourth Industrial Revolution The projection of artificial intelligence (AI) on the global landscape of development as the next stage of development interventionism foregrounds the capacity of new digital technologies to transform economies through automation (World Economic Forum, 2019). The rhetorical

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construction of the introduction of AI as the fourth industrial revolution has shaped the policy environment of nation states globally, capturing the imagination of the global elites and offering a narrative for both resource consolidation as well as the deployment of accelerated techno-­deterministic solutions to a plethora of global problems that are paradoxically the very product of accelerated techno-capitalism. The artificial intelligence (AI) technology, positioned as the solution to poverty and sustainability, forms the basis of futuristic conversations on development in 2020. Consider, for instance, the report, Data collaboration for the common good, published by the World Economic Forum (2019), produced in collaboration with McKinsey and Company. In its opening, the report posits: As we look at the diversity across the many stakeholders of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, three core and interdisciplinary concepts about what we want our future digital environment to look like emerge. Our digital future must be inclusive, trustworthy and sustainable … there is now abundant evidence that public-private data collaboration can deliver a measurable impact. The results can be seen in faster decision-making during natural disasters and disease outbreaks, better insights on addressing the complex challenges related to poverty, health and employment and more precise indicators to measure the achievement of the sustainable development goals (SDGs). (p. 5)

The claim to public-private collaboration is anchored in the vacuous claim about the role of data in generating measurable impact. How exactly can data generate impact remains obfuscated in the document, inviting readers into the belief that data and impact are connected, mediated through metrics. The very notion of impact is placed under the ideology of measurement, and, yet, the rest of the report offers no evidence for what impact means in the context of the struggles among the margins. The vacuous claims about sustainability and inclusiveness are situated amid the key problem tackled by the World Economic Forum (WEF) and the ideology driving its actual existence, the climate of trust deficit that is emerging as the most significant challenge for transnational capital. This role of the WEF as a mouthpiece of private interests is further evident here: … corporations are not just gaining a commercial edge through collaborations—they’re also supporting the common good. Already, businesses across sectors have entered collaborations aimed at improving disaster relief, driv-

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ing economic development in emerging markets and increasing public health. While these partnerships have delivered impressive gains, they could benefit further from more consistent engagement with the public sector. There have been several successful collaborations involving government agencies but nowhere near the volume needed to unlock the full value these partnerships could represent. The powerful combination of public- and private-sector data could help resolve some of the most pressing and long-­ standing social issues, including the problems that the UN’s SDGs are designed to tackle. (p. 6)

Note in the excerpt the formulation of the common good as a public relations tool for whitewashing transnational capital. The celebration of the business sectors in improving disaster relief, driving economic development in emerging markets, and improving public health serves as the basis for the call to further privatization through data capitalism. Data are offered as the basis for the privatization of what ought to be public development solutions, thus turning development into the ambits of privatized profiteering through the harnessing, commoditization, and marketing of data. The pressing and long-standing social issues, including the core areas identified in the SDGs, form the landscape on which the markets for profiteering are projected, communicatively inverting the very nature of the challenges that are embedded largely in unfettered neoliberal capitalism. A variety of artificially intelligent solutions from cloud computing to the internet of things (IoT) to blockchain are put forth as the digital frontiers of development. Placing these new digital technologies in the context of development creates new market opportunities, with new AI products being sold as innovations to respond to the development market. From states to NGOs to the United Nations to hegemonic development agencies, various sources of funding AI development are tied to opportunities for private capital. Large-scale development actors, for instance, put in seed funding for public-private partnerships for AI development solutions, from the design and delivery of solutions to the evaluation of impact. In this landscape, the SDGs and the impetus on measuring impact create new market opportunities for profiteering. For instance, IXO Foundation has developed the Amply DApp, a blockchain for measuring and tracking impact on projects in the global South for those investing in the UN’s SDGs. Development impact bonds and social impact bonds are created for investors to track the outcomes generated by their investments, financializing social impact through its incorporation into the ambits of digital technology.

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Consider similarly, Nexleaf Analytics, a digital platform that promises to deliver impactful measures of sustainable development through AI. The funding structure of Newleaf is generated by Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, World Bank, Google, Singularity University, Cisco Foundation, Path, Vodafone, and a number of national governments. Positioning itself as a data provider for measuring the impact of health, environment and other development projects, Newleaf places digital sensors in development contexts amid development projects, connects these sensors to cloud infrastructures, generates visualizable data and feeds these data into development planners, practitioners, evaluators and investors. One such Newleaf Analytics innovation is the Stovetrace monitoring system that is driven by cloud computing, gathering data on stove uses in the global South and connecting the data to credits, with rural women in the global South receiving cash payments for their measured uses of improved cookstoves and carbon mitigation. While placing the onus of climate mitigation on women experiencing poverty in the global South through behavior modification, the technology of Newleaf leaves intact the large-­ scale threat to climate change that originates from the practices of profiteering located in the global North. It leaves intact the carbon footprints generated by the funders of the technology, in turn upholding the ideology of techno-capital while turning the livelihoods and everyday behaviors of communities in the global South as sources of data. As a fundamental communicative inversion, the mapping and evaluating of cookstove use among women in the global South is delivered by the technology of the cloud, by equipment and data, which use large amounts of energy, at scales exponentially larger than the energy used in home cooking in the global South. Programs such as digital training and reskilling the workforce foreground state-driven strategies for preparing for the AI transformation. The hegemony of AI solutions obfuscates the vitality of critical interrogations that attend to the ownership of the AI technologies, the profits attached to the deployment of AI technologies and the policy approaches that are needed to address labor rights and labor ownership within the context of AI. The formulation of strategies for preparing a digitally enabled workforce leaves intact the underlying questions of power inequalities, ownership, and distribution of resources. The turning of lived experiences, livelihoods, everyday struggles, and knowledge in the global South into data, captured as binaries in the digital circuits of investment and financial-

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ization, constitutes a new form of data colonialism. Particularly salient in the context of artificial intelligence development is the politics of big data, attending to the ways in which data are mined and gathered, raising questions of: Who gathers the data? Whose data are gathered? How are the data incorporated into the neoliberal structures of global profiteering? AI in the context of work is discussed in terms of workless futures, projected in utopian discourses as freeing up creative human capacities (Dinerstein & Pitts, 2018). The articulation of automation as a solution from the Left, noting the oppressive nature of work, fails to critically interrogate the patterns of ownership of the technologies of automation. To the extent that the organizing structures of technologies reflect the interests of the capitalist class, technologies will continue to serve the logics of extraction, exploitation and oppression, further entrenching the inequalities in society. The world without work imagined for the future is one controlled by artificially intelligent machines in the service of capital (Srnicek & Williams, 2015). These technologies, deeply embedded within accelerated capitalist structures of profiteering and resource extraction, further consolidate the power of capital. Also note in the techno-­ deterministic construction of a socialist future is the systematic erasure of the displacements, expulsions and oppressions of indigenous communities from land and resources that form the infrastructures of the technologies. The Whiteness of the ideology of an automated future works through the erasure of indigenous experiences, indigenous organizing and the ecological disasters brought on by the AI technologies. Moreover, without changes in the patterns of ownership of the technologies, AI technologies as technologies of accelerated capital are likely to work further to consolidate the wealth and power of the capitalist classes that own and deploy the AI innovations. AI technologies, rather than eliminate work, are likely to create conditions of work that are increasingly more precarious, with the flexibility of movement of workforces across digital locations. Rather than artificially intelligent futures being work-free, they are likely to necessitate different forms of work with different qualitative properties, generating precarity in new ways that facilitate greater exploitation and accumulation of extractive profits. In contemporary contexts of spaces where automation led by AI transformations have started taking place, new forms of work-based precarity have been introduced, suggesting the intensified necessity of socialist organizing that revolutionizes the patterns of ownership in the AI space.

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5.3   Conclusion Technology is the driver of the development narrative, true to its Cold War dominant paradigm roots. Although the language of technology has been configured into the turn toward culture and participation, worth noting here is the miraculous role attached to technology. Technology is now invested with the capacity to empower communities through its participatory platforms. Through the many examples of techno-deterministic interventions, the chapter highlights the key role of the expert in the deployment of the technology. Technology, often sold as the medium for empowerment and enabling voice, works to erase the voices of subaltern communities, incorporating them into a monolithic logic of capital expansion. The digital futures depicted throughout this chapter as a basis for a technological future reproduce the capital-technology complex, devoid of critical interrogations of inequality, distribution of resources and power. What then are the transformative opportunities for anchoring the questions of technology in community ownership and socialist redistribution?

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CHAPTER 6

Culture-Centered Approach to Communication for Social Change

In the backdrop of increasing global inequalities (Harvey, 2005, 2007), the consolidation of wealth in the hands of the global elite (Piketty, 2014), and the erasure of platforms for the participation of the margins1 in democratic processes (Dutta & Pal, 2010a, 2010b) brought about by the neoliberal model of global governance (Dutta, 2012a, 2012b), the culture-centered approach (CCA) to social change communication offers an entry point for theorizing, measuring, implementing and evaluating communication for social change that emerges “from” and “with” the margins, directed at transforming the organizing structures of neoliberalism through radical democracies of the global South (Dutta, 2008, 2011; Dutta & Basu, 2007). Drawing upon the history of local community organizing in resistance to the hegemony of market-based logics (Dutta, 2008, 2011), the CCA theorizes the transformative roles of radical democracies in  local communities that challenge the developmentalist logic of neoliberalism. I would like to emphasize here the theorization of culture as a resource for transforming capitalist political economy by actively seeking to dismantle it. The process of culturally centering social change communication foregrounds community voices in discursive spaces where development policies are articulated, debated, implemented, and evaluated, fundamentally calling for a paradigm shift in the role to be played by the development communication theorist/practitioner from one of “targeting” communities through expert-driven interventions to co-creating social change interventions that “resist ‘development’ actively” (Devi, © The Author(s) 2020 M. Dutta, Communication, Culture and Social Change, Palgrave Studies in Communication for Social Change, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26470-3_6

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2004, p. xvi) through grounded partnerships with communities engaged in listening to community voices (Dutta, 2015). Building on the work of a generation of culture-centered scholars-­ activists-­community organizers (Dutta & Kaur-Gill, 2018; Dutta & Pal, 2010a, 2010b; Dutta et  al., 2018; Pitaloka & Dutta, 2019; Tan, KaurGill, Dutta, & Venkataraman, 2017), in this chapter, I will argue that what lies at the heart of the process of cultural centering is the location of the social change communication process. To initiate reflection on location, the following questions offer important starting points: Who initiates the culture-­centered process of social change? Who owns the communicative resources that are utilized in social change? Who sets the agenda and makes the decisions for the culture-centered processes? Who funds the social change process? Where is the decision-making of the culture-centered processes of social change located? Over the past two decades, as the processes of social change outlined in the CCA have been incorporated into a wide variety of contexts, conversations on the theories, methods, and processes of cultural centering ought to serve as entry points to debate and experiments with the framework. Situating these questions in the ambits of structural transformation, we ought to be asking, to what extent do the communicative processes in a social change intervention seek to bring about structural transformation? Based on the notion that the twin concepts of “culture-as-barrier” and “culture-as-resource” are both often deployed to serve the expanding agenda of neoliberal capital, I suggest the relevance of explicit conversations on where the calls to cultural articulation and community participation emerge from, who controls these communicative processes and resources, and what are the purposes served by these communicative processes of social change. The CCA interrogates the dominant framework of planned social change, foregrounding the necessity of de-centering the discourses and practices of communication that originate from the ambits of the dominant development institutions and structures. That the originary forces of participatory, sustainable, and culturally sensitive social change processes reproduce the imperial agendas of neoliberalism serves as the basis for radical imaginaries of change rooted in the resistive participation of communities in inverting these very agendas. The CCA draws its basis from (a) ongoing critiques of the development paradigm structured within the formations of neoliberalism (Wilkins, 2016); and (b) long histories of people-­ led social change communication initiatives that emerge from across the global South and South in the North, anchored in the principles of communication advocacy (Wilkins, 2014).

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As a framework for social change communication, the CCA de-centers the expert-driven, technology-centric dominant ideas of development articulated in elite North-South global networks under the ideology of neoliberalism2 and simultaneously seeks to build infrastructures of listening in global-regional-local spaces that foreground the voices of communities at the margins and their agentic capacities to imagine, create, and participate in social change processes (Dutta, 2015). The very definition of social change that is adopted and circulated in the mainstream literature on development communication that sees social change as planned societal change from primitiveness to modernity brought about by the introduction of new communication technologies is inverted in the CCA, instead attending to social change as resistance to top-down, growth-­driven, trickle-down interventions pushed as the universal truths of development. In opposition to, and as a framework for interrogating the top-down structure of development communication that has served as an organizing structure for neoliberal global policies, transformative social change communication practices seek to bring about radical possibilities of global organizing, grounded in principles of social justice, equality, and commitment to ecological sustainability. The meaning of social change thus is fundamentally inverted, “rendering impure” the definitional terrains of social change. Cultural centering, in this sense, is not simply a call for a turn to culture as the basis of development, as evident in ethnographic accounts that examine development from cultural accounts (see, for instance, Hemer & Tufte, 2005a, 2005b). The turn to culture in the CCA is constituted in a critical interrogation of capitalist structures of development through cultural meanings situated in antagonism to hegemonic structures (structures of neoliberal development in the contemporary context). In this sense, cultural centering is oppositional to the logic of cultural futures offered by Appadurai (2013a, 2013b) that works within the modernist aspirations of capitalist technologies, turning to culture as a resource for reworking modernization. In contrast, the very culturalist language of modernization ideology is the site of dismantling in the CCA (the idea that what is universal in modernization is itself always cultural, sold through communicative inversions as secular and universal), suggesting that hope for alternative futures lies in actively marking and transforming the rationality of techno-capital. Unlike the “cultural facts” as recipes for cultural tropes that leave the modernization ideology of techno-capital intact, culture in the CCA emerges as a resistive site of meanings in opposition, organized toward bringing about structural transformation.

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The interplays of culture and agency thus serve to offer conceptual bases for challenging the capitalist expansion as a hegemonic formation of development. Instead, the CCA seeks to explore socialist spaces, pathways and possibilities of organizing that draw upon cultural logics in resistance. Throughout the examples that are drawn in this chapter then, cultural accounts of meanings are examined in their relationships to structures, as the bases for interrupting and dismantling neoliberal capitalism. In this sense, the process of cultural centering can’t be situated within the logics of the international financial institutions (IFIs), Transnational corporations (TNCs) and Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs) that are tools for extending the hegemonic reach of capitalism. Participatory processes formulated by the World Bank (WB) or the International Monetary Fund (IMF), therefore, are inherently directed at capitalist extraction. In his review of communication for social change, Tufte (2017) suggests that participatory communication is embedded in democratic commitments. While I agree with Tufte that the turn to participation in the work of Paulo Freire is guided by a transformative commitment, the incorporation of participation into the IFIs turns it into a tool for serving capitalist interests. Participation in the tenets of the IFIs, foundations, and global civil society, such as the World Economic Forum, comprising elite capitalist actors is, by logic, a tool for developing and disseminating capitalist solutions. Instead, cultural centering begins from grassroots processes in communities, positioned directly as resistance to global capital in the imagination of socialist possibilities. This resistance to the hegemonic power of global capital, anchored in cultural narratives and woven into spaces of community organizing, is socialist in its impetus (more on this later). In this chapter, I will articulate the ways in which this turn to socialist politics ought to be placed at the crux of organizing processes of cultural centering. This turn to socialist politics, activism, and movements as the practical basis of the CCA builds on extant culture-centered scholarship and offers a guiding direction for future scholarship. Essential then to the framework of the CCA is the conceptualizations of development, social change and communication as sites of contestation, as struggles against the hegemonic formations of neoliberal capitalism. The taken-for-granted conceptualization of social change as top-down, elite-driven development is interrogated, situating the rhetoric of development in the realm of the particulars of the lived experiences of ­communities at the margins of top-down elite-imposed development interventions. Based on the notion that communicative marginalization, marked in being cut off from dominant discursive spaces in the mainstream, is produced by

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and, in turn, produces structural marginalization, the challenge for culture-­centered social change communication is in opening up discursive registers to articulations from the margins. These processes of centering articulations from the margins bring forth an alternative register to socialist organizing, turning to cultural imaginaries as resources for narrating calls to equality. The recognition that there is nothing natural about culture leads to an active politics of building infrastructures for cultural stories that mobilize organizing processes for generating socialist development futures.

6.1   Tenets of Culturally Centering The theorization of social change as an instrument of the status quo is juxtaposed in the backdrop of the radical inversion of social change communication as a constitutive framework for grassroots participation in social movements, activist politics, advocacy processes, and bottom-up community-led dialogues that seek to transform dominant structures by fundamentally interrogating the policies and programs that are carried out under the chador of development. Given the extensive co-option of cultural logics within the neoliberal ideology (itself a deeply Eurocentric and flawed cultural formation that sees individualism, capitalism and free market as the solutions for humanity, framing them as Enlightenment), situating the key concepts of the CCA within the broader question of dismantling/transforming structures is significant. This is urgent because of climate crisis, global inequalities, and consolidation of power in the hands of the transnational elite that constitute the current moment. 6.1.1  Interrogating and Addressing Communicative Inequalities Communicative inequalities, inequalities in the distributions of communicative resources, form the basis of ongoing processes of marginalization (Dutta, 2004a, 2004b). Hegemonic structures reproduce marginalization through the vastly differential access to communicative resources. The voices of communities at the margins are systematically erased to p ­ erpetuate marginalizing practices. Communicative inequalities, therefore, reflect and reproduce structural inequalities. Those with access to material resources hold the power over communicative infrastructures and occupy

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the spaces of decision-making, implementation, and evaluation. The nature of knowledge production itself is constituted amid these inequalities, with the economically powerful forces producing knowledge claims that serve their interests. The material manifestations of these knowledge claims, therefore, perpetuate the structural inequalities, rendering as common sense these inequalities. Various forms of communication, including vacuous communication, communication that is empty, and communicative inversion, the reversal of materiality through symbolic markers, are systematically deployed to perpetuate structural inequalities. To retain their power and control, dominant configurations of state, market, and civil society associations participate in the production of knowledge. From think tanks to centers to working groups to consultancy capital, knowledge formations legitimizing inequalities are systematically produced. Simultaneously, the voices of the materially disenfranchised are consistently erased, cut off from pathways of mobility. The very normative assumptions of communication work toward perpetuating this erasure. Subaltern communities are marked as primitive to justify the erasure of their voices from the discursive spaces. The work of knowledge production is to perform the erasure of subaltern knowledge. The subaltern body, captured in circuits of capitalist profiteering, generates new marketing opportunities, new advertising slogans, and ever-new social change communication campaigns that are targeted on the body of the subaltern. The image of the subaltern, reproduced in global circuits of communication capital, produced in brochures by large-scale fund-raising campaigns run by capitalist communication enterprises, works through the erasure of subaltern voice. Communicative inequalities, in this sense, sustain and form the profit-making infrastructures of private communication industries. Public relations and advertising corporations, operating across transnational spaces, profit from the production of campaigns, fund-raising activities, fund-raising promotional materials, and events, thriving on the communicative inequalities that form the basis of hegemonic social change communication efforts. 6.1.2  Communicative Justice The recognition that communicative inequalities correspond with structural inequalities suggests the role of social change in transforming these communicative inequalities. The recognition of subaltern agency (more on this in the next section) shapes the processes of social change commu-

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nication that begin by seeking solidarity with subaltern communities. The nature of this solidarity guides the ongoing search for communicative justice, translated into a struggle for voice. Culture-centered processes of advocacy and activism work from sustained relationships with subaltern communities to seek to build infrastructures of listening in the hegemonic mainstream so subaltern voices are heard. The recognition and representation of subaltern voices in the discursive spaces of knowledge production transform the very nature of knowledge. The vanguardist approach to knowledge generation as the basis of making grand claims about subaltern lives and livelihoods is dismantled with the articulation of knowledge as listening. The turn to listening disrupts hegemonic knowledge claims through the presence of subaltern voices. Moreover, the nature of communication advocacy and communication activism that emerges from the solidarity with subaltern struggles forms the basis for imagining development on the basis of subaltern knowledge. 6.1.3  Naming and Dismantling Hegemonic Cultural Meanings Hegemonic cultural meanings form the taken-for-granted infrastructures of the communicative processes of erasure and marginalization. Cultural meanings are not automatic but are often assigned by hegemonic actors to serve their political and economic interests. Implicit in the notion of cultural meanings is cultural erasure and marginalization; the margins are produced by the very existence of certain hegemonic formations. The hegemony of the cultural formations of capitalism forms the bedrock of the contemporary landscape of marginalization across the globe. The commitment of the CCA to listening to the voices of the margins stands on the marking of these hegemonic formations that constitute mainstream cultural logics, and are reproduced either as universals (such as the Eurocentric logic of protestant capitalism that is sold as modernization) or as reactionary cultural responses to Eurocentrism (such as the Hindutva hegemony in an increasingly fascist India, with a culturalist language deployed to target minorities). This reading of the inequalities in the deployment of cultural tropes forms the basis of the CCA, focusing on the communicative processes of erasure that are deployed through cultural logics. As noted earlier in the book, and as I have argued elsewhere, the very modernization paradigm that forms the knowledge infrastructure of

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development and social change communication is based on a deeply Eurocentric ideology of individualism, private property ownership and the free market as the normative site of exchanges. At the core of this cultural formation is the reduction of complex relationships into individual ownership, the narrow definition of liberty in terms of property and the market and the active erasure of human desires for equality. Cultural constructions of technologies as tools for controlling nature to generate profits and create emancipatory pathways form the zeitgeist of development communication. This hegemonic formation is then turned into a universal through processes of communication that work actively to project its values as truth, appealing to claims of universal science and enlightenment to then target communities at the margins (the South in the North; consider Native Americans and African Americans in the US that are targeted by the ideology of capitalism, communicatively inverting colonial occupation and slavery as emancipation) and communities elsewhere (consider the industry of development communication and social change that is entirely based on this logic). In contrast to this hegemonic ideology of capital, elites outside the spaces of Eurocentrism often use cultural reductionism to create meaning formations that perpetuate their power and control. In Singapore, for instance, the narrative of “Asian values” has been systematically and selectively deployed by the ruling elite to legitimize its authoritarian control (Dutta, 2018b; Tay, 1995). The articulations of democracy and freedom have been deliberately categorized as Western, Eurocentric, or liberal, using the “Western” label then to prop up, in contrast, an authoritarian culture of rule, controlling freedom of expression and freedom of assembly under the narrative of Asian values. Culture therefore is politically mobilized through the production of knowledge claims to assemble an Asia that is authoritarian, with strict controls on freedom. The framing of democracy as Western is strategic, enabling the tactics of authoritarian governmentality and erasing the locally situated calls to democracy, freedom, and liberty that one witnesses across plural communities of Asia and that forms the basis of legal systems across a range of Asian democracies. Specific selective and strategic readings of Confucianism, for instance, have been resurrected to anchor the conversation of Asian values. Similarly, specific hegemonic takes on concepts such as harmony and multiculturalism have been deployed to control freedom of expression, constructed in opposition to security. The expression of difference from the US is often used as an alibi by Singapore politicians, referring

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to race relations and propping up the image of race riots to control the  discursive arena.3 Paradoxically, the rights of minorities to express and organize around their experiences of racism and marginalization are often erased amid the calls for harmony, which itself is embedded in a culturally specific Confucian reading. The language of “rights” itself is framed rhetorically as Western, erasing the various organic and culturally situated claims to rights that emerge from Singapore’s margins (Tay, 1995). Similarly, consider the hegemonic cultural meanings that are deployed by the Hindutva right in India to prop up the body of the Muslim other, subjected to various forms of state, police, and popular violence. The turn to culture, depicted as a virulent and masculinist form of Hindu culture, forms the basis of the cultural meaning deployed as the anchor to the nation, marking the outside of this narrow identity as anti-national. The deployment of the culturalist narrative of Hindutva forms the basis of the state-sponsored national citizen registry that has actively disenfranchised a large proportion of Muslim and Bengali subjects who are marked as non-­ citizens, as outside of the realm of the statehood. The oppressive forces of the Hindutva state are accompanied by Hindutva cultural warriors that have systematically attacked Muslims across the nation. The rise of Hindutva and its attack on Muslims is further multiplied in Kashmir, where Article 370 of the constitution that gave Kashmir special protection has been scrapped, and Kashmir has been turned into an open prison, with controls on phone and Internet access, as well as controls on the mobility of Kashmiris. Naming, marking, and making visible the hegemonic cultural meanings disrupts the taken-for-granted assumptions attached to these meanings. The interrogation of cultural meanings amid structures draws attention to the ways in which structures deploy culturalist language, seeking to naturalize this language in order to maintain political and economic control. That meanings are not neutral guides an active politics of community organizing. The culture-centered processes of listening to the margins deconstruct the hegemonic cultural meanings that constitute and circulate inequalities within community spaces, regional-national spaces, and global spaces. This close reading of the strategic deployment of cultural meanings in the consolidation of wealth and power in the hands of transnational elites forms the backdrop against which culture-centered interventions seek to build solidarities with the margins.

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6.1.4  Co-constructing with Cultural Meanings at the Margins The notion that culture is constituted in, constitutive of and constituted by meanings focuses attention on the active work of meaning-making through communication. That meanings are contested and continually in flux guides the search for cultural meanings that serve as repositories of knowledge that challenge the hegemony of capitalist accumulation. That meanings are fixed by hegemonic actors to sustain the status quo becomes the basis for processes of co-construction through academic-community-­ activist partnerships, seeking meanings that actively dismantle the hegemonic structures. The concept of radical democracy as a form of everyday participation in decision-making, ever attentive to the processes of ongoing marginalization, generates a constitutive communicative infrastructure that is ever-open toward the margins. Reflexivity as a methodological resource in the CCA is continually guided by the questions: Who is/are not present in this discursive space? What are the logics of this discursive space that erase? How can these logics be dismantled so discursive spaces and processes can be opened up to the margins of cultures and communities? The recognition that cultural meanings are contested opens up the academic-activist-community organizing journey to search for meanings at culture’s margins based on an understanding the communities are fundamentally unequal spaces rife with tensions and erasures. To ally with culture’s margins therefore is to first and foremost acknowledge the inequalities within cultural spaces, the ways in which these inequalities are circulated and reproduced through the interplays of majoritarian and neoliberal formations, and the communicative strategies that actively produce the margins. Reflected in the struggles for voices from the margins, emergent cultural meanings and knowledge formations that crystallize through partnerships of solidarity seek to dismantle the neoliberal status quo and its normalization of capitalism, the reactionary status quo that deploys culture to both erase and silence the margins of culture, the think tank status quo of authoritarian regimes that draw upon culturalist language to prop up totalitarian practices, and the academic-NGO status quo that sanitizes cultural meanings in essentialisms to serve the interests of capital. 6.1.5  Cultural Centering as Resistance The voices of the margins recognized and re-presented in local-regional-­ national discursive spaces interrogate the received meanings of develop-

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ment and social change, producing knowledge that decolonizes the dominant articulations of development. For instance, the very articulation of social change as a technology-induced transformation of Third World4 societies is resisted by community-grounded definitions of social change as fundamental inversions of ideas of development. I draw upon my earlier work brought together in the book “Voices of resistance” to suggest that (Dutta, 2012b, pp. vii–): …we listen to the voices of resistance across the globe that foreground alternative rationalities of social, political, and economic organizing, challenging the hegemony of neoliberal ideology in organizing global economies. Primarily based on the economic substratum of resistance work, the book highlights the discourses, messages, and narratives of change that are articulated by the very people who are rendered invisible by the structures of neoliberalism. Drawing upon earlier work in Communication Studies that outlines the relationships between the discursive and material processes of resistance (Cheney & Cloud, 2006; Ganesh, Zoller, & Cheney, 2005; Dutta, 2008, 2011; Pal and Dutta, 2008; Ganesh & Zoller, 2012), the voices in this book engage with the possibilities of transformative politics as embodied in the agentic expression of those across the globe who are participating in varied forms of collective actions in order to be recognized and to resist the unequal policies promoted by neoliberalism. Drawing upon the Subaltern Studies framework (Guha, 1988; Spivak, 1988), on one hand, the book begins with the key concepts of deconstruction that are embodied in the critical communication literature; on the other hand, the deconstructive turn is seen as an opening for engaging with the positive sites of transformative politics that depict subaltern struggles for recognition and representation.

