Praxis Of Communication Research Articles

Theorizing CSA’s impact on nonprofit stewardship: New challenges for ethical corporate partnerships and issue engagement

Corporate social advocacy (CSA) scholarship has helped public relations scholars and practitioners better understand business engagement in multiple contentious issue contexts (e.g., Dodd & Supa, 2014; Rim et al., 2020; Waymer & Logan, 2021). Nonprofit organizations, while often having similarly public platforms, significant resources, and the will to engage in polarizing issues outside of their core purpose or purview, have, to date, not been a part of this theoretical framework. This paper serves to theoretically link nonprofit organizations to polarizing issue discourse—while maintaining their distinct facets and relational/stakeholder needs—by developing Polarizing Issue Stewardship. This new construct shifts the perspective of nonprofit stewardship strategies, originally developed by Kelly (1998) to a contentious issue context. The new construct provides insights for both theory and praxis of nonprofit communication.

Engaging Pre-Med Students in Field-Related Dialogue: Best Practices for a Dialogic Approach to a Health-Specific Oral Communication Course

Using a dialogic framework as the backdrop to course curriculum, I developed an Oral Communication course for pre-med students with the goal to enhance students’ public speaking skills while also incorporating health communication and applied communication research and activities to create opportunities for engagement. I propose best practices for teaching pre-med oral communication by deconstructing “bedside manner,” emphasizing a dialogic, audience-centered approach to communication, illustrating the praxis of genuine communication, creating a supportive climate through nonverbal and small group communication tenets, and creating a space to practice genuine communication. Using this approach, the layperson understanding of “bedside manner” becomes an intersection of these areas to better understand the complexities of physician-patient communication.

Using markers for digital engagement and social change: Tracking meaningful narrative exchange in transmedia edutainment with text analytics techniques

While social media offer an unprecedented opportunity for orchestrating large-scale communication campaigns, it is often difficult to track audience responses on various digital platforms over time and to ascertain if their engagement is aligned with the original intention. In this article, we share a promising solution—the purposive embedding and tracking of unique content elements as “markers” using text analytics techniques. Four markers were introduced in an Indian melodramatic television serial, Main Kuch Bhi Kar Sakti Hoon ( I, A Woman, Can Achieve Anything), which was part of a larger transmedia edutainment initiative in India to promote sanitation, family planning, and gender equality. These markers served as anchors for audience engagement with the originally intended messaging embedded in the narratives as well as for program monitoring and evaluation. We applied various web-based tools to systematically track marker-related engagement on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube across eight months. We also conducted semantic network analysis to better understand how marker-related social media comments evolved over time. Our investigation of using markers for digital engagement and narrative exchange in MKBKSH makes an important and timely methodological contribution to the scholarship and praxis of social and behavior change communication.

Paulo Freire’s role and influence on the praxis of popular communication in Brazil

The article approaches the relationship between the aims of Paulo Freire’s education for liberation and the praxis of popular communication in Brazil. The goal is to understand the extent to which aspects of Freire’s thoughts can intersperse with concepts and practices of popular, community, and alternative communication in Brazil. The study is based on bibliographic research on Freire’s work while reflecting on some of the principles of the education for liberation, particularly those embedding the praxis of popular communication in social movements. This paper concludes by arguing that principles such as ‘communication as dialogue’, ‘critical consciousness’, the ability to become a ‘subject’, ‘education as a practice for freedom’, ‘connection to reality’, and ‘social transformation’ lie prominently in the concept and practices of popular and community communication.

De Peirce en Castañares: Paideia y Agapismo

Texto en homenaje a la figura y a la obra de Wenceslao castañares, en el que se reflexiona con profundidad sobre los conceptos y las actitudes del profesor citado, señalando cómo su ejercicio de la docencia y la investigación era acorde con algunos de los más fecundos ideales de Charles Peirce, en los que se unía muy estrechamente la teoría y la praxis de la comunicación y el conocimiento.

