Expanding Upon Critical Methodologies and Perspectives in Communication Studies

ABSTRACT

Within this special issue, we turn our attention to critical perspectives within the communication discipline and seek to illuminate the implementation of critical methods across its broader contexts. While the communication discipline has historically been grounded in the normativity and centering of whiteness, critical perspectives, which are characterized by attention to communicative practices that attend to systems of power and hierarchy across social spheres, have been broadly integrated into and meaningfully shaped the study of communication contexts such as rhetoric, intercultural communication, and performance studies. We argue, however, that the incorporation of critical perspectives within the larger discipline remains underdeveloped. Therefore, in this special issue, we present articles that employ critical methodological approaches to offer important new ways of studying and centering marginalized identities, positionalities, and epistemologies across a range of contexts. Ultimately, we argue for a more expansive approach to thinking and teaching about methodology in general, and critical methods specifically, that inspires further “play” among communication scholars who value the need for social justice imperatives and epistemic delinking across all facets of communication studies.

KEYWORDS:

• Critical
• methodology
• epistemic delinking
• research paradigms
• social justice research

We came to this special issue with a shared interest in critical methods, characterized by attention to communicative practices that attend to systems of power and hierarchy across social spheres, from within critical intercultural communication. The topic of this special issue therefore primarily emerged from our desire as critical intercultural communication scholars to move such perspectives from the margins to the center of our discipline and its journals. However, in addition to being firmly situated as intercultural scholars, we each delve into other established communication contexts such as health communication, media studies, nonprofit organizing, relational communication, and communication pedagogy within the communication studies discipline. As we further reflected on our experiences and observations working with graduate students and colleagues outside our intercultural specializations, we also recognized the need to highlight the role that critical methods and perspectives can play across the wide range of contexts within communication studies scholarship. Therefore, within this special issue, we turn our attention to these critical perspectives within the communication discipline and seek to illuminate the implementation of critical methods across its broader contexts. In what follows, we first offer a brief overview of the development of critical methods within the field of communication studies and elucidate some of the limitations of this development that this issue tries to address. We then offer an overview of the articles included in the special issue. Finally, we offer some thoughts for future directions in expanding the use of critical methods throughout the discipline.

The Development of Critical Methods within Communication Studies

The communication discipline has historically been grounded in the normativity and centering of whiteness. Within rhetorical studies, the legacy of Greek philosophers such as Aristotle and Plato universalized the perspective of western white males (with the analysis also historically being done by white males) while uncritically “fail[ing] to grapple with Aristotle’s place within the history of US liberal education in a manner that is inextricably linked to (and not in spite of) his support for slavery” (Baugh-Harris & Wanzer-Serrano, 2018, p. 340; see also Chávez, 2015). Even though intercultural communication is perhaps the only context of study that specifically emerged to consider non-US/white cultures, it arose out of a need to understand different communication styles across nation-states to improve both international diplomacy and global business relationships. Early intercultural communication scholars therefore tended toward post-positivist cross-cultural analyses that nonetheless centered white US perspectives and employed quantitative methods that treated nation-states as stable variables (Moon, 1996). More recently, however, some communication scholars within these and other contexts have begun to embrace critical methods and perspectives more centrally. Below, we highlight a few key moments and scholars within this development.

Critical perspectives drawing from interdisciplinary scholarship began emerging in the late 1980s/early 1990s primarily within the contexts of rhetoric, intercultural communication, and performance studies. Asante (1989) challenged the whiteness of rhetorical studies by presenting the idea of Afrocentric rhetoric through which he argued that people of African descent had unique cultural styles of communication that deserved to be recognized and incorporated within the purview of communication studies and studied on par with the western styles that were taken for granted. McKerrow (1989), relying on Foucault’s theorization of power and discourse, introduced the theory of critical rhetoric, which helped reorient the study of rhetoric as not just concerned with identifying its persuasive power but also with demystifying how rhetoric conceals its reproduction of specific power relations. Nakayama and Krizek (1995) subsequently published their foundational article on how strategic rhetorics of whiteness discursively maintained the centrality and invisibility of whiteness. Ono and Sloop (1995) emphasized the idea that rhetorical scholars could and should study the everyday rhetorics of marginalized populations in their theorization of vernacular discourse.

