Communicating for Social Change:

Meaning, Power, and Resistance Mohan

Jyoti Dutta
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Edited by
Mohan Jyoti Dutta and
Dazzelyn Baltazar Zapata

Communicating
for Social Change
Meaning, Power, and Resistance
Communicating for Social Change
 Mohan Jyoti Dutta
Dazzelyn Baltazar Zapata
Editors

Communicating for
Social Change
Meaning, Power, and Resistance
Editors
Mohan Jyoti Dutta Dazzelyn Baltazar Zapata
Center for Culture-Centered Approach Department of Communications and
to Research and Evaluation (CARE) New Media
Massey University National University of Singapore
Palmerston North, New Zealand Singapore, Singapore

ISBN 978-981-13-2004-0    ISBN 978-981-13-2005-7 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-2005-7

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018959219

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
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publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the pub-
lisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the
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tional affiliations.

Cover Image by the Editors

Cover Design by Tom Howey

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Singapore Pte Ltd.
The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-­01/04 Gateway East, Singapore
189721, Singapore
 Dedicated to
Willie, June, Daniel, Lily
Advisory board members of the
“Singaporeans left behind” campaign
Launched by CARE
 Your voices
Emerging from your soul
From the depths
of your worn out bodies
From the truth
Of your everyday struggles
Raise their clarion call
For change.
Mohan Dutta, Singapore, May 1, 2016
 Acknowledgments

Although the academic study of social change and the intersecting com-
municative processes that generate spaces of social change are inherently
situated within the ambit of institutional powers, legitimized by the state-­
market nexus, the rupturing of discursive spaces in the status quo is enabled
when academics reach out to activists, community organizers, and social
movements. This book is therefore dedicated to the activists Samarendra
Das, Jolovan Wham, P. Satheesh, Vanessa Ho, and Braema Mathi, and
community organizers Indranil Mandal, Ramprasad Das, Tony Gillespie,
and Tracy Robinson, who have collaborated with the multiple projects of
Center for Culture-Centered Approach to Research and Evaluation
(CARE) that seek to embody the spirit of academic-activist-­community
collaborations. These collaborations and conversations, when powerfully
embedded in meaningful action, emerge as sites of precarity and embodied
risks. The advisory group members at the forefront of change, Uncle
Willie, Auntie June, Daniel, and Auntie Lily, who led our advisory group
with the “Voices of Hunger” advocacy project in Singapore, and created
the “Singaporeans Left Behind” advocacy campaign, you embody the
spirit and ethic of social change, bearing the many risks and costs that
come with believing in your voices. Your indomitable courage in being the
voices of truth forms the foundation of communication for social change,
rupturing the propaganda that circulates in the mainstream.
This book was conceptualised at one of the weekly meetings of CARE,
Department of Communications and New Media (CNM), National
University of Singapore (NUS) in 2015, where the research team felt the
urgency of intervening in the theoretical production of social change

ix
x ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

c­ ommunication knowledge from outside of the colonial tropes of social

change communication, rooted in the U.S. With the hope of sharing and
reaching a wider audience, especially in the global South, engaged in the
everyday practice of communicating for social change, the Conference for
Social Change: Intersections of Theory and Praxis was held in early
2016 in Singapore.
Each of the chapters in this book has been part of that inaugural
Conference for Social Change brought by CARE, Department of
Communications and New Media, National University of Singapore.
We wish to thank all of those who made this possible. We most espe-
cially thank our community partners who have served not just as inspira-
tion but as a source of strength. We also thank our NGO partners: Deccan
Development Society, India; Jolovan Wham and the Humanitarian
Organisation for Migrant Economics (HOME); Sherry Sherqueshaa,
Vanessa Ho and Project X, Dialita Performance from Indonesia,
Healthserv, Mohsin bhai and Banglar Kantha, and Food from the Heart.
We also wish to thank our distinguished keynote speaker Collins
O. Airhihenbuwa, and our plenary speakers Ambar Basu, Barbara Sharf,
and Raka Shome.
We also had the pleasure of witnessing a lecture demonstration by Rachmi
Diyah Larasati, poetography by Julio Etchart and Mohan Dutta, a docu-
mentary screening of Learning 65 by Dyah Pitaloka and Mohan Dutta, and
preconference film documentary workshops by Deccan Development
Society and independent documentary filmmaker Nakul Singh Sawhney,
who worked through elements of his film Muzzafarnagar baqi hai.
We thank all the conference secretariats who worked hard and pushed
through to make the conference possible, Satveer Kaur, Naomi Tan,
Pauline Luk, Abdul Rahman Bin Abdol Rahim, and Asha Rathina Pandi,
as well as the other members of the conference committee: Dyah Pitaloka,
Munirah Bashir, Ashwini Falnikar, Somrita Ganchoudhuri, Li Lijun,
Monishankar Prasad, and Julio Etchart.
We thank the CNM administrative staff who assisted us throughout the
planning, implementation, and conclusion of the conference, especially
Gayathri Dorairaju and Norizan Binti Abdul Majid.
We also thank Palgrave, especially Vishal Daryanomel and Anushangi
Weerakoon for their patience and help in putting this book together.
Our families hold the anchors to our ongoing work. Mohan would like
to thank his parents, siblings, wife, and children, Shloke, Trisha, and
Soham, for their strength, fortitude, and support on the journey of social
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xi

