A commentary: Communication, democracy and social change in crisis times – Disrupting power, dismantling injustices

Abstract

This commentary reflects on what the actual conditions for a democratic politics might mean for media and communication scholars, as we try to make sense of the structures and nature of communication, the conditions of democracies around the world and the possibilities for social change in these crisis times. To do so will require that we focus on relations of power – the exercise of power as dominance as well as the potential of the constitutive power of subjects as free agents. Power as dominance leads us to interrogate the structural imbrication of injustices in a broader social, political and economic context in order to understand what might be done not only to disrupt power but to dismantle injustices.