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Contribution short abstract

This work responds to calls to decentralize the global communication research agenda, shifting focus from geographic to moral. Drawing on field notes from my ethnographic immersion in Filipino fisherfolk communities, I explore six themes to advance more dialogic, participatory, and human research.

Contribution long abstract

Within communication scholarship, there is a growing call to decentralize the global research agenda from centers to peripheries. As a development communication scholar from the Global South, I argue that such decentralization must occur not only geographically, but also morally, with the aim of reorienting scholarship toward core humanist ideals. During my PhD dissertation, in which I engaged fisherfolk in island and coastal communities in the Philippines through storytelling activities on the realities of climate change, I produced extensive field notes documenting reflexive insights into the nature and significance of dialogue in research. Although these reflections were ultimately excluded from the dissertation manuscript, I contend that they offer a meaningful contribution to this broader call for decentralization.

In this proposed panel contribution, I share reflexive insights on dialogue in research, organized around six themes that emerged from my ethnographic field notes. First, research entails an ongoing negotiation of entry into communities and, by extension, power. Second, research participants actively mobilize spatial cues and temporal rhythms, rendering them material conditions of dialogue. Third, non-verbal and affective forms of dialogue foreground the embodied, performative dimensions of participation. Fourth, reflexivity sustains both analytical distance and dialogic openness. Fifth, reentry into the research community functions as a continuation of dialogue and an exercise of accountability. Sixth, reciprocity enacted through symbolically meaningful gestures matters not as closure, but as a surrender of power and authorship.

Through these reflections, I seek to contribute to a shift toward more dialogic, participatory, and, above all, fundamentally human research.