The book covers the trajectories and trends in social change communication, engaging the key theoretical debates on communication and social change. Attending to the concepts of communication and social change that emerge from and across the global margins, the book works toward offering theoretical and methodological lessons that de-center the dominant constructions of communication and social change. The chapters in the book delve into the interplays of academic-activist-community negotiations in communication for social change, and the ways in which these negotiations offer entry points into transformative communication processes of social change. Moreover, a number of chapters in the book attend to the ways in which Asian articulations of social change are situated at the intersections of culture, structure, and agency. Chapters in the book are extended versions of research presented at the conference on Communicating Social Change: Intersections of Theory and Praxis held at the National University of Singapore in 2016, organized under the umbrella of the Center for Culture-Centered Approach to Research and Evaluation (CARE).

The economic liberalization of India, changes in global structures, and the rapid emergence of India on the global landscape have been accompanied by the dramatic rise in popular, public, and elite discourses that offer the promise to imagine India. Written mostly in the future tense, these discourses conceive of India through specific frames of global change and simultaneously offer prescriptive suggestions for the pathways to fulfilling the vision. Both as summary accounts of the shifts taking place in India and in the relationships of India with other global actors as well as roadmaps for the immediate and longer term directions for India, these discourses offer meaningful entry points into elite imaginations of India. Engaging these imaginations creates a framework for understanding the tropes that are mobilized in support of specific policy formulations in economic, political, cultural, and social spheres. Connecting meanings within networks of power and structure help make sense of the symbolic articulations of India within material relationships.