Communication for Social Change in Latin America: Contexts, Theories and Experiences

1. This talk, background and purpose:

I conceived this talk in response to certain suggestions from Warren Feek for both Rafael Obregon's and my presentation two weeks ago.

I think it is useful to begin by summarising those suggestions, since my presentation is an attempt to dialogue with them. It may also be useful to tell you briefly how I plan to address those issues, and based on what kinds of experiences and reflections I will do it, since they constitute the references of what I am going to say.

Unfortunately, in the context of all my current commitments, and far away from both my personal library and files (they are in Caracas, I am in NY only for three months), two weeks were not enough to prepare anything like a more or less elaborated paper. The only thing I might do, would be to organise my ideas in a way that I expect could be USEFUL for you. Warren's questions, as well as the reading of both The Communication Initiative presentation in the Web, and the Rockefeller Foundation document "Communication for Social Change. A Position Paper and Conference Report" stimulated several connections and reflections for me. I have also skimmed through the pages of Making Waves, a valuable tool that meaningfully intersects with one of my ongoing projects.

Therefore, I decided to put them in writing, as you have them now, in what should be considered just "Draft Notes," a tool designed to organise myself, and at the same time, to stimulate our communication through your probable reading of them before the meeting. In any case, I think the most fruitful way to assume our meeting of next Wednesday is as a dialogue. So, whether you manage or not to read these pages before the meeting, please voice your remarks, questions, or whatever you think useful.

1.1. In short, Warren asked us to:

a. Please summarise the thinking of 3 major Latin American communication and/or social movement and/or development theorists that you consider important for this meeting.

b. Please use their work to highlight understanding of the strategies pursued by social action/development organisations whose work in your opinion provides good insight into effective communication/social movement/social change action in Latin America.

c. Please draw from the thinking and experiences in [a] and [b] above the main implications as you see them for other organisations/processes seeking to improve the effectiveness of their work.

1.2. What will I try to do, how, and based on what sources and experiences:

Unfortunately, I will not be able to satisfy the expectation of outlining main theoretical contributions in the field because I am away from my personal library and documents, and do not have time enough to locate bibliography in the libraries here.

Nevertheless, I modestly believe that it may be more useful to address a few significant issues about social movements and communication for social change from my own perspective on these subjects. I must point out that precisely because I am from Latin America, my own perspective draws on a diverse arrange of theoretical sources, some from Latin America, others from elsewhere. This is a significant characteristic of many Latin American perspectives, they usually are multi-rooted.

In addition, at least in my case, my perspective consciously draws from my own practical experiences in the terrain. In this my case is, again, not un-common. For Latin American intellectuals it is more or less common to have experience both outside and inside the academy, although outside experience is not always consciously integrated in academic writing.

Since what I have learnt in those contexts is perhaps more significant for my talk today than what I have learnt by reading books, it may be useful for interpreting my perspective that I briefly tell you about the learning contexts in which those practical experiences have taken place. They have been: doing field research with about sixty peasant and indigenous people storytellers in Venezuela; working in culture promotion with teachers and other agents in grassroots communities in a few Latin American countries; working as an "ad-honorem" consultant for a few indigenous peoples' organisations of several Latin American countries; collaborating in diverse processes with intellectuals from several social movements (indigenous peoples, afro-descendants, women, human rights advocates); a few short term consultancies done for the Pan American Health Organization in the field of social participation in health programmes; interviewing (for research purposes) officers of some international and multilateral agencies and NGOs regarding their agencies' policies and experiences with regard to social participation.

1.3. A few provisional remarks about Latin American contributions to the field of Communication for Social Change

Although, as I have said, I cannot take responsibility in this moment for summarising the main contributions to the theories of social movements and communication made from Latin America, I believe that I must at least highlight some crucial contributions made by four Latin American intellectuals from other fields of specialisation.

