as keystone of democracy
by Sally Acharya, American Weekly, Feb. 21, 2006
There is a question that Shalini Venturelli has heard many times as a professor of international communication, and it goes directly to the heart of her field.
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"If
you want democracy, you need to have a knowledge base . . . When there
is an information explosion within the social fabric, that’s when
you get change." —Shalini Venturelli Photo by Jeff Watts |
“Students sometimes say, ‘Why should we study communication when there is so much poverty in this world? Isn’t water more important? Isn’t food?’”
That question, she notes, begs another question. It has long been known, for instance, that washing hands and boiling water saves lives. But how does that information reach, or not reach, the people who need it? To Venturelli, transmission of knowledge and information is at the core of every society and is central to either increasing or hampering human rights and equitable development.
Venturelli, a member of the faculty at the School of International Service (SIS) since 1994, is the new director of the school’s Division of International Communication.
Communication can be villagers chatting about new practices in growing food, or it can be a radio broadcast inciting people to murder, as happened in the Rwandan genocide. Increasingly communication is also the Internet and the way it is used by rural women to start microenterprises, or blocked by the policies of authoritarian governments, or used to expose human rights violations, or wielded by a society’s elite to further increase their power in comparison to others.
So yes, water and food are crucial. But to separate water and food from the complex structures of information transmission that shape each society is to miss much of the picture.
Venturelli views her teaching and scholarship as intricately linked to the struggle for development and human rights. Those concerns have been her passion since she was a young girl in India, attending a Himalayan boarding school where Tibetan refugees often stopped in their flight to freedom.
It was there that she also nurtured a secret interest: American history. Since it was not a subject in her British-style school, she’d search the bazaars for books on the American Revolution and copies of the U.S. Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and the Bill of Rights. “The words rang so true—so incontrovertibly true,” she says. “It resonated with my mind and heart.”
And so it was that after boarding school, she not only insisted on having a job—a controversial choice in her family and community—but surreptitiously saved her money and took the entrance exam for American colleges.
Her parents wanted to arrange a proper marriage. Instead, she ran away to America, a secretly won scholarship in hand. “You really have to be a young person to do something that crazy,” she now says wryly. “But I was determined to make my life in America.”
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