Exploring feminist public sphere through Henvalvani Community Radio: an empowerment through communication approach

Identification of specific contributions made by community radio for translating the rhetoric of participation and empowerment into practice requires more attention. There is also a need to conduct more theoretical and empirical studies on “women and community radio.” The study attempts to fulfill these needs to an extent, and offers a fresh perspective to look at the ways community radio can be evaluated. Women’s narratives about the influence on health aspects by Henvalvani Community Radio situated in Chamba, a region of India, provided the necessary data and helped in finding the role of such participatory technologies in affecting the agency of the women. Habermas’ Theory of Communicative Action and Kleine’s Choice Framework guided the analysis. Empowerment through Communication (ETC) framework is proposed to provide a new perspective for comprehending the impact made by a community radio in influencing health seeking behavior of women. The study establishes Henvalvani Community Radio as a feminist public sphere helpful in altering the socio-cultural praxis of health communication.

O legado de Stuart Hall e a Comunicação Comunitária

This article advocates the relevance of Stuart Hall’s legacy for the study and practice of Community Communication, highlighting part of his production in the 1970s and 1980s, in which Marxian thought was more present. It is argued that the analysis of the various types of oppression and resistance that permeate the communicational practices only have to gain from its critical articulation to the general plan of the class struggle. It is defended, in epistemological, theoretical and methodological terms, a rapprochement between Cultural Studies and the Political Economy of Information, Communication and Culture, as a movement capable of revealing little explored horizons for the praxis of Community Communication.

Utility–Customer Communication

The aim of this article is to shed light on the theory and praxis of utility stakeholder communication. Our general research objective is to contrast citizens’ experiences of utility-specific information needs with the views of communication managers of municipal water utilities. Empirical data for the study were gathered using two methods. Citizens’ views were gathered from street interviews in several Finnish middle-sized cities, whereas the views of communication professionals of municipal water utilities were collected via email-based survey. Empirical analysis shows that one-way communication has its relevance, and it should actually be improved most notably in exceptional situations, such as water supply disruptions. More profound changes in customer communication require, however, that utilities support customers’ strive for sustainable and economical water consumption. The overall challenge to utilities is to get closer to the everyday needs of their customers and to develop new communication culture to support such an endeavor.

Identity and communication

The theme of identity is of central importance for the work of sociologists, cultural anthropologists, historians of religion, political scientists, biologists, geneticists, phylologists, logicians, legal scholars, linguists and semiologists. Their research contributions are without doubt productive. However, my approach differs completely. My aim is to investigate the term identity by using philosophical categories, on the one hand, and ethics of communication on the other. I first attempt at clarifying certain problems that characterize the concept of identity. I focus in particular on the relationship between the concepts of "identity" and "alterity". I then analyze these problems in relation to the specific praxis of communication. Within the framework of this investigation I formulate an idea of communication that differs from the currently mos widespread ones and I point out its unique ethical value.

La llamada objetividad de los medios de comunicación y sus paradójicas consecuencias para la verdad

A communication paradigm is proposed which opposes the positivist paradigm of information, which is dominant in the praxis of social communication. Therefore, truth is harmonized with the presence of the interpretation of the sender and the recipient of messages, and with the pragmatic level of meaning and language games. This paper concludes with aseries of theoretical and practical consequences for social communication.

Hunger as Health: Culture-Centered Interrogations of Alternative Rationalities of Health

What are the experiences of health at the margins of the globe? How do the material inequities in the distributions of resources across the globe play out in the expressions of the experiences of health in the localized contexts of the global margins? In this synthesis essay, I draw upon three interconnected ethnographies conducted over several villages in West Bengal, India, over a decade-long period to explore the alternative rationalities of health that emerge at the margins. At the heart of these ethnographies is the commitment to culturally center narratives of health as hunger, foregrounding the everyday experiences of hunger and the expressions of agency at the margins in securing access to food resources. Based on the synthesis of the ethnographies, entry points are suggested for the praxis of social change communication that builds on the articulation of health as hunger and imagines localized strategies of collective resistance.

Introduction: Is Development Research Communication Coming of Age?

