ABSTRACT
This chapter, utilizing the culture-centered approach (CCA) to public relations, puts forward the argument that obfuscating the vast inequities produced by neoliberal forms of governance and manipulating the top-down forms of power enacted by TNCs through discourses of participation, community engagement, liberty, and dialogue, public relations practices lie at the heart of neoliberal expansion, the production of communicative asymmetries, and the inequitable distributions of communicative opportunities globally. The critique of public relations as a rhetorical artifact serving the status quo creates openings for interrogating the interplays of power and control in public relations practices. In this backdrop, projects driven by the CCA are offered as dialogic openings for listening to the voices of the margins and for rendering impure the dominant categories of the mainstream that serve as the expert-driven justifications for erasure of subaltern voices. In summary, a culture-centered reading of public relations constructs public relations in resistance, in a framework of relating that engages the mainstream through disruptions of its assumptions and taken-for-granted logics.
