Communication Studies in Argentina in the 1960s and ’70s: Specialized Knowledge and Intellectual Intervention Between the Local and the Global

Abstract

The emergence of communication studies in Latin America in the s and ’s offers a productive viewpoint to think historically about social processes of emergence and consolidation of specialized discourses and knowledge. This essay aims to present some of the concepts and questions that have guided my research on the intellectual history of communication studies in Argentina. The concept of communication intellectuals, along with those of intellectual traditions and trajectories, offers valuable routes to address relationships between the production of specialized knowledge and broader social processes. In peripheral countries such as Argentina, it is also inescapable to ask about the global and transnational flow of ideas: How do the local and the global interact in the production of knowledge? How do we approach these relationships? Although this essay systematizes concepts and conclusions that refer to precise spatiotemporal coordinates, it also offers a more general reflection on ways of thinking and writing the intellectual history of communication studies as a contribution to its development in other regions and comparative analyses thereof.