In this article we reflect on three themes that highlight current trends in research communication for development and, in turn, shape this issue of the IDS Bulletin. We argue that shifts in the sociopolitical and theoretical context within which development research communication is being put into practice; the range and configurations of actors and roles being deployed; and technological advances or innovations available for research communication are affecting important and often contested changes. In introducing this collection of articles relevant to these themes, we conclude that further work is needed in mapping out this evolving landscape and better understanding the interlinkages, antecedents, and tensions between perspectives. Doing so, we argue, could contribute to a stronger praxis of development research communication.

Ethics and Public Administration: On the Italian Case and Beyond

In Italy the theme of ethics and public administration has not yet found expression in a shared ethical-normative perspective and a systematic regulative framework that might help to formulate suitable principles and promote good practices. The present contribution will first provide an overview of the Italian situation, and then show the need for a philosophical foundation of the relationship between ethics and public administration. Following this theoretical foundational reflection, it will then analyze the applicative and practical aspect of the relationship, by highlighting the importance of the virtue of integrity, and the praxis of communication.

Communicative action: the Habermasian and Freirean dialogical approach to participatory communication for social change in a post-1994 South Africa

Despite its almost four decade mainstay, the field of parti-cipatory communication for social change still experiences a definitional and pragmatic problem regarding what exactly participation is (cf. Jacobson & Storey, 2004; Chambers, 1994; Melkote & Steeves, 2001; Rogers, 1976; Lerner, 1964; Schramm, 1964; Servaes, 1995). What remains is a vastly under-theorised field of participatory communication for social change. This article examines the possibility of participatory communication approaching the Habermasian “ideal speech situation” in which people, as communicators, are seen as having a value in their own right and not simply regarded as a means to an end (cf. Habermas, 1984; 1987; 1989). Consistent with the Freirean “liberal pedagogy”, the praxis of dialogical communication or intersubjective communication is seen as putting right the “participative” quality of participatory com-munication (cf. Freire, 1970). For both theorists, transformative action can only occur if reflective and collective learning occurs in linguistically constructed settings where the normative dimensions of truth (logos), rightfulness (ethos) and truthfulness (pathos) are raised and met in the developmental conversation. This is especially significant in a globalised world and fragmented, post-bourgeois public sphere where debate among developmental stakeholders is becoming more marginal, in-strumentalist, and less public. Based on available analyses of development communication literature, this article proposes that the chosen dialogical approaches share a type of communi-cative behaviour (i.e. action theoretic), rather than representing a particular paradigm or school of thought. This could offer further definitional clarification of proper participatory communi-cation for social change in a post-1994 South Africa.

Thomas Phaer and the Assertion of Tudor English

Thomas Phaer's many printed works, including legal and medical texts, occasional verses, and classical translations, all insist upon - even assert - English as a language suitable for learned consciousness. As a physician, legal theorist, man of letters, and member of Parliament, Phaer represents a new English praxis of cultural and intellectual communication. His life and work are centered in the vicissitudes of Tudor polity, wherein he works to mobilize the vernacular and, in so doing, assert early modern English culture.

Dialogue and the Interpretation of Illness: Conversations in a Cameroon Village

The etiology of the Wimbum people in the Western Grassfields of Cameroon is described through an examination of the way in which the meanings of key concepts, used to interpret and explain illness and other forms of misfortune, are continually being produced and reproduced in the praxis of everyday communication. During the course of numerous dialogues, witchcraft, a highly ambivalent force, gradually emerges as the prime mover. As destructive cannibals or respectable elders the witches are the ultimate cause of all significant illness, misfortune and death, and as diviners they are also the ultimate judges who apportion moral responsibility. Even the ancestors and the traditional gods turn out to be fronts behind which the witches hide their activities.The study is on three levels: a medical anthropological exploration of explanations of illness and misfortune; a detailed ethnography of traditional African cosmology and witchcraft; and an examination of recent theoretical issues in anthropology such as the nature of ethnographic fieldwork and the possibility of dialogical or postmodern ethnography.