Critical Arts South-North Cultural and Media Studies

Critical Arts South-North Cultural and Media Studies ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: www.tandfonline.com/journals/rcrc20 Emancipatory Communication: A Critical Reflection on Communication Sciences in the Post1 Pandemic Era Thomas Tufte To cite this article: Thomas Tufte (12 Jun 2024): Emancipatory Communication: A Critical 1 Reflection on Communication Sciences in the Post-Pandemic Era , Critical Arts, DOI: 10.1080/02560046.2024.2358374 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/02560046.2024.2358374 © 2024 The Author(s). Co-published by Unisa Press and Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group Published online: 12 Jun 2024. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 110 View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rcrc20 CRITICAL ARTS https://doi.org/10.1080/02560046.2024.2358374 Emancipatory Communication: A Critical Reflection on Communication Sciences in the Post-Pandemic Era1 Thomas Tufte Institute for Media and Creative Industries, Loughborough University London, London, UK; Department of Communication and Media Studies, University of Johannesburg, Johannesburg, South Africa ABSTRACT KEYWORDS In an era of uncertainty, where epistemic freedoms are challenged and where many people feel excluded, how can communication – both as a discipline and a practice – serve to combat these uncertainties and feelings of exclusion? What epistemology can guide us and orient our communication science to ensure the right of all to produce knowledge on equal terms? What communication practice ensures inclusion and participation for all? Based upon a review of recent African lines of thought and their links to Latin American scholarship, this text advances an intellectual agenda that in the post-pandemic era can inform the development of theories and practices of communication that transcend the limitations of the dominant Western episteme when facing the current challenges of planetary transformations. Epistemology; Africa; Latin America; communication science; communication for social change; global south; epistemic freedom Introduction In the times we live in, influenced by the aftermath of the COVID-19 crisis, but also marked by populist political winds, war and conflict, AI and misinformation, the global power hierarchies and socio-economic inequalities have become even more visible. Critiques of capitalism, colonialism and patriarchy are resurging with extraordinary force, exposing the limits of these models and frameworks for the pursuits of a more just world. We have since the financial crisis in particular seen growing calls, often popular and in the streets, to counter the unjust developments in society. Decolonial, feminist, neo-Marxist and other critical frameworks are central in contemporary debates within which not only society is being reimagined, but within which social sciences are being revisited and reinterpreted. We are living in times where the epistemic injustices of the past are being addressed (Fricker 2007). For communication researchers and practitioners, we are faced with the challenge of reimagining our science and practice, positioning it around the challenges of our times. CONTACT Thomas Tufte t.tufte@lboro.ac.uk Loughborough University London, 3 Lesney Av, Here East, London E203BS, UK 1 An early version of this article was published, in Portuguese, as a chapter in: Peruzzo, C; V. Ribeiro & H. Lima (2023). Livro do XVII Congresso Ibero-Americano de Comunicação 2022. Faculdade de Letras da Universidade do Porto / Associação Ibero-Americana de Investigadores de Comunicação (ASSIBERCOM). © 2024 The Author(s). Co-published by Unisa Press and Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent. 2 T. TUFTE In this context, this article poses the following three questions: In an era of uncertainty, where many people feel excluded, how is communication – both as a discipline and a practice – serving to combat these uncertainties and feelings of exclusion? What epistemology can guide us and orient our communication science in order to ensure the right of all to produce knowledge on equal terms? Which, if any, communication practice can best enhance processes of inclusion and participation for all? The growing inequalities demand a deeper analysis of how to develop and design emancipatory communication practices. That challenge demands an emancipation of our communication science, understood as de-linking it from modernist, technoutopian and commercial frameworks in order to better inform the formulation of a communication science that can understand and theorize upon the planetary challenges we face today. To analyse the prospects of emancipatory communication in the post-pandemic era this paper explores three thematic issues. Firstly, it addresses the “age of uncertainty” we live in, analysing the experience of humanity in crisis. The uncertainty of our current