The concept of alternatives is reworked in culture-centered articulations of social change as resistance to the neoliberal model of organizing global political economy. Note here the fundamental departure of the CCA from approaches that call for placing culture at the heart of studying development carried out within the traditional development framework (see, for instance, Hemer & Tufte, 2005a, 2005b). In other words, culture in the ambits of the CCA is a site of active resistance to the forces of neocolonialism and capitalism, working toward imagining socialist futures. This notion of cultural struggle against neocolonialism as actively socialist is highlighted by the anti-colonial theorist and revolutionary Amilcar Cabral (1979):

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Another important distinction to draw between the colonial and the neocolonial situations lies in the prospects for struggle. The colonial case (in which the nation class fights the repressive forces of the bourgeoisie of the colonizing country) may lead, ostensibly at least, to a nationalist situation (nationalist revolution): the nation gains its independence and theoretically adopts the economic structure it finds most attractive. The neocolonial case (in which the class of workers and its allies fight simultaneously the imperialist bourgeoisie and the native ruling class) is not resolved by a nationalist solution: it demands the destruction of the capitalist structure implanted in the national soil by imperialism and correctly postulates a socialist solution. (p. 133)

Recognizing the fundamentally colonial nature of capitalist extraction, Cabral calls for situating the resistance to imperialism in an actively socialist imaginary. Decolonization thus is anti-colonial and formulated in the recognition of the relationship between capitalism and colonialism. That colonialism works as an instrument of capitalist extraction points toward an active politics of socialist transformation in dismantling the colonial project. The nationalist solution, which forms the basis for the turn to culture strategically picked by the national elite, is neocolonial, continuing to perpetuate the expansion of capital. This contemporary form of colonialism operates on the ongoing and accelerated colonization of spaces in the global South through the active collaboration between local-national elites, neocolonial structures and transnational capital. The anchoring of community as a site for resisting the interplays of neocolonialism and capitalism is therefore expressed in organizing processes that seek to build socialist futures. This turn to organizing actual socialisms through community struggles for democracy and communicative equality guides the theoretical, methodological, and practical work of the CCA. As noted earlier, the term alternative modernity is deployed in hegemonic structures of the academe to offer culturalist accounts of techno-­ capitalist development (see, for instance, Nederveen Pieterse, 2011). The recognition that culturalist accounts that prop up techno-capital are not really alternatives forms the essence of culture-centered processes of social change communication. Challenging and resisting the neocolonial and capitalist framing of alternative modernity as forms of capitalism rhetorically marketed as alternatives, the CCA suggests that such claims to alternative modernity are deeply embedded in Euro/US-centric agendas of colonialism, serving to extend and account for the global reach of capital. By the framing of various forms of capitalism emerging across the globe under the neoliberal model as alternative modernities, the articulation of cultural tropes to prop up alternative modernities works to erase the pos-

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sibilities of alternative organizing that are being offered across struggles around the globe and simultaneously co-opts the language of “alternatives” as a tool for capitalist expansion, serving the agendas of transnational capital. In this backdrop then, subaltern social movements, as spaces for the articulations of alternatives to the capitalist model of organizing, offer utopian imaginaries and axes for hopes for social change processes that seek to build voice-based, ecologically centered, and socialist futures. The culture-centered approach (CCA) foregrounds decolonial development knowledge constructed by communities at the global margins, situated at the intersections of culture, structure, and agency (Dutta, 2008, 2011). Culture, as a dynamic site of meaning-making, reflects the contested space where development is understood, theorized, and acted upon. Structure reflects the framework of organizing of resources. In the realm of development, structures range all the way from IFIs such as the IMF and WB to national level legislations to specific projects that are carried out in communities. Structures produce the margins through their organizing frameworks; experts sitting at the core produce development knowledge, envisioning, implementing, and evaluating interventions while communities at the margins stand in as targeted and passive recipients of development solutions. These solutions, largely removed from the lived experiences at the margins, are designed at predominantly White global centers with token representations of elite postcolonial experts trained in the structures of Whiteness and carried out by a coterie of development professionals that drop into targeted communities. These structures of development, formulated in the form of neoliberal policies, produce the experiences at the margins and are the targets of grassroots-­driven social change processes, resisting the overarching neoliberal hegemony of development and seeking to nurture alternative logics for organizing structures. Agency, reflecting the cognitive capacity of communities at the margins to make sense of the structures that shape their lives, to negotiate these structures, and to participate in transformative processes of change seeking to transform the structures, serves as a fulcrum for theorizing development knowledge from the bottom-up (Mignolo, 2010). Of particular relevance to this essay is the organizing framework of agency as expressions of alternative rationalities of development, providing templates for social change that interrogate the monolithic neoliberal rationality of development. In the rest of the chapter, drawing upon the works of Spivak (1988) and Beverly (2004), who suggest the role of academic-activists in the mainstream in building “infrastructures of listening” to voices at the margins, I review the scholarship of the CCA as a framework for listening

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to the voices at the margins constituted by top-down development interventions. Listening, as social change communication in the ambits of the CCA, offers a conceptual map and an epistemological grammar for disrupting the erasures that are built into traditional models of development, of “delinking modernity/rationality from coloniality” (Mignolo, 2010, p.  348), simultaneously centering alternative rationalities for organizing societies and relationships in local-global discursive spaces (Dutta, 2014). Building on the extant literature on the CCA, I put forth the argument here that the alternative politics against capitalist formations is an explicitly socialist politics anchored in popular participation in direct democracy (Fig. 6.1). In sum, the interplay of culture, structure, agency constitutes the communicative processes in the CCA.  The “infrastructures of listening” re-­ present opportunities for voices from the subaltern margins to emerge in dominant discursive spaces, interrogating the narratives and organizing logics of dominant structures, and fundamentally disrupting structures. In contrast to the framework of social change communication, theorized within dominant knowledge producing institutions, foundations, corporations, and development agencies, social change is conceptualized as an anchor for structurally transformative politics. In this sense, the CCA is oppositional to the dominant framework of development and culture in development. The CCA grapples with the tensions between attention to structures of global organizing derived from Marxist theory and attention to cultures as anchors to articulations in the global South, derived from postcolonial and subaltern studies theories (Chibber, 2014). The turn to everyday articulations grounded in cultural life offers an anchor for funda-

STRUCTURE

CULTURE

AGENCY

Fig. 6.1  Interplays of culture, structure, and agency

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mentally redoing development, articulating a community-driven framework of development through direct democratic community control over development decisions and development processes. The theories of development emerging from the subaltern and precarious margins of global capital fundamentally rescript the theory of development.

6.2   Culture Contesting Development The process of cultural centering is evident in the de-centering critiques emerging in development studies, interrogating the growth-driven principles of neoliberal development. In their collection On the edges of development, Bhavnani, Foran, Kurian, and Munshi (2009) observe: …development as a project that centers growth as its main goal has failed the most vulnerable people of the Third World because of a misplaced emphasis on varieties of top-down, elite-devised “modernization strategies”, a lack of attention to the central contributions of women and people of color, and a disregard for culture. For this form of development project, the Third World has been used as a space for the creation of new “resource frontiers…made possible by Cold War militarization of the Third World and the growing power of corporate transnationalism” (Tsing, 2005, p. 28). As Anna Tsing point out, these “resource frontiers” were places where business and military joined hands to “disengage nature from local ecologies and livelihoods” and rebrand natural resources as commodities for trade and profit. As Tsing (2005) shows, through a powerful study of the South East Kalimantan region of Indonesia, the relentless pursuit of resources to fire the engine of development has devastated local populations not just economically, but also culturally, as local ways of living and being gave way to the profit-and-loss logic of capitalism.

Decolonizing development is attending to the destruction of cultures threatened by the project of development as growth. The erasures in the growth-driven narrative are foregrounded by the analysis here, depicting the ways in which the material manifestations of the growth-based framework fundamentally destroy economic and cultural livelihoods. Culture in the CCA “renders impure” (Dutta, 2015, p. 135) the dominant categories of development and communication that are treated as universals, instead specifying the value-loaded and culturally based ideas of development. The totalizing and universal nature of development knowledge is disrupted by interrogating it, naming it, and marking its value-­

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loaded dimensions that emerge from culturally situated anchors of colonization that are circulated universally under capitalist modernity (including its alternative forms). For instance, culture-centered interrogation of the notion of building dams as a model of development attends to the cultural logics underlying the building of dams as universally accepted solutions to the energy needs of communities. The concept of building dams on rivers to harness energy is rooted in a techno-centric and reductive value system that sees and privileges technology as control over nature. Culturally based values of control, efficiency, and management shape modernist development discourses of water, simultaneously erasing cultural values of water as a collective resource, as a natural resource constituted in the harmonious relationship between humans and their ecosystems, and as a fundamental human right (Dutta, 2004a, 2004b; Narain, 2009). Culture-centered interventions interrupt the dominant structures of  development knowledge by attending to the value-laden nature of development ideas. In offering a “grammar of decoloniality,” Mignolo (2010) suggests: The grammar of de-coloniality (e.g., decolonization of knowledge and of being—and consequently of political theory and political economy) begins at the moment that languages and subjectivities that have denied the possibility of participating in the production, distribution, and organization of knowledge. The colonization of knowledge and of being worked from top down and that is the way it is still working today: looking from economy and politics, corporations and the state down. That is the way social sciences and financial and political think tanks work. On the other hand, the creative work on knowledge and subjectivity comes from the political society, from the institutionally and economically dis-enfranchised. (p. 346)

The ideas of development emerging from the grassroots offer bases of modernity that are based on fundamentally different notions of relating to nature, relating to human beings, relating to communities, and relating to global flows. Challenging the totality of knowledge that forms the basis of monolithic development dogma, the voices of cultural communities from the margins offer locally situated and globally mobile notions of modernity. For instance, an indigenous community of the U’wa people in Colombia has been resisting the drilling operations of the US-based Occidental Petroleum Corporation on their sacred land since 1993 by

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constructing their land as full of life as opposed to an inanimate resource to be exploited through drilling. In the first public complaint filed by the U’wa on March 31, 1993, this alternative paradigm of land was offered: We, the U’wa people, hereby restate our opposition to any type of study or tampering with the natural resources of our land […]. We are against exploration because: The land has a head, arms, and legs, and the U’wa territory is its heart, it is the wing that sustains the Universe; if it is bled dry, it cannot continue to give life to the rest of its body. Oil and other natural resources are its blood, and for this reason we must take care of them. (U’wa Communique, 31 March, 1993, published in Arenas, 2007, p. 126)

In the voices of the U’wa people, land comes to life, animated in its body parts and with a heart. In a relational ecology, the universe is placed in relationship to the U’wa territory. The interpretation of oil and natural resources as blood disrupts the colonialist notion of oil as a profitable resource. The imagination of land, oil, and universe put forth by the U’wa fundamentally transforms the idea of development in the realm of the extractive industries. To culturally center social change communication is to build infrastructures of listening to the voices of the margins that are hitherto treated as primitive targets that get in the way of development. Particularly salient in the colonial logic of development is the deployment of strategic communication as manipulation to serve the interests of the state-capital nexus. Bribes, promises of schools, hospitals, roads, and employment are often deployed by transnational capital as strategies for silencing diverse cultural articulations of development (Dutta, 2015; Munshi & Kurian, 2005; Padel & Das, 2010). Corporate social responsibility (CSR) projects, sustainability initiatives, and community development projects articulated in colonial logics seek to co-opt the spaces of community articulation by deploying the narrative of capacity building. Capacity, conceived in strictly colonial terms, is measured in the form of education, skills, and abilities that the community is framed as lacking, which then creates new markets for global non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and local elites. Similarly, the markers of modernity such as schools, hospitals, roads and so on that count superficially as reflections of development are often offered within privatized logics of CSR while erasing the decision-making capacities of local communities in the spaces of development. Paradoxically, the

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dominant construct of communication as development fundamentally undermines the capacities of communities to communicate. The cultural centering of conversations on development makes visible these co-optive processes in mainstream communication structures and simultaneously work toward disrupting them through creative partnerships with the margins. To culturally center social change is to fundamentally begin by having community-grounded conversations on what makes up communication, representation, and recognition. The practice of the CCA in social change communication, therefore, builds capacities for cultural stories to be told from within cultural sites (Dutta, 2015). Those forms of communication are co-created in collaboration with communities that enable cultural stories to emerge as legitimate frames of development, marking development as meaning-making and anchored in  local participation in communicative infrastructures of development decision-­ making. Meanings of development occupy the sites of contestation in global social change processes. As a colonial construct, development, conceptualized parochially as diffusion of communication technologies that enabled the linear progression of societies from primitiveness to modernity, is treated as a scientific universal. The struggles of communities at the margins interrogate these received meanings of development, instead reworking the discursive terrain on the principles of communicative equality. 6.2.1  Cultural Centering as Alternative Rationalities The conceptualization of culture as development renders impure the value-free position of scientific development that has dominated development discourse from the era of the post-World War Marshall plan framework of development to the era of neoliberal development (Dutta, 2015), foregrounding locally grounded imaginations of development into global spaces, suggesting iterative frameworks for practice. Moreover, the framework of development emerging from the subaltern margins as directly in opposition to the techno-capitalist ideology of development fosters the search for development models grounded in local experiences in the global South. As noted throughout this essay, culturally centering development builds capacities for alternative rationalities of modernity, co-creating pluralist spaces for ideas of development, building alliances for “other imaginations” that interrogate and resist colonial notions of development that are monolithically imposed globally (de Sousa Santos, 2015; Dutta & Pal,

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2010a, 2010b). These imaginations, as forms of truth-telling grounded in cultural epistemologies, share common grounds with each other and, at the same  time, crystallize into global alliances that resist the imperialist narratives of monoculture development. The processes of meaning-making that constitute these cultural epistemologies are rooted in a transformative commitment. The cultural centering of development thus fundamentally renders open the very meaning of development to diverse interpretations, linguistic communities, value systems and methods for the production of knowledge. For instance, the rationalities of farmers in Singur, India, protesting the building of a car-manufacturing factory by TATA, an Indian multinational, put forth the notion of “land as mother” (Pal & Dutta, 2013). The imagination of land constituted in the maternal bonds of love and nurturing relationships with farming families disrupts the technocratic neoliberal notion of land as a privatized commodity that needs to be managed and exchanged through efficient technology. The disjuncture between the rationality of “land as mother” and “land as private commodity to be efficiently managed” becomes visible as community relations teams of the TATA group grapples with the resistance of farmers to selling the land in spite of the large sum of money offered. On a similar note, the Via Campesina movement of farming and peasant communities that developed in response to the agricultural policies of GATT that excluded the agrarian poor sought to offer alternative narratives grounded in the lived experiences and struggles of farmers amid large-scale commoditization of agriculture (Via Campesina, 1996). Based on the observation that the exploitation of the peasant communities in the hands of neoliberal structures is intricately linked with the absence of the local voices from the discursive spaces of the mainstream, Via Campesina offered the voices of peasants: To date, in all the global debates on agrarian policy, the peasant movement has been absent; we have not had a voice. The main reason for the very existence of the Via Campesina is to be that voice and to speak out for the creation of a more just society…What is involved here is [a threat to] our regional identity and our traditions around food and our own regional ­economy…As those responsible for taking care of nature and life, we have a fundamental role to play…The Via Campesina must defend the “peasant way” of rural people. (Via Campesina, 1996, pp. 10–11 as cited in Desmarais, 2007, p. 77)

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The alternative rationalities put forth by the Via Campesina movement are grounded first and foremost in the creation of spaces for the voices of peasants to be registered in national-global policy spaces in ways that matter. Having a voice to speak out is understood as foundational to justice and to creating a legitimate framework for protecting the “peasant way” of life. Similarly, the voices of participants in the protests at Cochabamba offer alternative rationalities of universal rights to water. In their protests against the privatization of water in Cochabamba, Bolivia, the people of Bolivia struggling under the effects of neoliberal policies took to the streets, battling the police on the streets and indefinitely blockading the regional highways and roads (Olivera, 2004). The privatization of water resources in Cochabamba Bolivia played out in the backdrop of water shortages faced by the people, WB directives of water privatization in the region, the passing of Law 2029 that declared the privatization of the water and the confiscation of wells and alternate forms of water use, and the signing of a 40-year contract with a consortium of enterprises named Aguas del Tunari. With majority of the interests in Aguas del Tenari held by US-based Bechtel Corporation, and including Bolivian companies with political linkages, it became clear that the privatization of water served the interests of the global and transnational elites, simultaneously putting large price tags for water for the poor, who couldn’t afford the price of the water. The Coordinadora (Coalition in Defense of Water and Life) emerged in response to (a) the inability of local community members to pay the rising price of water; (b) the privatization of water, which Cochabambinos believed was a natural gift and a public service; (c) the nature of government decision-making; and (d) the erasure of the local community from decision-making structures that contracted out resources that belonged to the community without involving the community. In their protest, on January 12, 2000, the Coordinadora members blockaded traffic, busting car windows and forcing shops to close; this was followed by a town meeting in the plaza that demanded the government to send a commission. Subsequently, resistance was expressed in the form of planning a peaceful demonstration that was publicized as the “takeover of Cochabamba,” constituting the taking over physically of the main plaza, symbolically representing the coming together of the workers to take their own decisions. On February 4 and 5, 2000, marchers took over the streets of Cochabamba, setting up barricades and blockading the entire city. Subsequently, between April 4 and April 12, 2000, the Coordinadora’s

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organized protest marches in Cochabamba, with blockades cutting off the main highways and masses of protestors occupying the city centers in Cochabamba. The collective resistance against the privatization of water frames water as a community resource, owned by the community and, therefore, subject to community participation in decision-making regarding its uses and management. The rationality of access to water as a fundamental human right and as a public resource disrupted the neoliberal framing of water as a privatized resource to be managed through private organizing structures. In New Zealand, the protest against offshore deep-sea oil drilling depicts the organizing narratives that interrogate the privatization of natural resources (O’Brien, 2013). This organizing against the privatization of resources and proliferation of extractive industries is constituted in the backdrop of the co-option of the cultural as a tool for justifying the expansion of the extractive industries. In 2019, in the face of the occupation of Maori land to build a housing project by a private corporation in Ihumatao, Fletchers, Maori whanau are organizing in protest (Elers & Dutta, 2019). Again, centered in the organizing is the sacredness of indigenous land, drawing on the Treaty of Waitangi signed by Maori with the Crown, to document the violations of the treaty. The articulation of the sacred as a realm of organizing disrupts the neoliberal rationality that seeks to expand the reach and control of the market to every sphere of living and non-­ living objects. Through the articulation of the sacred, the market and its expansionary logic is placed under scrutiny, controlling it and placing limits on it, disrupting the normative production logics of capitalism. de Sousa Santos (2017, p. 125) refers to these alternative rationalities as “subaltern cosmopolitanisms,” depicting their locations in hitherto erased positions in the global South. He notes: Since scientific knowledge is not distributed in a social equitable way, its interventions in the world tend to serve the social groups having more access to such knowledge. Ultimately, social injustice is based on cognitive injustice…In the ecology of knowledges, finding credibility for non-­scientific knowledges does not entail discrediting scientific knowledge. It implies, rather, using it in a broader context of dialogue with other knowledges. (p. 189)

This principle of dialogue draws on the concept of communicative inequality put forth in the CCA (Dutta, 2008, 2011). The recognition that vari-

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ous knowledge frameworks are constituted in unequal structures shapes the articulation of the development imaginary, based on the creation of communicative infrastructures where the voices of the subaltern margins are heard. The recognition of science as one of multiple knowledge systems constituted amid inequalities in the distribution of communicative resources for voice creates a register for an alternative articulation of development. The recognition that the knowledge of science, often packaged in techno-deterministic top-down monoculture solutions that serve capital builds a register for democratizing science, placing it in conversations with and accountable to the subaltern margins. In their organizing into sanghams, cooperatives, dalit women farmers from Telangana, India, collectivized under the umbrella of the Deccan Development Society, put forth the knowledge of indigenous seeds, such as millet, in resistance to the techno-­ capitalist solution of biotechnology-based neoliberal agriculture (Dutta & Thaker, 2019). They hold peoples’ hearings, holding the state, private corporations, and scientific community accountable to the subaltern margins. The subaltern rationality put forth here reorganizes the structure of knowledge production, democratizing it on the principle of communicative equality. 6.2.2  Citizenship and Transformative Democracy In his synthesis of the literature on communication and social change, Tufte (2017) anchors social change in citizenship. For him, citizenship is the site of articulation of rights. The recognition of the citizen is the basis for her/his claim to an array of development resources, programs, and structures. The concept of citizenship as the basis for laying claims to development infrastructures and resources corresponds with the conceptualization of direct democracy in the realm of the CCA, with voices of communities at the margins owning communicative processes that constitute development structures (Dutta, 2011). Through their direct participation in democratic forms of decision-making in the context of development, individuals and communities can shape the form of the development processes, rooting these processes in radical democracy. Culture-centered processes, therefore, seek to co-create community-­ based, culturally anchored spaces for democratic participation in constituting development infrastructures (Dutta, 2018a, 2018b). Noting the hegemonic co-option of participatory forms of communication within the dominant state-market structures, the CCA outlines the nature of owner-

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ship of communication infrastructures, attending to the notion of “communication sovereignty” (Dutta & Thaker, 2019). The processes for building communicative equality, therefore, are grounded in culturally rooted pedagogies of democracy, learning through a co-creative process the workings of direct and representative democracy, making decisions at the grassroots through participation, and laying claims to development through direct participation in radical democracy at the grassroots. Communicative equality forms the underlying basis of citizenship articulated in the CCA, with communication interventions seeking to achieve communicative equality by co-building spaces of recognition and representation within communities. Communication sovereignty captures a community’s ownership of communication infrastructures and autonomy in decision-making, forming the basis of community decision-making in development (Dutta & Thaker, 2019). In the organizing of the sanghams (cooperatives) among dalit women in India, the ownership of a community radio by the women, their video-based storytelling, and their ownership of participatory performances as sites of storytelling serve as sovereign communicative infrastructures through which the women participate in the generation of knowledge about agriculture, while, at the same time, resisting the logics of neoliberal biotechnology-based agriculture. The hegemonic formation of communication development that sees the women as target audiences to be segmented and reached out to through technology-based platforms is inverted through the women’s ownership of the communication channels. Moreover, the women co-create communication infrastructures such as bullock carts carrying local seeds, processions (Beeja yatra) and local songs that serve as sovereign communication infrastructures, bypassing the logics of neoliberal development. The development of communicative infrastructures for democratic participation are intrinsically tied to the creation of culture-centered learning resources for democracy, and “learning to learn” from subaltern communities in co-creating and foregrounding counter-hegemonic communication infrastructures. Community members work alongside activists, civil society organizations, and academic partners to co-create lessons of ­everyday democratic participation, and simultaneously put these lessons into practice to transform the hegemonic structures. The nature of participation itself is transformed, from being dictated by the norms and hegemonic agendas of vanguardist development actors to being anchored in ownership of participatory processes by the subaltern margins. In this

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sense, the rules, goals and nature of participatory communication are determined by hitherto erased subaltern communities. The work of communication is one of mobilizing the margins in reclaiming development, anchoring development as a resource that meets the needs at the margins. Amid the privatization of water resources and the corresponding water shortage in Detroit, US, communities at the margins, activists and community organizers work together to create spaces for local decision-­making about water resources (Blue Planet Project, 2014). The turn to citizenship as the fulcrum of communication for social change is critical in the face of the ongoing attacks on citizenship that are written into neoliberal formations. The consolidation of power in the hands of transnational capital takes place alongside the depletion of democratic sites of participation, with market forces working systematically to purchase communication infrastructures, colonize communication infrastructures and render impossible opportunities for articulation. The global rise of authoritarianism is driven by targeted media campaigns, with growing digital components, and with extensive financial support. The marketization of politics has turned political processes into sites for exercising economic power, simultaneously disenfranchising citizens. Direct attacks on citizenship are being orchestrated by state-market forces, amid depleting public resources caused by unregulated market expansion (Walters, 2002). The expulsion of citizens by new technologies of surveillance, holding, detention and deportation forms the basis of a new politics of authoritarianism that works alongside neoliberal capital (Fassin, 2011). Entire industries of techno-capital are built around the surveillance, control, construction and management of borders, built around the exclusion of communities. Digital infrastructures for identifying, marking and managing citizens have left excluded large numbers of people in India, cutting them off from spaces of articulating rights to development resources. Simultaneously, citizens, now transformed into consumers of services identified with digital technologies, are reworked into privatized logics of the market (Jayal, 2019). The identity of the citizen is being reworked to legitimize violence on dalits and Muslims. The continual marking of the non-citizen, the exclusions of citizens under new regimes of purity and the mobilization of hatred work on platforms of techno-capital. Consider, for instance, the National Registry of Citizens (NRC) being mobilized by the right-wing Hindutva forces elected to power with a popular mandate, working through new communication technologies to craft a xenophobic campaign targeting India’s Muslim

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minorities. Climate change, neocolonial wars, and ongoing colonization, driven by the expansionary needs of neoliberal capital, increasingly displace subaltern communities from their everyday spaces of livelihood, expelling them as precarious labor into global circuits of capital (Dutta, 2019). These expulsions and the ongoing mobilities of precarious bodies across the borders form the backdrop of the targeted strategies of marking and reproducing borders. The recognition of the ongoing works of erasure, therefore, calls for new imaginaries of the “right to have rights” that are anchored in the voices of the non-citizen, the refugee, the asylum seeker, the stateless person (Benhabib, 2018). What then are the basis for the communicative rights of the stateless and the refugees and how can imaginaries of communicative equality be mobilized? These questions offer opportunities for culture-centered organizing, particularly in terms of considering the organizing role of solidarity as the basis for struggles for communicative equality. In recent culture-centered collaborations with the activist Murdoch Stephens in Aotearoa, CARE explores the role of communicative infrastructures for refugee voices, not only as anchors for voices of refugees within but also as invitations for voicing from the outside, from the spaces of dispossession beyond the markers of the state. 6.2.3  Theories from the Global South Theories emerge from sites of the global South, as anchors to resisting the homogeneous capitalist modernity imposed by transnational capital, and facilitated by the mix of IFIs and neocolonial nation states. The shifting geopolitics of neocolonial powers, with Asian states such as China and India emerging as key actors in the processes of exploitation of the poor and their displacement from their sites of livelihood calls for emergent theories of transformation that actively resist the processes of expulsion, displacement and ongoing exploitation of the poor. That the extractive processes of capitalist expansion are inherently colonial opens up the space for interrogating new Asian imperialisms rather than taking them as indicators of the “Asian turn.” The shifting geopolitics toward Asia that continues to reproduce the exploitations and oppressions of capitalism are different versions of the hegemonic capitalist logic rather than alternative imaginations. In this backdrop, movements of resistance emerging from the global South that resist the hegemony of transnational capital offer new sites of theorizing. Movements against the colonial expansion of Indian extractive capital (Adani in Australia, Vedanta in Zambia) offer

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alternative rationalities for political economy (Brigg, Quiggin, & Lyons, 2017). Similarly, movements against Chinese colonialism along the neocolonial Silk Road (Arase, 2015) and Marxist student movements in solidarity with workers and worker protests in China (Chan, 2018) offer anchors for alternative rationalities. Hegemonic concepts of culture, participation and sustainability incorporated into the World Economic Forum and into the structures of the WB are disrupted and resisted. Consider, for instance, articulations of sustainability that emerge through culture-centered conversations. Culture-­ centered interrogations of sustainability suggest that the placing of sustainability as an anchor for capitalist development keeps intact the colonial logics of development, reproducing “more of the same” rather than radically altering the textures, processes and rules of participation. Participatory processes constituted in mainstream initiatives of social change often co-opt the voices of communities at the margins, displaced from their sites of articulation and incorporated into top-down, expert-led theories of development. Culture is constituted within the hegemonic logics of transnational capital as an economic resource to be exploited, as a strategic communication tool and as a framework for whitewashing transnational capital (Munshi & Kurian, 2015). Resisting the co-option of cultural sites, voices of cultural communities at the margins of development actively participate in articulating alternative imaginations of modernity that disrupt the totality of the growth-­ driven narrative of development. For instance, in the ongoing protests of the Native Americans in Standing Rock, North Dakota, against the building of the Dakota Access pipeline through sacred grounds and risking to pollute the local water system, sustainable development is articulated as respect for the water rights of communities. Sustainable development in the ontology of the protests is the decoupling of sustainability from the dominant logic of development (as the building of the pipeline serving development as economic growth). This decoupling fundamentally then transforms the colonial framework of sustainability, rendering visible the impossibility of sustainability within the dominant agenda of development. Unlike and in resistance to culture as a site for hybridity and sustainability, incorporated into the hegemonic framework of transnational capital (as proposed by Nederveen Pieterse and others in the capitalist cultural studies group), culture is a site of decolonizing articulations that challenge neocolonial neoliberal capital. An alternative logic of modernity that conceptualizes universal right to water as a human right and articu-

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lates water in a sacred relationship with human beings disrupts the dominant narrative of building the pipeline as a source of development and growth. On a similar note, local articulations offered by the Dongria Kondh, an indigenous community in India, of the “Niyamgiri” hills they reside on as sacred disrupts the dominant narrative offered by the multinational mining corporation Vedanta of mining as development (Padel & Das, 2010). The dominant framework of mining as sustainable development offered by Anil Agarwal, the CEO of Vedanta, is disrupted by the voices of community members who document the violence carried out on their bodies, spaces and livelihood by the mining operation (Dutta, 2015). The everyday accounting of the effects of the mining operations, narrated by the bodies of community members, counter the branding strategies of sustainable mining as development. Here, an alternative narrative of the Niyamgiri being sacred disrupts the hegemonic narrative of mining development: There are five brothers, and the youngest one is Niyam Raja…Niyam Raja wondered what to do and decided to become the guardian of the streams and mountain range. So he decided to stay on the top of the mountain, and created mango, jackfruit, pineapple, orange, banana, and seeds. He said to us “Now live on what I have given you.” Actually Niyamgiri is the first Dongria, he is one of us, but he wants to stay at the top. We like to be here at his feet. At the top you have all the herbs and plants creating a magnetic force which keeps us healthy. We worship Niyam Raja by sacrificing goats and pigs. We have to offer him the first taste, otherwise he won’t accept our offering. That is why we don’t disturb anything on the top part of the mountain. Niyamgiri is sacred for us.

Note here the turn to culture, anchored in an epistemology that works through the question of the spirit, is an anchor to an ecological worldview that resists the extraction of mineral wealth and the expulsion of the Dongria Kondh from their places of livelihood. Also central to the narrative here is the imaginary of the commons, with the forested mountain of Niyamgiri represented as a common public resource built on human relationship with land. Amid the global threats of climate change and the neoliberal articulations of sustainability embedded in techno-capitalist models, indigenous knowledge across the globe offers transformative opportunities for reorganizing human relationships with nature. The last frontier of capitalist neocolonialism is directed at the occupation of indigenous lands, resources,

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and livelihoods, perpetuating racist logics that mark indigenous communities as underdeveloped and primitive. Working within the hegemonic structures of capital through participatory accommodation is likely to further enable this onslaught on indigenous livelihoods through indigenous engagement and corporate social responsibility. To commit to co-creating infrastructures for indigenous knowledge is, therefore, to join in solidarity with indigenous struggles against racist land grab and planned genocides carried out under the language of development. The techno-determinism of capitalist solutions, including the green new deal that further extends the colonial control over nature, ought to be interrogated through the presence of indigenous voices that put forth the interconnected relationship between indigenous rights and ecological survival. The CCA offers a framework for transforming communication for social change through its emphasis on building infrastructures for the voices of indigenous communities. Indigenous resistance to the market theorizes neoliberalism as a force of colonization, drawing out the parallels between colonial formations and  the win-win articulations of the market. In globalization and the ­colonial state of mind, the indigenous activist Moana Jackson (2007, pp. 176–177) voices: The arguments that the colonisers used to justify their entry and mechanisms they used to control the market under the guise of a mutually beneficial free trade are remarkably similar to those used in the last twenty years by the advocates of globalisation. They imposed way of thinking about the purpose of economics and the commodification of things that had once been treasures, and they promised development and civilisation as our salvation, even as they took away or redefined the means by which we could benefit and define what that meant. Today, the assumption that colonisation was more of a shonky property transaction than a denial of power has led to the return of some resources to Maori, along with the mantra that it is the path out of grievance mode. Old ideologies are revisited, and we are encouraged to return to the market and be entrepreneurs again, without the independent authority that once made that possible. We achieve some commercial success, but the disparities between our wealth and that of Pakeha are now exacerbated by a divisive corporate elitism that separates many of people from each other. Our poor and unwell retreat into a poverty where asking questions about what is happening just seems too hard, and those who have become rich often see no need to ask at all.

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Indigeneity, as a space of theorizing from the South, attends to the ways in which the frameworks of indigenous recognition constitute within neoliberal structures reproduce neoliberal hegemony and perpetuate the dispossession of indigenous communities, albeit under the rhetoric of indigenous recognition. Note the analogy drawn between neoliberalism and colonialism that depicts the ways in which neoliberalism creates a framework for some among indigenous communities to participate in the market while simultaneously dictating the terms of that participation, deploying participation to exacerbate and reproduce inequalities within indigenous communities and keeping intact the larger inequalities in the distribution of wealth between the Pakeha and Maori communities. The appearance of indigenous participation is constituted within the terms established by neoliberalism, where only those forms of participation are recognized that lend themselves to be co-opted into the racist colonial structures of neoliberalism. The question, how then can an indigenous politics of decolonization simultaneously resist the rationalities of the market, color political economy with indigenous worldviews, and re-distribute resources among indigenous communities with a socialist commitment, throws open new spaces for theorizing resistance to neoliberalism. Similarly, consider the social change processes constituted around the building of dams as markers of development (Dutta, 2011). The WB has systematically funded large-scale infrastructure projects building dams as instruments for development. In this backdrop, the global movements against dams foreground the negative economic, political, environmental and displacement effects of dams, voiced by the local voices of affected communities connected in transnational networks (Dutta & Pal, 2008; Rothman & Oliver, 1999). Whereas the local meanings in the cultural contexts of the lived experiences of marginalized communities offer the foundations for the immediate struggles of social change, these meanings simultaneously draw upon a global framework to create spaces of resistance that cut across geographic and cultural boundaries. Moreover, the locally constituted meanings in social change communication offer templates for alternative interpretive frames that can be deployed globally in decolonial struggles against dams. The global social change network International Rivers connects several communities, movements, NGOs and other partners across 60 countries, to protect rivers by protesting the building of dams and promoting alternative development frameworks for meeting the water, energy and flood management needs of communities (http://www.internationalrivers.org/). The alternative development

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frameworks draw on local contexts and interpretive frames and are simultaneously connected to a broader global agenda of resisting the development projects funded by the World Bank and other financial institutions.

