Journal vol. 4 no. 1

Journal of Latin American Communication Research 4 (1)

Editorial _________________________________________________________ How to promote academic dialogue?

This special issue of the JLACR about "Communication and Media studies: The regional dialogue” is presented as a result of efforts to promote internationalization and cooperative relationship among scholars and scientific entities.

The challenge has been stimulating the regional specificity and contextual embeddedness of theories, methodologies and research traditions, articulating differences as opportunities for the intellectual enrichment of academic communities.

We received and selected texts from ECREA, the European Communication Research and Education Association, NORDICOM (Nordic Information Centre for Media and Communication Research), IAMCR (International Association for Media and Communication Research), ICA (International Communication Association), and from the Latin American Communications Researchers Association (ALAIC) members.

Some JLACR papers ideas were discussed publicly during roundtables at Communication Conferences. In 2011, ECREA and ALAIC created a taskforce and since then the entities have been developing continuous activities together.

The ALAIC-ECREA taskforce organized roundtables to debate international prospective and expose their empirical analyses about the thematic, theoretical and methodological lines that have been followed by different regions in Istanbul (IAMCR 2011 and ECREA 2012), Montevideo (ALAIC 2012), Durban (IAMCR 2012), and Dublin (IAMCR 2013). At ICA International and Regional Conferences, ALAIC members were present at seminars about scientific cooperation in London (2013), and Brasilia (2014).

Another result of ALAIC-ECREA partnership deserves to be mentioned. Inspired by the European Media and Communication Doctoral Summer School, ALAIC supported the experience of the Latin American Communication Summer School, organized by a consortium of universities, at the University of Brasilia in March 2014.

In this issue, César Bolaño (“Latin American Communication Thought and the challenges for the XXI Century: Some theoretical points for a collective and critical new research agenda”) summarizes some ideas about the changes in the capitalist economy and society in the transition from the XX to the XXI Century and emphasizes the importance of the Latin American Political Economy of Communication and Culture in order to develop the global communication field in the collective perspective proposed by the ALAIC-ECREA task force.

Furthermore, the JLACR issue brings complementary manuscripts from European, North and South American researchers. Nico Carpentier, with his article “On Walls, Squares, Bridges and Sqridges. A framework to think about North-South dialogues in communication and media studies”, analyzes antagonism in the academia within a series

Journal of Latin American Communication Research 4 (1) of dimensions, such as political conflict, paradigmatic conflict, linguistic conflict and organizational conflict proposing the notion of the sqridge (square plus bridge) as a space to promote dialogues in academic spaces.

In the article “Media and Communication Research Goes Global. Reflections from a Nordic Horizon”, Ulla Carlsson reinforces the importance of collaboration across frontiers as an interplay of national, regional and international processes, which are is decisive for the development and improvement of the media and communication research field.

Katherine Reilly analyzes the changing world scenario as well. In “Emergent Latin American Theories of International Communication in a Post-Global World”, the researcher considered that the Latin America’s rich tradition of critical international communication research can be improved through an approach to research and knowledge production that emphasizes communication’s emergent epistemic processes of geopolitical production.

In the article “For the democracy of the systems of evaluating academic production: convergences of Latin-American & European scholars”, Aimée Vega Montiel points out the IAMCR role as influencing the policies of scientific production. For that, it would be necessary regular representation of all regions in consultancy bodies of IAMCR attending organizations such as the UNESCO and OECD. Aimée also prescribed more research and publication of regional analyses seeking participation of regional publishing houses and the use of Open Access as tools to promote academic interaction.

At last, in the text “United and fragmented: Communication and media studies in Latin America”, Silvio Waisbord argues that the field remains united yet fragmented in multiple, parallel lines of research. According to him, adopting an analytical position that places theoretical questions at the center will connect to arguments produced in different settings, and contribute to broad debates in the global community of communication and media scholars.

This edition includes an interview with Eliseo Colón Zayas, director of the School of Communication at the University of Puerto Rico and also in charge of ALAIC’s international relations, about the critical school tradition, and the similarities and differences between Latin American and researchers from other regions.

We thank the authors aligned in this issue for offering substantial contributions to promote academic dialogue. A special thank you goes to our partner Nico Carpentier for his permanent support, ability to propose ideas, to develop activities, and to plan regional and international meetings. Thank you also to the Carlos Arcila Calderón, past editor, and to Heloiza G. Herscovitz, current editor, for their dedication to the Journal of Latin American Communication Research.

Fernando Oliveira Paulino Invited Editor and ALAIC board member

Journal of Latin American Communication Research 4(1) Latin American Communication Thought and the challenges for the XXI Century: Theoretical points for a collective and critical new research agenda _____________________________________________________________________ Cesar Bolaño President of ALAIC bolano.ufs@gmail.com Abstract This article aims to offer a theoretical contribution to the dialogue promoted by the Latin American Communication Research Association (ALAIC) and the European Communication Research and Education Association (ECREA), that are developing an important set of actions in order to involve intellectuals in different parts of the world to improve critical thought in the international Communication field.1 Surpassing the lacks and divisions in human knowledge, caused by a variety of institutional and epistemological reasons related to the Western mainstream hegemony, is the main objective of the ALAIC-ECREA task force, as it engages in an international dialogue with macro-regional associations within the field.2

1 The

collaboration begun in 2011, in Istanbul, with a roundtable on the International Association of Media and Communication Research (IAMCR) Conference, and continued in other conferences of IAMCR (Durban, 2012), ECREA (Istanbul, 2012) and ALAIC (Montevideo, 2012). ALAIC traditionally participates in IAMCR, and in all the initiatives related to the Pan American and Iberian American dialogue. It participated actively in the creation of the Iberian American of Communication Associations Confederation (CONFIBERCOM) and organized a special roundtable in the Iberian American Communication Research Association (IBERCOM) Conference, in Santiago de Compostela, Spain, in 2013, inviting the North European Association of Communication Research (NORDICOM), which also participated in the ALAIC Montevideo Conference, in 2012. The roundtable in Santiago was hosted by the Galician association (AGACOM), and included representatives of the Spanish association (AE-IC), and IAMCR. 2 In June 2013, I participated in four international initiatives: The ALAIC seminar, where the organization presented itself – for the first time in 36 years – in an International Communication Association (ICA) conference, which took place in London, in a pre-conference about the BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa), in a very important post-conference with Latin American scholars, and in the ALAIC-ECREA roundtable, in Dublin, where we invited the host association (IAMCR), the NORDICOM, the Asian association (AMIC) and the Chinese Association of Communication (CAC). The objectives were to begin a discussion of a common agenda among macroregional research associations, ‘recognizing that regional diversity is a significant asset to our field, but at the same time drawing attention to the importance of avoiding counterproductive process of intellectual isolationism’, as it was formulated in the presentation of the meeting. On the other hand, it is important to stress that the international activism of ALAIC is combined with a more profound internal activism, exemplified by the dialogue with all Latin American national associations, the coordination of regional meetings on the subcontinent and many other initiatives, aiming to construct a broad space of intellectual exchange in the area. Also dialogues with other Latin American associations, like the one of Social Sciences (ALAS) or Political Economy (SEPLA) have been activated. The final objective is to develop a Latin American critical thought and to retake its historical international relevance in the field. To push internal forces ahead, the improvement of the academic

Journal of Latin American Communication Research 4(1) By defending ‘creative dialogues and exchanges’ in order to avoid inacceptable hierarchies, ALAIC and ECREA claim to contribute to this objective ‘by emphasizing the regional specificity and contextual embeddedness of theories, methodologies and research traditions’ and – referring to previous bilateral initiatives – by ‘critically comparing the strengths and weaknesses, the abundance and gaps, and then articulating these differences as opportunities for the intellectual enrichment of both academic communities’. The constitution, in Dublin 2013, of a regional organization task force, involving ALAIC, ECREA, NORDICOM, AMIC, CAC, in the context of IAMCR (see note 2) intends to extend this goal to the global level.3 The fundamental challenge, in my point of view, is to produce a certain consensus among a group of intellectuals – representative of the different geographical and epistemological areas – based on the recognition of critical thought as a common perspective, that is very important to, but not exclusive of Latin American academy. The objective of this text is to present some theoretical elements, that can help to build a common platform for action in order to rethink the relationship between communication and development, in an era of profound and worldwide changes in the power relations and hegemonies.

What is the role of communication and, in particular, the responsibility of the Communication field during the ongoing changes in the field of science, and in intellectual work in general? Is it possible to think the institutionalization of the field at the global level, appreciating the role of research associations in shaping the political and economic agenda? These questions emphasize the need to propose a large research program that challenges all common sense in the international field. It is not for me to decide here on the main elements of this program - it must be constructed collectively - but I would like to suggest the urgent need to (re)consider the - what I deem to be - central category of communication sciences: the mediation.

Firstly, I would like to summarize some ideas, more extensively developed in other texts, about the fundamental changes in the capitalist economy and society, situated in the transition from the XX to the XXI Century, which also include the intense changes in the communication sectors. Secondly, I will return to the academic

debate in the region is an essential condition for promoting an extended intellectual creativity that merits us our place in the international arena.

3 Some meetings (the roundtables at the conferences of IAMCR/Hyderabad, in July, ALAIC/Lima in August, ECREA/Lisbon, in November) and a special number of the Journal of Latin American Communication Research are planned for 2014, and other actions are in development.

Journal of Latin American Communication Research 4(1) field of Communication, in order to distinguish the Latin American Political Economy of Communication and Culture (EPC) from other Latin American paradigms and, on the other hand, from other international Political Economy perspectives. It is just an example to emphasize the need to consider the different cultural perspectives, historically determined, in the global collective intellectual dialogue in which we are involved. I will finish with the theme of mediation, from the perspective of the development of a new international research program. Of course, we should keep in mind that Latin American thought organized important discussions on these themes, but I am precisely trying to discuss, in different papers, the limits of this approach and to present an alternative related to the tradition of Brazilian PEC. Capitalist global changes and communications: a very brief overview Changes in capitalism, that interests us here, began with the structural crisis in the 1970’s. A good synthetic definition of the changes in the productive system is the idea of the Third Industrial Revolution. The problem is how to define it. I did it by adopting Marx’s definition of an Industrial Revolution, as a matter of the subsunction of work in capital, which involves technological developments. However, it is far from being restricted to it. The essential point for us is that Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), and more specially, the strengthening of software as a concept and a reality, promotes a broad subsunction of intellectual work (at all levels) and a general intellectualization of all labor process and consumption (Bolaño, 1995).

All social relations must be adapted to this dramatic change. An important consequence, for all economic sectors related to what we can name the ‘knowledge economy’, is that the brutal contradiction between the socialization of productive forces and the private appropriation – due to a complex value quantification problem – essentially modifies the character of the system, rendering it rentist and speculative in a much more profound sense than it was during the hegemony of finance capital in the XX century (Bolaño, 2002).

This hegemony now invades the inner production system, and the whole economy is organized as an economy of rights. The impact on the social structure could be understood by mixing Foucault’s concepts of vigilance and control, and Marx’s general intellect. In all cases, it is important to take into account that the

Journal of Latin American Communication Research 4(1) question of rights – as well as the technologies that are at the basis of the changes – also brings emancipatory possibilities, related to the ever-contradictory logic of capitalist development. For us, the most important point is that the capitalist mode of production is, in its essence, more and more informational and communicative.

Communication assumes a central role in the productive system and in all dimensions of life, which makes it a central locus for class struggle. Two consequences are important for our discussion: 1. The complete reorganization of the old mass communication system and the structure of the public sphere. Internet may be the more expressive example. Its constitution - due to economic, political, hegemonic, military determinations involves real changes that activate ancient contradictions in new ways.

2. Communication science is brought into question. The historical link of the discipline, in its genesis, to the USA’s global hegemony is well-known. It is clear, too, that there always has been a confrontation between orthodox and critical thought.

The Latin American perspective (not only in communication) is massively situated in the critical pole.

Another important change related to the international balance of political and economic power must be considered. The old post-war system disappeared in the new conditions that were emphasized before. The present reinforcement of the USA’s military hegemony represents, to a large extent, a reaction to the consequences of the changes, including the collapse of the former Soviet Union. The USA’s economic hegemony started to be put seriously in question in the 1970’s, even when the neoliberal changes supported it, but History did not finish. The rise of China as a serious economic competitor represents an effective challenge to the USA hegemony.4 Every country, all over the world, is repositioned because of the China factor.

It seems to be the final process of the extension of the capitalist mode of production that ends up encompassing every single part of the world. What kind of capitalism is being constructed in this precise moment is a matter of discussion. The structural contradiction involved can be expressed by the shock between the interests related to the mutual economic dependency between China and the US and, on the other hand, the Chinese strategies to construct coalitions like the BRICS, the BIICS, T-BRICS

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On the other hand, even the economic limits of the USA’s impressive global military apparatus were already evident at the end of Bush’s administration.

Journal of Latin American Communication Research 4(1) and so on. It is an interesting case of category construction, both in mind and in the real world.

Some words on Political Economy and the Communication field The complete academic communication field is called not only to explain what is happening, but also to cooperate with the other social sciences to understand the problem in its totality. International dialogue, South-South specially, is fundamental.

Latin American critical thought is crucial to this debate because it represents, among other things, an alternative West, an Indigenous, African, European, even Eastern and Middle Eastern West. The Latin American perspective is democratic, essentially counter-hegemonic, more than multi-cultural, mixed and inclusive.

The Latin American tradition in communication science includes two important and very known perspectives: the old Cultural Imperialism, or Cultural Dependency paradigm, and the Latin American Cultural Studies. A third perspective begins to be more widely disseminated now. Since the 1980s, it has been developed as an internal critique of the first and in a (sometimes tense) dialogue with the second: The Latin American Political Economy of Communication and Culture (EPC), that sometimes includes the political economy of information, telecommunications, knowledge, depending on the author, the text, or the specific research particularities.

It is important to keep in mind that Latin American or even, to be more strict, Brazilian EPC is quite different from similar Anglo-American or European approaches because of its particular genesis and intellectual influences. I will just give three examples, in order to illustrate the point: 1. The problem of creativity and the creative industries, that we are discussing in Brazil, adopts a very different approach than that of the European political economy by the incorporation of Celso Furtado’s concept of culture and his discussions about dependency and creativity in the diffusion of industrial civilization, especially (but not only) in his works from the 1970s. The European PEC organized a very good critique of the concept of creative economy, as it was developed, for example, by Tony Blairs’ New Labor in Great Britain. I agree, of course, with these criticisms, but I want to insist that creativity is a disputed concept. In this sense, it is not useful to remain stuck in a semantic discussion because the structural changes (to which I referred above) expand, in fact, the intellectual, cognitive, creative elements of work to every economic sector (Bolaño, 2012).

Journal of Latin American Communication Research 4(1) 2. The political economy of the Internet, which I am studying in the Federal University of Sergipe’s Economy and Communication Observatory (OBSCOM). I produced recently a modest paper where I stress the differences between my own perspective and that of Christian Fuchs, directly influenced by Dallas Smythe 5 , recognized as the founder of Anglo American approach in the area (Bolaño and Vieira, 2014). The central question is related to the incredible mistake of defining, in imagined Marxist terms, audience activities as productive labor (in watching TV, in the case of Dallas Smythe, or in navigating the web, in Fuchs’s perspective).

3. The Anglo American and European authors’ preoccupation in redefining cultural imperialism, in Schiller’s conceptualization (Sparks, 2012; Fuchs, 2010), which it is irrelevant in Latin America today. The related concept of cultural dependency, on the contrary, is still very important. From the same Furtado, and all the members of the Latin American Historic-Structuralism school, to the theorists of Cultural Dependency, passing by Dependency Theories, and later, in Communication, the critics from the Cultural Studies and from the Political Economy perspectives, the concept has had a long and complex history on the continent, and its development has not ended (Bolaño, 2012).

The only authors that participated in this long history, referred to by, for example, Sparks or Fuchs, are Mattelart (with a book published in English) and Gunder Frank. This is not the fault of Sparks, or Fuchs, or any other Anglo American or European author. I am not questioning their contributions. Sparks’ (2012) article, for instance, presents a schematic summary of the Anglophonic discussions about the cultural imperialism concept, which can be useful. It has an interesting analysis of the contemporary international cultural competition. And Fuchs (2010) revisits Lenin’s concept of imperialism, in parallel to a discussion on the organization of the information sector today, and he is presenting interesting data. However, the Latin American debate is much richer.6 I want to risk saying that the Latin American approach is more complete (and more general) because, in the case of historic-structuralism (that has no relation to French structuralism) because it is able to consider both, development and

5 I discussed Dallas

Smythe’s most known work by a theoretical approach and systematically (Bolaño, 2000).

6 I strongly recommend Furtado’s books from the 1970’s, specially the very well-known Dependência e criatividade na civilização industrial (Furtado, 1978). It is a pity that it was not taken into account by the Communication field until recent years, even in Latin America. The present recuperation of his culture concept in Brazil, however, is a very optimistic tendency.

Journal of Latin American Communication Research 4(1) underdevelopment, as two related tendencies of the same problematic cultural diffusion process. On the other hand, Latin American scholars developed the wellknown concept of mediation that is at the core of the communication field, at least in my point of view. But I define it in a different way.

My emphasis, to summarize my position, is on the limitations of the more traditional approach that is devoted to the analysis of reception but neglect creative work in order to show the capacity of the resistance of the audience. I do not want to question the audience’s interpretative capacities, but I do want to point to the risk of bypassing the problem of class contradictions, which leads to exaggerating the audience’s autonomy in the reception process.

I proposed a more general perspective on the problem of capitalism and communication, based on the recognition of a double contradiction in the essence of capitalism (labor-capital/economy-culture) that began with the fundamental accumulation of primitive knowledge during the origins of the capitalist mode of production and the origins of the cultural industry. On the other hand, mediation is a matter of social regulation that assumes, in monopolist capitalism, the form of a set of contradictory functions that the cultural industry must accomplish: propaganda, publicity, but also certain needs related to the symbolic reproduction of the Lebenswelt. This general perspective is able to incorporate the contributions of both Latin American critical approaches (Political Economy and Cultural Studies), at a very high level of abstraction (Bolaño, 2000).

It is even possible to construct analytical models for articulating the work of interdisciplinary collectives in a common framework. Each participant would, of course, bring specialized methodologies to study concrete problems and to propose solutions. Many different skills are required. In epistemological terms, the problem is not to reject simply the mainstream paradigm, which not only has a negative function (ideology), but also a positive one (manipulating). Both are effective, and they legitimate communication science (and its skills) through capital and the state. In the bourgeois consciousness, communication can be only propaganda or publicity and social control. What is needed is its immanent critique, that is, both the ideology critique and the critique of the capitalist society in its concrete manifestations, revealing its contradictions.

At the level of theory construction, the problem is to understand how the contradictions of capitalist society nowadays present themselves in new concrete

Journal of Latin American Communication Research 4(1) ways, organizing the communication systems. How is labor subsumed in the different cultural and creative industries? How can contra-hegemonic interests act in these new social and communicational contexts? A complete theory – articulated at macro and micro levels – is required to answer these questions. The capitalist mode of production is changing in its foundations, and information and communication are fundamental in these changes. Internet, ICT, etc. are responsible for a large colonization of the Lebenswelt (creating a control society), but also for the changes in the organization and actions of the social movements. No relativist approach is acceptable when what we need is to understand the real contradictions of the system, when real technological possibilities are masked by technological fetishism.

At the analytical level, the problem is to define flexible analytical models, in order to facilitate cooperation among the different researchers involved in specific projects related to specific social/communicational problems. It is an intermediate level that guarantees the wider dialogue, including methodological and empirical questions, and political solutions, for example, related to cultural policy, social policy, popular culture and hegemony, etc. It is clear that, in a vast research program, involving all the critical perspectives from the field, no consensus is possible at the methodological level, but mutual comprehension remains crucial.

The main challenge, not just for Latin American, but for all critical thought in communication science, is to reclaim leadership in the international field, on the basis of its historical contributions, facing a new social, political, economic, communicational context. The Latin American social reality is rich in culture and in contradictions that can excite our sociological imagination. Cognitive creativity and innovations in mental tools are fundamental. Collaborative working and international dialogue are just as important.

Bibliography Bolaño, C.R.S. (1995). Economia política, globalização e comunicação. In: C. R.S. Bolaño (org.), Globalização e regionalização das comunicações. São Paulo: EDUC, 73-95. _________ (2000). Indústria Cultural, informação e capitalismo. São Paulo: HUCITEC [an English version is in process].

Journal of Latin American Communication Research 4(1) _________ (2002). Trabalho intellectual, comunicação e capitalism. A reconfiguração do fator subjetivo na atual reestruturação produtiva. Revista da Sociedade Brasileira de Economia Política (SEP), Rio de Janeiro, 11, 53-78. [An extended version is published in English: Intellectual work, communication and capitalism: The reconfiguration of the subjective factor in the current productive reorganization. In: Bolaño, C.; Mastrini, G.; & Sierra, F. (2012). Political Economy, Communication and Knowledge: A Latin American perspective. New York: Hampton Press, 11-34. ___________ (2012). Campo Aberto: para a crítica da epistemologia da comunicação.

