The Working Group on Communication, Cultures, and Politics seeks to continue and expand upon the work we have been carrying out in the previous communication group. This time, we focus on the relationships and tensions within the triad of communication, politics, and culture. We place politics at the center, exploring its relationship with the cultures that inhabit us and the modes of communication, given that Latin America is experiencing a worrying democratic crisis where communication is the arena for debate and cultures are something we need to understand in order to see why these authoritarian forms of communication prevail. In this way, we hope to contribute with proactive proposals that foster the cultural and communicative sovereignty of our peoples.

We start from the position that the complexity of communicative phenomena in Latin America requires analytical, interpretive, and imaginative frameworks that

1) articulate the political and cultural spheres as inherent to communicative practices,

2) explore the ways in which these areas operate and transform each other,

and 3) analyze the implications of these articulations and transformations for the social life of Latin American and Caribbean societies.

We consider it relevant to focus on this triad given the erosion of the rule of law in some countries of the region, the rise of ultraconservative groups, and the polarizing trends observed in recent years. This shift in communication leads us to discuss right-wing ideology more than rights, weakens our understanding of the complexities of politics, and fosters cultures of symbolic precarity. With this approach, we seek to emphasize the multidimensional and intercultural nature of communication in order to offer theoretical contributions, analytical tools, empirical evidence, and creative experiences that allow us to anticipate the risks that threaten the region's democratic consolidation. But we don't want to stop there; rather, with this diagnosis, we want to activate and engage in digital creation to participate in the networks and arenas of debate and struggle of our time.

Communication, culture, and politics are presented as territories where disputes over meaning—that is, over the ordering of the commons—are interwoven. Viewing Latin America and the Caribbean through this triad allows us to contribute to the imagination of diverse democratic pacts in a context of profound social fabric breakdowns in the face of social, political, environmental, migratory, and economic crises. The struggle is against the hegemony of dominant communication strategies—anchored in political-commercial alliances that have consolidated media corporations and right-wing governments in our region. These corporations of private interests and self-interest have historically imposed conditions on popular gains and have fought against reformist projects carried out by progressive governments, thus hindering transformations, redistribution processes, and communicational, social, and cultural democratization.

Communication is recognized as constitutive of democratic construction and citizenship insofar as it enables the collectivization of interests, needs, and proposals; but also because it grants public and political existence to individuals, allowing them to see and represent themselves to themselves and others. This recognition of communication as a condition of possibility for democracy and citizenship is, at the same time, a condition of possibility for the political and the cultural. In turn, we are witnessing a cultural battle that leads to a communicative struggle over the meanings of democracy, freedom, rights, citizenship, and politics. Thus, we inhabit cultures marked more by precarity in the name of God, family, homeland, and property, where manipulation and distortion are based on cultural beliefs and fears. Therefore, understanding the cultures we inhabit is key to assigning meaning and acting politically.

In the political sphere, oppressive and anti-democratic practices in Latin America and the Caribbean are made possible by media hyper-concentration, a lack of regulations in communication and technology, disinformation campaigns, the depoliticization of culture, the judicialization of politics (lawfare), the criminalization of social protest, and political persecution, harassment, and proscription. Thus, in contemporary societies, the media are the arenas where democracies are played out (Rincón, 2015), establishing themselves as privileged spaces for social exchange and recognition, given their prominent role in the struggle for legitimate worldviews. It is within this framework that we understand the loss of confidence in democracy as a system for achieving well-being and social justice as a result of the neoliberal dismantling of institutions and as a consequence of the geopolitical forces that continue to exert pressure on our region. Therefore, we believe that to understand this moment, it is necessary to address necropolitics as a mode of operation of the necromachine (Reguillo, 2022). Thus, the emergence of popular right-wing movements is an area of ​​particular concern, since these articulated right-wing movements advance with polarizing and ultraconservative discourses on digital networks, through the capitalization of new celebrities and also through the occupation of alternative digital spaces that allow them to mobilize communities outside the mainstream.

In terms of communication, we have seen the consequences of using legal warfare, lawfare, and fakecracy (Ponce and Rincón, 2020; Marroquín et al., 2020) to attack or delegitimize opponents, the increase in hate speech, and insufficient regulations on the platforms that enable it. The discussion about the transformation of public opinion and the erosion of spaces for debate on public issues leads us to reflect on the processes of inequality, discrimination, and exclusion associated with the narratives that contest the meaning of the social, the construction of regimes of truth, and the mediations involved: If there is hate speech, it is because there are others who are not represented. The state does not censor; corporations do, because they harbor an economic hatred toward the most vulnerable and generate contempt. At this historical moment, the common reference points that make collective life, the defense of rights, and access to social justice possible are at risk. For this reason, it is necessary to return to the task of providing context and recovering the right to communication that allows us to historicize from popular media, popular academies, neighborhood communication, non-urban spaces, the everyday, the popular (Rincón and Marroquín, 2019), the bastard and the celebrity (Rincón, 2015).

