Andrew Skuse

Spaces of Resistance: Informal Settlement, Communication and Community Organisation in a Cape Town Township

This paper examines struggles for urban permanency in an informal settlement on the fringes of Cape Town in the run up to the South African national election of 2004. It focuses on the rapid emergence of the settlement of Nkanini (Forceful) and the key social, cultural, political and communicative dynamics that framed the ensuing bitter struggle between residents and local City of Cape Town authorities over claims to occupy the land. Analysis frames this struggle in terms of a local appropriation of basic human rights legislation that informs community action and therein claims to residential formality.

Managing distance : Rural poverty and the promise of communication in post-apartheid South Africa

This article examines rural telecommunications access and use among poor village households in the Eastern Cape, South Africa. Discussion is based upon a content analysis of 165 telephone calls, as well as a broader information and communication technology (ICT) ownership, access and use survey undertaken in 50 poor households within a number of rural villages in the Mount Frere district. These data are complimented and supported by qualitative data emerging from a longer-term UK Department for International Development-funded study of ICT use and social communication practices among the urban and rural poor in South Africa. The purpose of the article is to: (i) question existing notions of telecommunications access; (ii) assess the extent to which rural inequalities are exacerbated or ameliorated by telecommunications access; and (iii) examine the extent to which telecommunications are enlisted as a strategic tool by poor households for maintaining kin-based redistributive networks and enhancing livelihood sustainability.

Getting connected: the social dynamics of urban telecommunications access and use in Khayelitsha, Cape Town:

This article examines urban telecommunications access and use by poor households in the township of Khayelitsha, Cape Town, South Africa. Analysis draws upon a broad range of quantitative and qualitative data and in doing so seeks to reveal the complexities of how this access and use underpins a wide range of social and economic processes critical to processes of social development. By way of example, the issue of informal urbanisation and housing tenure is addressed, as is the critical role that telecommunications play in facilitating and maintaining important social networks, both across Cape Town and beyond. Further, this article gives consideration to how telecommunications support and enhance livelihood opportunities, and the fact that they are embedded in existing modes of social communication and manifestations of social, cultural and symbolic capital.

Voices of freedom Afghan politics in radio soap opera

This article examines the creative labour of a group of Afghan radio soap opera writers scripting a popular social realist BBC World Service radio drama for broadcast in Afghanistan. Analysis centres on struggles over the political representation of the Taliban within the soap opera between 1996-8, a period in which they dominated politically and militarily. A tension is revealed in analysis between the individual political beliefs of writers and the simultaneous need to ‘realistically’ represent Afghan social and political lives. Production accommodations resulted in the active portrayal of a nostalgic and traditional vision of Afghanistan. It is suggested that these representations ultimately denied a conservative Taliban presence within the soap opera, the portrayal of tradition kept alive for these writers an acceptable sense of a future that held more liberal possibilities than Taliban alternatives.

The Political Economy of Social Capital: Chronic Poverty, Remoteness and Gender in the Rural Eastern Cape

This paper uses two case studies drawn from in-depth ethnographic research in South Africas Eastern Cape to interrogate and problematise the often simplistic or reductive ways in which the concept of social capital is used in debates about development and poverty alleviation. It argues that if the concept is to be useful at all, it needs to be used in ways that are sensitive to the fact that social capital inheres in social relations; that these social relations cannot be understood separately from the meaning-giving practices and discourses with which they are entangled; that the analysis of social capital requires an agent-centred approach that is alive to the way in which it is used, transformed, created, made and remade; and that such an analysis furthermore needs to be alive to the nature of power relations both on the micro-level and the macro-level of political economy. The analysis of social capital therefore should be linked to a careful account of the practices, networks, systems and processes that empower some and enable them to climb out of poverty, but which also marginalise and trap others in poverty that is deep-seated and chronic.

Enlivened objects - The social life, death and rebirth of radio as commodity in Afghanistan

This article examines the social maintenance of commodity exchange and use values with specific regard to radio in Afghanistan. It addresses the socio-symbolic significance of the technology, as reflected in the domestic positioning and care afforded to radio sets. Radio brands, durability, disrepair and repair are also discussed in the context of poverty, the maximization of future exchange values and the long-term extraction of maximal use values. The article addresses notions of mundane everyday object enlivenment and concludes by suggesting that the meaning invested in certain objects, in this instance radio, is characterized by a process of ongoing economic and semantic investment that serves to maintain the object as a source of information, marker of social status, modernity and symbol of global connection.

Vagueness, familiarity and social realism: making meaning of radio soap opera in south-east Afghanistan

This article explores some of the semantic linkages that exist between the producers and consumers of a BBC World Service radio soap opera, produced for Afghanistan. Few ethnographic studies of mass media have tackled both production and consumption; the dominant preference within this emerging sub-discipline favours audience studies and makes unsubstantiated inferences concerning production regimes. This article takes analysis a crucial step forward to examine how the dramatic context of radio soap opera is defined and represented by producers, and appropriated and manipulated by listeners. Via discussion of the opposed categories of vagueness and familiarity, the social realist pretensions of the production - addressed through the criteria of place, voice, sound and language - are assessed against a range of audience readings of this representation of reality. The article concludes by stating that whilst social realism is aspired to and actively pursued by the soap opera’s writers and producers, it is only invested with meanings that are specific and socially located, upon contact with the audience.

Gender, ICTs, and Indicators: Measuring Inequality and Change

Abstract This article explores gender and information and communication technologies (ICTs) in the context of development, by analyzing a range of international ICT indices developed to measure broad access to and use of ICTs. This analysis highlights the relatively slow integration of specific gender-focused indicators into such indices, combined with the weak disaggregation of data by sex. The article also discusses a range of gender-specific indices followed by analysis of some more recent holistic measurement frameworks that help to illuminate how gender sensitivity can be practically integrated into broad-based communication for development (C4D) initiatives. The article concludes by considering some of the practical actions that can be taken to promote gender sensitivity at the program or initiative level.

Radio drama, gender discourse and vernacularization in Afghanistan

Abstract This paper explores how the New Home, New Life radio drama, produced by the BBC Afghan Education Projects Organization (BBC AEPO), integrates gender equity discourses into its production and therein vernacularizes them. It highlights the interplay between a number of internal and external dialogues that coalesce around the production’s dramatic content and cultural propriety. Analysis centres on the portrayal of a range of gendered cultural practices associated with marriage that the production’s funders identify as having negative social implications for girls and women. Examination of in-house production processes, as well as ongoing audience research engagement, reveal New Home, New Life’s representation of gender equity issues to be cautious and driven by an acute understanding that change can only be achieved if it proceeds cautiously and within a cultural frame of reference that is familiar to its listenership.

Sweet tales of the Sarangi: creative strategies and ‘cosmopolitan’ radio drama in Nepal

This paper examines the production of a development‐oriented BBC World Service Trust Nepal radio drama entitled Katha Mitho Sarangiko (Sweet Tales of the Sarangi). It positions this drama as an example of cosmopolitan cultural practice in that its writers and editors engage explicitly in a negotiation or a ‘working through’ of cultural differences as they strive towards their twin drama and development goals of communicating ‘positive’ social and behavioural change, such as conflict reduction, good governance and the observance of human rights. The paper identifies a range of creative strategies employed by the producers in their attempts to link a wide range of culturally, linguistically and geographically distinct locales and situations deemed representative of contemporary Nepal. It is suggested that such ‘linking strategies’ mobilise transnational cultural capital and a range of professional competencies, the most notable of which is a willingness to interpret and represent diverse castes, cultures and ethnicities.