Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

Examines communicative responses to transforming global communications systems and shifting structures of global economic and cultural power. Considers how communicators and producers of knowledge and culture interact with and produce these systems and structures and the implications of these processes for social justice. Note: Priority will be given to students enrolled in Global Communication Double MA Degree program. Students with credit for CMNS 858 (Special Topics: CMNS & Global Social Justice) in Spring 2014 & Spring 2015 may not take this course for further credit.

COURSE DETAILS:

Overview:

In Communication Rights and Social Justice (2014) Claudia Padovani and Andrew Calabrese explain that “communication rights are…associated with a broader human rights discourse and practice [in addition to] the concept of ‘social justice’ [which involves]…claims centered on international democracy, peace and human rights;…[and] aspirations concerning global economic and social justice.” Rather than communication being just a means to pursue social justice, here it is understood as a “fundamental process in society…that should be grounded in principles of freedom, diversity and open participation” (2014). Thus the attempt to have communication recognized as a right in itself by international bodies like the United Nations (Kidd, 2014). Thus for critical communication scholars, establishing communication rights at a global scale is not a technological problem solved, for example, by just promoting digital technologies, but involves creating a new communication order (Padovani and Cabrese, 2014).  

What is the nature of this new communication order? Before this question can be considered, it is necessary to examine hegemonic conceptions of justice that uphold Western imperialist ideas of rights. We need to understand how these ideas of justice, which are also tied to humanitarianism and human rights, are the basis of, as Indigenous scholar Dian Million argues, ongoing injustice (2013; Reisch, 2014), for instance, reducing the majority of humanity (and all other elements of the planet that make life sustainable) into expendable resources and justifying military invasion. The course next examines why more and better information is not the solution. We will read a selection of historical and contemporary writers, who examine hegemonic processes, like colonized consciousness, that make it difficult to recognize injustice and our complicity in it. To conclude, we will turn to scholars and activists who approach communication as a “fundamental process in society” that makes it possible for us to recognize that others, as well as the other living forms and the planet, are deeply interconnected and interdependent (Shiva, 2015; Simpson, 2011) and as praxis, can build relations of respect and recognition, the basis of social justice, that can assist in reconciling crisis and conflict (Boal, 2006).

Grading

Materials

REQUIRED READING: