ABSTRACT
Discourses can be thought of as ever-adaptive ways in which people conceptualize and communicate about any aspect of reality and which informs their perceptions and actions. They are influenced by their broad cultural and ethical context and they contain specific formal properties, which, in turn, shape how we perceive reality. In light of the many problematic and limiting discourses that emerge today I consider how these can be evolved. In order to do that, I begin this chapter by uncovering the ideological assumptions that underpin many contemporary communication processes. These include adversarial ways of relating where individualism is favored and contests are assumed to be normal and necessary models of social organization. As a result argumentative models of communication appear normal and inevitable. I then introduce the African philosophy of ubuntu as a normative alternative. This offers a framework for reconsidering some basic, naturalized assumptions around human relations and provides a realism from which alternative ways of communicating can take shape.
