Social Justice

Scholars from a wide range of academic disciplines have grappled with the concept of social justice. Communication scholars have contributed to that conversation by articulating a communication approach to social justice that (a) explains how individuals, groups, organizations, and communities that are under-resourced and marginalized are excluded from important discourses affecting them and (b) urges communication scholars to employ their resources (e.g., their theories, methodologies, pedagogies, and other practices) to challenge and change those exclusionary discourses. This entry explains the conceptual, theoretical, methodological, and pedagogical commitments and practices of communication and social justice scholarship.

The communication approach starts by recognizing that social justice is a deeply contested symbol with virtually no agreement about what it means and how it should be measured or assessed. Consequently, rather than arguing for a particular definition for the term, this approach articulates four premises associated with a social justice sensibility that can guide communication scholarship (both research and teaching).

The first premise is that a focus on social justice foregrounds ethical concerns, meaning that scholars should start by being clear about whose interests are privileged by their scholarship. Scholars make choices about what phenomena they study, how they study those phenomena, and to what ends they put findings from their scholarship—choices that favor particular interests and not others. The communication and social justice perspective exhorts scholars to choose to stand against domination, oppression, and other social injustices. This approach, thus, does not pretend to be neutral; it takes a preferential option for those who experience social injustice. This stance does not mean that all communication scholarship should promote social justice; it does, however, advocate for creating space in the communication discipline for such scholarship; argues that because communication scholars are embedded within systems (e.g., economic, political, social, and cultural) that oppress and exploit others, they cannot remain ideologically neutral in what they research and teach; and calls on communication scholars to own their research and teaching choices (which tend to privilege those with many resources at their disposal, such as large for-profit organizations) and to be explicit about whose interests they privilege.

The second premise is scholars' commitment to analyze how systems of communication (e.g., dominant discourses, social structures, and patterns of interaction) produce and reproduce injustice. Although scholars typically focus on individual cases of injustice (e.g., a person awaiting execution on death row), the communication and social justice approach strives to change systems that create and sustain injustice (e.g., societal acceptance and use of the death penalty). Communication and social justice scholars, thus, may seek first-order change in the short term to reenfranchise those who are marginalized into the mainstream, but ultimately, their goal is to produce second-order change that gets rid of unjust systems.

The third premise is communication scholars' adoption of an activist orientation, trying, as best they can, to change unjust systems. They strive to accomplish this goal by engaging in first-person perspective research, intervening directly into unjust systems by facilitating communicative practices (e.g., helping people to dialogue, offering communication skills education, and producing written and visual materials) and documenting the nature and effects of those interventions. Such scholarship stands in sharp contrast to traditional third-person perspective research in which researchers are positioned outside the stream of events and describe, interpret, critique (e.g., in critical organizational communication research, critical or ideological rhetoric, and critical theory), and/or (in applied communication research) offer recommendations and suggestions for others to enact. Although those traditional, normative research activities are important for understanding, sometimes evaluating, and perhaps encouraging [Page 909]others to intervene into and change unjust systems and thereby contribute to promoting social justice, those practices often have not encouraged or sanctioned interventions by researchers because they privilege developing and testing theory (for academic audiences) over the applied activist scholarship (to benefit those who are under-resourced and marginalized) prioritized by the communication and social justice perspective. Hence, rather than being spectators who watch and ponder the world without affecting it, a stance in line with the word theory, which is derived from the Greek words meaning contemplation, spectator, and view, the communication and social justice approach calls for scholars to engage in communication activism to change unjust systems.

...