Perhaps the two most significant of them are Paulo Freire, and Orlando Fals Borda, who have been inspiring references for many Latin American intellectuals in developing forms of interventions "to study with" diverse kinds of populations living in situations of social exclusion. They have also been inspiring in developing our own forms of intervention in social processes. They have not only been theoretical references, but also ethical references. Their work has reached well beyond universities, and in this sense they are also an inspiring source in thinking about how to transform our universities and our practices, a task that is central to my own agenda, and that in my view would have to be in the agenda of The Communication Initiative too. This is not only with regard to universities in so called "Third World" countries, but also in "First World" countries. The relative self enclosure of universities is a communication issue everywhere - for the universities themselves, as well as for their respective societies.

I thought it might be useful to highlight some aspects of the teaching experiences of Freire and Fals Borda. This is not to suggest that we have to replicate them, or incorporate them mechanically. However, their ideas have been appropriated and reworked by many intellectuals, activists and grassroots leaders in Latin America (and also elsewhere). I believe there is still much to be learnt from them and from their insights.

1.3.1. Paulo Freire's work has been so important at a worldwide level that I might perhaps assume that most of you already know about his work. Nevertheless, I prefer to run the risk of being redundant, and at least to highlight the importance of his work for us today.

It is possible that some of you associate the name of Paulo Freire (Brazilian, 1921-1997) just with popular education, or even only with literacy campaigns for adults, and with nothing else. Adult literacy campaigns have effectively been the kind of activities to which he has directly devoted most of his time, and the context in which he began to develop his approach. Some may also associate his name to his problematic idea of "consciousness raising," presented in his first book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, which he later self criticized in his book Pedagogy of Hope, saying that he found it contradictory with his own ideas, because it suggests that there is one who already has a critical consciousness and one who does not have it.

Nevertheless, in my view, the most important and distinctive features of his approach to adult education, and in the opinion of many also the secret of its success, have been both the relationship between theory and practice, and what based on his own words I would term as his "with the subject dialogical approach." Or as he said in his self-reflecting words: "my experience as an educator with the people, using adialogical and problem-posing education" (Freire [1970] 1993, 22; italics and bold are mine, D.M.).

Freire's work and influence have not been made solely from his books, but particularly from his practice of applying and continuously revising his ideas in numerous practical situations in several countries of the world. Given the character of his ideas, this suggests learning in those many situations in those countries. In this sense, his books only express his reflections about his own learning process as well as a system of propositions for others' learning, or in his own words: "none of the few books I have written up to now has been anything else than a certain kind of report [...] of experiences [...]" ([1977] 1982: 237). His book Cartas a Guiné-Bissau. Registros de una Experiencia em processo gives account of his experience of cooperation with the literacy programme of the government of Guinea-Bissau. An experience that he has repeatedly affirmed was one of cooperation and not one of technical experts, because "who is called to teach something must first to learn, in order to be able to keep learning once he or she begins to teach." ([1977] 1982:16).

Summarising, I would like to stress a few ideas from Paulo Freire: a) to work with the people, using a dialogical and problem-posing approach; b) to valorize local knowledge: c) to learn continuously from those people with whom we work (with regard to main interests in this room today, I would say to learn not only from diverse sectors within grassroots populations - which has become an indisputable truth, although unfortunately more a rhetoric than a practice - but also from local officers and intellectuals, as well as from people of other external agencies); d) to revise continuously our ideas.

1.3.2. Let me now briefly comment about some significant contributions of the Colombian sociologist Orlando Fals Borda, whose name is strongly associated with the idea of Participatory Action Research (PAR), a methodology which he is largely credited for developing, along with a handful of other people. This methodology seeks to articulate the production of knowledge with social change. Central to PAR philosophy - and as a radicalisation of earlier Freirean approaches-- is the belief that every person and community has a self-knowledge that has to be taken as a key element in designing any research, development, or political work. According to the PAR approach, the articulation of expert and local knowledge can produce synergy. His investigative and political work in the Atlantic Coast in the 1970s and 1980s provided the fertile ground on which PAR was developed. His Historia Doble de la Costa (three volumes published between 1979 and 1986) gives an account of this experience.

