The chapter introduces the overall aim with the anthology Voice & Matter, offering historical and disciplinary context for a better understanding of where communication for development is heading, as an interdisciplinary field of theory and practice. Firstly, we outline the altogether bumpy, contradictory and complex pathway leading to the present, which we, in section two, tentatively describe as a new momentum. The new forms of social mobilisation that took the world by surprise in 2011, most decisively in the so-called Arab spring but also elsewhere on the globe, sparked a disciplinary reorientation and subsequently a deepening and broadening of ComDev’s theoretical base. Section 3 offers a retrospective analysis of world development and outlines some of the ‘epistemologies from the south’ which increasingly inform contemporary development debates, while section 4 unpacks the features of what we call the ethnographic turn . Finally, we argue that ComDev has thrived not only in the constitutive tension between theory and practice but by remaining at the margins. Conclusively, we outline how the chapters of this book in each their way substantiate dimensions of the new momentum and its continuing articulation and redefinition of Communication for Development.