Malmö University Journals
Not a member yet
374 research outputs found
Sort by
Welcome to Globala Tider
Get PDFIn his paper for the 9th United Nations Roundtable on Communication for Development, organized by FAO and held in Rome, Italy, in September 2004, James Deane referred to the context in which the Roundtable was to take place as a critical one. In particular, Deane stressed one issue which is closely connected to the rationale at the basis of the Globala Tider project. According to him, “The rapidly changing communication environments in some of the poorest countries and the growing importance of communication for alleviating poverty suggest that new ways of discussing these issues, with the central inclusion of mainstream media and affiliated organizations, is becoming increasingly urgent”. But even if such urgency is clear, according to Deane, and we agree, “Currently... credible fora which can bring together mainstream, alternative and social advocacy organizations, as well as government and development decision-makers on these issues are in short supply” (James Deane, “The Context of Communication for Development”, FAO, 2004). Globala Tider –a Communication for Development webmagazine and an archive of Master thesis in Communication for Development developed by graduates from Malmö University in Sweden (ComDev)- will attempt to become a steady forum in which academics, practitioners and students can come together to share and discuss relevant issues for the advancement of the field. In the first issue of the webmagazine, which I am proud to introduce here, Karin Wilkins, Associate Professor with the Department of Radio-TV-Film at the University of Texas at Austin, discusses the politics of gender in development and the ways in which“empowerment” has been used in relation to gender issues. Thomas Hylland Eriksen, Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo and Special Chair at the Vrije Universiteit (Free University), in Amsterdam, discusses trust and reciprocity –as well as humiliation and marginalization- as central aspects of transnational networks. Oscar Hemer, Senior Lecturer and Program Director of ComDev at Malmö University, and Thomas Tufte, Professor in Communication at Roskilde University, introduce us to the challenge of the glocal as related to media and communication in development cooperation. Gordon Adams, Managing Director of Media Support, brings in experiences and reflections on the humanitarian role of mass media in conflict. Warren Feek, Executive Director of The Communication Initiative, joins us with his discussion of what the core elements of a development communication strategy should be in the case of the long term response to the Indian Ocean tsunami. Kerstin Gossé, a member of the ComDev staff, introduces us to the current discussion in Sweden regarding free education for all at all levels of the educational system. Linda Karlsson, a librarian at Malmö University, invites us to explore open access alternatives when searching for academic literature. Finally, Kristina Rorstrom (a journalist based in Malmö), Sanjay Gupta (an IT consultant based in India), Rasna Warah (a writer and journalistic editor based in Nairobi, Kenya) and Lena Millinger (an expert on museum communications also based in Malmö), all of them graduates from the ComDev 2002 edition of the ComDev Master course, present the details of their fieldwork professional experiences in Argentina, India, Kenya and West Africa, encompassing art and social work, the role of IT in tackling poverty both in rural and in suburban areas, and culture and memory, as different approaches to communication for development. Please read on, and do not hesitate to join us with your comments, questions and suggestions while we start working on the second issue of the webmagazine, which will be on-line in October 2005. Globala Tider is open to interaction, and communication among contributors and readers will allow it to become what it is meant to be
INFORMATION WANTS TO BE FREE
Get PDFYes, I admit it; I’ve always been in favour of Open Access. There is something so inspiring about the saying “information wants to be free” that hackers in the early days of Internet chanted. And as I participate, in my role as librarian, in Malmö University’s Master’s course Communication for Development, these old words are filled with new connotations.The thought that information wants to be free is a serious one, grounded in great ethical and epistemological positions, and it has obvious implications in the areas of communication and development. As the Internet has narrowed the world, enabling fast communication and meetings all over the globe, it has also increased the information gap and widened the digital divide. Each updated attempt to map the Internet, displaying hubs and nodes of connection clusters, clearly shows that there is still much to ask for
TIDES OF HOPE?
