|
Showing 1 - 3 of
3 matches in All Departments
African audiences and users are rapidly gaining in importance and
increasingly targeted by global media companies, social media
platforms and mobile phone operators. This is the first edited
volume that addresses the everyday lived experiences of Africans in
their interaction with different kinds of media: old and new, state
and private, elite and popular, global and national, material and
virtual. So far, the bulk of academic research on media and
communication in Africa has studied media through the lens of
media-state relations, thereby adopting liberal democracy as the
normative ideal and examining the potential contribution of African
media to development and democratization. Focusing instead on
everyday media culture in a range of African countries, this volume
contributes to the broader project of provincializing and
decolonizing audience and internet studies.
African audiences and users are rapidly gaining in importance and
increasingly targeted by global media companies, social media
platforms and mobile phone operators. This is the first edited
volume that addresses the everyday lived experiences of Africans in
their interaction with different kinds of media: old and new, state
and private, elite and popular, global and national, material and
virtual. So far, the bulk of academic research on media and
communication in Africa has studied media through the lens of
media-state relations, thereby adopting liberal democracy as the
normative ideal and examining the potential contribution of African
media to development and democratization. Focusing instead on
everyday media culture in a range of African countries, this volume
contributes to the broader project of provincializing and
decolonizing audience and internet studies.
Examines the variety of mostly unorganized and informal ways in
which Africans exercise agency and resist state power in the 21st
century, through citizen action and popular culture, and how the
relationship between ruler and ruled is being reframed. The recent
eruption of popular protests across North Africa and the Middle
East has reopened academic debate on the meaning and strategies of
resistance in the 21st century. This book argues that Western
notions of state and civilsociety provide only a limited
understanding of how power and resistance operate in the African
context, where informality is central to the way both state
officials and citizens exercise agency. With the principle of
informality as a template, the chapters in this volume collectively
examine the various modes - organised and unorganised, formal and
informal, urban and rural, embodied and discursive, serious and
ludic, online and offline, successful and failing - through which
Africans contend with power. Resistance takes place against the
backdrop of deep fractures in state sovereignty, the remnants of
colonial rule and the constraints of a global, neoliberal economic
system. Ebenezer Obadare is Associate Professor, Department of
Sociology, University of Kansas; Wendy Willems is Assistant
Professor, Department of Media and Communications, London School of
Economics and Political Science (LSE) and Honorary Research Fellow,
Department of Media Studies, University of the Witwatersrand,
Johannesburg, South Africa.
|
|