Malmö University Journals
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C4D over ten years
Get PDFI was a late comer to C4D. Only when I started the Master\u27s in communication for development at Malmö in 2005 did I discover there was a world of theory and people and background in this area that I had been working on incognito most of my working life. That had been the case for a lot of us. C4D had been under wraps, unnamed for a long time and to date it\u27s still not easy to figure out why. Because when you are presented with it as a coherent sector with its history, core readings, gurus and strategies it seems logical as a sector, rather than the sort of thing that should be kept secret because it somehow is too complex or challenging to name
Communication for Development is also a way of life
Get PDFWith some element of introspection, I can disclose that communication for development has not only played a big role, but it has also been a big part of my immigrant life in Sweden. Half of my eleven years in this country have been spent engaging both in the academic study and pragmatic applications of communication for development to varying degrees
Participatory video and citizen voice – We’ve raised their voices: is anyone listening?
Get PDFSheathed in the glamour of filmmaking and technical innovation, participatory video (PV) is often evangelised as a communication for development methodology that intrinsically fosters transformative social and political change. Such celebratory notions, however, can obscure the complexity facing participatory video practice in achieving significant response to the inequities PV participants face. In reply, I offer the principles of representation, recognition and response as a potential pathway for more meaningful citizen engagement and action. Doing so challenges the idea that using PV primarily to help people on the margins represent their concerns through film is enough to shift deep-rooted inequities of power. Rather, my argument suggests that participatory video approaches aimed at raising citizen voice require a broader framing of practice: one that positions key decision-makers watching the films to both value marginalised voice, and responsively listen
A breath of fresh air
Get PDFReading the first issues of Glocal Times back in 2005 was like a breath of fresh air, coming as I was from years of institutional communication within the UN system. I found articles submitted by colleagues and pioneers of communication for development, well known to me. But, more important were submissions by graduate students, representatives of NGOs and scholars from developed but also developing countries. A good mix from civil society, and the themes covered were timely but also original: You would never find in a UN publication a piece on “mediated and non mediated communication of Filipino au pairs in Denmark”. True to its mission, the publication is thought provoking and an original forum for ideas and issues related to communication for development and social change
Studenter som medskapare av undervisning i att söka, samla och värdera information
No full text
Denna rapport redogör för ett pedagogiskt utvecklingsprojekt som biblioteket på Malmö högskola genomfört under 2014 om studenter som medskapare av undervisning i informationssökning. Projektet har tilldelats pedagogiska utvecklingsmedel från utbildningsberedningen. Syftet med projektet har varit att utveckla metoder för att ta tillvara studenternas erfarenheter och tidigare kunskaper för att stödja deras informationssökning. Vi har velat undersöka på vilka sätt studenterna aktivt kan involveras i undervisningen genom att titta på olika former av brukarinvolvering. Utgångspunkten har varit att ökad delaktighet leder till en djupare förståelse hos studenterna för sitt eget lärande, men också en ökad insikt hos undervisande bibliotekarier för studenternas kontext. En av slutsatserna är att för att lyckas med studentinvolvering krävs en deltagarkultur där det faktiskt är möjligt att påverka. Brukarinvolvering handlar inte bara om metoder, utan det handlar även om att alla inblandade har en inställning som stödjer ökad studentdelaktighet
Can we study participatory video within film studies? A succinct approach
Get PDFParticipatory Video (PV) have been widely used by activists and filmmakers for almost thirty years. But the debate concerning its nature has not penetrated yet in academic discussions. The few theoretical works that already exist point out the role of PV as a process for capacity-building and community empowerment, but obliterate its importance as a specific form of audiovisual product. The aim of this article is therefore demonstrating, through filmic analysis of several PV developed by local organizations, that these videos produced by communities can be considered as filmic objects and conceptualized into the Film Studies field. Moreover, the article sets out to redefine Nichols participatory mode of representation to avoid the theoretical exclusion it supposes towards collectively produced videos.
Music, movements and conflict
Get PDFThis article introduces a research project to be used in a larger study that aims to investigate how around-the-globe musical practices have become tied up with political movements and functioned as conflict-coping mechanisms in contexts of social and political upheaval. A series of historical as well as recent cases are explored in this preliminary study, drawing from research undertaken separately on Solentiname Islands, Nicaragua (by Mery A. Pérez), Zanzibar, Tanzania (by Shani Omari), Australia (by Lesley J. Pruitt) and from the USA (the author). This piece in particular is concerned with the different musical movement’s engagement with tradition and change
Ny bibliotekssystemmiljö: slutrapport
Get PDFProjektets syfte var få fram ett beslutsunderlag för hur en ny eller förändrad bibliotekssystemmiljö kan stödja bibliotekets verksamhet från 2016. Detta innebär att:
Undersöka behoven utifrån processer för att få fram lösningar som ökar nyttan och effektiviteten samt kvaliteten i verksamheten.
Analysera konsekvenserna av olika alternativa lösningar för en kommande bibliotekssystemiljö.