change. Dazzie would like to thank her family and her daughter Zab for
the love and inspiration.
We thank all the chapter authors for their contribution to social change
in their respective parts of the world, depicting the plural and multitudinal
ways in which social change communication is imagined and crystallized.
These chapters offer inspirations for imagining social change outside of
and in resistance to the colonialist agenda of the dominant social change
communication literature.
 Contents

1 Introduction: Theory, Method, and Praxis of Social

Change  1
Mohan Jyoti Dutta

Part I Theoretical Articulations of Social Change   9

2 Self-Reflexivity for Social Change: The Researcher, I, and

the Researched, Female Street-Based Commercial Sex
Workers,’ Gendered Contexts 13
Iccha Basnyat

3 Gaze as Embodied Ethics: Homelessness, the Other, and

Humanity 33
Eric Kramer and Elaine Hsieh

4 Development Communication and the Dialogic Space:

Finding the Voices Under the Mines 63
Christele J. Amoyan and Pamela A. Custodio

xiii
xiv CONTENTS

5 The Kapwa in Compassion: Examining Compassionate

Health Care for Violence Against Women (VAW) Victims
Among PGH Health Care Providers 87
John Mervin Embate, Marie Carisa Ordinario, and Alyssa
Batu

Part II Contexts of Social Change Communication 109

6 Mama, Home and Away: Philippine Cinema’s Discourse

on the Feminization of Labor Migration111
Arjay Arellano

7 “Long-Distance Parenting”: A Media Ecological Study on

Values Communication Between Migrant Parents and
Their Children in Paete, Laguna133
Paoloregel Samonte

8 Harnessing the Potential of Communication for the

Well-Being of Transnational Families155
Rosel San Pascual

Part III Social Change Methodologies 173

9 The Health Communication Advocacy Tool: An Approach

Toward Addressing Health Inequity175
Chervin Lam and Marifran Mattson

10 Self-Reflexivity in DevCom Research: An

Autoethnography197
Rikki Lee B. Mendiola and Pamela A. Custodio
 CONTENTS xv

11 Participatory Communication and Extension for

Indigenous Farmers: Empowering Local Paddy Rice
Growers in East Java213
Edi Dwi Cahyono

Part IV Examples of Communicating for Social Change 235

12 Going Viral: Online Goal Emergence and Adaptation in

the Anti-human Trafficking Movement239
Rachel Gong

13 Communication Platforms and Climate Change

Adaptation of Rice Farmers in Lipa City, Batangas,
Philippines263
Benedict Omandap Medina

14 Integrative Medicine Focus Groups as a Source of Patient

Agency and Social Change for Chinese Americans with
Type 2 Diabetes285
Evelyn Y. Ho, Genevieve Leung, Han-Lin Chi, Siyuan
Huang, Hua Zhang, Isabelle Ting, Donald Chan, Yuqi Chen,
Sonya Pritzker, Elaine Hsieh, and Hilary K. Seligman

Part V Culture-Centered Approach to Communication for

Social Change 311

15 Culture-Centered Social Change: From Process to

Evaluation315
Mohan Jyoti Dutta

16 Embodied Memories and Spaces of Healing: Culturally-­

Centering Voices of the Survivors of 1965 Indonesian
Mass Killings333
Dyah Pitaloka and Mohan Jyoti Dutta
xvi CONTENTS

17 Inequalities and Workplace Injuries: How Chinese

Workers Cope with Serious Diseases Caused by Benzene
Poisoning359
Ee Lyn Tan and Mohan Jyoti Dutta

18 Media Portrayal Stigma Among Gender and Sexual

Minorities383
Jagadish Thaker, Mohan Jyoti Dutta, Vijay Nair, and Vishnu
Prasad Rao