Aracaju: OBSCOM. To be published.

Bolaño, C. R.S.; Vieira, E. (2014). The political economy of he Internet: Social networking sites and a replay to Fuchs. Television and New Media JCR, 15, 10-17.

Fuchs, C. (2010). New Imperialism: Information and media imperialism? Global Media and Communication, 6 (1), 33-60.

Furtado, C. (1978). Dependência e criatividade na civilização industrial. São Paulo: Paz e Terra.

Sparks, C. (2012). Media and cultural imperialism reconsidered. Chinese Journal of Communication, 5 (3), September, 281-299.

Journal of Latin American Communication Research 4 (1) On Walls, Squares, Bridges and Sqridges A framework to think about North-South dialogues in communication and media studies1 ________________________________________________________________ Nico Carpentier nico.carpentier@vub.ac.be ECREA Abstract This article analyses the workings of antagonism in academia, within a series of dimensions, such as political conflict, paradigmatic conflict (triggered by particular academic ontologies, epistemiologies, axiologies and methodologies), linguistic conflict and organizational conflict (triggered by competitive cultures and market-driven logics). After a discussion of different antagonisms, grounded in the European (academic) experiences of the author, the article then turns its attention to two trajectories that have the potential to overcome these divides: the fantasy of homogeneity and the recognition that conflict can be transformed from antagonism to agonism. The problem with the first trajectory lies in the post-political ignorance of conflict and diversity, which contradicts the need to structurally acknowledge the existence of conflict at the ontological level. For this reason, the second trajectory is preferred and used to support an analysis of the thresholds that hinder dialogues in these agonistic academic spaces, and of ways to overcome them. The article concludes with a discussion of two metaphors - the bridge and the square - and their capacity to signifythese agonistic academic spaces. As the argument is made to combine both metaphors, the notion of the sqridge is proposed.

Introduction – Divisions in academia Academia has a long history of division. As one of the social fields, integrated into national contexts and their political realities, academia has not escaped from these divisions. Let me start with briefly touching upon two divides that are deeply (geo-) political. During the cold war, when - to use Winston Churchill’s ideological concept – an iron curtain had descended across the (European) continent, most academics found themselves disconnected from their colleagues on the ‘other’ side. The circulation of knowledge was obstructed by a combination of material and discursive elements, such as, for instance, the lack of mobility and ideologically-inspired distrust. Of course, some academics (and their work) overcame these limitations, as Richmond’s (2003) book, with the rather telling title Cultural Exchange and the Cold War: Raising the Iron Curtain, shows. High-profile collaborations, such as the Nobel prize winning collaboration between the economists Koopmans and Kantorovich (see Bockman and Bernstein, 2008), and academic peace activism, such as the Pugwash movement (which also won a Nobel prize, for peace, in 1995) (Evangelista, 1999) certainly existed, but at the same time, the obstructions caused by the East-West divide played a significant role in limiting academic exchange and knowledge-sharing. To give only one example: One cannot but wonder whether the role of the Tartu–Moscow Semiotic School (see Waldstein, 2008) could not have been more influential, and the work of academics like Yuri Lotman could not

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Some of the discussions in this article are based on Carpentier (2010).

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Journal of Latin American Communication Research 4 (1) have circulated more, if they would not have found themselves on the ‘other’ side of the divide than French structuralism.

The second divide, between North and South Cyprus, is maybe less well-known, but has been equally disruptive. In contrast to the Cold War, this divide is still very present, as this island in the Mediterranean is characterized by a long-lasting conflict. Cyprus has been geographically and ethnically divided since 1974 when Turkey invaded the north and occupied 38% of the island, after decades of inter-communal tensions and violence between the two major communities, Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots. This also has consequences for Cypriot academia, as the following description of the legal status of the Northern Cypriot universities, with the strategic and continuous use of citation marks illustrates. It is the official position of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Cyprus (2012): “The ‘universities’ operating in the area of the Republic of Cyprus which remains under Turkish military occupation since 1974, are unlawfully operating ‘educational institutions’, since they are not in compliance with the relevant Laws and Regulations of the Republic of Cyprus on Higher Education. Therefore, these ‘institutions’, as well as the ‘qualifications’ they award, are not recognized by the Republic of Cyprus.”

Again, there are exceptions that show that cross-divide research is possible. The research financed and published by the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) is a prime example, with the report Media Narratives, Politics and the Cyprus Problem, edited by Christophorou, Sahin and Pavlou (2010) as one of the many significant outputs. Also the work of the Association for Historical Dialogue & Research (AHDR)2 needs to be mentioned here, as they try to reconcile the island’s different historical narratives. But again, academic collaboration across the Cypriot divide is not easy, and many thresholds remain.

These two political divides illustrate the obvious point that academia cannot escape the dynamics of antagonism, but also that academia is one of the locations where attempts are organised to overcome these divides. Secondly, these short narrations about the two political divides also illustrate that these (academic) divides are not only material, but also discursive, where both sides (can) become entrenched in opposite ideological positions, fed by distrust and the suspicion of ulterior motives. As the narrations about these two divides contain many elements that characterise antagonism in academia, they form the starting point of a reflection on the different antagonisms in academia. This, in turn, raises the question of how to overcome these academic antagonisms. After a discussion of different antagonisms, grounded in the European (academic) experiences of the author, the article then turns its attention to two trajectories that have the potential to overcome these divides: the fantasy of homogeneity and the recognition that conflict can be transformed from antagonism to agonism. The second trajectory is grounded in Mouffe’s (2005, 2013) work on agonism, which will be applied to academic conflict, and combined with a series of examples. In the conclusion, the second trajectory will also be enriched by a discussion on metaphors that try to capture dialogue and collaboration within a framework of diversity and conflict.

Antagonistic conflict in academia

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http://www.ahdr.info/home.php 2

Journal of Latin American Communication Research 4 (1) Underneath a layer of academic civility, often fierce struggles take place, whose objective can be described by making use of Tuchman’s (1972) concept of symbolic annihilation, and its three structuring aspects (omission, trivialisation and condemnation). The ruptures (or frontlines, to use a military metaphor) in academia often take the form of antagonistic divides, where particular academic ontologies, epistemiologies, axiologies, methodologies, but also other (academic) practices are defined as strange to academia, and become constructed as its constitutive outside3. These antagonisms also impact on academic identities, where propagators of particular knowledges are positioned using the friend/foe distinction. Inspired

by Mouffe (2005), we can return to the work of Schmitt (1996) on this matter, and his definition of the enemy as whoever is “in a specially intense way, existentially something different and alien, so that in the extreme case conflicts with him are possible.” (Schmitt, 1996: 27) Sometimes, these antagonisms are organised on a spatial base, pitching different regions against each other, or time-based, when ideas of different eras (and generations) conflict, but in many other cases these antagonisms characterise (and disrupt) particular academic communities within the same space and time zones.

Obviously, these antagonistic divides only very rarely result in violence4, but this does not mean that their intensity is limited. Despite common beliefs5, there is much at stake, as antagonistic positions all have very strong claims towards understanding social reality, and the resulting power struggles are located at every possible level of academia. These microphysics of power are played out in publications (and the reviewing processes that allow texts to be published or not), at conferences, in appointment and promotion committees, and in departmental meetings, with the objective to omit particular approaches, and to trivialise and condemn particular knowledges. At the same time, the intensity of these struggles is cloaked by academic politeness, professional group solidarity and collective interest, a lack of academic self-reflexivity and a lack of dialogue between the sociology (and philosophy) of knowledge and other academic fields and disciplines. Although academic analyses of academic struggle and antagonism exist, such as, for instance, Scandalous Knowledge by Hernnstein Smith (2006), the dark sides of these conflicts are often exposed in more literary works, such as, for instance, Hermans’ (1975) critique on a Dutch university in Onder Professoren [Amongst Professors].

One area where academic antagonism has manifested itself is in the so-called paradigm wars.

Paradigms are significant, because they, as academic ideologies, structure academic knowledge production. In Ritzer’s (1980: 7) words, “a paradigm is a fundamental image of the subject matter within a science,” and as such they combine three basic dimensions (ontology, epistemology and axiology6). Focussing on sociology as a “multiple paradigm science”, Ritzer (1980: 158) explicitly points to the existence of struggles between fields and disciplines, where “each of its paradigms is competing for hegemony within the discipline as a whole as well as within virtually every sub-area within sociology.” Before Ritzer, Kuhn (1962), using a more mono-paradigmatic approach and in a rather depersonalised way, described the struggle between paradigms and the scientific revolutions that lead to the replacement of one paradigm by another (which can be translated as their symbolic

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As Laclau and Mouffe (1985) argued, we should not forget that antagonisms have both negative and positive aspects, as they attempt to destabilise the “other” identity but at the same time desperately need that “other” as a constitutive outside stabilising their own identity.

4 As always, there are notable exceptions, such as the Unabomber (Chase, 2003).

5 This implies my disagreement with Sayre’s law, with states: “In any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the issues at stake issue—that is why academic politics are so bitter.” (quoted in Issawi, 1973: 178) 6 Sometimes also methodology is mentioned as a component of paradigms.

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Journal of Latin American Communication Research 4 (1) annihilation). But we should not forget that these paradigmatic wars impact on academics and their institutions. Gage (1989: 6) describes the consequences of the victory of qualitative research over the quantitative in the research of teaching: “Faculty members, graduate students, and research workers were convinced of the futility of the old way of studying teaching. In schools of education, enrollment declined in courses in tests and measurements, statistics, experimental design, and survey research. [...] Research grants and contracts from foundations and governmental sources became virtually unobtainable for objective-quantitative researchers. The Division of Educational Psychology of the American Psychological Association saw its membership shrink to about a fourth of what it had been during the 1980s. [...] The journals that published research on teaching contained almost no articles reporting tests of statistical significance, correlation coefficients, effect sizes, or meta-analyses. Instead, they were filled with reports on ethnographic studies of classroom phenomena and by sociopolitical and economic analyses of the ways in which teachers, curricula, and schools perpetuated the unjust social order.”

One of the areas where the paradigmatic struggles have been at their worst is the struggle between constructivism and realism. Smith (2006) for instance refers to Mohanty’s (1992) work on literary theory, who (in Smith’s reading) uses the “common dismissal of relativism as transparently absurd” in his argument that “contemporary literary/cultural theory is beset by a debilitating scepticism about the possibility of rational argument and objective knowledge that would be relieved by better acquaintance with the accounts of knowledge and language developed some years back […].” (Smith, 2006: 34) Another example is the Sokal hoax, in which a physics professor at New York University managed to get a fake article published in Social Text (which at the time was not using peer review). Later, in the book Intellectual Impostures, co-authored with Bricmont, Sokal (1998) thoroughly critiqued the use of science jargon in postmodern theory; a critique which was problematically conflated with a much less well-argued critique on the ontology of postmodern theory itself.

A second area of paradigmatic struggle is between critical and administrative research (see e.g. Melody & Mansell, 1983; Smythe & Van Dinh, 1983; Nordenstreng, 2009). Here, the confrontation is mostly located at the axiological level, between academic positions and identities that defend a “confrontation with unnecessary and illegitimate constraints on human equality, community and freedom” (Carpentier & Dahlgren, 2013: 304) versus the belief in an academia that can (and has to) be value-free. Related to this we can find (mainly, but not exclusively, with critical researchers) a concern for the instrumentalisation of research, and “the need to sometimes privilege non-functionality (not unlike in the Arts), or to maintain control on which type of relevance to privilege.” (Carpentier, 2010: 131 – my translation) This opens up another realm of fierce academic struggle, namely between academia and policy-makers.

This can be illustrated by an earlier analysis (Carpentier, 2010) of EU documents in relation to research and teaching. Through this analysis, the grounds for concern about the instrumentalisation of research became visible. Apart from the slightly vague references to societal relevance, the strong emphasis on the economic functionality of research and education was particularly evident in these documents. This was first of all translated into a strong emphasis on technology and the sciences. Nordenstreng (2009: 261) has called this fashionable dominance of technology the “Nokia-syndrome”. These material choices are moreover embedded in discourses of competiveness and (technological) innovation,

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Journal of Latin American Communication Research 4 (1) articulating academic research and education as important contributions to enhancing Europe’s competitive (economic) position. One document where we can find this discursive emphasis is the 2007 Council Resolution on Modernising Universities for Europe’s Competitiveness in a Global Knowledge Economy. In this resolution, the Council of the European Union (2007: 4) reaffirms: “The role of universities, through education, research and innovation, in the transfer of knowledge to the economy and society as a main contribution to Europe’s competitiveness and the need for closer cooperation between academia and the world of enterprise.” In the same document we also find another reference to the functionality approach of European academia, as the university’s educational programmes are also considered key instruments in the labour market policies. The modernisation discourse is used to legitimise this instrumentalisation of academic pedagogies.

For this reason, the member states are invited “to strengthen [the universities’] capacity to modernise their curricula to meet labour market and learner needs more effectively.” (Council of the European Union, 2007: 5) Another significant area of antagonism is related to the development of English as an academic lingua franca, which is one of the most visible effects of the westernisation of academia. The introduction of a lingua franca has benefitted communication and exchange within academia, particularly in Europe. To use McQuail’s (2008) words: “The wide use of English as a lingua franca has, somewhat paradoxically, been itself a vehicle for convergence and for the emergence of something like a European identity for the field.” Yet there are a considerable number of negative consequences linked to the domination of a lingua franca, and this has provoked resistance from academic communities in other parts of the world, often located in the global South, but also in European countries like France. We should not forget that language is for many people more than just a communicational tool. It is an argument well-captured by De Cillia (2002: 8) when he says that “languages are far more than just media of communication […] the mother tongue is the central symbol of individual and collective identity, a symbol which represents belonging to a certain ethnic group, to a certain language community.” It is also argued - and I tend to subscribe to that argument - that the domination of one language might reduce conceptual diversity and impoverish our academic language(s) and writing styles. Livingstone’s (2005 – see also Meinhof, 2005) mapping of the signifiers audience and public, shows how different words in different languages allow emphasising different aspects of the meanings of these crucial signifiers. In other words, social-communicative processes are not easily captured by one specific concept, and linguistic diversity does play a significant role.

As academics are (in most cases) embedded within universities, with their particular structures of departments, faculties and schools, these organisational structures become the prime locations of these antagonisms, as academics enter into competition with their colleagues over scarce material and symbolic resources. These struggles are intermingled and strengthened by interpersonal conflicts triggered by, for instance, clashing personalities. One illustration of these departmental wars comes from a blog posting by Tallmadge (2010), describing the conflicts a colleague found himself lodged in: “As we traded stories, it became clear that he had actually fought in many battles, from which he still bore scars. He had nurtured junior colleagues only to see them denied tenure; his scholarship had been publicly attacked by ideologues; he had armwrestled with deans for the resources needed to sustain a nascent environmental studies program that is now regarded as one of the best in the nation; he had been

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Journal of Latin American Communication Research 4 (1) tempted by offers of high-ranking administrative positions that would have given him power at the expense of family, community, and teaching.”

Weber, in Science as a Vocation (2004[1918]), formulated a more disturbing perspective on academia, when discussing what to say to young scholars that came to seek advice about the habilitation, they (as long as they are not Jewish, according to Weber7) must be asked this question: “Do you believe that you can bear to see one mediocrity after another being promoted over your head year after year, without becoming embittered and warped?’

Needless to say, you always receive the same answer: of course, I live only for my ‘vocation’ – but I, at least, have found only a handful of people who have survived this process without injury to their personality.” (Weber, 2004[1918]: 7) An even stronger formulation of a critique on the narrow-mindedness and shallowness of academics in dealing with colleagues (and thus the internal antagonisms) can be found the above-mentioned Dutch book Onder Professoren [Amongst Professors], published by Hermans’ (1975). The author of this fictional account was a geographer at the Dutch State University of Groningen from 1952 until 1973. After resigning from his position, Hermans wrote a vile critique of academic life, centred around the main character of chemistry professor Rufus Dingelam, who in this story wins the Nobel prize for a discovery done 20 years earlier. This award-winning substance (Alicodrin) is a whitener that can be used for washing, but derivatives were also used as a medicine against epilepsy and to increase potency. After the news is announced, Dingelam is confronted with his colleagues’ jealousy and hostility, self-interest and hypocrisy. Together with a student occupation of his laboratory, this eventually forces him to flee to Monaco.

The internal struggles and the competition for scarce material or discursive resources are further enhanced by existing cultures of competition within academia and by the increasing role of market-driven logics. An academic competitive culture is based on vertical hierarchies which are grounded in quality criteria. Refined categorisation systems (often created by academics) are used to produce these hierarchies, which are fed by the idea that is it possible to rank its objects, align them on a particular scale and determine the existence of a very best.

Examples can be found in the awarding of prizes (the Nobel prize is one example that has been referred to in this article), but also in the ranking of universities8, the categorisation of academic journals or of candidates for academic positions. An academic competitive culture is structurally different than a culture of excellence, which is not grounded in a ranking system, but in a threshold system that defines criteria for excellence but does not encounter the need to discriminate within the category of the excellent, and that is equally interested in developing support strategies to achieve excellence for those who have not achieved this status. For instance, in relation to journal reviewing, a culture of excellence stimulates journals editors and reviewers to work with authors to improve their texts, while (the worst excesses of) an academic competitive culture, or what Gill (2009: 239) calls “the peculiarly toxic conditions of neoliberal academia” results in reviews9 such as the following:

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Disturbingly, for Jewish students the advice is different: “lasciate ogni speranza” (Weber, 2004[1918]: 7), which translates as: “Abandon all hope.”

8 For an analysis of the universities’ “competition to become prestigious” (Breault & Callejo Parez, 2013: 2), see Breault’s and Callejo Parez’s (2013) book The Red Light in the Ivory Tower.

9 Another review that Gill quotes is this one: “I heard yesterday that my article for x journal was turned down. (Oh no!) You know, the one I worked on for ages and ages. I poured so much of myself into that piece (I know). And one of the referee’s comments was vile – it said something like ‘my first year undergraduates have a better understanding of the field than this author does -- why are they wasting all of our time.’” (a conversation between “a female friend” and the author, quoted in Gill, 2009: 228) 6

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“This paper will be of no interest to readers of x (journal name). Discourse analysis is little more than journalism and I fail to see what contribution it can make to understanding the political process. It is self evident to everyone except this author that politics is about much more than ‘discourse’. What’s more, in choosing to look at the speeches of Margaret Thatcher, the author shows his or her complete parochialism.

If you are going to do this kind of so-called ‘analysis’ at least look at the discourse of George Bush.” (Gill, 2009: 238) Secondly, also the increasing role of market-driven logics enhances antagonism. One area where these market-driven logics have had severe impact, is academic publishing. The dominance of commercial publishers has had a problematic impact on the accessibility of academic writing10, has removed the (textual) ownership from academics, and has excessively used free (academic) labour. In a recent interview, Brenner (2014), professor of Genetic medicine at the University of Cambridge and yet another Nobel prize winner (in Physiology/Medicine in 2002), harshly critiques these exploitative publishing models, and the antagonism embedded in them: “[...] the journals insist they will not publish your paper unless you sign that copyright over. It is never stated in the invitation, but that’s what you sell in order to publish.

And everybody works for these journals for nothing. There’s no compensation.

There’s nothing. They get everything free. They just have to employ a lot of failed scientists, editors who are just like the people at Homeland Security, little power grabbers in their own sphere.

If you send a PDF of your own paper to a friend, then you are committing an infringement. Of course they can’t police it, and many of my colleagues just slap all their papers online. I think you’re only allowed to make a few copies for your own purposes. It seems to me to be absolutely criminal.”

In some cases, the market-driven approach of academic publishers has provoked stronger resistance, as in the case when in 2006 the entire editorial board of the mathematics journal Topology resigned, to protest against Elsevier’s pricing policies. In their letter of resignation11, they argue that this pricing policy “has had a significant and damaging effect on Topology’s reputation in the mathematical research community.” At the end of 2013, Schekman (2013) – yes, yet again a Nobel prize winner – announced his boycott of what he called “luxury journals”: “chiefly Nature, Cell and Science.”

But also the university itself has not been spared from the market-driven logics. Stabile (2007: 3) argues that from the earliest days of the university, advocates “of employing a competitive market approach to academia by stressing monetary gain as an incentive” have existed, and interestingly links the non-market driven approach to virtue, and the market driven approach to sophism. More recently, universities, and their employees, have been exposed to what Gill (2009: 230) calls the “increasing corporatisation and privatisation of the University”, which produce new and more intense antagonisms:

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Commercial publishers have resorted to using an semi-open access model, in which authors (or their funders) now pay very considerable amounts of money to provide readers with unrestricted access to their work.

11 math.ucr.edu/home/baez/topology-letter.pdf. See also Shapiro (2006).