civilizational conjuncture has been provoked by and emerged from many contextual factors, both wars and pandemics, political and economic crises, all of which have contributed to affecting our ontological security (Bauman 2007; Tufte 2017). The second theme is to analyse epistemic injustice and what epistemic freedom can imply. It is about our right to think and to speak freely, and to produce knowledge and influence society on equal terms, no matter who we are and where we live. It speaks to our right to epistemic freedom (Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2018). The third theme is about our right to citizenship in a time with social inequalities on the rise. It speaks to a claim for not only voice and visibility, but for inclusion and participation on equal terms, for all, arguing for a communication sociology that addresses these absences and emergences (De Sousa Santos 2014). Hence also the centrality of an emancipatory communication. Latin American critical scholarship The notion of emancipatory communication which this article proposes is the anchor point of a reimagined communication sociology of absences and emergences is rounded off the rich Latin American critical scholarship within participatory communication, alternative communication, popular communication, communication for social change as well as the Latin American thinking around indigenous knowledge systems and pluriversal approaches to development (Escobar 2017). Another source of inspiration comes from the progressive Catholic Church in Latin America that paved the way both for the Theology of Liberation but also for a communicative practice seen in the Christian Basic Communities, the CEBs, that spread across the continent in the 1970s and 1980s, influencing and influenced by popular communication (Tufte, Jimenez-Martinez and Suzina 2020). The most significant origins of the Latin American critical scholarship in communication and social change date back to the 1950s and 1960s, growing out of a broad range of emerging experiences with bottom-up communication in the region. The community radios in Bolivia (Miners’ radio) and Colombia (Radio Sutatenza) became classical reference points of communicative experiences voicing the concerns of marginalized and oppressed groups in society. CRITICAL ARTS 3 In scholarship, the Venezuelan scholar Antonio Pasquali’s work at the beginning of the 1960s offered early critiques of the dominant Western communication paradigm (Pasquali 1963). By the late 1960s the Brazilian adult educator Paulo Freire had written his seminal book “Pedagogy of the Oppressed”, offering a critical analysis of power and oppression, proposing a ground-breaking pedagogical pathway for the emancipation of the oppressed (Freire 2017/1968). By the late 1970s, Bolivian Luis Ramiro Beltran, heavily inspired by Freire, wrote his seminal piece “Farewell to Aristotle”, developing further the concept of horizontal communication (Beltran 1979) that first was proposed by Frank Gerace (1973). Colombian Orlando Fals-Borda was a pioneer in theorising, and operationalizing participatory methodologies and participatory action research (Fals-Borda 1987). I draw also upon more recent scholars like Mexican Rossana Requillo’s work on youth, technology and city life (Reguillo 2017), Brazilian Cicilia Peruzzo’s work on community media, communication and social movements (for example Peruzzo 2022) and Bolivian Eric Torrico Villanueva’s work proposing a decolonial perspective on communication (Villanueva 2016, 2018, 2022). Many emerging and younger scholars likewise feed into the growing Latin American scholarship that challenges the dominant, mostly Western discourses in communication research and practice. For example, Mexican Claudia Magallanes-Blanco does very interesting work on communication from an indigenous perspective (Magallanes-Blanco 2022), Brazilian Leonardo Custodio’s work on favela media activism is catching international attention as practice-based decolonial media activism (Custodio 2017), and Brazilian Ana Suzina’s work on popular communication, most recently working on indigenous popular communication in the Ecuadorian and Brazilian Amazon (Suzina 2022) is similarly gaining traction. As a collective endeavour, Ana Suzina’s, Cesar Jimenez-Martinez and Tufte’s joint work around the legacies of Paulo Freire have helped rearticulate an interest in Freire’s work in recent years (Suzina, Tufte, and Jimenez-Martinez 2020; Tufte, Jimenez-Martinez & Suzina 2020; Suzina and Tufte 2022). This article builds its proposed research agenda very inspired by this Latin American legacy. Important here to stress, is how this critical Latin American scholarship connects with key African scholarship. There have historically been interesting south-south dialogues and inspirations, seen for example as far back as in Stephen Biko’s inspiration from Paulo Freire in the early 1970s (Chasi 2022), or as recent as in the current