ABSTRACT
Chapter 1 introduces the academic and practical importance of communicative justice as a core element of the pluriverse, an emerging framework that replaces the Modern/colonial assumptions of universality with historically grounded analyses that provide conceptual, epistemological, methodological, and empirical alternatives to neoliberal models of economic growth and social development. The pluriverse’s broad theoretical perspective is continuously extended, refined, and modified by the real-world findings of field studies. Within the pluriverse justice manifests six key dimensions—cognitive, sociopolitical, sociocultural, environmental, political-economic, and, crucially, communicative justice. Rooted in a Latin American decolonial perspective, communicative justice highlights the right to communicate, including being heard, as a key articulator of struggles; an essential tool to protest, resist, and achieve other rights. Beyond critiquing how corporate global media systems reproduce systemic injustices, it is of key importance to explore how media and communication can foster social justice as well.
