Browsing by Subject "Economic development--Social aspects--Mexico--Tepoztlán"

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Text, context, and communicative practice within an alternative discourse of development: the No Al Club de Golf movement of Tepoztlán, Morelos
(2002) Waters, Jody; Wilkins, Karin Gwinn, 1962-
The role of communication in development has generally been explored within the context of strategic interventions designed to promote social and economic change. Within this framework, the dominant discourse has articulated development as a system of problems and solutions determined by institutions and agencies. However, discourses constructed by other groups, such as communities, grassroots organizations, and social movements, may contain the potential to resist, redefine, and renegotiate the ways that development has been defined and carried out. In this dissertation, I analyze an alternative discourse of development in the texts and practices of a community-based social movement. This opposition movement formed in response to a proposed golf course and luxury resort on community-owned lands adjacent to the central Mexican town of Tepoztlán, Morelos. I ground the study of its discourse within theoretical perspectives that identify development as a discursive realm through which observable social phenomena are organized and expressed as a system of knowledge and power. I integrate analysis of texts and textual strategies with ethnographic practices of intensive interviewing and participant observation to explore the ways that this social movement engaged in the production and articulation of a discourse of social transformation. The dissertation engages prevailing tenets about development to elucidate the notion of alternative or resistant discourse, and the role of communication within this construct.