Against the grain

This agenda-setting theory essay offers a collaborative response to Sprague, J. (1992). Expanding the research agenda for instructional communication: Raising some unasked questions. Communication Education, 41(1), 1–25. https://doi.org/10.1080/03634529209378867 early theorizing on critical approaches to communication pedagogy, developing it to account not only for critical developments since but also to the political precarity increasingly organizing everyday life, especially of the dispossessed and particularly of the Global South (Shome, 2020). Indeed, we argue that the only viable pedagogical route that responds to the precariousness of life in the twenty-first century must be emancipatory rather than reformist. To make our point, we offer a metareview of over a century of literature published in the Quarterly Journal of Speech (1915–1952) and Communication Education (formerly The Speech Teacher; 1952–2021) to reveal the same Western liberal philosophies of education undergirding communication pedagogies generally. In this regard, our agenda-setting essay calls for a paradigmatic shift against the grain and toward emancipatory futurities. Content warning: This essay cites anti-Indigenous, anti-Black, and xenophobic discourse; take good care of yourself as you move through these pages interrogating our disciplinary complicities.