South-South dialogues around decoloniality and the role of universities (De Sousa Santos, Ndlovu-Gatsheni and Soudien 2022). I will in the following emphasize key points from this African scholarship. Ideas and perspectives relevant to a critique of the dominant paradigm of communication science have gained new momentum within African social sciences in recent years (Tufte 2023). It is tightly aligned with the broader critical scholarship, which does not emphasize communication but rather focuses on critically assessing the transformations of our times. An example is Achille Mbembe’s reflections on Africa as a key space from which to reinvent and understand contemporary global transformation: “Something fertile will spring from this Africa-glebe, this immense tilled field of matter and things: something capable of opening onto an infinite, extensive, and heterogeneous universe, a wide-open universe of multiplicities and pluralities” (Mbembe 2021, 6). Another entry point to such reflections can be found in Colin Chasi’s argument for ubuntu as a moral 4 T. TUFTE philosophy and call for humanity that opens up for agency and people’s ability to act (Chasi 2021). Very significant is also Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni’s work, offering us a comprehensive critique of Western epistemology, its colonial legacy and its detrimental impact upon knowledge production in the Global South. Ndlovu-Gatsheni argues strongly for the right to epistemic freedom and in the process, unveils many of the rich African strands of intellectual thought (2018, 2020). As for the notion of the Global South, a cautionary note is relevant. While often taken for granted to indicate a geographical location, it is important to emphasize that it should primarily be understood as a metaphor for the space of the marginalized groups in society, the women, peasants, indigenous groups, youth, disabled or others who traditionally have limited visibility and power. While often placed in the geographical global south, it could also entail marginalized groups in countries of the geographical global north (De Sousa Santos 2018). In the following, I will enter into a deeper discussion of some of these mentioned concerns, both about western dominant epistemologies, Africa as a space for opening up for other perspectives, and indigenous knowledge systems as a key anchor point for generating relevant research agendas. This article advances a research agenda that can inform and strengthen emerging communication theories and practices that transcend the limitations of the dominant Western episteme in facing planetary transformations, and that furthermore build upon important South-South links in formulating these perspectives and research agendas. The remaining part of this article is structured in three sections. The first addresses the current civilizational conjuncture, the second introduces some of the African contexts and scholarship, and the third points towards communication sociology of absences and emergences as a pertinent epistemological framing of an emerging research agenda. Humanity in crisis: grasping the current civilizational conjuncture Let us first scroll back to the time right after the Covid pandemic took our world to a standstill. In April 2020, as the world was closing down in fear of this new, unknown COVID-19 virus, Boaventura de Sousa Santos wrote a small book, called “The Cruel Pedagogy of the Virus” (“A Cruel Pedagogia do Virus”). Already at this early stage, what the COVID-19 crisis made visible, Sousa Santos argued, were the hierarchies of global power and the injustices of resource distribution. As it unfolded, the COVID crisis produced an increasingly visible map of global inequality and power imbalances. The years we now have lived with the pandemic have only confirmed those early patterns of global inequality. We have seen these inequalities manifest themselves both in unequal access to treatment and to vaccines, but also in how we have managed to cope and respond as nations and communities to the pandemic. The unequal distribution of resources has resulted in very different abilities to cope with the crisis. In terms of knowledge frameworks, sciences and methods that have informed the responses worldwide, we have seen the global roll-out of specific scientific discourses, often setting strong agendas, some with tremendous success in fast-tracking the production of vaccines. However, many negative effects and consequences occurred, consequences that we barely know about yet. We have only analysed the tip of the iceberg as to how the pandemic has affected global power hierarchies, wealth distribution, mental CRITICAL ARTS 5 health challenges and death tolls. Populist politics and fake news are equally factors that have had a seminal influence on some handlings of the crisis. In the early stage of the COVID crisis, the Turkish novelist Elif Shafak published a thought-provoking book called “How