Abstract
This chapter contributes to debates about the socio-political character and relevance of decolonization as a term that denotes anti-hegemonic and transformative knowledge and action. The objective is to demonstrate the decolonial nature of practices of comunicação popular (in Portuguese, or comunicación popular, in Spanish). Comunicação popular entails community-building and contentious processes of communication created by underprivileged, marginalized, and structurally oppressed social groups. The chapter starts with a brief reflection on the contentious character of debates on decolonization. After that, it tackles positionality and what (de)colonization means for an Afro-Brazilian scholar in predominantly white academia. Then, the chapter turns to practices of comunicação popular as decolonial actions as observed among favela media activists active against the Covid-19 pandemic in favelas of Rio de Janeiro.
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Notes
- 1.
“Não posso e não me interessa transcender a mim mesmo, como habitualmente os cientistas sociais declaram supostamente fazer em relação às suas investigações. Quanto a mim, considero-me parte da matéria investigada. Somente da minha própria experiência e situação no grupo étnico-cultural a que pertenço, interagindo no contexto global da sociedade brasileira, é que posso surpreender a realidade que condiciona o meu ser e o define. Situação que me envolve qual um cinturão histórico de onde não posso escapar conscientemente sem praticar a mentira, a traição, ou a distorção da minha personalidade.”
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Custódio, L. (2021). The Decolonial Nature of Comunicação Popular . In: Suzina, A.C. (eds) The Evolution of Popular Communication in Latin America. Palgrave Studies in Communication for Social Change. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62557-3_10
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