19 Epilogue409
Mohan Jyoti Dutta

Index411
 List of Figures

Fig. 5.1 Conceptual framework of the study 92

Fig. 6.1 Sarah leaves a covenant with her son, assuring him that she
will return to get him and be ultimately reunited in London 120
Fig. 6.2 Josie bids farewell to her family; this will only be the first of
more airport goodbyes 121
Fig. 6.3 Josie can’t give up hugging a stuffed toy, imagining the
warmth of her daughter’s embrace 122
Fig. 6.4 Josie tends to the needs of her employer’s child like a real
responsible mother 124
Fig. 6.5 Sarah becomes Mr. Morgan’s trusted aide and a good friend
whom he can share life stories with 124
Fig. 6.6 Josie is in a hurry to speak to her daughter, but she would be
unsuccessful with the arrival of her employers 125
Fig. 6.7 Sarah expresses how much she misses her son by regularly
calling home 126
Fig. 8.1 Harnessing the potential of communication at the micro level 158
Fig. 8.2 Harnessing the potential of communication at the macro level 163
Fig. 9.1 Health Communication Advocacy Tool 179
Fig. 15.1 CCA-based approach to designing community-placed
solutions319
Fig. 18.1 Experienced stigma mediates media stigma association with
identity disclosure. Unstandardized coefficients, Sobel test:
Z = 3.73, p<0.001, κ = 0.65, 95% CI for 10,000 bootstrap
samples: 0.26, 1.07 401

xvii
 List of Tables

Table 5.1 Verbal, non-verbal and approach aspects of Asal97

Table 12.1 Anti-trafficking activists interviewed 247
Table 13.1 Profile of rice farmers in terms of age 268
Table 13.2 Profile of rice farmers in terms of civil status 268
Table 13.3 Profile of rice farmers in terms of educational attainment 268
Table 13.4 Profile of rice farmers in terms of other source/s of income 269
Table 13.5 Profile of farmers in terms of number of years in rice
farming270
Table 13.6 Profile of farmers in terms of area or tract of land they
cultivate270
Table 13.7 Communication platforms utilized by rice farmers in
sharing information on climate change 271
Table 13.8 Problems experienced by the rice farmers due to climate
change273
Table 13.9 Assessment on the rice farmers’ adaptation to climate
change in terms of physical adaptive measures 274
Table 13.10 Assessment on the rice farmers’ adaptation to climate
change in terms of existing agricultural practices 275
Table 13.11 Assessment on the rice farmers’ adaptation to climate
change in terms of self-help programs and capacity
building276
Table 13.12 Difference on the physical adaptive measures of the farmers
in terms of profile 277
Table 13.13 Difference on the existing agricultural practices of the
farmers in terms of profile 278
Table 13.14 Differences in the self-help programs and capacity building
of the farmers in terms of profile 279

xix
xx LIST OF TABLES

Table 14.1 Details of participants divided by focus group 290

Excerpt 14.1 Focus group 1: Cannot control yourself292
Excerpt 14.2 Focus group 4: A Chinese person would say, “What kind of
food is this!”293
Excerpt 14.3 Focus group 4: You must eat otherwise you will not have
sufficient energy294
Excerpt 14.4 Focus group 3: I tried all kinds of herbal medicine295
Excerpt 14.5 Focus group 2: Our health insurance card does not cover
CM297
Excerpt 14.6 Focus group 2: I have diagnosed myself [but I don’t know...]299
Excerpt 14.7 Focus group 3: Everyday I have to have soup otherwise I am
not happy300
Excerpt 14.8 Focus group 1: CM information sources303
Excerpt 14.9 Focus group 1: Beef is very good for replenishing/nourishing
the blood305
Table 17.1 Job nature and length of exposure of Chinese workers 365
Table 18.1 Demographic characteristics of sexual and gender
minorities in three south Indian cities 392
Table 18.2 Factor analysis of gender and sexual minority identity
stigma scale 394
Table 18.3 Regression with media stigma as outcome variable 400
Table 18.4 Logistic regression model predicting identity disclosure 400
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Theory, Method, and Praxis

of Social Change

Mohan Jyoti Dutta

In January 2016, 57 social change communication scholars, communica-

tion practitioners, and activists from across the globe participated in a
three-day conference hosted by the Center for Culture-centered Approach
to Research and Evaluation (CARE) at the National University of
Singapore. The location of the conference in Singapore, positioned in the
interstices of Eurocentric capitalist democracy and practices of authoritar-
ian governmentality that foreground values of communitarianism and col-
lectivism as modes of organizing, offered an opportunity to critically
engage with the foundational theoretical concepts of social change com-
munication, explore the erasures constituted in dominant constructions of
social change communication, and foster entry points for listening to the
voices of the global margins. The articulation of social change and com-
munication from outside of the circuits of knowledge production in the
West/North created openings for contextually situated theorization of
social change, closely intertwined with the practice of social change com-
munication (Dutta, 2015). Simultaneously, the global concentration of
power in the hands of the transnational capital-state-civil society nexus
emerged as a consistent theme throughout the conference, therefore

