Next Steps in Advocating Communication for Social Change at the Community Level

In May 2004, the Communication for Social Change Consortium (the Consortium) convened a meeting of authors and scholars in communication for development to discuss and select pieces for an anthology with the aim of creating an academic reference resource of communication for social change for scholars and practitioners around the world. Approximately 100 texts on communication for development, participatory communication, citizens’ media, and community media were pre-selected. With a focus on theoretical essays as opposed to case studies, the strategy was to trace the concept of communication for social change from its origins, looking back 40 to 50 years if necessary. The end goal was to select 50 essays that are key to the understanding of communication for social change. A panel of 12 met for 3 days with the editors of the anthology and The Consortium to determine the 50 final texts to be published. This panel consisted of participants with recognition as development communication experts and scholars, from various regions of the world and it included members of what might be considered the "old" and the "new" generation of thinkers.

The editors, Alfonso Gumucio Dagron (Managing Director of the Communication for Social Change Consortium) and Thomas Tufte, PhD (Professor at Roskilde University) are both communication practitioners and educators. They were particularly interested in pieces that are not currently well represented in bibliographies, for example, authors and texts from Asia and Africa as well as those originally written in Spanish, French, Italian, or Portuguese. Their vision was to create an historical perspective on the evolution of communication thinking: an itinerary on ideas, not just practices.

The main criteria Gumucio Dagron and Tufte used to create the list of 100 pre-selected texts were related to the following key concepts:

• Participatory communication
• A sense of ownership
• Supporting citizens' or community organisations
• Horizontal, dialogic
• Cultural appropriateness
• Communication process rather than product
• Endogenous approach to development

Key to this meeting and the process leading up to it was the use of the CFSC paradigm (see the Consortium mission for a definition of CFSC) in its planning and implementation. To that end, authors as well as professors who will ultimately use the Anthology created and commented on the list of background texts from which the editors selected candidates for the Anthology. The criteria used by the editors to select the 100 initial texts were developed by practitioners and educators in the CFSC Network. And the selection of the final 50 texts was to be accomplished by the educators present at this meeting based on what they felt their students need to do their work better once they become practitioners.