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Journal of Latin American Communication Research 4 (1) “These include the importing of corporate models of management into University life; the reformulation of the very nature of education in instrumental terms connected to business and the economy; the transformation of students into ‘consumers’; and the degradation of pay and working conditions for academics, as well as the increasing casualisation of employment, yet with little organized resistance from trade unions or other bodies.” (Gill, 2009: 230-231) For instance at the level of university governance and project management, market-driven management use discourses of modernisation, responsabilisation, rationalisation, costreduction and efficiency. The struggle is still ongoing and some universities have maintained their decentralised decision-making structures that aim to guarantee internal (organisational) democracy and autonomy, for instance through the rotation of positions of power. Moreover, in these more traditional models, these universities are governed by academics that take on administrative-managerial tasks, and not by managers that remain detached from the academic activity as such. The increased entry of market-driven managers into the university’s decision-making structures leads to a different managerial culture, fundamentally alters the power balance within the universities and produces antagonistic relations within the university, often to the detriment of academics.

One anecdotal illustration of the consequences of the introduction of a market-driven managerial culture (and the antagonism it provokes) can be found in Frank Furedi’s (2004) introduction of Where Have All the Intellectuals Gone? Confronting 21st Century Philistinism.

In this introduction he explains the rationale for writing his book, directly referring to the reaction of a “senior university manager” (Furedi, 2004: 1) to an earlier article Furedi wrote (entitled What is the University For Now?) in which he pointed out that “students could spent an entire year at university without reading a whole book.” (Furedi, 2004: 1) The response of that “senior university manager” critiqued Furedi for assuming that “books should have a privileged status in higher education. ‘The tone of the article was to suggest that you can dismiss as undemanding any programme in which students do not read “whole books”‘, he [the senior university manager] complained.” (Furedi, 2004: 1-2) Trajectories of overcoming antagonistic conflict These antagonisms are widespread, but not omnipresent. Academia is also characterised by many forms of co-existence, recognition of diversity and collaboration. But at the same time, conflict remains very much part of academia itself. Following the discourse-theoretical position (Laclau & Mouffe, 1985), which is very much influenced by a sociology of conflict, conflict is seen as an ontological condition which structures the social, which necessarily also impacts on academia. But at the same time, antagonistic conflict is only one way to articulate conflict - based on a dichotomised friend/foe structure - and other ways are possible to overcome the antagonistic articulation of conflict without ignoring the existence of conflict itself. The re-articulation of antagonism into agonism is one trajectory that will be discussed here (in part 3.2), but before going there we need to discuss one other trajectory that deals with antagonistic conflict, and that is its ignorance by reverting to the fantasy of homogeneity.

Trajectory 1: The fantasy of homogeneity The fantasy of the universality and homogeneity of academic spaces is based on what Stavrakakis (1999: 96) calls “an ethics of harmony”, a desire for reality to be coherent and harmonious. This fantasy defines the (a) social as a whole, whose components are all equal

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Journal of Latin American Communication Research 4 (1) and similar. As a fantasy, it is of course not restricted to academia, and we can find many of its variations in other spheres of the social. For instance, in the nationalist variation of this fantasy, there is a national community which is an inseparable whole; while in the populist variation, the people are seen as the whole. In the academic variation, the fantasy of homogeneity consists in the desire for a consensus at the paradigmatic level (and its sublevels of ontology, epistemology and axiology), for full understanding despite linguistic differences, for the transcendence of political and cultural conflict, for frictionless collegialities and interdisciplinary dialogues, for the perfect collaboration with other segments of the social and for the final and ultimate resolution of difference.

One illustration of this fantasy can be found in the fragmentation / cohesion debate in the field of communication and media studies, as it is rendered in Craig’s (2008) summary of the successive special issues of the Journal of Communication on The Future of the Field: Between Fragmentation and Cohesion from 1993. There Craig writes: “Some saw the continuing fragmentation of the field as a problem; others celebrated fragmentation as an invaluable source of adaptive strength. Some called urgently for efforts to define the intellectual focus of the discipline; others just as urgently insisted that any such effort to define a theoretical core would be not only useless but counter-productive.” Particularly on the cohesion side of the debate, there is a strong belief that such a cohesion-generating consensus can (and has to) be achieved, effectively defining the core of the discipline, and using the problematising label of fragmentation to describe academic (paradigmatic) diversity.

It is important to stress that the notion of fantasy is used here in a non-orthodox Lacanian meaning. Common sense meanings of this concept tend to be almost exclusively negative, but in Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, fantasy is conceptualised as having (among others) a protective role (Lacan, 1979: 41), and remains connected to drive and desire, which also shows fantasy’s generative capacities. In relation to academia, this implies that the fantasy of homogeneity is a driving force for academic collaboration and exchange, grounded in the belief that mutual (and full) understanding can be achieved, and that all conflicts can eventually be resolved.

At the same time the academic fantasy of homogeneity becomes frustrated by a number of contingencies and dislocations, which make diversity reappear. Not unlike Lefort’s (1988) reflection on the empty place of power in contemporary democracies, we can say that the heart of academia, and its disciplines, is empty, but at the same time filled by a continuous stream of practices at the level of research, pedagogy, representation and (public) intervention. Different paradigms, pedagogical ideologies, individuals and organisations struggle for control of the empty heart of academia, in order to position themselves on one of the thrones of knowledge, only to be dethroned soon after or to have the phantasm disrupted by the presence of other academic discourses or institutions with similar claims.

There is also a dark side to the academic fantasy of homogeneity, as it can feed hegemonising strategies that make antagonism reappear by excluding what (or who) is defined as outside.

After all, if the Other is seen to threaten a community’s enjoyment, we can then turn against “the Other who stole it from us.” (Žižek, 1998: 209) Of course, as Mouffe (2005: 15; emphasis in original) remarks, not every we/they turns into an antagonistic friend/enemy relationship, but we should “acknowledge that, in certain conditions, there is always the possibility that this we/they can become antagonistic, that is, can turn into a relation of friend/enemy.” To use nationalism as an example: Žižek (1993: 201) points to the enjoyment this sense of belonging generates. He writes: “The element which holds together a particular

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Journal of Latin American Communication Research 4 (1) community cannot be reduced to the point of symbolic identification: the bond linking together its members always implies a shared relation toward a Thing, toward Enjoyment incarnated.” A similar process of othering can occur in academia, when a particular paradigm, approach, group, … has achieved a hegemonic (power) position that can enable them, in a very post-political way, to declare the fantasy of homogeneity realised, at the expense of a series of others.

Trajectory 2: Agonism and academia The problem with the first trajectory lies in the post-political ignorance of conflict and diversity, which contradicts the need to structurally acknowledge the existence of conflict at the ontological level. This means that we should avoid articulating the notion of conflict as intrinsically problematic, or as avoidable, but find ways to reconcile conflict and diversity with the (democratic) principles of academia. Consequently, the issue is not to suppress conflict, but to encapsulate it in a democratic-academic order.

To provide a theoretical basis for this second trajectory, we can make use of Mouffe’s (2005) reinterpretation of the work of Schmitt (1996) (and his friend/foe distinction) in order to theorise the need to shift from an antagonistic enemy model to an agonistic adversary model.

Agonism is seen to transform the antagonistic relationship into a “we/they relation where the conflicting parties, although acknowledging that there is no rational solution to their conflict, nevertheless recognize the legitimacy of their opponents.” (Mouffe, 2005: 20) In other words, an agonistic relationship does not hide the differences in position and interest between the involved parties; they are “in conflict” but “share a common symbolic space within which the conflict takes places.” (Mouffe, 2005: 20, see also Mouffe, 2013: 7).

In the context of academia this position first of all implies the acknowledgement of conflict within academia, and of the conflicts of academia with other fields of the social (e.g., commercial publishing, academic policies, …). From this perspective, conflict, and the diversity that lies behind it, is unavoidable and should not be ignored (as the fantasy of homogeneity does), or erased and (symbolically) annihilated (as antagonism does). The agonistic position leads to a multi-perspectivist, contextualised and dialogical approach to academia that stimulates communication between different academic positions, but also accepts that they are sometimes irreconcilable and that enforced reconciliations are more weakening academia than they are strengthening it.

Agonistic approaches to academia recognise that there are different pathways to theorise and research social phenomena and that the combination (whether the elements are articulated or not) enrich a particular field of study. These approaches also take into account the contexts of the different academic positions, in order to understand and appreciate their different histories, geographies, politics, sociologies and philosophies. Equally important is an emphatic and self-reflexive openness that facilitates dialogues between these different conflicting positions, avoiding ultimate truth-claims and zero-sum game debates. These encounters have the potential to generate academic alliances and to produce new, dialogicallyestablished, knowledges without artificially enforcing consensus, supported by the acknowledgment of the importance of structural irreconcilability within academia.

Crucial to the establishment of these agonistic academic spaces is the removal of a series of thresholds that hinder these dialogues. One significant threshold is language, an issue that, for

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Journal of Latin American Communication Research 4 (1) instance, has been discussed extensively within IAMCR,12 as this academic organisation has three official languages (English, Spanish and French) but English has become the dominant working (conference) language here as well. There is a need for more linguistic creativity to deal with language diversity, using translations,13 but also moving beyond translations by using multi-linguistic strategies. A second and even more structural threshold is created by sources of antagonistic conflict. Particularly important here is the need to decrease the impact of academic competitive cultures and of market-driven logics within academia, as they tend to lead to the incorporation of antagonistic conflicts, and work against the creation of agonistic communicative academic spaces. But also the violations of the human and labour rights of academics14 by university management or government actors are significant problems that require more attention. As I, together with Dahlgren, argued elsewhere (Carpentier & Dahlgren, 2013: 304), this implies better securing academia as a semi-autonomous field, engaging “in joint knowledge production and dialogue, e.g. in civil society, to engender participatory knowledge construction”, but resisting attempts at incorporation and protecting academia’s independence.

At the same time we should also acknowledge that many academics are already (implicitly or explicitly) committed to the creation of these agonistic communicative academic spaces, at the level of every day academic practices, or in specific projects. A first example is the European Cost Action Transforming Audiences, Transforming Societies (TATS),15 which ran from 1 March 2010 until 28 February 2014. With its 321 members from more than 30 different countries – mostly academics from European countries – the Action has (among many other outputs and activities) produced four edited books, 23 special issues in scholarly journals and six scientific reports, and it has organised nine open conferences or workshops and 15 panels in external conferences. Important for the argument made in this article is that, within the TATS Action, diversity within audience studies was explicitly acknowledged and protected, at the paradigmatic and methodological level but also in relation to region, gender and age. Secondly, the TATS Action explicitly organised a dialogical “building bridges” project to discuss the relevance of audience studies with non-academic stakeholders (Murru & Carpentier, 2013; Patriarche et al., 2014). In retrospect, one could argue that Cost Actions like the TATS Action show that there is also a need for similar theme-based and long-term networks at a more global level.

A second example is the work of the ALAIC/ECREA Task Force. Several panels were organised at major communication and media studies conferences (ECREA, Istanbul, 2012, ALAIC, Montevideo, 2012, and IAMCR, Istanbul, 2011, Durban, 2012, Dublin, 2013). These contributions where explicitly aimed at contributing to an interregional dialogue by emphasising the regional specificity and contextual embeddedness of theories, methodologies and research traditions in Latin-America and Europe, critically comparing the strengths and weaknesses, the abundances and gaps, and then articulating these differences as opportunities for the intellectual enrichment of both academic communities. In May 2012, ECREA and ALAIC also signed an agreement in which both organisations emphasised

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See, for instance, http://iamcr.org/lang-use-trans, http://iamcr.org/201103-lang-policy, and http://iamcr.org/langdebate.

13 For its book series at Palgrave, established in 2014, IAMCR will include one English translation of a non-English publication per year.

14 See http://iamcr.org/resources/latest-news/1209-turkey, for a recent IAMCR statement regarding academic labour rights and free speech in Turkey.

15 http://www.cost-transforming-audiences.eu/.

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Journal of Latin American Communication Research 4 (1) “that regional diversity is a significant asset to our field, but at the same time we believe that we should, through the organisation of creative dialogues and exchanges, avoid counter-productive processes of intellectual isolationism or hierarchization” (ALAIC & ECREA Joint Montevideo Declaration, 2012 – see appendix) The final example, more oriented towards the removal of thresholds that stimulate antagonism, is the so-called slow science movement. The concept of slow science is often attributed to Alleva’s (2006) letter published in Nature, with the title Taking Time to Savour the Rewards of Slow Science. Although there are different groups that use the label of slow science, and different articulations of the project exist, the following statement from the Slow Science Manifesto captures their main position quite nicely: “Society should give scientists the time they need, but more importantly, scientists must take their time. We do need time to think. We do need time to digest. We do need time to misunderstand each other, especially when fostering lost dialogue between humanities and natural sciences. We cannot continuously tell you what our science means; what it will be good for; because we simply don’t know yet. Science needs time.” (The slow science academy, 2010) Leung, de Kloet and Chow (2010) elaborate a series of strategies (politics of whining; bringing an ethics of slowness to our profession; more stress on collaborative work; promotion of new publication strategies) which are easily reconcilable with an agonistic approach to academia.

Conclusion In my conclusion, I want to briefly reflect on two metaphors, and their capacity to signify agonistic academic spaces. The first metaphor is the bridge, which can be seen as a metaphor for respectful academic exchange. In its reference to the absent space – the space that needs to be spanned by the bridge - it brings in the notions of distance, difference and conflict, and the intense effort and investment it takes to build a connector. The fragility and locatedness of the bridges also signifies the complexity of these dialogical endeavours. Also, the bridge metaphor shows that the construction of academic connectors is possible, even when it is difficult. But, at the same time, there are problems with the bridge metaphor, as it connectingtwo-shores structure grounds itself in a logics of dichotomisation. It also sets up the ideas that once the bridge has been constructed, it is easy to cross (Hall & Minnix, 2012: 67), and that a particular artefact (a bridge, and thus a theory, a method, …) can play this connecting role (Repko, 2012: 27).

The second metaphor is the square, which serves as metaphor for the opportunities of interchange, (re)presentation and debate (see for instance Iveson’s (2007: 3) definition of public space). Squares are accessible meeting places, that can be approached and entered from different sides. They are often the nerve centres of cities, where main buildings (town halls, churches, commercial headquarters, …) are located. They are also places of celebration, protest and surveillance (Yesil, 2006). As a metaphor for academic encounters, it signifies the existence and accessibility of multiple common spaces, but also the possibility to easily leave these space (and return to the home). But again, this metaphor has its problems, as it

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Journal of Latin American Communication Research 4 (1) downplays the efforts the engagement in agonistic practices require and moreover tends to (over)emphasise either the unity and homogeneity of the visitors, or the antagonism of the occupants (in whoever they are protesting against).

But the combination of these two metaphors, into what I propose to call the sqridge16, serves my purpose of signifying the agonistic academic spaces quite well. The sqridge metaphor incorporates the notion of diversity and conflict, which should not be erased but recognised, acknowledging that there are different positions (or river banks) in academia, that are structurally irreconcilable, but that can be connected. At the same time we should move away from a polarised way of thinking, keeping for instance Haraway’s (1985: 96) critique on binary oppositions in mind (captured in the following sentence of the Cyborg Manifesto: “One is too few, but two are too many”). Here, we need the symbolic strength of the square and its reference to the easily accessible meeting grounds that will allow for more communication, collaboration and contestation, without barricades but with agnostic respect for diversity.

In short: Academia needs more sqridges.

References Alleva, L. (September 21, 2006). Taking Time to Savour the Rewards of Slow Science, Nature, 443, 271.

Bockman, J. & Bernstein, M. A. (2008). Scientific Community in a Divided World: Economists, Planning, and Research Priority during the Cold War, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 50 (3), 581–613.

Breault, D. & Callejo Parez, D. M. (2013). The Red Light in the Ivory Tower. Contexts and Implications of Entrepreneurial Education. New York: Peter Lang.

Brenner, S. (2014). How Academia and Publishing are Destroying Scientific Innovation: A Conversation with Sydney Brenner, interview by Elizabeth Dzeng. Retrieved from http://kingsreview.co.uk/magazine/blog/2014/02/24/how-academia-and-publishing-aredestroying-scientific-innovation-a-conversation-with-sydney-brenner/.

Carpentier, N. (2010). Práticas Académicas Glocais e Translocais como Contrapeso ás Ideologias de Europeizaçao, [Glocal and Translocal Research Practices as a Counterweight for Europeanisation Ideologies]. In C. Álvarez and M. J. Damásio (Eds.), Teorias e Práticas dos Media: Situando o Local no Global. Lisboa: Ediçoes Universitárias Lusófonas, 119-139.

Carpentier, N. & Dahlgren, P. (2013). The Social Relevance of Participatory Theory, Comunicazioni Sociali, 3, 301-315.

Chase, A. (2003). Harvard and the Unabomber: The Education of an American Terrorist.

New York: Norton.

Christophorou, C.; Sahin, S. & Pavlou, S. (Ed.) (2010). Media Narratives, Politics and the Cyprus Problem. Peace Research Institute Oslo: Oslo.

Council of the European Union (2007). Council Resolution on Modernising Universities for Europe’s Competitiveness in a Global Knowledge Economy. Brussels: Council of the European union. See also http://register.consilium.europa.eu/pdf/en/07/st16/st16096re01.en07.pdf.

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Arguably, Jože Plečnik’s triple bridge, called the Tromostovje, over the river Ljubljanica in Ljubljana, Slovenia’s capital, comes close to the sqridge.

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Bildungsgeschichte und Europäische Identität, Band 3. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 115-128.

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Patriarche, G.; Bilandzic, H.; Carpentier, N.; Ponte, C., Schrøder, K. & Zeller, F. (Eds.) (2014) Building Bridges. Pathways to a Greater Societal Significance for Audience Research. Brussels: Cost Action TATS. Retrieved from http://www.cost-transformingaudiences.eu/node/1687 Repko, A. F. (2012). Interdisciplinary Research. Process and Theory. London: Sage.

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Appendix: ALAIC & ECREA Joint Montevideo Declaration ALAIC, the Latin American Communication Researchers Association and ECREA, the European Communication Research and Education Association, recognize the need to intensify the collaboration between both organizations. ALAIC and ECREA emphasize that regional diversity is a significant asset to our field, but at the same time we believe that we should, through the organisation of creative dialogues and exchanges, avoid counterproductive processes of intellectual isolationism or hierarchization.

ALAIC and ECREA will contribute to this dialogue by emphasising the regional specificity and contextual embeddedness of theories, methodologies and research traditions in LatinAmerica and Europe, critically comparing the strengths and weaknesses, the abundances and gaps, and then articulating these differences as opportunities for the intellectual enrichment of both academic communities.

The dialogue will be materialized through the organization of joint panels at international conferences, the translation and publication of academic work which is not sufficiently accessible in the Latin American or European region for linguistic reasons, and the publication of academic work which explicitly aims at reflexively comparing the different academic traditions in the Latin American or European Communication and Media Studies (sub)fields.

Signed in Montevideo, 11 May 2012 Signatories Nico Carpentier (Vice-President ECREA) François Heinderyckx (President ECREA) Fernando Oliveira Paulino (Diretor Administrativo ALAIC) César Ricardo Siqueira Bolaño (Presidente ALAIC)

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Media and Communication Research Goes Global.

Reflections from a Nordic Horizon _________________________________________________________ Ulla Carlsson Nordicom ulla.carlsson@nordicom.gu.se Abstract The scientific society is in a situation where the accumulation of knowledge, the formulation of concepts and models of thought must face the need for contributing to the understanding and even solution of crises regarding society and social life. That is a challenge even for the media and communication research field. Digitization with increasing commercialization and far-reaching media convergence, is changing our communication systems in terms of time and space, as well as modes of social behavior. The structure of both governance and markets has been transformed. The contemporary global and multicultural societies raise more complex issues than ever before.Scholars in different parts of the world frequently come back to the question of what is needed in order to be able to formulate the really difficult, the really important questions about contemporary society. How do we move towards an innovative agenda, one that cuts across ethnic, cultural, religious and political boundaries and at the same time can enhance the quality and value of our research in different parts of the world? There is a need for more all-inclusive paradigms and holistic perspectives based on the awareness that globalization also calls for regional epistemologies and multidisciplinary research approaches.

Introduction Our contemporary global and multicultural societies raise more complex issues than ever before. Internet and the ongoing digitization of media have transformed the media and communication landscape, and in turn transformed the social functions of media and communication and the structure of both governance and markets with even new types of transnational companies and media conglomerates.

These new contexts are a challenge for the media and communication research field. But, still the overall objective must be to enable our research field to answer questions about access to and the use of media and communication, the role of media and communication with regard to the distribution of power and influence in our societies, in addition to questions relating to media and communication content and the role of media and communication in everyday life and social change.

How can researchers in the field initiate and sustain dialogues on international scenes? And from a Nordic point of view - How can small countries with languages spoken by only a few million people gain recognition? The answer lies in collaboration across frontiers, both national and academic. An interplay of national, regional and international processes is decisive for the development of a field.

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The Status of Media and Communication Research – a global perspective Media and communication researchers have for a long time been working with issues regarding communication rights, media development, communication for development and social change, media concentration, etc. As early as the 1960s and 1970s, several media researchers were developing the field of mass communication research. The prime issues of that day concerned the end of colonialism and the political, economic and social development of states that had newly won their independence. This was also a period of technological advances: with television and communication satellites. The world became more global.

