The Working Group on Communication, Cultures, and Politics invites the production of situated knowledge around the relationships and tensions within this triad, which currently represents one of the central issues threatening popular and democratic projects. During the preceding period, the Working Group focused on addressing the reasons why authoritarian communication systems triumph in our region, as well as proposing narrative strategies capable of contributing to the cultural and communicative sovereignty of our peoples.

The complexity of communicative phenomena in Latin America and the Caribbean requires the updating of 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 spheres operate and transform each other, 3) analyze the implications of these articulations and transformations for the social life of Latin American and Caribbean societies, and 4) contribute to the development of territorial strategies and public policies where communication and culture are understood as fundamental rights that activate critical citizenships.

Currently, our region is simultaneously experiencing regressive scenarios in democracy, with increasing social insecurity and poverty (we are the most unequal region in the world), and unprecedented, progressive scenarios of improved democracy. That is to say, while at the beginning of the 21st century the expansion of rights translated into policies of recognition, their implementation through laws and citizen actions generated challenges from sectors whose privileges were threatened (business, agricultural, religious, media, and political elites), and became the center of cultural battles waged with veritable war machines such as social media and digital platforms, concentrated media outlets, and the creative industries.

The work carried out by this Working Group has demonstrated how culture and communication are among the main and strategic resources available to the peoples of the Global South. Culture comes first, as Horacio González (2019) argues: “It is what permeates us, identifies us, what makes us speak the way we speak and argue the way we argue. (...) Culture is the secret structure of everything that is done, even in economic matters.” And, in this sense, public policies—cultural, artistic, technological, and socio-environmental—must be designed not from behind desks but amidst large-scale social mobilizations, in the streets.

It is in this sense that the power of these media corporations rests on their ability to challenge common beliefs and establish notions of truth. This operation functions like magic, through the double game of collective ignorance and recognition (Saintout and Sidun, 2010). Thus, media power is understood through the illusion of that magical group that legitimizes it and for which there exist—as Florencia Saintout (2018) argues—a series of disciplinary strategies based on: a) colonization and material as well as symbolic extractivism, an exercise of imposition intertwined with the pedagogy of cruelty; b) the media used by elites as tanks of war to maintain their cultural dominance; c) the depoliticization and emptying of language; d) the hyper-concentration of media that shapes subjectivities and conditions democracy.

Big Tech companies have joined this ecosystem and—like the media—seem to be the bearers of this "magic": technocrats and CEOs of technology companies, hand in hand with "politically incorrect" leaders—we can cite the Trump-Bukele-Milei triangle as an example—appear to be some of its main exponents. These leaders embody what Omar Rincón (2024) calls "yopitalism": a new form of capitalism based on the exhibition of the self, where the individual becomes a personal brand, a commodity that must be constantly displayed on social media. Yopitalism proposes total freedom for businesses and individuals, promoting extreme individualism where having money to consume and show off becomes the supreme value, above collective well-being or shared rights. This yopitalist logic permeates contemporary politics, transforming it into a spectacle where what matters is the media show, the ability to generate trending topics, and the construction of a "cool" image that connects emotionally with audiences. According to Omar Rincón, coolture prioritizes the aesthetic over the ethical, the emotional over the rational, the performative over the programmatic.

In this way, they operate with a series of disciplinary strategies that share common narratives in which anger, fear, and resentment are imposed as common/hegemonic emotions that promise to destroy the social fabric and impose singular narratives laden with the superiority of some subjects over others (even when those who speak in these terms are that "other"). As Eva Illouz argues, the concentration of capital and the control of the media—and of platforms—create flawed causal frameworks that mobilize these emotions and shift the real responsibility for inequalities toward discursively constructed scapegoats (women, migrants, sexual minorities, grassroots activists, members of progressive and leftist parties, etc.). In this context, the great contemporary cultural battle is fought between egocentrism and democracy understood as social welfare and work for the collective good.

These shifts in communication, cultural, and political practices give rise to a series of historical processes of transformation that transcend the categories we in academia use to explain our time. Within this framework, we emphasize the multidimensional and intercultural nature of communication to offer theoretical contributions, analytical tools, empirical evidence, and creative experiences that allow us to anticipate the risks faced by grassroots projects and democracies in our region. This is why we seek to renew our commitment to moving beyond diagnostic approaches, promoting participation and the production of active knowledge rooted in local communities: “Behind every culture lies the land [...] And this land, thus described, which is neither a thing nor tangible, yet has weight, is the only answer when one asks the question of culture. It symbolizes the margin of rootedness that every culture must have.” That is why one belongs to a culture and turns to it in critical moments to feel rooted and to feel that a part of one's being is grounded. Is there no other universality than this condition of being fallen to the ground? (Kusch, 1976).

Thus, we understand that the condition for a society with social justice is to approach communication, cultures, and politics from an epistemology of the mud (Saintout, 2014). This implies production practices based on the dialectics of recognition: not of what already is, but of the need for a transformation that assumes the responsibility (Butler and Athanasiou, 2017) to construct aesthetic-political meaning from the margins as polyphonic narratives for navigating life in unequal contexts, crises, and great symbolic precarity.

