ArbetstitelVoice & matter
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Kort BeskrivningForeword
Readers will find in this assembly of essays a cluster of remarkable empirical studies in the first two sections, and some very penetrating discussions of basic concepts in the third. All focus on Communication for Social Change, the discursive network that is set to subvert and replace older Development Communication paradigms grounded in exploitative and/or philanthropic strategies towards what used to be called the ‘Third’ World during the decades of US-Soviet rivalry for planetary dominance. In other words, the majority of humankind living outside circles of power and wealth. The bi-annual Ørecomm Festivals serve as a petri dish for invigorating this network.
A key pair of concepts investigated here for their capacity to illuminate core issues are ‘voice’ and ‘capacity to aspire’. The term ‘voice’ is especially associated with a much-cited book by political economist Albert Hirschman (1915-2012), Exit, Voice and Loyalty (1970), and the term ‘capacity to aspire’ with a 2004 essay by cultural anthropologist Arjun Appadurai (1949-).
However, while the concept ‘voice’ has its merits in emphasizing the fundamental importance of the ability of the world’s poor to express their needs and demands in public fora from the streets to the Internet, the work of Charles Husband over more than twenty years now takes the issues still deeper. Others, such as Australian Communication researchers Tanja Dreher and Penny O’Donnell, Australian sociologist Cate Thill, and UK political scientist Andrew Dobson, have also contributed valuably in this direction.
Basically, Husband and the others underscore the limits of simply aspiring to speak, as per the argument presented in Gayatri Spivak’s much-cited 1983 essay “Can the subaltern speak?” Admittedly, speech itself is terrorized in many ways in many places, but the act of speaking alone, ven when successful, still guarantees rather little. The essence of the matter, argue Husband and the others, is whether anyone is listening. And by ‘listening’ they mean active listening, not simply having the radio on in the background.
Beyond even active listening, Husband emphasizes “the right to be understood.” Let us take a moment to get hold of this. Human rights are conventionally arrayed in three categories, or Generations. The first is the 1948 UN Declaration’s freedom of speech, from persecution, and so on. The second is economic, the right to food, housing, health care and the like. The third includes such matters as environmental rights, or the right to communicate – which comes back to ‘voice’ of course. But if no one is interested in understanding speakers’ priorities, context or experience, all the voice - all the low-power radio and all the wall graffiti and all the subversive songs in the world - will still end as monologues addressed to the powerful. Or worse, understanding those speakers may be undertaken by sociologists and anthropologists, organically (Gramsci) meshed with circles of power, whose labors may serve to understand in order better to discipline the world’s poor.
So while the notion of “a right to be understood” initially offends common sense (and could even seem to propose a certain carte blanche for the professoriat!), upon inspection it nails the primary problem. Thill suggests a nice term, “courageous listening,” by which she means listening with the anticipation that the speaker’s viewpoint may likely clash with one’s own, implying the intention directly and constructively to engage with difference, rather than muting or avoiding it.
However, much of this discussion presupposes some kind of interactivity between communities of the poor, and the powerful. The vital dimension is lateral: how are forms of listening developed among the world’s poor, not least where issues of patriarchy, religion, language, nationality, caste, ‘tribe’ and ‘race’ may bedevil such projects? How may such endeavors strengthen the voice of the dispossessed so it cannot remain dismissed by the powerful? What are the social movement media experiences which can illuminate fresh local possibilities? How do they interact with strikes, road blockages, occupations – and with community self-care projects in health and education?
Some significant shortcomings of Appadurai’s ‘aspire’ notion are identified in this volume. Both he and some of the contributors discuss in abstract terms the notion that the ‘capacity to aspire’ to a different world or worlds is a muscle that requires exercise. Yet the evidence for the actual, practical exercise of this muscle is voluminous in the multifarious instances of social movement media activism, from dance, song and dress all the way through radio, video and the Internet. These experiences are no fiction, and bypassing what can be learned from them is a form of political suicide.
These issues present themselves in the Global North, not only in dispossessed communities comparably with the Global South, but also in the chilling effect of our awareness of mass political Internet surveillance, as uncovered in particular by Edward Snowden’s revelations. This permutation of the issue of ‘voice’ and ‘listening’ in liberal democracies, and potent signal of their blockages on the ‘capacity to aspire’, hold very grave implications and pose major challenges.
Brooklyn, NY,
March 2016
John D. H. Downing
Editor, Encyclopedia of Social Movement Media (2011)
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