M. J. Dutta (*)
Center for Culture-Centered Approach to Research and Evaluation (CARE),
Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand

© The Author(s) 2019 1

M. J. Dutta, D. B. Zapata (eds.), Communicating for Social Change,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-2005-7_1
2 M. J. DUTTA

c­ alling for social change communication that interrogates the structures

that constitute dominant notions of contemporary governmentality.
The local as a site for occupying communicative spaces where change is
imagined, created, and carried out articulates imaginaries of social, cul-
tural, economic, and political organizing that directly challenge global
neoliberal hegemony and simultaneously frameworks of reworking the
local. The theorization of voice, spatially located at the global margins,
and explicitly resistive of the structures of neoliberal governance, offers a
counter to the market-driven imaginary of trickle-down development.
The attention to geography as an anchor for theorizing communication
and social justice also meant that our conference organizing committee
particularly paid attention to the representation of academic-activist voices
from across spaces in Asia, proximate to our own site of theory building at
CARE in Singapore. Therefore, the large majority of voices celebrated in
this edited collection emerge from Asia, taking seriously the task of what
it means to theorize communication and social change from/in Asia.
The concepts thus developed across the chapters demonstrate a deep
commitment to context even as they seek to engage with the global trajec-
tories of social change. Moreover, the conference emerged as a communi-
cative infrastructure for a range of activist performances, including
performances by the Dialita Choir, comprised of the survivors of the 1965
US-sponsored Indonesian genocide, performances by Lachmi Dyah
Larasati remembering trauma to articulate health and healing through
dance, and performances, activist workshops, and documentary screenings
by dalit women farmers organized under the umbrella of the Deccan
Development Society (DDS). For each of these activist performances,
critically engaging and interrogating the logics of power and control that
organize social systems offered the bases for theorizing social change com-
munication from the margins of neoliberal capitalism. I co-performed a
poetography with the photography and image artist Julio Etchart, who
served as a research assistant at CARE for four years. The poetography
sought to interrogate the organizing logic of the market that has colo-
nized the Asian-global scape.
In the backdrop of the consolidation of communicative spaces in the
hands of the power elite, conference themes grappled with the role of
communication in disrupting these processes of resource consolidation.
The positioning of the conference at CARE was meant to bring together
new and critical thinking about the interplays of culture and communica-
tion for social change, particularly drawing on the complex history of
 INTRODUCTION: THEORY, METHOD, AND PRAXIS OF SOCIAL CHANGE 3

Southeast Asia as a target of top-down social change communication

interventions emerging from the West during the Cold War. This Cold
War legacy was directly interrogated in the voices of the performers of the
Dialita Choir who experienced physical, sexual, and cognitive violence and
lost family members in the Indonesian anti-Communist purge, carried out
with US sponsorship. The voices of the survivors of 1965 disrupt the com-
municative inversions that have been circulated in elite discourse.
Particularly salient is the courage and tenacity of resistance that emerges in
these voices amid various state-driven techniques of repression, which
themselves are techniques learned and perfected by postcolonial elites in
South and Southeast Asia from the colonial masters. The locally consti-
tuted narratives of resistance offer lessons for global principles of social
change communication, building communication strategies and tech-
niques that disrupt the now-perfected strategies of colonial expansion and
capitalist exploitation.
Also salient was the theoretical anchor for positioning social change
communication amid neoliberal global transformations, reflected in the
hegemonic position of the “free market” ideology in spite of the evidence
that points to the failures of market-based organizing processes in address-
ing contemporary global challenges. The voices of activists, community
organizers, and participants from the margins of global production of
knowledge create different entry points for the conversations on social
change, connecting the theorizing of change processes to the contingen-
cies, challenges, and fragmentations in the practices of communication for
social change. The opening keynote with Professor Collins Airhihenbuwa
brought to the forefront the role of culture as an anchor to health and
healing. Encouraging social change communication scholars to closely
study the role of culture, Professor Airhihenbuwa opened up an invita-
tional space for alternative imaginaries of social change communication.