to stay sane in the age of division” (Shafak 2020). In this book, Shafak reflects upon some of the features characterizing our time and she referred to what we were going through as a crisis of meanings. She also describes the feelings of disillusionment and bewilderment many of us were and continue to experience. Although accentuated by COVID-19 these are not new experiences and feelings. The disillusionment, Shafak argues, is generated from a broken system and from a society where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer (Shafak 2020, 23–24). This broken system and this inequality have sparked indignation, anger, and frustration. We have seen it repeatedly manifested in protests and in the rise of broader social movements ever since the financial crisis erupted in 2008. In her book from 2017, “Rising landscapes – Youth, networks and uprisings in the autumn of civilisation” (“Paisajes Insurrectos – Jovenes, redes y revueltas en el otono civilizatorio”), the Mexican scholar Rossana Reguillo describes these uprisings as a response to the crisis of the current “civilisational project”. She argues that the resistance to and the protests against society must be analysed and can only be understood as part of a collapse of the extractivist ideology of the neoliberal development model (Reguillo 2017). In contemplating this broader and deeper crisis, Rossana Reguillo suggests several ways forward. Although her book was written before the COVID-19 crisis Reguillo’s analysis is helpful. Firstly, Reguillo argues, there is no way of understanding and recalibrating politics and the scene for politics and political decision-making without considering digital networks, the social media in all its facets. This point is widely recognized today so I will not focus my attention on that in this article. Rather, I highlight another element from Reguillo’s book, which is the role of affect and emotion in formulating visions of another and a better world. The feelings expressed by lots of young people in demonstrations and protests around the world contributed, as Rossana Reguillo shows in her book, to expanding the space in which we can feel included and feel as participants in society (Reguillo 2017, 18). We have in the past decade seen many examples of how crises have led to communities coming together, solidarity springing from the situation, and people expressing affect, emotion and hope. The solidarity shown and the general participatory experience emerging from the public squares, from the social movements, from the community mobilizations, from the network building and their vast articulation of demands represented a massive reaction to the fears and anxieties that many people felt. It demonstrated people’s agency and ability to act. Consequently, what we have seen in the past decade or more has been a multitude of examples of emancipatory communicative practices. Many of these experiences align well with the principles that informed Paulo Freire’s ontological call so many years ago. This was a call Freire made and presented as the spirit of one of his most referenced books, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, in 1968. His ontological call, Freire said, was based on five principles – the principles of love, empathy, humility, dialogue and hope. A common denominator in these principles was reclaiming AFFECT as resistance and as a core feature of social change (Freire 2017/ 1968). Freire’s five principles were and continue to be foundational principles in 6 T. TUFTE emancipatory communication experiences. They claimed humanity as an overarching principle and thus positioned such communication in clear opposition to hate, distance and to cancellation. Endemic uncertainty In many ways, the collapse of the extractivist ideology of the neoliberal development model is what has sparked this age of uncertainty mentioned above. Even preceding the financial crisis, scholars like the late Polish-British sociologist Zygmunt Bauman wrote about the conditions of endemic uncertainty that characterize what he called “liquid modernity”. This is a modernity that departs from a lot of well-established “truths” or dogmas, structures, relations and practices articulating uncertainty, Bauman argues, but also a modernity that articulates opportunity and hope (Bauman 2007). Following this argument, openness today is associated with an irresistible fate. An open society is a society where vulnerable populations are overwhelmed by forces they neither control nor fully understand. While openness originally stood for the self-determination of a free society, we are increasingly observing a society where vulnerable forces they neither control nor fully understand overwhelm populations. A consequence of these overwhelming forces, Bauman argues, is that we focus on things we can, or believe we can influence. So that instead of changing-the-world type of aspirations, we seek to control very individual issues (Bauman 2007, 11). What Bauman argues is that while existential fear remains unresolved, problems get refocused to be about safety. A very important and seminal distinction in these developments become “the decoupling of fear-inspired actions from the existential tremors that generate the fear which inspired them” (Ibid, p.13). Thus, what we see is a displacement of fear “from the cracks and fissures in the human condition where “fate” is hatched and incubated, to areas of life largely unconnected to the genuine source of anxiety”. In this shift from security to safety it is increasingly left to individuals to seek, find and practice individual solutions to socially produced troubles. It challenges our understanding of where we belong in society, and what we can do to intervene and influence change. In other words, it challenges our agency and our ability to act. Such an endemic uncertainty becomes the core feature of a crisis of humanity and civilization. It was in this context, that we must interpret Boaventura de Sousa Santos’ call – when the COVID crisis struck the world in 2020 and De Sousa Santos wrote the previously mentioned booklet “The Cruel Pedagogy of the Virus”. In here he rearticulates some of his previously known critiques against the legacies of colonialism and patriarchy, and the limitations of capitalism as a model for society. The book ends by inviting us to reflect, and to seek a rearticulation between “political processes and civilizational processes”. He ends by calling for an “epistemologic turn”, a call required for us to begin imagining a society in which humanity “takes on a more modest position on the earth we inhabit” (De Sousa Santos 2020). While calls for epistemological disobedience (Mignolo 2009) or epistemological freedom (Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2018) are not new, Sousa Santos used the profound global crisis sparked by COVID to reiterate the continued presence of power structures and epistemic structures the confirm the colonial matrix of power so clearly presented by Quijano decades ago (Quijano 2000) and he furthermore called for an environmental sensitivity. CRITICAL ARTS 7 Africa and epistemic freedom What does such an epistemological turn look like? According to De Sousa Santos himself, it is about the capacity to imagine the planet “as our joint house, and nature as our Mother Nature, whom we love and respect” (De Sousa Santos 2020). De Sousa Santos argues for a planetary approach that places humanity far more central in a notion of sustainable development that connects well with some of the more recent works of for example Arturo Escobar (Escobar 2017) or Engin Isin (Isin 2021), but also where other cosmovisions prevail and influence how we position ourselves and our role on planet earth. We see such positions amongst some of the mentioned African scholars. Mbembe argued that the Southern Hemisphere is the key space to reinvent and understand contemporary global transformations, and he argues there is no better laboratory than Africa to gauge the limits of our epistemological imagination (Mbembe in Bangstad 2020). One of the proponents of such an agenda – looking to Africa to gauge the limits of our epistemological imagination – is the Zimbabwean scholar Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni. He was previously a professor of African political economy in South Africa, but currently holds a chair in Epistemologies of the South at University of Bayreuth in Germany. Ndlovu-Gatsheni has for long been an important African voice in criticizing western development discourses, engaging deeply in debates about decolonization, retrieving the rich scholarship that grew out of the early years of independence in many African countries, in the 1950s and 1960s. He has also carried out a detailed systematization of African intellectual lines of thought (Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2018, 2021). Ndlovu-Gatsheni has become a key reference in strengthening the voice of African scholarship both within Africa and internationally. In critiquing the colonial legacy and its impacts upon Africa Ndlovu-Gatsheni not only critiques the Western epistemological imposition on Africa, but puts a lot of emphasis on drawing attention to and systematizing the many decolonial intellectual currents, movements and philosophies that have developed in Africa. In his book from 2018 called “Epistemic Freedom in Africa – Deprovincialization and Decolonization”, Ndlovu-Gatsheni outlines 20 intellectual traditions, ranging from African humanism, black consciousness and African renaissance to black feminism, African existential philosophy and African political economy. Epistemic freedom as Ndlovu-Gatsheni argues, “is fundamentally about the right to think, theorize, interpret the world, develop own methodologies and write from where one is located and unencumbered by Eurocentrism” (Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2018). His