Debashish Munshi is Professor of Management Communication at the University of Waikato, New Zealand. His research interests lie at the intersections of communication, diversity, sustainability, social change, and citizenship. He is co-author of Reconfiguring Public Relations: Ecology, Equity, and Enterprise (2007) and co-editor of Handbook of Communication Ethics (2011), On the Edges of Development: Cultural Interventions, (2009) and Feminist Futures: Re-imagining Women, Culture, and Development (2016). Priya Kurian is Professor of Political Science and Public Policy at the University of Waikato, New Zealand. Her research is interdisciplinary and involves work on environmental, social, and cultural sustainability through a focus on environmental politics and policy, science and technology studies, and development studies. She is the author of Engendering the Environment? Gender in the World Bank’s Environmental Policies (2000), and co-editor of Feminist Futures: Re-imagining women, culture, and development (2003; 2016); On the Edges of Development: Cultural Interventions (2009); and International Organisations and Environmental Policy (1995).
In Public Relations and Sustainable Citizenship, Munshi and Kurian once again deliver a powerful work of the highest quality scholarship that insists on our attention. Shifting the terrain for both functional and critical approaches to public relations, they emphasise the fundamental importance of action, connection and relationship to resistance communication. As a way of understanding the many acts of resistance to planetary domination by capitalist and political elites, the power of public relations for sustainable citizenship is both emergent, built on organic connections that grow as causes and concerns multiply, and urgent, built on a passion for justice that should engage us all. As such, this book is not only a powerful alternative theorisation of public relations in the interests of the planet and its people; it is also a call to action for scholars and practitioners to democratise public relations and use its power productively. - Lee Edwards, London School of Economics and Political Science