Changes in society and technology enforced new knowledge that turned previous knowledge on its head; new theoretical and methodological perspectives were developed - to a great extent as a consequence of an internationalization of research, including seminal work on the role of communication in national development, studies of the flows of news and information between countries and continents, of hegemony over the global media system, and so forth.

Society differs radically from that of the 1960s and 1970s, when the media and communication research field was formed. The contemporary global and multicultural societies raise more complex issues than ever before. The market paradigms based on the principle of the accumulation of private gains has become the driving force and organizational basis for social life in almost every country in the world.

But still some fundamental principles remain and they are different freedoms – the freedom to think, to speak, to read, to listen, to write and to communicate with others. Always we have to take human rights into account.

In order to be able to make use of human rights, citizens have to have some education and be in good health. Thus, many groups of people living in poverty are unable to use their rights.

They often face social inequality, poor schools, gender discrimination, unemployment and inadequate health systems. People caught up in war and violent unrest are especially vulnerable. Millions of people have been driven from their homes and have no civil rights whatsoever.

This is a context we have to understand, recognizing that power, hegemony, equality, justice and identity are concepts of decisive relevance.

We also have to consider the unbalance of power at different levels today. It is important to pay attention to the reconsideration of the state power in a new emerging power structure within and over the nation-state - of public, private or civil nature. Today there are, for example, a number of dominant transnational companies, also regarding media and communication, that are accountable only to holders of political power or the market – they fail in their responsibility both to the societies in which they operate and to the citizens of those socities.

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New kinds of conflicts due to organized crime, fundamentalism/extremism and acts of terror cannot be ignored. While horizons broaden, the world also seems to retreat further from us.

Some people feel the need to defend their identities, and when common cultural platforms can no longer be maintained, stockades are raised around local cultures, religious beliefs and communities. Transcendence of boundaries and defense of boundaries are twin aspects of the globalization process.

Globalization processes forces us not only to focus more on transnational phenomena in general, but also to note and explore differences. We have to argue for a stronger focus on regional inequalities and social transformation, and understandings of democracy and human rights from a multipolar world perspective - there are many different kinds of widening gaps and divisions. The gender issues not to be forgotten.

Media are vital to democracy. The presence of pluralism and independence of the media are essential to democratic rule - whether publishing takes place offline or online.

Media have long served as central, shared sources of information, as ‘watchdogs’ and as fora of discussion – in short, they have provided a public space. Digitization, with increasing commercialization and far-reaching media convergence, is changing our communication systems – in terms of time and space, as well as modes of social behavior. These changes are transforming the public space. Periods of change like this have occurred before, and they will occur again - as our history of the past 250 years makes clear.

The communication society of today has a tremendous potential. Media and communication represent social and cultural resources that can empower people, in both their personal development and their development as citizens from a democratic perspective. We have access to knowledge and an awareness of events that only ‘yesterday’ were far beyond our horizons.

And, we can make our voices heard in many different ways. Each of us can be our own writer, editor or director. We can communicate and interact as never before.

But, these potentialities also have implications. When each of us is able to create our own frame of reference – according to our own interests and preferences – and our own personally tailored flow of information, it means that we can turn our backs on others’ perspectives and others’ flows.

It has never been easier to find qualified information than it is today. And, it has never been easier to avoid that kind of information, or to be misinformed. Which, in turn, implies a risk of widening knowledge gaps and a polarization of views, of how we perceive reality.

With what implications for democracy and freedom of expression- we have to ask.

Democracy does not work without well-informed citizens with a critical eye, and wellinformed citizens cannot exist without reliable media and journalism that trains a critical eye on those who wield power. This has long been considered axiomatic. But does it still hold?

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Every day we see threats to freedom of expression: new forms of state censorship and repression, self-censorship, surveillance, monitoring and control, gatekeeping, propaganda, misinformation, organized crime, act of terror, anti-terror laws, threats to journalists – even murder of journalists - plus a variety of commercial hindrances.

On the web there is an ongoing battle against unlawful control and censorship– addressed to both ideological driven governments and commercially driven players. Participation, privacy and security are closely interrelated with democracy and freedom of expression.

These conditions emphasize that media literate citizens are essential for democratic development. Media and information literacy is without doubt a key competence today Rethinking …

Now, as then, issues of democracy and development are central, and once again in at least one sense, technological advances are a prime motor force - not least the questions how to bridge the knowledge divides and how to use media and communication both as tools and as a way of articulating processes of development and social change.

Access to information and the ability to share information is fundamental in the empowering of citizens, regardless of who and where they are. Information and communication can mobilize, increase transparency and accountability, and it is a stimulus to participation, active citizenship, lifelong learning and social change.

Information can mobilize, increase transparency and accountability, and it is a stimulus to participation, active citizenship, lifelong learning and social change.

The role of information has been formulated in these terms for decades. Different paradigms have emerged. Now we need to regain our sense of context and to broaden our perspectives in a holistic direction.

The research area and knowledge production are different nowadays. The character and directions of academic inquiry are ever-changing. Old subjects evolve, their influence waxes and wanes; new subjects emerge. All as the result of many different intellectual and social processes on different levels - national, regional and international.

The scientific society is in a situation where the accumulation of knowledge, the formulation of concepts and models of thought must face the need for contributing to the understanding and even solution of crises regarding society and social life. That is a challenge even for the media and communication research field.

The core conceptual apparatus established 30 to 40 years ago is somewhat inadequate. A good deal of renovation is called for if we are to comprehend the changes that are taking place.

Concepts are not entities unto themselves; they acquire their meaning from the contexts to which they are applied. And we need to know more about how the concepts relate to each other.

And, perhaps the Swedish researcher Jan Ekecrantz was right, that we need a “return to historical, disciplinary roots, reinserting media in the social and the cultural” (Ekecrantz 2007). With awareness of the increased economic importance of the media and communication sector around the world that is especially important.

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But, today the media and communication field is broad and characterized by diversity and extensive specialization. Few syntheses embrace the field as a whole. The rapidly growing flora of journals these days mirrors the situation. New research specialities are carved out and new journal titles started up all the time.

This implies a risk that perceptions of academic standards will continue to vary, and with them the quality of published work. Variation in standards is not to be confused with a healthy variety of interests, points of departure, concepts and methods, without which the discipline cannot thrive. Theoretical and methodological pluralism needs to be deliberately cultivated, and this requires competitive interaction between qualitative research environments.

When the issues are as complex as those we face today, and there is often no linearity between cause and effect, that is when holistic perspectives are really important.

Specialisation that produces studies of high quality is not a problem in itself, but it can be problematic unless accompanied by inquiry on a systems level. Without these latter studies, we have no knowledge of the whole to which we can relate the various parts. There is a risk that a high degree of specialisation may lose its fertility for lack of ideas and an inability to formulate new problems of relevance. An essential prerequisite for a fruitful development of knowledge is an interaction between micro and macro.

The process of dismantling public systems has also affected universities in their role as producers of knowledge, followed by problematic effects as a limitation of researchers critical and creative capacities. The frantic hunt for research funding, increasing pressures to publish in international journals, ranking systems, and far-reaching specialization - on a market that has become increasingly trend-sensitive - are not unrelated.

Thought, ‘second-thoughts’ and reflection are scarce in day-to-day academic life.

Monographs, as demanding of the scholar’s time and effort as they are important to our science, are not profitable ventures. All too little time is devoted to academic debate and critique; there is no ’career value’ in such undertakings.

Internationalization based on regional knowledge What do we need to be able to formulate the real and difficult questions – not least regarding communication and development? This question occupies many researchers today, and there is a call for greater internationalization of media studies.

A great deal of research has been done and is being done in many different places - in different academic disciplines around the world. But any one of us most probably is acquainted with only a small fraction of the work done or in progress. What means do we have to obtain an overall result that is relevant to our needs, in view of all the differences that nonetheless characterize the global system?

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How do we move towards an innovative and international agenda for these issues, one that cuts across ethnic, cultural, religious and political boundaries and at the same time can enhance the quality and value of our research in different parts of the world?

Internationalization is both enriching and necessary in the intercultural and global world of today as it is with regard to our common interest in broader, more all-inclusive paradigms.

This implies a learning process. Quite definitely, we need more collaboration - within our field, with other disciplines, with society around us and collaboration across national frontiers – not least beyond our familiar intellectual habitat. We need to learn more from one another, to share knowledge and context.

We have to build on past work but break new ground. We need to grasp and absorb new and unexpected insights and to question our ‘givens’. We need to develop analytical frameworks that will guide comparative analysis of communication for development. Without comparative studies we run an obvious risk that certain factors will grow out of proportion. Statistics would play a crucial role in this respect - always to remember that globalization calls for regional epistemologies.

We have to maintain and further develop national and regional collaboration, not least as a means to ensure that internationalization does not take place at the expense of knowledge about, and reflection on, scholars’ own societies and cultures. Fruitful national and regional dialogues are a great boon in international exchanges and vice versa.

Organizations like IAMCR , ECREA and ALAIC, AMIC and Nordicom - well established international and regional platforms with a sense of the history of the field – are more important than ever. Such fora where the most important major issues of our time can be addressed – especially with regard to scholars’ interest in broader, more all-inclusive paradigms.

Such fora can also help us in the important process of what I would call ‘creative selfexamination’. Where we consider the relevance of the questions we formulate, where we are more judicious in our choice of the theoretical perspectives and methods, and where we evaluate the validity of our findings and the conclusions we draw from them.

It is time to regain the initiative - nationally, regionally and internationally – to test our capacity to propose and imagine models that contribute to more holistic paradigms of civilizations – and that is about our accumulated knowledge, our memory, our ability to a critical approach, our creativity, our integrity and ethics, and – not least our will.

We must - put very simply - dare to do more - together!

References Bolaño, C., Mastrini, G. & Sierra, F. (Eds.). (2012): Political Economy, Communication and Knowledge: A Latin Americal Perspective. New York: Hampton Press.

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Carlsson, U. (Ed.) (2013). Freedom of Expression and Freedom of the Press Revisited?

Notes on citizenship and journalism in the digital era from a Nordic horizon. Nordicom, University of Gothenburg.

Carlsson, U. (2007). Why regional and international cooperation? Reflections from a Nordic Horizon. Global Media and Communication, 3.

Carlsson, U. (2005) From NWICO to Global Governance of the Information Society. In: T. Tufte & Oscar Hemer, Media and Glocal Change: Rethinking Communication for Development. Buenos Aires: CLACSO Books.

Ekecrantz, J. (2007). Media and Communication Studies Going Gobal. Nordicom Review, Jubilee Issue.

Elízaga, R. S. (2014): Facing inequality: A proposal for sociological debate (2014). XVIII ISA World Congress of Sociology. Facing an unequal world: challenges for global sociology.

Retrieved http://www.isa-sociology.org/congress2014/facing-inequality.htm Golding, P. (2005). Looking Back and Looking Forward: The Risks and Prospects of a NotSo-Young Field. Gazette 67 (6), 539-542.

Kierulf, A & Rønning, H. (Eds.) (2009). Freedom of Speech Abridged? : Cultural, Legal and Philosophical Challenges. Nordicom, University of Gothenburg. de Moragas, M. (2012). Democratic Communication Policies. In A. Montiel Vega (Ed.), Communication and Human Rights. Universidad Nacional Autonóma de México/IAMCR.

Journal of Latin American Communication Research 4 (1) Emergent Latin American Theories of International Communication in a Post-Global World ___________________________________________________________ Katherine Reilly Simon Fraser University kreilly@sfu.ca Abstract Latin America’s rich tradition of critical international communication research can be recuperated through an approach to research and knowledge production that emphasizes communication’s emergent epistemic processes of geopolitical production. For researchers, this can be done through careful consideration of the various stages of the knowledge production process including critical engagement with existing works, conceptual inquiry that takes up the stories that are told about key ideas, and an approach to problem definition that emphasizes the geopolitical markers and epistemological fragments that shape regions of knowledge production. These ideas are illustrated through two examples: communicative sovereignty and regional communications infrastructure projects.

Introduction Latin American communications research has a rich tradition grounded in strong theoretical contributions established in the 1960s and 1970s (Waisbord, 2014). In the area of international communication, this work draws on the region’s theoretical contributions to international relations and development studies, particularly theories of dependency (dos Santos, 1978). However, the critical force of this tradition has faced erosion from a number of pressures over the past decades, including various waves of political incursion into the academy, historical shifts, and the difficulties of maintaining research in the face of neoliberal constraints on intellectual production (Sabatini, 2012).

In some cases, these pressures have caused researchers to choose empirical over theoretical work. In particular, work on international issues has been pushed strongly in the direction of activist approaches to foreign affairs (Merke, 2011) under the direction of academics like Chilean political scientist, Luciano Tomassini (Heine, 2011). For communications this means studying the role of public relations, public opinion or egovernment in activist foreign affairs (Merke & Pauselli, 2014). There is immediate strategic value in this kind of research; however, it can come at the cost of either larger processes of systematization, or sustained reflection on the state of a field of study.

Researchers also take up ‘foreign’ theoretical perspectives to explain Latin American phenomena. We see this, for example, with the application of Joseph Nye’s concept of ‘soft power’ to studies of the region’s foreign affairs (Freytas, 2008) and communicative activities (Manfredi Sanchez, 2011). Examples like these are troubling because they suggest decline in local theoretical capacity, as well as a divorce of communications from political economic thinking. Finally, we see researchers of international communication

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Journal of Latin American Communication Research 4 (1) focusing on the implications of international regulation for domestic processes (Mastrini et al., 2012) rather than looking at the regional or international communications of Latin America (Reilly 2014).

All together, these pressures cause us to question whether a Latin American regional approach to critical international communication studies continues to exist. There have been efforts to recuperate and rethink Latin America’s critical tradition of international scholarship (see, for example, Beigel’s 2006 review of dependency theory), but it is not immediately apparent that these efforts can lead to adequate theoretical frameworks for thinking about communications in the region. Theories of core-periphery relations, dependency or empire do little to help us understand the complex relations of cooperation and conflict between Venezuela and Brazil, for example, and even less to understand how the communications of local non-state actors work to reshape those relations around questions of communicative sovereignty and justice, rather than security or economic competition. Older critical frameworks have also been complemented and at times challenged with theories of audience reception, cultural hybridity, post-colonialism and the like. In addition, ‘imperialist’ frameworks are less able to grapple with the dynamics of combined and uneven development, of the sort described by David Harvey (1975), and the ways in which these complex processes produce geopolitical realities. This last bit is particularly crucial to consider in this moment of geopolitical upheaval during which global growth-inequality is being complicated by new forms of state and regional consolidation.

In this paper I argue that recuperating Latin America’s critical tradition of international communications studies requires consideration of larger processes of research design.

Indeed, a focus on the region as something enacted is complementary to critically engaged perspectives on knowledge production. In this view, research is engagement with the world, and the way in which Latin Americans carry out their engagement with the world is producing of the region in which they find themselves. If communication is an epistemic act, then knowledge about communication needs to be self-conscious of its epistemic processes because these processes work to enact the world. If anyone should understand this, it should be we, the communications researchers given our study of issues such as ideology, propaganda, consent and reception. With this in mind, I argue that the best way to locate a critical regional tradition of critical international communications research within larger processes of global power shift and geopolitical upheaval is by enacting it through the research process. In what follows I look at three stages in the research design process: critique, conceptual inquiry, and problem definition.

I then consider the implications of research design for two contemporary international communications issues in the region: communicative sovereignty and the construction of regional communications infrastructure projects.

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Journal of Latin American Communication Research 4 (1) Critique: Research as Martyr To locate emerging regions of critical scholarship, it is necessary to begin the research process with conscientiously critical reflection on existing scholarship.

For me, this means understanding research as a martyr to the cause of knowledge production. In other words, I see research as something that dies for its ‘religious’ beliefs about knowledge production.

It can be difficult to understand research as something that must die for its own cause.

In part this is because of the kind of teaching universities often impart around knoweldge production. Perhaps the biggest problem here is that the academy tends to separate the study of philosophy of knowledge from the study of methods. At best we teach people how to interview within a particular tradition such as anthropology. At worst we teach people how to gather ‘data’ through an ‘interview’ as a form of ‘qualitative’ analysis with no reference to larger questions of knowledge production. Why this divide instead of, for example, critical, interpretive and positivistic approaches to knowledge production (Merrigan et al, 2012). I suppose the quantitative-qualitative separation serves as a pedagogical convenience. But in the long run we do a disservice by organizing knowledge in this way because we limit knowledge seekers to a transactional engagement with their world that focuses on data extraction and systematization. The problem with this should be especially familiar, and appalling, to students of communications: method is to research what clicktivism is to advocacy. Knowing that your click is qualitative (a statement) versus quantitative (a statistic) makes no real difference here. Limiting knowledge production to methods prevents us from being self conscious of how we communicate worlds into being through our knowledge producing endeavors.

A more complete approach to knowledge production considers the ways in which ontology, epistemology, methodology and methods come together to constitute a program of knowledge production (Grix, 2002). The assumptions we bring to the world will influence our beliefs about what can be known (performed, communicated, etc.). And these in turn shape our approach to design processes, and ultimately the types of methods we choose to employ. It doesn’t matter if you are an artist, a scientist or a philosopher, this will hold true. Within international studies, for example, positivism and realism go hand in hand in their depiction of the state system, while imperialism relies on a dialectical approach to knowledge production. Choosing a method without thinking through its implications for the type of story it will cause you to tell is like choosing a horse to travel from Calcutta to Caracas just because it’s a mode of transportation.

Instead, the most convincing and powerful knowledge demonstrates coherence between

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Journal of Latin American Communication Research 4 (1) its vision of how the world works, its philosophy of knowledge, and its systems of ideational production.

Understanding this is helpful, but it only gets us so far. A work may be coherent with itself, but just because we recognize the qualities of a work, we need not feel compelled to accept the ideas that it communicates. We may, indeed, comprehend the power, beauty or novelty of a work even as we disagree with it, and we may feel compelled to critique the work for precisely this reason. Criticizing other people’s knowledge products should be done conscientiously. Throwing research to the lions can be entertaining, but we should be attuned to the larger implications of what we do when we pull knowledge apart limb from limb. Dissecting research is an excellent way to understand the religious powers of it: if research has ideological overtones, then critique will reveal them.

Engaging in this kind of criticism is a great way to advance our own personal commitments to knowledge production, but more to the point, it will also force us to acknowledge what makes research ‘good’ within a particular context. This, in turn, will be revealing of what the relevant research context is, or what holds a ‘region’ of knowledge production together.

Both engage in collaboration between researcher and subjects

Figure 1: The ‘Three R’s’ of Intellectual Accountability (IA) On what basis does research derive its validity?

Reflexive (fulfilling an end)

Reflective (self-­‐ criticality)

IA

Results circumscribed by (potentially unexamined) foundations in both

Recursive (data-­‐ theory fit)

Both Researcher-­‐Driven

There are many different ways of approaching the martyrization of research, and we would ideally want to search for criteria that are locally relevant, but for the purpose of illustration I will share my own perspective on research programs. In my view, we can call knowledge producers to account according to how they justify their work. This vision is captured in Figure 1. Is knowledge ‘good’ when it fulfills an end, when it exhibits strong data-theory fit, or when its author is carefully self-reflexive of her own knowledge processes? Note that the community to whom research is accountable shifts in each case, as does its form of evaluation. What I have called ‘reflexive knowledge’ is accountable

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Journal of Latin American Communication Research 4 (1) to the needs and desires of the beneficiaries or recipients of knowledge (Nicholls, 2009).

This will be familiar to Latin Americans as Participatory Action Research (Fals Borda, 2006). ‘Reflective knowledge’ is the notion that researchers should engage critically with the standards by which they (themselves) judge verity (Ulrich, 2006). Reflectiveness recognizes the contingent nature of theorizing, but ultimately the author of the research will produce an account true to her own biases, agendas and experiences. Much interpretive research falls within this category of thinking. Finally ‘recursive research’ is accountable to a community of thinkers and their standards of analytical rigor and is what we typically think of when we focus on ensuring validity in the fit between data and theory.1 Here we find positivistic lines of thought.

Comparing different modes of intellectual accountability in this way raises uncomfortable questions about the various religious commitments of knowledge producers. Is it OK for research to exhibit unreliable results if it serves to help a community acquire urgently needed services? How would we feel about a study that produces highly reliable findings, but which does so using essentialist categories of analysis that stigmatize particular social groups? Asking these sorts of questions is exactly the point, because they cause us to start thinking carefully about the kinds of knowledge production that are important in a particular ‘region’ of knowledge production. What counts as ‘good’ research will shift depending on the ‘region.’

Research as martyr is a very empowering vision, because it makes knowledge production a creative act that rests in the hands of individuals. We are each responsible for deciding what kind of engagement we want to have with the world, and what kind of knowledge we ultimately want to communicate. We make those decisions in conversation with the decisions of other scholars, and this means that we do so in particular historical contexts.

Like the martyrs, good research has ideological causes to which it is committed, but also like the martyrs, it must pursue those causes within historical contexts that may be more or less friendly.

