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This valuable resource offers a wealth of practical and conceptual guidance to all those engaged in struggles for social justice around the world. It explains in accessible language and painstaking detail how to deploy and to understand the tools of media and communication in advancing the goals of social, cultural, and political change. A stand-out reference on a vital topic of primary international concern, with a rising profile in communications and media research programs Multinational editorial team and global contributors Covers the history of the field as well as integrating and reconceptualising its diverse perspectives and approaches Provides a fully formed framework of understanding and identifies likely future developments Features a wealth of insights into the critical role of digital media in development communication and social change
Proposes situating theory and practice within contexts of power, recognizing both the ability of dominant groups to control and the potential for marginal communities to resist. Contributors from communication and anthropology explore the global and institutional structures within which agencies construct social problems and interventions, the discourse guiding the normative climate for conceiving and implementing projects, and the practice of strategic interventions for social change. Examines early and emerging models of development, power dynamics, ethnographic approaches, gender issues, and information technologies.
Questioning Numbers: How to Read and Critique Research is a critical companion for students in research methods courses in any of the social sciences. This book helps teach students how to read and critique research that employs numbers in the course of empirical argument. Author Karin Gwinn Wilkins provides a list of guidelines for reading research and also presents a critical approach to judging and using numbers in navigating and changing social worlds. Illuminating the agendas and politics that can inform how research is conducted and interpreted, this text shows readers how to read and critique research contexts, research design, sampling strategies, definitions, research implementation, data analysis, and interpretation. It also provides strong pedagogical support, including key terms, review exercises, and end-of-chapter reflection questions. A flexible supplement to more comprehensive research texts, Questioning Numbers helps students to become more critical consumers and producers of quantitative research across the social sciences.
Mapping the Middle East -- Narrating the Middle East -- Mediating the Middle East -- Visioning from the U.S. prism.
Case studies of micro-enterprise, girls' education, and population programs suggest that our discourse limits our potential to conceive of development, communication, and gender outside of neoliberal ideologies. Advocacy for global social justice demands a different accountability through critical research.
Andreas Hepp takes an integrative look at one of the biggest questions in media and communications research: how digital media is changing society. Often, such questions are discussed in isolation, losing sight of the overarching context in which they are situated. Hepp has developed a theory of the re-figuration of society by digital media and their infrastructures, and provides an understanding of how profound today’s media-related changes are, not only for institutions, organizations and communities, but for the individual as well. Rooted in the latest research, this book does not stop at a description of media-related change; instead, it raises the normative challenge of what deep mediatization should look like so that it might just stimulate a 'good life' for all. Providing original and critical research, the book introduces deep mediatization to students of media and cultural studies, as well as neighboring disciplines like sociology, political science and other cognate disciplines.
How do the communication practices of governments, NGOs and social movements enhance opportunities for citizen-led change? In this incisive book, Thomas Tufte makes a call for a fundamental rethinking of what it takes to enable citizens’ voices, participation and power in processes of social change. Drawing on examples ranging from the Indignados movement in Spain to media activists in Brazil, from rural community workers in Malawi to UNICEF’s global outreach programmes, he presents cutting-edge debates about the role of media and communication in enhancing social change. He offers both new and contested ideas of approaching social change from below, and highlights the need for institutions – governments and civil society organizations alike – to be in sync with their constituencies. Communication and Social Change provides essential insights to students and scholars of media and communications, as well as anyone concerned with the practices and processes that lead to citizenship, democracy and social justice.
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As the American government uses the threat of terrorist violence to justify stringent domestic and exploitative foreign policies, Arab communities in the United States face the injustice of racial profiling and harrassment. The reaction of Americans to the genre of action-adventure film and its increasing use of Arabs as villians shows how our perceptions of Arab communities and individuals has been skewed. Using focus groups composed of a diverse cross-section of Americans, Karin Gwinn Wilkins analyzes how participants differ in their perception of specific action-adventure films and their Arab villains. More specifically, Wilkins interviews participants and asks them questions directly related to three topics: villains as threats to national security, film settings in relation to fear within global space and the Middle East, and heroes conquering evil. This book addresses the neglected empirical link between documented media stereotypes of Arab communities and the lived consequences of these portrayals, in terms of discriminatory practices and generalizations.