"Development institutions communicate about development through mediated communication strategies. The advent of image-intensive digital spaces such as Instagram has facilitated communication for these institutions, making ‘development’ more accessible to the public. However, the representation
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of development in these institutional digital spaces remains largely unexamined. By conceptualising Instagram as an emerging context for the ‘public face of development’, we conducted a content analysis of 300 Instagram posts by three major bilateral development agencies (USAID, DFID, and SIDA) in order to address critical questions concerning how they communicated about development agendas, subjects, and processes of development to the public. The study reveals that these representations of development in digital space largely adhere to feminised and infantilised visions of ‘ideal victimhood’ when projecting ‘what’ and ‘who’ should receive attention. These representations thus served to justify the Western-centred, neoliberal modes of development. Overall, these agencies’ communicative patterns regarding ‘how development can be achieved’ articulate perspectives on development to ‘look-good’ at home and ‘do-good’ abroad that make social change seem readily achievable." (Abstract)
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"The images used to market development often feature women, as victims of terrible traditions and disempowering situations, or – more commonly these days – as enterprising agents of change, poised to ‘lift’ economies and their families and communities. These images tell a story of victims an
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d heroines, representing development as a project of uplift and rescue. This chapter explores the politics of these representations. It takes as its point of entry a film project that sought to disrupt these narratives, producing a short film called Save us from Saviours. Engaging with those often represented as tragic victims and left out of the story of enterprising entrepreneurs to tell a story about sex work, collective action and social change, the film speaks to a set of larger questions about development intervention. Juxtaposing Save us from Saviours with another film, made at the same time about some of the same people, which gave rise to a third film, made by the sex workers in response, the chapter reflects on the complexities of development communications in an age of global connectivity." (Abstract)
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"Every photography subject deserves to be treated as an autonomous human being, capable of making independent decisions. In case of children, we also need to ensure their parents’ consent. We need to be constantly aware of our position in the power hierarchy — in the development world, in many c
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ases, we control the subject’s access to money, schooling, opportunities, and even fun. So they may defer to us by default, and it is our responsibility to not take advantage of this. It is our duty to protect the subjects from harm, and to ensure they enjoy every possible benefit of participating in our activity." (Page 8)
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"This handbook provides a distinctly African perspective on how to create direct linkages between consumers of information and development projects by using words and images that communicate and resonate with ease. Development issues can seem dull and flat but they can create a huge impact in societ
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y if turned into lively and robust stories expertly and skillfully told by creative journalists. With the help of this handbook, the African storyteller will be able to tell stories that matter on issues that matter and in a manner that does not clutter the page but appeals to the eye and the heart. After all, in development journalism, it doesn’t have to bleed in order to lead; it only needs to be readable and relevant. And finally, in an era of fake news that threatens to not only distort the truth, but sometimes endanger society through incitement to violence, it’s more important than ever that African journalists maintain the highest standards and use the latest tools to fight back." (Foreword, page 5)
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"International non-governmental organizations (INGOs) are known to employ freelancers to produce multimedia and to pitch it for them to mainstream news outlets. So it seems odd that research about the blurring of news organizations and INGOs has been largely focused upon the practices of full-time s
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taff at these kinds of organizations. To help fill this lacuna, this article constructs a model capable of interrogating the multiple forms of structure and agency at the heart of such forms of freelancing by blending Critical Realist theory with work by Bourdieu. It then uses this model to analyse semi-structured interviews with six freelancers who were involved in the production of media items about sub-Saharan countries. All of them were found to erode the distinction between INGOs and news organizations through different kinds of commissioning and syndication practices. But this article's main critical contribution lies in its efforts to illuminate why freelancers chose to engage in such liminal work; for the legitimating rationales they employed enabled them to avoid the “inter-role conflicts” experienced by freelancers who work for news outlets and commercial public relations organizations." (Abstract)
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"At present, INGOs, development agencies and media producers who attempt to engage audiences in issues of international development and social change operate in an increasingly saturated media environment, which is content rich but time poor. This leads to a search for innovative, web 2.0-native way
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s of presenting these often complex and challenging issues such as is interactive web documentary -a format that combines digital, interactive and social media with the documentary form. In this article I consider how interactive web documentary might affect audience engagement with issues of international development and social change via audience surveys and interviews based on two cases of idocs. Three modes of engagement appear to be enhanced by the format: active, emotional and critical engagement. Barriers to engagement -access, audience interest and tensions between discourses of gaming and issues of international development and social change- must be negotiated for the format to succeed in its aims." (Abstract)
