Applied communication, witnessing, and decolonizing futures

The massacre of innocent people is a serious matter. It is not a thing to be easily forgotten. It is our duty to cherish their memory. (Mahatma Gandhi, as quoted in Norman Finkelstein, 2021)

As I craft this final editorial for the Journal of Applied Communication Research (JACR) in November 2023, we are witnessing through our screens on digital platforms empirical accounts emerging from Gaza documenting a genocide. Between 7 October and 4 December, 15,500 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza and the West Bank and 1200 have been killed in Israel (Committee to Protect Journalists, 2023; United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, 2023). Voices of Palestinians witness the everyday effects of the genocidal violence carried out by Israel. These accounts, narrated by everyday Palestinians, documented by journalists, and expressed by healthcare providers and teachers, disrupt the whiteness of the colonial-imperial ecosystem that works aggressively to silence the voices emergent from settler colonial spaces.

Violent erasure forms the core of the settler colonial apparatus. The violence of colonialism perpetuates itself by turning off the lights, ensuring through its politics of civility, surveillance, and policing that the very acts of witnessing are violently suppressed. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists (2023), the Israel-Gaza war has killed 61 journalists and media workers, 54 of them Palestinian, at the time of updating and finalizing this editorial on 4 December 2023.

Simultaneously, settler colonial violence targets the very infrastructures for healing and care that are meant to mitigate the impact of violence (Devi, 2023). Consider the Israeli bombardment of several hospitals in Gaza over the past two months, depleting the fundamental infrastructure for healthcare and resulting in the deaths of patients as well as healthcare workers. At the time of finalizing this editorial, reports reveal that infants were left to die in the pediatric intensive care unit at Al-Nasr Children's Hospital in northern Gaza that was forced to be evacuated amidst the ground assault on the city by the Israeli military, with their decomposing bodies being witnessed by journalists (Salam et al., 2023).

The current moment in global geopolitics exists in continuity with the violence of settler colonialism, highlighting the importance of the #CommSoWhite movement for Communication scholarship, and for applied communication specifically. The various decolonizing registers emergent from across settler colonial and postcolonial spaces that challenge, critique, and dismantle the whiteness of applied communication scholarship are vital to rupturing the propaganda infrastructures of imperialism and settler colonialism (see Rodriguez et al., 2019). These decolonizing registers invite us to critically interrogate the epistemological foundations of applied communication scholarship, foregrounding questions of land, community, connection, and care that imagine communication as the basis for transformative openings.

Community emerges as the transgressive space for undoing and redoing methods, placing embodied struggles as sites for generating knowledge. Stories emergent from within communities and activist struggles offer invitations to radically re-imagine the conversations on what counts as scholarship. The conversations within JACR on ‘Communication Interventions’ for instance have opened up spaces for recognizing as knowledge the forms of struggles that constitute decolonizing and anti-racist labor.

As we witness the genocidal violence perpetrated by Israel in Gaza, upheld and funded by the U.S., we are reminded that any call for decolonization in the abstract is empty without the embodied politics of participation in and solidarity with struggles of resistance. Applied communication is powerfully positioned to engage creatively these linkages between communication theory and practice. For our commitment to decolonizing the discipline, this moment has opened up critically important questions about the nature of theory work, the intricate relationship between theory and land, the entanglements between theory and practical politics, the commitments of academics writing about decolonization and postcolonial conditions to resistive politics, and the possibilities of crafting just solidarities with actual anticolonial struggles built around land rights and against colonial occupation. As methods and high-tech resources of surveillance, policing, home demolitions, indefinite incarceration, and defence hardware are exported by Israel directly from ‘the Palestine laboratory,’ activists and communities must grapple with strategies of resistance to these militarized technologies of control and violence across democracies globally (Loewenstein, 2023).

This moment, witnessing through digital platforms the enormous scale of settler colonial violence, de-centers the performed safety of writing about decolonization in the abstract, confined to the ivory tower, or worse, through positive careerist investments in the settler colonial structures performed as neoliberal multiculturalism. The capacities of decolonizing struggles to fundamentally dismantle settler colonial structures offer creative openings for building just futures. Anticolonial resistance in postcolonial and settler colonial spaces rupture the ideological foreclosures of whiteness, opening up theory-practice conversations to critical questions about what counts as terror, the role of the state as the perpetrator of terror, and the roles of media in Western democracies as infrastructures of terror (Baconi, 2018; Erakat, 2020).

Simultaneously, the articulations of resistance from hitherto colonized spaces and aligned spaces of solidarity produce a variety of tactics of surveillance and violence. From being labeled as terror sympathizers to being marked as antisemitic, students, and staff across Universities are experiencing violent repression for voicing solidarity with Palestinian human rights. Organized attacks by far-right ideologues have sought to erase conversations on decolonization and genocide, turning to racist White civilizational narratives that uphold and perpetuate white supremacy.

At the National Communication Association (NCA) 2023 annual convention, the space for Presidential address opened up by NCA's first Palestinian American President Walid Afifi for the voices of activist scholars, including the voice of the Palestinian scholar Dr Ahlam Muhtaseb, was violently shut down (see Muhtaseb & Trimlett, 2017 for a research-based documentary that models the ethic of listening to Palestinian voices). According to accounts offered by Dr Muhtaseb, the discursive architecture of the shutdown was mobilized through the language of whiteness that works in tandem with Zionist propaganda, marking the naming of decolonization and genocide as risks, and as threats to the reputation of the NCA. That this form of settler colonial violence takes place amidst the organizational churn emergent through #CommSoWhite speaks to the vitality of ongoing commitments to transforming the rules, norms, and disciplinary registers of communication studies. It further speaks to the significance of mobilizations around academic freedom that secure the spaces for academic conversations on questions of racial justice, resistance to white supremacy, and anti-colonialism as decolonization.

In writing these last words in my role as editor of JACR, I find hope in the courage of journalists from Gaza who have built a visual register that empirically documents the genocidal apparatus of settler colonial violence. In the words of the journalist Motaz at the X handle @azaizamotaz9, accompanying an aerial video of destroyed homes, ‘Could you close your eyes for a second and imagine the dreams of these people who lost their homes, their lives and loved ones. Imagine everything you tried to build and achieve got lost in a second.’

This invitation to listening to the dreams of the dispossessed and the marginalized, to the voices that are erased by settler colonial genocidal violence renders visible the erasures scripted into hegemonic constructs of dialogue, democracy, and civilization that are mired in whiteness, offering the basis for our collective efforts in building a just discipline. Applied communication as witnessing seeds the possibilities for building just futures, based on decolonizing imaginaries that must voice out the accounts of genocidal violence that are carried out by the settler colonial-imperial apparatus.