Multi-Layered Trajectories for Academic Contributions to Social Change

Abstract

This essay follows Dr. Kirt Wilson's charge to attend to the global context as a force that shapes scholarship on communication. Key components of the present moment suggest the value of a strategy of proliferation even beyond Wilson's urged dialectical relationship between “nationalism” and “cosmopolitanism.” Though “inefficient,” the strategy of participatory governance at multiple levels in the model of a federalist monitory democracy will take advantage of the disparate perspectives engaged by different kinds and levels of affiliation, while both avoiding the risks of a one-world government and sustaining the necessary tasks of mutually inter-consequential collectivities. This approach is under-written by a transilient materialist onto-epistemology and a bio-symbolic analysis of common academic theories of social change.

Keywords:

• Globalization
• Democracy
• Social Change
• Cosmopolitanisms
• Nationalism
• Participatory Governance

Notes

[1] Kirt H. Wilson, “The National and Cosmopolitan Dimensions of Disciplinarity: Reconsidering the Origins of Communication Studies,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 101, no. 1 (2015): 244–57.

[2] Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York, NY: Penguin Books, 2004/2005), 65.

[3] Celeste M. Condit and L. Bruce Railsback, Transilience, http://www.gly.uga.edu/railsback/Transilience/Transilience.html.

[4] H. W. Brands, American Colossus: The Triumph of Capitalism, 1865–1900 (New York, NY: Anchor Books, Random House, Inc., 2011).

[5] Slavoj Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real!: Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates (London, UK: Verso, 2002), 41–49.

[6] Žižek, Welcome, 75, 78, 79.

[7] Žižek, Welcome, 81.

[8] Žižek, Welcome, 85.

[9] Žižek, Welcome, 85.

[10] John Keane, The Life and Death of Democracy (New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company, 2009).

[11] Celeste M. Condit, “Insufficient Fear of the ‘Super-flu’?: The World Health Organization's Global Decision-Making for Health,” POROI 10, no. 1 (2014), doi:10.13008/2151–2957.1149.