6.3   Interrogating Structures of Development The work of interrogating structures of development is constituted in building infrastructures of listening that signify the “effort to establish, implement, and monitor structures that allow subaltern5 resistance to be located and heard” (Spivak, 2012, p. 440). Infrastructures of listening, as resources placed in communities at the margins, build community capacities of communication and, in doing so, resist global inequalities by learning to “learn from below, from the subaltern, rather than only study him (her)” (Spivak, 2012, p. 439). The infrastructures of listening, thus co-­ created in collaboration with communities at the global margins, disrupt established ideas of development, offer other imaginations and depict the impossibilities and complexities of listening amid everyday forms of neoliberal co-optation. Listening, thus, is situated outside of and in resistance to structures of development institutions, as opposed to organizational listening framed within the ambits of development agencies directed toward gathering intelligence and developing strategic development communications based on audience inputs. 6.3.1  Structures of Interventions Attention to class formations in development interventions interrogates the disenfranchisements that are written into dominant models of social change, pushed in the global South/South in the North in the form of neoliberal economic policies. The articulation of neoliberal economic policies as development shapes the organizing of economic structures in nation states, serving the political-economic interests of the owners of capital and simultaneously disenfranchising the working classes. Class collaboration among global elites is integral to the formulation and ­reproduction of development discourse. For instance, neoliberal policies weakening labor unions and minimizing labor regulations are pushed as agendas of development as economic growth, formulated by IFIs and pushed in the form of conditions for lending, carried out by local elites. The effects of these neoliberal economic policies are experienced in the forms of precariousness among the working classes (Bieler, Lindberg, &

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Pillay, 2008). The flexibility and mobility of labor globally have resulted in poor working conditions, low wages and the absence of social, health, and economic protections (Dutta, 2015). Moreover, the global mobility of production and services has resulted in the active role taken by states in weakening labor unions (Harvey, 2005). Interrogating the structures of development attends to the class and imperial interests that are obfuscated by narratives of poverty alleviation and inclusive growth that occupy the dominant discourses of development. By interrogating the structures of development, the CCA attends to the communicative inequalities that constitute the sites at the center where development theories are produced, development ideas are generated and development policies are imagines. The framework of “theorizing from” or “theorizing with” disrupts the coloniality of knowledge production as theory generation “on” the Third World manufactured from a distance. For instance, the voices of activists-scholars from the global South voicing the ontology of resistance narrated in the “Arab Spring” disrupt the techno-deterministic hegemony of development discourse that frames the “Arab Spring” as a product of diffusion of Western technologies (such as Facebook and YouTube) in the Middle East that disseminated democracy (Collins & Rothe, 2014; Dutta, 2013; Prashad, 2012a, 2012b). Moreover, the hegemonic formations of interventions such as democracy promotion, support for civil society, and support for freedom are critically interrogated, situated amid the colonial agendas that are served by these interventions (Collins & Rothe, 2014; Dutta, 2015). For instance, critical interrogations of the US intervention in Libya disrupt the dominant narrative of democracy promotion circulated in dominant and mainstream spheres (Prashad, 2012a, 2012b). In this backdrop, as a feature of local organizing processes at the margins, the interrogation of the structures of development brings forth theorizations of social change from the global South. Community participation is a radical entry point for challenging the injustices built into the dominant frameworks of organizing structures, interrupting the rhetorical tropes of empowerment and participation that serve the agendas of contemporary neoliberal development, framing technologies as solutions to citizenship as empowered customer participation in the marketplace. Recognizing the complicity of the managerial-bureaucratic class with transnational capital, the work of culturally centering is the de-centering of the sites, means, and mechanisms of knowledge production. The complicity of local, regional, trans-regional, and global elites in the (re)pro-

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duction of knowledge that erases and simultaneously incorporates subaltern knowledge, the transformative work of theorizing from the global South lies in the participation of the subaltern margins. For instance, the hegemonic formations of “Asian turn” are disrupted through the activist interventions from the South in Asia that challenge the foundations of hegemonic claims to Asia and Asian inter-referencing. The theorization of the “Asian turn” in Singapore, Shanghai or Hong Kong, at the sites of Asian capital flows and financial hegemony colonizes the struggles across Asia that work against these processes of capitalist consolidation; to turn to the global South as spaces of interventions is to foreground resistive opportunities for disrupting these colonizing structures. Particularly salient is the racist and gendered nature of such theorizing, often, for instance, occupied by Han Chinese in Singapore, Hong Kong, and Shanghai, and by Hindu Brahmins in Bangalore and Mumbai. These racist, casteist, and gendered structures erase subaltern claims to knowledge through their inherent logics of what counts as knowledge. To co-­ create sites of interventions at the global margins in the South is to continually explore opportunities for disrupting these hegemonic locations through which claims to “alternative knowledge” are made. For instance, the voices of dalit, women farmers, organized into sanghams in rural Telangana, India, under the umbrella of the Deccan Development Society, to challenging the colonizing interventions of global agro-capital articulate: When we own this knowledge, we change how agriculture is practiced. It is all about who owns the knowledge and who gets to shape how we communicate about the knowledge. When you [referring to academics and civil society] own this knowledge, you do so by erasing us, so you are the experts. So a lot of what we do here in our struggles is to take back that ownership of knowledge. We own this knowledge [of indigenous seeds and farming] and this changes the economy. We are no longer exploited because we can’t be made fools. We grow these crops, observe them, compare them, and have confidence in what crops will sustain the economy.

The intervention, therefore, is in the community ownership of knowledge, with community claims to agricultural practices that challenge the hegemonic claims of monoculture farming. Interventions such as “Prajateerpu” (citizen’s jury) seek to transform the conversation on food futures in Andhra Pradesh by turning to citizens and engaging them in

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decision-making processes for evaluating various agricultural systems and practices. Citizen-led juries emerge as sites of interventions where the citizens share their knowledge as well as interrogate expert (juries are formed through public participation) knowledge through deliberative processes. 6.3.2  Reworking Structures of Development The work of cultural centering therefore is critically and foremost about de-centering the discursive and material structures of globalizing modernity that invokes culture to reify transnational capitalist hegemony. The anchor to the work of centering lies in the de-centering of the claims to culture that see it as a pathway for the expressing of capitalism, working through its different locales and trajectories, into different forms, marketed as “alternative modernities.” As demonstrated in the previous chapter, the turn to culturalism or culturally based arguments about local sites of modernity that emerged since the 1980s and accelerated through the  1990s was built upon a broader agenda of holding up the political economy of capital. Capitalism, now narrated through culturalist narratives of difference, is positioned in its hegemonic status, invoked through its claims of alternative modernities, which are nevertheless capitalist. Here’s Dirlik: It is possible that fear of intellectual reductionism, or functionalism, or simply sounding like a Marxist when Marxism is supposedly discredited, makes for a reluctance to stress the context of current discussions of modernity within the political economy of contemporary capitalism. And yet, this context is important to grasping not only arguments for globalization, but also the hearing granted to assertions of cultural difference. I would like to underline ‘the hearing’ here, for while cultural differences have been present all along, what distinguishes our times from times past is a willingness to listen to invocations of cultural legacies not as reactionary responses to modernity but as the very conditions of a global modernity. Especially pertinent is the challenge to Eurocentric conceptions of capitalism that became audible from the late 1970s with the emergence of East Asian societies as a new center of capitalist power, that remapped the geography of capitalism but also, in its very de-centering of capitalism, signalled the arrival of a global capitalism. According to this perspective, ‘multiple modernities’ may signify either the proliferation of modernities (in its multiplicity), or its universalization (with the multiplicities as local inflections of a common discourse, but also as its agents). (p. 284)

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The sites of capitalism across the globe, narrated in cultural stories, reproduce the structures of capitalist extraction and oppression. Critically noting and interrogating these cultural stories is the basis for de-centering the dominant structures of development. Reworking structures of development in democratic principles shifts the framework of development into the hands of the oppressed, with ownership and decision-making powers held by the oppressed. The local ownership of science, technology and knowledge, on one hand, foregrounds local knowledge, and, on the other hand, engages dialogically with scientific and technological knowledge. Community participation in democratic processes constitutes the generation of knowledge. In its commitment to turning scientific and technological knowledge to serve the needs of the oppressed social classes, the CCA draws its impetus from Marxist theories of development. Notes Peet (1997): Critical political economy takes a different position, seeing science, emancipation, democracy, equality as arenas of contestation fought over in a number of places and at a number of times rather than as pure products, or even ploys, of the Enlightenment. For political economy the challenge remains to transform the social relations within which intellectual activity takes place, to reorient imagination and theoretical practice, and to change the social relations of the implementation of intellectual endeavours: i.e. to make “science” serve the interests of the oppressed. (p. 82)

The CCA foregrounds the communicative processes through which communities at the margins can participate in the production of scientific knowledge, drawing in indigenous knowledge systems and culturally constituted systems of knowledge production (Dutta, 2011, 2018a, 2018b). The dialogic process of engaging science through communicative infrastructures that are owned by those at the margins inverts the hegemonic deployment of science toward serving the agendas of capital. The recognition of indigenous science and the struggles of indigenous communities to own the infrastructures where scientific knowledge is produced and circulated forms the basis of a transformative movement of democratizing the processes of knowledge generation. Elements of science that are integral to improving the quality of life of the poor are incorporated into larger structures of decision-making, where the poor participate on the basis of their conversations with science. For instance, in the work of the culture-centered approach (CCA) with dalit, women farmers organized under the umbrella of the Deccan

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Development Society, the ownership and redistribution of land by the women’s collective is tied to their ownership of communicative resources such as local community radio and documentary films (Dutta & Thaker, 2019). The community radio station is owned and run by the women’s sanghams, cooperatives that the women collectively participate in. Through the cameras they run and the scripts they create, the women disrupt the neoliberal rationality of cash-driven high-input agriculture. Structures of development are often formulated on the construct of the citizen, with the citizen as both the recipient of and an advocate for development. Development as citizenship, however, runs into limits when considering the global landscape of expulsion produced by neoliberal policies. The subaltern, removed from her/his spaces of livelihood, is cast into the global neoliberal economy as the precariat, with her/his body in various forms of exposure to threats. The very contestation of citizenship, who is a citizen and who is not, forms the basis of how development is organized, with the constant marking of the outside of citizenship as undeserving of rights and protections. The floating subaltern, without citizenship, is erased from the discursive structures of development, without the right to have rights. 6.3.3  Disrupting Technologies of the Futures The recognition that the technological futures proposed as imaginaries of change are often built on oppressive, extractive and exploitative practices that are strategically hidden is a critical anchor to the transformative process. Technologies as disruptions are projected as transforming the human condition and as holding the panacea to challenges of development and sustainability. From climate change to global inequality, which have been produced at an accelerated pace because of the neoliberal reforms that have been put in place across the globe in the last three decades, techno-­ capitalism is propped up as the panacea, making the pathway for further neoliberal reforms and penetration of markets. Technologies of the future are thus proposed by transnational capital as the solutions to the problems produced by capitalism. More technological innovation, it is suggested, are necessary to address the effects of unmitigated capitalism. Digital ­platforms, rhetorically marketed as the catalysts of cooperative movements and sharing economies, are depicted as the anchors to emancipatory futures. Optimistic conversations on artificially intelligent technologies depict the promises of universal basic income (UBI) and leisure, as pathways to structural transformations.

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For Klaus Schwab (2016), the Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum (WEF), the seduction of techno-capital lies in its ability to create new markets in addressing the challenges of climate change and inequality. The language of value generation and win-win communicates the possibilities that are unleashed by the technologies of the futures. He notes: New business and organizational models promise innovative ways of creating and sharing value, which in turn lead to whole system changes that can actively benefit the natural world as much as our economies and societies. Self-driving vehicles, the sharing economy and leasing models all result in significantly higher asset utilization rates, as well as making it far easier to capture, reuse, and “upcycle” materials when the appropriate time comes. (Schwab, p. 66)

Note here the deployment of vacuous communication, devoid of materiality. The seductions of self-driving vehicles and sharing economy are sold as resulting in higher asset utilization rates. The very language of asset utilization devoid of meaning is then set in relationship to the language of “capture,” “reuse,” and “upcycle,” another set of vacuous symbols devoid of material bases. As a communicative inversion then, privatized techno-­ solutions are positioned as solutions to the natural world. The various WEF reports on technology, big data and sustainability are rife with such vacuous communication, enabling the accelerated propagation of communicative inversions, which, in turn, keep elite power intact while projecting the elites as working to address the problems of climate change and inequality through public-private partnerships. In this backdrop of monocultures of techno-promotion, particularly by the global elites that control the social change communication industries, voices of the margins disrupt the taken-for-granted assumptions that are sold as solutions for the futures. For instance, the very notion of disruptive technologies as the anchors to innovation is disrupted through the presence of subaltern voices from the margins of these technologies. In the work of the CCA, with low-wage migrant construction workers in Singapore with limited to no labor protections, amid authoritarian state control on spaces of migrant worker organizing, the voices of migrant workers disrupt the narrative of digital empowerment, depicting the ways in which digital images seduce them into networks of low-wage labor (Dutta & Kaur-Gill, 2018). Foregrounding the communicative inversions

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in the symbols circulated through digital networks, the low-wage migrant workers depict the ways in which they are enticed into traps of precarious work in Singapore. In these articulations, the gaps between the image of Singapore as a smart nation and Asian destination and the material reality of the lived experience of low-wage migrant work are foregrounded. Similarly, the voices of foreign domestic workers in Singapore disrupt the empowering narrative of mobile phones as transformation, depicting the ways in which their (im)mobilities are constituted within racist, classist, and patriarchal formations that are produced at the interplays of authoritarian state management and neoliberal capitalism (Dutta & Kaur-­ Gill, 2018). The narratives of techno-empowerment are disrupted by the narratives of the margins that organize outside of the realms of technologies. Simultaneously, the communicative constructions of emancipatory digital futures are resisted by the voices of workers participating in the dirty labor of digital economies, resisting the digital transnational corporations through their collective organizing. For instance, the strikes carried out by workers for decent wages at the Amazon warehouses disrupt the image of clean movement put forth by Amazon (Eidelson, 2019). The narratives of clean technologies of the digital are disrupted by the voices of subaltern child workers in the conflict mines where the minerals (such as Coltan) that make up the technologies of digital capital are produced (Ayres, 2012). Whereas organizing efforts such as fair phones depict efforts to source minerals produced ethically, the material reality of imperial formations and local conflicts that constitute the contexts of mine work in the Congo escape neat categorizations. Similarly, the voices of factory workers in the assembly lines of Foxconn, narrating accounts of suicides, the oppressive workplace conditions and the severe health effects of being on the assembly lines where iPhones are produced disrupt the clean narrative attached to the technology of the iPhone through heavily funded PR campaigns. The hegemonic narratives of “green technologies” are disrupted by the voices of indigenous communities displaced by the land grabs that form the infrastructures of capitalist occupations of the remaining spaces of nature (Bonds & Downey, 2012). Particularly salient are the forms of climate apartheid and climate colonialism that are built into ever-expanding techno-capitalist solutions of sustainability that offer new technologies for addressing climate change while keeping intact and reproducing the underlying inequalities in the distributions of risks, opportunities, and

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access (Baldwin, 2013). Even as new technologies of Whiteness expand into spaces in the global South in order to drive the new green economy of capital, communities of color displaced from their livelihoods as climate refugees emerge as stateless bodies in the metropoles in the North, without access to fundamental rights, claims to citizenship and infrastructures for recognition and representation. The voice infrastructures co-created through culturally centered processes create openings for transformative articulations from the margins, continually disrupting the communicative inversions disseminated by transnational capital through propaganda instruments of hegemonic social change communication.

6.4   Conclusion In this chapter, the tenets of cultural centering were outlined, attending to the ways in which culture-centered readings of social change communication interrogate the structures that constitute communication. That structures constitute communication forms the basis for theorizing communicative inequality, the inequality in the distribution of communicative resources for voice. Communicative resources, owned by power structures, are deployed toward formulating social change communication in the service of global capital, consolidating power in the hands of capital and continuing to further entrench inequalities. The sections in this chapter draw attention to the ways in which subaltern bodies are incorporated into sites of profiteering in global capital, with the performance of subaltern participation directed toward serving the interests of communication capital. Noting that dominant development articulations operate on the very basis of communicative inequalities, the process of cultural centering turns to subaltern voices as the generators of alternative imaginaries. Addressing communicative inequality by co-creating communicative infrastructures serves as the basis for theorizing from the global South, with contextually situated theories from the margins disrupting and dismantling the neoliberal knowledge claims. The co-optation of culture as a tool of structure is resisted through the placing of communicative equality as the basis for the process of cultural centering.

Notes 1. The margins refer to the peripheries of world systems that are systematically rendered voiceless and as sites of exploitation. The margins refer to the peripheral spaces of global resource distribution, distribution of capital and policy formulation. Margins exist spatially in relationship to centers of

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power, with the legitimacy of power constituted in its very relationship with the margins. 2. The neoliberal ideology pushing the framework of the free market as the omnipotent panacea for human problems depends on an entire industry of experts occupying a variety of roles from the academe to think tanks, foundations, and consulting corporations. 3. Consider, for instance, the recent instance of a state-based program using a brown-face in an advertising campaign, with a Chinese actor painting himself brown to play an Indian and a Malay character. In response to the racist campaign, the Singapore digital performers PreetiPls and Subhash Nair created a video, incorporating parody. The video was made to be taken down, and the performers were given a warning. In explaining the decision, the Law and Home Affairs Minister, K. Shanmugam, noted, “We are not in the American situation. And we must see how we can progress further, because as many of us recognise, there continue to be racial fault lines and religious fault lines. It is always a work in progress.” See Straits Times article “Discuss race issues openly,” at https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/discussrace-issues-openly-work-to-make-things-better-shanmugam. Earlier in the year, the activist-academic Sangeetha Thanapal was given a stern warning for her Facebook post interrogating the racist constructions in the movie “Crazy Rich Asians.” Based on her work on Chinese privilege, Thanapal drew attention to the deep-seated racism in Singapore. 4. Third World refers to the developing nations of the global South that have historically been constructed as passive recipients of development interventions. 5. Subalternity is the condition of being erased.

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CHAPTER 7

Agentic Expressions and Socialist Futures

Agency forms the backbone of culture-centered processes of social change communication (Dutta, 2004a, 2004b). The recognition of the capacities of communities at the margins, communities erased from pathways of mobility into the dominant discursive spaces, to express their voices, shapes culture-centered processes of communication for social change. If agency forms the basis of social change communication, what form does it take in the CCA? Theorizing the very nature of agency becomes a key element of culture-centered scholarship, delineating various forms of theorizing agency. For agency to be transformative, interrogating and disrupting structures are fundamental impulses, expressed through the questioning of the taken-for-granted assumptions that are built into structures, and thus articulating an emancipatory politics. In contrast to the neoliberal framework of agency as individualized and privatized resilience, agency in the CCA is a site for collective recognition, expression of a negotiated collective identity, and organizing on the basis of this identity. The expression of subaltern voice, therefore, emerges from the collective recognition of subaltern agency as the basis for challenging and transforming structures. This commitment to the expression of subaltern voice is anchored in how the CCA theorizes communicative inequality, the inequality in the distribution of communicative resources for voice. The culture-centered methodology, when applied in the realm of ground-up interventions, maps out the communicative inequalities and seeks to transform it on the © The Author(s) 2020 M. Dutta, Communication, Culture and Social Change, Palgrave Studies in Communication for Social Change, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26470-3_7

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basis of solidarities with communities at the margins. Noting that subalternity as a condition is shaped by ongoing erasures at the margins of the margins, culture-centered processes are recursive, with the continuous search for and reaching out to the voices that are erased by the rules, norms and guidelines of dominant discursive spaces. This also translates into the open-endedness of culture-centered processes, built on reflexivity that attends to inequalities in distributions of opportunities for voice within communities, associations, organizations and unions. This reflexivity then forms the basis of a transformative politics of solidarity that embodies an ongoing commitment to invitational dialogue with the margins. Note here the multiple layers of workings of communicative inequalities, in placing communities at the margins of the mainstream and in constituting inequalities within communities. In this sense, the CCA draws on the notion that communicative inequality is relational, reflected in power imbalances in relationships that shape the differential access to actors to communicative infrastructures. The relationship between the symbolic and the material is played out in the enactment of agency, with agency serving as the basis for transformative action. That the symbolic is grounded in the material, and, in turn, the material is anchored in the symbolic, forms the basis of communicative struggles for voice rooted in everyday experiences at the subaltern margins. Rather than seeing the possibilities of resistance in monolithic networks and in techno-mediated platforms that feed the techno-fetish, the CCA turns toward the question of communities as sites of expressions of democracy. The process of cultural centering is one of turning toward direct democratic control over development decision-making, anchored in a fundamental transformation of the knowledge structures. Epistemic equality, as the basis of co-creating development processes, is embedded in communicative equality.

7.1   Agency, Community, and Social Change The agentic expression of social change communication in the decolonial articulations of marginalized communities inverts the expert-driven framework of neoliberalism that perpetuates colonialism by reproducing the framework of social change knowledge produced at a distance. Communities as decolonial sites are fragmented, dynamic and contested spaces of meaning-making, rife with differences and plural debates on the issues that are most salient to community members. Even as certain

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i­dentity positions emerge as salient markers around which communities come to organize, these positions are contested in community life. Communication as community advocacy. Advocacy communication reflects the resistive framework of social change communication that seeks to intervene in public opinion and policy structures through the strategic uses of communication (Wilkins, 2014). Communities at the margins of neoliberal development participate in a plethora of communicative practices to register their voices (Dutta, 2013). The struggles of the Dongria Kondh in the context of their resistance to the mining operations in Niyamgiri, for instance, witnessed everyday community performances, processions on streets and songs shared through collective networks as communication resources that emerged from within the communities (Dutta, 2013). These communication resources then were embedded in digital networks of solidarity, being carried across global spaces in mobilizing a global movement of solidarity for the Dongria Kondh. Moreover, the lived accounts of experiences with the mining operations, including health effects and effects on the environment, were registered on everyday forms of mobile media and circulated through digital networks. Communication as community advocacy centers interpretive frames of development as lived through the experiences of community life, disrupting the frames that constitute the propaganda of development driven by knowledge frames created by experts. The notion of narratives emerging from within discursive spaces transforms the concept of discourses being imposed top-down through communication as persuasion. Note here the anchoring role of community voice through local participation and organizing, which then drives the digital articulations of resistance. The communication rights framework that emerged in the backdrop of the New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO) continues to be voiced through the various communication rights advocacy campaigns across the globe, including the Communication Rights in the Information Society (CRIS) campaign attached to the United Nations (UN)-sponsored World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS). Drawing upon his over three decades of advocacy work with communication rights, Thomas offers an in-­depth analysis of the vibrant right to communication across various communities and contexts in India. What is eloquently depicted in the account offered by Thomas is the linking of “local practices to local theorists and their theories,” thus, in this instance, privileging the theoretical accounts of communication rights emerging from sites of struggle in the global South.

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The work of communication as community advocacy against caste-­ based discrimination in dalit (referring to the lower castes in caste-based Hindu India that are subjected to caste-based stigma and discrimination, including untouchability) movements in India, for instance, roots itself in the communicative rights of dalits (referring to the lower caste and untouchable groups). Articulation of rights through communication is a key feature of the ongoing organizing, mobilization and politicization of the dalit identity, working into the political structures of Indian democracy in the form of political parties and simultaneously interrogating the very features of Indian democracy that are embedded in Brahminical norms. Particularly salient in contemporary dalit movements is the turn to the teachings of B.  R. Ambedkar, a leader of the depressed classes and particularly the Mahars (leather workers) in the Bombay presidency, who influenced by concepts of equality advocated by leaders such as Jyotiba Phule in the nineteenth century, saw fundamental resistance to the caste-­ based oppression of Hindu society as the basis for dalit rights. For instance, Ambedkar commemorated the 1818 Battle of Koregaon, which holds great significance for dalits because 800 troops of the British Army comprising Mahars defeated the troops of the high caste Hindu ruler Peshwa Baji Rao II, which were much larger in number. In 2018, amid the climate of upper-caste Hindutva politics in India, dalit assertion emerged as a communicative structure for resisting the turn to cultural authoritarianism mixed in with the large-scale adoption of accelerated practices of capitalist accumulation. The 200th anniversary of the Battle of Koregaon was incorporated as a discursive site for organizing in protest against the Hindutva forces in India, while simultaneously laying claim to a resistive dalit identity. Resistance to the culturalism constituted within dominant structures, we see in the Mahar articulations a resistive articulation of culture as a site of storytelling, decolonizing the Hindutva history of India to put forth the story of the Mahars as the original inhabitants of India subjugated by the invasion of caste-based Aryans from the West. Performance. In the struggles of the margins, performances are salient tools of community advocacy that render visible the experiences of marginalization. As embodied accounts of marginalization, performances capture the marks of violence materially expressed on the body. In the global South, social movements have been anchored in performance. Theater for social change, for instance, has been a key communicative resource in socialist struggles in the global South, articulating imaginations of development grounded in worker rights, collective ownership of resources, and

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resistance to capitalist accumulation. The Indian People’s Theater Association (IPTA), for instance, was a key resource in the formulation and expression of the agendas of the Left in India. The growing Left movement across India catalyzed and consolidated public support in the context of the anti-imperial struggle and later in the early years of nation-­ building. Performances addressed the questions of imperialism, poverty, capitalism and worker organizing. Often placed at factories, streets, and slums, performances drew in the poor and the margins in the scripting of stories, situating the stories of marginalization under the broader narratives of exploitation and oppression. In authoritarian regimes, such as Singapore, theater has served as a site for interrogating state power, introducing critical questions and interrupting the state’s hegemonic narrative of development. Performances often draw in the body as a site for disrupting hegemonic formations. Self-sacrifice has historically operated as a powerful frame for social change movements. The self is subjected into the space of political action; the body becomes the site of enunciation, and symbolically creates a discursive space for resistance as it disrupts the taken-for-granted assumptions about politics and citizenship. Hunger strikes, for instance, depriving the body of food, have remained a powerful act of resistance in movements of civil disobedience across the globe. Framed in narratives that draw on cultural articulations of hunger, hunger strikes disrupt the hegemonic notions of neocolonial and capitalist exploitations through the stories narrated by the body. The body, placed as the lack of ingested food, disrupts the normative notions of the body as the site of consumption mediated through the market. The hunger strikes performed by India’s farmers amid the agrarian crisis disrupt the hegemonic narrative of neoliberal progress, paradoxically attending to the reality of the hungry farmer. In protesting against the oppressive policies of globalization that have placed them at the margins of contemporary economies, and sharing the stories of deprivation and material inaccess faced in their own lives, farmers, miners and indigenous people across the globe have committed suicides as the ultimate expressions of resistance to the state-sponsored neoliberal violence carried out in the form of globalization (Majid, 2008). The stories narrated by bodies committing suicides are stories of displacement, expulsion, and exploitation in the backdrop of the accelerated penetration of the neoliberal project. Majid narrates the story of the suicide committed by a South Korean farmer, Kyung Hae, president of the Korean

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Advanced Farmers Federation, in the Mexican resort of Cancun in 2003 when he was attending the Fifth World Trade Organization (WTO) Ministerial Conference: On the day the WTO conference opened (coinciding with the Korean Thanksgiving holiday of Chusok and around the second anniversary of 9/11), Kyung Hae climbed the steel barricades separating protesters from officials and stabbed himself to death, thus concluding a long attempt (including a self-stabbing in Geneva a decade earlier) to bring the world’s attention to the destructive impact of globalization on South Korea’s rural communities: “I am crying out the words to you that have so long time inside my body,” he wrote. (p. 137)

Kyung Hae’s suicide at the very site of neoliberal hegemony became a media spectacle, thus disrupting the representations of the WTO with the stories of violence perpetrated by global policies that reify the power and control of transnational corporations (TNCs) in the global South. Suicide, as a performance, ultimately disrupts the status quo through its narration of the structural violence that remains hidden underneath the marketing strategies, advertising campaigns, and public relations initiatives of global corporations. It breaks past the controlled and strategic use of symbolic markers by TNCs, articulating stories that are altogether different, narrating alternative rationalities that disrupt the market logics. Consider similarly the ongoing farmer suicides amid the agrarian crisis in India brought about by the rapid commoditization of agriculture, neoliberal transformation of agriculture into a cash-driven practice, technology-­ intensive transformations, and accumulating cycles of debts to feed the input-intensive agriculture. The stories of farmers committing suicides and those of widows caught in the webs of debt after their husband’s suicides attend to the violence of the neoliberal project. These are stories of deprivation, of structural violence and desperation, and of loss in the face of the neoliberal project and its instruments of power and control played out through global policies. As a symbolic marker of violence, suicide enters into the discursive space to draw attention to the much more deep-­ seated, hidden forms of structural violence that are perpetrated by the agendas of neoliberalism in the global landscape. Worth noting in the culture-centered strategies of performance is the explicit emphasis on resistance and structural transformation, in contrast to the co-option of performance as a channel for disseminating the

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­ egemonic ideas of development. The neoliberal transformation of much h of the global South witnessed the increasing incorporation of theater as a channel for disseminating dominant development ideas. The resistance-­ based roots of street theater and community performances were erased as increasingly theatrical performances were incorporated into dominant development communication interventions. In this backdrop, theatrical performances as sites of cultural centering seek to regain the place of theater as a site of resistance. Through their performances that challenge the taken-for-granted assumptions in dominant structures, stories anchor social change. Auto-­ ethnographic accounts, autobiographies, stories told from the margins disrupt the hegemonic assumptions circulated within structures of oppression, as justifications of the oppressive practices. The voices of individuals and/or community members living in subalternity. Community media. Increasingly in the face of consolidation of media power in the hands of transnational capital, the struggles of communities at the global margins has been constituted around the creation and implementation of community media for telling stories from within communities (Carpentier, Lie, & Servaes, 2007; Kidd, Rodriguez, & Stein, 2009; Pavarala & Malik, 2007). Community media, created through the participation of communities at the margins, draw on local cultural rules, codes and value systems to develop frameworks of communication. The rules of communication and the infrastructures of decision-making are embedded in community life, in the fabrics of community relationships. The plurality of community media depicts the robustness of grassroots democratic processes in voicing diverse understandings of development, economics, society, culture, and politics. Interrogating the dominant models of development that are advertised on privatized communication channels, community media present alternative rationalities of development, thus offering new scripts for social change communication. The community radio run by the cooperative of women farmers organized into Sanghams under the umbrella of the Deccan Development Society (DDS) depicts the role of community media in creating spaces that challenge the neoliberal ideology disseminated through the mass media (Thaker & Dutta, 2016). Knowledge, freedom and democracy. Knowledge is the resource used by those in power to erase the voices of subaltern communities. The claims to knowledge, made within specific linguistic strategies, rituals, and formations are the very sites that erase subaltern claims to knowledge. The

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deployment of techniques of making knowledge claims through expert uses of methods works to silence subaltern voices. Democracy and freedom are embedded within these structures of knowledge production to erase paradoxically the voices of the subaltern margins. Democracy constructed within dominant structures of knowledge is deployed toward serving neoliberal agendas that erase subaltern livelihoods. Reworking the sites of knowledge production and re-creating the very meanings of freedom and democracy as the bases for community voice create the bases for social change. Structures are transformed through the building of community-­ owned communicative infrastructures where knowledge claims from the margins may be made. Noting the interplay of communicative infrastructures of knowledge and freedom, voice Mattelart and Mattelart (1998): The age of the so-called information society is also that of the production of mental states. It will be necessary to rethink the question of freedom and democracy. Political freedom cannot be reduced to the right to exercise one’s will. It also lies in the right to control the process whereby that will is formed. (p. 156)

Communication thus is central in the struggles for sovereignty, closely intertwined with the nature, content and forms of knowledge being generated. The freedom to generate knowledge from the margins shapes the processes of structural transformation, with knowledge claims from the margins serving as the bases of resistance. The work of building communicative infrastructures in this sense is constituted around foregrounding spaces and inviting methodologies in dialogue through which subaltern claims may be foregrounded. Articulating subaltern claims as the basis for creating pathways of alternative development is based on creative spaces for knowledge generation that are embedded in subaltern life. The dialogue with the hegemonic structures and forms of generating knowledge claims is shaped by ownership and accountability of knowledge, placed in the hands of the subaltern margins. This turn to the democratization of knowledge is not anti-­science as is often portrayed in caricatures; instead, it seeks to hold the methods, tools, and outcomes of science accountable to the voices of subaltern communities. Science thus is democratized, placed in dialogue with other knowledge systems grounded in the actual lived experiences of subaltern communities.