Within intercultural communication, scholars such as Mary Jane Collier, Alberto González, Dolores Tanno, Dreama Moon, Wenshu Lee, Gust Yep, Lily Mendoza, and Rona Halualani (see Collier, 1989; Collier et al., 2001; Halualani, 2000; Moon, 1996; Tanno & González, 1998) argued for critical perspectives that challenged static notions of nation-state as synonymous with culture, emphasizing how cultures and identities were politically and historically shaped and contested through power relations. Relying solely on nation-states as the basis of intercultural research, they argued, ignored not only the identities of marginalized groups within these nation-states but also the dynamic nature of culture and identities. González et al. (1994) further exemplified how narratives could be used to center voices from within these cultural populations that had historically been marginalized in communication research.

Performance studies, while originally rooted in literary studies, largely transpired within communication studies through a critical lens as a way of opposing the western prioritization of “elites” as the sole producers of knowledge (Conquergood, 1992). It inspired the development of performance as a research method that viewed identity as both enacted and constructed through performance (Simmons & Brisini, 2020). This consequently facilitated not only the emergence of critical ethnographic research about diverse communities (e.g., Johnson, 1995; Jones, 1993; Madison, 1993) but also propelled what Simmons and Brisini term as “the personal turn” (p. 23), shifting the lens onto the author and spurring autoethnographic research as “an important mode in discussing representations and scholarship surrounding a whole host of culturally performed subject positions” (p. 26). Perhaps one of the most prolific examples of attending to the intersections of performance studies, critical ethnography, and autoethnography is found in Warren’s (2003) work illuminating the everyday and staged performances of normativity in educational settings.

Running through these developments was the importance of challenging the “epistemic privilege” (Mignolo, 2012) of dominant white perspectives, which were often embedded in post-positivist pursuits of objectivity, in the construction of communication knowledge. Outside the discipline of communication studies, prominent scholars had begun to make this argument, including Edward Said’s (1979) foundational work on Orientalism and Spivak’s (1988, 1999) famous argument that western notions of subjectivity performed epistemic violence by foreclosing the consciousness of the subaltern as a source of knowledge through violent processes of Eurocentric translation. Such recognition of epistemic privilege further facilitated the growth of critical perspectives within communication that have centered the identities, experiences, and knowledge production of and by marginalized groups both within and outside the United States. Bonilla-Silva’s (2003) sociological theorizing of how colorblindness facilitated the continuation of systemic racism, including within higher education, also reinvigorated critical communication scholarship challenging the centrality of whiteness within the discipline.

Scholars such as Flores (1996, 2000), Brouwer (2004), Corrigan (2016b, 2020), Hasian and Delgado (1998), Holling (2006), Na’puti (2019), Chávez (2013) and Davis (1998) have incorporated critical approaches to rhetoric that draw on critical racial movements, queer studies, indigenous studies, and/or intersectional feminism (see Crenshaw, 1991) to explore the unique experiences and erasures of various groups of marginalized people. Critical communication scholars such as Shome and Hegde (2002) and Parameswaran (2002, 2008) have advocated for the incorporation of postcolonial perspectives to address how shifts in global power structures have affected and interacted with the discourses and identities of people in varied locations and ways. Performance scholars have theorized about the performativity of whiteness (Corrigan, 2016a; McIntosh, 2018; Warren & Heuman, 2007; Warren & Kilgard, 2001); Blackness (Alexander, 2014; Griffin, 2012), Latinidad (Amaya, 2007; Calafell, 2007; Chávez, 2009; Delgado, 2009), transnationality (Atay, 2018; Pindi, 2018), and queerness (Eguchi, 2015; Johnson, 2014).¹ We, the guest editors of this special issue, include ourselves among scholars who have embraced critical turns in the study of intercultural communication to further center historically marginalized identities (e.g., Chávez, 2010; Chen & Lawless, 2018; Cisneros & Nakayama, 2015; Harris, 2007; Heuman, 2015; Heuman & González, 2018; Mudambi, 2015, 2023; Orbe, 1998, 2000).

