Voice & Matter: Communication, Development and the Cultural Return

VOICE & MATTER VOICE 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 and the Cultural Return Communication, Development 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 Voice & Matter Communication, Development and the Cultural Return 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 Oscar Hemer & Thomas Tufte (eds.) and social justice, the chapters in this volume make important contributions to how we think about voice, power, technology, culture, and social change. Taking VOICE on the challenge of interrogating the development industries and their inability to detach from market forces and confront power inequities, this volume repositions © The authors and Nordicom 2016 the agency of subjects who use their own voices and their own media on their own MATTER terms – taking matters into their own hands.” Clemencia Rodríguez, Professor in Media Studies and Production, Temple University, Philadelphia, USA ISBN 978-91-87957-31-4 (print) ISBN 978-91-87957-32-1 (pdf) Oscar Hemer & Thomas Tufte (eds.) Oscar Hemer & Thomas Tufte COMMUNICATION, DEVELOPMENT AND Published by: THENordicom CULTURAL RETURN University of Gothenburg Box 713 SE 405 30 Göteborg Sweden University of Gothenburg Box 713, SE 405 30 Göteborg, Sweden Telephone +46 31 786 00 00 • Fax + 46 31 786 46 55 E-mail [email protected] Cover by: Per Nilsson www.nordicom.gu.se Printed by: Ale Tryckteam OscarAB, Bohus, Hemer Sweden, 2016 & Thomas Tufte (eds.) ISBN 978-91-87957-31-4 NORDICOM 9 789187 957314 NORDICOM VOICE & MATTER VOICE & MATTER COMMUNICATION, DEVELOPMENT AND THE CULTURAL RETURN Oscar Hemer & Thomas Tufte (eds.) NORDICOM Voice & Matter Communication, Development and the Cultural Return Oscar Hemer & Thomas Tufte (eds.) © The authors and Nordicom 2016 This book is published in collaboration with the UNESCO Chair on Freedom of Expression, Media Development and Global Policy at the University of Gothenburg. ISBN 978-91-87957-31-4 (print) ISBN 978-91-87957-32-1 (pdf) Published by: Nordicom University of Gothenburg Box 713 SE 405 30 Göteborg Sweden Cover by: Per Nilsson Printed by: Ale Tryckteam AB, Bohus, Sweden, 2016 Contents Editors’ Preface and Acknowledgements 7 Foreword 9 Oscar Hemer & Thomas Tufte Introduction. Why Voice and Matter Matter 11 I. Reframing Communication in Culture and Development Francis B. Nyamnjoh Communication and Cultural Identity. An Anthropological Perspective 25 Linje Manyozo The Language and Voice of the Oppressed 43 Stefania Milan Stealing the Fire. Communication for Development from the Margins of Cyberspace 59 Karin Gwinn Wilkins & Kyung Sun Lee The Political Economy of the Development Industry 71 Susanne Schech International Volunteering in Development Assistance. Partnership, Public Diplomacy, or Communication for Development? 87 Anders Høg Hansen, Faye Ginsburg & Lola Young Mediating Stuart Hall 101 II. Ethnography and Agency at the Margins Jo Tacchi When and How Does Voice Matter? And How Do We Know? 117 Sheela Patel Building Voice and Capacity to Aspire of the Urban Poor. A View from Below 129 Andrea Cornwall Save us from Saviours. Disrupting Development Narratives of the Rescue and Uplift of the ‘Third World Woman’ 139 Sharath Srinivasan & Claudia Abreu Lopes Africa’s Voices Versus Big Data? The Value of Citizen Engagement through Interactive Radio 155 Faye Ginsburg A History of Cultural Futures. ‘Televisual Sovereignty’ in Contemporary Australian Indigenous Media 173 Pegi Vail Gringo Trails, Gringo Tales. Storytelling, Destination Perspectives, and Tourism Globalization 189 III. The Return of the Politics of Hope Ronald Stade Debating the Politics of Hope. An Introduction 203 Ronald Stade On The Capacity to Aspire. Conversation with Arjun Appadurai 211 Nigel Rapport Aspiration as Universal Human Capacity. A Response to Arjun Appadurai 217 Gudrun Dahl Is Good Intention Enough to Be Heard? On Appadurai’s ‘Capacity to Aspire’ 225 Thomas Hylland Eriksen Hope, Fairness and the Search for the Good Life. A Slightly Oblique Comment to Arjun Appadurai 241 References 249 Contributing Authors 265 Editors’ Preface and Acknowledgements Voice & Matter was the overarching theme for the fourth Ørecomm Festival in September 2014. When we founded the Ørecomm Centre for Communication and Glocal Change in 2008,1 it was our pronounced long-term aim to establish a centre of excellence in Communication for Development research with a bi-national base in the Øresund region (Malmö and Roskilde). From 2011 to 2014 we organized a yearly Ørecomm Festival, focused on specific concepts within – or