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Consider in this context the work of subaltern organizing that disrupts the colonization of subaltern knowledge systems through biopiracy, the stealing, patenting, and privatization of the subaltern knowledge of nature to generate profits (Bodekar, 2003; Dutta & Pal, 2010a, 2010b). Under the guise of trade-related intellectual property rights (TRIPS), neocolonial corporations, predominantly based in the US patent indigenous seeds stolen from across the global South through the tools of biotechnology. As an instrument of neoliberal colonialism, TRIPS actively enables the stealing of indigenous knowledge systems and the destruction of indigenous lifeworlds. The production of hybrid seeds serves as the basis for privatizing the indigenous seed and incorporating it in the networks of global capital. The work of patenting the seeds takes place in legal structures in the global North, with the notion that the challenge to the biopiracy of the seed would have to be placed in the structures of the North. Inherent then to the instruments of biopiracy is the establishment of antidemocratic structures steeped in communicative inequalities. Transnational biotechnological corporations successfully seek patents on food grains from the South, removing these food grains from local sustenance systems in the South and turning them into commodities to be purchased from TNCs from the North. The notion of the patent serves as the basis of knowledge grab. TRIPs treats indigenous knowledge as common property because it is not patented, thus opening the pathway to the privatization of knowledge. The idea that if knowledge is not patented, it is not owned and, therefore, is open to technological modifications, which can then be patented, is deeply colonial (Bodekar, 2003). Bodekar (2003) observe that the TRIPS Agreement does not extend either patent or geographic protection to the traditional knowledge of indigenous people. The patent laws under TRIPS do not adequately recognize the traditional form of breeding as “prior art” (i.e., the entire body of knowledge available to the public before a given filing or priority date for any patent, utility model, or industrial design). TRIPS operates on fundamental inequalities in the determination of what counts as knowledge, enabling the exploitation of knowledge systems that are rich in genetic resources and low in technology. The access to technology in the global North enables the process of colonization, with TNCs owning the technology working to harness and reproduce genetic material for patenting, expropriating local resources and owning them through theft to generate greater profit.

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Consider, for instance, RiceTec, a Texas-based TNC that sought to patent basmati rice. Basmati rice is traditional to South Asia, primarily India and Pakistan. In September 1997, RiceTec successfully applied for several patents on the basmati rice and grain lines. RiceTec’s US patent claimed the invention of “novel rice lines with plants that are semi-dwarf in stature, substantially photoperiod-insensitive and high-yielding, and that produce rice grains having characteristics similar or superior to those of good quality basmati rice grains produced in India and Pakistan.” The Pakistani and Indian governments refuted the patents, stating that the plant varieties and grains already exist as a staple in India and that neither variety of rice can be grown in the US. The United States Patent and Trademark Office rescinded 15 of the 20 patents granted. However, the five remaining patents continue to permit RiceTec to exclude others from making, using and selling its patented basmati rice in the US until 2017. Note the active erasure of the ownership of genetic material originally developed by South Asian farmers; the germplasm from these varieties was initially collected in the Indian subcontinent and later deposited and processed in the US and other places. Moreover, the colonization of the “basmati” name enables RiceTec to colonize the market for rice (Trade and Environment Database (TED), 1998, 2005). In this backdrop of the colonization of subaltern knowledge systems and biological resources, subaltern communities voice their claims. When the US-based multinational W. R. Grace filed a patent for the plant Neem (widely used for healing in Ayurveda, a healing system located in epistemology of the global South) in the European Patent Office (EPO), the grassroots group Navdanya (a network of seed keepers and organic producers across sixteen states in India) built communicative infrastructures for participation in the spaces of the South, creating participatory forums for discussing the theft of Neem and mobilizing over 100,000 signatures in subaltern communities. In addition to this work of voicing within the infrastructures of the global South, Navdanya collaborated with international organizations to file an oppositional petition to the patent at the EPO in Munich, Germany (Shiva, 2007). The communicative inequality built into the colonizing structures of TRIPS is resisted through the theoretical framework of biopiracy, offering both communicative and material resources for resisting the colonization of subaltern resources and knowledge systems by TNCs in the North. Navdanya’s resistance is enacted in the form of promoting seed sovereignty (Bija Swaraj) and food sovereignty among farmers by setting up a

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learning center on biodiversity and organic farming, training farmers on seed sovereignty and sustainable agriculture, promoting the rejuvenation of indigenous knowledge and culture, running campaigns on the hazards of genetic engineering and defending people’s knowledge from biopiracy (www.navdanya.org/). In its campaign against the approval by the Agricultural Ministry of India for the commercial planting of Bt. Brinjal, Navdanya interrogated the science behind the dissemination of Bt. Brinjal, questioning the claim that without the genetically modified Bt. pests cannot be controlled and citing the evidence of the increase in pesticide use in Vidarbha after Bt. Cotton was introduced (Shiva, 2010). This evidence was presented in the backdrop of evidence of the efficacy of toxic free organic farming as practiced by the Navdanya farmers. Second, questions regarding the safety and risks associated with transgenic Bt. were raised. These questions of safety of GM foods have been also raised in the European Union as well in the US, where non-profit advocacy groups such as the Center for Food Safety have emerged as sites of contesting the control held by TNCs in the agricultural market. Of particular concern are the health effects of genetically modified foods and the question of the safety of such foods (www.centerforfoodsafety.org/geneticall2.cfm). Third, Navdanya called for data from studies of self-pollination versus cross-pollination of Bt. Brinjal, along with the maximum distance traveled by the Bt. pollen. Farmers organized themselves as genetically modified organism (GMO)-free Jaiv Panchayats (Living Democracy), with letters being sent from approximately 4365 Navdanya farmers representing 126 Jaiv Panchayats, declaring Bija Satyagraha (non-cooperation) to stop GM foods. References to the indigenous culture and to the historic-cultural concept of Satyagraha to locate the indigenous movement in the context of the Indian freedom struggle against British colonialism, where Satyagraha or non-cooperation was used as a strategy of resistance to the British colonialists by promoting sustainable indigenous forms of production and simultaneously boycotting the products marketed by the imperialists in the indigenous spaces. Based on public hearings on Bt. Brinjal, pressures from farmers and the declaration of 12 states that they will not allow Bt. Brinjal, the Minister of Environment declared a moratorium on Bt. Brinjal (Hindustan Times, February 24, 2010). As the example of Bt. Brinjal demonstrates, culture-centered co-constructions with the margins create opportunities for the development of alternative discourses and rationalities that challenge the reductionist and profit-driven narrative of

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neoliberalism. The “epistemological inequality” (de Sousa Santos, 2005, p. ix) that constitutes the neoliberal structures of agrarian transformation across India, carried out in the name of development, is inverted by an active politics of communicative equality. The participation of farmers in the Jaiv Panchayats is anchored in the right to communicate, voicing the knowledge claims of farmers to reimagine development. Digital spaces. Digital spaces on one hand are constituted within the militarized profit-driven structures of information networks, serving as instruments of accelerated financialization and incorporation into neoliberal hegemony; on the other hand, they offer viable platforms for articulating alternative imaginaries of development (Dutta, 2013). One of the earliest examples of digitally mediated subaltern resistance that was organized, networked and articulated through the Internet is the Zapatista movement (Cleaver, 1998). The distribution of information about local oppressions and struggles in the Zapatista communities via the Internet created the basis for networks of solidarity across the globe with other indigenous, environmental and feminist movements (Cleaver, 1998; Garrido & Halavais, 2003; Schulz, 1998). The digital space of the Zapatista movement developed a model of solidarity among indigenous communities for resisting the dominant global-national-local structures that perpetrated their exploitation and erasure, and connected these indigenous struggles with issues of environmental activism and women’s rights. The success of the movement was attributed to its capacity to digitally narrate the story of a grassroots struggle of resistance, to build linkages with struggles that bypassed and often resisted national policies of structural adjustment, to create a global base of support and public opinion for the local Zapatista struggle, and to place into the mainstream public spheres of globalization local models of alternative rationality, participatory processes and organizing that stood in opposition to the colonial principles of neoliberalism. Noting the revolutionizing role of the Ejercito Zapatista de Liberacion National (EZLN, or Zapatista Army of National Liberation) in creating a global network of grassroots solidarity utilizing the web, a network analysis conducted by Garrido and Halavais (2003) demonstrated that Zapatista-related sites are central to the global NGO networks and bind them together. What is salient about the Zapatista-driven networks is their grounding in a guerrilla-based revolutionary movement working in solidarity with indigenous resistance, voicing alternative ideas of organizing (Zapatismo) that challenge the basis of neoliberal governance. The

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t­ heorizing of network-based resistance emerging from the EZLN disrupts the techno-deterministic construction of technology as an enabler of activism, instead foregrounding the originary role of local struggles in driving networked alliances that then leverage technologies. Note also the articulation and development of technologies of resistance that bypass the technological solutions reproduced by transnational capital (Twitter, Facebook). Of salience here are the alternative notions of social-political-­ economic organizing circulated through networks, directly in resistance to the structures that offer technologies for development as solutions of democratization. Similarly, in the context of India, the digital space created by dalit (referring to lower caste) struggles against the oppressive structures of the caste system, narrates embodied experiences of caste oppression, catalyzing solidarity against caste structures and mobilizing participation. Digital sites such as Dalit Camera play catalytic roles in witnessing the narratives of violence, in storying the narratives and in mobilizing offline protests through calls to action (Kumar, 2016). In the state of Assam, in the backdrop of the systematic campaigns targeting Bengalis and Bengali Muslims under security labels circulating the image of the “illegal Bangladeshi immigrant,” a genre of poetry called miyah poetry (mian is often used by Hindutva ideologues to derogatorily refer to Bangladeshi Muslims) voices narratives of resistance, attending to the everyday oppressions of Bengalis in Assam. Digitally mediatized spaces also connect and coordinate various forms of offline action through direct calls to action. The recognition of technology as a site for transformative politics in the ambits of the CCA first and foremost acknowledges the role of technology as an instrument of neoliberal hegemony, and then works through technological tools in community-enabled processes to articulate sites of social change. In this sense, the dominant paradigm of technology-driven social change that places technology as the very catalyst for change is inverted, instead theorizing the role of community processes as sites of change, with technologies emerging as a reservoir of tools to disseminate the message of change. Moreover, as in the instance of the EZLN, the theorizing of resistance and revolution carefully locates the new movements as a continuance of ongoing socialist Left struggles against imperialism, financialization, and neoliberal expansion (Garrido & Halavais, 2003). The recognition of the politics of resistance across the global South disrupts the liberal capitalist techno-deterministic narrative that celebrates the Internet and social media as the causes of revolutionary awakening and empowerment in

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communities at the margins. Instead, the digital emerges as another site of protest politics, working with other communicative sites, spaces and forms, to voice challenges to neoliberalism. In the struggles of the Uyghur communities, the claims to cultural rights and recognition find expression in the digital space. The plight of the Uyghurs amid ongoing Chinese colonialism, apartheid, and extractive policies under the “One belt, one road” policy is narrated in online spaces, such as www.uyghurcongress.org, narratives articulate the everyday experiences of cultural persecution and terrorization: Ms. Zhang (a pseudonym), a worker at a public-sector organization in Yuli county, doesn’t feel that her life is improving. On the contrary, she has been experiencing ever-growing oppression and terror. In June of last year, Ms. Zhang’s work unit held a mandatory, during which government officials demanded that employees report and expose one another. Topics for reporting included: whether Uyghur employees usually speak Mandarin or Uyghur; whether they eat halal or Chinese food during their breaks; do their names have sensitive meanings, like Mohammed or Arafat; do employees or their relatives have religious beliefs or have ever participated in congregations or any other religious ceremonies; whether or not any individuals or their relatives have ever gone on a pilgrimage to Mecca, and similar questions. (Retrieved from https://www.uyghurcongress.org/en/?p=37315)

The account draws attention to the ongoing strategies of oppression carried out by the Chinese state. The account of the techniques of interrogation attends to the everyday forms of erasure and violence that community members experience. The narrativization of specific tactics of interrogation attends to the climate of fear that is reproduced, working toward cultural erasure, or what the Uyghur resistance movement describes as cultural genocide. Campaigns shared in the digital space seek to raise awareness about the ongoing strategies of colonization and apartheid. For instance, the campaign on raising awareness about the “Re-education camps” offers a background to the workings of the camps: One of the principle targets of the Chinese government’s strategy to stabilize and culturally assimilate the Uyghur population has been the practice of Islam. The mass incarceration of Uyghurs also forms part of the Party Secretary Chen Quanguo’s ‘de-extremification’ efforts in the region, which has tried to conflate the peaceful practice of Islam and any expression of Uyghur dissent with ‘extremism’ and terrorism. Restrictive legislation has

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established state control over every aspect of religious practice in the region and young Uyghurs are not allowed into mosques or to be taught about religion by their parents. Since April 2017, Uyghurs accused of harboring “extremist” and “politically incorrect” views have been detained in re-­ education camps throughout the Uyghur Autonomous Region and are subjected to indoctrination classes where they are forced to denounce Islam and swear allegiance to the CCP. Religious men in particular have been targeted, according to a source who had been detained in one of the camps who was interviewed by the WUC.  Cities with a more religious population have experienced greater rates of detention, especially in Hotan[i]and Kashgar[ii]. (Retrieved from https://www.uyghurcongress.org)

The depiction of the mass incarceration of the Uyghurs and the forced re-­education camps serves as the basis for calls to action. Digital spaces play key roles in documenting the atrocities perpetuated by the Indian state in Kashmir. Stories of the violence that forms the fabric of the Indian colonial occupation in Kashmir depict the atrocities built into the military-police structures of control deployed by the Indian state. Digital sites emerge as sites of resistance through the telling of stories that account for and depict the enactments of violence. For instance, narrating the mass rape carried out by the Indian army in the villages of Kunan and Poshpora in Kashmir on February 23, 1991, the digital space of Kashmiri Women’s Resistance Day, foregrounds stories, images, videos, with Kashmiri women remembering the violence. The day of resistance disrupts the colonial occupation carried out by the Indian state by making visible its routinized practices of oppression. Every fiction has some facts, and every fact appears fictional if we study it hard enough. We can never know the complete truth about anything, no matter how hard we try. The fiction above is inspired by my meetings and conversations with the people of Kunan Poshpora, and my study of the statements given by the victims to “fact” finders, police and reporters. It was written as an answer to the questions that came up in my mind, to my overactive thoughts, which arose while dealing with documents and individual details till my head became dizzy. I tried to get answers through my study of the facts of that night but I could never get a complete answer. I was looking for answers to questions like, how would a girl from this village feel after becoming a victim of mass rape? But I realized that none of us can have an answer for this. (Retrieved from http://www.kashmirlit. org/2018-annual-kashmiri-womens-resistance-day/)

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The interplays of fiction and fact, of poetry and accounts, of images and videos in the digital space, construct the impossibilities and erasure that are built into the violences meted out by the Indian state. This digital sphere of resistance connects with and disconnects from everyday protests against Indian occupation in Kashmir. The online offers accounts of the offline, especially when the privatized media channels across India organized around Hindutva logics play out the state narrative, erasing Kashmiri voices. In the recent decision of the right-wing Indian government to repeal Article 370 of the Indian constitution that gave autonomous rights to Kashmir, electronic communication from Kashmir has been shut down and media have been heavily censored. In this backdrop, digital media serve as spaces for Kashmiri diaspora communities across the globe to circulate stories of atrocities in Kashmir. Similarly, journalists and fact-finding missions into Kashmir capture through cameras images and videos of the torture, atrocities, harassment and human rights violations in Kashmir. The digital infrastructure forms a key element of the “Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions” (BDS) Movement, calling for global solidarity in resistance to the colonial practices of Israel in Palestine. On the website of the BDS movement, the following description is offered: For nearly seventy years, Israel has denied Palestinians their fundamental rights and has refused to comply with international law. Israel maintains a regime of settler colonialism, apartheid and occupation over the Palestinian people. This is only possible because of international support. Governments fail to hold Israel to account, while corporations and institutions across the world help Israel to oppress Palestinians. Because those in power refuse to act to stop this injustice, Palestinian civil society has called for a global citizens’ response of solidarity with the Palestinian struggle for freedom, justice and equality. (Retrieved from https://bdsmovement.net/what-is-bds)

Solidarity lies at the heart of the BDS movement, and the digital infrastructure works to mobilize global support. The naming of the Israeli practices of colonialism and occupation is weaved into images, stories and campaign initiatives inviting action. The website serves as a resource for potential recruits into the campaign, engaged communities that seek to join the resistance against Israeli colonization, as well as academic, cultural and activist communities seeking to change Israeli colonizing practices by putting pressure on Israel.

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Digital infrastructures offer opportunities for crafting narratives of labor resistance, working alongside offline spaces of worker organizing (Qiu, 2017). The logics of global capitalist expansion that constitute the digital are disrupted by communicative imaginations of resistance articulated locally, coming up with alternatives. Culture is mobilized in resistive narratives that attend to the violence and oppressions written into the circuits of production of global capital, disrupting the hegemonic cultural narratives that render as universal the colonizing ideology of techno-­ capital. Qiu (2017) describes worker-generated content (WGC) as the communicative resources that offer insights into the classed nature of digital economies, the distribution of power in these economies, and the production of content, opening up “extensive spaces of voice, struggle, and solidarity at the grassroots” (p. 132). Worker voices expressing identity, dignity and community are intertwined with the everyday material needs of employment, housing and family welfare. Qiu describes WGC platforms, such as Qzone, a blog service, and Weibo, China’s version of Twitter, where workers voice their everyday negotiations through mostly images and videos. Noting the growth in WGC in recent years, Qiu points to the new wave of collective action among workers. WGC emerges not only as a space for voicing resistance through images and videos but also as an infrastructure for coordinating solidarity. Mobilizing support, and complementing the protest action on the picket line. The ecology of protest in worker collective organizing at strikes for instance plays out in the narration of resistance through images, videos, poetry shared via social media. The emergence of worker voice on digital platforms is intertwined with the physical spaces of protest organizing and protest action. In the conceptual framework of the CCA, the digital is a space that is part of a broader context of communicative infrastructures, very much embedded within logics of power and the resistance to these logics. Therefore, the CCA enters into a co-construction with digital possibilities on the basis of a critical notion that situates digital technologies as sites of reproducing power. Rather than conducting analyses of Twitter feeds and Facebook networks that indeed can offer important insights about the effectiveness of activist and advocacy interventions, the CCA attends to the (im)possibilities of structurally transformative articulations within the ambits of various structures. While analyses of networks of tweets or Facebook posts can indeed offer insights into networks that make social change communication interventions create impact, the CCA interrogates the broader logics within which these communicative infrastructures

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work, the possibilities of interrupting these logics and the openings for structural transformation. For instance, the presence of subaltern voices that foreground the materiality of digital networks creates anchors for collective subaltern organizing. Consider, for instance, the materiality of the lived struggles of precarious and informal workers in the peripheries of data centers, data hubs and data ecosystems. Voicing these materialities of struggles offer anchors to labor organizing that disrupts the extractive logics of the digital. Simultaneously, the voices of subaltern communities displaced from their sources of livelihoods by energy colonialism that feeds the cloud infrastructures attend to the threats to climate implicit in claims to sustainability. It is critical to note here the capitalist ideology that is invested in the portrayals of digital technologies as the foundations of social change communication, creating new markets for technology-based social change communication industries (see, for instance, Dixon, 2011). The role of technology-based neocolonial corporations seeking market opportunities and collaborating with the US Empire needs to be critically interrogated in the context of the techno-deterministic narratives of Twitter and Facebook-based social movements. That these technologies and access to them is constituted within the larger realms of power and neoliberal organizing is evident across a wide array of totalitarian controls of technology platforms and collaborations of technology-based corporations with authoritarian powers. Even at the time of writing this book, the right-wing Hindutva state of India scrapped Article 370 in India-occupied Kashmir, further consolidating its settler colonialism in Kashmir. Even as it imposed this imperial control, the Indian state blocked off Kashmir, cutting off its Internet and communication links with the outside world and controlling news reports coming out of Kashmir. Potential dissident voices were arrested and held under control. In 2019, Singapore passed the protections from online falsehoods and manipulation act (POFMA), an act that academics and activists note is directed at silencing dissenting thoughts and critical articulations (Dutta, 2019). The digital is retheorized, rendered impure through the participation of subaltern communities in struggles to be heard. The logics of digital organizing are interrogated through movement processes that entirely or mostly bypass the digital. For instance, the resistance of indigenous communities in Lalgarh, West Bengal, against the development policies of the state, foregrounded and circulated communicative practices of playing drums, blowing conches, singing songs, and dancing as the channels

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through which change was voiced (Dutta, 2011). Although movement leaders appeared in media interviews strategically, these appearances were mostly controlled and often opaque and contingent, leaving open narrative readings of the change process and deploying silence and uncertainty as strategies of resistance. A culture-centered reading of social change communication, therefore, fundamentally disrupts the techno-­deterministic fetish of new communication social change scholarship carried out from within the domains of neoliberal global institutions. That mediated tools are complex, are constituted within structures and are not the magic bullets that bring about social change open up conversations that critically read the colonizing logics of mediating discourses. Instead, the lessons of communicative infrastructures emerge from developing habits of deep listening to the “margins of the margins,” ever attentive to erasures and the voices that are absent from the discursive space. The work of movement organizing, therefore, is one of building communicative infrastructures, including digital infrastructures, which are egalitarian and anchored in a commitment to communicative equality. Simultaneously, the organizing work of resisting state-private control over communication infrastructures translates into protesting the various forms of state-capital control over communicative spaces, including digital spaces. 7.1.1  Alternative Organizing In challenging accelerated capitalism and the penetration of neoliberalism into everyday life, various forms of alternative organizing have emerged across the globe, depicting alternative imaginaries for organizing development. The cooperative movement for instance has had a long presence not only within socialist and Communist economies but also within capitalist economies as alternative forms of organizing that are grounded in collective ownership, distribution of work and distribution of resources. Similarly, forms of generating food based on ecologically driven relationships have challenged the extractive logic of growth-driven agriculture. In these alternative forms of organizing, communicative infrastructures play key roles as spaces for the articulation of voices. Cooperatives. With their histories rooted in socialist struggles, cooperatives offer important examples of economic organizing that are based on the concept of collective ownership, collective decision-making, and collective distribution of resources. Worker voice and control form the infrastructures of cooperatives, with decisions made by workers through

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collective participation. In worker cooperatives, worker-members, forming the majority of membership, both own and participate in the operation of the enterprise. Worker cooperatives create and maintain sustainable jobs through the foregrounding of worker voice in decision-making processes. The distribution of resources on egalitarian principles offers anchors to organizing that challenge the hegemonic status quo. Often emerging through small experiments from across the globe, cooperatives offer important lessons in worker-owned organizing. Some cooperatives form into larger units that run through the principles of horizontal communication. Communicative equality is a key feature of cooperatives, offering insights into organizing processes that create opportunities for the participation of plural voices, particularly of the margins. In the backdrop of the precarity produced by the “gig economies” amid the digital transformations across the globe, worker cooperatives create infrastructures for the centering of worker voices (Johnston & Land-­ Kazlauskas, 2018). The creation of platforms through worker involvement and participation places the control over platforms in the hands of workers. Scholz (2017) puts forth the notion of the “platform cooperative” as a digital infrastructure that “embraces technology but wants to put it to work with a different ownership model, adhering to democratic values, so as to crack the broken system of the sharing economy/on-demand economy that only benefits a few” (p.  14). The notion of worker control in traditional cooperatives translates into the development of worker voice as the basis for platform cooperatives, designed by workers through their participation and delivering the services and delivery models of the privatized digital platforms (Stern, 2016). The Union Taxi Cooperative (2017) in Denver, Colorado, is driver-owned, with an app that replicates the major ride hail companies, providing passengers with the option to request, monitor, and rate rides in Denver. Cooperative membership has created a unified group where workers can leverage their membership numbers and power as local business owners to influence local regulations governing such issues as meter rates, traffic rules and transportation planning. Communicative spaces for other imaginations. Spaces such as the World Social Forums (WSF) offer alternative sites for globally connecting locally based social movements and alternative ways of knowing (Smith, Reese, Byrd, & Smythe, 2015). With the motto, “Another world is possible,” the WSFs emerged on the global scene at the peak of neoliberal globalization, as communicative infrastructures for peoples’ movements that challenged the accelerated capitalist aggression of neoliberal policies.

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As spaces of learning, sites of the World Social Forum emerge as anchors to raising alternative claims of development, voicing actual lived realities of development that challenge the neoliberal model from across the global South. The forum also serves as a conduit for bringing to global attention local issues and sharing resources across spaces, particularly information and learning resources. The connections between local struggles enabled at the sites of the WSF bring about openings for global transformations. Salient to the organizing work of the WSF is the foregrounding of knowledge production/generation from the global South.

7.2   Labor, Movements, and Solidarity Amid the large-scale disenfranchisement of labor across the globe brought about by structural adjustment programs (SAPs) imposed by international financial institutions (IFIs) under the promise of driving growth-driven development, labor organizing offers a framework for social change by seeking to present the collective voices of organized labor across local, regional and global spaces (Aliu, 2015; Bieler, Lindberg, & Pillay, 2008). Discursive spaces for listening to the voices of labor are constituted in the backdrop of state-driven efforts at the weakening of labor regulations and the weakening of union organizing to attract transnational capital (Dutta, 2016). Transnational capital, enabled by the removal of trade barriers, seeks environments of production across the globe where the labor costs are the lowest, thus pushing states to further weaken their labor laws to attract private capital. Moreover, the disenfranchisement of agrarian economies in rural areas of the global South has catalyzed large-scale migration to the semi-urban and urban sites of production across the globe, producing conditions of precarious labor in informal sectors of work (Dutta, 2016). The unprecedented expulsion of the poor from their sources of livelihood, as these sources have been colonized by transnational capital into the transnational capitalist economy constitutes the subaltern in the neoliberal metropole, toiling under authoritarian techniques of discipline, without rights and without frameworks for recognition and representation. 7.2.1  Labor Organizing Salient then in labor organizing is the co-construction of spaces for recognition and representation of the working classes in socio-political-­economic

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contexts where labor unions are strictly regulated by the state, and/or subject to violence meted out by the state-capital apparatus under the guise of security, juxtaposed in the backdrop of weakened social support and public welfare programs. Solidarity connects formal union organizing with the organic processes of the informal sectors and youth experiencing the precarity produced by neoliberal reforms, leveraging national, regional and global linkages to voice alternatives to neoliberalism. Articulating solidarity serves as an entry point of resistance to transnational capital, creating anchors for collaborations across regional and global spaces, and, simultaneously, with issue-based social movements that extend beyond labor. The Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) articulated solidarity as an entry point for resisting neoliberal policies regionally (Aliu, 2015). Moreover, the organizing work of the COSATU depicts the role of networked solidarity in creating spaces for listening to the voices of workers in dominant discursive space, pushing for alternative policies that respect the rights of workers. Cross-border alliances create communicative infrastructures for holding transnational capital accountable, working across spaces and sites of global law and justice (Brookes, 2013). Amid the neoliberal transformations of the global South, the attack on unions and the coordinated co-option of union structures, workers insurgency across the South offer oppositional models to neoliberalism. Organized into alliances and connected with communities in building solidarity, these forms of collective worker resistance depict the centrality of worker voice in mobilizing organizational processes in resistance, challenging the consolidating power of financial capital and imperialism (Ness, 2016). In the context of India, for instance, the opening up of the country to foreign investments has worked alongside systematic attacks on the labor movement through neoliberal policies. In the context of the automobile manufacturing unit of Maruti Suzuki India Ltd. (MSIL), with above 70% control by the Japanese TNC, Suzuki, located in the export-­ processing zone (EPZ) of the Gurgaon industrial belt, Haryana, the Maruti Udyog Employees Union (MUEU) emerged as a site of resistance. In response to the low wages, inhumane treatment of workers, arbitrary harassment, terminations and violent intimidation, workers started organizing strikes for higher wages between 1999 and 2001. Workers started protesting by wearing black badges, holding meetings at the factory gates, and sloganeering. In 1999, based on a general meeting of rank-and-file workers, the tactics of hunger strikes and two-hour work stoppages (tool downs) formed key elements of resistance. In response to the worker resis-

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tance, MSIL introduced a “good conduct agreement,” which only 600 of the 4800 unionized workers signed. MSIL responded by locking out the union members and allowing only those workers that signed the agreement. The Maruti lockout continued for two months until January 2001, when workers accepted the “good working conditions” agreement. The Suzuki management then initiated a series of repressive strategies for punishing the workers, ultimately disbanding the MUEU and establishing a company union, Maruti Udyog Kamgar Union (MUKU) to prevent the workers from independently organizing. The TNC started dramatically reducing the permanent workforce, and, instead, increasing the temporary workers. Throughout the repression, the role of the state police was integral to perpetuating the repression by MSIL. In 2007, Suzuki opened a second production plant in Manesar, building a highly automated factory with robotics and digital infrastructure, a large informal and temporary workforce, and a minority of permanent workers. The accelerated speed of production (with one car produced every 45 seconds) and its physical and psychological effects, lack of adequate rest time, variable wage structure that allowed significant wage deductions, and uncompensated overtime formed the basis of worker resistance, resulting in sit-down strikes in 2011. The workers applied for the registration of the Maruti Suzuki Employees Union (MSEU) with the labor commission of the state, and sought to eliminate the flexible pay scheme, moderate the accelerated speed of production, and regularize informal workers as full-timers. The Suzuki management responded by requiring permanent workers to declare they were already members of MUKU. In response, the workers began a sit-down strike in June 2011, demanding their right to join their own union. MSIL responded by suspending the 11 workers who had submitted the registration document; the state police surrounded the factory. The strike continued, with support from other workers in nearby industrial facilities, with MSIL finally agreeing to take back the 11 workers and promising not to retaliate. Once the workers returned, the management retaliated by deducting 26 days of wages. The state labor department rejected the application of the workers to register MSEU, stating that they were already represented by MUKU. When the MSIL reopened the Manesar plant in August 2011, it demanded that workers sign the “good conduct” agreement. Only 18 workers signed the agreement, resulting in MSIL locking out workers, and hiring replacement workers. The lockout ended in September when the workers accepted the “good conduct bond” and membership in the