As such, critical perspectives have been broadly integrated into and meaningfully shaped the study of rhetoric, performance, and intercultural communication, within the larger discipline, opening doors to decentering dominant cultures and epistemologies. Building on this body of research, all of the articles published within this special issue employ critical methodological approaches that offer important new ways of studying and centering marginalized identities, positionalities, and epistemologies, ranging from African epistemologies (Chirindo & Mutua, 2024) and decolonial scholarship (Lechuga & Ghazal Aswad, 2024) to diasporic Filipinx subjectivities (Villanueva, 2024) to the experiences and perspectives of gendered victims of domestic abuse in the United States (Flynn et al., 2024). We follow Baugh-Harris and Wanzer-Serrano’s (2018) call to continue developing critical methodologies “that speak to lived experiences, historical exigencies, and systemic operations of power in both situated and broad scopes” (p. 341). By incorporating these articles, we anticipate further opening up spaces for dialogue, understanding, and the raising of critical questions that propel the articulation of critical methodologies and perspectives forward.

While critical turns in rhetoric and intercultural communication have been relatively prominent, expansion to other communication contexts, such as health, interpersonal, instructional, and organizational communication, has been more limited. In this sense, the incorporation of critical perspectives across the breadth of the discipline remains inchoate. Although calls for critical work in these areas also emerged in the late 1980s/early 1990s (see Deetz, 1982; Lannamann, 1991; Lupton, 1994; Mumby, 1997), such perspectives have not been as widely embraced.² To better illuminate the critical work that is being done within these areas of scholarship, we have included articles in this special issue in areas such as organizational communication (Flynn et al., 2024), health communication (Tucker et al., 2024), and crisis communication (Patton & Snyder-Yuly, 2024) as a move toward broadening critical perspectives within the discipline.

In addition, we have included articles that critically analyze communication and technology (Doshi, 2024; Gajjala et al., 2024; Patton & Snyder-Yuly, 2024; Villanueva, 2024). Inquiry into the relations between communication and technology is fast-growing, spurred on by the immense growth in the use of social media, videoconferencing, Artificial Intelligence (AI) software tools, etc. In fact, the two most recent special issues in Communication Studies have been focused on Computer-Mediated Communication and AI software, respectively. However, despite calls to explore communication concerns such as community, identity, and resistance among marginalized populations within digital spaces from critical perspectives (Feenberg, 2009; Rybas & Gajjala, 2007), we found that both special issues were dominated by social scientific research. As the articles in our special issue demonstrate, the use of communication technology is an extension of our world where issues of power and social justice are reflected and reproduced and therefore need to be studied through innovative methodological approaches that consider and respond to the unique affordances of specific types of technology.

Despite our attempts to invite critical scholarship in diverse contexts of communication research, we acknowledge that we struggled to receive submissions across them that fully embraced critical perspectives centered on marginalized perspectives. One explanation may be the way that the paradigmatic approach to research tends to relegate the application of critical research methodologies to specific programs of research within communication. Post-positivism is associated with quantitative analysis, critical perspectives with rhetorical and discursive approaches to analyzing texts – and to a lesser extent qualitative fieldwork (see Lawless & Chen, 2019) – and performative approaches with embodied experiences. These latter methodologies seem divorced from contexts of communication research that tend to be grounded in the post-positivist paradigm, which is perceived as “incongruent” with “the values and assumptions embedded within critical perspectives” (Suter, 2018, p. 124). Perhaps a few of the selections within this special issue will encourage us to bridge this gap.

Moreover, because these research paradigms are often presented and understood as a linear progression from post-positivism to interpretive to critical/performative – those operating within the earlier paradigms tend to have limited exposure to critical ways of doing research. In our graduate classes that focus on qualitative methodologies, we often find that our students are familiar with the assumptions of post-positivist research and must unlearn those assumptions before engaging in interpretive and critical research. However, they report that their quantitative research methods classes do not engage in the same level of discussion of paradigmatic assumptions, especially in relation to critical approaches to doing research, perhaps because post-positivist assumptions may be taken for granted. Hence, many communication scholars specializing in research contexts dominated by post-positivism may not know, much less attempt to engage, critical methodologies.

