Abstract
The texts in this Special Issue revolve around an initiative known as the International Panel for Social Progress (IPSP) (https://www.ipsp.org/). Since summer 2015, the IPSP, modelled on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has been bringing together 269 critical social scientists from around the world. This panel of interdisciplinary scientists was charged with the mission of gathering and integrating findings produced by social scientists across different disciplines to produce a report on contemporary society well grounded in social scientific research. The final report includes 22 chapters covering a wide range of social issues, including new geographies, inequality, economic growth and planetary welfare, cities, markets and the future of capitalism, social justice, democracy and the rule of law, cultural change and religious communities. Chapter 13 addresses Media and Communication; for 2 years, from 2015 to 2017, a team of 17 scholars from six continents collectively wrote Chapter 13 as an attempt to rethink the contemporary media environment. Some have compared this effort to the MacBride Report of the 1980s.
Led by Nick Couldry and Clemencia Rodríguez, Chapter 13’s team of authors decided on a set of foundational principles, which include avoiding universalist narratives dominated by a Global North perspective and foregrounding narratives from the Global South. The authors were also determined to diverge from traditional narratives centred solely on major media/digital industries to make space for representations of community media, indigenous media and activist media as key players in today’s mediascape. The result of this 2-year collective endeavour is Chapter 13, a 37,000-word report on the affordances and challenges of our media environment. The report also includes case studies from China, Indonesia, Mexico, Russia, Sweden and South Africa. Chapter 13 is available in English (https://www.ipsp.org/download/chapter-13) and Spanish (https://www.ipsp.org/download/capitulo-13-medios-y-comunicaciones-pdf). A small book version of Chapter 13 will be printed for teaching purposes by the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication (CARGC) at the University of Pennsylvania, with the kind support of Marwan Kraidy, one of the chapter’s authors. A book version will also be published in Spanish by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation with the support of Omar Rincón, another of the chapter’s authors. We hope there will be many more opportunities to extend the arguments and the policy proposals of our chapter.
The authors sought feedback on Chapter 13 from various international scholarly fora, including a panel at the International Association of Media and Communications Research (IAMCR) conference in Leicester (2016) and a special session at Cartagena (2017), as well as at the International Communication Association (ICA) conference in San Diego (2017). Panels were also held at the University of Melbourne in Australia and at the Annenberg School at the University of Pennsylvania in the United States.
The central article in this Special Issue is a summary of Chapter 13, but we are aware that the story presented by Chapter 13 is far from complete. Our media environment is highly complex and fragmented. We present Chapter 13 as an incomplete narrative and we believe that only through dialogue and interaction with others can we come close to a comprehensive understanding of how media and digital platforms affect our lives. Thus, we asked Sasha Costanza-Chock, Anita Gurumurthy, Andrew Iliades and Gustavo Gómez to respond to Chapter 13. These authors took the mission to heart, producing in-depth and highly critical commentaries on Chapter 13; these four texts make up the rest of this Special Issue.
We hope the texts collected in this Special Issue will introduce and contextualize the goals and potential contributions of the IPSP project, and especially Chapter 13, which focuses on media and communication. These contributions go beyond the field of global media and communications to address the broader areas of knowledge, policy, activism and practice concerning struggles for rights, justice and progress amid great global social, political and cultural transformation.