Malmö University Journals
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Mobilizing for Global AIDS Treatment - Clicking Compassion and Shopping Salvation
Get PDFGlobal communication about HIV/AIDS requires the creation of new communities that can bridge distances and distinctions of nationality, language, class, race, gendered-identities and other forms of local identification on a disease that is associated with the realm usually understood as private (sexuality). Global AIDS, characterized as ‘the disease of our time’, is responsible for spawning an entire industry devoted to the prevention, detection, treatment, and potential cure of HIV/AIDS. In terms of scale, this industry works primarily cross-nationally, with donors from the North funding programs for AIDS prevention and care in the South. Anti-retroviral drugs (ARVs), typically produced as generics by manufacturers in India or South Africa and purchased by aid funding, are central to global AIDS programs. Yet, mobilizing for global AIDS treatment embodies the logic of marketing, in which Africans with AIDS are sold as lives to be saved. This article will draw from international relations theory, sociology and anthropology to offer an interdisciplinary perspective on mobilizing communication globally
Communication for Development in Good and Difficult Times - The FAO Experience
Get PDFThe article tells the story of the evolution of communication for development within the United Nation’s (UN) Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), describing the good times in the past as well as the difficult times in the last decade as an example of how the discipline continues to be marginalised in development institutions. The author argues that new challenges and trends demand new thinking on the part of institutions and governments, as well as new practices and skills by communication practitioners, and stresses the need to avoid re-inventing the wheel. New approaches should be married up with the participatory principles and methodologies applied in the past that are still valid for meeting the new challenges. The article concludes with a discussion of the prerequisites for an enabling environment for mainstreaming communication for development
The Growing Pains of Community Radio in Africa - Emerging Lessons Towards Sustainability
Get PDFCommunity radio is considered as an intervention strategy of choice for deepening participation and community ownership. Donors have funded a proliferation of community radio projects in the Global South, prompted by stories attesting to the power of radio as a tool for social change. The evidence suggests that beyond empowering communities, community radio can catalyse behaviour change and impact positively on wider development outcomes. In practice, the record has been mixed, with sustainability a critical challenge. A recent evaluation found that radio stations created through top-down initiatives tend not to survive when external funding dries up. Where such stations do survive, their purpose often becomes different from what was originally intended. Only in a handful of cases have previously aid-dependent radio stations become sustainable. Informed by insights from practitioners, and evaluation reports and scholarly literature, this article draws some emerging lessons
The Globalization of the Pavement - A Tanzanian Case Study
Get PDFThis article investigates examples of citizen media production and communication (blogs and social media sites in Tanzania and its diasporas) in the immediate aftermath of the Gongo la Mboto blasts in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, February 2011.At the centre is the relationship between media use and communication practices of the pavement – drawing from the notion of pavement radio – and the spaceship, i.e. a metaphor for traditional mass media, exemplified by policies and practices of the BBC and its World Service.We argue that new social media practices as digital pavement radio are converging with traditional forms of street buzz and media use. Forms of oral communication are adapting towards the digital and filling information voids in an informal economy of news and stories in which media practices are stimulated by already ingrained traditions. An existing oral culture is paving the way for a globalization of the pavement
Teaching and Learning Communication Process as Community-based Transdisciplinary Inquiry
Get PDFThis article discusses experiences in teaching and learning communication processes oriented towards social change and development, specifically, using the approach known as community service learning (CSL). The relevance of CSL is that it mobilizes university students as communicators and seeks to develop global consciousness through transdisciplinary inquiry with local communities. Using the case of an undergraduate course at the University of Guelph (Canada) involving 33 CSL individual and team projects, this article reinforces the importance of experiential learning for teaching and learning communication process. In light of policy-level calls for the reform of higher education to meet social change and development needs, CSL provides an interesting opportunity, but it also encounters distinct challenges within our academic institutions and for those of us who teach and mentor university students
Rebranding Development Communications in Emergent India
Get PDFWith access to and competence in new ICTs a defining feature of modern citizenship in much of the global South, we need to understand the complex and ambivalent discourse around public-private partnerships, digital inclusion and the very rebranding of development communication in the 21st century. India’s prominence in this area is partially explained by the economic and symbolic success of its export-oriented IT industry. The spectacular nature of economic disparities in the world’s largest democracy – an emerging market vying for global recognition with some of the most severe rural poverty rates worldwide – has meant that private sector actors are increasingly eager to present themselves as active participants in a new discourse of development. In unequal information societies across the global South like India, a critical analysis of corporate actors in the development arena must take into account the wider field of conflict and struggle over the redistribution of public resources evident in the era of liberalization
Means of Communication - Transnational Struggles and Scarce Resources
Get PDFMarx, famously, ”placed Hegel on his feet” by arguing the primacy of economic and material processes over the spiritual and intellectual. In his analysis, the world advanced, dialectically, through growing contradictions between means of production and relations of production (property relations), mediated by recurrent class struggles. Although material scarcity is by no means absent from the contemporary world, an important scarce resource analysed well by Hegel and largely neglected by Marx, and which is essential today, is self-esteem, including the right to define oneself. Using examples from identity politics in a number of countries, I am trying to show that a democratisation of the means of communication may be a key to a less volatile world and an important dimension of a more equitable world society
Global Survival - Towards a Communication of Hope?
Get PDFConfronted with serious challenges to human survival, communication should be mobilized to rescue the planet’s future. This requires the development of new forms of discursive power that shift from a culture of fear to a culture of hope. This can be achieved through global networks of those urban movements that increasingly move beyond their local political environments. The global city can emerge as a crucial site for the claim to human survival in dignity
ComDev in the Mediatized World
Get PDFIn late 2011 we are in the beginning of a revolution that may or may not turn out to be more far-reaching than the one unleashed in 1989. A common denominator in this resurging revolution is the mobilizing power of the so-called social media. Even if labels such as the Twitter or Facebook revolution are rightfully refuted, the on-going Arab Spring is a clear-cut example of an unprecedented communication power, largely out of the authorities’ control.While the crucial role of media and communication in processes of social change at last becomes evident, it is however not associated with the field of communication for development and social change. While that field historically has been about developing prescriptive recipes of communication for some development, it is time attention is refocused to the deliberative, non-institutional change processes that are emerging from a citizens’ profound and often desperate reaction to the global now