Opening Up the Black Box of Communication Governance in South Asia: Critical Policy Ethnography as Methodology

The chapter posits Critical Policy Ethnography (CPE) as a methodological offering for a humanistic study of communication governance and media policy research. In the line of activist and engaged scholarship on communication and media governance that have contributed to calling attention to democratising global communication, we draw out Critical Policy Ethnography (CPE) as methodological praxis in engaging with the processes and practices of policy-making for media. Making a case for drawing on critical ethnography for policy studies, this chapter showcases four cases from India and Bangladesh. In doing so, we illustrate how CPE may address the closed-door nature of much of policy-making for media, making way to draw on informal spaces and conversations even while studying formal mechanisms and venues of policy-making, across online and digital realms.