Fals Borda further refined and popularized the PAR approach through publications in various countries and with colleagues from various parts of the world. Institutionally, this work took him through a period of intense collaboration with the Consejo Latinoamericano de Educación de Adultos - the institutional home of the highly politicised popular education approaches in the continent - which he headed in the 1980s.

The idea of "devolution" is an important and integral element of the way of "to study with" proposed by the PAR approach. Fals Borda states that devolution is an obligation, and that it is an aspect of the participatory research praxis (1987, 112). He also stresses that the devolution of knowledge and techniques, cannot be reduced to publishing books or booklets, but it has to adopt many other forms, including diverse communicational forms and other communal projects and activities (1987, 114). In his view, in a PAR praxis it is not enough to integrate theory and practice, but also knowledge from several sources have to be combined (1987, 44). An important element of the approach is the insistence on the need of breaking with "relationships of subordination" and connected forms of knowledge production (i.e., the subject-object relationship). He also insists on the rule of promoting the "potential redundance" of the experts, and on building symmetric relationships of cooperation. He also emphasises that the PAR approach is not compatible with the time pressures of writing a dissertation and other academic pressures (1987, 64), and I would here add neither is it compatible with the pressures associated to the cycle of projects as understood by multilateral agencies. Incidentally, this remark reminds me of the methodologies that the World Bank call "participatory." Most of them allowing participation only in headquarters selected project areas, and framing this participation within methodologies and time constraints that are part of the World Bank experts' culture, but not of the peoples in the terrain (if anyone is interested, we may discuss a couple of examples of this in our meeting).

1.3.3. Finally, I also have to stress here two specific contributions made by two other more recent Latin American intellectuals. These are the idea of "mediation" proposed by Jesús Martín Barbero, and the idea of "socio-communicational circuits" proposed by Néstor García Canclini. These are only two of the many insightful ideas proposed by these colleagues, but I believe are the most significant for the matter of our meeting today.

Martín-Barbero has proposed the idea of mediation as necessary in understanding how the messages of the media are re-elaborated, re-signified, and appropriated, by people. The concept of mediation emphasises how media messages are negotiated among different agents in diverse social contexts. This idea reminds us of the much needed careful valorization of local histories, and cultures, in dialogue with extra-local messages, and agencies. In his pioneering book De los Medios a las Mediaciones (1987) (Communication, Culture and Hegemony. From Media to Mediations, 1993), he has emphasized that "audiences" are not mere decodifiers of messages, but actual producers too. In this sense, culture is a matter of communication (1987, chapter 2).

In his book Consumidores y Ciudadanos (1995) (Consumers and Citizens, 2001), García Canclini has proposed the idea of socio-communicational circuits, as one designated to highlight the existence of diverse "circuits" in any given national society. He particularly discusses how through and within these circuits diverse representations of identities are produced (see chapters 5 to 8).

I will later on integrate the contributions of these four authors in the final section of this talk.

1.4. What to Learn about Communication for Social Change from the Theories of Social Movements.

Theories of Social Movements have usually been classified in two main groups. On the one hand are those that may be grouped under the label of "identity making approach", which focus on identity making practices of social agents. On the other hand are those that may be grouped under the label of "resource mobilization approach," which emphasise the work done by social agents in mobilizing resources. Resources in this case mean many diverse factors: social experience, social knowledge (including organiaation and communication know how), social networks, leadership, material resources, etc. In my view, we do not need to choose between these two approaches - they should not be seen as alternative and mutually exclusive, but as complementary. Instead of telling you details of one and other approach, I will briefly summarise a few lessons from both that may be relevant for the purpose of our meeting:

The social making of a collective identity is a condition for the existence of a social movement. There is not a social movement without a collective identity. But this is in a certain way like the story of the chicken and the egg. Who is going to produce representations of identity capable of gathering others? How are these representations of identity produced and circulated in order to gather a movement?

