‘Communication is a vital element of change in any environment’
By Editor on December 8, 2008 11:20 pm
Professor Emile McAnany began his communication career with a PhD at Stanford University (1970) where he remained until 1978 as a research associate and lecturer. He moved to the University of Texas at Austin in 1979 and had a joint appointment in the College of Communication and the Institute of Latin American Studies. He moved to Santa Clara University in 1997 and was chair of the Department of Communication from 1997 though 2002. He currently holds the Schmidt Professorship in Communication at the university. He has published nine books and a large number of journal articles and chapters over his career.
The focus of Professor McAnany’s work has been in the area of communication for development and social change and the international trade of cultural products, especially in Latin America. He worked on the social impact of the Brazilian soap opera on fertility and gender changes in the 1990s. Currently he is working on a history of the field of Communication for Development and Social Change or c4d as it is called. He also is involved with the Center for Science, Technology, and Society at Santa Clara University where he helps in judging panels for the annual Technology Awards Benefiting Humanity and studies these projects for their contributions to sustainable social change. In a conversation with Rohit Chopra, he discusses his journey to his current research project, the contested understandings of development that have shaped the history of c4d, and the challenges involved in thinking about and enabling social change through communication.
Professor McAnany, thank you for this interview. What motivated your interest to undertake this project about an early history of communication and social change?
I came to the field of c4d (Communication for Development and Social Change) at the beginning of my doctoral studies at Stanford in 1965. Wilbur Schramm had just published his classic book, Mass Media and National Development, the year before, and I had run across a copy in French in Belgium where I was at the time. When I read the book I realized that this was the kind of communication studies I wanted to pursue. I ended up studying with Schramm and doing a dissertation with him as well as being his first field manager for a five-year study (1968-73) of educational television in El Salvador. I stayed on at Stanford after I finished my PhD in 1970. Schramm was forced to retire from Stanford in 1973, and I and two colleagues who had worked with me in El Salvador (John Mayo, Dean of Communication at Florida State, and Bob Hornik at Annenberg East at Penn) got a five-year grant from USAID to continue work on media and development. So we continued to work in field projects in Mexico, Guatemala, and the Ivory Coast over the next five years. We also helped carry on the c4d classes that Schramm had taught before leaving in 1973. Everett Rogers came to Stanford in 1975 to join us in c4d work although we three had separate projects. Mayo left in 1977 for Florida State, Hornik and I left the following year (he for Penn and I for Univesity of Texas at Austin where I had a joint appointment in the School of Communication and the Institute of Latin American Studies).
All this is by way of explaining my interest in c4d since I studied and worked in the field and taught at Stanford from 1965-1978. I continued my interest in international communication at UT Austin but turned this interest to issues of export of US media and circulation of Latin American television genres like telenovelas (soap operas). I directed many doctoral dissertations on a range of such topics. In 1990 I got involved with a group of researchers at the Population Research Center where we received funding over about six or seven years to study how the overwhelmingly popular telenovela genre may have contributed to various social changes among viewers. It was a historical study that used a variety of methods (census data analysis, survey, focus group interviews, ethnographic studies, historical analysis, and content analysis) to get at a phenomenon that had flourished from about 1970 to 1996 when we undertook field studies. This kind of work brought me back to c4d but from a different angle. Rather than study media interventions, we were studying how media may have affected a national population over time. A challenge to accomplish. We finished the data gathering by 1999 and wrote and published a number of disparate articles and chapters but, alas, the book we had planned and worked on for several years was never completed. I left for Santa Clara University in January 1997 as data collection was being completed but remained very much in contact with colleagues at UT and in Brazil, but we were never able to refocus our attention enough to finish the book that would have brought the many parts of the research together in a more synthetic fashion. When I came to Santa Clara, I was chair of the Department of Communication for six years from 1997 to 2002. I got involved with the new Center for Science, Technology, and Society and from 2000 was a judge of one of the panels for the Technology Benefiting Humanity competition. I found that many of the projects we judged were c4d projects coming from many grassroots groups in developing countries so I stayed with the Awards and have just finished seven years of judging out of the last eight. It has very much brought me back to c4d issues.
