Digital Communication Ganesh Rao Pdf 12
Harriet Wehrenberg
Shiv Ganesh (PhD, Purdue University, 2000), is joining Moody College in Jan. 2019 as a professor in the Department of Communication Studies. Ganesh studies communication and collective organizing in the context of globalization and digital technologies. His work spans critical-institutional and poststructural approaches to communication, and is currently comprised of two strands; studies of technological transformations in collective action; and studies of dialogue, conflict and social change. His research is largely qualitative but has incorporated quantitative elements, and he has done fieldwork in a number of countries, including India, Aoteaora New Zealand, the United States, and Sweden. Current projects include a study of advocacy and voice amongst indigenous people displaced by the creation of environmental reserves in India, as well as a large-scale survey of digital interaction and engagement dynamics amongst global networks of activists. His research has appeared in a number of journals including Communication Monographs, Communication Theory, Human Relations, International Journal of Communication, Journal of Applied Communication Research, Management Communication Quarterly, Media, Culture & Society, and Organization Studies. Ganesh is a former editor-in-chief of the National Communication Associations Journal of International and Intercultural Communication, and is on the editorial board of several other journals, including Communication Theory, Information, Communication & Society, Journal of Communication, Journal of Applied Communication Research, Management Communication Quarterly, Organization, and Womens Studies in Communication. His research has won several awards from both the International Communication Association and the National Communication Association. Ganesh comes to Moody College from Massey University in New Zealand, where he served as a professor of communication and head of the School of Communication, journalism and marketing.
Dr. Ganesh was named a Fellow of the ICA in 2021. He serves on the editorial boards of a number of top journals and was previously editor of the Journal of International and Intercultural Communication. His co-authored volume Organizational Communication in an Age of Globalization: Issues, Reflections, Practices is currently in its second edition, and he is co-editor of the 2021 collection By Degrees: Resilience, Relationships, and Success in Communication Graduate Studies, and HIV, AIDS, and Sexuality in Later Life, published in 2022.
[MastersinCommunications.com] May we begin with an overview of your academic and professional background? How did you first become interested in researching social change and collective action, and begin to apply perspectives in organizational communication to studying forms of social and political organizing as varied as global social movements, NGOs, and community organizations?
My Ph.D. ended up being a critical qualitative study of information technology in a Nongovernmental Organization (NGO). I went to the NGO I was working with three times over the course of two or three years. I look back at that and see how it really set the stage for the fieldwork I did in subsequent years.
[MastersinCommunications.com] Your research frequently makes use of ethnographic and participatory methodologies, and you have conducted fieldwork in a number of countries including Aotearoa New Zealand, India, Sweden, and the United States. Could you tell us a little bit about your experiences conducting fieldwork and how you have drawn on this research in your scholarship on, for example, global activist networks?
[Dr. Shiv Ganesh] I have conducted fieldwork in a number of countries. Like most researchers in the field, I began with where I was. I think an important part of being a critical qualitative researcher is making sure your work involves interrogating and working from the standpoint of your positionality. For me, that was being a South Asian, cisgender, gay male around the turn of the millennium. My first few big fieldwork projects were in India, and that started with my Ph.D. work. A couple of years ago, I wrote a piece about what characterized that fieldwork in the beginning, and one thing I think is common to a lot of my projects is long-term immersion. The ethnographic engagement of my shortest projects was over a year long, and the longest project has been six years long.
[MastersinCommunications.com] For those of our readers who may be unfamiliar with ethnography and participant observation, could you discuss how you approach conducting research in these diverse cultural and political contexts? What are some of the challenges of conducting global fieldwork and what has it uniquely enabled you to attend to in your work?
If you want to do global work and global ethnography and you live in the United States, I think that continues to be a significant challenge. Perhaps it is less so now than when I started in the field around the turn of the millennium, but certainly I think doing global ethnography remains challenging for those reasons. At the same time, I think doing global research has uniquely enabled me to develop interesting perspectives on communication and organizing themselves.
My very first project was on digital media, rationalization, and NGOs. That was my Ph.D. work. The NGO that I studied was an environmental NGO working in sustainability, and so all of a sudden I found myself studying sustainability for my Ph.D., which is not something I had anticipated doing at all.
When we talk about globalization and neoliberalism, the two things go hand-in-hand. You cannot talk about one without the other. My Ph.D. project was precisely about how organizations have been transformed by neoliberal globalization.
For instance, what constitutes activism has become increasingly commodified. When you actually look at social movements over the last 20 years, I identify at least three waves in which what we call activism has transformed.
The first wave is the networking of activism that we saw around the turn of the millennium that culminated in protests in Seattle and elsewhere. That was the emergence of a new, highly networked form of global activism that connected actors in Brazil with, for instance, farmers in India and activists in the Global North. Consequently, coalition building was much more possible.
My big worry since that study is not about the potential for collective action to happen digitally, but just how much that space has been co-opted and how difficult it is for activists to find safe spaces online anymore that are not surveilled, monitored, and from which data is not extracted. That should be the next step in studying digital collective action. What exactly is happening now that all these spaces are co-opted by this extractive logic that [Shoshana] Zuboff in her book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism cast light upon so well.
[Dr. Shiv Ganesh] Dawna Ballard came to me with the idea for that forum, and I encouraged her to lead it, which she did so expertly. She got a few of us together to try to talk about the need to think about how we can do things to effect diversity, equity, and inclusion in the academy. The exigence for that was, of course, the summer of 2020, the murder of George Floyd, and the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement. That was one piece of the context.
Related to that, there was the U.S.-centric issue where the National Communication Association had the controversy about distinguished scholars and the lack of diversity among them, and the real and very painful tension between those scholars and the Association that was so distressing for so many people. We felt that it was time to think not just in terms of what was happening at an associational level, or what the issues were, but also in terms of what we should try to do as academics.
[MastersinCommunications.com] Your forthcoming co-authored book is entitled By Degrees Resilience, Relationships, and Success in Communication Graduate Studies. After working on this book, are there any lessons you would like to pass on to current graduate students or students who are contemplating pursuing an advanced degree? Do you have any advice you would like to give, more specifically, to students interested in organizational communication, the study of social movements, or critical qualitative research more broadly, who are considering pursuing a graduate degree in communication?
Thank you, Dr. Shiv Ganesh, for your fascinating discussion of your research on organizational communication, political communication, and collective action in the modern, digital-centric era!
Ganesh Acharya is a PhD candidate from Nepal, holds Master's and bachelor's degrees in mass communication from Purbanchal University, and has experience working as a communications and multimedia professional for several renowned organizations in Nepal.
The thesis focuses on exploring the perspectives of policymakers from low-and middle-income countries of the Global South to assess the role of citizen capabilities in strengthening democracy and enhancing government-citizen relationships using digital and emerging technologies in public sector communication.
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