at the margins of – the field: Agency and Mediatisation (2011); the Public Sphere (2012); Memory and Social Justice (2013). Voice & Matter (2014), with the subtitle “Glocal Conference on Communication for Development”, was in a way a summing up and synthesis of all the previous themes, with the significant addition of Hope, and what Indian- American anthropologist Arjun Appadurai has defined as “the capacity to aspire”. It is our ambition to continue to organize Ørecomm Festivals, on a biannual basis,2 as part of our strategy to foster further developments of meta-theory within Commu- nication for Development. The purpose of such meta-theory is, firstly, to integrate ComDev as a research field in its own right, and subsequently, to define and refine the theoretical context of ComDev, with regard to specific key concepts or themes, and thereby also systematise its connections with related research fields. So far, three anthologies, including this one, have come out of the Ørecomm Festivals (Askanius & Stubbe Østergaard 2014; Hansen, Hemer & Tufte 2015), and a number of other publications are directly or indirectly the fruit of this collaboration (i. e. Enghel & Wilkins 2012; Ngomba & Wildermuth, forthcoming). This Voice and Matter anthology largely reflects the topics dealt with at the conference. We are immensely thankful to all the speakers who agreed to elaborate their presentations for this volume. We also wish to thank the former vice-chancellors of our universities, Ib Poulsen and Stefan Bengtsson, and the heads of our departments, Lene Palsbro3 and Sara Bjärstorp, for facilitating our interregional collaboration, with support from the European Regional Development Fund (Interreg IV A) and Roskilde University’s vice-chancellor office for financial support to this book. A special heart- felt thanks to information manager Ulrica Kristhammar, research assistant Yuliya 7 EDITORS’ PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Hudoshnyk and the interregional project coordinator, Marie Brobeck. Finally, we thank Ulla Carlsson, Ingela Wadbring and the full team at Nordicom for taking on and publishing this anthology. Malmö and Roskilde, May 2016 Oscar Hemer & Thomas Tufte Notes 1. The official launch was in a panel at the IAMCR Conference in Stockholm in July 2008, with Jan Nederveen Pieterse and Karin Wilkins as invited panellists. 2. The 2016 Festival addresses the communication challenges of the so called Refugee Crisis in a glocal perspective 3. Lene Palsbro was head of department at the Department of Communication, Business and Informa- tion Technologies until December 2014. 8 Foreword Readers will find in this assembly of essays a cluster of remarkable empirical studies in the first two sections, and some very penetrating discussions of basic concepts in the third. All focus on Communication for Development and Social Change, the discursive network that is set to subvert and replace older Development Communication paradigms grounded in exploitative and/or philanthropic strategies towards what used to be called the ‘Third’ World during the decades of US-Soviet rivalry for planetary dominance. In other words, the majority of humankind living outside circles of power and wealth. The bi-annual Ørecomm Festivals serve as a petri dish for invigorating this network. A key pair of concepts investigated here for their capacity to illuminate core issues are ‘voice’ and ‘capacity to aspire’. The term ‘voice’ is especially associated with a much-cited book by political economist Albert Hirschman (1915-2012), Exit, Voice and Loyalty (1970), and the term ‘capacity to aspire’ with a 2004 essay by cultural anthropologist Arjun Appadurai. However, while the concept ‘voice’ has its merits in emphasizing the fundamental importance of the ability of the world’s poor to express their needs and demands in public fora from the streets to the Internet, the work of Charles Husband (1996; 2000; 2005) over more than twenty years now takes the issues still deeper. Others, such as Australian Communication researchers Tanja Dreher and Penny O’Donnell, Australian sociologist Cate Thill, and UK political scientist Andrew Dobson, have also contributed valuably in this direction. Basically, Husband and the others underscore the limits of simply aspiring to speak, as per the argument presented in Gayatri Spivak’s much-cited 1983 essay “Can the subaltern speak?” Admittedly, speech itself is terrorized in many ways in many places, but the act of speaking alone, even when successful, still guarantees rather little. The

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