Theorizing Communication for Social Change

Theories of communication for social change conceptualize communica-
tion in specific logics. The dominant constructions of social change com-
munication reproduce an overarching framework of liberal democracy,
circulating the imaginary of civil society, working hand in hand with
mechanisms of the state and the market in constituting communication
for social change. In this backdrop, the chapters presented in this collec-
tion interrogate the notions of democracy and capitalism, inverting on its
4 M. J. DUTTA

head the very notion that capitalism is a necessity for sustaining demo-
cratic processes and practices. The mostly US-generated body of scholar-
ship on communication and social change that pushes the US imperial
agenda on the global arena is interrupted by the voices from other geo-
graphic locales, disrupting the assumptions about neutral and universal
social change communication. An emergent theme across the articles in
this edited collection is one of voice in the backdrop of the increasing
consolidation of communicative power in the hands of the power elite.
Attending to the inequalities in the circulation of communicative pro-
cesses and communicative resources, the essays in this collection point to
the constitutive role of communication as voice.

Methodology of Communication for Social Change

The question of methods for social change communication introduced in
this edited collection deconstructs the very logic of what we understand as
communication for social change. The naturalized notion of social change
communication as planned social change projects driven from US/West-­
centric sites of expertise, in collaboration with local elites, is disrupted
through the re-turning toward the many geographies of social change com-
munication outside of the knowledge circuits of the West. What these many
geographies reveal about communication for social change is at once the
displacement of the key methodological tenets from the Cold War develop-
ment logic, and the possibilities of a “politics of hope” that emerges from
elsewhere, offering theoretical anchors for “polluting” the concepts of the
mainstream. In the wide range of manuscripts that have been assembled
here, the received concept of social change communication is disrupted by
a plurivocality of methods for the study of communication for social change.

How Do We Evaluate Social Change Communication?

The concept of evaluating social change communication is plurivocalized,
creating anchors for depicting social change from diverse viewpoints, par-
ticularly attending to the creation of spaces for knowledge creation from
the margins. What does social change mean for those at the margins? How
do communities at the margins of global development understand the
effectiveness of social change communication? From the largely quantita-
tive focus on field-based experiments, with pre/post comparisons between
experimental and control communities, that has served as the gold stan-
 INTRODUCTION: THEORY, METHOD, AND PRAXIS OF SOCIAL CHANGE 5

dard for the measurement of the effectiveness of social change communi-

cation, articulations of effectiveness of social change communication from
the global margins are grounded in narratives that describe the social
change process, its effects on the lives of community members, and the
effects on societal and cultural processes.

Stories as Method
The shift to the voices from the global margins interrupts the quantitative
reproduction of knowledge on communication for social change, instead
offering narratives as bases for building the evidence base for social change.
For instance, in the voices of indigenous communities threatened to be
displaced by an extraction project, putting a stop to the land grab is con-
sidered as evidence for effectiveness. Similarly, in the voices of communi-
ties of food-insecure households, having enough access to food is
considered as a measure of effectiveness. In this sense, community mem-
ber narratives depict the workings of the social change communication
effort. Similarly, the stories of marginalized community members coming
together in a collective and having their voices be heard in a discursive
space that systematically erases them is an anchor to alternative definitions
of social change communication.

The Scholar-as-Activist
The scholar-as-activist interrupts the dominant location of the scholar
within elite structures of grant-funded, public-private interventions
achieved through partnerships between the state, global civil society, and
transnational capital. The foundation of “academic tourism” where the
scholar “goes in and out of the community” to push an expert-designed
intervention into the community is inverted by the articulation of activism
as the basis of social change communication scholarship, deeply inter-
twined with the struggles of the local communities scholars reside in, and
committed to transforming the politics of the local as it enters into the
global (Hartnett, 2007, 2010). Activism, by its very nature, identifies the
structural conditions that reproduce injustices and the material contexts of
marginalization, intervening into these marginalizing practices through
communicative performances (Frey & Carragee, 2007).
Where the social change communication scholar sits and how she/he is
mobilized to work on social change communication are fundamentally
6 M. J. DUTTA

inverted in articulations of communication for social change emerging from

the global margins. In contrast to the invisible expert academic located in
elite centers of expertise in the North/West, far removed from the everyday
struggles of the subaltern margins, the body of the scholar is placed in the
middle of struggles of subaltern communities, “intervening into discourses”
(Frey & Carragee, 2007, p. 7). Rather than developing communication
interventions from elite positions of privilege based on targets defined by
funding agencies, private foundations, and corporations, the notion of the
scholar-as-activist reorients its commitment to the voices of the margins,
seeking to cocreate communicative infrastructures for subaltern participa-
tion. The turning of the scholar into an activist-­participant is itself a resistive
turn, retheorizing “academia as habitus” (Bourdieu, 1984).

