Calendar of Upcoming Events

Annual George Gerbner Lecture

Annenberg School for Communication
October 22, 2009

Karin Gwinn Wilkins

University of Texas at Austin

Reporting the death of “development communication” has indeed been an exaggeration* While academics have been advocating the importance of “social change” through naming conference divisions, publications, and programs, many of the underlying themes of “development” seem to be surviving this transition. Through a review of the questions raised in communication scholarship on development and social change, I consider continuity and change within the field. First I will assess questions raised in the more prominent focus on communication FOR development, or strategic intervention through the use of communication technologies and processes. These questions tend to evaluate the potential of communication strategies in social marketing, entertainment education, and media advocacy programs to change audience knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors. Next I will explore how attention to communication ABOUT development has questioned how development practices and discourses communicate assumptions about the agents (such as the role of gender) as well as the processes of social change (recognizing the contexts of institutional agendas and of global geometries). Finally, I will reflect on how questions raised in more recent attention to “social change” circumscribe visions of strategic intervention, privileging the individual and the social at the expense of more collective political and economic structures.

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