Communication intervenes into the world. It agitates, ruptures, disrupts, opens up, and transforms.
Our everyday acts of participating in the lifeworld of communication, in making sense of our experiences, in connecting meanings to everyday actions, in relating to each other, and in connecting to each other to form collectives offer transformative openings. These transformative openings imagine the world in new ways, challenging existing borders that we are often fed incessantly by power structures, and creating practices for relating and connecting anchored in social, cultural, political, and economic justice. It is therefore apt that the inaugural issue of Communication Interventions grapples with the interplays of border-making, border-breaking, and contagion. The pandemic offers the backdrop against which the imminently necessary boundary disruption work is bravely performed by the editors and the authors.
Titled ‘Quarantined across borders,’ this first edited collection of critical essays practice border crossings as they interrogate the hegemonic formations that constitute and sustain borders. The editors, three women of color colleagues, Professor Srividya Ramasubramanian, Professor Aisha Durham and Professor Joëlle M. Cruz work through their embodied negotiations of a racist, gendered, hetero-normative academe constituted within colonizing logics of the Empire to forge spaces for conversations that dismantle the grammar of academic performance. The intersections of race, social class, gender, citizenship status, and work inhabited by the many bodies voicing the accounts of border negotiation in this collection intervene into the world by suggesting possibilities of transforming the taken-for-granted narratives constructing the borders marked to contain contamination.
The simultaneous im-permeability, fluidity, and porosity of the borders voiced in these critical reflections invite us to imagine transformative registers. The intersecting interplays of the personal and the political form the basis of theorizing our collective responses to the pandemic. How we come to co-create our relational and collective responses to the pandemic, rooted in an ethic of care, marks the opening for solidarities so urgently needed to build a socially, politically, and economically just world. I hope these initial communication interventions inspire you as much as they have inspired me to imagine the labor of applied communication in diverse registers. I hope they offer you the necessary courage to start re-drawing the boundaries of how we come to interpret, practice and evaluate applied communication practice.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).