Media And Communication Theory In Africa

This contributed volume explores theories of media and communication and focuses on providing African perspectives on global conversations. Using broad cases relating to media and communication theories, this book explores socio-cultural issues affecting most modern African societies, providing a conceptual and empirical framework for explicating the potential place of media techniques and structures in Africa. As a good template for understanding and applying communication theories and approaches in the African context, the volume is a priceless asset for Media and Communication scholars.

This book advances alternative approaches to understanding media, culture and technology in two vibrant regions of the Global South. Bringing together scholars from Africa and the Caribbean, it traverses the domains of communication theory, digital technology strategy, media practice reforms, and corporate and cultural renewal. The first section tackles research and technology with new conceptual thinking from the South. The book then looks at emerging approaches to community digital networks, online diaspora entertainment, and video gaming strategies. The volume then explores reforms in policy and professional practice, including in broadcast television, online newspapers, media philanthropy, and business news reporting. Its final section examines the role of village-based folk media, the power of popular music in political opposition, and new approaches to overcoming neo-colonial propaganda and external corporate hegemony. This book therefore engages critically with the central issues of how we communicate, produce, entertain, and build communities in 21st-century Africa and the Caribbean.

This handbook comprises fresh and incisive research focusing on African media, culture and communication. The chapters from a cross-section of scholars dissect the forces shaping the field within a changing African context. It adds critical corpora of African scholarship and theory that places the everyday worlds, needs and uses of Africans first. The book goes beyond critiques of the marginality of African approaches in media and communication studies to offer scholars the theoretical and empirical toolkit needed to start building critical corpora of African scholarship and theory that places the everyday worlds, needs and uses of Africans first. Decoloniality demands new epistemological interventions in African media, culture and communication, and this book is an important interlocutor in this space. In a globally interconnected world, changing patterns of authority and power pose new challenges to the ways in which media institutions are constituted and managed, as well as how communication and media policy is negotiated and the manner in which citizens engage with increasing media opportunities. The handbook focuses on the interrelationships of the local and the global and the concomitant consequences for media practice, education and citizen engagement in today’s Africa. Altogether, the book foregrounds convivial epistemologies relevant for locating African media and communication in the pluriverse. This handbook is an essential read for critical media, communications, cultural studies and journalism scholars.

This edited collection is a cutting-edge volume that reframes political communication from an African perspective. Focusing on sub-Saharan Africa and occasionally drawing comparisons with other regions of the world, this book critically addresses the development of the field focusing on the current opportunities and challenges within the African context. By using a wide variety of case studies that include Mozambique, Zambia, Rwanda, Zimbabwe, Ghana, Kenya, Uganda, South Africa, Ivory Coast and Nigeria, the collection gives space to previously understudied regions of sub-Saharan Africa and challenges the over-reliance of western scholarship on political communication on the continent.

Most Western-driven theories do not have a place in Black communicative experience, especially in Africa. Many scholars interested in articulating and interrogating Black communication scholarship are therefore at the crossroads of either having to use Western-driven theory to explain a Black communication dynamic, or have to use hypothetical rules to achieve their objectives, since they cannot find compelling Black communication theories to use as reference. Colonization and the African slave trade brought with it assimilationist tendencies that have dealt a serious blow on the cognition of most Blacks on the continent and abroad. As a result, their interpersonal as well as in-group dialogic communication had witnessed dramatic shifts. Black/Africana Communication Theory assembles skilled communicologists who propose uniquely Black-driven theories that stand the test of time. Throughout the volume’s fifteen chapters theories including but not limited to Afrocentricity, Afro-Cultural Mulatto, Venerative Speech Theory, Africana Symbolic Contextualism Theory, HaramBuntu-Government-Diaspora Communications Theory, Consciencist Communication Theory and Racial Democracy Effect Theory are introduced and discussed.

The book provides insights on decolonising media and communication studies education from diverse African scholars at different stages of their careers. These academics, located on the continent and in the diaspora, share an interest in decolonising higher education broadly and media and communication studies teaching and learning in particular. Although many African countries gained flag independence from different European colonial powers between the 1950s and the 1970s, this book argues that former colonies remain ensnared in a colonial power matrix. Many African universities did not jettison ways of teaching and learning established during colonialism, and even those journalism, communication, and media studies training programmes which were established after the attainment of flag independence did not place decolonial agendas at the front and centre when setting them up. Starting with big picture thematic questions around decolonisation, the book goes on to consider what the implications of change would be for students and instructors, before reflecting on how far it is possible to decolonise curricula and syllabi and what this might look like in practice across a range of subject areas and country contexts. Overall, this book presents a nuanced picture of what a decolonised media and communication studies education could look like in sub-Saharan Africa. This book is essential for researchers in Africa in disciplines such as media and communication studies, journalism, film studies, cultural studies, and higher education studies. More broadly, the concepts and ideas on decolonising teaching and learning discussed in the book are relevant to instructors in any discipline who are interested in doing the decolonial work of contesting coloniality.

How can an "ethics of listening" guide the media to contribute to the deepening of democracy in Africa? In Africa, the media plays a significant role in conflict management and resolution. Which conflicts the media report, which are ignored, and how conflicts are represented can have a profound impact on the outcomes. While the media can in some cases ensure the stability of African democracy, critics have pointed out that in other cases, the media actually increases tensions in areas of conflict. The media tends to privilege only elite voices, offering superficial coverage of marginalized groups in a way that increases polarization. In The Ethics of Engagement, Herman Wasserman explores the ethics of the media in conflicts that arise during transitions to democracy in Africa. He examines the roles, responsibilities, and obligations of media in contexts of high socioeconomic inequality. In doing so, he looks at ethnic and racial polarization in the histories of colonialism, post-colonial authoritarianism, and hybrid regimes. Taking a critical view of the normative guidelines and professional identities of journalism inherited from contexts outside of Africa, he argues that a more reciprocal and collaborative approach is needed. He develops a new ethics of engagement that would require the media to facilitate the resolution of conflicts across differences of ethnicity, citizenship, and class. A central point of this theory is the development of an "ethics of listening" which would enable the media to conceive of their role as facilitators in democratic deliberation and community-building. Wasserman applies his ethics of listening to case studies across the African continent. He finds that by following this new model of conduct, the media may actually deepen democracy and help de-escalate conflict. This original study provides a useful framework for reimaging the media's role in transitional democracies in Africa--and across the globe.

Re-imagining Development Communication in Africa is organized into three sections or parts, the first focusing on the past and the history of development communication scholarship; the second analyzes theoretical issues, and finally a third section that looks at country cases. The first part provides several perspectives on the historical development of the field as it pertains to Africa. Some of these look at ideological, indigenous contributions, and the particular importance of gender issues. The second section provides a critique of development communication theory and provides a more cultural appropriate alternative. Additionally, the book applies existing theory to practice in African communities. This leads to the third section of the book which focuses on development communication in some country cases such as in Cameroon, Kenya, Nigeria, and Rwanda.