1,721,039 research outputs found
Reframing African ontologies in the era of decolonisation
Get PDFIn this chapter, we reframe African ontologies as a form of “problematising” the sub-field of political communication, and as a form of “consciousness raising”, about the need to decolonise its inter-disciplinary theory-praxis. We begin the process of dialogue and self-reflexivity by interrogating the theory-practice of political communication, thereby creating new knowledge production about political communication in Africa. This “decolonisation” of political communication and the resultant knowledge creation need to consider the epistemic insights of authors from Africa, in the field of political communication. In other words, African authors and scholars thinking with, and from, ‘subalternalized racial/ethnic/sexual spaces and bodies’. Or, put another way, it should be an example of what Archie Mafeje has called “endogeneity” – that is, African representation/scholarship that affirms African socio-economic context, positionalities, experience/s, African subjectivities and insights, and knowledge from Africa; and, in doing so, centres Africa, removing it from the margins. This chapter focuses on how to create knowledge production, which is also what Grosfoguel refers to as “epistemic disobedience”. As such, instead of supporting the current status quo in political communication, it serves to challenge, disrupt, destabilise, and interrogate this status quo, which, without doubt, is racialised, hierarchical, classist, capitalist, heteropatriarchal, gentrified, imperialist, and westernised
Social media as a sphere of political disruption
Get PDFThe public sphere in Africa has always been a preserve for “old boys” who at all material times dominated and monopolised the political discourses over their citizens. However, there has been an observable change with the advent and accelerated use of social media, as subalterns are now talking back to power. In Zimbabwe, much of the public sphere disruption has been led by what the government has termed “cyber-terrorists” or “dissidents” who openly discolour the characters of the ruling party and government elites. The use of social media, defined by its heightened ductility in the hands of users, has thrown the government and ruling party elites into panic, inviting extra-judicial and legislative changes seeking to curtail online expression. This chapter investigates how “cyber-terrorists” have been employing social media in Zimbabwe (2016–2018) to disrupt the general communication convention of top-down approach. Zimbabwe’s “cyber-terrorists” draw inspiration from folkloric, cultural, spiritual, pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial dissident figures who were celebrated as founding fathers/mothers and patriots among the African people while being lampooned and executed by government elites of the day. Deploying a reconfigured theorisation of the public sphere and of subalternity, the study examines the nature of dissidence in a sample of Evan Mawarire’s #ThisFlag campaign – thus, establishing the possibilities and limitations of deploying social media as a tool for disrupting and challenging hegemonic discourses, and expressing dissent, protest and dissidence as citizens engage with political and state actors
Decolonising Political Communication in Africa: Reframing Ontologies
No full textThis book uses decolonisation as a lens to interrogate political communication styles, performance, and practice in Africa and the diaspora. The book interrogates the theory and practice of political communication, using decolonial research methods to begin a process of self-reflexivity and the creation of a new approach to knowledge production about African political communication. In doing so, it explores political communication approaches that might until recently have been considered subversive or dissident: forms of political communication that served to challenge imposed western norms and to empower African citizens and their histories. Centring African scholarship, the book draws on case studies from across the continent, including Zimbabwe, South Africa, Nigeria and Ghana. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of politics, media and communication in Africa. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781003111962, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license
Theorising global risk journalism
Get PDFThis chapter highlights this book’s methodological and theoretical directions. The editors present the critical justification for this volume and suggest pathways for current, past and future trajectories to theorise global risk journalism. We introduce our two-year study which was inspired by the atrocious conditions of living under the COVID-19 pandemic. We also explain how and why we came together as a group of journalism scholars and practitioners, joining hands with fellow researchers and journalists from across the globe. The introduction also lays the foundation for the key contributions made by this volume, articulating the editors’ main arguments and providing summaries for its 18 chapters.</p
The Devil is in the Rumba Text. Commenting on Digital Depth
No full text© The Author(s) 2018. One Sunday at around noon one day in 2014, Maman Thérèse (a fictive name) arrived in the compound where I live when I carry out fieldwork. She often dropped by to greet my host mother. That day, I noticed that she was carrying a DVD, which, as I learned, she had received from one of her girlfriends at church. She wanted to hear my host brother’s opinion about the content. This married woman with four children is in her late thirties and works as a nanny in the school that one of her daughters attends. Since I first met her in 2003, I have always known her to visit the Church of the Awakening (a type of Pentecostal-charismatic church). With a smile that seemed to beg for apologies, Maman Thérèse told me that the DVD contained a clip in which some of Fally Ipupa’s music video clips-he is one of Congo’s most successful rumba musicians-are interpreted as “genre Illuminati,” a secret society in the imagination of Kinois (inhabitants of Kinshasa) intimately connected with the world of Freemasonry and Rosicrucianism. I had already noticed various posts on my Congolese friends’ Facebook walls about the possible connections between Congolese musicians and this secret society. Now I was shown that these accusations also circulate on other media carriers and among people who do not remediate such messages on their Facebook accounts.status: Publishe
‘Mobile phone communication in the mobile margins of Africa : The `communication revolution' evaluated from below’
