Thomas Tufte

Participatory Communication : A Practical Guide

Many communication practitioners and development workers face obstacles and challenges in their practical work. A participatory communication strategy offers a very specific perspective on how to articulate social processes, decision-making processes, and any change process for that matter. Participatory approaches are nothing new. However, what is new is the proliferation of institutions, especially governmental but also nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that seek participatory approaches in their development initiative. This guide concerns to provide perspectives, tools and experiences regarding how to go about it with participatory communication strategies. It is conceived as a guide to be of relevance and utility for development workers in the field. It is targeted at both at government and their officials, the World Bank staff, and at civil society. The particular relevance of this guide is three-fold: 1) placing the practitioner debate about participatory communication within a conceptual framework, allowing the practitioner who reads this to position him or herself conceptually, understanding some of the possible implications of opting for one or another strategic approach in their use of communication; 2) providing an introduction to the use of a participatory communication approach to specific development projects as well as illustrating the use of participatory communication in broader social change processes; and 3) drawing generic lessons learned from the experiences with participatory communication.

ComDev in the Mediatized World

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.

Civil society sphericules: Emerging communication platforms for civic engagement in Tanzania

This article explores the communicative practice of a Tanzanian NGO, Femina. Based on a tripartite model of engagement (Madianou, 2012) integrating speech, action and understanding, and drawing on fieldwork on the communication practices of Femina, I critically assess the forms of civic engagement the organization strategizes about and seeks to articulate amongst Tanzanian youth. Situated in the ‘perverse confluence’ (Dagnino, 2011) between neoliberal and radical democratic agendas in the communicative practices of civil society-driven media platforms, Femina navigates between identities as an NGO, a social movement and a media initiative. In the context of the growing literature on social networking sites and their affordances, dynamics and structures, the case of Femina illustrates how a civil society sphericule emerges within the dynamic co-evolution of new and old media platforms. The study is furthermore an example of the difficult shift in civil society practice, from service provision to an agenda of public service monitoring, social accountability and community engagement.

Afterword : Addressing the Challenge of The Present Continuous

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.

Introduction: Civic mediations

It is with great pleasure that we introduce this special issue of Ethnography on ‘Civic Mediations’. The two of us have long felt that the time is ripe for a deeper conversation about what it means to do an ethnography of the public sphere. In this issue we seek to problematize what public sphere ethnography means as an epistemological problem, as a matter of ethnographic engagement, and as a mode of ethnographic writing and re-presentation. The contributions in this issue take inspiration from and join a robust and multidisciplinary conversation about the relations across media-nation-publics, a conversation that spans the fields of media studies, cultural studies, political communication, and anthropology, and that is informed by the work of Habermas (1991 [1989]) and Anderson (2006 [1983]), as well as by more recent work within media anthropology, the anthropology of mediation, critical theory, semiotics, and communication studies (Abu-Lughod, 2005; Boyer and Hannerz, 2006; Cody, 2011; Couldry, 2010; Couldry et al., 2009; Ginsburg et al., 2002; Vidali and Peterson, 2012; Warner, 2002). Central for all articles in this collection is a concern with the distinct ways in which ethnography contributes to both public sphere theorization and investigation. Thus the question has not been just one of ethnography being a tool for better and more richly documenting public spheres, but about ethnography’s power to inform the theorization of public spheres, from the bottom up. In this sense, ethnography is not simply a method (e.g. participant-observation, close listening, hanging out, or being there), nor is it defined just as a topical or rhetorical focus (e.g. ‘the everyday’ or ‘real people’s stories and voices’). It is also an analytical lens and a mode of theorization. With this analytical sensibility, the ethnographer is guided to look for and explain the complex interconnections across phenomena, as well as the systems of meaning that motivate and result from human action. Such a way of doing ethnography embeds a theory of the social or the cultural, one that takes meaning as emergent in practice (Brauchler and Postill, 2010) and

O renascimento da Comunicação para a transformação social – Redefinindo a disciplina e a prática depois da ‘Primavera Árabe’

No mundo todo, temos experimentado um ressurgimento de praticas multilaterais de Comunicacao para a transformacao social, uma infinidade de acoes em que voz, cidadania e o coletivo tem estado no centro do palco como valores essenciais, de principios e praticas. Assim, esse artigo objetiva analisar as alteracoes conceituais advindas desse contexto de mudanca, pois o mesmo desperta uma serie de questoes. A partir de pesquisa bibliografica, procuramos mostrar que, ao considerar as taticas dos cidadaos na dinâmica comunicativa da sociedade em rede, as instituicoes podem desenvolver uma sensibilidade de modo a ver os cidadaos como agentes da transformacao social.