Expanding Upon Critical Methodologies and Perspectives in Communication Studies

Within this special issue, we turn our attention to critical perspectives within the communication discipline and seek to illuminate the implementation of critical methods across its broader contexts. While the communication discipline has historically been grounded in the normativity and centering of whiteness, critical perspectives, which are characterized by attention to communicative practices that attend to systems of power and hierarchy across social spheres, have been broadly integrated into and meaningfully shaped the study of communication contexts such as rhetoric, intercultural communication, and performance studies. We argue, however, that the incorporation of critical perspectives within the larger discipline remains underdeveloped. Therefore, in this special issue, we present articles that employ critical methodological approaches to offer important new ways of studying and centering marginalized identities, positionalities, and epistemologies across a range of contexts. Ultimately, we argue for a more expansive approach to thinking and teaching about methodology in general, and critical methods specifically, that inspires further "play" among communication scholars who value the need for social justice imperatives and epistemic delinking across all facets of communication studies.