Get PDFMy thoughts and support go to all affected by the earthquake and Tsunami in the Indian Ocean rim. Your pain is impossible to comprehend. Naturally, the international development community needs to do all in its power to ensure that the immediate, cruel and devastating tragedy of the Indian Ocean Tsunamis is mitigated to the greatest extent possible. But we also need to ensure that the immediate, emergency response does not set the conditions for a slower, drip feed, development problem.The immediate response to the huge waves that swamped, drowned and shattered so many individual lives and sucked the lifeblood out of so many communities is to focus on rescue, care, shelter, food, disease prevention and reconnecting those families and communities that somehow, miraculously, survived. No one should much care who does this work or how it is done. Just bring on all the expertise, funding, food, water purification, medicine, shelter and other essentials and get them where they are needed, as quick as possible. Bring it on, in the best possible sense of that phrase
Back to the Balkans
Get PDFIn my adolescence in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, Yugoslavia had the international image of a modern nation in the avant-garde of contemporary culture and politics. The Praxis group of philosophers and social scientists (some of whom later were to become fierce Serbian nationalists and war criminals) played a substantial role in the leftist upheaval of Western Europe, and artists and filmmakers like Dusan Makavejev were as influential as Emir Kusturica is today. Makavejev’s early films, WR: Mysteries of the Organism (1971) –with American poet and Fugs member Tuli Kupferberg in a side role- and Sweet Movie (1974) were astonishing in their erotic explicitness and fusion of (anarchist) politics and sensuality. When I visited Yugoslavia in 1972, on my first Inter-rail journey through a Europe still frozen in the simple logics of the Cold War, Marshall Tito’s federation was one of the few to defy that same logic. I merely passed through Zagreb and Belgrade but spent some memorable days in Sarajevo. With its mosques and wooden houses it was a living vestige of the Ottoman past and a glimpse of “the Orient”, yet clearly a crucial part of modern socialist Yugoslavia. On one of the hillsides facing the main Muslim graveyard, the big letters TITO in red overlooked the town, in unintentional ironic resemblance of the Hollywood sign on Beverly Hills. I didn’t come back to Sarajevo until December 2003, when Malmö University, supported by the Nordic council of ministers, arranged a seminar in the now capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The seminar formed part of Malmö University’s Master course in Communication for Development and the theme was Culture, Conflict and Reconciliation/Media for social change in the Balkan region. We all know what happened to Yugoslavia as a consequence of the end of the Cold War. But what has not been sufficiently analyzed and debated is the crucial role that the media played in the nationalist onslaught which escalated to genocide. And one of the sad lessons of the post-Dayton reconstruction is the failed media policies of the new nation states and the international community, as analyzed by Kemal Kurspahic, former editor in chief of the Sarajevo daily Oslobodenje, in his book Prime Time Crime (2003). Yet the tragedies of former Yugoslavia and Rwanda are the prime cases referred to in the emerging field of ‘Media and Conflict’, which in the last few years has become one of the main fields of research and practice within Communication for Development. The focus is not only on the media’s obvious ability to instigate conflict –even genocide– but also and primarily on ways of using media and communication to advocate and build peace and reconciliation. The Sarajevo seminar was also a starting point for a number of Project Works carried out by ComDev master students in the West Balkan region between 2003 and 2005. Two of them were examined earlier this year and are presented in this second issue of Globala Tider, with a thematical focus on the Balkans. Ulla Engberg has studied communication for development as a component of a rural development project in Topola, Serbia. Susan Kennard has made an in-depth study of the role of art in the social processes and practices of post-war Sarajevo. We are intending to continue the exploration of the Balkans and we wish to extend the regional focus to include Turkey and the East Mediterranean –the former Ottoman Empire. The next Communication for Development seminar in the context of Malmö University’s Master course will take place in Istanbul 27–31 October, in the form of the workshop “Towards a New Balkan Cultural Studies”, co-arranged by Malmö University, Istanbul Bilgi University and City University of London, and supported by the Swedish General Consulate in Istanbul. The workshop will gather scholars and artists from the region and elsewhere to address the new cultural dynamics of Europe and, possibly, draw the outlines for a new interdisciplinary area of study. The core objective is to establish, if not a new academic field, then a new terrain of academic debate and exchange. Or, in the words of the seminar’s co-coordinator, Kevin Robins: “Our proposition is intentionally counter-intuitive and intellectually provocative. We believe that a key resource for thinking about transnational and transcultural developments in Europe can be found in Balkan history and experiences. The often demonized Balkans are taken as a cognitive device to re-think European Cultural and