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Artificial Intelligence in Public Relations and Communication Management: Perspectives of Ghanaian Professionals
Get PDFArtificial intelligence (AI) is presently transforming society and industries with significant implications for the public relations and communication profession. However, scholarship on this subject in Africa is lacking. This paper addresses this gap by investigating AI in the public relations and communication management industry in Ghana. It focuses on the knowledge, adoption, and impact of AI, as well as the perceived risks and challenges associated with the application of AI. The study used the quantitative method to gather data from 275 professionals. Results revealed that professionals have a limited understanding of AI despite their knowledge of the concept. Communication professionals believe AI will impact the profession, their department, and how they work. However, they did not foresee any challenges or risks associated with applying AI (e.g. competency in using AI, motivation to use AI, and loss of jobs). The result points to the need for professionals to increase their knowledge and understanding of AI. There is also the need for public relations scholars in Ghana and Africa to begin serious discussions on this issue.
Artificial Intelligence’s (AI’s) Implications for Strategic Communication
Get PDFOrganisations in Africa have integrated Artificial Intelligence’s (AI) innovations, such as data driven technologies and automation, into their operations. This is being done, among others, to enhance customer relationships, strategic communication and to deliver services. However, there are suggestions that these data-driven technologies are not transparent enough, which is contrary to what strategic communication is about. A survey in South Africa, for example, shows that only thirty nine percent of the people have heard of AI. This is despite South Africa being among the top five African countries in the 2020 Global Government Artificial Intelligence Readiness Index. Several academic papers evaluating the AI topic from different standpoints have been published in recent years. However, little academic work has been done regarding AI’s impact on strategic communication in the African continent. Although AI automation and applications seek to address most of society’s pressing problems, there are also challenges such as the technicality of AI, ethical issues, and overselling of AI. This conceptual article, analyses documents published on AI, journal articles and books content, identifies and discusses AI challenges, reviews different approaches to AI, examines AI’s impact on the strategic communication field and makes recommendations, with an intention to contribute to the AI and strategic communication disciplines. The research established that AI will continue to preoccupy academics and the public because of the increasing intermingling of smart technologies with different areas of human life
A Comparative Study of HPV Vaccine Acceptability Across Global North and South Countries: USA and Kenya
Get PDFThis study examined the HPV vaccine landscape in Kenya and the USA with a focus on if differences exist in the perceptions of HPV knowledge, vaccine attitudes, subjective norms, perceived behavioural control, and vaccine intention among students across country and gender. It also provides useful findings that can inform the design of persuasive health messages to promote the uptake of HPV vaccines among college students in Kenya and the USA. The study used surveys to recruit 1,033 participants (511 Kenyan and 522 USA students). The two-way MANOVA analysis revealed that the multivariate main effects showed no significant differences for gender, but the results revealed a significant main effect for the country. However, the interaction between gender and country of the participants was not significant. The univariate analysis revealed that the participants of the two countries had small significant differences in their subjective norms about HPV vaccination, and perceived behavioural control. The correlation analysis showed that HPV knowledge correlates with knowledge about the HPV vaccine and country, but not with gender. The results also revealed that knowledge about the HPV vaccine correlates with both gender and country. These results highlight the most salient predictors of vaccination intentions among college students that health communicators can focus on when designing and implementing HPV vaccination campaigns targeting students in Kenya and the USA.