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company based MUKU.  The agreement also outlined a non-retaliation principle against union activists. Upon returning to work however, the workers found the contract laborers who had supported the demonstrations and occupation locked out. They responded by going on a strike. The strike continued until police entered the factory to shut off water, canteen, and toilets. When MSIL tried re-opening the factory, the workers went on a strike again, occupying the factory, in spite of management attempts to hire private security forces to disperse the workers. This resulted in MSIL hiring back contract workers although it refused to reinstate the workers seeking to form an independent union. All casual workers and 64 full-time workers were reinstated and grievance cell was formed. It however forced the union leadership and all active union members to take voluntary retirement. In March, 2012, union activists formally registered the Maruti Suzuki Workers Union, raising the demand of equal rights for the contract workers. The management refused by stating that contract workers were not members of the union, leading to worker refusal to participate in training exercises aimed at increasing production quotas. In July, 2012, an argument between a worker and a supervisor served the pretext for MSIL bringing in private “bouncers” dressed as workers to threaten and intimidate workers. The confrontation resulted in part of the factory being set on fire and the death of a human resource manager who was supportive of the workers’ organization. The ensuing violence served as the pretext for police repression in the form of arrests of workers and their family members and the state’s decision to place a 500-strong battalion inside the Manesar factory. The private security forces of MSIL have worked alongside the police to intimidate and torture workers, threaten them and force fired workers to sign resignation letters. The first information reports (FIRs) filed against 500 workers resulted in large-scale arrests, with 150 workers being jailed between three and five years without charges. A Haryana court sentenced 13 workers to life imprisonment. Critical to the strategies of resistance deployed by workers at MSIL is the overarching principle of collective solidarity, connecting permanent workers with precarious workers. The struggle for worker voice and representation forms the essence of the struggle, with workers demanding their dignity and right to representation through a union of their own. Amid the neoliberal onslaught across the global South, the collective organizing of the Maruti workers also points to solidarity across various worker spaces in a special economic zone (SEZ). The MSEU had built strong community ties in the local community in the form of community factory coun-

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cils. These community factory councils played key roles in extending solidarity to the workers against state-MSIL violence. The individualization promoted by the overarching neoliberal ideology is disrupted in the stories of collective bargaining, collective rights, and collective networks of support. Social movements in the backdrop of neoliberalism organize around the shared markers of precariousness produced by structural adjustment programs that pushed privatization, lowering of trade barriers, and weakening of public welfare (Harvey, 2005, 2007). For instance, the protests that catalyzed the Arab Spring were initiated by bottom-­up participation across various sectors of civil society, with a key element leading up to the movement being the resistance enacted by trade union movements across Egypt, working alongside protests voiced by youth experiencing high levels of unemployment (Dutta, 2012a, 2012b; Prashad, 2012a, 2012b). Drawing upon a long history of resistive politics in the global South, the Arab Spring was primarily a protest against the neoliberal transformation of Egypt, articulated around the marginalization of the lower classes of society, drawing in a broad coalition of actors experiencing the effects of neoliberalism (della Porta, 2015; Shihade & Shihade, 2012). In Tunisia, the Jasmine revolution was started by the marginalized unemployed (mostly graduates) and the southern mining region workers, with unions having a strong presence in initiating the protests (della Porta, 2015; Dutta, 2012a, 2012b). On a similar note, the economic-growth driven “trickle-down” rhetoric of neoliberal development is disrupted by articulations of labor that attend to the precarity of the working and educated classes produced by the flexible movement of capital across global spaces (Fine, 2015; Milkman & Ott, 2014). The narratives of labor voiced amid neoliberal reforms articulate the rights of workers, putting forth a framework of rights that interrogates the neoliberal narrative that frames labor regulations as barriers to growth and development. The rights of workers voiced through the participation of workers in discursive spaces disrupt the colonial hegemony of neoliberal policy celebrating weakened labor regulations as necessary conditions for growth. Similarly, voicing of rights drawing on global frameworks of worker rights offers spaces for seeking justice for migrant workers who most often lack the legal rights and protections accorded to citizens and work in the interstices of global economies. Migrant workers in transnational construction industries, for instance, often work in high-risk environments, with minimal protections and at very low wages; foregrounding

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a narrative of worker rights renders visible the violence embodied in the neoliberal propaganda of “trickle-down.” In the informal sectors of work, workers have limited to no protection (Eaton, Schurman, & Chen, 2017). For instance, domestic workers, daily wage laborers, and sex workers work at sites of global production that offer very limited to no protection (Basu & Dutta, 2008; Dutta, 2017; Dutta et al., 2018). A narrative of rights connects the collective resistance of an organized working class with the articulations of rights emerging from the informal forms of work and articulations of rights among the unemployed (Basu & Dutta, 2008; della Porta, 2015; Dutta, 2017; Dutta et  al., 2018). The rights of the garment workers of Bangladesh, joined with the articulations of worker rights in the US, for instance, builds a platform of solidarity that interrogates and resists the poor labor practices of the garment/fashion industry. In Uruguay, the formation of the Sindicato Unico de Trabajadiras Domesticas (SUTD) formed the basis of domestic worker claims to rights for recognition, representation and collective bargaining (Goldsmith, 2017). This process of domestic worker organizing resulted in the formalization of domestic work as well as in an increase in domestic worker wages and social protections. In Brazil, similarly, the claims to rights emerge from the subaltern context of domestic work, building a lexicon that is anchored in the emancipatory imaginaries from the South (Acciari, 2019). In the US, creative and sustained strategies of labor organizing have been directed at the transnational giant Walmart targeting its low wage policies. The targeting of Walmart for labor protests is particularly salient, given the role of Walmart in setting labor practices and wages across the retail and service industries, as well as for the broader economy. The advocacy group Organization United for Respect at Walmart (OUR Walmart) ran a series of successful labor protest campaigns at Walmart, with the prominent “Making Change at Walmart” campaign that began in 2010 (Rolf, 2015). The National Black Friday protest event was created as a signature event, with 500 associates walking off the job on Black Friday in 2012, and walkouts and protests in front of Walmart stores organized in 2013, 2014 and 2015, demanding a living wage of $15 an hour. The protests leveraged social media and created a presence outside of stores, resulting in media coverage. In 2016, Walmart raised its minimum wage to $10 an hour. The fight for 15 among fast-­ food workers in the US is another example of a campaign that builds the local community capacities of fast-food workers to protest by connecting them with traditional union organizers and community organizers. These

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capacities of fast-food workers to protest have resulted in the largest numbers of walkouts and protest actions by low-wage workers in the US, demanding “$15 and a union” (Rolf, 2015). Similarly, the exposure to risks at workplaces globally emerges as a key organizing theme that connects labor movements with workers in precarious jobs that don’t have union representation (Basu & Dutta, 2008; Dutta, 2017; Dutta et al., 2018). Amid global patterns of migration to sites of production that have minimal to no labor regulations, the framework of worker rights connecting local sites to global discourses offers a fundamental basis for disrupting the precarity of work produced by neoliberal flows, connecting workers into alliances for social justice (Dutta, 2017). In their organizing challenging the threats to everyday health and wellbeing, sex workers in Sonagachi, West Bengal, organized into a sex workers union, the Durbar Mahila Swamanyaya Committee (DMSC) (Basu & Dutta, 2008). What forms the infrastructure of the DMSC is the grassroots community-based collective of sex workers based on the principle of voice and committed to developing structurally transformative interventions. The cooperative itself works as a framework for economic protection amid the precarity of sex work, enabling the workers to negotiate decent wages and working conditions. Note here that the participatory model of sex worker organizing evident in the DMSC, when displaced from its structurally transformative commitment and incorporated into the Gates-funded Avahan campaign as a social marketing strategy, loses its capacity to sustain itself. This draws out a key element of culture-­centered interventions, the explicit emphasis on structural transformations, in resistance to the neoliberal apparatus of the hegemonic social change communication industry. In culture-centered interventions developed by foreign domestic workers and low wage migrant construction workers in neoliberal Singapore amid its strict authoritarian laws that control labor organizing, the framework of rights emerges as a disruptive anchor for drawing attention to risks in working conditions that threaten health and wellbeing of workers (Dutta & Kaur-Gill, 2018). The very articulation of rights in public spaces amid an authoritarian structure that deploys the language of “Asian values” to erase rights-based participation disrupts the culturalist language. For instance, low-wage migrant construction workers attended to their right to decent food, highlighting the structural conditions of catering businesses, placing the messages about food rights on public transport systems (wrapping up buses, placing advertisements in MRTs and MRT

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stations, etc.). Similarly, digital infrastructures of communication advocacy created by low-wage migrant workers foregrounded the rights-based framework, normalizing the discursive construction of rights voiced by workers from the margins (Dutta, 2017; Dutta & Kaur-Gill, 2018). The precarization introduced by digital transformations are active sites of ongoing organizing. Traditional unions have expanded their interpretations of work to create discursive anchors for worker organizing. For instance, the New York Taxi Worker Alliance (NYTWA), has collaborated with workers to bring multiple cases against Uber, supporting with filing successful unemployment claims (Rivoli, 2016), and pushing toward the recognition of Uber drivers as employees for the purposes of qualifying for employment benefits (Griswold, 2017). The incorporation of platform-­ based work into the domains of union organizing creates openings for securing employment-related protections such as unemployment, guaranteed minimum wage, and so on. Similarly, infrastructures for voices of labor are particularly critical in crowdsourcing platforms, such as Amazon Mechanical Turk, where the labor of workers is actively made invisible. Resisting the communicative inequality built into this invisibility, workers have created forums such as “Turker Nation” to discuss AMT’s “approval” or “rejection” policy that permits the job requesters to pay only for jobs they are satisfied with. Through forums, workers have an opportunity to communicate with other workers, receive information, and develop strategies. Collaborating and developing partnerships with traditional unions offers another framework for raising worker demands, particularly in terms of shaping policy frameworks governing labor in digital platforms (Johnston & Land-Kazlauskas, 2018). Similarly critical is the development of strategies for direct action where gig workers might not have access to institutional power to raise their voices (Vandaele, 2018). The recognition of gig workers as formal workers is a key site of ongoing struggle, one that will be critical amid workplace transformations through the accelerated penetration of digital capitalism and, specifically, artificial capitalism (AI) capitalism. Work councils offer another framework of organizing, giving workers the rights to information, consultation, and participation. Developing creative strategies for the ownership of communicative ­infrastructures by subaltern workers in neoliberal economies that continually reproduce precarity is critical to securing worker rights.

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7.2.2  Socialist Futures The monolithic narrative of the triumphalist march of secular neoliberalism is disrupted through the articulations of subaltern and proletariat presents and futures, crafting the imaginary of a future based on equality that is firmly rooted in the histories of socialist movements from the past into the present. Alternative forms of organizing based on socialist principles draw on long histories of socialist organizing across the globe, and offer imaginaries of equality and solidarity that disrupt the neoliberal narrative of individualization, economic growth, and competition (Dutta, 2008, 2013; Quigley, 2015). The hegemony of the market is redefined, resisted, and co-opted into struggles of and for equality. Resisting the onslaught of mainstream media narratives, often framed in the ambits of the social change communication industries funded by IFIs such as the World Bank (WB) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), declaring the end of socialism after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, socialist organizing processes across communities around the globe that have existed in spite of and amid the unilaterally imposed neoliberal reforms depict the power of collectivist and communitarian forms of organizing (Dutta, 2008, 2015). Even amid the onslaught of structural adjustment programs (SAPs), local-regional-national forms of organizing challenge and demonstrate the alternatives to the individualized principle of organizing resources under neoliberalism. For instance, the organizing of fishing cooperative societies, village-level organizations of rural people displaced due to the construction of a dam on the Tawa River, a tributary of the Narmada River, depicts the power of collective organizing drawing on non-market-based principles and on the basis of collective ownership and management of resources (Tyagi, Pal, & Lakra, 2007). The emergence of movements such as the Arab Spring, the Indignados/15M movement in Spain and the Occupy Wall Street movement in the US is constituted in the ambits of imagining socialist futures, and, in doing so, creates alternative spaces for participation such as occupation of town centers, occupation of public spaces and public assemblies (Dutta, 2013; Shihade, Flesher Fominaya, & Cox, 2012). The narrative of socialist visions is positioned directly in opposition to the privatization of public goods/materials/ resources by transnational capital (Dutta, 2012a, 2012b). The voices of resistance that emerged across the US in the Occupy protests formed the infrastructures for voices of resistance in socialist struggles for equality across a plethora of contexts from demands for fair housing to demands

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for living wage. The fight for 15 across the US, for instance, emerged out of the organizing capacities and articulations of voices at the margins of the US economy. In the multiplicities of resistance emerging in Latin America, the demands for self-determination offer alternative imaginaries of hope that challenge the fundamental framework of wealth consolidation under neoliberal capitalism (Dinerstein, 2014). For instance, the Zapatista movement in Chiapas, Mexico, organized in resistance to the onslaught of neoliberal interventionism in the form of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), conceptualizes the notion of Zapatismo as an alternative imaginary, encapsulating notions of community autonomy and solidarity, independent credit, local-level collaborative decision-making, access to market and fair prices, and land rights as anchors to development (Dutta, 2008; Holloway & Peláez, 1998). As an anti-imperialist revolution against neoliberal globalization (Dutta, 2008), the Zapatista rebellion in Chiapas, Mexico, brought large parts of the Las Canadas and Selva Lacandona regions under the control of the EZLN. Through strategies of land occupation based on clandestine guerrilla resistance, the movement embodies the enactment of agency among indigenous communities who created the EZLN as their project, disrupting the neoliberal enclosure and co-option of indigenous resources as objects of profiteering. The notion of indigenous ownership of resources emerges both as a site for individual and collective expressions of agency, connecting individual expressions to collective actions of social change. In resisting the global forces of neoliberal expansion, the EZLN created a global space for transformative politics and alternative rationalities by working through networks of solidarity with activists and mediated sites of change across the globe, building one of the earliest sites of networked resistance against neoliberalism that also existed outside of the communicative platforms of neoliberal capitalism. The Movement of Landless Workers (MST) offers another example of participatory resistance, anchored in the tenets of grassroots mobilization. Developed in the convergences of the progressive Christian movement emerging from the Sandinista victory in Nicaragua and spreading across Latin America and trade union struggles, the MST created transformative spaces with landless workers laying claim over the spaces they were living in. The democratic processes organized in response to the dictatorship and the popular dissatisfaction with neoliberal policies formed the backdrop for the emergence of the Workers’ Party and the Single Workers’ Trade Union, both connected with the MST. The connection between the

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grassroots participatory democracy through everyday forms of participation and representative democracy through the political role of the Worker’s Party created the framework for a bottom-up democracy revolution across Brazil. The participatory budgeting movement in Porto Alegre emerged out of this turn to grassroots democracy, building infrastructures for voice equality. The process of participatory budgeting works toward communicative equality by ensuring that participation is open to all, irrespective of status or affiliation with any organization, the internal rules emerge from the participants themselves negotiating direct and representative democracy, and the allocations for investments are made through a combination of general and technical criteria that ensure that decisions and rules at the grassroots are aligned with the technical and legal demands of government action (Avritzer, 2005). The process of participatory budgeting in Porto Alegre and Belo Horizonte is reflective of the transformative role of culture as voice in reworking structures. The voices of the poor, emerging from the margins, sought direct control of frameworks of decision-making in the design, implementation, and evaluation of development projects locally. This was accomplished through the processes of deliberation and negotiation that brought together neighborhood association members, social actors, and citizens. Participation occurred through the direct presence of citizens. This is then complemented with representation, where delegates and/or councilors are elected. The regional assemblies are attended by the mayor and begin with a report describing the decisions taken and the administrative implementations of projects implemented in the previous year, giving participating public opportunities to raise questions, express their opinions about what has been taking place and what should be taking place for the next year, and identify specific projects to be created to address community needs. At the end of the first round of the regional assembly, delegates are elected from the participating individuals based on an allocated quota that is proportionate to the size of the meetings. The second stage involves intermediary meetings, where delegates rank priorities and vote on which public works the region will claim. Subsequently, regions and priorities are identified based on the region’s previous access to a particular public good, the size of the region and the region’s own ranking of the priorities. In the second round of the regional assemblies, the region elects delegates to the participatory budget (PB) council. The council members in the PB council represent the regions, the priority areas, the umbrella organization of the neighborhood communities and the municipal work-

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ers’ trade union. The PB council then looks at the priorities created by the regional assembly, the priorities emerging from the intermediary meetings, the plan from the City Planner’s Office and the inputs from the mayor’s cabinet. After a final budget is put in place, the council monitors the implementation process. The struggles of peasants, landless workers, and indigenous communities at the global margins share similar threads of resistance against displacement, dispossession and exploitation witnessed at sites of workers’ organizing across the globe and the struggles of the precariat (Foti, 2017). Particularly salient are the organizing processes among the precariat, creating common platforms that bring together casual workers, immigrants, temporary and part-time workers, hourly wage-workers and so on, building new and flexible bases of solidarity for resisting the flexibilization of global capital (Quigley, 2015). The collective organizing of workers is grounded in an imaginary of socialist futures that challenge and resist the precarization and global exploitation of workers, offering a basis of political organizing that imagines a socialist future (Tait, 2016). For instance, the organizing of landless workers in Brazil articulates principles of sovereignty and grassroots democracy to resist the exclusions produced by neoliberalism (Robles, 2001). The link between the unemployed poor and the labor movement offers an exemplar of a radical alternative to traditional forms of labor organizing. Similarly, the traditional linkages between unions and political parties ought to be further strengthened by grassroots community organizing processes among the poor. In the history of Left-­ of-­center parties, trade unions played key roles in helping labor, socialist, and social democratic parties secure power, and the parties, in turn, emerged as sites for securing labor rights, welfare, full employment and labor market regulation (Milkman & Ott, 2014). The formation of alliances and coalitions to articulate socialist pathways of development that challenge neoliberal austerity measures is evident, for instance, in the formation of the Coalition of Radical Left (Syriza) in Greece (Spourdalakis, 2013). Similarly, the organizing of Podemos in Spain is constituted around the creation of an alternative space for the people, where everyone can participate, thus attacking the structures of elite representative governance and inverting the hierarchies (MacMillan, 2017). These alternative spaces are however continually under attack by the national-global elite that seek to influence the mechanisms of representative democracy to sabotage transformations promoting equality. Consider for instance the paradox in the attempts by IFIs to dismantle the

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democratically elected socialist government in Brazil even as the PB framework was largely co-opted by the IFIs to serve the agendas of transnational capital. The undermining of participatory democracy and popular participation in Brazil by elite actors, working alongside the interests of the US Empire, speaks to the importance of building strong networks of solidarity that withstand the ongoing attacks by capitalists. These networks of solidarity ought to be anchored in practical politics of support among grassroots democracies across geographies, which work through transnational networks to challenge elite repression. Even as transnational capital takes on varied forms of exerting power and control across global boundaries, catalyzing the power of the IFIs to minimize and/or erase the possibilities of collective organizing and resistance amid global spaces in search of foreign direct investments and economic growth, the organizing of trade unions focuses on the politics of the local-national, struggling to secure the spaces for collective bargaining, and simultaneously offering the bases for political parties working directly to secure socialist imaginaries amid the pressures of wealth consolidation driven by neoliberal forces. Even as precarity is reproduced through the movement of cheap migrant labor across global boundaries, without the rights of citizenship and, therefore, without the rights of articulation within national structures of judiciaries, the work of labor activists focuses on building transnational networks of solidarity that emerge into alliances for justice (Milkman & Ott, 2014). 7.2.3  Subaltern Social Movements That resistance to the colonial impetus of capitalist growth has a long history of articulation, performance, and dissemination in the global South is best exemplified in the form of subaltern social movements. Contemporary forms of subaltern social movements emerge as continuities of and transformations in subaltern protest practices that have historically emerged in postcolonial contexts. Neoliberal processes of wealth extraction through exploitation and displacement direct target subaltern communities as accelerated mechanisms of production and financialization seek new land, material resources, labor, and markets. Particularly salient is the targeting of subaltern communities, whose land, livelihoods, knowledge, and ­biological resources offer new market opportunities for transnational capital (Dutta, 2012a, 2012b; Nielsen & Nilsen, 2015; Pal & Dutta, 2013). In this backdrop of the direct state-corporate attack on subaltern liveli-

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hoods, often through the languages of culture, participation and sustainability, subaltern communities organize in the form of movements (Dutta, 2015). Culture-centered processes of centering subaltern voices explore communicative infrastructures for the subaltern voices to emerge. Articulations of change emerging from the subaltern margins resist the neoliberal-neoimperial state structure that threatens to displace subaltern communities from their sources of livelihoods. Consider, for instance, the following articulation voiced by an indigenous (Adivasi) leader in a struggled against mining-driven displacement: We fought the British thinking that we will be equal in the independent India. There will be land settlement, for instance—but the savarnas (upper castes) and the rich people have controlled (akthiar) the land, including Adivasi (original dwellers) land. Today, they are at the center of wealth and rajnithi (politics). It is going to be a stupendous task to try and remove them (stated in the dominant Oriya language as Toleiba or likened to an attempt at removing a massive boulder/rock from the pathway). (Kondh Adivasi elder from a village in South Orissa, quoted by Kapoor, 2007, p. 10)

Subaltern voices of social change such as the voice of the Kondh leader interrogate the inequalities that are constituted in the dominant structures of organizing social systems. The dominant logics of organizing societies are interrogated through the presence of subaltern voices in discursive spaces. Similarly, Maori resistance against neoliberal reforms across New Zealand resists the privatization of spaces, the colonization of indigenous lifeworld by market principles, the corporatization of organizing structures and the promotion of the free market within the ambits of the Treaty of Waitangi settlement process (Bargh, 2007). The gargantuan force of mining development that displaces indigenous communities from their livelihoods to make room for transnational mining profiteering through a variety of strategies from community relations, corporate social responsibility to the direct use of private-state violence is resisted across indigenous communities globally, fundamentally interrogating the meaning of development and offering alternative imaginaries of development (Gordon & Webber, 2008; Yagenova & Garcia, 2009). Amid the large-scale violence carried out on subaltern communities across the global South (Sundar, 2016), subaltern social movements emerge into public registers as sites of alternative articulations, placing powerful alternative visions of decolonization, foregrounding develop-

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ment solutions rooted in subaltern imaginaries (Kapoor, 2007). The struggles of indigenous communities across the globe for instance, that are mostly erased from dominant discursive spaces, emerge sporadically but powerfully as visible entry points to alternative imaginaries. This sporadic emergence of subaltern voices is often strategic, embedded in histories of movements and often in collective decisions to emerge into the dominant discursive space. The hitherto erased accounts find meaning in movement mobilization, circulating stories and images that interrogate the hegemonic narratives circulated in power structures. Subaltern social movements thus depict the strategic and organized agency of subaltern participation around an identity anchor that serves as the basis for challenging the hegemony of neoliberal rationality, materially inscribing protest practices to resist the aggressively displacement-based neocolonialism carried out by the state. In the protest against the extractive colonizing practices of China in Xinjiang, references to indigeneity articulate imaginaries of the environment that challenge the hegemonic development narrative (Hathaway, 2016). In 1975, in New Zealand, more than 5000 Maori participated in an hı̄koi, long communal march as a form of protest, to draw attention to their land rights and the colonial violence through the occupation of Maori land (Harris, 2004). This collective protest, grounded in Maori organizing, formed the basis of the formation of the Waitangi Tribunal. In the backdrop of the ongoing colonization of Maori land, the ongoing protests at Ihumatao, described earlier against the occupation of land by a building corporation, depict the organizing role of indigenous voice as the basis for dismantling colonial capitalism (Elers & Dutta, 2019). The Maori voice of resistance in Ihumatao, in solidarity with indigenous voices in Hawaii and elsewhere across the globe, offers pathways for addressing the very challenges that have been brought on by the accelerated corporate-­ colonialism of neoliberal governmentality. Putting forth the notion of land as sacred, the protests at Ihumatao attend to the ongoing forms of colonization that occupy Maori land and violate sacred spaces. The notion of the sacred emerges as a cognitive register for reorganizing land rights and land ownership. In the Standing Rock protests in North Dakota, the voices of indigenous activists protecting their sacred land and their water resources center the fundamental rights of communities to forms of livelihood that define community life (Munckton, 2016). The identity of a community in this sense emerges as the basis for mobilizing community participation as well

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as seeding solidarity with a wide range of indigenous and environmental activist networks. Similarly, the Lalgarh movement in West Bengal, India, in the backdrop of police atrocities, state-sponsored corporate land grab, and political-economic marginalization experienced mostly by indigenous communities, brought forth the notion of indigenous dignity as a guiding framework of social change (Dutta, 2012a, 2012b). The participation of subaltern communities at sites of local-national-global resistance narrates alternate stories of development, challenging the messaging strategies perpetuated through neoliberal branding campaigns. 7.2.4  Communities, Communicative Inequalities and Margins The CCA recognizes that communities are spaces that are imbued with power, built on communicative inequalities that constitute the infrastructures of community life (Dutta, 2018). Culture-centered interventions that seek to co-create spaces for the voices of the margins, therefore, are anchored in this recognition of the heterogeneous nature of communities, constituted in differentials of power, seeking to build invitations to dialogue to the “margins of the margins.” The recognition of communicative inequalities within the participatory processes of culture-centered interventions, therefore, is an ongoing presence in collaborative spaces and deliberations, attending to the questions “Whose voices are being erased by our participation?”, “Who is not present here?” and “Who are at the margins within these spaces that we are participating in?” These questions on the production of marginalization in participatory processes are ever attentive to the erasure of identities, subjectivities, and positions for laying claims to development resources, how they are allocated and how they are implemented. Based on the principle of communicative inequality, the advisory groups and community meetings in the CCA are open and flexible, inviting new members based on the consideration of the margins of the communicative spaces for participation. The work of creating communicative equality, therefore, is ongoing work that is built on the concept of reflexivity, critically interrogating the positions of power that are constituted in community formations. 7.2.5  Reflexivity Reflexivity in the form of critically examining the workings of power anchored in the consideration of voice circulates through the various for-

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mations of communities, advisory groups, community meetings, associations, neighborhood meetings, unions, and political parties (Dutta, 2014). The notion of reflexivity when anchored in the CCA is guided by an ongoing critical interrogation of relationships of power and the ways in which these relationships of power constitute communicative inequality. The recognition that the dominant positions occupied within discursive terrains are embedded in specific relationships of power, both within communities and outside them, contributes to the ongoing interrogation of the workings of power within. Reflexive interrogations of power formations within community spaces co-creates the basis for centering communicative equality in the agentic expressions of social change. The processes of turning to the voices that are erased in the participatory infrastructures render these infrastructures open-ended and flexible, ever-attending to the inviting the margins. In the political organizing of the Left, reflexivity brings forth opportunities for interrogating the existing power formations, thus creating opportunities for extending beyond the traditional forms of party organization, reaching out to the margins with a commitment to communicative equality. Similarly, the consolidation of political power in the hands of the party elites is inverted through the practices of communicative equality, turning toward the margins within party organizations to participate in decision-making. Ever-attending to who is erased from the discursive spaces of participation creates infrastructures of communicative equality within the organizing processes of political parties.

7.3   Conclusion In this chapter, we explored the ways in which the concept of communicative equality weaves throughout the expressions of community agency in social change communication. The process of cultural centering turns to communicative equality, thus ever attentive to the questions of voice and erasure. Whose voices are being heard? Whose voices are being erased? The recognition that culture is often the tool of neoliberal transformation, deployed by the networks of the local-global elite to consolidate elite control over communicative spaces turns then toward openings for the communicative expressions of agency from the margins. The processes of radical democracy that emerge at the grassroots transform communicative inequalities by turning the ownership of communicative processes in the hands of communities at the margins. The direct ownership of participatory processes shapes how development is conceptualized, the ways in

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which development resources are organized and the implementation of what is seen as interventions for development. The very participation of the subaltern margins in the processes of defining development and constituting the development agenda transforms the overarching framework of development. Culture is reworked from the margins, in the expressions of voices from the margins situated in the everyday contexts of lived experiences. Various forms of communication advocacy and activism from the margins, when embedded in the participation of the margins in the ownership of these communicative processes, serve as registers for offering alternative imaginaries. Communicative infrastructures at the margins include community and alternative media, digital spaces, as well as local-national-­ global sites of making knowledge claims. In addition, the alternative rationalities at the margins articulate alternative communication infrastructures that are rooted in cultural logics that resist neoliberal co-­ optation. For instance, the organizing work of women farmers situates seed banks and seed processions as communicative infrastructures for narrating the story of the seed that challenges neoliberal agriculture. The chapter attends to various forms of alternative political-economic organizing logics that emerge from the challenge to the neoliberal status quo, from cooperatives and collective organizing to labor unions that challenge the neoliberal formations. The juxtaposition of labor struggles, subaltern social movements and party struggles in the backdrop of communicative equality creates a template for social change communication theory, research, and practice that is committed to actively imagining socialist futures that are committed to equality. The chapter in summary offers a corrective to the propaganda in the hegemonic social change communication literature that has systematically stigmatized, backgrounded and erased articulations of socialist principles for social change communication. At the same time, by anchoring such socialist imaginaries in communicative equality, the chapter depicts the contributions communication scholarship can make to crafting an alternative future amid the challenges of climate change, increasing inequalities and the entrenched co-optation of democratic processes in the hands of capital.

