ICA presents: Hello, I'm Ellen Wartella and welcome to this episode of the Architects of Communication Scholarship podcast series, a production of the ICA Podcast Network. Today, our architect is Silvio Waisbord. Silvio Waisbord is Director and Professor in the School of Media and Public Affairs at George Washington University. Since joining GW in 2007, he has served the school as Director of Graduate Studies and associate director. He's the author or editor of 18 books, and he's published in the areas of investigative journalism, media scandals, communication studies, media policy, and global social change. Between 2015 and 2018. Silvio was editor in chief of ICA's own Journal of Communication. Today, Silvio Waisbord is in conversation with Pablo Boczkowski. Pablo is Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Northwestern University. And here is Pablo Boczkowski.
I'm really thrilled to have this conversation today because beyond his professional accomplishments, Silvio is both an intellectual role model and a dear friend. What makes him a terrific intellectual is that he's curious, thoughtful, erudite, generous, and he's usually not taking himself or his ideas all that seriously. What makes him a dear friend is that Silvio is someone you can always talk to–the kind of person who will always listen to what you have to say and meet you where you are. Silvio, my friend, delighted to have you with us today.
Thank you very much. I'm very happy to be here, and thank you for your very generous introduction.
Tell us about your personal history and your trajectory, you know, before you enter the communication field.
I grew up in Argentina, more specifically I spent my childhood in Patagonia in a town by the ocean when I attended elementary school. When I was 10, the family moved back to Buenos Aires, where I finished elementary school and high school. I started college in 1979, that was during the military dictatorship in Argentina. I was very frustrated with the university experience in 1979, given I was in the Department of Sociology. I was not very happy studying there for a number of reasons, but primarily because studying during a dictatorship was not very intellectually rewarding. I completed my PhD in Sociology in 1983, just as the dictatorship was pushed out of power after the 1982 Malvinas/Falklands War. I knew when I was finishing college that I wanted to do research on politics and culture. After I finished, I was a research assistant for a well-known communication researcher in Argentina. That's when I got the media communication bug, doing work with him on media industries. That was an experience for me to learn more about communication theory, communication studies, not only in Latin America but also in the United States and to some extent, in some European countries. My first immersion in communication study was after I finished my licenciatura in sociology.
Who is this colleague who was highly influential in your becoming a communication person?
His name is Heriberto Muraro and he did a number of studies on the Argentine television and filmmaking industry. I was actually teaching assistant for a class, and I was working with his then- wife. Heriberto was looking for a research assistant to do this big project on the filmmaking industry. It was in partnership with the Union of Filmmaking Workers, actually. So it seemed like a good research opportunity. That was the beginning. Then, the year after actually, I got the opportunity to be a teaching assistant for another important figure in communication studies in Latin America and in Argentina. That was Oscar Landi. I started being a research assistant. It is typical in Argentina, in an academic job, you have multiple jobs. You never have a single job. So I also started being a research assistant for yet another communication researcher, Toto Schmucler, who was teaching a class on communication, design, and popular culture, for students in this school of architecture. So I find myself working with these three, well-known–and very different in many ways–communication researchers, and that's when I confirm that I want to do communication and media studies. I was exposed to a number of scholars, many who came to guest lecture in the class I was TA-ing for. That was a wonderful experience. I have been exposed to great people, not just very interesting and very original scholars, but wonderful human beings, willing to share time and talk about all kinds of stuff. The three of them were actually almost like Renaissance scholars, in the sense that you could talk to them not just about communication and media, but about politics, art, mathematics. Any topic was an interesting topic. So I particularly remember enjoying this conversation. I said, “I want to do this for a living.” That's when I decided that what I wanted to do in terms of research, teaching, and writing, was media and communication studies.
Very interesting. This was a period in Argentina and in other parts of Latin America for democratic renaissance and a cultural effervescence.
Absolutely. In fact, two of these three people went into exile during the military dictatorship and when I met them were pretty much fresh back into the country. One went into exile in Mexico, the other one in Brazil. Those were particularly, as you say, very effervescent times in Argentina, I would say ‘82 until ‘87-’88, sort of a democratic spring. And you can feel that. In hindsight, you can see that those were very exciting moments, to do all kinds of things, but particularly to do intellectual work.It was a foundational moment.
