"This dissertation explores audiovisual assistance programs through an examination of the largest such program: the EU’s ACPCultures+, which since 2008 has awarded over 50 million Euros to nearly 60 audiovisual training programs, distribution initiatives, and production projects in sub-Saharan Afr ... ica and the Caribbean. Using textual and policy analyses, in-depth interviews, and both digital ethnography and multi-sited ethnographic research in Brussels, Addis Ababa, and Nairobi, I analyze three case studies of projects funded by ACPCultures+ – a screenwriting course in Kenya, a pan-African video-on-demand platform, and the first Ethiopian film to screen at Cannes film festival – while tracing the circulation of the program’s aims and policies from its headquarters in Brussels to audiovisual professionals in Africa and the Caribbean. These cases show how, as ACPCultures+ grapples with media diversity in an era of globalization, it builds on postwar histories of both international development and EU cultural and audiovisual policies in ways that simultaneously enable and constrain media industries in the Global South. Ultimately, this research demonstrates how audiovisual assistance programs are an underexamined piece of the global media landscape in which Northern policies and Southern practices together can reframe debates about media and cultural hegemony and suggest new ways of conceptualizing the geographies of audiovisual industries and policy." (Abstract) more

"In this paper, I examine the aims and motivations behind the EU’s audiovisual assistance programs to countries in the Global South, using data from policy documents and semi-structured, in-depth interviews with program managers and administrative staff in Brussels. These programs prioritize forms ... of audiovisual content that are locally specific, yet globally tradable. Furthermore, I argue that they have an ambivalent relationship with traditional notions of international development, one that conceptualizes media not only as a means to achieve economic development and human rights aims, but as a form of development itself." (Abstract) more