Linguistic Resistance and Power in Indian Political Public Relations Practice: A Video-Ethnographic Study
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Authors
Rasquinha, M
Sissons, H
Supervisor
Item type
Journal Article
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Journal Title
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Publisher
SAGE Publications
Abstract
India’s multilingual landscape presents political public relations (PPR) practitioners with both strategic opportunities and communicative challenges. Campaigns often rely on Hindi and English, but regional languages such as Kannada and Tamil are also used to assert identity and push back against Hindi and English dominance. This article draws on 56 hours of video from ethnographic fieldwork and ten semi-structured interviews with social media teams at two South Indian political parties during the 2019 general election. Using Ethnographic Communication Analysis (ECA), it examines an everyday professional interaction through critical discourse analysis, conversation analysis, and gestural analysis. The findings show how multilingualism functions as a site of symbolic struggle, where practitioners negotiate belonging, exclusion and representational legitimacy. Humour, code-switching, and language-based microaggressions emerge as communicative tactics of solidarity and resistance. By foregrounding the Global South context and adopting a multimodal ethnographic approach, this study extends critical public relations scholarship by showing how multilingualism is used in the reproduction of power and inequality.Description
Keywords
4701 Communication and Media Studies, 4703 Language Studies, 4704 Linguistics, 47 Language, Communication and Culture, 2001 Communication and Media Studies, 3506 Marketing, multilingualism, political public relations, linguistic resistance, India, language and power
Source
Public Relations Inquiry, ISSN: 2046-147X (Print); 2046-1488 (Online), SAGE Publications. doi: 10.1177/2046147X251409227
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© The Author(s) 2025. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access page (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).