Yet, we disagree with the presumption that the requisite objectivity of quantitative research is at odds with critical perspectives. Scharrer and Ramasubramanian (2021) argue for the advancement of quantitative criticalism “not to reveal some universal ‘truth’ but rather to expose injustices and inequalities and bring data to bear on the structures and forces that help explain those injustices and inequalities” (p. 11). We contend that there is a need to move away from methodological silos that reside within specific paradigms because it creates unnecessary limitations/boundaries around possible ways of thinking and creation of knowledge. Several articles in this special issue consequently showcase the deliberate merging of multiple methodological and paradigmatic approaches to critically-oriented research (Flynn et al., 2024; Gajjala et al., 2024; Lechuga & Ghazal Aswad, 2024; Tucker et al., 2024).

The predominant restriction of critical scholarship to particular contexts of communication research also contributes to its marginalization in the publication process wherein critical approaches emphasizing nondominant epistemologies and issues of social justice do not always occupy prominent spaces within our scholarship. Chakravartty et al. (2018) astutely highlight the marginalization of scholarship by or about people of color that is often associated with critical perspectives, confined to specific conference panels and journals that are primarily focused on intercultural, critical/cultural, feminist/queer, performative, and sometimes rhetorical perspectives. As they explain, issues of gatekeeping often restrict more “mainstream” journals to more traditional (read: white, Eurocentric) research. Because scholars can easily dismiss and avoid them altogether by simply choosing not to read these journals, creating indirect impacts for tenure and promotion, this can also discourage young scholars from moving in this direction.

The inclusion of these articles in this special issue is therefore an intentional move on our part to reflect the breadth of perspectives present within the discipline and to highlight efforts to welcome a range of paradigmatic perspectives and methodological approaches into the Communication Studies journal. We aim to demonstrate that the critical paradigm in communication is not necessarily tied to any context of communication or any methodological approach but rather may be utilized in varied ways within research that is grounded in the goal(s) of evaluation, reform, and/or emancipation. Recognizing that the work being done in this regard is vital to our discipline and deserves to be fully integrated and centered within our journals, this special issue seeks to illuminate such work.

Extending Critical Methodologies in Communication Studies

With the above goals in mind, we bring together eight articles that offer new or extended approaches to critical research in communication studies for our special issue. We offer here a general categorization of the essays based on the contributions they make while also pointing out the ways in which some of the essays bridge across the different categories. Our hope is that we have provided an engagement with critical methodologies and approaches across a range of specializations within the discipline and that in this regard we have offered scholarship that piques interest with a broad range of scholars within communication studies.

The first two articles challenge and expand current epistemological approaches to critical communication through decolonial perspectives. In “Toward an African Critical Orientation,” Kundai Chirindo and Eddah Mutua argue that the Chicago and Frankfurt Schools had influenced critical approaches to communication to focus on power and domination. Without discounting the importance of these concepts, they argue that there is scope for decolonizing Eurocentric critical theories by including non-Western epistemological understandings of criticality. Specifically, they draw on indigenous African knowledge bases to promote a critical paradigm based on community and relationality. They offer two exemplars, one being a community-based development project led by the African Medical and Research Foundation (AMREF) and the other being the #Rhodesmustfall movement that began with a protest of a statue of Cecil John Rhodes on a South African university campus.

Michael Lechuga and Noor Ghazal Aswad, in their article “‘Decolonization’ As a Metaphor, not a Movement, in Communication Studies and Rhetoric,” challenge communication scholars to reflect upon how they may use the term “decolonization” as an empty signifier that constitutes a “move to innocence.” Using an innovative methodological approach that draws inspiration from both quantitative meta-analysis and critical thematic analysis, they critically analyze a set of articles from fifteen widely read communication journals to identify and code for references to the term “decolonization”. Ultimately, they advocate for a praxis-based definition and usage of decolonization that connects more clearly to counterhegemonic social movements.

