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ERIC Number: EJ1451826
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2024
Pages: 22
Abstractor: ERIC
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0363-4523
EISSN: EISSN-1479-5795
Decolonizing the Pedagogy of Health Communication Campaigns: A Culture-Centered Approach
Mohan J. Dutta
Communication Education, v73 n4 p405-426 2024
In this essay, the author interrogates openings for decolonizing the pedagogy of health communication campaigns. In doing so, they will not rehash in this stimulus essay the current zeitgeist of health communication campaigns, which forms the dominant conceptual registers and shapes the teaching and practice of health communication campaigns. Rather, the author begins with the observation that the #CommunicationSoWhite movement in Communication Studies has pushed for changes in this subdiscipline with a foundationally racist history. However, superficial efforts of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), by not building the necessary infrastructures for decolonization, continue to keep the whiteness of the discipline alive and thriving. The author notes here that the politics of representation of health communication scholars with intersectional identities in the pages of health communication journals is an important starting point in de-centering disciplinary whiteness, but not adequate in transforming the racist epistemology that drives the conceptualization, implementation, and evaluation of health communication campaigns. Too often, scholars with intersectional minoritized identities are repressed into existing structures of health communication scholarship and pedagogy, which are performed under the rhetoric of DEI but actually perpetuate disciplinary whiteness and colonization--or ignored/silenced altogether (Dutta, 2007). The author draws upon the meta-theoretical framework of the culture-centered approach (CCA) to outline the organizing role of communication in cocreating voice infrastructures that mobilize at the "margins of the margins" toward structural transformation, placing the body in relationship with Indigenous and Global South struggles for land rights, rights to food, rights to climate justice, rights to universal health and worker rights (Dutta, 2004, 2008, 2018a). Drawing upon experiments with pedagogy we have been carrying out at the Center for Culture-centered Approach to Research and Evaluation (CARE), the essay will explore the methods of health communication campaign design as health advocacy rooted in community democracies. The CCA builds on the critique of decolonization as metaphor to suggest that decolonizing health communication campaigns must turn to the materially anchored communicative work of transforming structures through participation in struggle (Tuck & Yang, 2014). The author specifically attends to the labor of cocreating pedagogies in communities, in classrooms, and in graduate advising spaces, suggesting the necessity of disrupting the boundaries between pedagogies and the boundaries between subdisciplinary areas (health communication, organizational communication, public relations, social change communication, environmental communication, etc.). Critical reflexivity as an embodied collective practice is at the core of the CCA, turning to learn together in partnership with communities, the habits of critique, and accountability (Dutta, 2014). Teaching health communication campaigns adopting the CCA therefore calls for cocreating infrastructures for imagination that actively seek to dismantle settler colonialism, the carceral systems of oppression, racial capitalism, patriarchy, and imperialism. In the work of transforming hegemonic structures, the CCA suggests the value of embodied risks, placed in solidarity with communities and in resistance to hegemonic power structures. The author wraps up the article by exploring academic-activist solidarities as the basis for learning alternative practices of love, courage, and relationality in studies of marginalization and disenfranchisement.
Routledge. Available from: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. 530 Walnut Street Suite 850, Philadelphia, PA 19106. Tel: 800-354-1420; Tel: 215-625-8900; Fax: 215-207-0050; Web site: http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals
Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Descriptive
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A