Politics of Transnational Feminism to Decolonize Feminist Organizational Communication: A Call to Action

Abstract

We draw upon transnational feminism as a theoretical resource to outline decolonial thinking for feminist organizational communication in this essay. Decolonial perspectives in transnational feminism reinforce antiracist, anticapitalist, and anti-imperial interventions in theory, practice and activism. We argue that the assumptions of neoliberal hegemony and imperial legacy remain largely unchallenged in feminist organizational communication research and call for rigorous examination of global capitalism and its close links with colonization of knowledge to make the project of the empire visible. Our recommendations urge shifting dominant sites of knowledge-making to epistemologies of disenfranchised women and generating insurgent knowledges by carefully forging non-exploitative collaborative relationships with activists and communities of struggle. We hope these agendas offer new imaginings to decolonize imperial legacies, address historical absences and silences, and invigorate social justice orientation in the field.

Organizing as Tong (通): Decolonizing Organizational Communication from the Roots

“…Broadfoot and Munshi (2007) raised the provocative question regarding how to recover alternative rationalities and/or emotionalities, worldviews, and voices of organizing in the global context. Since then, scholars have recovered/highlighted native, indigenous, and other forms of organizing that are often erased from prominent organizational research (e.g., Cruz, 2017; Cruz & Utah Sodeke, 2021; Dutta & Pal, 2010; Kang et al, 2016; Long, 2016) and called for continued efforts to challenge the dominant Euro-American intellectual traditions in organizational communication (Broadfoot et al, 2018; Pal et al, 2022; Pal & Nieto-Fernandez, 2023). Yet, this decolonial orientation to the knowledge of organizing has continued to encounter challenges, as the Euro-American roots of management have promoted themselves as culturally neutral and universal (Cruz & Utah Sodeke, 2021).…”