These issues are too complex issues to address herein. And, in any case, the main conclusion is: there is no unique answer, we have to go case by case. The answer varies from context to context, from sociocommunicational circuit to sociocommunicational circuit. Moreover, when we go case by case, we see that finally identity making is also an issue of resource mobilization. On the one hand, we learn the importance of mobilization of symbolic capital, which is an issue not considered by resource mobilization theories. On the other hand, we see the importance of mobilising those other resources that are actually considered by resource mobilisation theories, which in diverse ways and circumstances allow for identity making.

In one way or the other what we may see is that every kind of resource is in the hands and heads of people, who live and act in specific contexts, in specific forms, according to the ways in which they interpret and represent social experience, which are informed by their distinctive social experience. These contexts may be large or narrow, but it is within those specific contexts, or socio communicational circuits, where meaning is produced. Meaning is not made in a vacuum, neither does come from genetic information, or blood, it is not what "the media" tells, but among other things it is how what "the media" tell us is interpreted, elaborated, appropriated, transformed, according to prevailing values and interpretations of social experience, both past and present. These values and interpretations are produced by very specific agents, not by the a social movement itself, which for this case does not exist.

What we have in social movements is a constellation of more specific social agents (grassroots community organisations; NGOs; worker, peasant and student unions; social, political, cultural and political leaders; teachers, artists, and intellectuals). They are bound through certain interpretations and agendas, not just by need or social problems, but by the ways in which these needs and problems are subjectively felt and interpreted, and by the possible solutions and agendas that are elaborated. All this is contextually relative, all this is elaborated by specific agents throughout specific sociocomunicational circuits. Nevertheless, given social diversity, the production of meaning always involves conflicts, transactions, and negotiations among agents. This is, I believe, what we may learn, not as much from Social Movements Theories, but from both experience and studies about specific social movements, and moreover from the reflections of those involved in them.

How to learn from this in order to be able to contribute to improving the quality of life of diverse populations worldwide ? I will try to address this issue based on these reflections on social movements, as well as from the former notes on contributions made by those mentioned Latin American intellectuals, and my own practical experience.

1.5. Some thoughts based on both all of the above and my own practical experience, which I hope may spark further dialogue:

1) To listen, value and learn from the local people (diverse sectors of interests, diverse age and gender groups, diverse leaderships and intellectuals): What are their needs, dreams, aspirations, agendas, ways to address problems and achieve goals, what are their means and procedures? . What do they expect from outside agents?

2) To revise critically both the "role of outside experts," and "outside expert knowledge" (which sometimes is expected to transfer to target local people, and it is expected that they will accept the "outside expert knowledge" as it is). Be able to conclude that "outside experts" are not expert, but just a particular kind of agent, whose knowledge is institutionally framed, and therefore, necessarily partial and biased. The wiser attitude is to be able to learn from those one expects to work with.

3) Knowledge is produced everywhere in social experience. International experts' and Academic knowledge are just two varieties of knowledge. We have too many years presuming we are the great masters of knowledge, and evidently we have been wrong or the world would look differently. Academic and International expert's knowledge are two interrelated forms of knowledge, which as any others are context relative, and institutionally framed. They are only two specific forms of knowledge, they are not "universal" knowledge (see Mato 2002). There are many other forms of knowledge. If we are going to act outside our "buildings", we need to learn from those other forms, particularly if we have any ambition to contributing to the betterment of other social groups' quality of life.

4) More projects like "Making Waves" are needed. It is necessary to learn from the experience of those who are doing. It is necessary to document those lessons in order to make the narratives and reflections of involved local leaderships and intellectuals available for diverse audiences. This may serve many purposes: to stimulate the work and reflection of others, to teach in schools and universities, to teach outside development agents about the pros and cons of diverse approaches.

5) Wherever in the world, Universities either are part of the solution, or part of the problem. They have to be challenged to engage actively in social change, to apply their knowledge. There are many valuable exceptions, but looking at what is predominate, we see the production of knowledge without regard for local needs and aspirations. It is the self-reproduction of the academy and its relationship to transnational trends. Universities have to change the ways they produce knowledge. In addition they have to be the main places where local, contextually ground knowledge is valued. But, at the same time outside agents have to learn to understand the specific dynamics of any local/regional/national university, and to value its potential collaboration.