This is also a radically pluralist vision (Santos, 2007) that supports the idea of cognitive justice (Visvanathan, 1997). This commitment to epistemic or hermeneutical justice invariably raises the question of whether and when some ways of knowing are better than others. Cognitive justice argues for equal respect for different ways of knowing, but detractors worry that this opens the door to oppressive or destructive systems of knowledge.2 My own view is that diversity cannot exist without disagreement, and we should welcome the resulting debates as an opportunity to generate greater understanding of the research commitments that are typical of particular political-economic contexts.

Furthermore, the point is to avoid hermeneutical injustice, which is a situation in which “a gap in collective interpretive resources puts someone at an unfair disadvantage when it comes to making sense of their social experiences” (Fricker, 2007). In other words, we

1 Please note that reflective, reflexive and recursive are words that get used in very different ways by different authors.

2 This is a well-trodden debate, which I will not rehash here. A summary can be found in Sparks, 2008.

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Journal of Latin American Communication Research 4 (1) should not see Latin America as a geographically given region of knowledge production, but rather as a context for emergent epistemic regions. Allowing, and indeed fostering, open debate about these processes provides a means to uncover the characteristics, boundaries and inequalities of that terrain.

Conceptual Inquiry: How to get to Caracas Another critique that might be leveled at this vision is that it atomizes in ways that undermine cultural or class logics, or makes impossible the identification of knowledgeproducing regions. Indeed, pursuing this kind of work asks that researchers reflect deeply on their commitments, a task which ethnographers refer to as positionality (Takacs, 2002).

This need not necessarily lead to atomization.

By way of example, I recently asked a group of graduate students to write a paper in which they explored their positionality vis-à-vis knowledge production. My class included several ‘international’ students, including four from Beijing and two from Latin America (though it must be said that the ‘Canadian’ students were also diverse in their origins). The students bore the assignment like a kind of castigation, and I spent many hours helping them think through their commitments to knowledge production. But interestingly, they each faced the ‘punishment’ very differently. Some students worried about their ‘research identity’ or lack thereof, while others focused on the problem of essentialization in the research process. I found the reaction of the four individuals from China to be particularly interesting. It would be tempting to blame their reticence to engage with the idea of positionality on language or educational background. But as I graded the final papers and digested their reflections, it came to me that the assignment itself embodied a violence—that asking people to publicly proclaim their epistemological commitments was not unlike subjecting people to a Maoist struggle session within a cultural revolution. Mao, after all, was asking people to explore their positionality vis-àvis the project of Chinese socialism! I realized that the Chinese students came by their suspicions of the assignment quite honestly, even if they weren’t entirely conscious of the source. I later confirmed my theory in conversation with a colleague. This result convinced me that commitments to knowledge production have a co-constitutive relationship with cultures and classes. That relationship may be complex and polyvocal, but context will nonetheless bear some weight in our various engagements with the world.

Indeed, it is precisely this tendency towards the formation of significant clusters of understanding within given historical periods that we need to focus on when designing research projects. This brings us to a second topic, which I have called ‘conceptual inquiry’ but which is often mistakenly referred to as a ‘literature review.’ To be sure, there is something out there called a literature review. It generally identifies the parameters of a field, and the debates within it, with reference to a body of literature. I’m suspicious of that activity, however, and beg that we carefully interrogate the uses to which literature reviews are put. I find that much of the time they function as a kind of justification for the research that is being done, but in ways that are often highly questionable. “Many researchers are travelling from Calcutta to Caracas, some of them by horse, and some of them by bicycle. But my work will differentiate itself through

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Journal of Latin American Communication Research 4 (1) walking.” I’d rather think about conceptual inquiry instead—because it provides a means through which to grapple with the communicative and investigative processes that give rise to knowledge producing regions. It also sets the groundwork for understanding one’s individual role within that project.

When I speak of conceptual inquiry what I mean is a systematic engagement with the meanings and applications of ideas that are central to a project of inquiry. For example, in my own work the idea of openness is important because I do research on networked spaces, while one of my graduate students has done a great deal of thinking about the idea of sovereignty because she is researching the food sovereignty movement.

Conceptual inquiry helps us to locate the cultural, ideological or symbolic content of an idea. But conceptual inquiry is more than just an exercise in defining terms or locating the origins of words (etymology), although that may be part of it. It is also a careful accounting for how we tell the story of that concept, and this means that it must also offer a reflection on the ways in which a concept is changing through time. It is not just the fact of change that matters here, but more importantly, our approach to capturing that change in the stories that we tell when we communicate the conceptual heritage of our research.

Metaphors of ‘conceptual heritage’ can take an infinite number of forms, of which I will share a few popular social science tropes. When we depict concepts as having traditional content, then we emphasize resilience and cultural significance by trying to demonstrate stability. When we depict concepts as changing through evolution, the suggestion is that they morph teleologically through ‘natural’ adaptive processes. When we depict concepts as changing dialectically, as does Gramsci, we are pointing to the compromises and struggles at work in holding together a cultural whole. When we explore concepts through genealogy like Foucault, then the object is to uncover the ways in which power works quietly, like a gardener in the night, to prune the arborescent ‘truths’ of the world into shape. When we approach concepts through the rhizomatic metaphor given to us by Deleuze and Guatarri then we are both questioning the stability of functional wholes, and also suggesting that conceptual ‘moments’ are emergent, contingent, and result from complex processes. In this view, concepts are not random or relativistic social constructs, but rather they are rearrangements of old ideas into new wholes that have ontological bearing (De Landa, 2006).

Figure 2: Arborescent versus Rhizomatic Metaphors

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The point here is not only that conceptual inquiry should be done as part of research design (it should), but also that the ways in which scholars typically depict concepts and their change processes communicates knowledge cultures and regions into being within particular historical contexts. In particular, we can expect that the metaphors adopted by scholars of international communication in Latin American at the current juncture will capture something of the contemporary reality of the moment. Indeed, I believe that this is precisely something that international communications scholars should address in their thinking, and that doing so can be productive of regional perspectives. This isn’t a question of how others got to Caracas, but rather a question of how others understood and recounted the trip.

Problem Definition: Epistemology and Global Shifts Conceptual inquiry should be an integral part of what is typically called ‘problem definition,’ (though I balk at creating such a strong link between research design and the resolution of ‘problems’). Problem definition is about selecting a topic, knowing how you will relate it to your personal vision of what makes research ‘good,’ and figuring out how you will communicate the story of concepts that are important to your work. When it comes to recuperating critical scholarship on international communication, then, the ‘problem’ faced by researchers is that of capturing the politically-informed processes that produce knowledge-bearing regions. This will of course rest on the former: the politics of martyrdom and dominant accounts of histories of knowledge. Given this, in what follows I reflect on the ways in which critical international communications scholarship might tackle the problem of identifying regions of knowledge production.

Contemporary theories of international processes often take up “variegated capitalism” (Peck and Theodore. 2007) or combined and uneven development, as a way to capture differing experiences with incorporation into what is now a fully global capitalist system, as well as the active role of states and other actors in ongoing processes of capitalist formation. For economic geographers, this can be understood in terms of the different geo-social processes that work to reproduce capitalism in different ways (Hudson, 2004).

It should be noted that this is a post-global approach to understanding, since the emphasis is not on the emergence of global spaces, but rather on the dynamics of social, economic

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Journal of Latin American Communication Research 4 (1) and political processes given global integration. This approach puts more emphasis on the social production of capitalism, and by extension, varieties of media systems corresponding to varieties of capitalism (Hallin and Mancini, 2004) within a globalized system (Waisbord, 2013). Thus Robinson argues “more determinant (of causal priority) in conceptualizing regions within the larger unity of the emerging global economy and society than uneven accumulation, while still important, is the distinct configurations of social forces and institutions that arise from these configurations” (2011, p. 355).

What this means is that if we want to build a link between the constitution of a region and its perspectives on communication research, then we need to understand how different groups “make the world intelligible by opening our experiences to alternative sources of normativity” (Matereke, 2012, p. 165) within a unified global context. This question is particularly important given the many calls by post-development scholars for alternative ways of knowing, epistemologies of the south (Santos, 2006), cognitive justice (Visvanathan, 2002), methodologies based in regional modernities (Shome, 2012), “diversality” (Mignolo, 2002), and the like. These works rest on the assumption that epistemological openness will lead to alternative futures and will therefore release the global periphery from the shackles of hegemonic Western epistemologies. Where these works often fall short, however, is in their vision of how ways of knowing will connect with historical processes and their social formations.

Relationships between epistemological processes, communication and historical formations can be established through geopolitics of knowledge. Classical discussions of geopolitics take categories such as territory or statehood as given. But in more recent work, “geopolitics is discourse about world politics, with a particular emphasis on state competition and the geographical dimensions of power” (Tuathail, 2006, p. 1). This definition is useful because it draws our attention to the communicative processes that construct patterns of geopolitical relations. However, the emphasis on state power limits the field of potential geopolitical forces and excludes subaltern actors from our consideration, limiting us to the sphere of “visible” politics and to the authoritative texts that produce dominant conceptions of space and time (Patil 2013).

We can address this problem by leveraging the work of Mendieta (2007), who suggests we focus on “geopolitical markers” because “they become the means by which sectors of society are precisely excluded and written out of history, from the web of human interdependence.” These markers are formed from “epistemological fragments”— “fragments of society, of human consciousness”—that are “given life within specific geohistorical contexts” (pp. 3–4). That is to say, knowledge is taken up in specific ways that constitute processes of social, political, and economic discrimination, subordination, or exclusion. Thus patterns of epistemological accountability or conceptual inheritance will establish the geopolitical regions knowledge production.

Mendieta’s approach to geopolitics gives us both the possibility of hegemonic knowledge-power and a way to engage with specific incarnations of power within particular histories, cultures, and languages. This concept makes it possible to study the different actors and processes at work in establishing and maintaining social, political,

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Journal of Latin American Communication Research 4 (1) and economic boundaries, and we can imagine different types of geopolitical markers that work in different ways to structure different types of relationships. These markers can take on the cultural practices and local knowledges of the groups that uphold them. In this sense, geopolitical markers are more than just dividing lines; they are also the confluence (intersections) of complex social practices that produce them and result from them. In this way, geopolitical markers are both produced by and producing of power.

But they are also within the reach of those who wish to create change given that they are upheld by the everyday practices and assumptions about the parameters of reason in which we all engage.

This means that rather than seeing the contemporary moment of global power shifts as a brief period of transition between moments of hegemonic consolidation (as Realist international relations scholarship might do), it needs to be understood as a period during which the renegotiation of geopolitical markers can reveal the perimeters of intelligibility on which history is constructed. The forces (institutions, regulations, definitions, traditions) that produce and reproduce markers of inclusion and exclusion and that mark out the terrain of regulation and emancipation will shift. Contradictions will emerge between old logics and new logics, and this will create opportunities to reflect productively on the terms through which we make sense of the world—the epistemological fragments that establish the parameters of human consciousness.

In other words, by exploring these regions of knowledge production, scholars of international communication can engage in transformative work. To the extent that there is a Latin American perspective on international communication, then it will reflect the communicative and epistemic efforts of social groups as they work to reorganize the geopolitical markers and normative constructs that shape their integration into larger global and regional flows. On continuation, I consider how this might manifest in concrete terms.

Post-Global Latin American Communications I have looked at three stages in the research design process and I have argued that a Latin American regional perspective on communications will emerge out of the processes of critique, conceptual inquiry and problem definition that Latin American researchers pursue. I have also suggested that we can understand the relationship between those processes of research design and the constitution of a ‘region’ through geopolitics of knowledge and the ways in which those processes shape localized processes of sense making within an already globalized context. Once a ‘problem definition’ has been established, scholars naturally look for case studies through which to study their particular preoccupations. In this section I want to briefly tackle two examples of how international communications scholars can reveal emergent regional perspectives on communications within a larger global political economic context.

A perfect example of this is the emergence of the idea of ‘communicative sovereignty’ in Latin America in recent years. Over the past decade, several Latin American governments have re-written national communications laws to ensure greater distribution

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Journal of Latin American Communication Research 4 (1) of communications licenses among different social groups (Hintz, 2011). These reforms have allowed for a flourishing of community radio outlets across the region which are, in turn, supported by web-based networks of alternative media and social movement actors.

News distribution channels such as Radio Mundo Real (www.radiomundoreal.fm), ALER (www.aler.org) and AMARC (www2.amarc.org) collect stories from local actors and also cover regional events that have local implications. They make their stories available for republication or rebroadcasting free of charge, and in this way support both the flourishing of local media, and processes of integration in the region through its social movement bases.

These expressions of so-called ‘communicative sovereignty’ (personal interview) most likely take their cue from a longer tradition of thought about food sovereignty in the region. However I want to suggest that communicative sovereignty has unique characteristics that can be understood through the geopolitical approach described above.

The demand for local control over communications might be characterized as a demand for greater political autonomy. However, this rather simplistic approach not only reduces sovereignty to autarky, but also reduces communications to transmissions that are voided of their content or interpretation. For scholars of international communication it is much more interesting and productive to understand communicative sovereignty as an effort to reframe the relations of justice that establish the foundations of the state (Agamban, 2005). In this sense, communicative sovereignty can be understood as mediated processes of geopolitical struggle over the normative content of justice, a struggle which is emblematic of a moment of global power shift during which both the internal and external forces that define those normative markers are in flux.

Some of my own research demonstrates that regional alternative news networks in Latin America have a strong coverage of regional processes and events, while mainstream news networks, despite having regional distribution, focus their coverage on either national or global news coverage (Reilly and Febres Cordero, 2014). This makes sense when we consider the differing interests of alternative and mainstream news producers vis-à-vis the definition of sovereignty as a framework for justice in the region. And more to the point, it demonstrates how the emergent production of Latin America as a knowledge region is shaped by struggles over the definitions of belonging, rights, productivity and the like.

The second example revolves around the strategic positioning of telecommunications in the region. Between appeals to the United Nations by Russia and China, and Snowden’s revelations about the surveillance activities of the American NSA, telecommunications have become the subject of intense global geopolitical contestation in recent years. These struggles have touched Latin America in several important ways. Take for example UNASUR’s project, advanced within the South American Infrastructure and Planning Council (COSIPLAN), to build a fiber optic ring around South America (Zibechi, 2012).

This new infrastructure will relieve South American dependency on private commercial broadband links, which are both very expensive (contributing up to 50% of the end-user cost to connectivity in the region) and also pass through data centers in the United States (which poses a security threat). The project could be understood through traditional

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Journal of Latin American Communication Research 4 (1) geopolitical analysis, but this would bypass a rich Latin American conversation about the meaning of region and international relations, and the role of communications in it.

Specifically, this project is viewed very differently by different states in the region. For example, in Brazil’s view, the fibre optic ring is an infrastructure and service provision project. States need to work through regional bodies such as UNASUR to build this type of fundamental infrastructure, using state-financial backing and oversight as required. But once the backbone is built, and national broadband infrastructure is extended out to subregional centers, end-user pricing should be ensured through competition among local service providers. Ultimately this means that the market will be the guiding principle for the regulation of broadband infrastructure in the region. Venezuela, on the other hand, supports the project because of the security benefits it will bring, as well as its potential to support autonomous development. According to the Venezuelan Minister of Communication the broadband project is merely a first step in creating regional informational autonomy. Once the ring is complete, Venezuela envisions state-run or sponsored data hubs as well as a regional Internet search engine that will reorganize flows of information throughout South America (Prensa Latina, 2012). Meanwhile, other countries in the region are pursuing subsidiary policies that might take advantage of these larger infrastructure planning initiatives. This is the case in Ecuador where it is state policy to actively pursue the implementation of a knowledge society based in the principles of open knowledge (see www.floksociety.org).

How should we understand these coexisting but different processes? Certainly we could look at them in terms of traditional forms of political-economic competition, and there may be some element of that at work in these examples. But I would argue that it is much richer and more reflective of the emergent international communications theorizing of the region to focus on the geopolitical markers and epistemological fragments that emerge out of these debates. UNASUR and ALBA present alternative visions for regional integration in South America, so what is truly interesting about these regional communications policies are the ways in which they are justified and taken up in local contexts, and how they reorganize the ideas that structure social relations in the region, both through the communications infrastructures that they produce, and through the different ways they are understood. In this sense, examples like these ones present excellent opportunities to locate already existent theorizing of international communication in Latin America today.

Conclusions The question of whether Latin American is a knowledge-producing region is misleading.

Historical contexts are producers of knowledge and that knowledge itself is a form of communication. For communications scholars in particular, the objective should not be to debate the existence of a region, but rather to engage with the processes of communication that are at work, including the epistemic aspects of communicative processes, and the ways in which they give rise to regions of knowing. That means examining the various stages of knowledge producing processes and debating the characteristics of those processes that are important to a particular time. As I’ve tried to

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Journal of Latin American Communication Research 4 (1) emphasize throughout this paper, in order to be able to do this, we need to move away from cookie cutter visions of research, or closed processes of research program formation.

Rather we need to look at research as a creative process in which individual researchers, located within a particular historically informed social context, take up particular commitments to research, adopt certain metaphors for story-telling about concepts and their processes of change through time, and define problems in particular ways.

When we understand theory in this way, as something that arises out of history, rather than as something that is bounded by a geographical region, then it becomes possible to make a relationship between the communication of knowledge and the geopolitics of the contemporary moment. In particular in this post-global age, localities struggle to integrate themselves into universal economic and cultural processes, and these struggles will include epistemic processes. It is through the examination of these processes that we can locate emergent theorizations of international communications, and also analyze, from a critical perspective, the power structures at work in the constitution of these processes. In my own work, this means in particular making a relationship between geopolitics and knowledge, and I trust that it will give rise to new insights into critical international communications.

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Journal of Latin American Communication Research 4(1) United and fragmented: Communication and media studies in Latin America _________________________________________________________________________ Silvio Waisbord George Washington University waisbord@gwu.edu

Abstract Scholars have lamented the state of fragmentation in communication scholarship for it undermines its consolidation as a distinct and coherent field of study. My interest in this article is to assess whether this diagnosis applies to communication and media studies in Latin America.

My argument is that the field remains united yet fragmented in the region. Unlike communication scholarship in the United States and some European countries, it is grounded in common theoretical and analytical roots laid down in the 1960s and 1970s. Foundational studies produced made original and important contributions to the field at large, most notably, the study of media/cultural imperialism, innovations in communication/media policies, and the intersection between media and cultural dynamics. Since then, the field has become consolidated and expanded with the proliferation of research and universities and the development of various lines of research. The result is the empirical fragmentation of the field in multiple, parallel lines of research. Although fragmentation has produced rich empirical studies on myriad issues, it has yet to produce path-breaking, ambitious arguments that once were distinctive of the “Latin American” tradition of communication and media scholarship. What is needed, I argue, is to adopt an analytical position that places theoretical questions at the center, engages with arguments produced in different settings, and participates in broad debates in the global community of communication and media scholars.

The current state of the field of communication studies has been described as “fragmented” in the United States (Beniger, 1993; Cooren, 2012; Stanfill, 2012; Wiemann, Pingree & Hawkins, 1988) and Europe (Donsbach, 2006; Nordenstreng, 2007). Situated at the convergence of the social sciences and the humanities, the field comprises parallel theories, empirical interests, and disciplinary traditions. Attempts to cross divisions and forge connections have been rare. The remarkable expansion of the field in the past decades has exacerbated this trend by adding research directions and theories. Lacking a common disciplinary trunk, the field has become consolidated into a series of parallel offshoots and niche studies.

Scholars have lamented the state of fragmentation because it undermines the consolidation of communication as a distinct and coherent field of study (Craig, 2007; Rosengren,1993). They are concerned about communication studies remaining a thematic prolongation of established

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Journal of Latin American Communication Research 4(1) disciplines rather than a field with unique questions and theories. To address the scattering of communication research in different disciplinary directions, they recommend fostering a dialogue across traditions in order to search for common theoretical frameworks and empirical questions.

My interest in this article is to assess whether this diagnosis applies to the evolution and current state of communication and media studies in Latin America. By focusing on this case, I hope to contribute to understanding the globalization of communication/media scholarship and the (dis)connections in the trajectories of the field across the world. I do not intend to offer a detailed comparison of academic cultures. Instead, I want to examine distinctive aspects of the field in Latin America by drawing comparisons with the field in the West. Claude Levi-Strauss’ observation about understanding other cultures as a way to comprehend our own culture is useful for the analysis of academic cultures: specific characteristics of scholarly fields in particular geographical settings become salient in comparison to others.

My argument is that the field of communication/media studies remains united yet fragmented in Latin America. Unlike communication scholarship in the United States and some European countries, it is grounded in common theoretical and analytical roots laid down in the 1960s and 1970s. Foundational studies produced made original and important contributions to the field at large, most notably, the study of media/cultural imperialism, innovations in communication/media policies, and the intersection between media and cultural dynamics. Since then, the field has become consolidated and expanded with the proliferation of research and universities and the development of various lines of research. The result is, similarly to what has been observed in the West, the empirical fragmentation of the field in multiple, parallel lines of research (Fuentes Navarro, 2009; Sodré, 2012b). Although fragmentation has produced rich empirical studies on myriad issues, it has not necessarily contributed to producing path-breaking, ambitious, and influential arguments that once were distinctive of the “Latin American” tradition of communication and media scholarship. What is needed, I argue, is to adopt an analytical position that resembles the one that generated novel theoretical insights in the past: a cosmopolitan view that places theoretical questions at the center of the analysis, cautiously and critically approaches theories produced in different settings, and is engaged with debates in the global community of communication and media scholars.