In cultural terms, we see how the reconfiguration of creative industries occupies a central place in the fabric of political activity. Hypermediatization, reinstitutionalization, the power of platforms, corporate lobbying, and relationships with the state and citizens cannot be separated from the production, circulation, and consumption of cultural products. Furthermore, cultural expressions materialize as a form of political action within the practices of peripheral communities, which seek to reimagine their ways of life through multiple sensibilities. The search for alternative worlds and the explosion of fluid identities overflow into aesthetic pleasure, joy, festivity, irreverence, and the absurd. These are ways of constructing aesthetic-political meaning from the margins as polyphonic narratives for navigating life in unequal and crisis-ridden contexts. We propose understanding politics as "the search for people's joy."

This Working Group's first period (2013-2016) fostered the consolidation of an interdisciplinary and pluralistic academic and political space, exploring the connections between communication, politics, and citizenship in our region in light of contemporary events, through a critical, creative, and historically situated approach. Thus, its meetings, productions, and exchanges have contributed to understanding the role of communication in the cultural landscape of our countries.

During the second period (2017-2021), the work of articulating and producing knowledge was deepened through meetings, publications, and the strengthening of networks. As proposed, this Working Group contributed to the exchange and generation of knowledge related to the triad of communication, politics, and citizenship from a critical and historically situated perspective in the Global South, from a Latin American standpoint. Furthermore, it worked to raise the profile of the research and outreach work in communication, politics, and citizenship carried out by the Working Group through the channels created by CLACSO, as well as that developed by each of the member countries of the network and the region. It created spaces for meetings and the exchange of knowledge and experiences among Working Group members and various representatives of community and public media; representatives or actors in grassroots communication projects linked to social, political, and educational organizations; and representatives or members of national and/or regional communication policies (public, private, foundations, among others) to contribute to the development of joint projects with a perspective of communication as a human right.

In this third period, the Working Group aims to contribute to the reflection on the political dimension in relation to communicative processes and cultural practices, striving to reimagine the theoretical, methodological, and empirical approaches used for their analysis. Likewise, we want to emphasize the production of digital creations to activate the languages ​​in which meaning is contested in contemporary society (memes, digital networks, videos, performances, etc.).

From this approach, the GT seeks to explore and create, in an undisciplined way, emerging objects of study, marginal practices, bastard politics, popular representations, queer identities, as well as the subaltern movements that mobilize creative resistance and popular forms of hope (Marroquín, 2021).

On the other hand, we are interested in unraveling the reconfiguration of mediations associated with the automation of society (Stiegler, 2018), technopolitics, and the production of algorithmic and data-driven cultures, which give rise to algorithmic processes and their implications for state governance and democracy. Finally, we are interested in exploring the artifacts, devices, and infrastructures that support communicative and cultural processes, from the everyday to the unconventional. We believe that materiality has been an underrepresented area in reflections on the production of politics, the political, and democracy in the region.

Based on the framework of communication, politics, and culture, the GT will focus on the following thematic axes:

1) art, culture and festive resistance,

2) narratives, imaginaries and the Latin American right,

3) hate speech, polarization and discrimination,

4) technopolitics and technocultures, algorithmic and data cultures,

5) cultural materialities, popular cultures, bastard politics,

6) Media and political agendas and counter-agendas.

From these perspectives, we seek to contribute to the study of the economic, social, and democratic crisis expressed in the reconfiguration of political and communicative processes through the production of emerging imaginaries, narratives, and cultural practices. We argue that, in this specific context, it is pertinent to pay close attention to marginalized cultures, underground movements, radical manifestations of political action through creative expression, and the production of a sense of the common good.

The Working Group has firmly grounded its work in critical, decolonial, Latin American theories that address popular culture, mediations, technopolitics, and resistance. In this issue, we continue along a path that allows us to further explore the conceptual foundations developed by the Working Group and also advance into new territories that blur disciplinary boundaries and interrogate objects of study from epistemologies that question origin (Marroquín and Vargas, 2022), the place of the situated, the disruptive, and the counter-hegemonic in order to contribute to social transformation. Thus, this group proposes to transcend academic limits to embrace the praxis of epistemic decolonization in the communicative, cultural, and political spheres.

The question of communication, politics, and culture is therefore fundamental to unraveling the tensions we are facing socially. Inequality is not only material or economic; that is why it is important to contribute to redistributive processes that benefit the most vulnerable sectors of society. We must embody the idea of ​​an academy committed to humanism, solidarity, and the collective—knowledge born from humble beginnings and hope. From this perspective, we propose to understand the relationship between communication, politics, and culture.

Thus, the GT's objective is to promote the production of undisciplined, creative, comparative, and cutting-edge knowledge that generates original perspectives on communicative, cultural, and political processes. We seek to foster the reinvention of theories, methodologies, and empirical approaches to understanding social reality that do not fit within institutionalized views of knowledge production. Through the promotion of spaces for dialogue, we aim to further consolidate an academic space committed to contemporary regional contexts, where the links between communication, politics, and culture in Latin America are explored, embracing the productive nature of knowledge and its potential as a tool for creating more just social orders.