David Buckingham, The Media Education Manifesto
Silvio Waisbord, The Communication Manifesto
polity
Copyright © Silvio Waisbord 2020
The right of Silvio Waisbord to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2020 by Polity Press
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All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3222-3
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Waisbord, Silvio R. (Silvio Ricardo), 1961- author.
Title: The communication manifesto / Silvio Waisbord.
Description: Cambridge, UK ; Medford, MA : Polity Press, [2019] | Series: Manifesto series | Includes bibliographical references. |
Identifiers: LCCN 2019011786 (print) | LCCN 2019017099 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509532223 (Epub) | ISBN 9781509532193 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509532209 (pbk.)
Subjects: LCSH: Communication--Philosophy.
Classification: LCC P90 (ebook) | LCC P90 .W2185 2019 (print) | DDC 302.23--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019011786
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I am grateful to Mary Savigar for the invitation to contribute to Polity’s series on manifestos in communication and media studies. Her invitation came as I was completing my book on the state of communication studies, also with Polity. The offer was appealing yet daunting. It was an opportunity to develop ideas I had been thinking through for a while, even if the suggested title, The Communication Manifesto, with echoes of Marx and Engels’ masterpiece of the manifesto genre, was intimidating. Also, writing a manifesto, as “poeticized action” in Tristan Tzara’s (1981) definition, was not in my wheelhouse. Prescriptive, actionoriented, rousing briefs were not the preferred style of my written scholarship. I have been more inclined to dissect media and communication questions and parse academic arguments than to urge colleagues to take political action. Eventually, I enthusiastically accepted Mary’s offer after concluding that the manifesto genre is suitable to make an argument for why communication studies needs to step up interventions with non-academic publics.
I have been intrigued about the role of intellectuals in public life since reading Karl Mannheim’s Ideology and Utopia for a sociological theory course in college in 1979, during the last military dictatorship in Argentina. Reading Mannheim’s argument in favor of public intellectualism while I was living under authoritarianism was a jarring and critical moment (perhaps not exactly the intention of the faculty, who had been appointed by the regime). The dictatorship persecuted, tortured, and disappeared intellectuals, scholars, and scientists who were engaged in dissident politics and had worked with political parties, unions, alternative media, guerrilla movements, low-income communities, and social movements. In my mind, Mannheim’s argument endorsed the idea, well established in Latin American intellectual history, that scholars should be actively involved in public affairs beyond the classroom. Knowledge is socially and politically grounded, he argued. My academic surroundings proved his point, even amid military repression of critical thinking. Politics infused virtually everything – curricula, classroom discussions, faculty appointments – before, during, and after the dictatorship. Once the pro-democracy movement gained ascendancy, students’ activism ran high in the streets and university politics. In this context, it was natural to wonder about one’s position in public life, even as a budding scholar.
I continued to ponder these issues after I moved to the United States in the late 1980s and throughout my academic career. These matters became more concrete after I left academia to work on communication research and practice in international development. I regularly collaborated with government agencies, civic society organizations, scientists and technical experts, and activists’ groups. Although this book is not a memoir, it gave me the opportunity to take stock of my thoughts and experiences.
The focus of the book is on public scholarship in communication studies: interventions by communication scholars in the public sphere beyond academic campuses. If manifestos are part sermon, part technical guide, as Terry Eagleton (2017) wonderfully put it, this manifesto hopes to be the latter more than the former. As a reader, I never found the high-minded tone of manifestos engaging, although some examples, notably Thomas Paine’s Common Sense as well as the pamphlets by early twentieth-century artistic vanguards, were hugely formative readings. Like any manifesto, this book makes a normative argument and offers recommendations with the hope to influence conversations and actions.
I benefited from “conversations with a purpose” (Burgess, 1988) with friends and colleagues, many of whom represent the kind of public scholarship that communication studies embraces and should fully support. Special thanks to Amit Schejter, Andrea Palopoli, Bob McChesney, Carmen Gonzalez, Carolyn Bryerly, Carrie Rentschler, Cherian George, Chris Anderson, Claudia Lagos, Dafna Lemish, Eduardo Villanueva, George Villanueva, Holley Wilkin, Iccha Basnyat, Jacqueline Vickery, Jair Vega, Karla Palma, Kate Wright, Larry Gross, Lisa Henderson, Lynn Schofield Clark, Maria Soledad Segura, Martha Fuentes, Michael Delli Carpini, Pablo Boczkowski, Pat Aufderheide, Paula Gardner, Peter Lemish, Phil Napoli, Ralina Joseph, Rasmus Nielsen, Sandra Osses, Sarah Stonbely, Seth Noar, Sonia Livingstone, Stephen Ostertag, Stine Eckert, Talia Stroud, and Vikki Katz. Our conversations helped me to a better understanding of opportunities and challenges for public scholarship, as well as the ways communication studies contributes to a better informed and more egalitarian and tolerant world.
Thanks to Sarah Dicioccio for her excellent assistance with various aspects of this book. I am grateful to Ellen MacDonald-Kramer, Justin Dyer, and everyone else at Polity for their support throughout the process. Two reviewers offered thoughtful feedback.