The theoretical and political challenge of the GT's work revolves around questions centered on the democratization of communication, in a context where hyper-concentration is not only deepening, but where the monopolization of technological tools is widening the gaps of digital, cognitive, and narrative inequality. Thus, the battle for communication sovereignty must be recognized as part of the cultural battle for the construction of democratic hegemony. To achieve this, we need to contribute to the development of agendas that represent the needs of the peoples of our region, with the aim of "participating in the construction of inclusive communication, promoting progress toward the establishment of the human right to communication" (Ottaviano and Rus, 2023) in its physical and symbolic structure.

Four decades ago, Jesús Martín Barbero (1983) warned that new communication practices and technologies are redefining the role and relationships of the state and the media, given that the hyper-concentration of scientific and productive developments in this area affects the entire Western democratic model. Cultural and communication processes cannot be viewed solely from a technocratic perspective; it is necessary to pay attention to the mediations and contexts in which they occur, since media and digital technologies are spaces where the meanings of everyday life are produced and contested.

Currently, the presence of Big Tech not only operates through the manipulation of public opinion but also directly through actions that deepen inequalities and violate rights. The challenges, opportunities, and risks to the communication sovereignty of the Global South are growing with the development of so-called Generative Artificial Intelligence, and in this respect, we are concerned with its relationship to cultural, communicational, political, and intellectual work, insofar as it involves any sociotechnical system where the data that feeds algorithms shapes behaviors and even democratic institutions. As Bernard Stiegler (2018) argues, today the reconfiguration of mediations associated with the automation of society, technopolitics, and the production of algorithmic and data-driven cultures gives rise to algorithmism and its implications for governance.

Following Hannah Arendt, we understand that narrativity is fundamental to restoring to politics its original meaning of plurality, concerted action, and the predominance of the word. Narrative allows us to approach events in their singularity, as fragments full of meaning, rather than as a linear historical continuum. This perspective helps us understand how the stories we tell construct the public sphere and guarantee its permanence, while political action only acquires meaning when it is narrated and shared in the public space. However, in the current context, this narrative capacity is being colonized by market-driven and algorithmic logics that fragment collective experience and erode democracies from within.

All these shifts give rise to a series of historical processes of transformation that transcend the categories we in academia use to explain our time. Faced with this scenario, the Working Group seeks to explore and create, in an undisciplined way, emerging objects of study related to the triad of communication, culture, and politics, as well as to unravel the strategies that shape contemporary narratives and contribute tools so that our communicators can narrate with memory and political commitment. Within this framework, we 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 faced by popular projects and democracies in our region.

Thus, on the one hand, we understand that it is not a matter of explaining and educating, but rather that we must fight where popular cultures reside: music, religion, food, and festivities all share a common, collective, and embodied meaning. At the same time, we consider that public media, community media, and educational/university media are spaces whose narrative and representational responsibility becomes even more relevant, insofar as the materiality for telling our stories cannot be limited to the reach determined by algorithms or to the media outlets of media corporations. That is why one of the main challenges of the next term of the Working Group involves strengthening the levels of response to the problems in our territories through the creation of an interregional communication network capable of integrating community and public media that can challenge political narratives.

From this perspective of the Global South, we aim to highlight and strengthen the multitude of grassroots and community-based experiences where communication is transformed into music, art, video, and soundscapes to tell our stories and address inequalities in expression. This involves responding to the challenges of our territories by creating an interregional communication network capable of integrating community and public media that can challenge established political narratives. Within this framework, the Working Group collaborates with other CLACSO initiatives, such as the Working Groups on the Political Economy of Information, Arts and Politics, Appropriation of Digital Technologies and Intersectionality, and Anti-Patriarchal Struggles, Families, Genders, Diversities, and Citizenship, to build spaces for dialogue and cooperation between academia and organized civil society. This collaboration will illuminate situated action strategies with citizen participation, grounded in the construction of common goods, the promotion of human rights, care, and solidarity.

In this sense, to address the current communication landscape, it is essential to position ourselves within the paradigm of "communicational citizenship" (Mata, 2003), acknowledging the possibility of being disruptive subjects of rights who can not only give and receive information, seek and disseminate it, create and share it, but also "demand redress for any communication event that violates our rights, and for a new institutional framework that supports the redress of damages." This paradigm is complemented by the recognition of the collective right to free speech from the perspective of the popular classes, challenging cultural hegemony and strengthening the community dimension of communication and cultures as spaces for the effective exercise of the rights of peoples.

It should be noted that the Working Group on Communication, Cultures and Politics is characterized by an interdisciplinary and pluralistic composition and has a history of work from four previous periods that consolidate it as a space for the production of situated and emancipatory knowledge, placing a strong emphasis on dialogue between academies, social movements, political organizations, the public sector and non-governmental organizations (associations and foundations in the field of communication, media and culture).