Along with Lechuga and Ghazal Aswad (2024), the next three articles innovate by combining disparate paradigmatic and methodological approaches to extend the usage of critical perspectives in research. In their article “A Critical Quantitative Approach to Examining Intersectionality: Interrogating Race and Class in the Context of Female Chronic Pain,” Rachel V. Tucker, Jacqueline N. Gunning, Elizabeth A. Hintz, and Amanda Denes demonstrate how multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) may be employed in the context of health communication to study communicative disenfranchisement in relation to chronic pain using an intersectional approach. They consider how intersecting oppressions may exacerbate disparities and inequities in patient-provider communication and, in turn, in health outcomes. In “Critical Rhetoric Meets Community-Based Participatory Research,” Bailey F. Flynn, R. L. Bince, and Sarah Layden merge critical rhetorical perspectives with a community-based participatory research project as a way of engaging in praxis-based research that centers the epistemological perspectives of the researched communities while engaging in self-reflexive critical analysis. They outline their processes working with Resilience, an organization that supports survivors of sexual assault. Radhika Gajjala, Ololade Margaret Faniyi, Debipreeta Rahut, and Trisha Ayn Bonham combine qualitative and quantitative analysis along with feminist heuristics in a mixed methods approach to analyzing big data in “Uncovering Right-Wing Digital Enclaves and Reactionary Politics: A Feminist Multi-Method Examination of a Transplatform Campaign.” They begin with a critical visual analysis of an advertisement that was aired in India featuring a lesbian couple participating in the popular heteronormative Hindu ritual Karwa Chauth. The authors argue that this ad evinced the neoliberal cooptation of LGBTQ inclusivity for the sake of selling a fairness cream, a product that promotes casteism and colorism. They then extend their study to a cross-platform analysis of Twitter data to identify how far-right Hindutva social media networks responded to this ad by spreading misogynoir, lesbophobia, and a sense of Hindu victimhood, forcing its removal and an apology by the company marketing the cream. Importantly, in all four of these articles, the authors elucidate their own processes of reflexivity and adjustment along the way as they bring together seemingly diverse methodological approaches.

Gajjala et al. also forms a part of the next set of articles, which considers innovative ways of applying critical methodologies in the context of contemporary technology, considering the interplay of factors such as larger discursive and structural contexts, cultural specificities, and technological affordances. In “Unapologetically Blackfishing: Being Black without the Consequences of Blackness,” Tracey Owens Patton and Julie Snyder-Yuly use image repair theory to analyze Kim Kardashian’s responses to accusations of “Blackfishing,” a type of modern-day minstrelsy in which women who clearly are not Black darken their skin and/or emulate other styles that are popular among Black American women. Importantly, while image repair theory is well known within the context of crisis communication – an area that is not particularly known for doing critical work – Patton and Snyder-Yuly bring a critical lens to their analysis by combining it with critical technodiscourse analysis (CTDA) as their methodology. CTDA expands upon critical discourse analysis by bringing a multimodal approach that allows for greater analysis of technological factors, such as platforms and their affordances.

The final two articles in this special issue use autoethnographic methods that consider the interplay between lived experiences, technological affordances, and identity negotiation. In Marissa Doshi’s article “Storying my Body in Bits and Bytes,” she uses critical cyberautoethnography to analyze how everyday tasks of creating and using Bitmojis in online conversations are implicated in larger discourses of privilege and marginalization. Reflecting upon how her experiences growing up as a woman in India played a role in her Bitmoji creation, she then analyzes two separate online interactions, demonstrating the influence that offline contexts of casteism and colorism have on digital embodiment and communication. George Villanueva considers multimodal autoethnographic sincerity in his article “Multimodal Autoethnographic Sincerity.” Reflecting on his experiences rewatching a documentary that he filmed about a 10-day festival held in his father’s hometown in the Philippines, he argues that multimodality allowed him to explore the interrelationship between affect and the passage of time in relation to the ongoing processes of diasporic identity negotiation. His analysis focuses on three embodied affects he experienced, namely, haunting, torture, and Bayan, drawing from a Tagalog concept that reflects his joy of coming together amongst his fellow Filipinx community.

