Political economy of information, communication and culture

The Political Economy of Information, Communication and Culture (EPICC) is a research tradition that today seems more than relevant for the analysis of the complex organizational logics of the so-called Information and/or Knowledge Society.

Insofar as it connects or relinks the historical and social with the domination of nature, it helps us understand the concrete social practices and logics that underlie contemporary development models of the so-called innovation economy. His studies highlight the increasing processes of colonization that constitute surveillance capitalism.

If neoliberalism operates on the principle of moral and intellectual isolation and disconnection, the EPICC aims to connect agents, institutions, communities of readers, political and social movements, and critical communication theory in the present and for the future. The epistemological struggle to reconfigure the critical field of communication, in the current historical process, involves defining the cognitive horizon of the new digital society and the centrality of the struggle over the code in the new form of capital reproduction. 

Thus, research in EPICC contributes to critical thinking in communication fundamental elements for the analysis of the dialectic of access to and control of information in Latin American democracies. 

From the McBride Report to the Porto Alegre Forum and the Internet Social Forum, scholars, communicators, and social liberation movements have been demanding a different communication structure based on the analysis of political economy and the contribution of materialist knowledge in communication to the social appropriation of new technologies and information systems. This Working Group aims to continue working on the articulation, grouping, and promotion of economic-political studies and critical mediation theory, recovering the historical and scientific legacy of the productive Latin American school. In this endeavor, a proposal is presented, directed both to the academic community and to social movements and collectives advocating for a new information order in times of platformization and algorithms. True to the tradition of articulating wills and coordinating critical-reflective efforts on the field of communication and culture, the EPICC Working Group aims, in short, to account for the most advanced thinking on the subject, in order to formulate a well-founded theoretical critique, as well as innovative analyses on the emergences and democratic alternatives of progress that must be thought about geopolitically from new matrices and analytical tools. 

The activities of the CLACSO Working Group on the Political Economy of Information, Communication and Culture They are organized into the following lines of work:

I. Epistemology and theory of the political economy of communication
II. Ownership structure and communication policies in Latin America
III. Social Economy of Communication
IV. Geopolitics and the Geology of Information
V. Platform capitalism and regional alternatives
VI. Connectivity and ICTs in Latin America
VII. Cyberactivism and emerging communication in digital culture
VIII. Artificial intelligence and value chains in communication

Around these lines of research, the connection between the cultural and communicative, technological and economic, and political-informational and techno-aesthetic aspects that are at the base of the EPICC analysis model, we will seek to define a logical framework for a global understanding of the interrelationship existing between the different levels of action, which will be revealing both the problems of a practical order and the disinformation logic of post-truth, as substantive aspects of the models of ideological representation present in contemporary theoretical practice. 

Our CLACSO Working Group on the Political Economy of Information, Communication and CultureIt is comprised of trained and trainee researchers from 10 Latin American and Caribbean countries and maintains equitable gender representation. It was created in 2019 and begins its second term of work at CLACSO in 2023.

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Work plan 2023-2025