Fundamentals of Public Communication Campaigns

CHAPTER 9 Social Justice and Social Change

The third major part of this book focuses on public communication campaigns for social justice and social change. The next three chapters (i.e., 10, 11, and 12), in particular, focus exclusively on the #MeToo campaign, campaigns for LGBTQ+ rights, and Black Lives Matter campaigns. All three are paradigms of campaigns for social justice and social activism. They seek to engender profound, long-lasting changes within society and even the world at large. It is a fight for equality and justice in support of minority or disenfranchised groups. The two brief case studies provided in this chapter are the campaigns against female genital mutilation (FGM) in Africa and against honor killing in Pakistan. These types of struggles to improve society―and, in this case, the living conditions of women―are often struggles to change the status quo, or cultural politics. Cultural politics refers to the way that culture—including citizens’ attitudes, opinions, beliefs, and perspectives, as represented in civic life, the media, and the arts—shapes society and political opinion, and forms the basis of social, economic, and legal realities. Cultural politics is also defined as the collection of cultural backgrounds, social practices, and political processes through which citizens’ daily lives are distinctively produced within a particular milieu or civilization.¹ The second part of this chapter focuses on campaigning for environmental policies and what ...