Promoting Urban Social Justice through Engaged Communication Scholarship: Reimagining Place (Routledge Social Justice Communication Activism Series)

Winner of the 2023 Jane Jacobs Urban Communication Book Award, awarded by the Urban Communication Foundation

Based on the author’s scholar-activist interventions to promote social justice in cities, this book highlights the role engaged communication scholarship can play in fostering a more equitable future.

Through three innovative case studies situated in South Los Angeles, the book illustrates engaged communication scholarship projects grounded in design criteria that are social justice-oriented, place-based, collaborative, and public. It models university-community partnerships that promote positive social change in marginalized communities that stand to benefit the most from university resources, guiding readers in how these partnerships can be incorporated into social justice-oriented curriculum and engaged learning projects. It provides strategic recommendations for how "in community" communication research and media practices can be used to build local power in marginalized urban neighborhoods, and calls for communication’s research, pedagogy, epistemologies, practices, ethics, politics, and community engagement to purposefully serve the concerns of marginalized groups in society.

The book will be of interest to researchers and social change practitioners interested in solution-oriented work in cities within the fields of research methods, organizational communication, urban planning, public policy, sociology, and social work.

George Villanueva is an Assistant Professor of Advocacy and Social Change in the School of Communication at Loyola University Chicago. In addition to his academic background, George has over 15 years of practitioner experience in electoral politics, urban planning & development, community organizing, and community program evaluation.