Oscar Hemer
Malmö University
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Nordicom Review | 2012
Oscar Hemer; Thomas Tufte
Abstract In late 2011 we are in the beginning of a revolution that may or may not turn out to be more far-reaching than the one unleashed in 1989. A common denominator in this resurging revolution is the mobilizing power of the so-called social media. Even if labels such as the Twitter or Facebook revolution are rightfully refuted, the on-going Arab Spring is a clear-cut example of an unprecedented communication power, largely out of the authorities’ control. While the crucial role of media and communication in processes of social change at last becomes evident, it is however not associated with the field of communication for development and social change. While that field historically has been about developing prescriptive recipes of communication for some development, it is time attention is refocused to the deliberative, non-institutional change processes that are emerging from a citizens’ profound and often desperate reaction to the global now.
Reclaiming the Public Sphere : Communication, power and social change | 2014
Oscar Hemer; Thomas Tufte
The Fear Industry is certainly one of today’s most lucrative businesses, providing secure jobs, turning private homes into little fortresses and enforcing the ongoing transformation of our cityscapes: Public life moves from street cafes, parks and other open spaces to supervised shopping malls. This trend can be detected all over the world, but nowhere as clearly as in South Africa, where fear and suspicion of the other has been state ideology until little more than a decade ago. Apartheid was one of the most elaborate projects of social engineering –in its repressive brutality comparable only to the grand modern projects of fascism and communism, and one of its most devastating features was the deliberate destruction of all public spaces where interracial encounters might occur. The white South Africans’ paranoia is notorious –and of course not without reason: Afrikaans and English speakers alike, they have enjoyed the privileges of racial segregation all their lives, and the brutal violence of crime in South Africa today bears the accumulated anger of the humiliated and oppressed. During apartheid, the black majority was excluded from the city centres and locked up in peripheral townships and illusionary “homelands”. Now, the white minority and the new affluent black middle class live locked up in their fortified homesteads, terrified of being robbed or murdered. Mauritian-born artist and architect Doung Jahangleer came to Durban in the mid ‘90s and was immediately caught by the atmosphere of fear – which is not an exclusive phenomenon of the white community. Durban is the city with the largest Indian population outside India, and in the South African racial hierarchy, “Indians” and “Coloureds” were the middle categories. Durban, and all of KwaZulu-Natal, were also the epicentre of the deadly antagonism between Inkatha and ANC, which in the early transition process escalated close to civil war. In order to overcome his own fear, Doung went walking into the no-go areas of Durban, exposing himself to the violence, literally asking to get hurt. What he experienced was, however, rather the opposite: The same people that he had learned to dread welcomed and even embraced him. Thus, he started to explore the forgotten urban non-spaces systematically and invited others to share his experience. He initiated City Walks as a form of combined artistic exploration and political intervention, trying (in vain) to convince the municipal authorities to direct attention to what he calls the in-between zones. He takes us –a group of fifteen participants in the Memories of Modernity project– on the 5-hour tour. It starts in Musgrave shopping centre in a predominantly white suburb built on the ruins of former Cato Manor – Durban’s equivalent to the romanticized multicultural townships Sophiatown (Johannesburg) and District Six (Cape Town)– and ends at the BAT Centre in the harbour. Doung leads us along the heavily trafficked N3 freeway, on a parallel pedestrian highway with scattered sweets and cigarette vendors. We make a short cut through an area of deserted apartment blocks, where some time ago the homeless managed to chase away the drug lords, only to be brutally evicted back into the street by the police. We arrive at the Warwick Triangle, the true heart of Durban: a conjunction of crossing freeways, railway terminal and microbus station where, according to Doung, some 600,000 people pass by every day. I have passed it a hundred times in car or taxi on my three visits to Durban, but never on foot –and it is truly a completely different experience. The passage has become a bustling marketplace. The air is thick with petrol and diesel fumes, scents of herbs and dried animals in the medicine stands, and nauseating odours from the food-tents where cow-heads are being axed and boiled. There is also an almost palpable tension in the air. We are obviously out of place. This is a non-place, invisible from a car’s window, and consequentially these are non-people. Even South African tourist guides warn visitors to the nearby Victoria Street Market never to go beyond the limits of the market building. Walking the streets of Durban becomes a revelation. It changes my entire perception of the city and of South Africa as a whole. I discover things I never saw before, and I move with a new kind of casualness. Even in Johannesburg –one of the few places in the world where I have really felt afraid. What does this tell us about communication and social change? Well, maybe it points to the limits of mediated communication. Public spheres are the prerequisites for any kind of democracy, but they require physical public spaces where people actually meet and confront each other. Information alone cannot combat fear. It is necessary to cross the invisible lines and walk out in the urban wilderness, even at the risk of “getting hurt”. There is no other way to reclaim the public sphere.
Archive | 2017
Oscar Hemer; Hans-Åke Persson
In the light of the last two years’ dramatic development in Turkey, the aftermath of the popular protests that started at Gezi Park in Istanbul in the summer of 2013 seems to be fading. What was ce ...
Archive | 2017
Oscar Hemer; Hans-Åke Persson
In the light of the last 2 years’ dramatic development in Turkey, the aftermath of the popular protests that started at Gezi Park in Istanbul in the summer of 2013 seems to be fading. What was celebrated as a sign of democratic maturity in a modern, prospective EU member state now may rather appear as an almost futile attempt to articulate visions of a pluralist political sphere in an increasingly repressive society. This introductory chapter argues, however, that Gezi was a liminal moment whose long-term implications remain to be revealed. In the prism of perspectives on Gezi that are presented in the anthology, this chapter dwells particularly on one reference point, which in the aftermath has attained renewed significance: the Ocalan crisis of 1998, which in an unexpected way were to impact both the Kurdish question and the relations between Turkey and the EU.
Archive | 2016
Oscar Hemer
This chapter discusses the relation between writing and ethnography from two different perspectives. First, drawing from his own experience of both literary, journalistic and academic writing, the author explores the interrelations between these three writing practices, with a specific focus on creative forms of academic writing and even the deployment of fictional elements in ethnographic research. Second, “turning the tables”, he looks at literary texts (books, films and other formats) as ethnographic data. Primarily founding his argument on examples from South Africa and Argentina, he claims that literature may hold key information about processes of development and social change that cannot be assessed by other means. The notion of the conceptual repertoire (Appadurai 1996) is applied in the analysis of fiction’s role in the production of collective memory and self-understanding.
Archive | 2014
Oscar Hemer
Thomas Hylland Eriksen: It would be fun to compare notes with Carsten Jensen regarding how one is perceived as a cosmopolitan intellectual in Norway and Denmark, respectively. There are some striking similarities, and I could subscribe to several of the points made.
Archive | 2005
Oscar Hemer
Archive | 2011
Oscar Hemer
Glocal Times | 2005
Oscar Hemer; Thomas Tufte
Archive | 2012
Oscar Hemer