Skapa ett underlag med rekommendationer för beslut i ledningsgruppen
ComDev in the Margins
Get PDFTen years and twenty-one issues ago, when I wrote my first editorial for Glocal Times, the headline “Coming of age” came naturally. It alluded to the then five year old Communication for Development Master programme at Malmö University, for which this Glocal Times has been an indispensable companion ever since. That statement may at the time have seemed prematurely self-assured, but a decade later the MA programme has definitely reached maturity, and arguably even seniority (in the academic sense of the word). Now Glocal Times is coming of age as the “relevant digital reference in the field of communication for development and social change worldwide” it set out to become. The past decade is an interesting time frame from the perspective of ComDev as an interdisciplinary field of theory and practice, representing both crisis and consolidation – implosion, and a possible new beginning. Glocal Times was launched in 2005 at a meeting at the University of the Philippines in Los Baños, which aimed at founding a global university network in Communication for Social Change and Development. This initiative, driven by the Communication for Social Change Consortium, was one of many in what seemed to be a new momentum for media and communication in development cooperation, in the run-up to the first World Congress on Communication for Development (WCCD) in Rome, 2006. For some reason, the anticipated breakthrough never happened. On the contrary, the Rome congress was instead followed by a strange fallout of the field. For example, FAO, one of the organizers of WCCD, demoted their C4D department, which has only recently been revitalized. (The university network unfortunately never took off either, although many important bilateral contacts came out of it, such as the long-standing pedagogic collaboration between Malmö University and the University of Guelph.) The backlash incidentally coincided with the veritable explosion of social media and the emergence of new forms of social mobilization, building up to the popular uprisings of 2011 that took the world, and not least the development industry, by surprise. At the IAMCR conference held in Istanbul in July 2011, at the height of what was still referred to as the Arab Spring, the social media and the new social movements were discussed in almost every panel. But these world-shattering occurrences were rarely, if at all, associated with ComDev. Hence, ironically, when at last the crucial role of media and communication in social change processes became evident to everyone, the existing field of ComDev theory and practice seemed to be by-passed, unable to seize the momentum. This startling turn had the dual effect of boosting the field and adding to its crisis at the same time. The urgent need to analyse and understand the new phenomena (that turned out not to be that new, eventually) further underscored the need for new theory and transdisciplinary approaches. The impetus in current media and communication research on social media, civic engagement and spontaneous social change processes has arguably impacted on Media and Communication Studies as a whole. Development Studies has during the same period tended to move from hard-core economics and social sciences towards a humanities orientation, increasingly focusing on cultural aspects and representations of development and globalization. A third clear tendency, linked to the other two, is the rising impact of Anthropology in the field, as can be observed in the attention given to media ethnography, visual and digital storytelling etc. All this speaks in the favour of ComDev, although not in its conventional hands-on conception of communication for development. In this broad, culturally oriented understanding, ComDev is rather the analysis, at meta-level, of the interplay between communication and development. This shift is more important than it may appear to be at a first glance. It is perhaps only now that ComDev is beginning to come of age as a problem-oriented academic field of research in its own right. On the other hand, perhaps partly as a consequence of this reorientation, we may be seeing a resurgence of the original DevCom; that is, the strategic, solution-driven communication practices with roots in agriculture extension. Hard-core development issues are gaining renewed priority in marginalized areas of the globalized world. These seemingly oppositional tendencies mirror in a way the field’s constitutive tension between theory and practice -academics and practitioners-, and there is not necessarily any contradiction. Colombian media scholar Clemencia Rodriguez, one of the keynote speakers at this year’s IAMCR conference in Montreal, advocates the notion of media at the margin, a concept and approach which may apply to remote rural communities as well as transnational activist networks. Instead of focusing on media technologies, she suggests that we look at the appropriation of media at grassroots’ level. With examples from the geographic margins of Colombia, as well as the Occupy movement in the US, Rodriguez underlined in her address how some of these grassroots’ initiatives have developed “idiosyncratic media pedagogies” based on local languages and aesthetics. Rather than looking for linearity and homogeneity, she says, we should focus on processes of cross-pollination, adaptation, hybridization, and replication, which are often visible in grassroots media. I find the margins to be an apposite metaphor for Communication for Development as well. ComDev is thriving at the margins, both in theory and practice. Once ‘participatory communication’, ‘empowerment’ and ‘social justice’ become buzzwords in the hegemonic development speak, there is really reason for caution; not only due to the devaluation of the concepts, but because the institutional logic itself tends to be counter-productive and even destructive. There are innumerable examples of NGOs and other agencies that, albeit well-meaning, quell rather than incite citizens’ own initiatives. (As ComDev scholars and practitioners, we must be open to the possibility that the main obstacle to change may be the development industry itself.) Celebrating its 10th anniversary, Glocal Times is now evaluating how to take a major new step. We intend to become a fully-fledged peer-reviewed academic journal, yet still remaining a forum for graduate students and professional practitioners. You are, dear reader, most welcome to contact us with suggestions on how to solve that riddle. Meanwhile, enjoy this fully-fledged Jubilee double issue! It looks back on the past ten years, in personal reflections by a selection of the scholars, practitioners and alumni that have contributed to the success of the journal and to the development of ComDev at large. It moreover contains a thematic section on participatory video, which was one of the subjects of last year’s Örecomm Festival (Voice and Matter, 17-20 September 2014). There will be no Festival this year – only a 15th Anniversary ComDev seminar in Malmö. But the Örecomm Festival is due to be back in 2016. And so, of course, is Glocal Times