Decolonizing Communication for Social Change: A Culture-Centered Approach

The role of communication in planned social change is portrayed as a linear conduit for inducing pro-development behavior change in the “undeveloped” world. Later versions of social change communication started incorporating culture and participation into multicultural participatory development programs. This essay suggests that development discourses, including their later incarnations incorporating culture and participation, serve as vehicles for capitalist market promotion. These new forms of planned social change communication, scripted in the narratives of local empowerment, community-based participation, and entrepreneurship, work to systematically erase subaltern communities. Building on the theoretical framework of the culture-centered approach (CCA), I examine the ways in which dialogues with the margins of development discourse resist these dominant conceptual categories of development. The subaltern, standing in for the popular, resists neoliberal interventions through her active participation in popular politics.