A short and incomplete genealogy The story of the field of communication and media studies in Latin America has been told numerous times (Atwood & McAnany, 1986; Beltrán Salmón, 2000; Mattelart & Mattelart, 1997; Otero, 2011; Rodriguez and Murphy, 1997; Schmucler, 1997). No need to repeat the whole story again here. Some aspects, however, need to be brought up for the purpose of my analysis.

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Journal of Latin American Communication Research 4(1) First, communication and media studies have been used interexchangeably in the region. The distinction between communication and media studies has remained definitely more clear on both margins of the North Atlantic than in Latin America. In the latter, this distinction has been blurred as communication was subsumed under “mass communication/the media.” Rhetoric, information studies, and interpersonal communication in everyday places, families, and organizations had a minor presence. Communication and media have often been used as synonymous (de Moragas, 1981), as if mediated processes completely dominate human communication. The limitation of this confusion is that they are two distinctive yet related fields of study, with different histories, epistemologies, and theoretical grounding (Martino, 2007).

Communication as approached from psychology, rhetoric, conversation and language analysis, and ethnomethodology cannot be confused with “mediated” communication that place media industries, organizations, processes, and policies at the center of the analysis.

The “media-centrism” of communication studies in the region was the result of the fact that the field was born from cross-disciplinary interest in the mass media rather than human communication writ large. Sociologists, philosophers, historians, literary critics, and economists converged in a common, emerging intellectual space in the 1960s. Disciplines that shaped the evolution of communication studies in the West Rhetoric, such as cybernetics, biology and psychology (Rogers, 1994), had negligible influence. Lacking the wide-ranging diversity of disciplinary approaches and theories found in the West (Carbaugh & Buzzanell, 2010; Bryant & Miron 2004), particularly in the United States, communication/media studies in Latin America remains focused on media and cultural processes.

In Latin America, the field is historically anchored in debates about mass society and capitalism that dominated the social sciences and humanities in Europe and some academic quarters in the US in the 1960s. Various strands of critical theory, from Marxism to structuralism to semiotics, defined the subject of study as well as the analytical agenda. Communication studies became an extension of intellectual interest in other social questions such as capitalism, socialism, class relations, ideology, identity, and consciousness. The study of media and communication was linked to understanding specific dimensions of large-scale dynamics related to power and social/cultural change in late capitalism. This was reflected in landmark studies that defined the field such as the capitalist structure of media markets, the domination of US cultural industries in the region, the alliances between transnational capital and domestic media powers, semiotic analysis of media messages, media, development, and social change, and so on (de Moragas 1981).

Second, arguments were formulated against the positivist tradition and modernization approaches in communication studies dominant in the U.S (Gilman, 2003). Researchers in Latin America criticized the informational, individualistic and functionalist premises underpinning the “dominant paradigm” in communication associated with the works of Daniel Lerner, Wilbur Schramm, Paul Lazarfeld, and Everett Rogers. Studies rejected the theoretical and epistemological apparatus of, what was called, “functionalist” communication studies. Against 3

Journal of Latin American Communication Research 4(1) the idea of communication as information transmission grounded in cybernetic studies, they embraced the idea of communication as critical consciousness grounded in Marxism, psychoanalysis, and Paulo Freire’s work. They adopted a structuralist approach focused on the linkages between communication and social forces that was critical of the psychological, individualistic premises of communication studies. They embraced qualitative and critical approaches against what they saw as the prevalence of quantitative, number-crunching methodologies. They criticized US scholars for putting communication research in the service of capitalist and imperialist interests represented by the US government and foundations. Instead, the notion that intellectual production should be intrinsic to anti-capitalist struggles in the global South was prevalent.

The field was not particularly interested in building neat disciplinary boundaries. Scholars were not concerned about, to paraphrase Andrew Abbott’s idea, the “chaos of interdisciplinarity.” Nor were they keen in cultivating an “epistemic culture” (Knorr-Cetina, 1999) that established intellectual differences vis-á-vis adjacent sciences and disciplines. Corralling communication and media studies seemed contrary to the essence of the subject of study. Instead, scholars plundered theoretical ideas from art criticism and history, economics and sociology, semiotics and political activism that shaped critical thinking and progressive politics. They didn’t conceive communication as discipline situated in splendid isolation from other intellectual pursuits and academic traditions. They liberally blended insights from theories developed by John Berger and Louis Althusser, Walter Benjamin and Susan Sontag, Roland Barthes and Antonio Gramsci, Raul Prebisch and Darcy Ribeiro, Herbert Marcuse and Regis Debray, Julia Kristeva and Theodore Adorno, and Paulo Freire and Jose Carlos Mariategui. These were “travelling theories,” in Edward Said’s (1993) perceptive observation: theories adapted and translated to make sense of local experiences. The field brought together a hodgepodge of theoretical insights grounded in vastly different experiences, disciplinary backgrounds, and geo-political realities to interpret communication and culture in Latin America in contemporary capitalism.

I am not convinced by the argument that the field in the region grew out a double theoretical influence, as Martin-Barbero and Rey (2000) have argued. In their view, both the “informational/instrumental” paradigm anchored in the US tradition and the “critical/ideological” paradigm of Latin American social sciences influenced the early days of the field (see Kaplun, 2013). However, the former didn’t become institutionalized in schools of communication or the academic community. Its presence was limited to translated articles and books and specific development programs funded by US government agencies, but it never evolved into an indigenous tradition with strong roots in Latin America. There was hardly a regionalized version of “the dominant paradigm” that followed the path charted by US scholars.

If anything, this paradigm served as a constant point of reference to justify the need for critical arguments. This is reflected in the perennial critique of functionalism, used as shorthand for “modernization,” “administrative,” “positivist” research commonly identified with “mainstream”

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Journal of Latin American Communication Research 4(1) communication studies in the United States. The problem is that “functionalism,” if we identify it with the ideas developed by Talcott Parsons and Robert Merton, lost currency in communication studies (and arguably in the social sciences) a while back. It hardly has the prominence it had in a more layered and theoretically scattered field. Regular indictments of “functionalism” bring zombie theories back to life, and build a convenient and unnecessary straw-man to sing the praises of critical theories. At this point in time, criticizing “functionalism” is to beat a dead theoretical horse. It would be as if Latin Americans still object to the Catholic Church for celebrating Mass only in Latin or protest the Spanish Crown for monopolizing foreign trade.

The critique of functionalism is linked to another feature of the field in the region: From the beginning, communication/media studies evolved into a regional, “Latin American” field of scholarship. This was the result of extensive collaboration and cross-reading/citation across the continent. What defined “Latin American” communication/media studies was a collective awareness about common processes in the region coupled with shared empirical questions and theoretical influences. Its identity was also grounded in a deliberate position against theoretical approaches identified with “Yankee/gringo” scholarship, government, and media industries, as illustrated by classic works by Luis Ramiro Beltrán, Juan Diaz Bordenave, and Antonio Pasquali (Martin-Barbero 2002; Vassallo de Lópes & Fuentes Navarro 2005).

Academic research was closely linked to real-world politics and remained conscious about the need to place communication studies within historical and political contexts. Latin American communication/media scholars were critical of “Ivory tower” intellectual work. Many were personally active in the politics of the 1960s and 1970s in the region, and in some cases, occupied prominent positions in government. As universities became epicenters for political effervescence in the aftermath of the 1959 Cuban revolution, scholars deliberately opposed defining themselves and their work as “academic” (Walsh, 2005). The Sartrean model of intellectuals engagé committed to radical politics was particularly appealing amid the antiimperialist, nationalistic, revolutionary politics that characterized the leftist intelligentsia at that time. Prominent communication/media scholars were publicly identified with leftist political parties and organizations, served in governments with progressive agendas, and participated in regional and global debates about the New World Information and Communication Order sponsored by UNESCO. This evolution suffered an important setback with the coming of right-wing military dictatorships to power in the Southern Cone during the 1970s. Scholars based in Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Uruguay went into exile after suffering persecution and threats, and magazines, journals, and universities were shut down. Given these political conditions, intellectual production somewhat shifted to universities in other countries, namely Colombia, Mexico and Venezuela where conditions were significantly better for academic work.

It was in the late 1970s and early 1980s when Latin American cultural studies branched off as a field of study from within communication/media studies. About the time communication/cultural 5

Journal of Latin American Communication Research 4(1) studies was emerging in the United Kingdom, it also surfaced in Latin America (Szurmuk and Waisbord, 2011; Waisbord, 1998). The foundations were laid out by the works of Nestor García Canclini (1995) and Jesus Martin-Barbero (1993) which were critical of dominant arguments and developed original ideas that defined cultural studies in the region. It is not exaggerated to say that they shifted the course of communication/media research and were largely responsible for the “cultural turn” in the field. Both authors questioned then-popular theories of media imperialism and cultural imposition to understand cultural formations and processes.

García Canclini (1995) produced ground-breaking anthropological studies of popular cultures that challenged then-prevalent arguments about the power of “mass cultures” and media industries on cultural formation. His notion of “hybrid cultures” illustrated his argument about the complex dynamics of cultural traditions and expressions in the region. His conclusion helped to reposition the study of culture within communication studies and raised warnings about making ambitious deductions about cultural processes from the analysis of media texts and systems. Simultaneously, Martin-Barbero (1993) invited the field to move the analysis from “the media to mediations,” as his landmark book is entitled. Equipped with a sophisticated theoretical scaffolding anchored in continental philosophy, he prodded the field to rethink the relation between communication, media and culture – to shift the focus of the research from “objects” to processes (Martin-Barbero, 2013). Not only was he critical of the dominant media-centrism and long-held suppositions about the numbing effects of media flows from Hollywood as argued by the “media imperialism” thesis. He was also fascinated by how people engaged in sense-making processes in everyday places – from popular markets to telenovela watching – to (re)create individual and collective identities. In his view, the analysis of media texts should not be the focus of communication studies, but rather, it needs to be placed in contexts where people develop a sense of self and nurture common bonds with others.

Largely thanks to García Canclini and Martin-Barbero, communication and cultural studies have been tied at the waist in Latin America. This was not a complete innovation as previous studies had also been concerned with both communication and culture. After all, both issues were central to pioneering journals in the field such as LENGUAJES and Comunicación y Cultura (Grimson, & Varela, 2002; Schmucler, 1997). Yet their most significant innovation was that different sets of questions needed to be asked about “the media” by placing texts/industries within the study of cultural dynamics. Research on “media audiences”, “cultural consumption” and “youth culture”, which have exploded since their landmark books, are indebted to their ideas. These works capped the early intellectual development of the field in Latin America in the 1980s.

What should we conclude from this abbreviated history?

One conclusion is that communication studies grew out a common intellectual trajectory in Latin America in contrast to the West, where the field lacks a unified history and a clear identity (Eadie, 2011; Simonson, García-Jiménez, Siebers, & Craig, 2012). In the region, the field is

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Journal of Latin American Communication Research 4(1) grounded in cross-disciplinary interest in mass communication and critical social theory, and has paid close attention to the political and cultural uses of the media. The canon of communication studies is more intellectually homogeneous than in the West. It features classic texts of the media/cultural imperialism tradition, structural semiotics and discourse analysis, continental philosophy, cultural studies, and political economy. These theories and approaches have been the lingua franca of the field, included in must-read reading lists of graduate programs and bibliographical references. Compared to the West, notoriously missing in the Latin American field are specific theoretical approaches (pragmatism, phenomenology, ethnomethodology), disciplinary traditions (social psychology, cognitive psychology) and research subjects (media effects, conversation analysis).

Because it embraced a more narrow view of communication, the field developed a common theoretical and epistemological core in Latin America. It became organized around a common set of research subjects, such as media industries, cultural dynamics, and media policies. Critical political economy and cultural studies have stood high even as new thematic questions (such as political communication, health communication, and journalism studies) have gained ground in recent decades. Critical approaches embedded in post-Marxist, post-structuralist debates maintained an influential position. Interpretative and ethnographic studies remain preeminent; positivist approaches have a minor presence. Canonical texts cover significant less ground than in the West. The linkages between academia and politics are still strong. In recent years, scholars have actively participated in contemporary processes of media reform in many countries and are visible voices in governments and the media.

The field evolved with one ear close to theoretical arguments particularly in Western Europe, and the other tuned to historical and contemporary developments in the region. This branded the unique contributions of the “Latin American” tradition. It cultivated a consciousness of Latin America as a common intellectual space, defined by a shared history that could be interpreted by applying insights from theories produced in the West and adapted to different conditions and processes (Barranquero, 2011). It did not champion an “indigenous” way of thinking, steeped into local intellectual currents and uncontaminated by Western influences. The field neither adopted a navel-gazing position nor did it celebrate parochialism. Dominant approaches were not chiefly interested in building an intellectual project uniquely anchored in local traditions, particularly compared to other regions of the global South where indigenous, cultural and religious cosmovisions infused the development of communication theories (Gunaratne, 2010; Miike, 2010; Sesanti 2010). Scholars didn’t denounce Western theories in the name of intellectual sovereignty, but instead, they picked selectively depending on ideological sympathies and ontological premises. While they criticized theories that failed to scrutinize capitalism or link communication to social structures, they embraced continental philosophy, semiotics, and social theory that helped to contextualize communication and media in specific social formations.

Consequently, the field has been open to global and regional development and intellectual trends.

It was a globalized field of study in the sense of connected to intellectual debates elsewhere, 7

Journal of Latin American Communication Research 4(1) before globalization became a buzzword in the post-Cold War era. It sought to de-Westernize communication scholarship decades before it became a concern among academics in the West (Park & Curran, 2000). It was skeptical of universalist claims before deconstructionism and postmodernism became fashionable. It was unabashedly cosmopolitan, constantly rethinking the viability of ideas produced in Europe and the United States in the region.

Where we are This historical excursus shows the consolidation of communication/media studies into a cohesive, interdisciplinary field of study. It cannot be considered a nascent area of academic interest, a “field in construction.” It has become the outgrowth of a “scientific/intellectual movement” (Frickel & Gross, 2005) with distinctive ideas, organization structures, resources, and opportunities. It is intellectually organized around distinctive theoretical and analytical traditions. “Communication” is the umbrella term for the study of media industries, systems, policies, reception, cultures, and organizations. Critical traditions – from Barthesian semiotics to Frankfurt School cultural pessimism, from political economy to cultural studies – have had a strong influence. It is a mature field with the essential organizational infrastructure: scores of departments and schools, thousands of students and researchers, dozens of journals scattered throughout the region, professional organizations, and national and regional meetings.

Compared to the field in United States and Europe, the object of study in Latin America is less diffused as a result of the fact that fewer disciplines and theories have converged. The research tradition of media effects, social networks, message design, information processing, have a strong presence. Nor is there a visible influence from disciplines such as information studies, social psychology, cybernetics, rhetoric, conversation analysis. The field is focused on the study of fewer subjects, namely “the media” and cultural processes, and remains analytically embedded largely in various strands of critical theories.

Because intellectual traditions and thematic interests remain different, the challenges for the field in Latin America are not similar to the ones identified in the West. In the latter, the challenges are grounded in the interdisciplinary nature of the field: the lack of theoretical coherence, the persistent of parallel lines of research, and the lack of common goals (Craig, 2007). These issues are less of a problem in Latin America because the field has a more unified intellectual genealogy that still informs research agendas and analytical perspectives. Less disciplinary omnivorous than the field in the United States, for example, heteroglossia is less of a challenge in the region. Thanks to a shared past, the field speaks fewer theoretical and disciplinary languages.

The current challenge, I argue, is different. It is less about finding a common canon or language and more about reinvigorating theoretical thinking and charting out new analytical developments. It is a field with “theoretical challenges,” as Muniz Sodré (2013) rightly puts it.

What has been missing during the past decades amid the proliferation of publications, academic

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Journal of Latin American Communication Research 4(1) programs, and journals are new theoretical questions that could not only redefine the directions of the field but also make significant contributions to the global field of communication and media studies. What is necessary is, to borrow François Cooren’s (2012) call, to “put theory at the center” in order to sharpen the original contributions of research about Latin America communication and media to the field at large.

What are the causes of the “theoretical challenges”? Two factors need to be mentioned. Research tends to be organized and dispersed around empirical questions instead of theoretical arguments or broad analytical and conceptual debates. The substantive literature produced in the past decades has made important contributions by documenting and offering thoughtful insights on a range of important empirical issues – from media audiences (Bonilla Velez 2011; Orozco Gómez, 2012) to media policies (Mastrini & Becerra, 2009). Yet a significant body of knowledge has yet to make important theoretical innovations that nudge communication and media studies to reconsider previous arguments in light of findings coming out of the region.

Frequently, studies have resorted to using existing theories to analyze certain empirical phenomena instead of probing them or trying to advance new theoretical arguments. This tendency produces derivative ideas rather than novel propositions that question conventional wisdom or push the field in new directions. This is particularly curious considering that Latin American communication scholarship has historically taken pride on its critical tradition – questioning rather than simply perpetuating received knowledge.

Such tendency is also visible in double attitude about theories that originated elsewhere, particularly in the United States and some Western European countries. On the one hand, there persists a mix of skepticism and unfamiliarity with certain lines of thinking that never made into the mainstream of communication/media research such as pragmatism, media effects, cognitive psychology, and ethnomethodology. On the other hand, there continues an innate curiosity and enthusiasm for current European “social theory,” without careful considering how well they travel across borders or how they can be enriched from a “Latin American” perspective.

Examples include recent works by sociologists (Bourdieu, Castells, Luhmann) and philosophers (Auge, Badiou, Butler, Laclau, Ranciere), which have been widely applied to the study of communication and media. The limitation lies in the tendency to use rather than to probe theories to assess their virtues and shortcomings to analyze communication and media. Such attitude diverges from the past given that communication scholars showed a cautious approach in the reception of “foreign” theories. The foundational literature showed a healthy inclination to assess the applicability of arguments produced in the midst of American academia, Parisian politics and Italian insurrections. Such skepticism seems to have dissipated as if what is produced anywhere necessarily applies elsewhere. It would be actually remarkable if arguments made elsewhere, typically outside the field of communication and media studies and without particular consideration of the empirical richness of cases in Latin America, would translate perfectly well.

Putting theory at the center 9

Journal of Latin American Communication Research 4(1) Producing theoretical innovations or steering theory in new directions, let alone producing “Theory” that may revolutionize the field, is not easy. Our intellectual times are far from the heady days of grand social theory in the West (Eagleton, 2004). It is not obvious whether the kind of sweeping, ambitious theorizing that dominated the social sciences and the humanities into the 1980s is still possible. A combination of factors has made such attempts improbable.

Academic specialization drives scholars to produce modest theoretical arguments applicable to niche areas and more narrow questions. Also, embarking on producing grand theories with universalist ambitions is ideologically suspicious in the aftermath of academic multiculturalism and postmodernism. The recognition of the endless complexity of social phenomena, too, leads to aiming for modest arguments instead of master explanations about big communication questions. Although conclusions about “the death of theory” might be vastly exaggerated (Elliott & Attitridge, 2012; Lionnet & Shis, 2011), these are tough times for comprehensive, universalist theorizing.

But even if theory-building may not set its sight on a vast social horizon, it is still worth trying to produce parsimonious and rigorous explanations beyond specific cases. Producing “Theories” may set the bar too high, but it is still possible and necessary to generate original theoretical propositions that invite us to see things in a different light and keep the body of knowledge springy. Pushing new theoretical insights forward is a non-negotiable condition for academic research. Every PhD student is expected to make even a modest contribution to theoretical knowledge. There is still the belief, as Russell Neuman and colleagues (2008) have shown, that failing to push theoretical arguments forward is considered a sin in the field. Empirical research is parasitic on past theories and studies, yet it needs to set out to revisit received ideas, seek conceptual breakthroughs, and chart new analytical directions. If this missing, research quickly becomes stale and uninteresting, and fades without leaving theoretical traces.

Communication/media studies needs constantly to interrogate theoretical arguments. This is particularly so given that interest in a range of “communication” issues – from the use of information technologies in everyday sociability to the structure of media markets – clearly overflows the boundaries of the field. Scholars trained in a wide range of disciplines, from psychology to economics, study communication and media phenomena without making reference to communication theories, becoming affiliated with communication academic organizations, or publishing in “communication/media” journals. Because “communication/media” are ubiquitous in every corner of society, they have become a matter of interest across the humanities and social sciences. In all likelihood, the “mediatization of everything” (Livingstone 2009) will exacerbate central features of the field, namely being empirically untidy, organized around parallel research questions, and brought together under the same institutional infrastructure a motley collection of scholars, departments and journals interested in all-things-communication.

