Re-Grounding Communication Studies

The next speaker in this ANZCA 2023 session is Cathy Greenfield, whose interest is in communication studies’ contribution to ‘talking country’ at a time of global crisis. This must necessarily proceed through cross-cultural engagement between First Nations and non-Indigenous people, and is especially important in the context of enduring and renewed struggles for Indigenous sovereignty.

The present project was prompted especially by the development of a mobile walking tour app called Land of Birds in collaboration with the Dja Dja Wurrung people northwest of Melbourne, which would provide access to selected locally relevant stories as users explored the countryside and thus enabled them to become witnesses to Indigenous history and sovereign knowledge. This also asks non-Indigenous listeners to approach Indigenous knowledge with attention and humility.

But such projects are also about researchers’ commitment to engaging with and supporting Indigenous struggle, while acknowledging the limitations of their own knowledge about country and culture. This is a necessary connecting and embedding of themselves in Indigenous knowledge, and an adoption of personal voices and conditions as part of their way of being in and with country.

This also represents an acknowledgment of power: communication sits within the history of modes of social regulation that accompany the mutations of power, as Mattelart has put it. Collaboration with Indigenous participants can address such power relations, and a communication approach to this can be different from one grounded in cultural studies. Communication can correspond to the materialisation of relations, taking a less human-centred and more all-inclusive approach; this helps make more visible the network of connections, links, and relations that underpins our world.

This also highlights the situatedness of being and communicating on country, and creates an embodied and embedded sense of authority. This might lead to a need for communication studies to come down to earth.