Hacking communicative totalitarianisms. A workshop on narrative tactics to reinvent the common.

Today, public discourse is encapsulated in multiple narrative bubbles that rarely intersect. Thus, the culture war involves a struggle over the very conditions that allow certain narratives to exist, circulate, and become credible. In times of polarization and information overload, voices are no longer silenced by prohibitions, but rather censorship occurs in the modulations of visibility that digital platforms grant or diminish.

In this scenario, the right wing seems to have appropriated the language that attracts attention and resonates with a large segment of the popular population. Meanwhile, the left wing and progressive movements appear to be anchored in moralizing or explanatory discourses that distance them from everyday conversations, while at the same time they must deploy strategies to communicate effectively in territories characterized by the hyper-concentration of media ownership and algorithms.

We are thus faced with a context of communicative totalitarianism where narrative skills and the possibilities for reach or engagement are increasing, creating a gap that is political, economic, and technological, and exacerbating inequalities. These communicative regimes—political, media-driven, or algorithmic—which concentrate power over the production, circulation, and validation of meaning, condition the perception of reality and reduce the plurality of voices. Contemporary censorship is no longer characterized by prohibition, but rather relies on the logic of saturation and information manipulation.

We face a predatory power that threatens our ways of thinking, feeling, and narrating; and the problem isn't that we can no longer speak, but rather that we fail to influence the prevailing meanings and what society believes. From this workshop, we understand communication as a field of symbolic struggle where emotions, political sentiments, and the very forms of democracy are at stake today.

In this way, we propose a pedagogical and aesthetic intervention that reactivates the narrative power of the left, progressive movements, and social movements. We invite you to work on the narrative self who conceptualize communication as a performance of disputed identities and narratives, exploring political meanings through the symbolic and emotional journey of the characters who embody power in our region today.

It is along this path that this space proposes the challenge of creating militant, popular, and affective narratives capable of contributing to public discourse. We hope that, collaboratively, teachers and participants will experiment with languages, plots, and formats. We challenge you to think about and tell stories outside of established methods, to step outside of your comfort zones—moral, political, and communicative—in order to generate symbolic alternatives that activate citizenship through enjoyment, emotion, and collective experience.

To this end, the contributions of Latin American critical communication are revisited, and in particular the reflections of Jesús Martín-Barbero (1987) to address mediations and popular cultures; the contributions of Marita Mata (2023) on communicational indiscipline, understood as a situated and emancipatory political practice; the notions of culture y yopitalism which Omar Rincón (2024) brings us to challenge contemporary subjectivities; the narrative strategies to counteract the spectacularized communication of the new right wing, as presented by Amparo Marroquín (2024); and the contributions of an epistemology of mud and hope, as proposed by Florencia Saintout (2018), to make our media integrate the projects of cultural sovereignty.

Thus, it is an invitation to revalue languages, reappropriate plebeian aesthetics and use tactics linked to digital technologies as narrative allies to recover the sensitive dimension of politics, to reinvent the everyday, to communicate with, from and for rights.

GENERAL PURPOSE

Designing ideas, formats, communicative, symbolic and popular tactics for the cultural battle from and with rights.

SPECIFIC OBJECTIVES

That students acquire skills and abilities to:

• Analyze the communication strategies and styles of left-wing and progressive narratives.
• To explore forms of political, artistic, and media narrative from the perspective of the popular, the contradictory, and the affective. This means thinking about politics through storytelling, emotion, performance, and community building.
• Reappropriating technological, aesthetic, and political tools from a tactical and situated perspective.
• To produce ideas, formats, and tactics that engage through humor, irony, remix, one's own voice, and the power of collective storytelling.

• CLASS 1: THE CULTURAL BATTLE AND COMMUNICATIONAL TOTALITARIANISM

Teacher in charge: Omar Rincón

Modality: synchronous 

• CLASS 2: BUKELE, MILEI AND OTHER SPECIES

Teachers in charge: Amparo Marroquín | Daiana Bruzzone

Mode: asynchronous 

•  CLASS 3: DIGITAL POPULARITY

Teacher in charge: Daiana Bruzzone

Mode: asynchronous  

• CLASS 4: IDEAS LABORATORY

Teachers in charge: Omar Rincón | Daiana Bruzzone | Amparo Marroquín

Modality: synchronous 

• CLASS 5: MY PROJECT FOR THE CULTURAL BATTLE

Teachers in charge: Amparo Marroquín | Daiana Bruzzone

Modality: synchronous

• CLASS 6: IDEAS FAIR

Teachers in charge: Omar Rincón | Amparo Marroquín | Daiana Bruzzone

Modality: synchronous 

• Amparo Marroquín (UCA, El Salvador)
• Omar Rincón (UniAndes, Colombia)
• Daiana Bruzzone (FPyCS - UNLP, Argentina)

The workshop The course will be delivered virtually, combining synchronous and asynchronous components. Over the course of a month, a total of six classes will be offered: four live sessions and two recorded sessions available for asynchronous viewing. Each class will integrate critical theory, case studies, and creative production.

Live classes will be held through the Zoom platform, which will allow direct interaction between participants. In addition, students will have access to exclusive materials, available in the virtual classroom, that will complement the content covered in each session.