work reveals the breadth of African intellectual traditions and is itself a powerful example of how to exercise epistemic freedom. In many ways, it connects with Latin American discussions of decoloniality. NdlovuGatsheni actively seeks this south-south dialogue. For example, in 2022 he invited Argentinean Walter Mignolo, one of the leading Latin American scholars on the geopolitics of knowledge and decolonility, to give a talk online in the context of a seminar series run by him for Johannesburg Institute of Advanced Studies. Also in 2022 he published a joint interview with De Sousa Santos about the role of the University in knowledge production. (De Sousa Santos, Ndlovu-Gatsheni, and Soudien 2022). For the field of communication, the Southern African scholarship as described above, is developing a series of pathways of research. Significant scholars include Colin Chasi, 8 T. TUFTE Nyasha Mboti and Cuthbeth Tagwirai. They are all three Zimbabweans working at South African universities. Mboti is in the process of publishing a collection of four volumes on the field of Apartheid Studies (Vol 1 is out: Mboti 2022), working on not only documenting the continued presence of systems of oppression in South African society, but more importantly on proposing a methodology to study oppression. Tagwirai is currently working on exploring the digital media texts of social movements, using Apartheid Studies as his conceptual framework. Chasi, as we shall see, has explored humanity in Ubuntu and has with it opened up for an exciting ground upon which to discuss communication. However, before engaging more profoundly with some of these works and discussing their link to communication, lets us first turn to the African city to understand how a reconceptualization of development necessarily passes by a review of the lived experiences in the African city. Afromodernity The African cities offer us perspectives that may well challenge both our perception of Africa, but more importantly, our understanding of where we find learning experiences about modern everyday life today, agency and emancipatory communication prospects. In 2001, Rem Koolhass and Edgar Cleijne pointed in the direction of African urban studies, arguing that a city like Lagos, one of the biggest cities in Africa, a non-city as others would consider, is actually highly functional despite a lack of infrastructure. As they stated, and I quote: “Lagos is not catching up with us. Rather, we may be catching up with Lagos! It’s a paradigm of the future of all cities! (…) At the forefront of globalizing modernity” (Koolhass and Cleijne 2001). In their later book, “Lagos: How it Works” Koolhass and Cleijne approached Lagos as the icon of West African urbanity. Their main assumption is that African cities represent an extreme, paradigmatic set of cities at the forefront of “globalizing modernity”. Similarly, and pushing these points more towards communication and social change, Sarah Nutall and Achille Mbembe, who live and work in Johannesburg, South Africa, edited a fascinating book about Johannesburg as the Elusive Metropol (Nutall and Mbembe 2008). In this book, they argue that metropolitan existence is less about the city as such or how the latter is made and by whom, than about how it is exhibited, displayed and represented, its colourfulness, its aura and its aesthetics: “There is no metropolis without its aesthetic dimension” (Nutall and Mbembe 2008, 17). In exploring the everyday experience of the metropolis, they furthermore draw on what they denominate “critical pedagogies”’, including “pedagogies of writing, talking, seeing, walking, telling, hearing, drawing, making” (Nutall and Mbembe 2008, 9). This adds the role of pedagogy to our critical rethinking of emancipatory communication and aligns well with Freire’s line of thinking. However, to understand the co-creation of cities, with the participation of its inhabitants, we must critically unpack discourses of for example “the rainbow nation” of South Africa, its colourfulness and aesthetics. As Nutall and Mbembe argue, we need a more complex theorization of race, labour and capital as a means to understand the relation between injury and personhood or the extreme acts of violation perpetrated in the name of race in the history of South Africa’s city forms (15). CRITICAL ARTS 9 Recalling the history of Johannesburg that began as a mining town 135 years ago and that grew along with capitalism, industrialism and apartheid, Mbembe and Nuttall argue that: The dialectic between the underground, the surface and the edges is, more than any other feature, the main characteristic of the African modern of which Johannesburg is the epitome, and perhaps even of the late modern metropolis itself” (Nutall and Mbembe 2008, 17) Consequently, in our exploration of how to define emancipatory forms of communication in the postpandemic era, these reflections on the elusive metropolis are relevant. Johannesburg