EduCom: Educommunicating Social Sustainability.

The research profile EduCom is a broad framework which is intended to accommodate concepts and theories from the six research milieux of the School of Education and Communication at Jönköping University. The aim is to integrate the school expertise in education and communication, creating a new combined and interdisciplinary profile that promotes educommunication research to respond to local and global challenges of social sustainability.

Educommunication, combining education and communication, emerged in Latin America in the 1970s as a movement proposing an alternative understanding of communication and education as a renewed paradigm for reconfiguring power asymmetries, access to communication, and quality education especially in marginal communities. Based on the horizontality of the education/communication process from a participatory and creative vision that allows the existence of diversity in educational, community and cultural spaces in a democratic way.

The overall purpose of EduCom is to implement the concept of educcomunication as a process permeating various action competences able to potentialize the achievement of social justice and consequent social sustainability. Educommunication, associated with the notion of action competence, becomes a means to operationalize social justice, contributing to the development goal of social sustainability. The specific goals of the research in the profile area are the following:

  • Develop theoretical frameworks linking educommunication, action competence, social justice, and social sustainability
  • Develop interdisciplinary curricula and research methodologies to potentialize social sustainability with action competence and social justice as stepstones
  • Apply the developed curricula and research methodologies in collaboration with external partners such as schools, museums, and nonprofit organizations
  • Propose policy formulations and best practice standards departing from the research findings.

The EduCom research profile is led by Professor Renira Gambarato and Professor Ole Henrik Hansen.