Interrogating Power
That social change is constituted in fields of power is a theme that works
through many of the chapters. To examine and participate in social change
communication therefore is to interrogate the organizing logics of power
that constitute institutions, organizations, projects, and sites of social change
communication (Dutta, 2015, 2017). The academic locus itself emerges as
a site of interrogation, questioning the logics that constitute academic
knowledge production and practice. The authoritarian regimes and totali-
tarian structures of governance across Asia (and more specifically Singapore
in the context of local projects carried out by CARE) therefore suggest criti-
cal anchors for interrogating power and its workings in relationship to uni-
versities as sites of knowledge production (see for instance Tan, Kaur-Gill,
Dutta, & Venkataraman, 2017). For instance, after the conference ended,
and during a time when CARE’s advocacy project on poverty (#nosingapor-
eansleftbehind) in Singapore came under scrutiny, institutional- state struc-
tures pointed to the social change communication conference, placing it
under surveillance and seeking to know the purpose of the conference. The
notion of activism and its relationship with academia is interrogated through
the question of the body. Claims to activism are grounded in interrogations
of embodied relationships and risks to the body constituted in relationships
with power. Radical chic articulations of activism that serve to posture mar-
ket-friendly academic brands that sell the neoliberal model of education are
juxtaposed amid questions of activism as a site for interrogating power.
The suggestion that the location of social change communication within
academia is out-of-the-ordinary or unacademic became the basis for much of
the communication work of CARE, seeking to retain the space for legitimacy
 INTRODUCTION: THEORY, METHOD, AND PRAXIS OF SOCIAL CHANGE 7

for carrying out social change communication projects through academic-

activist-community partnerships, mobilized toward generating knowledge of
communicating for social change from the margins. Power, circulating within
institutional structures, sought to delegitimize the communicative practices of
social change by marking these practices as unacademic, disruptive, threaten-
ing. Communicative infrastructures among the poor for instance became
threatening as they challenged the dominant narratives that erase poverty. The
work of communicating social change then became one of reworking these
sites of power, seeking to retain the communicative infrastructures for the
participation of the margins. As reflected in many of the chapters, reflexivity as
a methodological tool turns the lens inward, situating as its subject the power
embedded in academic sites of knowledge production. The lessons emerging
from the chapters offer important lessons regarding strategies for cocreating
communicative infrastructures at the margins amid authoritarian strategies of
state-market control.

Conclusion
This edited collection of essays seeks to offer new ground for theorizing,
empirically examining, and participating in communication for social
change. That social change communication processes are complex, com-
plicated, and messy suggests that academics studying and practicing social
change communication continually explore invitational spaces for opening
up the conversations. The very nature of space, rendered impure, through
academic-activist-community partnerships is reconstituted in new ways
through social change communication practices from the global margins.
I hope as you read these chapters, you attend to the constitutive ways in
which academe is interpellated through communication for social change
from the margins. This continual orientation toward the margins of
knowledge production is generative of an ethic that opens up to multiple
plural stories.

References
Bourdieu, P. (1984). Homo Academicus. Peter Collier, trans. Stanford, California:
Stanford University Press.
Dutta, M. J. (2015). Decolonizing communication for social change: A culture-­
centered approach. Communication Theory, 25(2), 123–143.
Dutta, M. J. (2017). Migration and health in the construction industry: Culturally
centering voices of Bangladeshi workers in Singapore. International Journal of
Environmental Research and Public Health, 14(2), 132.
8 M. J. DUTTA

Frey, L. R., & Carragee, K. M. (2007). Communication activism volume one:

Communication for social change.
Hartnett, S. J. (2007). “You are fit for something better”: Communicating hope
in antiwar activism. Communication activism, 1, 195–246.
Hartnett, S. J. (2010). Communication, social justice, and joyful commitment.
Western Journal of Communication, 74(1), 68–93.
Tan, N., Kaur-Gill, S., Dutta, M. J., & Venkataraman, N. (2017). Food insecurity
in Singapore: The communicative (dis)value of the lived experiences of the
poor. Health communication, 32(8), 954–962.
 PART I

Theoretical Articulations of Social

Change

Dazzelyn Baltazar Zapata

This part of the book explores theoretical articulations of social change. In

particular, it looks at (1) how communication scholars theorize issues of
social change, (2) make sense of what is considered social change to begin
with, and (3) explore how emerging alternative theories and frameworks
in communication address various kinds of disparities.
The opening chapter titled Self-Reflexivity for Social Change: The
Researcher, I, and the Researched, Female Street Based Commercial Sex
Workers’, Gendered Contexts starts off with reflecting on the role of the
researcher in social change. As social science scholars, we are always
involved in research in more ways than what is revealed in our scholarship.
Iccha Basnyat questions this valorization of objectivity that is abundant in
communication research. She interrogates the prescribed top-down mea-
sures of social change that remove the researcher from the process and
erase the voices of the communities in the name of “objectivity”. Basnyat
eloquently argued how positioning the self in relation to those being
“studied” enables the communication scholar to foster participatory co-­
constructive spaces for change. This becomes a transformative space that
blurs the line between the researcher and the researched. Basnyat weaves
the lived experience narratives of female commercial sex workers to her
own voice—a co-constructive process of their gendered-selves as she links
it to the broader context within which these stories transpire.
The next chapter, Gaze as Embodied Ethics: Homelessness, the Other, and
Humanity by Erik Kramer and Elaine Hsieh, engages ethics in relation to
homelessness. The authors theorize gaze as they interrogate a culture that
10 Theoretical Articulations of Social Change