It seemed that experience shaped your trajectory considerably, even to this day, because if we fast forward many years, you had publications like The Communication Manifesto, Communication: A Post-Discipline, and El Imperio de las Utopías (The Empire of Utopia), your essay about your experience, after 30 plus years of living in the US, these are texts that had this breadth of perspective. They are effervescent, and they connect areas that in communication studies tend to be more siloed and modes of inquiry that tend to be separated. If we fast forward, how was the process for writing both The Communication Manifesto and Communication: A Post-Discipline, which are different, but they share that attempt to interrogate where the discipline is at and the interface between the discipline and society at large?
Communication: A Post-Discipline comes out of the experience that I had as editor of the Journal of Communication, in which I thought, there was a wonderful opportunity to learn more about what communication studies or communication science, looks like–what it is, a very dynamic object of study and dynamic post-discipline. That was the argument that I presented. I applied for the position because I thought it was an interesting opportunity to learn more about communication studies, not in order to figure out what communication studies is. Probably like most people, we enter communication studies in one niche, and then we find our place there. Then eventually, we expand to one or two more overlapping interests. That's our perspective, what communication studies is out of 30-40+ divisions of ways that we slice up communication studies. The book was, basically, “I think I'm learning a lot here.” I'm trying to figure out what I'm learning, and the book is an exercise to figure that out–not in terms of as an editor but the perspective as an editor in terms of trying to figure that out. Every time that I saw a finalized issue of Journal of Communication, I said, “What do these articles have in common?” That, to me, was a very interesting intellectual challenge to answer. What is it? And The Manifesto, in some ways, was ideas that I had for the communication discipline. First of all, I didn’t have the space, and second, it would have required much more explanation than the space that I could have been granted. So I say the ideas about, “How do we make sense if this is so chaotic? Where do we find common cross points?” That's what The Communication Manifesto is a call for rethinking what we mean by public scholarship in communication studies. I'm making an argument that perhaps the traditional ways of thinking about public scholarships are too narrow and don't capture much of what many of our colleagues do–that doesn't necessarily fit the conventional idea of public scholarship as a scholar who has media presence.
Let's then go back in time. You are in the second half of the 80s, in the middle of all of this cultural and political effervescence in Argentina, transitioning into communication, and you decide to go for graduate school. How was that process? Why the US? Why San Diego? Why sociology?
When I fell in love with communication and media studies my plan was, a few years after undergrad, to study in Italy because the work of many Italian communication researchers was widely read and discussed in Latin America.What happened was, among my other multiple jobs that I had back then, I also worked for Elizabeth Jelin, who is a well-known sociologist in Argentina. She has done tremendous work on social movements, particularly human rights movements, feminist movements. I was working as a teaching assistant for her. At some point, she asked me, “Have you thought about studying in the United States?” And I said, “No, I thought about studying in Italy eventually.” She says, “Well, if you're interested, let me know if you want to find out more about programs. I can tell you more about the kinds of people who work in sociology.” She explained patiently to me these are the universities, this is what they do. She primarily recommended me to go to programs with a strong Latin American Studies. This was still the Cold War. There was a number of important well-resourced Latin American Studies programs in many American universities, such as University of Texas and The University of California San Diego. That's when I say, “Well, maybe if I go there, I can get a PhD in Sociology and do work in culture and communication.” I ended up in San Diego because I got a teaching assistantship for two years. I didn't have my own funding. Financially, it made sense. And when I applied to San Diego, I found out about the Department of Communication at San Diego. I remember going to the Lincoln library in Buenos Aires, which was a library associated with the American embassy. Maybe San Diego is the right place because I could take classes in the Department of Communication. And of course, in the Department of Communication in San Diego back then was Herb Schiller, widely known in Latin America. So that added another reason why I eventually ended up in San Diego. A strong sociology program that had an emphasis on culture, at least back then, a Latin American Studies program, and this Department of Communication looked like a promising place for me to take courses.
You mentioned some of your early intellectual influences. Starting with the PhD program and onwards, what would you say were your influencers or intellectual role models, mentors, that have shaped the way you’re thinking about media communication over time?