is a metropolis in every sense of the word. It is a thoroughly African capitalist formation, however closely tied to the world economy, as is Lagos, London, Sao Paulo and Hyderabad. The philosophy of Ubuntu – Ubuntu as a call for humanity While discussing African perspectives on the epistemology of the south, globalization and modern city life constrained by forces of colonialism and capitalism, it becomes relevant to bring forward another dimension of African philosophy and social science. I am referring here to Ubuntu. Ubuntu is the name given to a moral philosophy developed by Bantu-speaking Africans. As Colin Chasi explains, it broadly refers to a notion of humanness/humanity, where “a person is a person with/through others” (…) “Humanness is presented as something that is co-produced by individuals (…) Ubuntu vests people with the creative power to construct the social good” (Chasi 2021). Chasi’s book “Ubuntu for Warriors” shows us how African leaders as the historical nineteenth-century Zulu leader King Shaka, President Nelson Mandela, Archbishop Tutu, the anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko, Zambia’s late President Kaunda and Winnie Madikizela-Mandela are important players “in how ubuntu is played out in cultural-historical settings by people who demand and have rights to liberation in all its splendid possibilities” (Chasi 2021). As Nlovu-Gatsheni points out in the preface to Colin Chasi’s book, “while Chasi is not oblivious to the haunting issues of violence in nation-building and the warrior tradition, he is attentive to the elements of agency and actionality. He hence thinks about ubuntu as a living spirit of liberation that must be appreciated within concrete human history”. (Nlovu-Gatsheni, in Chasi 2021, xiii) Rethinking the warrior tradition as Chasi does, Ndlovu-Gatsheni argues, is an act of love for humanity. Furthermore, he argues, “such love, in fact, is a key ingredient of ubuntu as humanism” (Ibid). Interestingly, this connects well with Freire’s approach to humanness and connects with the principles of Freire’s ontological call mentioned previously. Ubuntu, as presented by Chasi and Freire’s philosophy of change have in common an attention exactly to the element of agency and actionality deeply rooted in humanism as the driving force of their spirits of liberation. On two occasions, Chasi brings in ubuntu in reflections about communication for social change and refers to Freire in the process. In his article “On Humility: Reading Freire with Ubuntu” Chasi (2022) reflects on how humility in communication for social change may lead to (re)humanization. Chasi speaks of Solidarity Rights, giving the example of how ubuntu and African moral thinking contributed to the global thought about human 10 T. TUFTE rights by valuing human solidarity. The African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights, which was adopted in 1981 and entered into force in 1986, is the only international legal charter that recognizes solidarity rights. It speaks of solidarity as both duties and rights. Chasi links this to Freire’s approach to communication as an education that humanizes people. He further argues that denial of education is an act of violence and aligns such structural violence closely with the Latin American theologists of liberation mentioned previously. In another article, Chasi addresses the issue and challenge of pain in communication for social change (Chasi 2020). He defines communication for social change as a humanitarian project “that uses socially accepted styles of preventing and ameliorating pain”. He argues that the need to address these pains to avoid that “well-meaning communication for social change” produces harmful implications, consequences, incidents and norms of pain and of its social uses’. In historicizing how we have dealt with “pains” Chasi speaks about the epistemological dominance embedded in some ways whereby Western societies have dealt with pains, developing more effective practices of “knowledgepower”. Chasi argues that modernisation is a paradigm of thought which, when it is assumed as a “mantle of theory and practice” (Chasi 2020, 161), takes forward rationalist ideas about pain, which carry the legacies of modernist and colonial practices. Chasi’s argument challenges us to revisit our epistemological foundation. An example of this can be seen in a case study developed by Nompumelelo Gumede, a PhD student from the University of Kwazulu-Natal, in Durban, South Africa. She has worked with the impacts of the pandemic on communities in South Africa and shown how local South African populations, struck by the fears and anxieties that Covid-19 provoked, were offered one-way, top-down communication services that stifled public participation and failed to integrate local knowledge and contexts. It is an example that speaks to what Chasi called the continued epistemological dominance and communicative practice, in South Africa, of