No full textThe mobile phone has become part of the changing history of communication cultures in Africa. Instead of viewing the introduction of new communication technologies as ‘having major effects’, as is often the case in ICT4D (Information and Communication Technologies for Development) circles, we view the relation between technologies and society as interactive. New technologies, such as the mobile phone, may indeed lead to social change, yet at the same time people appropriate new technologies in creative and unexpected ways and make them fit into their social repertoires, thereby changing earlier meanings of the same technology. In this contribution we will discuss so-called marginal mobile communities in Africa in their interaction with new ICT. With this we mean communities consisting of strings of people spread over vast social spaces, combining migrants in various places and people that continue to live in the ‘marginal’ regions. Marginality is understood as related to absence of communication infrastructure that often combines with a political marginalisation vis-à-vis the state and with feelings of marginalisation. We will relate large-scale processes – here changes in patterns of mobility and communication – to mundane and everyday experiences of social connecting. We argue that these are more instructive than the usual macro-level assumptions about the ‘impact’ of the ‘ICT revolution’ in such so-called marginal regions. Contrary to a model-like approach to changes wrought by new ICT, we focus on the local evaluations of continued or new patterns of communication, mobility and social hierarchies at a daily level. The article discusses case studies from Cameroon (economic migrants), Mali (pastoral nomadic societies), and Angola (war refugees) focusing on local evaluations of the developments in communication technology in recent years. These local evaluations are interpreted in a comparative framework discussing the different and convergent histories of these regions in terms of marginality, infrastructure, mobility and communication technologies
Taking the Spy Machine South: Communications Surveillance in Sub-Saharan Africa
No full textIn 2013, former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden collaborated with journalists to leak documents on the NSA’s spying activities. The NSA is a United States (US) governmental agency responsible for the collection of signals intelligence, or intelligence gleaned from the surveillance of electronics networks (Gill & Phythian, 2012, pp. 79–101). The leaks revealed that the NSA was intercepting the communications of millions of innocent citizens in the USA and elsewhere, through various surveillance programmes. These widespread abuses of citizens’ right to privacy occurred in spite of the fact that the NSA was meant to use programmatic surveillance only to collect evidence of serious crimes or terrorism, which are almost universally considered to be legitimate grounds for surveillance. The documents also showed that the NSA collaborated extensively with other governmental spy agencies, especially those that form part of the ‘Five Eyes’ group of countries. The ‘Five Eyes’ refers to a coalition of countries co-operating with one another to fight terrorism and other national security threats, and includes the USA, the United Kingdom (UK), Australia, New Zealand and Canada (Privacy International, n.d.-b). The Snowden revelations caused widespread outrage, with communications users in many countries protesting against violations of their rights and freedoms
Citizen Journalism in Kenya as a Contested “Third Space”
No full textOutside the formal media structures, Kenya has always had a broad range of vibrant alternative sites for public expression and deliberation. As a reaction to successive post-independence governments’ domination and control of mainstream media, Kenya’s “cultural workers”, through music, drama, comedy and “new journalism”, have routinely developed a powerful oppositional narrative that constantly punctures the majesty of power, offering the “margins” not only a space but also a language with which to confront the excesses of the state. This was particularly so in the 1990s, during the clamour for political pluralism. Because the broader communication infrastructure was not radically changed despite political pluralism and media liberalisation in the 1990s (see Ogola, 2015), these spaces and expressive forms for alternative political narratives have remained profoundly relevant. Broadly conceived, citizen journalism, as one of these alternative expressive forms, has been instrumental for ensuring executive accountability and public participation in national debates
Decolonising Political Communication in Africa
Get PDFThis book uses decolonisation as a lens to interrogate political communication styles, performance, and practice in Africa and the diaspora. The book interrogates the theory and practice of political communication, using decolonial research methods to begin a process of self-reflexivity and the creation of a new approach to knowledge production about African political communication. In doing so, it explores political communication approaches that might until recently have been considered subversive or dissident: forms of political communication that served to challenge imposed western norms and to empower African citizens and their histories. Centring African scholarship, the book draws on case studies from across the continent, including Zimbabwe, South Africa, Nigeria and Ghana. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of politics, media and communication in Africa
Decolonising Political Communication in Africa
Get PDFThis book uses decolonisation as a lens to interrogate political communication styles, performance, and practice in Africa and the diaspora. The book interrogates the theory and practice of political communication, using decolonial research methods to begin a process of self-reflexivity and the creation of a new approach to knowledge production about African political communication. In doing so, it explores political communication approaches that might until recently have been considered subversive or dissident: forms of political communication that served to challenge imposed western norms and to empower African citizens and their histories. Centring African scholarship, the book draws on case studies from across the continent, including Zimbabwe, South Africa, Nigeria and Ghana. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of politics, media and communication in Africa
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