I will say, Michael Schudson was in joint appointments in sociology and communication back then. So I took a course with him on US political communication. I found I was very stimulated talking to him but also as I read his work, I found it profoundly challenging because it’s the kind of work that challenges you to rethink conventional wisdom. It was a total pleasure to work with him and have him as my advisor. I worked closely with Dan Hallin. He was also on my committee. The Department of Sociology in San Diego, at least back then, was known for having strength in historical sociology and sociology of culture. I took a number of courses on both subjects, which I dearly loved and helped me to think more between the macro and the micro in different ways. And finally, Chandra Mukerji was in my committee as well. With her, I learned so much about not only sociology of culture but doing qualitative work. Learning so much about academia, learning about social theory, I found her profoundly inspiring. I wrote my dissertation on changes in political communication in Argentina by looking at election campaigns and media and journalism in the 1980s. Those were some of the people that I worked with closely. But I think that it's hard to actually pinpoint exactly your influences, and thinking about who influenced you is just the number of levels or categories. The people that you work closely with, the people that you read and admire, or you find that there's something interesting about the way they think or the way they read, or the way they ask questions.
Very interesting. Now, you have become arguably the most influential scholar of Latin American media communication, journalism, politics–those intersections. One of the ways in which you have managed to do that, globally is by becoming cultural, so to speak. You understand and embody the culture of the region, but you are a cosmopolitan, and understand the culture, the norms, and the traditions of inquiry of the more globalized academic field. Knowing what you know about the US in particular, but also European traditions, what do you see that Latin American scholarship can bring to a global conversation?
If you're an intellectual and academic in the Global South, you're almost inevitably at the crossroads of different intellectual influences. It's very difficult to avoid it. So you become in contact with ideas originally produced in the US or different parts of Western Europe, just because of the nature of the travel of the organization of global academia; the North/South uni-directionality of ideas, especially academic ideas for a long time. So something interesting happens when ideas that originated in different places happen. When you read somebody who produces ideas, looking at the experience of 19th century France, or interwar period in the UK, and you read that in Argentina, in Brazil, in South Africa, or in Japan, because that is not the context. Why is that relevant to you? That is something that is almost natural, in ways that is not, if your position–I will say in context, is in the North–because you're exposed to all these ideas, local ideas, original ideas, let's say anywhere in Latin America, that come from a very different traditional experience, in spite of the fact that people have digested European and American ideas for a long time, and trying to sort of reinterpret them in the local context. So what we bring is something that is always trying to read it, trying to read it in different contexts. That is a different experience. I'm not saying it's better or worse. It is different.
It's a process in part of never taking knowledge for granted.
Absolutely right, because it will be quite remarkable that ideas produced in different contexts will travel so well in very different cultural, economic, social, political contexts, to explain things the same way. My sense has never been in this debate between important and local ideas. That binary division did not make much sense to me because what always makes sense is being very omnivorous, taking and borrowing and rethinking or criticism, ideas coming from different places–not as many places as we will like. It's primarily exposure to ideas from a few European countries and the US more than from other countries in the Global South. I think that is changing gradually. The position that you occupy is, by definition, very different. And that's what I think we bring to this global debate: Not claiming uniqueness, but claiming uniqueness in being hybrid.
What do you think are the big intellectual questions for communication scholars to address in the next decade or so?
Toxic forms of public communication have become the foci of research in the last decade, particularly in the last five years. Here, we can think about misinformation, hate, denialism, conspiracy theories–all forums that we can cluster as toxic forms of communication, from a perspective that believes in public life and democracy based on understanding, tolerance, difference, evidence, data, some kind of reason, some kind of positive emotions, empathy, understanding. And I don't think that we have an (in detail) understanding of how better forms of communication can actually work in today's digital societies. We understand why toxic forms of communication have traction, why certain publics find it appealing, what are the political consequences, why social media platforms are built in such a way that appeal to the bad angels of our nature, so to speak. I don't know, if we find especially at a large scale, how the more positive ways of thinking about communication can actually be scaled up. In fact, we have a wider and richer vocabulary to call undemocratic forms of communication. We still have the same language about positive forms of communication that build democracy or democratic values. And that, to me, is a big challenge. Again, it's not about whether it works in certain specific contexts, local communities, it's how you think about large-scale phenomena here. That, to me, is one of the main challenges.
What do you think are some of today's big societal challenges and opportunities where the field of communication and media studies can make a difference?