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CHAPTER 8

Social Change Communication as Academic-­ Activist-­Community Partnerships

I am sitting here at what is supposed to be a retreat for university managers at this fancy hotel at the heart of financial capital, witnessing a conversation unfold between a University administrator and an economist. The administrator, from one of these humanities departments, referring to his pedagogy at the birthplace of neoliberalism, shares eloquently about the neoliberal innovation, and how it transformed the globe. The same administrator then goes on to talk about how more programs are needed in the humanities that take seriously the basic logics of economic freedom in order to prepare future ready graduates from universities. (Notes from fieldwork, place and date removed for anonymity)

The control of neoliberalism as a dogma over universities is amply clear in the direction universities have taken globally; as the above conversation depicts, this dogma has spread its net much beyond the narrow economics faculties to shape how wider university managers, including those in the humanities, have taken to its seduction (Feldman & Sandoval, 2018; Heath & Burdon, 2013). The seduction is repeated as a pseudoscience, packaged in the language of generating jobs and preparing future-ready graduates (as if these administrators have already developed some well-­ calculated formula for what the future looks like). The accelerated transformation of the globe through the hegemonic appeal of the technologically mediatized free market has gone hand-in-­ hand with the large-scale privatization of universities. Universities, re-­ © The Author(s) 2020 M. Dutta, Communication, Culture and Social Change, Palgrave Studies in Communication for Social Change, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26470-3_8

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done in the narrative of the market, are increasingly dictated by the powers of the state and the market to re-do their agendas in the narrow habits of preparing workers for the ever-expanding global market and generating instrumentalist knowledge that serves the agendas of private capital. “Being future ready” or “preparing the next generation for the digital economy” are the prevalent slogans driving universities, uncritical of the privatizing forces of digital economies, the large-scale inequalities, and the catalytic threats to the environment. Within this transformation of universities, social change communication has increasingly been configured as the buzzword, incorporated into the marketing and promotional materials of universities, while at the same time, the spaces and infrastructures for participating in democratic processes of social change are constrained. The globalization of neoliberalism as a mode of governmentality is situated amid the ongoing hegemony of the organizing logics of Whiteness in constituting Communication Studies. As evident in the transformative movement that emerged in the discipline in the face of racist articulations expressed by its distinguished scholars, seeking to dismantle the hegemonic racism built into the discipline, the ongoing work of social change is deeply intertwined with the politics of knowledge production. The norms of Whiteness that constitute the disciplinary spaces are tied to the reproduction of colonizing logics that work through the erasure of scholars at the margins, scholars of color, indigenous scholars, women, LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer) scholars, and scholars negotiating the able-bodied hegemony of the discipline. The “Communication Scholars for Transformation” movement emerged in this backdrop as an infrastructure for dismantling the very notions of merit and excellence that are mired in Whiteness. The violent response of Whiteness to these voices depicts the relevance of ongoing activism that names and dismantles the racist habits of Communication Studies. The ongoing work of dismantling the Whiteness of the discipline ought to attend to the globalization of Whiteness. Consider, for instance, the hegemonic logics reified by the International Communication Association (ICA) as it seeks to internationalize, disseminating the logics of merit embedded in Whiteness into the institutional structures distributed globally. That the conferences and journals of the ICA are occupied by scholars embedded largely within US institutions reflects the politics of Whiteness. The Whiteness of disciplinary publishing is intertwined with the proliferation of the metrics industry. The globalization of rankings has turned spaces of knowledge generation

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across the globe into sites of reproducing Whiteness, with the hegemonic space accorded to largely White ICA journals. Simultaneously, cultural narratives have been co-opted into the market imaginary, with market supporting cultural processes and artifacts occupying the radical position. Claims of cultural intelligence, culture-asresource, and cultural sensitivity have played key roles in positioning the humanities and social sciences in enabling the development of intelligent market tools that are anchored in local logics. To find their position of relevance in the neoliberal university, cultural studies programs in the humanities have been positioned to deliver culture as a usable concept that enables market-­driven development. Projects of art promotion, city branding in the claims to cultural resources, and the academic posturing of radicalism have largely usurped the transformative spaces for radical inversions of neoliberal logics. Claims such as promoting the free market or promoting capitalism tied to identity politics (such as markets as enablers of queer politics) is de-westernizing or decolonizing communication for social change has enabled various forms of unfettered regional market promotion. The ­concept “context” has been co-opted to serve neoliberal agendas of market promotion. Culture-centered interventions grounded in the lifeworld of communities at the margins fundamentally disrupt the colonial production of knowledge by reimagining the role of the academic, the relationship of the academic with communities at the margins and the relationships of academics with activists participating in co-creating advocacies in collaboration with communities (Smith, 1999). The very idea of the academic at a distance, who parachutes into the marginalized community, bringing in development solutions, based on his/her scholarly distance and expert knowledge is disrupted by the reworking of academic-community-activist relationships as grounded in the rhythm of community life, in the heterogeneities and fragmentations of community identities and articulations, in the dialectic tensions of cultural meanings in community conversations and in the negotiations of community-driven solutions (Alexander & Warren, 2002). Academic knowledge production as an instrument of colonial reproduction is resisted by academic knowledge as a situated relationship with communities at the margins of global politics (Luthra, 2015), collaborating to co-create spaces where community voices may be registered in ways that matter to the lives and livelihoods of those living in the margins, foregrounding the negotiations of power in making knowledge claims as the sites of contestation and transformation (Dutta et al.,

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2013). In this sense, then, the recognition of the location of community participation in relationship to the structures of marginalization locates culturally centered projects in resistance to the neoliberal frameworks of global-national-local transformations, ranging from interventions of community-­based, community-owned democracies, to community-driven social movements (such as in the realm of movements of indigenous rights), to transformative party politics (such as in the examples of Podemos).

8.1   Recognizing Community Work as Transformative The recognition of the right of communities at the margins to dignity lies at the heart of the culture-centered approach (CCA). This concept of the “right to dignity” emerged through some of the early works of the CCA in collaborations with Santali communities in Eastern India, and I much later came to find resonance of this idea with Axel Honneth’s (1996) ethics of recognition. The right to live a life with dignity and be recognized anchors the concept of voice in the CCA, drawing on the notion that having a voice is intrinsic to feeling a sense of dignity. The feeling of being disempowered is often tied to the sense of being without dignity for not having been recognized as a speaking subject who has a voice. Recognizing community work as transformative is based on an active commitment to shifting the terrains of communication, thus disrupting the very normative ideals of communication. 8.1.1  Groups as Conversational Spaces In culture-centered collaborations with the margins that have historically been erased, co-creating conversational spaces located at the margins forms the basis of the struggles of recognition. Noting communicative erasure as a universal to the processes of marginalization (Dutta, 2004a, 2004b), as a theme that flows across communicative spaces that produce subalternity, the work of the CCA is one of partnering with communities in both learning about the conversational spaces that exist within communities, as well as building conversational spaces that are embedded in community norms and community-grounded ideas of communication. These conversational spaces emerge organically through community-­

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based initiatives as well as through academic journeys in community life. Ethnographic immersion in communities at the margins offers insights into the communicative erasures, the ways in which communicative processes in hegemonic structures erase community voices and the communicative tools that are needed for forming groups that are embedded in community life. Unlike the tools of focus groups that are intended for turning communities into data through group interactions, groups as conversational spaces are owned by community members in partnerships with academics and/or activists, built on normative ideas of group formation created by community members. The concept of ownership is itself dynamic, with the locus of the group ownership often shifting based on the dynamics of power in the community. For instance, the impetus for forming a collective group emerges from the communities in the realm of subaltern social movements; in these conversational groups, community-academic-activist collaborations explore the erasure of voices, the processes through which these erasures take place, and the communicative strategies and tools that are necessary to the processes of collectivization and challenging of structures. For instance, community members who have come together in the backdrop of a new mining project that threatens to displace the community from its sources of livelihoods might identify building tools for having their voices heard, creating petitions, developing accounts of their marginalization that would enter into dominant discursive spaces and developing legal claims to be made in juridical systems. The recognition that the erasure of communities from sites of articulation is integral to their ongoing political and economic marginalization is then tied to, first and foremost, challenging and changing the structures of communication. The extractive nature of abstractions that are sold as knowledge claims ought to be closely interrogated, instead returning to the possibilities of knowledge generation amid subaltern struggles. For instance, in the work of the CCA with communities living in poverty in Singapore, the very language of poverty emerged as the basis for the poor to challenge the discursive erasure of poverty. Challenging the discursive rules around poverty, therefore, was integral to the conversations in community advisory groups, where community members experiencing poverty felt that by creating a conversational space that acknowledged poverty, they were collectively building a space for recognition. The “Singaporeans left behind” advocacy campaign emerged from this space as a strategy for

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opening up a conversation on poverty in Singapore (see Tan, Kaur-Gill, Dutta, & Venkataraman, 2017). The condition of being marginalized is thus reflected in this deep sense of feeling as though one does not have a voice; she is unheard and the mainstream does not offer structures for her to be recognized. The communicative work of the CCA, therefore, is based on building “infrastructures of listening” so communities feel that they have a voice in ways that matter. Worth foregrounding here is the notion of “in ways that matter.” To build “infrastructures” of listening, the existing forms of power and their distribution need to be examined that shape communicative spaces and resources. Understanding how communication is located within structures and the rules of communication that make possible the presence of voices, culture-centered interventions seek to challenge actively these structures and their logics of constructing communication. The recognition that hegemonic structures often co-opt voices from the margins to serve their neoliberal agendas leads to an explicit politics of locating the voice infrastructures in communities in the margins, with the origins of these infrastructures situated at the margins, and the ownership of the infrastructures held by subaltern communities. As opposed to the move of the communication for development and social change (CDSC) literature to co-opt social movements into the broader narrative of development (Obregon & Tufte, 2017), the CCA turns toward the community ownership of communicative infrastructures that construct the articulations of social change and development, often resisting hegemonic development and development institutions in order to foreground alternative rationalities of development. Where communicative infrastructures for voice are located, therefore, is a critical question, with the academic-­activism of the CCA working toward resisting academic structures and transforming them so the infrastructures of knowledge production are moved out of the hegemonic structures and into subaltern communities. The work of challenging existing structures of communication calls for an orientation to partnerships with communities at the margins that interrogate the overarching ideologies of voice. Recognizing the generative power of knowledge from within subaltern struggles for livelihood opens up spaces that dismantle neoliberal governmentality. The norms surrounding voice and expression often need to be disrupted in order to co-create the space for collaborating with communities at the margins. The revolution in this sense is as much about redoing our universities. Our work of

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social change communication has to begin by resisting and challenging the very structures of the universities we reside in and the practices of institutionalization that universities constitute. 8.1.2  Voices The concept of voice is a key thread in culture-centered collaborations with the subaltern margins (Dutta, 2018b). The question of communicative equality forms the basis for exploring the ways in which communicative infrastructures may be co-created for listening to the voices of subaltern communities. The recognition that subaltern voices have always been articulated then turns to how might we, as academics, collaborate with movements, communities, parties, unions, neighborhoods, activists and community organizations to center communicative equality. The principle of communicative equality shapes the solidarities in the actual work of building communicative infrastructures that are anchored in subaltern voices, guided by subaltern logics and owned by subaltern communities. The actual work of building communicative infrastructures for subaltern voice, therefore, is one of seeking resources, identifying sources of support, and developing the designs of the interventions. The ownership of the communicative resources by subaltern communities translates into community control over the agendas, goals, objectives, strategies and tactics emerging to form the interventions. Contrast this with participatory methods that originate from the agendas and goals of funding agencies anchored in neoliberal governmentality, private corporations, foundations, public-private partnerships and so on. The work of the academic becomes one of embedding in community spaces and seeking opportunities for everyday solidarities in community struggles. From this everyday work of solidarity, problems are identified and potential solutions are created. The recognition of voice as an expression of communicative equality also turns toward the placing of the academic voice in support for subaltern struggles and activist interventions, often placing the academic body in resistance to the state-capitalist structures that increasingly control universities. 8.1.3  Questions of Power in the Academic Position At this sharing session, we are discussing our work with foreign domestic workers in Singapore. She shares how in our cultural centered collaborations

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with foreign domestic workers, domestic workers form collectives in which they identify, develop, and implement strategies of change. In the audience is one of these senior migration scholars who responds, “What is the point of change? Aren’t you guys part of the power?” This question of power and our location within power is a question that lies as the basis of our conversation. I share this, stating “that we are embedded in relations of power is precisely the reason why we explore the question of solidarity with foreign domestic workers, a group that is continually displaced from the discursive space.” By working to learn from our positions of power what strategies of change in dominant structures might be articulated to seeking to undo these positions of power brings us back to the collaborative relationships with foreign domestic workers in our advisory groups. (Fieldnote, May 2017, Singapore)

The question of power in the academic position is a key resource in guiding the labor of communication scholars working in projects of social change. The work of identifying, theorizing and then activating to transform communicative inequalities is rooted in the recognition of power. That academic power constitutes how academics relate to and connect to spaces and struggles translates into the ongoing work of questioning one’s academic position. The interrogation of this position, however, can’t simply be an individualistic exercise to be captured in reflections and journal notes. In culture-centered interventions, this interrogation is actively directed toward constituting the ways in which we as academics relate to communities, community organizations, neighborhood associations, and activists. The ways in which we form academic-community-activist partnerships are grounded in the ongoing questioning of power embodied in the academic position (Bradford & Dutta, 2018). Unfortunately, the question of power tied to academic and activist positions working with subaltern communities often is deployed by hegemonic structures to justify academic elitism and insularity and, worse, to delegitimize and/or attack academic positions that are crafted in lending solidarity with subaltern struggles. The turn to reflexivity and academic positionality within the hegemonic structures of the neoliberal university can, unfortunately, work precisely to erase spaces of academic solidarity with the margins, based on the convenient and opportunist excuse that power is anyways embedded in academic positions. To do culture-­centered work is to return to the interrogation of the question of academic power and privilege to precisely seek out opportunities for solidarity with subaltern communities. Reflexivity then generates action and is connected to

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the work of doing community labor, from building projects, designing posters, creating campaigns, leafletting, participating in community theater, sloganeering, walking in protests, and so on. The everyday work of community labor is the site where academic power is rendered equal, placed alongside other forms of labor that academics engage in just as they invite community members and activists to participate in academic labor. The process of sharing labor offers an infrastructure for imagining communicative equality, with activists and community organizers invited into the academe, actively exploring resources in the university to actively support these other forms of labor within the university. The activist-in-residence program created by the Center for Culture-centered Approach to Research and Evaluation (CARE) in one such attempt to disrupt academic power by inviting activists into the academe, recognizing their active roles as producers of knowledge. A significant proportion of the resources at CARE then are allocated to financially supporting the activists as they deliver public talks, conduct workshops and participate in collaborative activities in the production of white papers. Because academics do indeed occupy spaces of power that silence and erase, often reproducing the neoliberal agenda through the various ­seductions that are available to universities, placing these very forms of academic power in the struggles of the subaltern classes and collectivized subaltern social movements creates transformative opportunities. The praxis of cultural centering, therefore, is the work of placing the academic privilege in struggles of resistance and structural transformation. Resistance here is performed as a collective struggle that brings academics in solidarity with subaltern communities, finding spaces for collective identity formation and organizing that challenge the various forms of marginalizing and erasing practices. When communicative equality is achieved, the relationship is one of sameness, with academics losing the distinctive traits that mark them as academics. In working toward this relationship of equality based on sameness, the political philosopher Jodi Dean (2019) offers the trope of the comrade: Comradeship is premised on inclusion and exclusion, anyone but not everyone can be a comrade…Comrades are those on the same side of the division. With respect to this division, they are the same. Their sameness is that of those who are on the same side. To say comrade is to announce a belonging, and the sameness that comes from being on the same side. (p. 68)

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To work toward this relationship of comradeship with the communities one works with, the academic has to aspire toward sameness. Sameness is defined by the division in the politics of oppression. This politics of sameness is distinctly different from a politics of expertise that positions the academic as the one holding knowledge, with something to give to the community. Through the recognition of sameness, comradeship creates the basis for communicative equality. Comradeship also calls for the courage to place the academic body on the line in interrogating repressions, alongside the communities one works with, alongside the activists one collaborates with and beside other academics who have placed their bodies on the line.

8.2   Disrupting Academic Habits The wholesale neoliberal transformation of academia has embedded academia within the overarching logics of neoliberal measurement and strategy (Cupples & Pawson, 2012; Shore & Wright, 1999; Shore et  al., 2015). The culture of individualization, profit orientation and narrowly framed utilitarianism has shaped and co-opted the spaces and sites of ­cultural articulations, inundated with auditing firms, consulting firms, surveillance corporations, measurement units, market research firms, strategic communication firms and data intelligence experts (Shore et al., 2015). Cultural theorizing, strengthened in the logics of the market and sold as pragmatism, has been formulated as a necessary tool for sustaining the neoliberal order, incorporated into tools of measurement, evaluation, and accounting. Moreover, terms such as pragmatism and communitarianism, presented as anchors for difference, legitimize authoritarian practices of management that reproduce the neoliberal order. The interest in culture from United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) to the World Bank (WB) to the World Economic Forum is rooted in the emergence of culture as a tool for keeping intact the power and control of the global neoliberal elite, narrated in the language of economic development. The formulation of cultural research in terms of pragmatism, application and instrumentalism locate culture in the overarching logics of neoliberalism, with activism formulated within the neoliberal status quo.

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8.2.1  How We Live Our Academic Lives In the backdrop of globalization and the turn to large-scale privatization of universities, authoritarian management techniques have increasingly emerged as normative in academia, flowing across global spaces. More and more calls for producing new numbers, generating data, and generating evidence of impact are being placed on academics, as universities configure themselves in narrow market-driven games shaped by rankings. The metric university on one hand places the burden of turning herself/himself into data on academics, and, at the same time, uses these data to discipline faculty, staff, and students. In what I call elsewhere as metricide (see Dutta, 2018a, 2018b), or death by numbers, academic lives are increasingly precarious, subjected to a wide range of repressive tactics. Audit cultures, imported into universities as technologies of monitoring processes in the name of preventing corruption are tied to corrupt practices of generating market opportunities for private auditing firms (Muir & Gupta, 2018). Notes Shore (2018, S93): Audit culture is an assemblage of different policy processes, accounting technologies, and moral injunctions that exert power through the normalization and naturalization of particular ways of thinking and financialized forms of management. In academia, audit culture reaches down from government officials, university leadership teams, and faculty managers to heads of schools, departments, and individual academic staff in ever-more pervasive drives to measure and improve staff productivity and performance.

University workers are subjected to various forms of measurement, generating a plethora of data to be then collected and analyzed by auditors. The culture of auditing disciplines academics into the logics of the market-­ driven privatized university through the production of the fear of the audit. The transformation of the public university into the “audit university” has created new market opportunities for auditing firms that are themselves implicated in corruption (Shore, 2018). The production of corruption through study findings reported on the media by the Big Four auditing firms depicts the active production of corruption as a market, building new business opportunities for these firms. In his analysis of the introduction of the audit culture in public universities in New Zealand, Shore (2018) depicts the ways in which the market for audit was mobilized through the production of targeted media campaigns, releasing studies commissioned by auditing corporations narrating the rise in cor-

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ruption in New Zealand and predicting a crisis. The production of the studies thus was strategically tied to the production of a risk culture, framing risk assessment and risk management as key activities in addressing corruption. Whistle-blower hotlines created to report on corrupt practices emerge as tools of disciplining, exercising political power over academia through the production of corruption as an object. In authoritarian regimes, these whistle-blower hotlines are embedded in opaque processes, with employees of auditing units reporting to the Provost or the President of the University. The appearance of committees such as Committees of Inquiry appointed by university leadership under the veneer of opaque processes that retain the power in the hands of the university leadership. Who appoints these committees, how committee decisions are read and communicated and who has access to committee decisions are embedded in networks of power. Which whistle-blowing calls are followed up on and which are not are not made available to university staff, with these decisions themselves often made by university leadership. In authoritarian regimes, the whistle-blowing process itself is mired in corruption, using the performance of whistle-blowing and inquiry to silence voices that interrogate the corrupt practices of the regime. The communicative inversion of the auditing processes lies in the very appeals to transparency and accountability as rhetorical tools, while inverting the materiality of the opaqueness, closed-door decision-making and elite controls that are exercised through these processes. Auditing then works to discipline, actively producing a climate of fear, delineating the boundaries of acceptable academic work. Starting from monitoring who is invited to be a guest speaker in classrooms and at conferences to being told what to teach in the classroom, academics teaching social change communication find themselves often in precarious situations. These pressures are constituted amid the global seductions of radicalism and of academic responses to sustainability, as evident in the incorporation of sustainability in the newly launched impact rankings by QS. Audits of social media posts are carried out by teams of managers hired into the university machinery to assess and contain risks. Topics such as the Israeli occupation of Palestine, racism in Singapore, Chinese repression of Marxist student-worker collectives are increasingly considered out-of-bounds, with academics daring to cross the line being subjected to concerted attacks. The recent attack on Professor Marc Lamont Hill for his commentary on Israeli occupation in Gaza is one of

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the latest examples of a pattern of attacks on critics of Zionist atrocities and apartheid. I have myself been targeted for disciplining, all the way from being continually called in and asked to seek partnerships with relevant Ministries for my work on poverty to being told that the University will take action if I don’t stop posting on Facebook to being interrogated for creating an activist-in-residence program. Most recently, for expressing solidarity with Marc Lamont Hill and his use of the phrase, “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” I was targeted by the Israel Institute of New Zealand, which targeted me through the use of political power, contacting the university administration and then publishing on its website an article that labeled me, along with other critics of Israeli settler colonialism, as extremist. The web article came out on the eve of the White supremacist attack on largely brown Muslim migrants and refugees in Christchurch, New Zealand. To be social change communication scholars in this global turn to authoritarianism is to closely examine how we each live our academic lives, to prepare ourselves for the forces of stigmatization and labeling and to build our strengths in supporting each other. The alienating effect of academia that represses through individualization needs to be resisted through acts of solidarity that join in on struggles and hold academia to account. In the backdrop of the authoritarian decision taken by the University of Illinois leadership to un-hire Steven Salaita, academic organizing in solidarity held the university to task. To challenge the forces that silence the voices of the margins is to lend one’s body to the struggles of the margins. In this work of lending our bodies to struggles against exploitation and oppression, it is crucial to develop larger collectives within and outside academia that hold academia accountable. 8.2.2   Academia as Business Academia everywhere is being turned strategically and categorically into a business. Such is the global hegemony of knowledge capital that from the nature of knowledge work to what counts as knowledge production to transnational corporations running the global game of rankings, the input-­ output model has been adopted as the normative model in academia. From students from China and India seeking to migrate to the US to pursue their undergraduate education, to the global movement of faculty, to highly paying academic positions that float across boundaries (having myself negotiated this seduction in the context of seeking to find a home

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for the Center for Culture-centered approach to Research and Evaluation outside the US mainstream), metrics and rankings drive the academic game. The business of academia, with increasing attacks on critical spaces and voices and the erasure of spaces of faculty governance, is being carried out through a mix of authoritarian control and market pandering. Interrogating the claim made by W. J. T. Mitchell and Wang Ning that theorizing is the everyday language of life in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), Dirlik (2008, p. 4) captures this seduction well in his introduction to the special issue on China in boundary 2: Chinese academia is very much in the business of business, academic or otherwise, and entrepreneurship is one of the criteria for a successful career…Mitchell’s apparent suspension of critical judgment is unfortunate but not unusual when it comes to distinguished American intellectuals confronting their persuasive counterparts in the PRC. It may be the hospitality, expressed among other things in endless banquets and bottomless supply of “white lightning” (otherwise known as baijiu) that endows every present-­ day Beijing, perpetually shrouded in clouds of pollution, with magic, and fairy tales with reality. It may be unspoken hopes of a visiting appointment in the “middle kingdom” of legend, or an honorary degree from the children of Confucius and the Yellow Emperor. More likely it is an unspoken desire to convert the Chinese to one’s way of doing things—a secular vision of the missionary thing—that ironically seeks to pave the way to conversion of the Chinese by compliance in their self-representations, even when they push against the limits of credulity. Whatever may be the temptation, it finds nourishment in the benefit of careers on all sides when intellectual activity is being “globalized,” same as capital and commodities.

The globalization of intellectual activity so aptly captured by Dirlik above is driven by the logic of the academic market, seeking to find its consumers and benefactors across global spaces. These new markets are not only new opportunities for intellectual products, but they are also integral to the promotion of the internationalization metrics that count toward the rankings. The unprecedented rise of neoliberalism globally has led to the de-­ funding of academe, with systematic attempts at turning universities into sites of private capital. The increasing power of donors and financial capital on university campuses is an ongoing and imminent threat to academic freedom. Recently, the firing of the Palestinian academic Steven Salaita from the University of Illinois under charges of incivility for his tweets

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foregrounding the atrocities carried out by Israel in Gaza after he was offered a position brought to the forefront the power of donor influence on university campuses. Similarly, powerful trustees at Temple University called for the firing of Marc Lamont Hill after he criticized Israeli settler colonialism at the United Nations. Donor influence often works through opaque processes and techniques. Demands made for firing faculty members whose ideas are inconvenient or that challenge the status quo are often made over phone calls, closed-door meetings and donor networks. The activist-in-residence program run at the CARE came under such pressures with our activist-in-residence program, when inviting the renowned New Zealand activists Sue Bradford and Tame Iti. In both instances, talk from the structures about donors threatening to pull donation to the University circulated amid the public programs and collaborations. Here, I note the university leadership committing to support the program amid/ in spite of these threats from donors. That donors, trustees, political actors exercise powerful influences on the university agenda ought to be a site of interrogation and resistance, reworking the university in alternative imaginaries. Moreover, the power of financial capital on university campuses, it may be argued, fundamentally corrupts the academic mission of universities. Consider, for instance, the example of the sex-offending, elite ­capitalist-­philanthropist and sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, his linkages with Trump, the Clintons (Epstein was a founding member of the Clinton Global Initiative) and other powerful political actors, his associations with Wall Street and elite journalists, such as Katie Couric, and his systematic public relations campaign for image-building through university donations after his initial conviction as an underage sex offender (Kantor, 2019). The Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz, who helped defend Epstein on the trafficking charges, has been accused of having sex with underage girls through Epstein’s trafficking network. During his relationship with Harvard University, Epstein donated over US$ 7 million, regularly met with Harvard professors including Martin Nowak, Stephen Jay Gould and Steven Pinker, and claimed friendships with then Harvard President Lawrence Summers and Alan Dershowitz. Under a website, “Program for Evolutionary Dynamics” that went up at Harvard University by 2014, a full-page hagiography of Epstein, rife with a black-and-white image of Epstein looking directly at the reader is offered:

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Mr. Epstein founded the Jeffrey Epstein VI Foundation in 2000 to fund and support cutting edge science around the world. He is one of the largest supporters of individual scientists, including theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, Marvin Minsky, Seth Lloyd and Nobel Laureates Gerard ‘t Hooft, David Gross and Frank Wilczek. More recently, Mr. Epstein has supported advances in artificial intelligence, notably the OpenCog Foundation in Hong Kong and Joscha Bach’s Micropsi work in Berlin, which have been building virtual cognitive models of the human mind. The Jeffrey Epstein VI Foundation also plays a continuous role in supporting education across the United States as well as philanthropy in the US Virgin Islands, where the foundation is based. Mr. Epstein is actively involved in the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics and regularly participates in lectures and academic events. He is also involved in the Santa Fe Institute, the Theoretical Biology Initiative at the Institute for Advanced Study and the Quantum Gravity Program at the University of Pennsylvania. He recently sat on the Mind, Brain and Behavior Committee at Harvard University. Mr. Epstein is a former member of the Trilateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Relations, the New York Academy of Science and a former Rockefeller University Board Member. (https://web.archive. org/web/20150115044217; http://www.ped.fas.harvard.edu/people/ friends/Jeffrey_Epstein.html)

In his elite scientific connections, Epstein expressed his deep interest in transhumanism, the uses of the technologies of artificial intelligence and genetic engineering to improve the human population, a new media form of eugenics. He had hoped to seed the human race with his DNA by impregnating women at his ranch in New Mexico. Note here the revolving door between the circuits of influence at the University. Epstein circulates between Harvard, University of Pennsylvania, Trilateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Relations, the New York Academy of Science and Rockefeller University. The production of knowledge is business, with the agendas of science constituted in the service of whitewashing corrupt philanthro-capital. Moreover, worth noting is the overarching ideology of Whiteness that forms the infrastructure of private funding of knowledge (discussed in depth in the chapter on technology). Closer home, note the relationship between Epstein and the MIT Media Lab, particularly with the funding, the deception, and the corrupt relationships that formed the infrastructures of the lab. Also note here the allegations of participation in child sex exploitation directed at the pioneer of artificial intelligence (AI), Marvin Minsky, who was also a member of the advisory board of the cryo-

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preserving corporation, Alcor, with speculations of him having signed up for the cryopreservation experiment. The elite power of the academe, joined with the elite power of transnational capital, operates on corrupt practices that are sustained by material and communicative inequalities. Noting this corruption of the academe in the hands of private capital, Steven Salaita outlines a pathway for the fundamental work of resistance and activism in the academe, one of dismantling and resisting the power of philanthro-capital. 8.2.3  Academic-Activism as Institutionalization Terms such as collaborations, partnerships and engagement have become the buzzwords for universities seeking to find relevance in a climate driven by the neoliberal mandate. Academic research, defined in terms of the opportunities for collaboration with industry in generating value, has been shaped by the turn to wholesale neoliberalism in academia, often devoid of theoretical rigor. Academic-activist collaborations have, in this climate, been framed as opportunities for generating revenue and for producing instrumental knowledge, paradoxically turning activism as a brand that has cache and economic value. The branding of academic engagement as activism has enabled the institutionalization of knowledge, on one hand, communicating a performance at the edge and, on the other hand, fashioning the edge into the overarching logics of the market. The metrics of institutionalization thus have served as the basis for how activism is conceptualized and constructed, established within the neoliberal desires of the academe. Engagement, devoid of transformative politics and a commitment to transforming the overarching structures, is defined in the terms of the practical uses of academic work to the industry. Consider, for instance, the following depiction offered by Cassity and Ang (2006): Partnerships are also encouraging academics to think about the wider public. Collaboration with industry encourages engagement. In the words of one interviewee, ‘It lends a little bit more Realpolitik to the products of research’. As another put it: ‘It’s made me think much more constructively rather than just critically. Rather than sitting back and providing this critique of why the museum got it all wrong, it is: How can I provide something which says, “well, this is how we do it”, or “this may be the way to go”. So I look at positive outcomes as well.’ Thus, Linkage Projects has encouraged

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researchers to go outside their ivory towers, and to contribute to finding ways of addressing, if not solving, problems in the real world. (p. 11)

The language used to define partnerships is embedded in the overarching ideology of instrumentalism. The nature of the use value of the research is tied to solving problems, with the problems being defined within the ambits of the existing power structures. Worth noting is the parochial construction of engagement as a tool of power, serving to reproduce the mechanisms of control. The creation of positive outcomes depicted in terms of prescriptive steps to be adopted is placed in the backdrop of critique, ultimately leading to shaping products. The construction of engagement within the ambits of power thus frames engagement in instrumentalist logics tied to markets, products and industry needs. Consider, for instance, the conceptualization of engagement in the context of what is defined as public scholarship in Waisbord’s (2018) book, The Communication Manifesto. The Manifesto offers public scholarship as a framework for institutionalizing publicness in communication studies. Summarizing the various forms of public scholarship, Waisbord reminds the reader: Public scholarship in communication studies should espouse critical, constructive reasoning. It needs to be skeptical of power, dogmatism and ­ideology. It should foreground essential aspects of the scholarly enterprise: facts and rigor, general propositions and unique insights, history and perspective. (p. 40)

Note here the very depiction of scholarship as enterprise, normalizing the language of entrepreneurial capital. The depiction conflates power, dogmatism, and enterprise, combining them into a homogenous box against which the author invites public scholars to be skeptical. The academic enterprise is defined in terms of what are marked as its characteristics, facts and rigor that the academic then is positioned to bring into public. The depiction of academic as an a-ideological enterprise, or as one that offers the tools to be skeptical of ideology, erases the fundamentally ideological nature of knowledge production that works on the erasure of communities. The invitation to be skeptical of power is oblivious to the very power constituted in academic formations and the textures of power in the discipline that make particular knowledge claims legible and legitimate. The notion of the discipline, in this instance, the Communication

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discipline, as the source of facts and rigor is oblivious to the very structures of Whiteness that constitute the politics of knowledge generation in the discipline. Consider within this framework, Waisbord’s guidance regarding public scholarship offered to junior scholars: I intend to offer ideas about possible types of scholarship that could be helpful for doctoral students and junior scholars. Every decision about scholarship is political. It signals our choices about how we want to intervene in public. Choices are explicit or implicit responses to the question “What is communication studies for?” Why do we do what we do? To mention a few options: Spread civic knowledge, help people cope with personal and social challenges, foster citizenship and democratic communication practices, empower people, offer tools to live healthier lives, help organizations make better decisions and be more inclusive, give visibility to silenced voices, stimulate critical consciousness, and tackle a host of social problems—from loneliness to inequality. (p. 7)

Note here the framing of the responses to the purpose of Communication Studies within the broader agenda of public scholarship. The communication scholar, positioned as the expert, explores questions of communication within the ambits of the structure, from diffusing knowledge to creating inclusive practices to stimulating critical consciousness. The overarching structure, the power embedded in it and the structure of academia as the site of knowledge production are left intact. The prescriptions then offered throughout the book explore tactics of institutionalizing within the academe public scholarship. A similar thread of instrumentalism is evident in the depiction that Morris and Hjort (2012) offer in their positioning of academic-activism in the context of cultural studies in their book on academic-activism. Dismissing the critiques of the turn in cultural studies toward administrative research and responding to the interrogation of the co-optive politics of functionalism, they note: “This is a question that makes no sense other than rhetorical provocation without a context to provide materials for a meaningful answer and communities to whom that answer matters. The strength of the local case studies, transformative national projects, personal detours and crossinstitutional ventures described in this volume is that they are able to nominate contexts and communities that do indeed give shape and substance to the ‘what’ as well as the ‘how’ of institutional action.”

