Unlearning Communication for Social Change—A Pedagogical Proposition

We have in recent years seen growing calls for pedagogies for social change amongst communication and development scholars, identifying resistances, critiques, and emerging practices in the field. This review article addresses this ‘pedagogical turn’, suggesting that it is in these pedagogies we can see the pathways to unlearn and relearn communication for social change. Offering a decolonial analytical lens, this article asks two questions: What characterizes these critical pedagogies? And how can the various pedagogies contribute to unlearning and relearning the field of communication and social change? This article is structured in five parts, first offering a review of key critiques articulated within the field of communication and social development in the past two decades, arguing that, in practice, what we are seeing is the organic development of a pluriverse of knowledges, values, and visions of society. Secondly, it proposes the decolonial term of ‘unlearning’ as a pedagogical pathway and epistemological ambition for the production and recognition of a pluriverse of knowledges, thereby challenging dominant perceptions of society and social change. Thirdly, it introduces a model of analysis which structures ways whereby we can think about monocultures and ecologies in relation to a range of dimensions of the pluriverse. Fourthly, it reviews key critical pedagogies, discussing how they address epistemic injustice both in broader societal contexts as well as in the university space. This article concludes by discussing how the process of unlearning through critical pedagogies has implications for the configuration and definition of the field of communication and social change, suggesting three areas for further research: ways of seeing (positionality), new subject positions (relationality), and new design processes (transition).