A Culture-Centered Approach to Listening: Voices of Social Change

Drawing on an understanding of marginalization as intrinsic to mainstream communication theorizing and research, this essay argues that exploitation is rooted in the denial of the communicative capacity of the margins and in the co-optation of the margins as the subjects of top-down communication directed at the margins by experts. The distributions of communicative infrastructures map out the inequities in distributions of economic resources, reifying the unequal distribution of resources by perpetuating values embedded in the interests of the power elite. Listening offers an opening for interrogating the inequities in the global landscape of distribution of power, by attending to the unvoiced assumptions and principles underlying the logics of concentration of power in the hands of the transnational elite. Drawing from postcolonial and Subaltern Studies theories, I engage with the culture-centered approach to outline key tenets of listening as entry points to addressing the global inequities that are produced by neoliberal globalization. Listening through inversion, incompleteness and imagination works in solidarity with the margins to co-construct theory rooted in the ontologies, epistemologies, and values of the margins.