justifies cruelty to this marginalized homeless population that is rendered

invisible and disposable. They explore the larger sociocultural context that
contributes to the complexity of homelessness in the United States.
Kramer and Hsieh examine the issue of homelessness from the perspective
of cultural phenomenology or the cultural conditions that facilitate such
structures. Their chapter challenges us as they take us on a journey to view
homelessness and our humanity as deeply intertwined and that social sci-
ence needs to go beyond mere theorizing for it to really make a dent and
foster social change.
The third chapter, Development Communication and the Dialogic Space:
Finding the Voices Under the Mines by Christele Jao Amoyan and Pamela
A. Custodio, amplifies the voices of a small fisherfolk community in
Calancan Bay, Sta. Cruz, Marinduque, Philippines. Through engaging the
(un)heard voices of fisherfolk, who bore witness to how unsustainable
mining transformed a local fishing village into an industrial wasteland.
After decades of struggle for socioeconomic welfare, environmental reha-
bilitation, and social justice, the fisherfolk remain in unhealthy polluted
living conditions. The authors listened to the people’s dialogues and
everyday conversations and argued how this creates a new space for critical
discourse. They operationalized dialogue using Freirean concepts of dia-
logue for desirable social change. Amoyan, first author and dominant voice
of the chapter, accounts entering the field to listen and collate the silenced
voices of the fisherfolk and from there, develop a sense of self-­reflexivity as
she journeys through the multitude of lifestories and her own.
Chapter four, The Kapwa in Compassion: Examining Compassionate
Healthcare for VAW Victims Among PGH Healthcare Providers by John
Mervin Embate, Marie Carisa Ordinario and Alyssa Batu, talks about
compassion through the lens of kapwa. They investigated the ways and
means through which compassionate healthcare was extended through
communicative behaviours of healthcare providers in a public-funded hos-
pital to Violence Against Women (VAW) patients. The Philippine General
Hospital (PGH) caters to about 600,000 patients every year, most of
whom come from poor economic backgrounds and among the few which
has a working Women’s Desk. The authors used a locally developed the-
ory on the Filipino psyche called Sikolohiyang Pilipino (Filipino psychol-
ogy) to engage the concept of compassion. The authors found that
healthcare providers are able to deliver compassionate healthcare to VAW
victims through recognizing, relating, (re)acting and empowerment. The
 Theoretical Articulations of Social Change  11

providers also view compassion as Kapwa (kindred), Pakikiramdam (shared

inner perceptions), Kagandahang-Loob (shared humanity), Asal (atti-
tude). A dichotomy between call of duty and social responsibility. Embate
and colleagues discussed how health workers are affected by various fac-
tors and are inhibited by different organizational/structural and sociocul-
tural factors. They discussed how compassionate healthcare is restricted
by structures. They argued that amendment in government policies,
proper budget allocation, and a rehabilitation of sociocultural influences
that marginalize women are called for to empower women and bring
about social justice to those who have been violated by the system.
 CHAPTER 2

Self-Reflexivity for Social Change:

The Researcher, I, and the Researched,
Female Street-Based Commercial Sex
Workers,’ Gendered Contexts

Iccha Basnyat

In this chapter, I argue that positioning the self, that is, researcher, in rela-
tion to those “researched” through self-reflexivity enables the communi-
cation scholar to foster participatory spaces for social change. I use social
change, as noted by Waisbord (2015), “to refer to the activation of insti-
tutional and social networks to promote transformations at individual,
community and structural levels toward social justice” (p. 146). It is
important to define social change, because as Waisbord (2015) highlights
communication for social change “grounded in studies on a vast range of
health issues (e.g., family planning, HIV/AIDS, child health, malaria)
reflects long-standing patterns in global aid, namely priorities and funding
flows” (p. 147). Academic scholarship that “parallels international devel-
opment” (Waisbord 2015, p. 147) positions only the researcher as the
expert, and such designing and implementing social change projects
remain at the discretion of the researcher. The consequence then is that
voices of the communities are absent from this communication discourse.