Given the prospects of further fragmentation, it is imperative to continue developing an interdisciplinary theoretical scaffolding. The congenital cacophony of communication/media 10

Journal of Latin American Communication Research 4(1) studies will not go away. The field is bound to live permanently in perpetual chaos, with splintered lines of research and theoretical branches. One way to (re)define the field is to pursue common theoretical questions that are relevant across empirical and disciplinary divides. What sets one academic field apart is not only its unique subject of inquiry or institutional infrastructure. It also needs a shared interest in producing new theoretical arguments. A theoretical body lays out important questions, provides a common frame of analytical reference, and signals research directions.

Another reason for fresh theorizing is the constant need to shake up intellectual dogmas and renew the analytical apparatus of the field. To reiterate what any graduate student is constantly reminded, utilizing theories is important yet insufficient. Academic scholarship should constantly probe the interpretative value of past theories rather than recite old truisms. It is a double-entry process: Theories shape our thinking while research reshapes theories. One doesn’t need to embrace an absolutist Popperian vision or hold a blue-eyed conviction about scientific progress to believe that intellectual pursuits should constantly probe theories. Following theories as Godhanded catechism is unexciting. It produces predictable arguments that make research almost unnecessary. It is contrary to the kind of critical, original thinking frequently celebrated in academic discourse, class syllabi, annual reports, and commencement addresses.

In the case of communication/media studies in Latin America, critical theorizing could not only reinvigorate the field. It might also provide common questions for debating across lines of research that tend to be clustered by topic – industries, audiences, arts, journalism. Theoretical challenges offer conceptual and analytical bridges that can inform thinking in specialized areas of work and break off insular thinking.

Scholarship without borders Foregrounding theory is also important to renew and strengthen the contributions of Latin American research to the field at large. Despite the limitations of English as lingua franca in the global academia (Lugo-Ocando, 2010), increased globalization has opened up new opportunities for showcasing the contributions of research about the region. To become truly globalized and de-Westernized, the study of particular developments within one community, region, or country needs to be placed in the broad context in the field by interrogating theories and arguments produced across settings. Theory-building offers a way simultaneously to break away from the analytical limitations of local empiricism, to bridge political, cultural and geographical divides, and challenge persistent Western-centrism (Hafez 2013).

Formulating theoretical propositions also help to address a pesky question that recurrently appears in the field: the scientific nature of communication and media studies. Sentiments have been divided around this question. Some believe that the “scientific” model identified with the use of certain methodology and epistemology provides the mirror in which the field should see itself; instead, others believe it is the wrong model given its narrow ontological and ideological

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Journal of Latin American Communication Research 4(1) assumptions about knowledge about society. Different positions on this question continue to split the field in separate quarters, the “qualitative/quantitative” rift being one of the most notorious (and least productive) divisions.

No need to revisit this long and complex debate here. Part of the problem, I believe, is that the concept of “science” doesn’t allow finding common ground. It generates strong and opposite reactions across the many divides that stops the discussion before it starts. To some, science evokes the grand project of Western philosophy; to others, it is marooned in the model of natural sciences. To paraphrase Ludwig Wittgenstein, sometimes words stand in the way of understanding each other. What we need is to reformulate the question of “scientificity” and the “scientific” aspirations of the field. What is at stake is the need to permanently (re)articulate theoretical propositions that provide rigorous and generalizable explanations beyond purely empirical and descriptive analysis. In the spirit of Max Weber’s classic formulation of science, we need to enrich coherent and reasoned arguments to organize and interpret evidence. The point is producing research that renovates ambitious, rigorous, evidence-based, sophisticated interpretative frameworks.

In the case of Latin America, the challenge is to produce innovative theoretical arguments that capitalize on the wealth of empirical lines of research and the unique intellectual tradition in the region. What to study is not the problem. Endless number of topics merit study given the reach and constant revolution of communication and social connectivity. Instead, the problem is insufficient attention to theoretical questions that could bring together communication and media scholarship around a common research agenda and foster conceptual and analytical breakthroughs. Although I am aware that this is a difficult task in the context of the compartmentalization of research in specific divisions of professional associations and niche journals, it is worth exploring ways to do it.

Theorizing should be motivated by asking how and why Latin American cases rise new theoretical questions, take propositions further, and/or provide findings that question existing arguments. The broad question needs to be “What does research about communication/media processes in the region add to theoretical debates?” The value of empirical research is not only to analyze certain developments for better comprehending them, but also to serve as the foundation for developing new theoretical insights.

The position here proposed – interrogating the local relevance of arguments developed elsewhere and producing original theories in dialogue with debates in the West – is not entirely original. It actually taps into the tradition of communication and media studies in the region. Pioneering studies adopted such perspective almost half a century ago: they engaged critically with paradigms produced elsewhere instead of simply applying or rejecting them. By probing the relevance of “foreign” theories in light of different conditions, they unmasked their universal pretensions (Mignolo & Escobar, 2010). By doing so, they laid out the foundations of the field in the region born at the crossroads of reading Western arguments “against the grain” of local 12

Journal of Latin American Communication Research 4(1) communication, media/cultural industries, political histories, social mobilization and indigenous intellectual traditions.

Thinking theoretically is a way to engage in Latin American scholarship in debates in the field at large. It is way to reorient the focus from empirical studies about local and regional issues to conceptual conversations across geographical borders. This is necessary at a time of increased academic globalization and “de-westernization” (Park & Curran, 2000) of communication and media studies. Besides widening the empirical pool of cases, studies about specific countries or regions should advance new theoretical insights, just as one expects from any study, no matter its geographical focus. So-called “regional/area studies” should not reinforce geographical divides.

They unintentionally reify, however, conventional topographical notions of social studies, divided across geo-political constructions and “area” specializations. Inward-looking studies may provide valuable insights about local and regional developments and provide a shared space for scholars interested in a certain geographical region. Instead, “regional” scholarship needs to participate in common, global debates by testing arguments grounded in different realities and raising new theoretical and empirical questions.

Latin American communication and media studies needs to reengage with broad theoretical debates beyond geographical borders. Such shift is needed to cultivate a truly cosmopolitan scholarship, “a field of the world” to paraphrase Kant’s classic definition of cosmopolitanism (Waisbord, 2014). This means an intellectual mindset interested in refining theoretical thinking informed by myriad cases from around the world rather than accumulating empirical knowledge or compartmentalizing research in geographical areas. Our knowledge and conclusions are limited as long as they are based on limited set of cases.

Research directions With this view in mind, I want to suggest research directions for studies about Latin America that might contribute theoretical lessons about important questions in the field. My inclination is to embed communication and media studies in the analysis of power, “the fundamental concept in the social sciences,” in Bertrand Russell’s well-known assertion. This is particularly so considering abysmal economic and social disparities, and fluid and dynamic politics in contemporary Latin America. My interest is to understand whether and how the study of communication and media helps to understand how power works and the prospects for strengthening citizenship.

Here I propose four research questions about communication, media, and power: How does citizen activism contribute to changing power relations in media systems and performance as well as media policy making? Do digital media and new forms of media “prosumption” contribute to citizen empowerment? How are communicative spaces for difference and similarity connected to democratic debate and governance? How are myriad forms of communication and

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Journal of Latin American Communication Research 4(1) media linked to processes of social and political change? In what follows I flesh out these questions.

One theme is citizen activism around media policy reforms, a subject of growing interest in media and communication policy as well as central to many recent experiences throughout the region. Citizens’ initiatives and participation in myriad ways have been central to recent public debates and legislative reforms virtually everywhere in the region, including Argentina’s 2009 audiovisual services law, Ecuador’s 2013 law, Uruguay’s 2007 community media law, Brazil’s Marco Civil on Internet regulation, Mexico’s opening of television markets and Internet regulation, Venezuela’s myriad media laws, and so on.

For the past decades, studies on media and democracy have focused on the centrality of civil society and the role of the State. An underlying premise of this line of inquiry is the idea that citizens’ participation makes important contributions to effective democratic accountability and institutional performance. This idea places hopes in civic society to reinvigorate democracy and institutionalize forms of communication that foreground ordinary citizens instead of elites or experts. Civic engagement in/with the media is deemed necessary to strengthen the quality of democratic life and addresses chronic problems of media systems, specifically the disproportionate influence of markets and political elites, the weakness of civic voices and the narrow agenda of news organizations in covering social problems. Certainly, the challenges for media democracy are not identical across regions and political regimes, and the spread of digital technologies, in principle, offers opportunities for redressing old inequalities in political communication.

In Latin America, a range of obstacles for promoting opportunities for civic voices persists.

Government discretionary manipulation of press economies, libel laws, the absence and weakness of freedom of information, and informational routines tilt the balance in favor of political elites. Media concentration and commercialism reduce opportunities for progressive actors to get fair and consistent access. Cozy relations between giant media business and governments negatively affect civic interests that challenge both industrial corporations and allied politicians. Also, anti-press violence amid situations of statelessness, particularly in Mexico and Central America, makes public expression extremely dangerous for citizens and journalists. These obstacles undermine the possibilities for pluralist media systems featuring institutions and platforms that scrutinize political and economic powers, promote a diversity of views, reflect heterogeneous cultures, and cover a range of public issues and demands.

In Latin America, organized publics have pushed to curb the power of both states and market through innovative proposals and legislation. They have aimed to legalize community media, curb media concentration, promote domestic production of audiovisual content, regulate official advertising, ensure public access to government information, increase media accountability and transparency, and eliminate libel laws and other forms of chilling speech. In contrast to a past tradition of citizens’ opposition to the state on media matters, civil society actors have used a 14

Journal of Latin American Communication Research 4(1) range of strategies including opposition, advocacy, and coalition-building with state and market actors to promote democratic changes.

Here there are valuable lessons not only for understanding ongoing political shifts and new forms of civic participation. They are also important to further our grasp on emergent forms of citizen participation and media policy making.

A second theme for further exploration is the issue of social media and citizens’ mobilization, a subject that has received a great deal of scholarly attention, both outside and inside communication and media studies in recent years. This is an appropriate subject to study in Latin America, not only given recent examples of using digital platforms for contesting power and organizing citizens - from student activism to citizens’ mobilization against extractive projects along the region. It is also a relevant issue given the region’s pioneering tradition of alternative uses of various media (from radio to grassroots video) for political empowerment (Rodriguez & Mirelles, 2014). With high levels of Internet penetration and the explosion of mobile platforms in the past few years, the region is incredibly rich with examples of “digitally connected” citizenship.

Various questions need to be closely inspected around new forms of mediation of collective action. Has the proliferation of digital technologies resulted in increased mobilization, in a region with persistent inequalities in digital access? Do digital platforms make it possible to bypass conventional brick-and-mortar associations? How specific social and political conflicts affect the use of digital platforms and, in turn, are affected by the wide availability of the latter? Does the political use of digital media “follow” rather than “precede” protest (Wolfsfeld, Segev, & Sheafer, 2013)? How are communicative practices “hybridized” – mixing old and new technologies, interpersonal and mediated communication - around the contestation of power? Do digital platforms challenge traditional forms of political representation and voice in a democracy?

A third area of research is interrogating the implications of the ongoing consolidation of segmented spaces of communication for democratic debate and governance. These are spaces for communicative homophily populated by citizens who share similar political views, socioeconomic positions, educational backgrounds, religious affiliation, and so on. The fragmentation of both old media and digital platforms has facilitated this process. Citizens are able to tailor media exposure to content that fits existing interests, predispositions, and views, thereby reducing the chances they may encounter unintended news, information, and opinion.

Personalized news, selective exposure, and communication islands become dominant. Instead, the prospects for media content attracting different populations or facilitating exposure to same information across publics become slimmer. The decline of mass media undermines the possibility of media platforms providing common spaces for the meeting of socio-economic, cultural, and political heterogeneity that characterizes contemporary democracies. This development raises concerns about the impact of the exacerbation of polarized beliefs on 15

Journal of Latin American Communication Research 4(1) democratic communication and political dynamics, namely the lack of awareness about the lives and demands of fellow citizens, and the difficulties for consensus-building actions.

Underlying this line of argument is the notion that democracies should provide spaces for discussing and encountering similar interests (based on geographical location, occupation, ethnicity and other variables) and heterogeneous ideas and beliefs. Democracies require communication for expressing and bridging differences. When only one type of communication predominates, democracy suffers. Common mediated spaces, dominant during the height of the mass media, catapulted dominant views to the center in detriment of a diversity of opinions and expectations. Mass media were not particularly good at reflecting and nurturing difference. In contrast, the primacy of communication homophily leads to a different set of problems: the perpetuation of enclosed, self-referencing views separated from the rest of society. The communication architecture of democracies should encourage citizens to come in regular contact with similar and different viewpoints and experiences. Whether citizens actually take advantage of such opportunities is a different, even more complex matter that remains the subject of much analysis.

The challenges presented by the solidification of niche, segregated  communication and the weakening of common, large-scale spaces, are different and have uneven consequences across societies. Impact may not be similar in multicultural societies or highly homogeneous societies (in terms of ethnicity, religion, race, language). Nor should we assume that the effects may be similar in polarizing public opinion and democratic politics in polities with moderate differences on fundamental issues or in those with high degree of social exclusion or moderate social inequalities, and in democracies with a history of violent confrontations or a tradition of peaceful resolution of conflict and compromise.

Latin America offers a fertile ground to examine these questions and probe concerns about ongoing trends in digital communication raised by recent scholarship in the United States and Europe. The region remains an immense laboratory for myriad experiments in communication promoting sharedness and diversity. Recent initiatives to institutionalize multiculturalism in Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, and Ecuador through a range of media projects provide a wealth of experiences to examine the challenge of cultivating a common democratic polity on the basis of the recognition and reaffirmation of cultural pluralism (Gumucio-Dagron, 2014).

Likewise, the issue of whether digital communication promotes polarized opinion and politics is enormously important. It takes special relevance considering not only the tragic history of political polarization and violence in much of the region, but also given the exacerbation and mobilization of polarized opinion in specific countries in the past decade. Uncivil speech and ideological bubbles in digital communication that may lead to bitter and vicious politics is not just a plausible, hypothetical problem. Regrettably, it has been a familiar scenario in countries with a long record of political and social violence. The question, then, is whether social media

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Journal of Latin American Communication Research 4(1) and other digital platforms intensify polarized opinion and, in turn, leads to hardening positions that make the politics of compromise and consensus-building difficult.

The deepening of “echo chambers” is particularly problematic in countries with marked levels of social exclusion and disparities. Certainly, this is not a new development if we consider that both communication and media have historically evolved amid such conditions and, arguably, were constitutive of social differences based on class, race, ethnicity, education, and language.

Finally, my last suggestion is to explore ways to bridge the “paradigm divide” between informational/strategic and participatory paradigms in theory and practice of communication for social change. I believe insights from both traditions are needed to comprehend the multidimensionality of communication to promote social justice and address power inequalities. It is hard to envision how sustainable social change is possible without addressing power relations.

Wrestling with power to encourage large-scale social change inevitably demands strategic communication and participatory politics (Waisbord, 2014).

Participatory communication is more than the presence of democratic conditions of speech or the mobilization of affected publics. It implies questioning power inequalities and transforming institutions through various strategies to produce structural changes. The literature on social movements (Goodwin & Jasper, 2009) has amply demonstrated that collective mobilization is not just the result of spontaneous, random actions. Successful efforts to promote social change demand strategic thinking – planning and implementation of goals, tactics, publics, opponents, and arguments. Transformative strategic communication necessitates discussions about goals, key publics, messages, and tactics. It is linked to ways to frame problems for various publics, form alliances, leverage funding, human, and institutional resources, and identifying appropriate opportunities for promoting social justice.

Latin America is a rich setting for probing these ideas. Not only it produced pioneering studies about communication, development, and social change half a century ago, a tradition that remains strong in the field (McAnany, 2012). The region has also been the place for the recent emergence and consolidation of social movements that blend insights from strategic and participatory communication to achieve change across a range of issues – human rights, domestic violence, health, education, environment, employment, child labor, and others. Just as they foreground participatory mechanisms to foreground different voices against the monotonous public discourse dominated by political and economic elites, they resort to various persuasive strategies to raise awareness about issues and persuade various publics to support change.

Certainly, these four lines of research do not make an exhaustive list of topics to explore and refine theoretical arguments in the field of communication and media studies.

Conclusions

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Journal of Latin American Communication Research 4(1) The Latin America case suggests that the globalization of academia may not necessarily streamline research agendas, analytical perspectives, and theoretical approaches. The field of communication studies has, no doubt, become globalized if by this we mean increased connections through “international” journals, books, and conferences. Global connectivity, however, doesn’t inevitably lead to shared research directions, common perspectives or similar criteria to define what counts as quality research. If the Latin American experience is a good indicator, the academic habitus, even if open to ideas originated elsewhere, remains rooted in local intellectual traditions and oriented towards domestic questions.

The question, then, is how to turn attention to theoretical issues by foregrounding questions that are relevant beyond specific local and regional boundaries. By facilitating conversations and collaborations across regions, the globalization of academic work offers the opportunity to produce studies and theories based on cross-national evidence. Given these conditions, compartmentalizing research in geographical boxes is not only a waste. It has no intellectual justification. The de-westernization of the field in the spirit of cosmopolitan scholarship demands shared questions and multiple perspectives. Publishing cases from the global South in English may be an important step, but it is insufficient if there is not engagement with ideas produced elsewhere. Just adding and stirring case studies from the South to existing research in the West doesn’t necessarily result in a new kind of academic sensitivity, original approaches, or solid theorizing based on myriad cases. It might bring an international polish but it won’t shake up parochialism. It might widen the pool, but it wouldn’t necessarily shift the debate or enrich theoretical perspectives.

What is needed is to continue to stimulate a curiosity about relevant theoretical and empirical questions in the field at large in both the West and the global South. I hope I have shown that Latin American scholarship has much to offer in this regard.

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For the democracy of the systems of evaluating academic production: convergences of Latin-American & European scholars

Aimée Vega Montiel CEIICH-UNAM aimeevegamx@yahoo.com.mx Abstract The purpose of this article is to analyze some trends and challenges Latin-American scholars face towards academic assessment. I propose that the IAMCR be the channel by which communication scholars from all regions of the world influence policies of scientific production.

Introductory note The contribution of Latin-American scholars to media and communication studies has been very significant. However, the dialogue and exchange with scholars from the North are not usually in terms of equality but of hierarchy. Why? Southern scholars communities do not actively participate in the definition of the models and systems designed for measuring and assessing academic production. Although there are specific methodologies and instruments operating at both local and regional contexts, the academic production of Southern scholars is subjected to the rules defined in other latitudes of the world –in latitudes where different social problems and different scientific conditions for research exist.

The effects of this phenomenon are evident in at least two scenarios: the construction of the object of study and its influence on the research agenda.

In this logic –the logic of the market-, that tends to legitimate a few theories, methods and problems, competitiveness over cooperation tend to be the rule of our production and organization (Ortiz, 2009).

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Journal of Latin American Communication Research 4 (1) Therefore, this paper is motivated by the desire to highlight some of the effects of this process in the scientific communities that, as we will see, are conditioned by their relationship with the English language.

The structural problems We have to admit there is an unequal structure of production and dissemination of knowledge in the international scientific system. This is the effect of various processes, both external and internal to our field.

The external process is connected to two main aspects. First, it is connected to the dominance of neoliberal capitalism in the criteria of qualifying scientific knowledge (Fuentes, 1997). Second, to the dominance of natural sciences in the definition of rules that assess academic production in all fields, including the social sciences. The idea of a researcher in its laboratory, publishing one paper and being multi-cited, has become a universal pattern to define “quality” in academic work. This system erodes the value and possibilities of other forms of dissemination of knowledge –including books.

The internal process is related to the domination of the social sciences powers (USA and Europe) over communities of the South, such as Latin America. The argentine sociologist Fernanda Beigel calls this phenomena “academic dependence” (2010).

Here are some of the expressions of this dominance: 1. The publishing system. This system has established universal publishing standards that define quality in terms of what is good in the Anglo-Saxon world. This system goes beyond to establish basic rules for a qualified paper. Since English is the only valid language to publish, according to this system, for the non Anglo-Saxon researchers this requirement affects their identity and creation processes, what in Divina Frau-Meigs’ perspective, "transforms us into research entrepreneurs (publish or perish) instead of creators and innovators" (2009). One central effect of this is that the knowledge produced in languages other than English has a “reduced impact and a poor international circulation, as well as a low place in the hierarchic academic system” (Beigel, 2010). One example is the Social Science Citation Index, a data base not only 2

Journal of Latin American Communication Research 4 (1) limited by its restriction to scientific production in English, but also by the criteria to build the instrument which, according to Fernanda Beigel, indicates mainly publications from the US as “high impact” journals.

2. Linked to that effect is the manipulation of scientific recognition by publishers, usually located in the North (Beigel, 2010).

3. Another implication of the dominance is the change in institutional assessments, today mainly influenced by external entities to Universities. According to Beigel (2010), in the 1960s, public agencies and private foundations started competing for cultural and ideological influence in Latin America, and other regions of the South – such as Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, Organization of American States (OAS), and Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)-, looking for economic progress. Latin American States response was to allow these organizations to define the criteria to assess academic production.

4. A further expression of the dominance is the influence of global entities, such as UNESCO, in the definition of the research agendas. It directly affects the objects of study, theories and methods and, in consequence, the funding that universities, organizations and governments assign to it. The inconvenience is that there are many problems in the Southern regions that, not qualifying as a priority, become invisible and, therefore, their solution are proven difficult.