6) Wherever an outside agent wants to engage in development it has to learn to develop context based/grounded approaches working with the populations in question. Letting the populations themselves command the process, with the outside agent becoming just a resource.

7) To revise the driving role of the project cycle, which usually is just the budget cycle, and is usually year round. This cycle should not be imposed over local experiences and time cycles. This kind of imposition only creates false situations. To produce results in such a period does not respond to local needs, priorities, ways of doing, etc.

8) Sustainable social change is a long term processes.

9) Communication is not unidirectional, is not just dissemination of messages, but is social processes, is working together, is everywhere.

10) Communication cannot be seen as an appendix, or as a set of specific tasks within an already given project. If a project seeks social change, then it has to be seen as a communication experience. It is not enough to communicate our thinking, we do need to think and work "communicatively." For this I mean "to think every project from a communication perspective, from the very beginning; which of course implies to produce the project in communication with both the involved population and potential allies." Communication means links and exchanges between different agents.

11) If development projects are seen as social change projects, and therefore as communication projects, they cannot begin in the headquarters of an outside organisation, except as a set of questions: What happens there? Would they want us there? To do what? What? How?. Of course outside organisations have their own views. The issue is not impose these views, but neither is it to forget them. The issue is to dialogue, honestly, and be willing to learn, this means to change, in the process.

12) Social change is driven by specific social agents. For social agents to exist, they need an identity. Identity making is part of social change processes, and it is communication & culture.

13) Social processes involve relations of power, everywhere. Willingly or not, outside agencies often reinforce and/or exacerbate these asimmetries with their practices. Special efforts have to be made in avoiding these kinds of consequences. This involves research, reflection, and overall careful efforts incorporating the communication process into every possible group, particularly those less visible for the outsider. Depending on both project foci and societies, the invisibility in question lies along lines of gender, religion, ethnicity, socio-economics status, sexual orientation, body particularities ("disabilities", shape (fat or not, for example), age, etc.

14) Exchanges between International Experts and/or Scholars and those who are usually named as "beneficiaries" of development projects involve critical issues of "translation". For issues of "translation", I do not simply mean a question of sometimes speaking different languages, but overall having different frameworks of interpretation, different ways of interpret a same experience, different values and systems of representations. It is not enough to acknowledge the importance of these kinds of gaps, it is necessary to address the carefully, intentionally, through collaborative work among all the involved sides.

References:

Fals Borda, Orlando 1987 Conocimiento y poder popular: lecciones con campesinos en Nicaragua, Colombia y México.

Freire, Paulo 1970 Pedagogía del Oprimido. Madrid: Siglo XXI. Original: Pedagogia do oprimido, 1970

Freire, Paulo 1977 Cartas a Guinea-Bissau: apuntes de una experiencia pedagógica en proceso. Madrid: Siglo XXI. Original: Cartas a Guiné-Bissau. Registros de una Experiencia em processo, 1977.

Freire, Paulo 1993 Pedagogía de la esperanza. Madrid: Siglo XXI. Original: Pedagogia da esperança: um reecontro com a pedagogia do oprimido, 1992

García Canclini, Néstor 2001Consumers and Citizens: Globalization and Multicultural Conflicts. Original: Consumidores y Ciudadanos, 1995

Martín-Barbero 1993 Communication, Culture and Hegemony. London: Sage. Original: De los medios a las mediaciones, 1987

Mato, Daniel 2002 Prácticas Intelectuales Latinoamericanas en Cultura y Poder. In: Daniel Mato (ed.). In: Daniel Mato (ed.) Prácticas Intelectuales Latinoamericanas en Cultura y Poder. Caracas and Buenos Aires: Universidad Central de Venezuela and CLACSO (Consejo Latinoamericano de Ciencias Sociales). Pp.: 21-46.