Annenberg Hall, Mind Lab Room 1H

Postdevelopment, decoloniality and CDSC’s ecocentric challenge 

This talk will explore the emergence of “Postdevelopment” (PD) within the field of communication for development and social change (CDSC), specifically considering its bio-centric elements as linked to indigenous epistemologies and notions of degrowth and decoloniality. It will discuss how PD’s rise presents two fundamental challenges to prevailing CDSC models: First, the broad rejection of entrenched tropes of development-ideology that privilege growth-based discourses and European and Anglo-American expertise and technocracy. Second, the radical notion that nations can elaborate understandings of development by drawing from non-Western concepts of what constitutes a thriving society, while taking into consideration biophysical planetary limits. 

About Patrick Murphy

Patrick D. Murphy is the Verizon Chair in Global Broadband and Telecommunication and Professor in the Department of Media Studies and Production. His research interests include global communication, environmental communication, ethnographic methods, and Latin American media and cultural theory. He is the author of The Media Commons: Globalization and Environmental Discourses (Univ. of Illinois Press, 2017), and is co-editor of Negotiating Democracy: Media Transformation in Emerging Democracies (SUNY, 2007) and Global Media Studies (Routledge, 2003), and his work has appeared in numerous journals and chapters in edited books.