In spite of those conditions, Latin American scholars have built their own strong identity, evident on Jesús-Martin Barbero, Rosa María Alfaro, Rossanna Reguillo, Antonio Pasquali and Néstor García Canclini’s perspectives. However, the work of these researchers are mainly published in Spanish, and remain invisible.

So the central problem here is the supremacy of English in the international academic system, which limits the possibilities of dissemination of knowledge in other languages.

The problem of English Brazilian anthropologist Renato Ortiz writes in The Supremacy of the English Language in the Social Sciences that “globalisation conjugates in English”. In the realm of science this is paradoxical as, on the one hand, the value and practical purpose of English for our work is very important. It is the language that allows us non-Anglo-Saxons to 3

Journal of Latin American Communication Research 4 (1) communicate not only with British and American researchers, but also with other European (Portuguese, French) or Asian researchers and so on, to reach agreements to improve the quality of life of societies. On the other hand, the predominance of the English language does not contribute to the collective sense of our work. Instead, it divides it by establishing a hierarchy. Such effects are expressed at the thought and the action outline levels, which can be resumed in one major implication: The influence of Anglo-Saxon scientific communities on the construction of the object of study, i.e. on the theoretical and methodological definitions used for research. When we translate in English, in Divina Frau-Meigs' words, the essence of a notion gets lost; translation may lose concepts.

According to her, "The example of concepts relates directly to identity and through it to a person’s individual rights, especially dignity. Such is the case of style, which is even more annoying than that of ideas. Most researchers spend their entire life perfecting their phrases, chiselling away at a paragraph for hours and days, adding a nuance that feels just right. The most famous among us tend to be the ones who have the perfect balance between ideas and style. And it can all disappear in translation since translators tend to dispel ambiguity and clarify notions so that readers don’t think that the translation is faulty" (2009).

For what has been explained here, we know that both publishing and being quoted in English is highly valued, but sometimes it is detrimental to ideas. I remember the sad confession made by an European researcher made at the ECREA Conference held in Barcelona in November 2008. He pointed out that his interest in working with Latin American researchers and universities had been detrimental to his productivity, as publications in Spanish were not recognized in evaluations in his country.

Thus, the usefulness of English in the context of globalization is an indisputable fact. It is a useful communication tool but its prevalence has also created a language hierarchy and, in the words of Renato Ortiz (2009), the consequent intellectual segregation has created inequities among us.

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Journal of Latin American Communication Research 4 (1) We have historically lived the risk, the constant threat of the establishment of a hegemonic model representing the world that legitimates theories, methods and problems. That model is widely known: the market. In this context, scientists do not escape its domination; it is the one that rules society and us as a part of it. It governs our logic of production and participation. Thus, demands for competition prevailing over those of cooperation have invaded the scientific field, and there exists, therefore, a latent threat that collective scientific action will be undermined (Vega, 2009).

I understand that researchers all over the world are subjected to these systems, so I ask at this point: What can we do, as a community?

Since I think this is a problem closely related to the human rights, we have to focus our attention on the development of creative forms of cooperation. Here my proposals: 1. Continuous promotion of the representation of all regions in consultancy bodies of IAMCR attending organizations such as the UNESCO to influence the research agenda- and publishers –to promote work with proved quality in other languages than English.

2. I broadly suggest that the IACMR be the channel by which all communication researchers of the world influence policies of scientific production. At this point, I think we need a representation on global entities, such as OECD, to influence the criteria on academic assessment.

3. Support for activities that grant prominence to regional communication research, in coordination with regional associations. I propose ALAIC and ECREA lead the building of research networks to stimulate collective production of knowledge, with visibility in the international scientific system.

4. Stimulation of research and publication of regional analyses seeking participation of regional publishing houses.

5. Another proposal has to do with the use of Open Access, as well as other alternative databases.

I want to close my essay quoting Renato Ortiz, “It would be ideal to speak all the languages in which the social sciences are expressed. We would then possess not a universality of spirit, but a library at the service of a greater wealth of knowledge”.

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Journal of Latin American Communication Research 4 (1) Thus, I sum up the utopian ideal of this paper with the aim of “recovering specificities by making languages relevant, as they are the expression of our worldviews”.

Salud.

References Beigel, F. (2010). The challenge of constructing autonomous social sciences in the South. II Workshop on Academic Dependence, Mendoza, Argentina.

Frau-Meigs, D. (2009). Languages, research and human rights. Paper presented at the IAMCR Conference, Mexico City.

Fuentes, R. (1997). Academic communication research in Mexico: notes for a reflexive balance sheet. Mexican Journal of Communication, 3, México, Fundación Manuel Buendía.

Ortiz, R. (2009). La supremacía del inglés en las ciencias sociales, Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI. Vega, A. (2009). Towards linguistic diversity in IAMCR. Paper presented at the IAMCR Conference.

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Raimondo Anselmino, N. & Reviglio, M. C. (Eds.) (2013). Territorios de Comunicación. Recorridos de investigación para abordar un campo heterogéneo. Quito: Quipus, CIESPAL. Guillermo Esteban Ferragutti ISHIR - CONICET ferragutti@ishir-conicet.gov.ar

To simply say that designing a research project and writing a thesis are not just mere activities, but complex processes with multiple interconnected levels and problems that have to be engaged in a transversal way, might seem, at first sight, an obvious statement.

This is something widely said, and few times truly gauged.

Methodology manuals often become actual instruments of eternization, in the words of Bourdieu, of the craft of research, remaining isolated in a level of abstraction and scientific purism that little contributes to spread real light about the practice sense of knowledge construction.

This book is an input in that sense. A group of Ph.Ds and Ph.D candidates in social communication, most of them from the National University of Rosario (Argentina), have organized -in order to systematize them in a collective publication- their own experiences about their theses. This book proves itself useful in several directions. Firstly, it will be helpful for those who are interested in similar graduate and post-graduate themes.

Secondly, it will help those who want to have a general idea about the specificity of the social communication research field. Lastly, and in a more general point of view, it will serve anyone who wishes to obtain a complementary vision of methodology, which, as said previously, may offer an idealized image of the details of research process.

In spite of the fact that a work of this type involves a certain and inevitable unrealization attached to narrative discourse, the authors of this book offer a self-reflection, inherent to any craftsmanship –as writing a thesis certainly is- in some cases in present tense, of their own research practices, the problems they faced, and the ways they solved them. Each one discusses how to work around the tension between narrative and retrospective.

The eternized image of many research manuals turn the research process into a system of watertight stages, connected in a linear fashion, as a production circuit, to which adjectives as “recursive” are often incorporated, as if they were a strategy to avoid questioning. Although these elements bring the necessary grounds and categories to proceed in the research process in a self-analytical manner, it is not less true that there is “something missing”, and that can only be recovered, with its own limitations, by the experience report. It is all about visualizing those elements, but brought into play in a concrete practice, and historicized in the personal chronology of the researcher.

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As we advance in further reading, the idea that nothing in the research process is a priori stable and common to all grows strong. So does the notion that the elements of a thesis design emerge slowly and simultaneously from that confusing initial lagoon, where researchers advance taking very personal decisions.

So, doctoral theses arise as a true authorial process, under a design with crafted elements, where decisions are made in such way that, at times, they do not seem to be sufficiently grounded, or are simply wrong. In this sense, erudition, creativity, curiosity or conjuncture help the research process gain its originality, specificity and richness.

Furthermore, if we travel through the intellectual itinerary of each one of the authors of the book, it is possible to perceive a certain collective path, with similar problems and difficulties, and common doctoral seminars. They represent a group of colleagues that respect and help each other, who share mutual reading and collaborative practices, which are indispensable for the production of a qualified thesis.

In Chapter 1, Susana Frutos establishes a theoretical cut and characterization of the specific problems of the social communication research field. At the same time, her article offers a profile of the author as director of the Ph.D program in Social Communication of the National University of Rosario - the formation and belonging space of most authors in this book.

In Chapter 2, María Cecilia Reviglio discusses her experience with her thesis, titled Youth, discoursive competences and University. Academic discoursive practices of students in the admittance threshold to University. The case of Social Communication degree in UNR1. Reviglio focuses on two terminal points of the research process: the construction of a research problem, which in her case emerged from her own teaching practice, and the proper problems involved in the writing of a thesis, i.e. the so called white page complex, or the search for the best data structure or category strategies, or even the personal quest for developing a personal esthetical writing style.

In Chapter 3, Natalia Raimondo Anselmino builds her study object based on a series of questions originated in the passage from the printed press to online, focusing on the readers participation sections as news commentators. In the long process of construction of a knowledge object, Raimondo Anselmino faced the difficult task of reporting on a media platform that in its operation, its aesthetics, and its forms of participation periodically suffered great redesigning that permanently resignified these spaces. Her thesis is titled The Link between newspaper and reader in online press. Analysis of intervention and participation reader spaces in Argentinian newspapers Clarín and La Nación2.

1

Translation offered by the author of this review. Original Title: Jóvenes, competencias discursivas y universidad. Las prácticas discursivas académicas de los estudiantes en el umbral de ingreso a la Universidad. El caso de la carrera de Comunicación Social de la UNR. 2

Translation offered by the author of this review. Original Title: El vínculo diario-lector en los periódicos online. Análisis de los espacios de intervención y participación del lector en los diarios argentinos Clarín y La Nación.

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In Chapter 4, Florencia Rovetto, author of Social representation of work of female press workers: Comparative and qualitative analysis of current news reporting3, is the only person in this book to complete her Ph.D in the Autonomous University of Barcelona, where she studied the Spanish media. After finishing her thesis, she returned to Argentina, where she began a postdoctoral project, which consisted in a comparative study of both countries. Her report describes her work in a Spanish institution, which gave her the possibility to develop a complete and well-framed state of the art piece. Also, she discusses how her research results clearly show the need of a profound debate about gender-related issues in the field.

Lautaro Cossia’s thesis, on the other hand, is a current work-in-progress, so that the author worries, first, about showing his initial interests that derived from his study on the humoristic graphic press (satire, in particular) and its figurative-written representation during the modernization process in Rosario city, during the period of 1871-1914. Then, he inquires about the reach and limits of humor and satire notions, historicizing them as concepts, and confronting them to the difficult task in course, consisting in putting these categories in a historical context of changes in the functioning modes of the press. His work examines changes of juridical order, with the apparition of new legal regulations; changes of technological order, with the incorporation of new printing techniques; and changes, of journalistic order in general, regarding the passage of a factious press to commercial and generalist press.

In Chapter 6, Mauricio Manchado describes how a postgraduate seminar course can evolve into a study titled Jail, communication and subjectivity. The discourse of conduct in the subjective construction of imprisoned population who transits the releasing threshold of prison. The case of the Unidad Penitenciaria Nº3 of Rosario city4. The author describes the long periplus that a researcher must overcome to be admitted in what it is, probably, the most opaque and closed itself institution that we can imagine: prison. What began first as a research on the secret as a resistance practice but also as a substratum (of the unsaid things) from which the construction of imprisoned population emerges, became –thanks to the notion of thresholdity in a seminar, also present in the work of Reviglio, and after several turns-, a study on what the imprisoned population must be, if gathering the necessary conditions. This all gets translated in a series of conducts and, overall, a discourse about conducts.

On what concerns Claudia Kenbel, she describes, on Chapter 7, the Cultural circuits and tensions of sense. The ‘rurbanity’ according to social memories in Río Cuarto city5 (work in progress). Departing from the persistence of certain practices and rural economic

3

Translation offered by the author of this review. Original Title: La representación del trabajo de las mujeres en la prensa: Análisis comparativo y cualitativo de la información de actualidad.

4

Translation offered by the author of this review. Original Title: Cárcel, comunicación y subjetividad. El discurso de la conducta en la construcción subjetiva de la población encerrada que transita el umbral de egreso de la prisión. El caso de la Unidad Penitenciaria Nº 3 de la ciudad de Rosario 5

Translation offered by the author of this review. Original Title: Circuitos culturales y tensiones de sentido.

La rurbanidad según las memorias sociales en la ciudad de Río Cuarto.

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activities in urban contexts, the category of ‘rurbanity’ makes its entrance, as an expression of the tension between production and circulation of senses associated to an urban-modern social order, and the material and concrete situation of its actors. In this report, the author focuses on the description of the methodological construction of her work as a response to a series of problems in the construction of the object under study. In particular, the subjective narration of conflicted personal milestones and social memory allowed her to express that tension previously mentioned.

In Chapter 8, Soledad Ayala inquiries about the forms of reading and how they are changing, departing from the coexistence between paper platforms and electronic. From the decision of embracing a socio-technical framework, we can already see traced down the main choices of categories and concepts, and also, the empirical cutting and the delimitation of the field from which data is obtained: the first and fifth years of a public university and three private ones (Methodist evangelist, Catholic and secular) of Law degrees, and of a technic-public university, and two private ones (Methodist evangelist and Catholic) of the System Engineering degree of Rosario. Some partial results are anticipated too, and they open the question to why young students belonging to a certain age group usually called as digital natives use the electronic platform as a reading instrument in such a low measure in comparison to print.

In Chapter 9, Sebastian Castro Rojas, with his thesis on Use and appropriation modalities of TICs and new forms of relationship: the case of cyber-locals of Rosario city in present times6, have tried a real micro-sociological approach to the practices and uses related to sociability under an important condition: at the moment he started his research, the amount of cyber-locals in Rosario had suffered a geometrical explosion. They were object of an unprecedented great interest, and very soon, without any way of predicting it, their number decreased as spasmodically as they emerged.

Finally, Andrea Calamari tells how starting from restlesness triggered by a film, the phenomenon of work emerges as an interesting issue, and then, the discursive field on employability establishes itself as a strategic element of the new posfordist society. With that in mind, the author analyzed the business sections of newspapers and corporative websites of a group of human resources consultants on national level to try to elucidate the discursive matrices of the labor industry.

This book indicates that the world of scientific research misses more experience reports that narrate with rigor and intellectual honesty the avatars of its production and strategies put into play, because after all: What it is to write a thesis? We wonder. It is to have an idea and be able to argue it, to give it sense and sustenance, it is to take risks to a new possible way of comprehension, it is to listen to intuition and then give free rein to a scientific way to express it. It is to learn with others: to reveal the questions and to work consciously for that the answers could fill them (p.169).

6

Translation offered by the author of this review. Original Title: Modalidades de uso y apropiación de Tecnologías de Información y Comunicación y nuevos modos de relación: el caso de los ciberlocales de la ciudad de Rosario en la actualidad.

\ Joournal of Latin American Communication Research 4 (1) Interview Eliseo Colón Zayas on Critical Thought Eliseo Colón Zayas is a professor at Porto Rico University and the director of international relations at ALAIC. He was interviewed by Fernando Oliveira Paulino, professor at University of Brasilia and ALAIC’s board member.

-In regards to the critical thought school, could we say that there is an European approach or a Latin American one? At what levels are they different and similar (theory, method, etc.)? What are their differences?

The critical thought tradition is embedded into Europe’s and Latin America’s epistemology theories in search for meaning, knowledge and understanding. For me, the notion of a Latin American critical thought refers to a category which, like many others, represents the works, writings, theories and ideas of a number of intellectuals whose work seek to forge not only an understanding of Latin American societies, including their utopias and dystopias, but pursue social change and transformations. As a category, critical thought is tied with processes of modernity. Europe’s long philosophical tradition comes together as the set of ideas we call Western canon, out of which much of Latin American critical thought developed. As it happened in Europe, there are various temporalities to Latin American critical thought. Europe’s critical thought tradition spans from the Greco-Latin philosopher, the Medieval Latin tradition, Renaissance and Baroque thought to the founding fathers of Modernity, Descartes, Kant, Adam Smith and the Scott empiricism tradition, Hegel, Marx and Engels, the Vienna School, the Frankfurt School, Gramsci and much of the 20th century structuralist and marxist traditions, along with the Cultural Studies tradition and the French thought. Latin America’s critical thought had an ongoing dialogue with the European tradition from the first decades of the 19th century to the early 20th century. The ideas of Toussaint Louverture, Bolívar and Miranda, Sarmiento, Echeverría, Alberdi, Bello and Martí proved fertile for revolutionary movements all through the 19th century. Mariátegui’s marxistindigenous tradition opened an entire new way to understand Latin American realities, while Vasconcelos, Paz and Fanón, Cardoso, Furtado and Freire, among many others, provided insights to rapid developments during the 20th century. Recently, the works of Jesús Martín Barbero, Néstor García Canclini, Aníbal Ford, Eliseo Verón, Muniz Sodré, Renato Ortiz, Rossana Reguillo, Calos Monsiváis, Alejandro Grimson, and José Joaquín Bruner have changed the way to look, to read and speak about Latin American critical thought. These researchers have changed the paradigm of Latin American critical thought with a powerful voice in the concert of international research and thought based on their own vision, while sharing methods, and fields of common interest such as sociology, anthropology, economics, linguistics, semiotics, and communication studies understood as the production, circulation and reception of signifying practice.

- How do you evaluate the relationship between Europe and Latin American researches?

\ Joournal of Latin American Communication Research 4 (1) At institutional level, there is much to be done. At the personal level, researchers have been getting together in professional gatherings and meetings, which have proven beneficial for both.

- What was different in the past? What has changed? How the technology can change and help this interchange? What is the perspective of the future?

Latin American universities are more willing to work with their European counterparts. Latin American universities and research centers have to achieve full recognition from their European counterparts in order to foster and promote scientific interchange. Technology will help at a personal level, but work needs to be pursued at an institutional level.

-What can both regions learn from each other? opportunities?

What are the gaps and the

Learning from each other is always an ongoing process of sharing and exchanging of ideas. Each side should avoid skepticism, which in the majority of cases is mere prejudice and resistance arising when different research and academic cultures work together.

-How do political realities impact the communication and media studies?

Critical thought in communication and media studies in Latin America has called into question the hegemonic forms of understanding the neoliberal capitalist market, the colonization of power and certain Eurocentric assumptions, while arguing for the development of democratic political forms. Research on communication and media studies bring to the forefront the social movements, especially those of the peasant, the indigenous, ethnic groups and the urban unemployed movements of the 21st century, as well as the landless workers, zapatistas and the piqueteros, class fractions, sexuality and gender issues.

On the other hand, the expansion of the European Union, the economic and financial crisis in many European countries, long term unemployment in the Eurozone, immigration, the rise of xenophobic discourses, the rise of nationalism, as well as many other social-political, cultural and economic issues during the first two decades of the 21st century have made European critical thought provide answers to problems being discussed and researched in Latin American for a long time.

-How do the economic realities impact the communication and media studies?

Economic realities cannot be discussed separate from the political reality. The current economic crisis and transformation of capital affects both regions. What can be said of the impact of the political situation in critical thought in communication and media studies applies to the economic realities since both affect democracy and the process of democratization.

\ Joournal of Latin American Communication Research 4 (1) -How does research produced in different languages impact the communication and media studies?

Multilingual Europe, with a plurality and diversity of national and regional languages, has taken English, with few exceptions, as the language for science and research. Bilingual Latin America, Spanish and Portuguese, has begun slowly to dismantle its distrust of English in research and science. A new and young generation of researchers has taken English as their language for scientific transfer of knowledge.

-What about the colonial heritage? What about reverse colonization?

Colonialism and neocolonialism are 19th and 20th century forms of world order; globalization and the new world order can be seen as their offspring. However, the new globalization opens the possibility of dialogic in a decentered, heterogeneous and fragmented world order which can be seen as an alternative to colonial and neocolonial domination. The new globalization allows for new boundaries, recodes, reformulations, and new linguistic and cultural transfers.

- Is it possible to compare the relationship between Europe and Latin American with other continents? What is similar? What is different?

Instead of comparing, what is important is learning from what is being done in other areas. Also, one might pay attention to the close ties and interchanges of Latin American research traditions with the United States, especially the Caribbean basin, Central America and MĂŠxico, and the way they have influenced communication and mass media research.

- How can IAMCR or ICA stimulate the interchange and dialogue between regional perspectives and approaches?

Latin American researchers should join both associations individually, while ALAIC should join them institutionally to promote and pursue a constant dialogue with communication and mass media researchers from diverse research traditions.

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Contributors to this issue

Fernando Oliveira Paulino: Professor at University of Brasilia and board member of the Latin American Association of Communication Reseachers (ALAIC.) Cesar Bolaño: Professor at Sergipe Federal University, Brazil, and president of ALAIC. Nico Carpentier: Associate Professor at the Free University of Brussels, Belgium and vice-president of the European Communication Research and Education Association (ECREA) from 2008 to 2012.

Ulla Carlson: Professor and director of NORDICOM, University of Gothenburg, Sweden.

Katherine Reilly: Assistant Professor at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada.

Silvio Waisbord: Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the School of Media and Public Affairs at the George Washington University, and editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Press/Politics.

Aimée Vega Montiel: Researcher at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, and vice-president of the International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR).

Guillermo Esteban Ferragutti: Researcher at ISHIR – CONICET, Rosario, Argentina.

Heloiza G. Herscovitz: Associate Professor at California State University Long Beach and editor of the JLACR.