Voice and Matter is an outstanding collection that will reinstate the centrality and urgency of Communication for Development as an area of research and a field of practice. Hemer and Tufte’s vast expertise in the field of ComDev shines through in the volume’s multidisciplinary approach, methodological and theoretical advances, and inclusion of contributions from diverse world regions (i.e. Latin American schools of participatory communication and recent African Ubuntu-centric epistemologies, among others). Drawing from the lived experiences of collectives and individuals who use media and communication to work toward emancipation and social justice, the chapters in this volume make important contributions to how we think about voice, power, technology, culture, and social change. Taking on the challenge of interrogating the development industries and their inability to detach from market forces and confront power inequities, this volume repositions the agency of subjects who use their own voices and their own media on their own terms – taking matters into their own hands.
Clemencia Rodríguez, Professor in Media Studies and Production, Temple University, Philadelphia, USA
This book is about belonging. It analyses media uses, media representation, globalization and cultural change. But fundamentally, it is a book about identity politics and practices of the Scandinavian societies and people. One of the largest challenges the Scandinavian societies have been struggling with during recent years is how to respond – politically, socially and culturally – to the growing number of immigrants and refugees, and their descendants, in societies traditionally conceived of as culturally rather homogeneous. So, in some sense, this book is a story of identity formation – of identifying and analysing some of the conditions and characteristics upon which the citizens of Denmark, Norway and Sweden negotiate and construct their histories, identities, social orders and cultural practices, as well as their ontological securities.
The Yearbook 2009 focuses on youth as a generation of actors and citizens who are increasingly exposed to and making use of media/ICT for entertainment and informational purposes, for social networking and mobilization, and for knowledge sharing. At the core of this creativity and these innovative practices is media and information literacy. Young people’s competence in using media, their ability to produce, understand and interact with the multiplicity of both new and old media formats and technologies have been instrumental in the manifestation of social processes of change. This book seeks to explore theoretical assumptions as well as empirical evidence of media and information literacy in action. But it also gathers examples of how youth in developing countries have used their skills to bring about change.
The book questions whether and how young citizens in Africa engage with media and communications technologies and platforms in a desire to be included in the change processes of their societies. The theme echoes some of the claims made by disenchanted and frustrated youth and other citizens in the streets of North Africa’s cities in 2011 and 2012. They were severely critical of the governance structures in their countries, mass social mobilizations took place, governments fell and, in the aftermath, the slow process of transition continued, now with one tyrant less but still with uncertain outcomes and huge challenges for the social and economic development of these countries. Youth in particular engaged massively, visibly, loudly and dramatically around demands to be involved and included in their countries’ development processes. This yearbook taps into the less visible and dramatic, but nevertheless highly dynamic and influential, process of media development and the enlargement of youth-driven, deliberative spaces which sub-Saharan Africa is currently experiencing.