Future Directions

We envision the articles in this special issue, when read and understood together, to demonstrate the breadth of possibilities and potential for innovation when it comes to critical methodologies. The development of critical communication scholarship requires a wide range of knowledge in different traditions and methods that can facilitate the creative and, at times, experimental development of methodologies. Specifically, we hope this issue inspires further “play” among communication scholars across research contexts, methodologies, and theoretical perspectives who value the need for social justice imperatives and epistemic delinking across all facets of communication studies. Communication scholars may see the potential for applying the methodologies presented herein in other contexts, merging them with other methodologies and theoretical perspectives, or building on them by further innovating new critical methodologies that continue to break down arbitrary barriers across paradigms, methodologies, and communication contexts.

These goals carry with them several practical implications for our discipline. First, we may need to reconsider how we teach research methods in conjunction with the traditional categorization of research paradigms so that formative scholars can understand the potential for combining various methodologies with critical perspectives. Second, our special issue serves as a prompt to editors of any communication journals that do not commonly feature critical scholarship, especially where their contextual focus seems incongruent with critical scholarship, to actively work to invite and center critical scholarship. Third, and relatedly, we also call upon those who may serve as gatekeepers, whether as editors, reviewers, or otherwise, to recognize that, while certain boundaries for what counts as knowledge production are certainly necessary, keeping them too rigid may be counterproductive in encouraging the innovation and expansion of critical scholarship. This applies both to journals/communication research contexts that historically eschew critical scholarship and to those in positions to define what “counts” as critical scholarship.

The need to embrace and enhance critical methodologies and perspectives in all facets of communication research is more urgent than ever. While we continue to battle the lasting effects of centuries of racism, (settler) colonialism, misogyny, homophobia, and a host of other inequities, political forces are working not only to unwind any progress that we have made but also to silence the scholars engaged in this work. And while these ever-present dangers are still with us, additional ones such as climate change, abuse of technology, environmental oppressions, and increasing mental health concerns are emerging. Our methods of inquiry and the questions we ask about human communication must adapt, improvise, and innovate in the face of these challenges.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Communication Studies editor Yuping Mao for recognizing the importance of and approving this special issue to highlight critical scholarship. We would also like to thank the thoughtful reviewers who helped make this special issue possible. Finally, we would like to acknowledge Alberto González for his support, mentorship, and leadership throughout our co-editorship for this special issue.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Anjana Mudambi

Anjana Mudambi (University of New Mexico) is a critical intercultural communication scholar, and much of her research has explored how South Asian Americans have engaged, reproduced, and challenged dominant, hegemonic discourses, with a specific interest in their relationality to other marginalized communities. She has also written about challenging whiteness and about critical intercultural communication pedagogy. Anjana serves as co-editor and the lead author of our introduction for this co-edited special issue of Communication Studies.

Amy N. Heuman

Amy N. Heuman (Bowling Green State University) focuses on the role communication plays in cultural identity negotiations and performances of identity, intercultural relationships, co-cultural group, and dominant group interactions, as well as how communication is utilized by community members to mobilize for social justice. She is particularly interested in the intersecting negotiations of race/ethnicity/class/gender/sexuality through critical and feminist lenses. Amy serves as the associate editor of Communication Studies, lead co-editor for this special issue, and second author of our introduction to this special issue of Communication Studies.

Notes

1. Despite the classifications made here, it is important to acknowledge that much of this work is also intersectional.

2. This claim is not meant to discount the work of scholars such as Shiv Ganesh, Shaunak Sastry, Mohan Dutta, Brenda Allen, Shardé M. Davis, Kristen Cole, Sandra Faulkner, Deanna Fassett, C. Kyle Rudick, and others, including some of the authors within this special issue, who have been working to incorporate critical methods into these contexts of communication scholarship. Rather, we intend to highlight the limitations of these efforts.