A Culture-Centered Approach to Listening: Voices of Social Change

Abstract

Drawing on an understanding of marginalization as intrinsic to mainstream communication theorizing and research, this essay argues that exploitation is rooted in the denial of the communicative capacity of the margins and in the co-optation of the margins as the subjects of top-down communication directed at the margins by experts. The distributions of communicative infrastructures map out the inequities in distributions of economic resources, reifying the unequal distribution of resources by perpetuating values embedded in the interests of the power elite. Listening offers an opening for interrogating the inequities in the global landscape of distribution of power, by attending to the unvoiced assumptions and principles underlying the logics of concentration of power in the hands of the transnational elite. Drawing from postcolonial and Subaltern Studies theories, I engage with the culture-centered approach to outline key tenets of listening as entry points to addressing the global inequities that are produced by neoliberal globalization. Listening through inversion, incompleteness and imagination works in solidarity with the margins to co-construct theory rooted in the ontologies, epistemologies, and values of the margins.

Notes

1. ¹The role of knowledge in the dissemination of global inequities is evident in the establishment of the Washington consensus, also referred to as neoliberalism, as the universal model of global governance, through the influence of think tanks, transnational corporations, international financial institutions (IFIs), nation states such as the United States and United Kingdom and global civil society organizations (Dutta, 2008a, 2008b, 2008c, 2011, 2012; Ganesh, Zoller, & Cheney, 2005; Harvey, 2005). The establishment of the neoliberal order has been accompanied by the incredible concentration of resources in the hands of the global elite, carried out under the language of democracy and liberty, and disseminated through the intellectual work of Milton Friedman, FA Hayek, the Mont Pèlerin Society, and several think tanks such as the Cato Institute, American Enterprise Institute, and the Heritage Foundation. The tremendous concentration of power in the hands of the transnational power elite has been accompanied by neoliberal reforms pushed by the IFIs in the form of structural adjustment programs carrying out trade liberalization, opening up of economies, minimization of tariffs and subsidies, minimization of taxes for the rich, and minimization of regulations and public provisions such as education and health. The financial crisis beginning in 2008 resulted from the minimization of regulatory oversight brought about by the neoliberal restructuring of global finance, further exacerbating the already penetrating global inequalities and inaccess to resources among the poor. Unemployment, hunger, and poverty continued to grow globally as nation states increasingly faced the consequences of the financial crisis.