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The narrative of pragmatism is constructed within institutional logics that further the hegemony of the institution, located within the hegemonic networks of power. The reference to context is propped up as a justification for functionalistic politics. The authors then go on to prescribe: “How” questions matter; the literature on executive leadership and change management in institutions may be as remote from the concerns of most Cultural Studies in the West as the world of human rights law, but it has much to teach us about the impact of the choices made by individual managers in effecting the differing outcomes (in our terms, the varying degrees of livability) that particular universities produce within a common policy regime.

Note the formulation of the neoliberal tools of change management and executive leadership as the frameworks within which this functionalist version of activism is played out. The nature of activism thus presented is constituted in the logics of opportunism and careerism that enable the fashioning of activism as a radical performance that is replete with techniques of managerial disciplining that uphold the overarching structures that constitute contemporary academia. Activism, folded into the politics of institutionalization, serves institutionalized structures and the academics seeking to benefit from these structures. Rather than a resistive struggle against the neoliberal structures of the academe and the logics of ­managerialism that have colonized academic spaces, the call for institutionalization works within these very structures, finding ways of accommodating to and working with these structures. The prescription of “pragmatic thinking” offered in the collection works to build legitimacy within the status quo. Furthermore, the framing of activism in terms of academic-activism and placing this work within the realms of a politics of institutionalization, on one hand, co-opts the disruptive capacity of activism and, on the other hand, neutralizes the political power of activism in transforming structures, particularly university structures (see Bennett, 2012 in the same collection). The realms of institutional action depicted in the collection as “academic-activism” then formulate strategies of working within the managerial spaces and logics of neoliberal academia. Paradoxically, the work of activism is framed under the reproduction of managerial logics, reproducing thus the managerial hegemony rather than disrupting the colonizing spaces of the academe. Narratives of participation, collaboration and teamwork, the precise tools

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of neoliberal managerialism are formulated as radical departures. That the references used are drawn from outside of the US/Euro hegemony further go on to position these moves toward institutionalization as somehow de-westernizing, conveniently obfuscating the anti-institutional struggles and disruptive politics of challenging the institution taking place across the globe, and in much of this, taking place in the global South. 8.2.4  Radical Posturing The radical space for transformative politics is increasingly co-opted into a radical posture, replete with culturalist depictions and cultural narratives (see, for instance, Morris & Hjort, 2012). The performance of radicality in the neoliberal university is often tied to the branding of spaces for attracting enrolments, research opportunities, and rankings. Specific claims to the radical position can paradoxically work to entrench a particular disciplinary thread or strand of scholarship, often devoid of participation in the everyday politics of structural transformation. Consider, for instance, the ways in which the term activist is deployed by academics as a market opportunity for drawing students and resources, disconnected from the material work of activists and community organizers, and, in many instances, actively working to delegitimize the actual spaces of transformative work. A week of academic tourism into a community, a trip to an activist art space or attendance at a performance serve as the basis for academic self-presentation to attract new resources and markets. Claims to doing activism, founding activist networks and creating activist platforms speak to the neoliberal desires of the university to draw new social change-­ oriented market audiences while, at the same time, erasing the risks, labor, and solidarity necessary for doing the activist work. This co-option of the radical space is critical to the sustenance of the neoliberal order amid the financial crisis, the crisis of the environment, and the growing resistance to the neoliberal order across the globe. The studies of culture as radical performance, erased from critiques and interrogations of the dominant global capitalist structures, are tied to the formulation of fashionable spaces of neutered radicalism that are integral to the promotion of the global free market. Art, activism and social justice, incorporated into the hegemonic circuits of capitalist promotion, are integrated into opportunities for promoting and reproducing the principles of the market. Claims to de-westernization and decolonization in the academe have emerged as hegemonic sites to retaining the hegemony of the mar-

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ket, dressed in the culturalist codes of Asian or Latin American difference. The radical branding of market forces is achieved precisely through the deployment of culturalist terms and through appeals to difference. Difference itself becomes a key tool for the posturing, positioned in the foreground as a strategic tool for appealing to the market from locations of capital outside Europe-US. The mechanisms of the market depicted from elsewhere, such as from China, Hong Kong or Singapore, are positioned as de-westernization, with the radical turn of de-westernization working precisely to serve the expansion of market logics and celebrate these market logics. Difference is configured into academic performance as a tool that enables the power structure to reproduce itself, bereft of solidarity with the poor and the disenfranchised. The resistive work of communication for social change needs to critically interrogate the opportunism that is often tied to posturing, instead creating collective anchors that hold academics accountable to communities, to activist partners and to each other. 8.2.5  Postcolonial Claims The emergence of the elites from postcolonial societies into sites of colonial capitalism coincided with the global hegemony of neoliberalism as a model of governance (Dirlik, 1999). In the mid-1990s, as part of this migratory geography amid neoliberal transformation, I moved for ­graduate education to the mid-west, to the North Dakota State University in Fargo, North Dakota. Whiteness formed the cognitive structure of the graduate program, and I have written elsewhere about how the ideology of Whiteness produced a narrative of the global South that is largely divergent from the materiality of everyday life in the South. What my reading of Whiteness failed to work through though was the classed nature of my own discomfort, that I was responding to Whiteness from my largely middle-­upper class, middle-upper caste privilege. One of the earliest works of writing I performed critically read the Ronald Joffe film “City of Joy” narrating the story of Calcutta through an ideology of Whiteness. While my response rightly interrogated the politics in the portrayal of Calcutta as the space to be saved by the White Man, I failed to interrogate my own class-caste politics that wanted to see other accounts of Calcutta. A large proportion of postcolonial elites entered into US institutions on the basis of the mobility afforded by the British English language educa-

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tion in India and access to spaces of education afforded to those with caste and class privilege. The 1960s onward witnessed the emergence of multiculturalism as a site for pedagogy in the US, very much tied to the goals of the Empire (Dirlik, 1999). The postcolonial turn and its emergence on the landscape of US academia offered an opportunity for cultural critiques that interrogated the binaries circulated in imperial sites of knowledge production. The cultural turn also reified as depicted throughout the first three chapters of the book the neoliberal status quo, foregrounding nuances, ambivalences and strategic ambiguities while simultaneously undermining oppression, resistance and structural transformation. Cultural references to and descriptions of hybridity, cosmopolitanism, and mimicry for instance disrupted the hegemonic constructs of Whiteness by offering accounts of the ways in which cultural scripts, symbols and stories interpenetrated each other; these are deeply intertwined. However, worth noting in these cultural accounts of interpenetrating boundaries is the erasure of the inequalities and class differentials that constitute postcolonial societies, the deeply unequal structures within postcolonial societies, as well as the ways in which a large cross-section of postcolonial academics, occupying positions of class and caste privilege (consider the number of Brahmins that make up the postcolonial nexus), have historically benefitted from these positions of cultural critique in the imperial academe. This results in an identity-based politics that vastly profits from inequalities and from the occupation of difference as a marker for profiteering in the multicultural academe. Difference, mobilized toward serving the interests of the status quo, works toward managing markets, attracting customers from multicultural contexts and positioning universities favorably to secure grants. At the same time, this sanitized version of postcolonial difference is deployed to discipline and control spaces of solidarity, often deploying postcolonial academics in the service of the repressive regimes. In the midst of being targeted by misinformation planted and circulated by a repressive regime, I was struck by the complicity of senior minority-performing postcolonial/cultural studies scholars in reproducing the lies planted by the structures. These lies were of course planted while performing postcolonial victimhood. Critical engagement with postcolonial claims therefore situates these claims in actual relationships of solidarities with communities challenging ongoing forms of colonization. Beyond the superficial identity politics played out to portray victimhood, the transformative capacity of postcolonial politics emerges in the theoretical

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tools it offers to current and ongoing struggles against colonization. To commit to a postcolonial politics is also to demonstrate an active engagement with current decolonizing struggles against neocolonialism and settler colonialism.

8.3   Co-creating Habits of Academic Life I stand always on the side of those who will toil and labor. As an artist I come to sing, but as a citizen, I will always speak for peace, and no one can silence me in this. (Paul Robeson)

Paul Robeson was an African American singer and civil rights campaigner, whose voice became synonymous with the struggles of the oppressed in the global South. In my youth, I was introduced to Robeson’s political art through my early training with the Indian People’s Theater Association (IPTA) that was deeply embedded as a cultural organization in the struggles of the Communist Party of India. Performing to the song, “They don’t let me sing, Paul Robeson,” I was introduced to the political role of art as radical intervention. Academia takes a leaf from this interplay of art and activism, imagining the production of knowledge as itself embedded in the clarion call to social justice emerging from the voices of the oppressed. The revolutionary history of the people’s theater in India emerges in the global space of social change as a pointer to the ­transformative power of communication through art, as an expression of people’s voice. The wholesale neoliberal transformation of the university calls for radical transformations of universities as sites of knowledge production. Where universities are globally driven by narrow, market-based metrics, fundamentally reconfiguring the university is a fundamental stepping-stone to transforming the neoliberal order. As sites of knowledge production, as partners to industries and communities, as key collaborators in social change communication processes, universities are important anchors for imagining social change communication. The work of social change communication, therefore, needs to begin by reimagining the role of the university, building habits of university life that challenge the neoliberal order. Transforming these habits is an ongoing struggle, especially given the various processes through which radical articulations have been co-opted.

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8.3.1  Reflexivity The turn to reflexivity in the CCA is committed to interrogating the structures of capital through the work of building solidarities with communities at the margins, social movements and political parties explicitly committed to resisting the neoliberal model. Contrary to the notion of reflexivity that emerges in Beck and gets taken up by Nederveen Pieterse, the concept of reflexivity here is a political anchor to undoing and redoing the role of the academic in imagining and collaborating on co-creating alternative development structures that challenge the mainstream through democratic ownership of development infrastructures including the local, state and national governments. State resources and processes are turned into sites that are owned by the people through their participation in democracy. The alternatives to neoliberalism are thus forged through cross-platform solidarities that connect academics to activists and a wide array of communities at the margins including the working classes. Even as the category of the working class is actively targeted and dismantled through policies producing precarity, reflexivity serves as the basis for reimagining a working-class politics, organizing workers in solidarity with the poor, unemployed and socially marginalized communities. In this sense, reflexivity is a radical departure for imagining and building alternative modernities beyond the parochial logics of the capital and the market, demonstrating the sustainability and longevity of such models of organizing. Reflexivity as a methodological tool interrogates the privilege of the researcher as an expert, inverting the position of the researcher as a value-­ free producer of universal knowledge (Dutta & DeSouza, 2008) and attending to the very politics at the sites where knowledge of development and social change is produced (Bhattacharya, 2013; Dutta & Basu, 2013). The expertise of the researcher is brought into question, turning development knowledge as the site of interrogation, rendering it “impure,” and making visible the underlying values and interests that are served by development knowledge (Dutta, 2010). The professional classes of academic experts, MBAs and non-governmental organization (NGO) managers that profit from the development industry are interrogated, with methodological tools emerging from communities that closely examine the expert-­ driven logics offered by the status quo. Specifically attending to the workings of power in the production and circulation of knowledge claims, reflexivity meditates on the inequalities that are constituted in/at discursive sites.

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The very acknowledgment that universities as sites of knowledge production are imbricated in the politics of neoliberal consolidation of resources in the hands of capital serves as the impetus for actively challenging the organizing logics of universities as sites for producing development knowledge. The values underlying knowledge claims in development projects that are pushed through communication interventions are examined through the presence and participation of community voices, attending to the political and economic agendas that are served by these knowledge claims. For instance, the participatory claims made by projects of the World Bank are interrogated through the questioning of the very nature of participation in the poverty reduction strategies articulated by the Bank, noting the ways in which articulations of participation serve as mechanisms for diffusing top-down expert-led transformations (Dutta & Rastogi, 2016). Reflexivity, therefore, emerges as a strategy for de-centering the production of knowledge at the global metropolis, collaborating with subaltern communities at the global margins on the strategies of interrupting the dominant categories of development knowledge. Through reflexivity, the very category of development is inverted, drawing upon lived experiences of subaltern communities that are displaced by development projects to articulate the ways in which development produces violence. Reflexivity as a method of communication for social change communicatively inverts the very conceptualization of social change, naming the role of social change as a tool for usurping control in the hands of transnational capital and redefining social change as a politics of structural transformation through the participation of subaltern communities in organizing processes at the global margins (Dutta, 2012a, 2012b). To work through the question of reflexivity therefore calls for a commitment to undoing the structures of power that inhabit the dominant sites of knowledge production in that guide neoliberal policies. In a global climate where neoliberal policies draw their very power from academia and from academic sites of knowledge generation, reflexivity serves as the basis for struggles for disrupting neoliberal hegemony. I noted in a journal entry when attending a conversation on methodological questions in Singapore: In Singapore, where academia is part of an elite category, the concept of reflexivity takes a turn toward power. At this workshop, as I hear postcolonial jargons and pontifications on reflexivity, I am struck by how the very call

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to reflexivity serves elite hegemony. As an academic, and part of an elite society in Singapore that is embedded in relations of power with the state, one can throw in the term reflexivity as a way to justify why she/he doesn’t speak up or take a stance. As a paradox, reflexivity this way keeps power intact. To the extent that I, as a Provost Chair Professor, a Head and a Director, as a middle class, middle caste, male expatriate (itself a privileged category, but also rife with precarity because my employment pass may be cancelled any day), occupy my place of power is by not challenging power. By not doing anything about the poverty I witness in Singapore, I keep intact my position of privilege. I can write about my reflections in journals and my negotiations of complex emotions, and that would be entirely safe. It’s an altogether different project to acknowledge my privilege, and then to seek to work in partnerships with the poor to interrogate it, challenge it, and deploy tools of advocacy that I have access to in our partnerships with the poor in Singapore. The work of reflexivity then would call for doing much more than acknowledgment and discussions in air-conditioned rooms in one of the Arts and Social Sciences (AS) buildings. Writing journal articles and academic books is safe. But that doesn’t change the texture of poverty, and certainly doesn’t transfer the power of storytelling into the hands of individuals, families, and communities experiencing poverty. Committing to transformation would suggest that I precisely place my privilege in the midst of conversations with our community groups experiencing poverty. That we look at what makes up this privilege, what underlies its ability to make expert-elite pronouncements, what tools are used by this position of privilege, and how to use these tools in our community groups to achieve the goals group members want to achieve. When uncle Willie says, let’s use these white papers (a tool of privilege used by think tanks in Singapore’s knowledge economy), my privilege (knowing the tools of the white papers, the tools of conducting literature reviews, the tools of designing studies, knowing the grammar of writing press releases) becomes a community tool, mobilized toward goals that those that have been systematically erased find meaningful. In doing so, my privilege moves beyond the performance of a memo-ing exercise (an exercise of academic writing) or an exercise of accountability to my elite peers (other academics), instead turning into a material resource in a politics of intervention. I recognize that in doing so, I haven’t really undone the power I occupy (although in Singapore, as is evidenced earlier in this book, I have now positioned myself in a relationship of antagonism with the structure). In turning the point of accountability toward those at the margins, the work of privilege shifts its locus and at the same time keeps at the center the question of academic power.

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The work of reflexivity has to turn the process of interrogating power into a political project that organizes academics into collectives working with solidarities with various groups at the margins rather than serving as another tool of power that justifies academic collaboration with explicit positions of power. Moreover, the work of de-centering the dominant paradigm of development involves rendering the processes of knowledge production visible to subaltern communities, creating pedagogies at the subaltern margins for learning the communicative strategies of claims making and collaborating with subaltern communities at the global margins to produce knowledge. Knowledge emerging through partnerships with subaltern communities in the global South enters into the dominant sites of global production of development knowledge, rendering impure the conceptual categories such as poverty alleviation, sustainable development and public-­ private partnership through the presence of subaltern voices. 8.3.2  Embodied Resistance Noting the long history of academic-activism, Catherin Orr (2006) situates academic labor as an activist when it connects with issues and movements that are anchored in equity and social justice. The role of academic-activists has been salient in the women’s movement, anti-war campaigns, civil rights, anti-nuclear protest, labor movements and movements against globalization. This work of academic-activism is situated in the articulation of the university as a political space for the pedagogy of democracy and community, as opposed to the notion of the university as an economic space that forms the bulwark of the neoliberal transformation of the university. Located within this overarching imagination of academic-activism, academic-­ community relationships in social change communication as embodied resistance to colonial formations seeks to disrupt the diffusion of colonial knowledge through performances of the body at the margins (Dutta & Basu, 2013). Moreover, the constituting of knowledge of social change within the dominant structures that deploy the narrative of development to extract new resources and create new markets is disrupted through the articulation of knowledge production as resistance, working in solidarity with subaltern communities (Dutta, 2010). That the naturalizing of development as the tool for expulsion and displacement of the poor from their spaces of livelihood calls for a radical reworking of devel-

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opment, inflected with and imagined in community articulations of development. When the voices of development and spaces articulating development are owned by communities at the global margins, the work of the academic is constituted rather than working from within the ambits of the World Bank or USAID, the communication academic begins her/ his work through collaborations with communities at the margins of the neoliberal order. The body of the academic, thus, is placed in conversation with subaltern struggles, resisting the hegemony of academic tourism that (re)produces dominant knowledge claims from distance. The experiences of the body in marginalized contexts tell the story of violence naturalized through colonial interventions of development. For instance, the voices of the Dongria Kondh in the struggles against the mining colonialism carried out by the multinational mining corporation Vedanta disrupt the narrative of mining as development, resisting the mining expansion with their bodies. Voice, expressed through the body, materially disrupts the colonial formations of development. For instance, “Theatre of the oppressed” offers one example of embodied performance as resistance, narrating the effects of colonial notions of development, documenting the effects of colonial development on subaltern bodies (Boal, 1979). Performances of communities being submerged by the building of a large dam on the Narmada river express their resistance by placing their bodies in the rising water levels. Images of submerged bodies under the rising water levels brought about by the dam disrupt the dominant narrative of dam-as-development. Academic partnerships in solidarity narrate the stories emerging from these submerged bodies, disrupting through the bodily experiences the grand narrative of dam building as development. The placing of the body in solidarity inverts the dominant construction of academic knowledge as a resource for carrying out development interventions, serving the colonial military-industrial-capitalist complex. The hegemonic notion of the dam, often funded by large development agencies such as the WB, is disrupted through the accounting of the drowning of bodies, metaphorically and materially standing in for the erasures written into development. That development itself is a site of ongoing resistance and that the university is often a hegemonic tool for perpetuating the expulsion and displacement of the margins under the name of development are foregrounded through performance. Performance as embodied resistance carries the stories of the margins to sites of knowledge production at development centers, think tanks and universities, disrupting the fundamental assumptions of benevolent development that pushes capitalism through displacement.

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At the heart of resistance is an embodied protest against the extractive relationships that uphold colonial capitalist formations. These extractive relationships shape the very nature of knowledge claims and the ways in which the knowledge claims are deployed to serve the hegemonic expansion of colonialism. That the traditional formation of social change communication resides within colonial logics of capitalist expansion serves as the basis for fundamentally resisting the very structures of US/Eurocentric spaces of knowledge production that offer prescriptions of development. The resistance work in academia is, therefore, primarily about rewriting the history of knowledge, resisting the claims to knowledge from spaces of colonial power with anti-colonial claims. In a letter to his wife, the African revolutionary leader Patrice Lumumba wrote from the Thysville Prison, “The day will come when history will speak. But it will not be the history which will be taught in Brussels, Paris, Washington or the United Nations…Africa will write its own history and in both north and south it will be a history of glory and dignity.” The work of anti-colonial resistance therefore is one of taking back the spaces of pedagogy, imagination, and practice that have been colonized by Euro/US-centric capital. The very notion of anti-colonial as the basis of decolonizing work transforms knowledge production through the cultural centering of imaginations that articulate political economies that are ecologically based, socialist and grounded in indigenous knowledge systems. Reflecting this resistive work of activism within the university, Chatterjee and Maira (2014) note in their edited collection “The imperial university”: What does it mean, then, to challenge the collusion of the university with militarism and occupation, the privatization of higher education, and economies of knowledge from within the U.S. university? When scholars and students who openly connect U.S. state formation to imperialism, war, and racial violence are disciplined, then how are we to understand freedom, academic and otherwise? How is post-9/11 policing and surveillance linked to racial, gendered, and class practices in the neoliberal academy? Has the War on Terror simply deepened a much longer historical pattern of wartime censorship and monitoring of intellectual work or is this something new? (p. 9)

I add to the call so eloquently laid out by Chatterjee and Maira, asking, what then does challenging the university look like amid the global hegemony of militarism and variegated imperialisms? What does it mean to resist US, Israeli, Indian, Chinese imperialisms (to name a few of the key

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imperial formations in contemporary times, with the increasing global convergence between imperialism, neoliberal governmentality, and extractive logics? What does it mean to activate against settler colonialisms in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Israel, India, China and the US, especially amid the forces at Universities that seek to silence anti-colonial voices? The work of the academic as performing embodied resistance is thus the basis for resisting academic structures, the power constituted in these structures, and the sites of erasure built into academia. The superficial terms of engagement, collaboration and partnership, which often work positively as resources for generating new funding opportunities are interrupted with an ethic of solidarity that is rooted in the communicative struggles of the oppressed for recognition and representation. The materiality of communicative infrastructures offers the basis for resisting the structures of neoliberalism that are often postured toward co-opting the margins to serve goals of rankings, branding and so on, with new and renewed forms of rankings being continually thrown into the mix. The university itself as a neocolonial neoliberal structure needs to be directly targeted with activist interventions that interrogate and seek to dismantle the logics of privatization and enclosure of the commons. That education, knowledge and scholarship are public goods shapes the work of academics as activists within the university. That universities are not laboratories and incubators that serve as the handmaidens of/to private capital is an important principle in the activist work on campuses. Rather than seeking to institutionalize particular cliques, formations, or sub-­disciplinary approaches, the work of the academic-activist is to unsettle the university, its norms and the very institutionalized service to capital that has been emboldened in the neoliberal decades. Delineating between activism and the language of “research impact” that forms part of the hegemonic university agenda, observe Rhodes, Wright, and Pullen (2018): The example of climate change activism shows how the value of academic work exceeds, and can at times refute, an impact agenda erected to police academic work along a neoliberal agenda. Such activism has had, at its core, a determination to upset the political consensus that has underpinned industrial development on a global scale. In other words, it exemplifies a political undoing of ‘the perceptible divisions of the police’ (Rancière, 1998, p. 30). The logic of research impact is precisely the opposite in that it assumes a homogeneous order where the right to speak is limited to those who will

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and can attest to the neoliberal domination of the economic over the political. This institutes a doubling up of the effort required for academic activism in the impactful University. (p. 144)

What the authors depict as “acting up” in the University is an explicit call to resist the forces of institutionalization within the University. Offering the example of the grant calls of the Australian Research Council (ARC), this resistance is set in opposition to the hegemony of research grant cultures that put forth the category of “research impact” as a neoliberal tool for market expansion and consolidation of power in the hands of capital. Consider for instance the ARC linkage grants on climate change that are given out to consolidate the hegemony of private capital through linkages, in opposition to climate change activism that recognizes and resists these capitalist formations as the roots of climate change. In the arena of culture, the hegemony of grant cultures and the professionalization of impact in grant calls in spaces such as Australia and the UK have shaped the marketization of culture, constructing culture and community in the service of the agendas of capital. Similarly, in the realm of technology, studies of digital cultures and digital publics formulated under “research impact” have been constructed to serve the expansionary logics of the market under the umbrella of public-private partnerships. Noting the role of the university as an infrastructure for the pedagogy of d ­ emocracy, suggest Rhodes et al. (2018), “This does not divorce the University from society, quite the contrary it establishes a particular relationship between the two, whereby critique serves to nurture a civil society, not the least by exercising a cultural authority to ‘raise concerns or advance ideas that are antithetical to the interests of other powerful constituencies, like business or government’ (Orr, 2006, p. 5), and indeed antithetical to the impact agenda” (p. 143). The work of activism is situated in resistance to this neoliberal order that incorporates academic labor in the service of capital under terms such as “engagement,” “community,” “enterprise,” “development,” seeking to dismantle neoliberal ideology and its organizing assumptions. In the organizing work of CARE locally and across the globe, seeking the spaces within the academe is one of ongoing contestation, of anchoring in the politics of discomfort that challenges the ideology of the neoliberal order. The everyday work of seeking resources to support the infrastructure that enables the work of CARE is, therefore, constituted amid this politics of resistance. For instance, the activist-in-residence program at CARE that

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brings in activists who seek to radically interrogate and dismantle the neoliberal-­neocolonial agenda (CARE has hosted activists such as Braema Mathi, Sue Bradford, Tame Iti, Teanau Tuiono, Jolovan Wham) is one of ongoing unsettling within the academe. I have long been interrogated for my friendship with the Singaporean activist Jolovan Wham who has consistently placed his body on the line for freedom of expression and assembly, human rights, and migrant worker rights in Singapore. At the time of wrapping up the revision of this book, I am collaborating with Jolovan on developing an academic-activist intervention during his residency at CARE, imagining strategies for resisting authoritarianism. 8.3.3  Witnessing Communication for social change in the backdrop of global injustices foregrounds the performative practices of witnessing that disrupt the silences constituted in the branding campaigns and propaganda materials circulated in the dominant structures. For instance, the overarching narrative of democracy, including growth, and freedom articulated in the context of Burma strategically obfuscates the narratives of the Rohingya communities in Burma who are strategically being targeted through a genocidal campaign (Spivak, 2016). “To ‘give witness’ from one’s own experience” in this context is to utter the narratives of oppression and erasure experienced by the Rohingyas in Burma, disrupting the silences that are perpetuated in dominant discursive spaces. Bearing witness and making repetitious utterances render impure the liberal narrative of Burmese transition into democracy, celebrating the market rationality while simultaneously erasing the voices narrating stories of the currently ongoing genocide in Burma. Similarly, in the backdrop of the state-­ sponsored and US-backed genocide of Indonesians suspected to be Communists in the 1960s, the performance of academic work as witnessing disrupts the inequalities that constitute the status quo (Pitaloka & Dutta, 2016). In Singapore, the voices of the prisoners of 1987 who were arrested under what is now termed as the “1987 Marxist conspiracy” disrupts the narrative constructed by the state (Tze, Leng, & Teo, 2017). To witness is to place one’s senses amid the injustices perpetuated by power and to commit to narrating stories of injustice that disrupt erasures. Unlike Yue’s (2012) depiction of cultural citizenship that works with(in) the authoritarian techniques of control and leverages Singapore’s pragmatic neoliberal-

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ism to articulate “doing” change, citizenship emerges in the activist work of Function 8, the collective of the prisoners of the 1987 Marxist conspiracy, as the very site of resistance by witnessing injustice. To witness in this sense is to reimagine democracy, foregrounding the erasures from citizenship and democracy in Singapore through authoritarian techniques of governmentality. The work of social change communication scholars-activists, for instance, in the context of #BlackLivesMatter becomes one of disrupting the Whiteness that constitutes and justifies the oppression of African Americans in the US. Witnessing thus fundamentally inverts the production of objective knowledge from a distance, instead articulating the production of knowledge as one of interrogating the organizing structures that legitimize injustice. Witnessing offers an anchor to media advocacy that fundamentally disrupts the nature and form of media, turning mediated sites into spectacles of resistance. Media advocacy interventions built on witnessing interrupt the dominant structures of organizing society, politics, economics (Wilkins, 2014). Consider the recent intervention offered by Professor Marc Lamont Hill, Steve Charles Professor of Media, Cities, and Solutions in Temple’s Klein College of Media and Communications, delivered to the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People at the United Nations Day of Solidarity on November 26. The speech made by Professor Hill is an excellent exemplar of principled communication ­scholarship that reaches out to the call for social justice. In his speech, Professor Hill calls out Israeli state-sponsored atrocities and the ways in which these atrocities have systematically oppressed, colonized, and threatened the Palestinian people. At the end of the speech, Professor Hill invoked the rights of the Palestinian people, noting “We have an opportunity to not just offer solidarity in words but to commit to political action, grass-roots action, local action and international action that will give us what justice requires and that is a free Palestine from the river to the sea.” Witnessing the Israeli atrocities being carried out on the Palestinian people, Hill co-­created a discursive opening, inviting the targeted attack of the pro-Israel power structures, circulating allegations that the phrase “from the river to the sea” is antisemitic. Similarly, amid the Israeli attacks on Gaza, the scholar-activist Steven Salaita tweeted critical accounts of the atrocities carried out by Israel, leading to him being targeted and losing his appointment with the University of Illinois under the accusations of incivility. Ongoing attacks on academics witnessing the Israeli atrocities in Gaza and speaking out against these atrocities are evident across campuses

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globally. In my negotiations of speaking out against the atrocities perpetuated by Israel and in my work of placing my body on the line in solidarity with scholars such as Hill and Salaita, I have been targeted by the Israel Institute of New Zealand. These targeted attacks have taken the form of exerting pressure on the university administration as well as running public disinformation campaigns. To witness Israeli settler colonialism and occupation calls for placing the body on the line in resisting the colonialism as well as in resisting these organized disinformation campaigns through solidarity work. In the work of CARE, with the activist-in-residence program, I have been told by the structures that the bringing on campus of specific activists has resulted, on different occasions, in donors calling the leadership and threatening to pull money from the university (on other occasions, I have discovered powerful support from the university). These techniques of control gather their power by operating in opaque spaces, without transparency, accountability and democratic participation. The work of the academic-activist as one of witnessing atrocities in  local-national-global spaces fosters a discursive and material register for structural transformation; these discursive and material registers in the university need to align with struggles outside the university that offer some forms of protection. Moreover, actively witnessing oppressive practices that silence voices of academic-activists across spaces is critical, moving the realm of academic solidarity beyond campuses and borders. 8.3.4  Challenging Fear The production of fear lies at the center of authoritarian techniques of power and control. In writing about the culture of fear that percolates across institutions including academia in Singapore and that therefore ­limits the discursive sites of articulation in his book Singapore Incomplete, notes George (2017): At public forums about Singapore politics, you’ll occasionally see someone from the audience go to the mic and utter that four-letter F-word. Fear. The person pleads: Singapore has come so far, but when will we be able to leave our fear behind? If there’s a government official on stage, he will probably laugh and answer the question with a question. Fear? Why? Don’t tell me you are afraid right now?