This is a long way to answer a short question. I hope that this brief history makes clear my motivation to do this historical work. Schramm is considered the founder of the mass communication field as well as one of three founders of c4d (the other being Everett Rogers and Dan Lerner). I knew all three and worked with two of them so I have a personal perspective as well as a historical interest in writing this history.
You draw attention to the fact that your project speaks to a historiographical demand, looking at the founding texts, authors, and context of emergence of c4d. Could you share your thoughts about this?
There has been some work on the general field of mass communication studies in the US that I cite in my chapter on the founders of c4d, but I point out that no one has done a comparable study of c4d. I feel that I have the experience, the contacts, and the perspective to have a go at what I think the history should be. Obviously, my work is highly selective and interpretive, but I will get it out there for others to consider. One of the problems with trying to write such a study is that c4d has been a field that has been fought over for decades, mainly between those who fund and therefore define development and those who have a more ideal view of what development should be. There were others, more radical, in the 19760s and 1970s who argued that the whole enterprise of development was based on a flawed capitalist system that was doomed to fail.
There is also the difference between theory and practice that needs to be considered in doing a history: some writers of more theoretical work want to concentrate on discourse of other academics; people from the field often think of these academics as being without the necessary experience of how difficult projects are to do and change to be made. Writing a history of the field requires to take all of these divisions and disagreements into account without distorting the reality of the entire phenomenon. No one can do justice to the whole, but I am trying to acknowledge as many facets as possible. Many histories only deal with people—who they were and what they did or said (this is Rogers’ approach that he calls a biographical method in his History of Communication Study published in 1994) and ignore contextual factors, institutional structure, and the dual reality of theory and practice (especially in c4d where field work is often unrelated to theory).
One of the intriguing arguments that you make in the paper which you presented at the 2008 International Association for Media and Communication Research [IAMCR] conference is that we are at a juncture that is similar to, and curiously reminiscent of, the earlier historical moment with regard to communication for development. As you state, “modern ICTs like the Internet and PDAs are being used to promote social change, but they are confronted by the same structural and political barriers for peoples in developing countries as they were fifty years ago.” That was when Lerner published the first theory of c4d, when radio, film and print were the reigning media. What would you say is similar and different about the challenges facing us today from that earlier moment?
My comment in my paper comparing fifty years ago and today is quite simple. Although we have many new ICTs that can do some marvelous things, the problems they confront are by and large very similar to those of fifty years ago, including poverty, disease, discrimination, and racism. The challenges are very much the same as before. In order to create meaningful social change, ICTs and interpersonal communication remain the two fundamental processes that might help, but we have to remember that although communication in some form is fundamental to change, it is not something that we can engineer in some facile way. The enthusiasm for new technologies, new theories, and new approaches has always been regretted later. I am reminded that Schramm acknowledged that his enthusiasm and confidence in mass communication in his 1964 book was misplaced. On the other end of the spectrum, the radical economist, Andre Gunder Frank, who helped create and popularize Dependency theory in Latin America and elsewhere in the late 1960s could regret his naïve belief in revolution and radical change by the Third World in an autobiographical article in 1991.
So in many ways, the problems are as great—greater in some cases—as before. In other ways, the world has changed and both problems and opportunities are different. The new ICTs allow people to access information much more readily and this can mean some real differences in peoples’ lives. PDAs can help gather important health information and send it via satellite to ministries of health to monitor and intervene in the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Almost everybody now can get access to radio and even television is spreading rapidly to larger sectors of the globe. Whether that is a plus or not remains to be seen. New technologies are a double edged sword as people living in India and China may have experienced with the invasion of television content into their daily lives. So yes, there are profound differences today, but the challenge for change remains constant.
You suggest the need for a range of approaches, methods, and strategies as well as ideological flexibility in approaching communication for development. Could you comment on this.
I had said before that the field is always more a battle field because of difference constituencies (researchers, funders, recipients, etc.), theories (paradigms are displaced but not without a fight) and approaches (big, centralized, top down versus small, flexible and bottom up) and methods (quantitative versus qualitative in measuring success). The work of historical studies, it seems to me (even though I do not claim to be a historian), is to take into consideration all aspects of the historical phenomenon under study in order to validly assess what was happening. Of course, in the final analysis, the author has to give an interpretation of the data that will be uniquely hers/his.