The Rising Religious Extremism and Mob violence in Nigeria: Threats to National Integration and Sustainable Development
Get PDFBefore the emergence of Boko haram terrorist group in the early 2000s, religious extremism in Nigeria had sparked large scale crises in Kaduna and Plateau among other states in the country. Since the inception of the Nigerian fourth republic, such crises have been undermining public safety and by implication, the country’s quest for national integration and sustainable development. In the light of a mob violence that resulted in the gruesome murder of a college student who allegedly uttered blasphemous comment, this paper examined the rise of religious extremism in Nigeria. Looking beyond human security threats like poverty and illiteracy, the paper utilised desk review of published documents to establish the historical and political factors that sowed in the country, the seeds of religious extremism now germinating. The paper found that the nature of the pre-colonial empires that now make up the Nigerian state coupled with colonial and post-colonial factors including the dissipation of knowledge on Islamic justice system, competition over political powers and the politics of divide and rule have converged to make religion a volatile phenomenon in the country. Therefore, the paper concludes that until the multidimensional factors are addressed through mitigating and preventive efforts—such as robust religious education, religious regulation, interreligious dialogue and economic empowerment—the country’s quest for ‘peace, justice and strong institutions’ among other Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) will remain a mirage
Re-imagining Religion: Towards a Thematic Approach to Religious Studies at UKZN to Religious Studies at UKZN
No full textExamining the Introduction to Religion (RELG 101) module below, offered at the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) reveals a rigid adherence to the World Religions Paradigm (WRP) in structure and content. This article assesses the alignment of the RELG 101 module with Clingerman and O\u27Brien\u27s (2015) content, context and intellectual growth objectives. It also highlights the limitations of the current framework in meeting the specified objectives, providing insights into the challenges the students face and proposes a shift from the current adapted World Religions Paradigm to a thematic approach
Orientalism and Monotheism in Studies of Early Japanese Christianity
Get PDFIn the wake of Said’s landmark work, Orientalism (Said 1979), scholars have been widely concerned with countering the value-laden interpretations which have historically traveled with ‘colonialist’ or ‘Orientalist’ analyses of reli-gions in Japan. However, modern studies of early Japanese Christianity, i.e., Japan’s Kakure Kirishitan (hidden Christians), despite their emergence in the ‘post-colonialist world’, have often maintained a subterranean, Orientalizing tendency to generalize and abstract an inauthentic or compromised Christi-anity of early modern Japan against that of a more genuinely Christian West. Kakure interpretations of monotheism, the doctrine of the Trinity, and certain worship practices are portrayed as ‘polytheistic’, ‘syncretistic’, and as uniquely serious misunderstandings or abrogations of both ‘Christian theolo-gy’ and the very concept of monotheism. Meanwhile, Western Christianities, despite their own analogous and statistically-demonstrable penchant for mis-conception and theological imagination, are subsequently implied to be more authentically or quintessentially monotheistic or Christian. This essentializing configuration betrays an a priori separation of ‘Japanese’ and ‘Western’ reli-gions and raises the question as to whether analysts operating in the ‘post-colonial era’ have yet to become fully aware of the basic warning of Said’s Orientalism – a still-timely message which is not, as some seem to believe, centered on the errors of a specifically Western hegemony, but on the dangers of otherizing in general as a form of devaluation
A Review of Plastic Pollution; Conventional and Recent Bioremediation Technologies
Get PDFThe discovery of the first artificial plastic in 1869 (earlier called celluloid) by John Hyatt was a bid to replace the use of Ivory for ornaments and artistry, which endangered animals like the elephant. John Hyatt discovered plastics by dissolving camphor in nitrocellulose and alcohol in heat. While this invention piqued the interest of scientists to have considered it a groundbreaking scientific discovery, little attention was paid to the aftermath effects of its usage. Hence, as the use of plastics continued to burgeon over the past decades, plastics have now begun to pose a serious threat to marine and land inhabitants. This threat encompasses the competition for space, water contamination, and environmental toxins release, contributing to the pollution of inhabitable lands. Unfortunately, third-world countries are consistently impacted worse as the global demand, production, and distribution of new plastics are increasingly becoming disproportionate to the rate of degradation and recycling. Consequently, many disciplines and research institutes have constantly invested time and resources in developing new technologies to combat non-biodegradable plastic waste. However, since the conventional methods of degrading plastics have been found to be less eco-friendly, there has been a paradigm shift towards using biological techniques to serve as better alternatives. In this study, an overview of the conventional and modern biological and non-biological pathways for degrading plastics are elucidated with concluding views on the microbial degradative pathway as a viable means for developing countries
Engaging the Mechanisms of Faith? How Faith Communities Can Contribute to Ending Violence Against Children
Get PDFViolence against children is shaped by social norms which are frequently underpinned by faith-related beliefs and values. There isrenewed global recognition of the role of religions in legitimating or challenging harmful attitudes and practices, and this highlights the relevance and influence of faith communities in child protection. Faith communities may also have a unique role to play by engaging spiritual capital and faith mechanisms for positive change. These approaches go beyond an instrumentalised yet importantrole in service provision alone, to also transform harmful beliefs and offer positive alternatives grounded in faith mandates. This article draws on insights from a 2019 scoping study that explored positive and negative beliefs across multiple faith traditions that shape the perpetration, justification, or engagement to end violence against children. The study included three research components: a literature review, a case study submission process, and key informant interviews with experts on child violence working with diverse faith communities. Its findings show many ways in which religion’s spiritual capital can either help place children at society’s centre or can support harmful hierarchies of power that enable violence against children and seek to resist positive change
Afrika’s Cause Must Triumph: Towards the Hegemony of Lembede’s “Afrika for the Afrikans” as a Political Philosophy of National Liberation in “South Africa”.