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The audience titters nervously, not quite sure what the right answer to that question is. It’s hard to answer in the affirmative when one is in a chandeliered hotel function room, and the only sign of surveillance is the hovering waiter checking if one’s dessert plate is ready to be cleared. The dialogue moves on to another topic.

George then goes on to note the following: It is a difficult topic to address, but no discussion of Singapore’s political development would be complete if it didn’t examine our culture of fear. Fear inhibits our participation as active citizens. Some of it is irrational. There are some Singaporeans who think we live in a totalitarian police state. They decide it’s too dangerous to participate in politics, even if it’s just to sign a petition or share their views in public. They say they won’t get involved because they are afraid of the consequences. Fortunately, there are also Singaporeans who have a stronger urge to participate. People in civil society, for example, know only too well that the walls exist, having bumped into them. But their instinct is to try locate doors that can be nudged open. (pp. 87–88)

What George points to in his analysis of the pervasive culture of fear in Singapore is the invisibility of the tactics of fear production, working and reproducing themselves in a broader climate of uncertainty because they are “hard to document” (p. 89). In what George describes as “calibrated control,” the techniques of producing fear work in Singapore through their threats of consequences, often economic in nature and embedded in deniability. Offering examples of the tools of discipline and punish such as “making jobs and other rewards conditional on good political behavior” “revoking the right to live and work [for foreigners through the employment pass] in the country at any time,” or “bureaucratic harassment” such as audits, George points to a “whole-of-government approach to retribution” (pp. 91–92). Connecting the culture of fear to academia, he offers his own experiences with promotion and tenure at the Nanyang Technological University, as well as the experiences of several academics, including Kevin Tan, Chee Soon Juan, Lucy Davis, Philip Holden and Thum Ping Tjin, George points to the mix of tactics such as “a shadowy system on political screening,” “blacklisting,” “blocking,” “warning” and attacking the reputation of critics that silence academic voices. The tactics of fear that George refers to above are increasingly part of a global phenomenon of silencing voices of difference that interrogate the

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normative assumptions of the neoliberal university. Moreover, one of the appeals of the “Singapore model” it may be argued is its ability to circulate a climate of fear that silences critical voices without making visible the techniques of oppression that would draw attention to the techniques of repression. When planting “seeds of doubt” on the reputation of a scholar can work effectively, it becomes redundant to deploy explicit techniques of authoritarian repression. In doing so, universities can keep up the façade of protecting academic freedom, with university managers responding, “Have you heard of instances of violation of academic freedom?” The recent example of the cancellation of a course on “Dialogue and Dissent” at the Yale-NUS College (YNC) is an excellent example of such forms of control, where academic rigor, for instance, can be deployed as a trope for silencing voices (see Dutta, 2019). Reputations of scholars, artists and activists are systematically attacked, being excluded from the academic space, having been marked as against the interests of the nation. The trope of the anti-national is increasingly the standard tool for fear-mongering to target academics and silence academic voices. The culture of fear, when normalized into everyday practices, turns academia into a space for regurgitating the arguments of power. Knowledge in the arts and social sciences reproduces the claims of power rather than critically interrogating these claims. In such instances, the role of academia in social change communication is limited to carrying out the propaganda work of power, often working within the overarching ideology of power that will draw grants and branding opportunities. Given the paradoxical nature of social change communication discourse, often as the necessary trope for the Davos elite to strategize on and rhetorically perform to, universities reflect the paradox in their adoption of the Davos elite discourse in positioning themselves to “solve global grand challenges” while they simultaneously become the spaces for silencing the resistance to the ­large-­scale neoliberal transformation of the globe. As gatekeepers of the discursive space, universities shape and constrain the realms of acceptable academic participation, while on one hand appearing to be socially engaged with sustainable development goals and global grand challenges, and on the other hand, working precisely to silence. The transformative work of communication for social change therefore is first and foremost about transforming academia within such authoritarian regimes. The work of transformation however has to begin by challenging the sites of fear that are reproduced by the regime. The overt and covert strategies that are deployed to produce fear need to be called out and resisted.

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In my own negotiations of authoritarian techniques of control in academia, I have been struck by how often these techniques of control are hidden behind opaque processes. I recall once being interrogated by the system for holding a conference on “Communication for Social Change,” interrogating why an academic center is hosting a conference on communication for social change. I also recall feeling fear at the first instance when called in to respond to this line of questioning. The questions started picking pace as an advocacy campaign created by the poor started drawing the attention of the system, having run into confrontation with the structure of the state and the various webs of power intertwined with this structure. Fairly soon after these sets of questions, I was told my grant applications were being audited by a “screening agency” (what this so-­ called screening agency was and who controlled it was not at all clear), which had noticed that there were “current and previous grant applications” that were not accurately reflected in the applications. This part of the grant application form is filled in by an administrative team member. I acknowledged the error, took ownership of it and committed to ensuring this would not happen again. With this, I thought the matter had resolved. I was therefore surprised when after a few months I received a letter that was labeled as a letter of warning, and used the term “academic misconduct” to refer to the omissions in reporting. When I challenged a cog in the system to re-do the letter, as the term “academic misconduct” was not acceptable (after having consulted colleagues serving in leadership positions with US funding agencies, such as National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation, who converged on the conclusion that this is considered a minor administrative error, which is usually fixed with a revision if a grant progresses through the system), the cog came back with some wishy-washy response about how the letter didn’t mean anything. The message I interpreted was loud and clear, “if I don’t toe the line, I will be subjected to such techniques of repression.” I was correct in my assessment; the repressive techniques increased in their forcefulness, especially as I stood unwilling to give in. I recall laughing one time when a university cog questioned me on my friendship with a particular activist (who was on the blacklist created by the state) and especially the public display of the friendship. As universities are increasingly subjected to techniques of repression, challenging the fear that is strategically produced through a wide range of tactics becomes critical. The rise of authoritarianism across universities globally is marked by the wide array of strategies for the production of fear.

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This is what I wrote on my Facebook: #pettyauthoritarianregimes #fear …The game petty authoritarian regimes will play, and this includes institutions of higher learning within such regimes, to silence voices that are somehow perceived to be critical is to launch smear campaigns. Rather than engage arguments in open, transparent, and accessible platforms, they will do all they can to character assassinate critical voices. Such tactics of smear campaigning serve two purposes for the regime: (a) Divert attention from the argument being made to begin with; (b) perpetuate the climate of fear such that anyone else would be scared to offer a critique. There are two things the literature tells us about how you bring about change in these regimes: (a) refuse to be scared; and (b) keep with the critical arguments, ensuring they are widely available in the discursive space. As with Egypt as a recent example or with Gandhian resistance as a classic example, the discursive availability of ideas are the seeds of change. You might not see it now, but know this: when you seed an idea based on reason and place it in the discursive space, the idea will multiply, reproduce, and find its strategic opportunity. Ideas are larger than us, and have a way of finding the effects they are meant to have, beyond the control of the originator of the ideas. Such is the power of change.

I was writing then, and I write now, as much in response to my own fears and insecurities as I do to communicate with an audience. The process of writing itself creates a space for me to articulate my fears, render them visible and work on them. That fear itself is an everyday presence in our lives as we negotiate authoritarian structures needs to be acknowledged publicly, making visible the vulnerabilities we negotiate, and serving as the basis for drawing up collective courage. Through this work of making visible our vulnerabilities, we make possible relationships of solidarity based on our collective courage to speak up and speak out against injustices we witness. 8.3.5  Challenging Convenient Narratives Convenient narratives keep intact academic privilege. Often devoid of evidence, or with enough counter-evidence that interrogates the conceptual bases of the narratives, the narratives continue to sustain themselves. In the social change communication literature, for instance, the narrative of campaign effectiveness often circulates in elite academic, policy, foundation and donor agency discourses, in spite of the evidence base that sug-

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gests there are great limits to the effects claims. Similarly, the convenient narrative that individual behavior change interventions addresses the health needs of the poor is a narrative that keeps power intact, doesn’t challenge the underlying structures that constitute poor health and is devoid of evidence. One of the narratives of convenience that we academics like to tell ourselves is only if we depoliticize our work, we would be able to carry on with the work we are doing. This often translates into finding the “right recipe” that would allow us to survive in the institutions we belong to. For instance, amid the challenges I was experiencing from the system with my work on poverty, I was offered convenient narratives such as “Why don’t you do the poverty work elsewhere, not just Singapore?” or “Work on other projects, not just poverty because it crosses the out-of-bound markers.” I call these convenient narratives because they align themselves with the goals of power, leaving intact the power structures. One such narrative of convenience when depicting Singapore’s success story, a narrative that is counter the narrative offered by Cherian George of state control through calibrated coercion is a construction offered by Chua (2017) in his book “Liberalism disavowed.” Starting off with “Singapore is easy to denigrate from a distance,” Chua offers us the seduction of an insider’s look, a view from the inside of Singapore: Against the critique of authoritarianism, one should note that during the early 1960s till the end of the 1970s, when political repression was most intense in Singapore, authoritarian regimes were practically the norm in decolonized nations and economic failure was the rule in these regimes. The failed states were characterized by the propensity of the authoritarian postcolonial elite to plunder the national wealth; endemic corruption at every level in both the public and private sectors of their economies; tribal or ethnic antagonism, often encouraged by the self-interested elite; unscrupulous tampering of ballot boxes accompanied by violence during elections; and finally, the increasingly alienated and restive population that could only be controlled by state violence involving the police and military…After 50 years of sustained economic growth, Singapore is now an overwhelming middle-class society of public-housing homeowners with an increasingly better educated, culturally diverse and informed citizenry that is globally connected and globally mobile, as students, tourists, or managers in homegrown or foreign multinational corporations. Given these changes, the continuing simplistic and reductionist characterization of the Singaporean as

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“docile,” culturally race-bound and living in fear of political authoritarianism is descriptively inadequate. It is a view that reflects an increasingly misinformed understanding of contemporary Singapore society. (pp. 3–4)

In what reads more like a propaganda manifesto for the Singapore state and its long-ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) than an academically informed analysis, the critique of Singapore as an authoritarian state is discounted, framed rhetorically as a view from the outside. The at-a-­ distance critique is juxtaposed in the backdrop of a laundry list of characteristics of failed postcolonial states (although none of these states are named, so the reader does not have a way to discern the sample Chua is drawing from) against which Singapore is propped up as a comparison. This depiction of authoritarianism as the norm in decolonized nations picks and chooses the decolonized nations it wants to point to as the basis for setting up the narrative of “clean elections” held by the PAP, while ignoring the vibrant and grassroots-based democracies evident in multiple decolonized spaces and nations in the global South. The analysis of democracy then moves on to make another branding statement about Singapore society, depicting it as globally connected, educated, middle class, and culturally diverse. In this depiction of Singapore society as middle class and rich, with globally competitive human capital, Chua reiterates the PAP branding slogans, conveniently erasing the experiences of the poor and the working classes in Singapore, the absence of opportunities for collective organizing for workers, the large scale precarization of the middle classes (with middle-class job loss, retrenchments, etc.), the struggles of aging in Singapore in the absence of significant welfare protections, the challenges with health care among the poor and the middle classes, the absence of minimum wage, the experiences of racism among Indians and Malays, the experiences of state repression that ­activists and critical performing artists go through and the marginalization of low wage migrant workers that perform the dirty and dangerous jobs with no opportunities to collectively organize. Chua then goes on to note the following: What this “encouraged” understanding veils, intentionally or otherwise, is the social democratic origin of the PAP; which explains some of the fundamental social and economic programs which are critical to the economic and political success of the PAP government, and from which it has not wavered in more than its 50 years in power. The PAP’s social democratic origin, not

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authoritarianism, explains the Party’s vociferous disavowal of liberalism as the basis of politics and government. (p. 5)

The depiction of Singapore’s social democracy is propped up on some logic of “collectivism” underlying the state’s rejection of liberalism, national public housing program, state capitalism and multiculturalism. Chua’s depiction of Singapore as a social democracy by referring to the originary story of the PAP fails to offer empirical analyses of the policy frameworks in Singapore, their practices and outcomes that would substantiate the claim to social democracy. The claim to PAP’s social democracy offered by Chua is devoid of engagement with the empirical data that document entrenched intergenerational poverty in Singapore, the lack of access to basic ingredients of wellbeing among the poor in Singapore, the presence of hunger and food insecurity among the poor (Tan et al., 2017), an individualistic system of constructing welfare that places the onus on the individual, the challenges of homelessness (Tan & Forbes-Mewett, 2018), and most importantly, the growing income inequality that is not addressed by the state. The claim to social democracy because of “collective” or “communitarian” and later depicted as “Confucian” modes of state management is a peculiar claim, divorced from the well-established concepts of democratic participation, community ownership, resource redistribution and social welfare grounded in social justice that form the foundations of social democracies (see, for instance, Dutta, 2011). Contrast Chua’s rhetoric with the empirically based report published by Oxfam on a number of indicators on the commitment to reducing inequality (CRI) (Oxfam, 2018). Ranked 149th out of 157 countries in the Commitment to Reducing Inequality (CRI) Index, Singapore secured a score total of 0.162, with the lowest score for harmful tax practices and a low score in public social spending, with only 39% of its budget allotted for education, health and social protection. Contrast Singapore’s low ranking on the Oxfam index in the backdrop of the highest rankings on the Oxfam index of social democracies such as Denmark and Finland. The narrative of convenience re-presented and circulated in hegemonic discourse about Singapore is disrupted by the voice of auntie Maria, one of our community collaborators who co-created the “Singaporeans left behind” advocacy intervention:

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No one wants to listen to our voices. Has anyone asked, so what are you having difficulty with? When I go to the social worker, they are not interested in talking to me. So I run from here to there. You look here, there are so many people who are having difficulty. Now you look at all those nice places, the condos, and the way people live. Now that will bring in money. No one cares here about people like us. Will anyone listen to what I have to say? Every day is hard just to get by. But no one will listen.

The communicative disvalue of the lived experiences of those experiencing poverty is tied into the ideology of self-help and individualization that stigmatizes the poor and at the same time erases the poor. The voices of the subaltern margins collectively organized into strategic anchors disrupt the hegemonic narratives and erasures written into the structures. The global ascendance of transnational capitalists into the spaces of everyday life has also meant that academic spaces have been largely colonized by the hegemonic structures of capital, pushing capitalist solutions to societal problems and fundamentally failing to interrogate the roots of a large number of these problems in neoliberal policies. The hegemony of neoliberalism across university campuses has, on one hand, generated institutionalized responses from academics, and, on the other hand, has systematically targeted critical voices. The rewards attached to the academic promotion of narratives of convenience have contributed actively to the stigmatization of resistance within and outside of academia. Academic resistance is framed by hegemonic university structures as unnecessarily politicizing the academe, “making trouble” and fostering incivility. Academics raising critical questions are labeled as “social justice warriors” and are systematically undermined, often unfortunately by other academics who fashionably carry the radical brand but simultaneously enjoy the seductions of power in the neoliberal academe. Universities as gatekeepers of civility and safe spaces that protect powerful interests work closely with political and economic forces, state representatives, bureaucrats and private funders to silence voices that question and critique the formations of power. Planned stigmatizing campaigns, planting seeds of doubt, generating confusion, labeling and spreading rumors are some of the strategies that are actively cultivated in the neoliberal university to undermine radical positions of critique seeking communicative equality.

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8.4   Conclusion The role of the academic is integral to social change communication, depicting the ways in which academia is tied to the politics of change. Whereas this role itself is often left untheorized in social change communication work, any conversation on equality, justice, and development must begin by explicitly attending to the position occupied by the academic. Attending to this position is part of democratizing the spaces of participation, foregrounding the communicative inequalities that constitute social change. How we structure academe is the basis for the imaginaries of knowledge claims that serve as the basis of development. Our participation in academic work is tied to the politics of social change communication, offering opportunities for us to critically interrogate what we mean by development, what are the bases of development, and what are the opportunities for considering openings for democratizing the politics of development. As universities have been reorganized under the logics of neoliberal governmentality, social change communication has emerged as an industry in the service of transnational capital, mediated through the roles of the state and civil society in the service of the market. Resistance to these neoliberal transformations is the basis of social change communication, suggesting that we have to reorganize the spaces we inhabit as academics. Seeking spaces of solidarities with subaltern struggles, activist interventions and socialist formations is the basis of communication for social change, predicated on an active reorganizing of the culture of academia that rewards pragmatism, opportunism and shallow careerism. Instead, the concepts of solidarity, witnessing, courage and resistance offer alternative anchors to reworking the logics inhabiting academia. The figure of the comrade offered by Jodi Dean is an invitation to a politics of sameness grounded in the pursuit of equality. The book outlines a critical framework for examining the interplays of culture and communication in the context of development. It locates the various approaches to culture in their relationship to capitalism and ­hegemonic formations of development, depicting the ways in which culturally situated meanings are co-opted into the logics of the market. The state, civil society and capital nexus work consistently to co-opt cultural meanings and turn these meanings into profitable commodities. The turn to culture as an alternative axis for development has worked through the upholding of elite power through claims to culture and difference, simultaneously obfuscating the cultural claims to livelihoods and organizing

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that offer alternatives to capitalism. We then turn to the CCA as the basis for learning to listen to the voices of communities at the margins, embedded within local contexts and articulating knowledge claims that resist the capitalist modes of development as modernity. Attending to communicative inequalities, the CCA emerges as a co-creative process for building communicative equality. Through the active political work of building communicative equality, communication infrastructures are co-created for the voices of subaltern communities. The knowledge claims thus made emerge into global structures as alternative economic and political logics of development. This book specifically attends to the socialist politics that is the imaginary basis of the CCA. The four models of development outlined in this book offer different pathways and frameworks for the role of communication in social change processes. The goals, forms and nature of communication are articulated within the broader political-economic formations that are reproduced by the four models of development. The object of study, development, in each of these frameworks, is situated within a broader underlying ideology, offering the taken-for-granted assumptions and the bases for how development is constructed, the ways in which it is studied, and its uses in development communication interventions. The dominant framework of development communication constituted within the Cold War agendas espoused a top-down model of development serving the agendas of the dominant global structures, aid agencies, foundations, and international financial institutions that funded these projects. Development in this dominant framework was a Cold War propaganda tool for fighting Communism, directed at recruiting the newly independent postcolonial nations to the overarching US ideology of democracy and free markets against the Communist ideology of state-driven development. Development is conceptualized within this framework as linear movement from primitiveness to modernization, with the work of development focusing on diffusing specific technologies into underdeveloped countries that are marked as lacking in the characteristics of development (Preston, 2012). Technologies such as agricultural innovation and population control were seen as weapons of development against the surge of Communism, with the strategic control of population growth in the Third World, the growth in food productivity, and access to free markets seen as key to the fight against Communism. The underlying ideology of liberal democracy formed the bases of the conceptualization of development, specifically deployed to serve the US geosecurity and market interests. The conceptu-

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alization of the self-interested rational actor formed the bulwark of development communication, with development communication strategies focusing on how best to persuade this rational actor. Communication was mostly constructed as a persuasion strategy that would effectively recruit passive target audiences of the Third World to the mantra of development. Theories such as the theory of cognitive dissonance, theory of reasoned action, theory of planned behavior and the elaboration likelihood model were specifically designed to persuade target audiences. In contrast to the dominant framework of development as liberal internationalism, the Marxist framework of development attended to inequalities in the distribution of material resources that produced development and underdevelopment, creating dependencies in the world systems that underlie the fundamental questions of development. Marxist analyses of development attended to the differentials in distributions of power among nation states which dictate the flow of materials and resources, placing nations at the peripheries of global development. Putting forth a center-­ periphery relationship, Marxist analyses of development attended to the ways in which the conditions of underdevelopment in the periphery resulted from the very conditions of advancement in industrialized economies of the North/West. The CCA, offered as a framework for listening to the voices of the margins, disrupts the hegemonic narratives perpetuated in neoliberal frameworks of social change organizing by sharing stories from the margins that challenge the taken-for-granted assumptions that constitute the status quo. The voicing of erasures and of communication strategies in the mainstream that erase by fixing communities at the margins as subjects of interventions opens up the space for the scholarship of social change communication that seeks to engage in social change processes “from” and “with” the margins. Therefore, the CCA suggests a fundamental inversion in the conceptualization and treatment of knowledge, moving from expert knowledge produced at centers of development discourse to community-grounded knowledge of development that is produced from the margins of mainstream development. The work of social change communication is turned into one of decolonizing the structures of knowledge production, rendering impure the received frameworks of development circulating in the mainstream. The interventions in the structures of knowledge production are integral to the reworking of social change as social justice, working through embodied and engaged partnerships in co-creating entry points for transforming political, economic and

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societal injustices perpetuated by transnational state-market-civil society hegemony. Most importantly, it suggests that the status quo of the business of the social change industry has to fundamentally change, where communicators begin by working for large development agencies, foundations, and corporations, serving the agendas of the status quo to communication as radical democracy grounded in community participation. As we wrap up this book, I hope you had a chance to look closely at what culture means in social change communication and the various ways in which culture is incorporated into communication for social change. That culture is deeply intertwined with structure suggests on one hand that culture is co-opted into neoliberalism to transform the landscape of everyday life in communities. On the other hand, cultural meanings, values and stories are central to the active imagination of a socially just world. Inverting the cognitive epistemicide that is carried out actively through the neoliberal project, an active commitment to building communicative equality makes openings for subaltern voices and knowledge claims as the basis for radical democracies. These democracies, committed to an emancipatory politics, transform global capitalism through their active practices of socialisms. These socialisms, anchored in voices at the margins, are plural, based on solidarities across spaces, emergent in community action, in movements, in activist organizing and interlinked with an actively Left politics committed to socialist futures. If there is hope for ecosystems, habitats and humanity (and, I believe, in hope), it is in the active and urgent construction of socialist realities that dismantle neoliberal capitalism in our communities and globally.

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Index

A Academic-activism, 343–347 Accelerated capital, 233 Accelerationism, 195 Acting up, 358 Activist politics, 243 Agriculture, 60 Alternative modernity, 250 Alternative organizing, 301–303 Alternatives, 249 Anti-imperial struggles, 105 Apartheid, 119 Artificial intelligence (AI), 229–233 Asian authoritarianisms, 148 Asian capitalism, 147 Asian Development Bank, 151 Asian imaginary, 182 Asian values, 165 Audit, 337 Authoritarian, 171 Authoritarianisms, 148–151

B Barrio Adentro, 88 Behavior change communication, 120 Big data, 213 Bija Satyagraha, 293 Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, 109 Bolivarian movement, 87 Bricolage modernities, 147 C Cambridge Analytica, 212 Capacity, 255 Capacity building, 137 Capitalism, 10 Capitalist communication enterprises, 244 Capitalist extraction, 38, 250 Capitalist ideology, 256 Challenging existing structures, 332

© The Author(s) 2020 M. Dutta, Communication, Culture and Social Change, Palgrave Studies in Communication for Social Change, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26470-3

405

406 

INDEX

Challenging fear, 361–365 Chavismo, 88 Citizenship, 222, 360 Civil society, 109–112, 244 Class struggle, 75 Climate change, 126, 218–221 Co-constructing, 248 Cold War, 16 Collective organizing, 10 Collective ownership, 286 Collectivization, 74 Colonialism, 132–134 Colonizing, 160 Common good, 231 Commune, 85 Communication for development and social change (CDSC), 114 Communication for social change, 1 Communication rights, 285 Communication Scholars for Transformation (CST), 4 Communication sovereignty, 261 #CommunicationSoWhite, 4 Communicative equality, 261 Communicative inequalities, 89 Communicative infrastructures, 260 Communicative inversion, 194 Communist, 80 Communitarianism, 165 Community, 20 building, 212 engagement, 211 media, 289 organizing, 239 radio, 273 voices, 135, 239 Community-based participatory research, 132 Comradeship, 335 Conscientization, 70 Consultancy capital, 244 Cooperatives, 260, 303–310 Co-option, 162

Co-option of the radical space, 347 Corporate social responsibility (CSR), 212 Creative cities and neoliberalism, 161–163 Creative city, 162 Cuba, 86 Cultural capital, 159 Cultural centering, 241 Cultural globalization, 148 Cultural hybridity, 175 Cultural indicators, 158 Cultural intelligence, 167–170 Culturalist arguments, 151 Culturalist explanations, 97 Cultural measurement, 158–161 Cultural power, 157 Cultural Revolution, 84 Cultural sustainability, 165–167 Culture, 3 “Culture-as-barrier,” 240 Culture as fluid, 19–20 “Culture-as-resource,” 240 Culture of fear, 363 Cyber-Left, 207 D De-centers, 241 Decentralization, 179 Decolonization, 163, 250 Decoupling, 264 De-extremification, 296 De-linking, 151 Democracy, 360 Democracy promotion, 198 Democratic processes, 194 Democratizing, 260 Demonetization, 216 Department for International Development (DfID), 123 Dependency theory, 77–78 Development communication, 5

 INDEX 

Dialogic, 272 Difference, 349 Digital exclusions, 224–225 Digital infrastructures, 299 Digital programs, 221 Digital spaces, 294 Digital technologies, 141 Digitization, 212 Dominant, 101 culture, 166 paradigm, 13, 105 Donor, 131 E East Asian capitalist development states, 171 Ecology, 159 E-deliberation, 205 E-governance, 205 Embodied protest, 356 Embodied resistance, 354–359 Empowerment, 107, 133, 204 Energy grids, 220 Engagement, 201 Entertainment, 122 Entrepreneurial, 194 E-participation, 205 Epistemic equality, 284 Erasure, 166 E-transactions, 205 Eurocentric colonialism, 179 Eurocentric roots, 184 Expertise, 38–41, 139 Experts, 38 Exploitation, 105, 156 Extracting culture, 155–171 Extraction, 212 Extreme exploitation, 41 F Facebook revolutions, 193

Family planning, 122 Financialization, 1, 120 Florida, Richard, 161 Folk, 123 Food security, 60 Fostering incivility, 369 Foundations, 124 Fourth industrial revolution, 196, 229–233 Free market, 150 Free market ideology, 1 G Global elite, 196 Globalization, 1, 6 Global-national-local, 294 Global South, 90 Global tourism, 145 Glocal, 130 Glocalization, 155 Gosplan, 82 Grassroots, 254 Grassroots mobilization firms, 109 H Hegemonic, 101 Hegemonic narratives, 275 Hindutva, 149 Horizontal communication, 108 Human biology, 217 Hunger, 126 Hunger strikes, 287 Hybrid, 177 Hybridization, 157 Hybrid modernities, 147 I Imagining Asia, 182 Impact investment, 125 Imperialism, 75

407

408 

INDEX

Inaccess, 287 Inclusive citizenship, 201 Indigeneity, 180 Indigenous, 178 knowledge, 265 resistance, 266 rights, 266 worldview, 220 Individual behavior change, 104 Individualized consumer, 134 Indonesian Communist party (Partai Komunis Indonesia, PKI), 90 Industry engagement, 164 Inequalities, 70, 126 Influence, 31 Infrastructures of listening, 245, 251 International financial institutions (IFIs), 102 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 123 Internet of things (IoT), 222 Inter-referencing, 182 Interrogation, 247 K Keynesianism, 94 L Labor organizing, 303–310 Labor schools, 83 Land grab, 156 Learning to learn, 261 Life-extending technologies, 218 Linkage projects, 164 Listening, 268 Livelihoods, 156 Loans, 135 Localisation, 129 Localism, 151

M Making trouble, 369 Managerial techniques, 157 Marginalization, 330 Marginalized, 140 Marginalizing practices, 243 Market, 134, 244 Market interventionism, 60 Marxist, 69 Mass general strikes, 72 Meaning-making, 248 Media advocacy, 360 Melange modernities, 147 Metrics, 160 Micro-credit, 205 Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), 153 Mining development, 212 Mission Robinson, 88 Modernization, 16 paradigm, 202 theory, 32 Monolithic, 254 Multiculturalism, 167 N Neocolonial, 149 Neocolonial interventions, 108 Neoliberal city, 157 Neoliberal development interventions, 107 Neoliberal experiment, 109 Neoliberal technologies, 11 Neotribal capitalism, 179 Networked movements, 202 New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO), 18, 79 Non-aligned movement, 142 Non-governmental organizations (NGOs), 110 Nudge economics, 214–217

 INDEX 

O Occupy, 115, 335 One Belt, one Road, 76 Organizational Development (OD), 132 Other imaginations, 256 P Panchayats, 293 Participation, 105, 130–135 Participatory budgeting, 136 Participatory communication, 113, 262 Participatory processes, 264 Participatory rural appraisal (PRA), 113 Passive, 101 Patent, 291 Performances, 287 “Planned” social change communication, 2 Planning agency, 82 Platform fetish, 201 Platforms, 202 Police-military violence, 41 Politburo, 96 Political economy, 11 Poor, 258 Postcolonial, 142, 252 Postcolonial elites, 348 Post-development, 175 Post-ideology, 163–165 Poverty, 126 Poverty reduction strategies (PRSs), 2 Poverty reduction strategy papers (PRSPs), 134 Power, 41, 104, 335 Power and development, 41–47 PPPs, 211 Pragmatic thinking, 346

409

Pragmatism, 171 Pre-capitalist societies, 70 Precarity, 233 Precarization, 310 Pre-determined, 131 Privatization, 108, 149 Privatization of water, 258 Proletariat, 70 Propaganda, 29 Public, 345 Public Opinion, 29 Public-private collaboration, 230 Public relations, 140 R Racist, 48–57 Radical, 165 Radical posturing, 347–348 Radio Communication Project (RCP), 122 Realist aesthetic, 84 Reflexivity, 248, 318–319, 351–354 Regional integration, 183 Resistance, 149 Resource redistribution, 74 Revolutionary, 70 Reworking, 272 Rockefeller Foundation, 124, 203 Russian revolution, 71 S Sacred, 259 Science of communication, 31 Seduction, 195 Self-help, 107, 134–135, 204 Self-sacrifice, 287 Settler colonialism, 119 Shared meanings, 71 Silk Road, 150 Smart cities, 225–229

410 

INDEX

“Smart” development, 226 Socialist, 249 development, 73 imaginary, 250 movements, 311 organizing, 70 planned economy, 81 Social media, 338 Social movements, 114, 243 Solidarity, 183, 339 Sovereignty, 89 State, 244 Structural adjustment programs (SAPs), 2, 106 Structural inequalities, 115, 243 Structural transformation, 10 Subaltern, 261 cosmopolitanisms, 259 social movements, 315–318 studies, 252 voices, 283, 316 Suicide, 288 Sustainability, 152 Sustainable, 152 Sustainable development, 151–155 Sustainable development goals (SGDs), 153

Transhumanism, 217 Transhumans, 217 Transnational hegemony, 108 Trickle-down, 103 “Twenty-first century socialism,” 96 Twitter uprisings, 193

T Techno-capital, 194, 210 Techno-deterministic model, 197 Technology, 193 Theories from the Global South, 263–268 Think tanks, 244 Third World, 59, 79 Top-down, 115 Trade, 149 Tradition, 49

W Washington Consensus, 6, 103 Western model, 50 Whiteness, 202, 328 Witnessing, 359–361 World Bank, 123 World Decade for Cultural Development, 102 World Economic Forum (WEF), 153 World Trade Organization (WTO), 123

U UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), 142, 156 Unequal structures, 260 Unheard, 332 United States Agency for International Development (USAID), 123 United States (US), 2 democracy promotion, 109 imperialism, 78 Urban redevelopment, 142 US Empire, 9, 18 V Venezuela, 87–89 Violence, 52–55 Voices, 140, 193