ABSTRACT

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.

chapter 2|24 pages

Afrokology of media and communication studies

Theorising from the margins

chapter 4|14 pages

Rethinking African strategic communication

Towards a new violence

chapter 5|13 pages

Afrokology and organisational culture

Why employees are not behaving as predicted

chapter 6|10 pages

To be or not to be

Decolonizing African media/communications

chapter 8|19 pages

Decolonising media and communication studies

An exploratory survey on global curricula transformation debates

chapter 9|15 pages

Africa on demand

The production and distribution of African narratives through podcasting

chapter 10|14 pages

The African novel and its global communicative potential

Africa’s soft power

chapter 11|11 pages

Citizen journalism and conflict transformation

Exploring netizens’ digitized shaping of political crises in Kenya

chapter 12|15 pages

Ghetto ‘wall-standing’

Counterhegemonic graffiti in Zimbabwe

chapter 13|11 pages

“Arab Spring” or Arab Winter

Social media and the 21st-century slave trade in Libya

chapter 14|13 pages

On community radio and African interest broadcasting

The case of Vukani Community Radio (VCR)

chapter 15|12 pages

Not just a benevolent bystander

The corrosive role of private sector media on the sustainability of the South African Broadcasting Corporation

chapter 18|11 pages

Nollywood as decoloniality