Get PDFAnton Lembede, who is regarded as a member of the “new Afrikans”, propagated the political philosophy of Afrikanism thatis premised on an exclusive idea of “Afrika for the Afrikans.” On the other hand, A.P. Mda’s idea of “broad nationalism” pursued an inclusive idea of Afrika. This paper seeks to foreground Lembede’s exclusive idea of Afrika in contrast to Mda’s idea of “broad nationalism” and inclusive idea of Afrika. We will rely on the historical and comparative method and the Afrikan-centred theoretical paradigm. There are several findings which this paper has deduced. The first one is that the political and intellectual relationship between Lembede and Mda has eventuated in the epochal emergence of the antagonism between two Afrikan political philosophies of national liberation in conquered Azania. These philosophies are Afrikanism and broad nationalism. The second one is that the intellectual legacy of Lembede is a marginalised study in South African scholarship especially on the figures of the Black Radical Tradition. The third one is that the broad nationalism of Mda was transformed into the Azanian political tradition by Robert Sobukwe and Steve Biko. The last one is that the triumph of Mda’s idea of Afrika must triumph has contributed to the disastrous dominance of nonracialism in South Africa at the expense of the racial nationalism of Lembede. This nonracialism has taken the form of the Congress/Charterist nonracialism of the African National Congress and its Tripartite Alliance and the Azanian nonracialism of the Pan-Africanist Congress and the Black Consciousness Movement. The fundamental objective of this paper is a call for the replacement of these naïve and dangerous forms of nonracialism with the uncompromising racial nationalism of Lembede, so that Africa’s causecan triumph as he envisioned it
Honouring Children: Towards a Theological Anthropology of Children Informed by a Relational View of the Trinity
Get PDFThe views held about the humanity of children influence faith praxis with regard to children. Recognizing the full humanity of children will help pose questions that will lead to critical reflections on theories and practices thatunderpin the lived realities of neglect, abuse and violence against children. It is said that a faulty anthropology produces a faulty theology, and a faulty theology produces a skewed anthropology. It is argued that views of children that harm them in daily life could be connected with views of Godas authoritative, hierarchal, powerful and strong, a God who punishes and disciplines. There is, therefore, the need to explicate a Christian view ofchildren that honours the dignity and humanity of children and could result in faith practices that are liberating. The Trinity could serve as a framework for a theological anthropology of children. The paper explores insights from key scholars such as Miroslav Volf (1998), Jürgen Moltmann (1991) and Catherine LaCugna (1991) on a relational view of the Trinity to glean resources that could influence a theological understanding of the personhood of children: resources which recognise the full humanity of children and honour their dignity, and interdependence as well as mutuality in faith communities and society. The paper posits that a relational view of the Trinity could provide a sounder foundation for a deeply relational and non-hierarchical Christian view of children that arehonouring, and therefore, promotes faith praxis that is liberating and encourages flourishing