"How and to what extent are women in grassroots communication creating avenues for democratic communication and fostering social change? How is grassroots communication consolidating women's views and perspectives on gender subordination and social transformation? Women in Grassroots Communication b
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rings together a stellar cast of contributors from across the globe–Africa, Asia, Latin America, and North America–to answer these and other questions. First, they review the various frameworks for addressing the relationship between women, participation, and communication, looking at the ways women have been perceived. Next, the authors look at the social roles of women in their communities, their capabilities to communicate, and their informal networks at the local and community levels. The third section focuses on media production and the issues of media competency, identity, representation, evaluation, and group process. Finally, by looking at the connections between women's participatory practices and wider sociopolitical initiatives, the final chapters examine the issues of organization, leadership, and communication strategies." (Publisher description)
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"This ambitious, broad-ranging study of one of the world's most interesting genres laudably tries to cover the telenovela industry, its creative process, the contents of novelas, and their reception by the working class. Besides having the descriptive richness one might expect of a book-length case
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study, the work has a sophisticated and relatively thorough theoretical orientation [...] Overall this book is a very good introduction to Brazilian television and the telenovela in particular. It is also of considerable value to those interested in Bourdieu's ideas, questions of social class and audience in general, or ethnographic research about audiences in the Third World." (Book review by Joseph Straubhaar, in: Journal of Communication, Spring 1990, page 162-164)
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