I. Basnyat (*)
School of Communication Studies, James Madison University,
Harrisonburg, VA, USA

© The Author(s) 2019 13

M. J. Dutta, D. B. Zapata (eds.), Communicating for Social Change,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-2005-7_2
14 I. BASNYAT

For instance, in health communication, scholars often refer to concepts

such as communication strategies, communication campaigns, social mar-
keting and mobilization, persuasive communication, and awareness raising
where behavioral change is the dominant form of change (Lie1 & Servaes,
2015). These terminologies reflect more about the researcher than the
community. Rather, I argue that a social change project needs to engage
with the community, and to do so we must begin as a self-reflexive
researcher.
Self-reflexivity ensures that both the “researched” and the “researcher”
engage in a coconstructive meaning-making process that produces cultur-
ally meaningful knowledge. “Engagement and co-constructive possibili-
ties creates a dynamic space that is fragmented, contested, and continually
revised on the basis of journeys of solidarity with marginalized communi-
ties” (Dutta, 2010, p. 538). The concept of reflexivity implies turning the
lens inward to explore spaces of collaboration through dialogue (Dutta,
2010). Self-reflectivity is an important consideration because it allows the
researcher to preserve their own subjectivity and to avoid becoming absent
from the research process and the research context (Bott, 2010). Self-­
reflexivity is an ongoing conversation with oneself about what you are
experiencing as you are experiencing it. Particularly, self-reflexivity high-
lights the choices one makes when deciding what to research, whom to
research, and how the interpretations are situated. Nagata (2004) notes
that “to be self-reflexive is to engage in this meta-level of feeling and
thought while being in the moment. The strength of being reflexive is that
we can make the quality of our relationships better at that time in that
encounter” (p. 141). To be aware of yourself and to be present in the
moment is to learn from one’s experience with the intention of improving
the quality of one’s interactions with others (Nagata, 2004).
Using a case study of the lived experiences of commercial sex workers
and my self-reflexivity, I juxtapose our stories to illustrate the significance
of the “researched” and the “researcher” as active participants in the
research process. The way we imagine our research process, that is,
researcher/expert or researcher-researched collaboration, is the way we
enact our social change projects. First, I begin with theorizing self-­
reflexivity. The aim is to draw attention to the significance of coproducing
culturally meaningful knowledge by the researcher and the participant.
Next, I will use fragments of data from my field work to juxtapose my
position as a researcher and as a woman of the same culture to the lived
experiences of female commercial sex workers (FCSWs). I have two
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331-333
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641

642

643

in chorea,

455

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388

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676

in thermic fever,

396

397

398

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432

cold, use of, in spinal sclerosis,

903

hot, use of, in spinal sclerosis,

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sulphur, use of, in chronic lead-poisoning,

691

value of, in hysteria,

281

282

283

warm, use of, in acute myelitis,

823

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in tumors of spinal cord,

1096

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malignant, in acute myelitis,

819

Belladonna, use of, in epilepsy,

501

in infantile spinal paralysis,

1155

Bell's palsy,
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607

Bismuth, use of, in vomiting of the opium habit,

675

Bladder, disorders of, in chronic alcoholism,

614

in tabes dorsalis,

829

834

836
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1045

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1096

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823

simple meningitis,

720

in Bell's palsy,

1207

in cerebral hemorrhage and apoplexy,

976
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774

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1015

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710

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805

in tetanus,

555

in thermic fever,

398

Blindness, hysterical,
248

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776

word-, in nervous diseases,

31

Blisters, use of, in epilepsy,

502

in hæmatoma of dura mater,

710

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555

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398
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in writers' cramp,

538

Blood, changes in, in chronic alcoholism,

615

618

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662

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391

392
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612

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682

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253

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1267

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614

state of, in general paralysis of the insane,

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1234

RAIN AND

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NÆMIA AND

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763
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799

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796

Morbid anatomy,

792

Prognosis,

799

Symptomatology,

795
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799

Medical,

800

Derivatives,

800

Mercury,

800

Surgical,

800

Emptying contents,

800

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774

Diagnosis,

787

Etiology,

776

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781

Appearances of, in cerebral anæmia,

781

Symptomatology,

782

Treatment,

788
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789

Amyl nitrite,

788

Cannabis,

789

Cold pack,

789

Massage,

789

Morphine,

788
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763

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772

Etiology,

765

Symptomatology,

768

Treatment,

773

Baths,

773

Bleeding,
774

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773

Cathartics,

774

Cautery,

774

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773

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774

Diet,

774
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773

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773

Pediluvia,

773

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790

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791

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791
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792

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792

of septic origin,

792

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791

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791

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