Media Studies”. This issue of Globala Tider connects to the Istanbul workshop, with key contributions by some of its participants. Maja Povrzanovic-Frykman explores the Balkan predicaments of ethnicity, violence and place, with a focus on Croatia and Croatian immigrants in Sweden. Anders Hoeg-Hansen writes on “the memory problem”, discussing the cases of Holocaust and war memorials in Germany, a theme which certainly has relevance to recently war-struck West Balkan region and also to Turkey, where the Armenian holocaust of the crumbling Ottoman Empire remains a sensitive “non-issue” after a hundred years of defiant denial. The workshop in Istanbul is also coinciding with the 9th Istanbul International Biennial and Art’s connection to remembrance, investigation and social change is a theme that we wish to explore within the ComDev agenda. In this issue Nikos Papastergiadis, Willy Brandt professor at Malmö University during the first half of 2005, addresses the role of “art in the age of siege” and proposes ethical alternatives to the mainstream political discourse. You may of course still ask yourself what “New Balkan Cultural Studies” has to do with Communication for Development. There are many answers to that question. Firstly, culture and media analysis forms a key part in the ComDev curriculum at Malmö University. Secondly, we are deliberately trying to move away from the traditional division of the world in developed and developing countries, First and Third world, and making the globalizing, transnational and transcultural processes a focus of our interest. Europe, and not least its borders with neighbouring regions, becomes a very interesting case in that respect. The Balkans should not only be seen as a regional denomination, but also as a conceptual figure with further cultural and political implications and a certain resemblance with another key and complex concept: the Orient. Thirdly, we are also intent on exploring ways of combining artistic and academic research as part of rethinking ComDev methodology and practice. Workshop participants Zelimir Zilnik and Adela Peeva have very much to contribute in this respect. As has the groundbreaking “videoletters” project by filmmakers Eric Van der Broek and Katarina Rejger, which is portrayed in this issue. We are confident that the combined workshop and seminar in Istanbul, like the one in Sarajevo, will be the starting-point for many new Project Works in the extended Balkan region, some of which will be presented in future issues of Globala Tider. Enjoy reading and welcome to contact us with reflections and suggestions! Oscar Hemer Executive edito
Filmmakers as “reconciliators”: the Videoletters project
Get PDFAn interview with Eric van den Broek This interview with the Dutch documentary-maker Eric van der Broek is an account of how the media, instead of inciting or aggravating conflicts within nations or misguiding international perceptions, can sometimes help heal deep emotional wounds in concrete ways
THE HUMANITARIAN ROLE OF MASS MEDIA IN CONFLICT
Get PDFThere are compelling examples of how the mass media has played a positive role in peace-building. For instance, Radio Duwanza is situated ina remote region south west of Timbuktu in Mali and broadcasts to an estimated 126,000 people. The station is run by a local NGO with a staff of six. Education is important, with series on health, farming, literacy, the environment and women’s rights –all approached from a localperspective. In an area devoid of other local information sources, Radio Duwanza fulfils a key role as an outlet for self-expression and local culture
Internet as a tool for communication, information and participation
Get PDFThe case of tertiary students in Namibia Between July and August 2001, I set out to investigate the conditions for Internet as tool for information and communication among tertiary students in Namibia: to what extent they had access to what back then was still a new tool, and what they used it for. In the longer perspective, I wanted to explore Internet’s potential to become a tool for participation in the democratic process in the hands of Namibian students. This article includes an update of the situation of the national ICT projects I studied during my field work
THE POLITICS OF GENDER
Get PDFGender, like any other construct of social demarcation, embodies and perpetuates political systems of oppression. Feminist theory reminds us of the ways that artificial divisions into dichotomies of male and female serve to benefit groups in power. Critical theory implores us to recognize the intersections across gender, ethnicity/race, class, religious affiliation, sexual orientation and more. The underlying issues here concern systems of power, operating through the language and structure of development to bolster prominent institutions and to constrain potential for resistance.Recognizing the connections across various dimensions that mark privilege and oppression, here I focus on gender as one illustration of this larger dynamic
EDUCATING THE WORLD
Get PDFIn these days in which you need to pay even for the smallest services, like getting a glass oftap water in a restaurant or visiting a public toilet at the train station, there is no wonder that people get surprised when they find out that some things are still for free.One of the most commonly asked questions among international aspirants for the Communication for Development Master Course at Malmö University(ComDev) is how much it costs to follow the program. When they learn that there is no tuition fee, it does not take long before you getan attendant question: why