modernist and colonial practices (Gumede 2022). It also ties in well with Peruvian scholar Anibal Quijano’s colonial matrix of power (CMP) insofar as it suggests an extensive control of subjectivity and knowledge (which is one of the four interrelated domains of CMP). It bears witness to the fact that in moments of crisis, we often see a reinforcement of existing power structures, and reaffirmation of hierarchies, situations which also communicative practice often align with. Towards a (Communication) sociology of absences and emergences From this brief review of critical Latin American and African social science emerge a number of points relevant to a research agenda for emancipatory communication. Firstly, we must critically deconstruct the dominant communicative discourses to uncover power hierarchies and how they unfold and influence communicative practices. The brief example from Gumede’s work, emphasizing the lack of dialogue and empathy in the unidirectional communicative practices employed by authorities in the context of a health crisis, alerts us to some of the risks of power imbalances and communicative impositions that rather exclude and render invisible than include and make visible vulnerable groups and their situation in moments of crisis. CRITICAL ARTS 11 Secondly, the insistence on ubuntu as an approach to social science, brings in a humane perspective upon human behaviour. It resonates well with the focus on affect and on recognition of the other that permeates from for example, Freire’s ontological call. Freire was himself deeply concerned with questions of humaneness. Both Ubuntu and Freirean philosophies of change point towards communication as a process of education that humanizes and emancipates oppressed or marginalized groups, offering alternatives to the dominant discourses. Thirdly, pursuing critical studies of modernity in the form of in-depth studies of everyday life in the metropole is a way to not only defamiliarize our common-sense readings of Africa. It also adds new perspectives to the similar Latin American tradition of critical studies of everyday life, and it helps understand and locate where and how to explore agency and emancipatory practices. It calls for attention to context, both in the form of analysis of the political economy of modern livelihoods and not least the culture-sensitive immersions into these livelihoods. Fourth and finally, by situating this research agenda within the broader debates of decolonization and decoloniality, and thus exploring novel designs of the pluriverse, it opens up for not just epistemic disobedience and freedom, but a promising pathway of reflection and action. If we now recall the sociology of absences that Boaventura de Sousa Santos consistently and for many years has argued for, we can begin to outline a communication sociology of absences and emergences. De Sousa Santos proposes to develop a sociology focusing on all the absences amongst the people on the other side of the abyssal line, those that are not seen or heard in our societies (De Sousa Santos 2014). In elaborating the epistemological foundations of the subaltern, De Sousa Santos developed what he has called an “epistemology of seeing”, contrasting it with what he calls the dominant “epistemology of blindness”. The blindness he refers to is a blindness to all the absences, needs and injustices of marginalized groups in society. The epistemology of blindness, De Sousa Santos argues, is what has led to the historical process whereby a particular form of knowledge has come to dominate. He calls it “knowledge-as-regulation”. It is that which has come to dominate “knowledgeas-emancipation”. Reclaiming “knowledge-as-emancipation” is part and parcel of the identified research agenda for an emancipatory communication. The core challenge lies in enhancing communication practices whereby these other forms of knowledge and experience are generated, made visible and impact upon the processes of social change. If we link this approach to knowledge production with the current crisis of development – that was fuelled by the consequences of COVID-19 – the solution cannot be reduced to technical questions about how best to craft communication interventions as this would reflect a knowledge-as-regulation approach. Governments, transnational agencies, NGOs and social movements are today all faced with the challenge of reversing negative spirals of social change. This puts a strain upon the kind of research that is pursued and supported. The COVID crisis definitely pushed research even more towards “administrative research” and with significant implications, the most severe of which has been the limiting of epistemic freedom. This article’s reflections upon critical Latin American and African scholarship have sought to carve out a discursive space from where alternative worldviews can further develop, proposing key 12 T. 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