The Drum Beat 840: DECOLONISATION: Challenging What We Do and How We Do It

• 1. Dominant Paradigm?
  "[W]e have witnessed the growing body of research offering critiques of the dominant paradigm. They include critiques of its narrow behaviour change focus (Waisbord 2001), development institutions not listening to the subjects of development (Quarry and Ramirez 2009), critiques of evaluation practices and the number frenzy associated with most widespread methods (Thomas 2014), a critique of the marginalization of the subaltern with the development of a culture-centered approach to communication and development (Dutta 2011), analysis of the privatization of funding to the development sector and its implications (Wilkins and Enghel 2013), critiques of the unjust development paradigm and its community consequences (Manyozo 2017), and a critique of the lack of attention to power dynamics, suggesting more deeply theorized attention to the spaces of power in development practice (Ewoh-Opu 2019)..."
• Link to full article 
• Link to summary by the CI
   
• 2. Co-Conversation?
  "In the field of communication for development and social change, we saw early articulations of decolonial perspectives by, for example, Mohan Dutta (2015), offering an elaborate critique of the dominant paradigm in development communication and on that basis proposing three 'decolonial perspectives', emerging from subaltern perspectives and framed within his own culture-centered approach (CCA). The three perspectives are about listening, participation, and co-conversation." 
• Link to full article 
• Link to summary by The CI
   
• 3. Local and Regional Movements?
  "As Herrera-Huerfano et al. rightly state: 'The evolving perspective of the pluriverse is grounded in decolonial scholarship and comes from the practices that communities and social movements around the world are implementing to question the Modern hegemonic paradigm and improve the degrees of justice' (Herrera-Huerfano et al. 2023, p. 7). There are global trends, many localized and regional movements from the global south resisting the universalizing and dominant discourses." 
• Link to full article 
• Link to summary by The CI
   
• 4. Unlearning?
  "...is a pedagogical proposition that aims to challenge established perceptions of society by questioning them, leading to reinterpretations of society. It is an epistemological ambition about producing knowledge from a different point of departure. From a decolonial perspective, it is about what Mignolo coined as 'epistemological disobedience' (Mignolo 2009), critiquing the way we go about our field of study but not remaining in the critique or expressing other worldviews but also formulating pathways to open up action in pursuit of these other worlds." 
• Link to full article 
• Link to summary by The CI
   

• Please click here to read a summary of the article and/or to download it. Please also scroll down to comment on it!

• 5. Social Struggles?
  "...draws clearly on Paulo Freire's critical pedagogy, seeing the decolonial pedagogy as a methodology that is grounded in peoples' realities, subjectivities, histories, and struggles' (Mignolo and Walsh 2018, p. 88). The social struggles are thus for Walsh, as they were for Freire, pedagogical settings of learning, unlearning, relearning, reflection, and action." 
• Link to full article 
• Link to summary by The CI
   
• 6. Anti-racist Pedagogy?
  "The Black Movement in Brazil offers a first illustrative example of developing a pedagogy, in their case, an anti-racist pedagogy grounded in the practical experiences with fighting for the rights and recognition of black Brazilians, while at the same time being engaged with and connected to other movements and knowledge systems, like that of feminist movements and indigenous groups....Such actions are not necessarily spectacular and linked to large movements or organizations but can happen almost unnoticed in the everyday..." 
• Link to full article 
• Link to summary by The CI
   
• 7. Indigenous Knowledges and Pedagogies?
  "...growing attention to indigenous worldviews and communication practices. Claudia Magallanes-Blanco (2022) refers to an encounter from 2018 of Mexican scholars - including indigenous communicators from different ethnic groups, facilitators of community processes, and socially committed academics—meeting to reflect upon their communication practices, revisiting the history of indigenous media and communication in Mexico, the role of indigenous communication practitioners inside and outside their communities, and their relationship with the stage, and, overall, exploring how to go about media and communication from an indigenous perspective....[A] lot of connections exist between discussions about indigenous communication with popular and community communication, and recent books offer insights into both region-specific Latin American experiences and debates (Suzina 2021) as well as broader global south experiences with the indigenous, alternative, and popular (Herrera-Huerfano et al. 2023). What this developing scholarship points to is a process of unlearning..." 
• Link to full article 
• Link to summary by The CI
   
• 8. Universities?
  "Generative theorizing furthermore rethinks the meaning of the higher educator. As Schwittay argues, it may consequently 'require unlearning of traditional approaches to theorization, a reimagining of the educator, pursuing prefigurative pedagogical politics where we begin to enact in the here and now the transformative vision we have for the future (an affective process, linked to our personal assumptions, aspirations and anxieties)' (Schwittay 2021). With generativity, critique and care become building blocks towards an 'academic subject of possibility'. If we connect this to Herrera-Huerfano's model of analysis around dialogues of knowledge..." 
• Link to full article 
• Link to summary by The CI
   

• Please click here to read a summary of the article and/or to download it. Please also scroll down to comment on it!

• 9. Ways of Seeing?
  "...is about exposing knowledge in a situated manner, raising awareness around the geopolitical location of the knowledge that is shared in, for example, academic canons on communication but also canons of communicative practice. How communication is perceived, implemented, and evaluated depends upon our positionality and thus our ways of seeing..." 
• Link to full article 
• Link to summary by The CI
   
• 10. Relearning?
  "By recognizing such legacies in the struggles of 'getting to own oneself' as Fanon called it, the field of communication and social change is faced by challenges that transcend communication and are more about the underlying structures and processes of change. Hence, a decolonial perspective upon communication and social change requires engagement in the broader process of unlearning and relearning..." 
• Link to full article 
• Link to summary by The CI
   
• 11. Design Processes?
  "...includes attention to changing ecologies, or communing and reworlding, as key design categories that help us conceptualize and implement transformative design processes (Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2023) ... about building a commons where the reworlding can happen..." 
• Link to full article 
• Link to summary by The CI
   
• 12. Seeing, Being, and Taking Action?
  "[E]merging processes of relearning and re-centering are beginning to show more visible, articulated contours of other centres of knowledge production. Looking ahead, we will need more and deeper explorations into the contemporary experiences of other ways of seeing, being, and taking action..." 
• Link to full article 
• Link to summary by The CI
   

• Please click here to read a summary of the article and/or to download it. Please also scroll down to comment on it!

ENQUIRY: Your priorities, opportunities and challenges!
 

What kinds of challenges and opportunities infuse your communication and media development, social and behavioural change work? This survey is a chance for you to let us know! We will report back on results and trends so you can gain insights from your peers in the network.
Click here to lend your voice.