Transformative Communication Studies: Culture, Hierarchy and the Human Condition

This book extends scholarship in the field of critical communication studies and ethics, articulating new ways for actualizing the goals of applied or socially engaged communication scholarship. This interdisciplinary collection of essays charts intersections between communication/cultural studies and a variety of emergent emancipatory and liberatory discourses. Every essay attempts to address the following questions: What would a theory of liberation look like that is premised on a communication view of the world? How would such a view expand and even redefine our understanding of liberation? Finally, how would such a view enlarge our understanding of what is collectively, communally, and organizationally possible? In other words, the chapters articulate what can be loosely considered a humanist theory of communication and praxis. The goal is to move beyond discourses of liberation that are grounded in essentionalist assumptions and to move the conversation toward an engaged criticism on cultural and social levels that facilitates and encourages progressive action.