Culturally centering social change communication: subaltern critiques of, resistance to, and re-imagination of development

Abstract

ABSTRACTChallenging the dominant framework of culture as development that incorporates culture as a tool for neoliberal growth-driven development, the culture-centered approach (CCA) to social change communication offers an entry point for theorizing and articulating communication for social change that emerges ‘from’ and ‘with’ the margins. Interrogating the fundamental notion of what counts as development, the CCA seeks to re-turn the discursive sites of articulating development into the hands of subaltern communities at the margins. The theorization of culture in social change communication as an instrument for consolidating the hegemony of the power elite is juxtaposed in the backdrop of a 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 the very meanings and practices of development. The voices of the margins recognized and represented in local–regional–national discursive spaces interrogate the received meanings of development and social change, producing knowledge that decolonizes the dominant articulations of development.