I was trained in the traditional social science methodology of my time at a university that, at the time, was a bastion of quantitative empiricism. While I was still at Stanford things began to change and even some leaders of quantitative methods (like Lee Cronbach) were critiquing the approach if not throwing it out. But the critical paradigm entered from Latin America and from the likes of Herb Schiller in the US. I worked in the critical mode for some years and still maintain a critical perspective. But I have not abandoned my training in quantitative method although I favor the qualitative because both methodologies serve important purposes in answering different questions. One other perspective that I learned from Wilbur Schramm was a broad approach to communication. At the Institute for Communication Research at Stanford, a doctoral student had to take about half of all of the graduate classes outside of communication. I had classes in sociology, psychology, economics, statistics, business, and engineering in my years of study. This helped me work collaboratively in field projects with a variety of other researchers. In my work on Brazilian telenovelas, my closest collaborators were demographers, sociologists, and Brazilian media scholars. I also worked closely with economists in a number of projects. This forced me outside of the sometimes very narrow and parochial interests of American mainstream communication studies.
With the global ascendancy of neoliberal models of governance, there is increasingly a skepticism about the role of the states and governments in developmentalist projects. Yet what comes across strongly in your paper is the prominent role of the US government in the history of c4d. Based on the history of the field, what roles, specific as well as collaborative, do you think the private and public sectors could play in enabling communication for development today?
I think things are changing in regard to government involvement in c4d. For the first several decades (say 1960-1980) almost all c4d work was tied to central governments. And it still remains so today to some extent. It is not that the central or state governments no longer are responsible for providing services for people, They are and often they are the natural point of entry for large, international projects that deal with health, education, nutrition, agriculture, population, etc. The thing that has changed is the role of NGOs, non-profits, and even individuals in working for change. There is also the growth of huge foundations like Gates, Hewlett-Packard, and Skoll. These and and other high tech billionaire fortunes are entering the c4d field with a variety of funding and an independence of the usual bilateral and multilateral institutions of the UN and World Bank that deal with governments. The best example of a new institution for c4d is Muhammad Yunus’ Grameen Bank and allied social businesses in Bangladesh. Grameen is not a foundation nor a government agency nor a business in the usual sense. It is a social business in that it is self-financing but a non-profit. It makes money but helps people in its many businesses like Grameen Phone or (soon-to-be) Grameen/Danon Yogurt (for malnourished kids)! The c4d is changing because more people and institutions are getting into the game. I don’t know how this will turn out, but I do know that things are changing.
What contributions do you think scholars in communication can make in c4d?
I obviously think they can make great contributions. But the problems are many. First, c4d is rarely taught any more in the many US communication schools. Much of the work is done by other schools like health, education, environment, engineering, etc. who do the field work related to c4d. There are a number of places in other countries that still or even newly work in c4d. I teach a c4d intro course to upper division undergraduates and relate the course to finalists in the Tech Awards. I have some colleagues who also teach these kinds of courses at both graduate and undergraduate levels. I think we can update our courses through a better focus on globalization which is entering the curricula of many US universities as well as bringing into a variety of communication courses the Millennium Development Goals of the UN. There is an increasing interest in more active learning outside the class room in US universities that could be related to c4d kinds of interest (whether in other countries or in our own communities, communication is a vital element of change in any environment). Just trying to understand social change within the parameters of communication would be a challenge in a whole array of communication courses. In addition to teaching, communication scholars can make contributions by participating in field work—or through their students who do field work; they can help study how communication works in the field; they can do historical research as to how c4d has operated in given countries, regions, or cultures as well as to how it has operated within a given intellectual field like education, health, population, agriculture, etc. Synthetic studies of this kind can be very useful in summarizing results across many projects; they are not often done. Reach out to other fields that are often trying to include consideration of media or other ICTs in their own research. This was my experience with my demography colleagues in Texas and Brazil. There are, no doubt, many other avenues for work and collaboration. Possibilities are limited only by our imaginations.
Professor Emile McAnany can be reached at emcanany@scu.edu
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