Voice & Matter
Communication, Development and the Cultural Return
“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
Content
Editors’ Preface and Acknowledgements
Foreword
Introduction: Why Voice and Matter Matter
Oscar Hemer, Thomas Tufte
I. Reframing Communication in Culture and Development
Communication and Cultural Identity: An Anthropological Perspective
Francis B. Nyamnjoh
The Language and Voice of the Oppressed
Linje Manyozo
Stealing the Fire: Communication for Development from the Margins of Cyberspace
Stefania Milan
The Political Economy of the Development Industry
Karin Gwinn Wilkins, Kyung Sun Lee
International Volunteering in Development Assistance: Partnership, Public Diplomacy, or Communication for Development?
Susanne Schech
Mediating Stuart Hall
Anders Høg Hansen, Faye Ginsburg, Lola Young
II. Ethnography and Agency at the Margins
When and How Does Voice Matter? And How Do We Know?
Jo Tacchi
Building Voice and Capacity to Aspire of the Urban Poor: A View from Below
Sheela Patel
Save us from Saviours: Disrupting Development Narratives of the Rescue and Uplift of the ‘Third World Woman’
Andrea Cornwall
Africa’s Voices Versus Big Data? The Value of Citizen Engagement through Interactive Radio
Sharath Srinivasan, Claudia Abreu Lopes
A History of Cultural Futures: ‘Televisual Sovereignty’ in Contemporary Australian Indigenous Media
Faye Ginsburg
Gringo Trails, Gringo Tales: Storytelling, Destination Perspectives, and Tourism Globalization
Pegi Vail
III. The Return of the Politics of Hope
Debating the Politics of Hope: An Introduction
Ronald Stade
On The Capacity to Aspire: Conversation with Arjun Appadurai
Ronald Stade
Aspiration as Universal Human Capacity: A Response to Arjun Appadurai
Nigel Rapport
Is Good Intention Enough to Be Heard? On Appadurai’s ‘Capacity to Aspire’
Gudrun Dahl
Hope, Fairness and the Search for the Good Life: A Slightly Oblique Comment to Arjun Appadurai
Thomas Hylland Eriksen
References
Contributing Authors