Just choose any global social problem that we have. You can talk about environmental crisis, migration, gender based violence, racism, misinformation, labor exploitation–any issue that you feel is a global social problem, and think about what are the communication questions here? What is it that communication can bring to understanding the problem as well as to resolving the problem? I find it a rich vein because any of these are interdisciplinary problems. Therefore, necessarily, there is a communication component there are no matter how you approach communication studies, how you arrive, how you ended up in communication studies. No matter how you understand communication, you will find something that is relevant to any or many other global social problems. That to me, is something that we can make an important contribution. Not because it's always an intellectual challenge, or because it is an existential challenge, it’s because it's another way of engaging with non-communication scholars, activists, practitioners, in ways that can reach the way we think, as well as something that we can contribute to fields of disciplines and institutions that actually don't know or have a different understanding of what communication does or how communication can help us understand a certain problem.
What would you say you have built as an intellectual architect for the infrastructure of knowledge of the field?
I think this idea of trying to find connecting points. To me, that is something that I think we sorely need as we become much more fragmented, much more diversified, epistemologically, almost like living in parallel worlds in silos. How do we think about connecting points? Why would I do it? Why will [my institution] support bringing people together from different paths in communication studies, under one roof? That requires finding commonalities, which you could say is an analogy for something else. But it's sufficient for our post-discipline, to find what we have in common. That's what I try to do. I think that I tried to do a map of what the problem is in one book and trying to offer at least one way of finding commonalities in the other book. That's what I tried to do when I was editor of Journal of Communication. I tried to do it in ways that it should represent the huge variety of voices and diversity of approaches, theories, questions that exist, that people identify themselves as communication research. That's a very important thing to do, especially if you are in a position like a journal editor. That's what I tried to do almost explicitly–that will be my imprint. That is a home to people who do very different communication research. They find that Journal of Communication is a journal that they read or want to publish in, etc. That's one of the things that I tried to do, and with many of these things, it's hard to tell what you accomplish. You try your best. What actually happens, we don't know. In some ways, it is the satisfaction, the pleasure of intellectual pursuits, just doing it, rather than what happens later on. Of course, that can be very rewarding, but in some ways, it is what is driving you, the curiosity or the passion that you have in doing that. To me, I was far more interested in trying to find the connecting dots, rather than drawing strong lines. It's much more interesting to find new ideas or intersection points, rather than battling over what is and what is not communication.
I'm sure as an editor, you read many different ways of making arguments. And there are ways of making arguments to stake boundaries and there are ways of making arguments to connect. How do you write for bridging, for connecting?
You try to figure out along the way: what are you trying to say? How are you trying to say in a way that is compelling and engaging? Think of yourself as a reader. How much time do you give a writer to bring you into the text? How much time? Two pages? Ten pages? The entire book? I think that it’s a matter of trying to be clear and compelling in the language that you find interesting. Second, you try to think in a way that is not dogmatic. I think that having grown up under an authoritarian regime, I became very sensitive to any kind of dogmatic thinking. It is boring. If you know beforehand what you're going to find out, who needs to do the research? Isn't that more interesting in which you actually do the research and you find that your hypothesis was right, rather than you already can predict what you're going to say before that? That, to me, is the challenge. Can you say something new, even if you write two pages, or if you write 300 pages, something that you think that nobody has said it, especially as we live in a very crowded environment with hundreds of journals. It's not how you stand out, it's how you make yourself be interested in what you're doing. It's not about your status in the field is about why you're going to say the same thing you have been saying for the last 10 years on the previous two research projects. If I know the answer, is it still worth doing the research?
All right, my friend, thank you very much for sharing your journey, your knowledge, your wisdom. Thank you personally for all that you've taught me and mentored me over the years, and all the best for the future ahead.
Thank you very much, Pablo. It is a pleasure having a conversation with you and thank you very much for your time and your very generous words.
This episode of Architects of Communication Scholarship podcast series is presented by the International Communication Association Podcast Network and is sponsored by The School of Communication at Hong Kong Baptist University. This episode was produced by Dominic Bonelli and Sharlene Burgos. Our executive producer is DeVante Brown. Our Production Consultant is Nick Song. The theme music is by Humans Win. For more information about our participants on this episode, as well as our sponsor, be sure to check the episode description. Thanks for listening.