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"Understanding how the British media has framed British aid efforts to Afghanistan is imperative to successfully campaign for continued public support for the long term development of the country. This is especially important given the scheduled troop withdrawal in 2014, which many commentators have
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cautioned is likely to result in a decrease in media interest on Afghanistan. This report investigates Afghanistan in the British print media from December 2008 to November 2013. Specifically, it focuses on the British print media’s portrayal of British aid efforts in Afghanistan in 2013. The report aims to provide the British and Irish Agencies Afghanistan Group (BAAG) with an understanding of the amount of coverage Afghanistan has received, how the British print media has framed British aid efforts in Afghanistan in 2013, the obstacles and influences that journalists face in reporting on Afghanistan, and how journalists perceive this narrative to unfold given the political developments ahead. The findings of this report are drawn from a Nexis UK search, a content analysis and interviews conducted with key journalists reporting on Afghanistan." (Executive summary)
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"Through the efforts of increasingly media-aware NGOs, people in the west are bombarded with images of poverty and inequality in the developing world. Representations of Poverty is the first comprehensive study of the communications and imagery used by international NGOs to represent the developing
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world. In this meticulously researched and original book, Nandita Dogra examines the full cycle of representation - integrating analyses of the public messages of international development NGOs in the UK with the views of their staff and audiences. Exploring the Europeanised discourses inherent in appeals to this notion of a 'common humanity', she argues for a greater acknowledgment of NGOs as significant mediating institutions which can expand understandings of global inequalities and their historical causation." (Publisher description)
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"This article considers research approaches often associated with media and journalism studies as complementary assessment strategies to inform decisions associated with evaluating foreign aid. In order to do so, the case of British foreign aid towards Colombia in the context of the War on Drugs is
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examined as a case study. The authors explore the relationship between aid giving and the receipt of aid by focusing on how the media can be used as a peacebuilding indicator. There is a dearth of academic inquiry into these issues. This article attempts to flesh out some future lines of scholarly enquiry using the UK–Colombia case study example. It uses research interviews with state officials, multilateral organizations and NGO representatives as well as a review of press coverage in Colombia over a two-year period. The article argues that media could potentially be used as an important indicator of peacebuilding success and failure in the context of aid giving and receipt but that to achieve that there are specific pre-conditions and issues to be addressed by the different parties." (Abtrtact)
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"Para la elaboración de una información veraz sobre Cooperación y los países del Sur, es necesario un empleo adecuado de la terminología, objetivo que Farmamundi pretende con el glosario de conceptos presentado en este documento, sin olvidar que hay tener en cuenta una serie de principios que c
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ontribuyen a que la información pueda ser lo más fiel posible a la realidad de los hechos sobre los que se informa. Por ello, dentro de esa idea de que ONGD y Medios de Comunicación aúnen esfuerzos para crear una conciencia social que persiga un mundo algo más justo y humano, se exponen a continuación algunas ideas que pueden servir de referencia para una labor comunicativa más instructiva." (Página 7)
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"El presente estudio se propone describir y analizar las representaciones de la pobreza en los medios gráficos de 8 países de Centroamérica y el Caribe. Para tal fin se ha tomado como referencia un período de 6 meses, entre abril y septiembre de 2008, considerando el cual se realizó un relevami
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ento de las noticias que hacen referencia, directa o indirectamente, a la problemática de la pobreza en los siguientes diarios según países [...] El discurso narrativo provee principios de inteligibilidad de la realidad histórica que resultan constitutivos de la propia comprensión humana del pasado y su contemporaneidad. Lo propio del relato es la posibilidad de ordenar una serie cronológica de eventos en una trama cuyo tema será la confi guración de un conjunto de relaciones entre agentes, acciones y acontecimientos." (Presentación del estudio, página 7)
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"In many ways, this book is a simple and straightforward product of social science research. A conceptual expectation was created through the integration and extension of existing theory and research findings. The responsiveness argument presented in chapter 2 lead to the expectation that aid bureau
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cracies will try to roughly match the levels of aid they offer with their perception of the domestic political importance of the recipient. It was argued that the news media provide a simple, clear and easily accessible indicator of that importance and, as a result, it was expected that aid bureaucracies will respond to the content of the news media by matching development aid allocations with levels of coverage. From that conceptual foundation, a comparative battery of tests were conducted to evaluate the empirical implications of that expectation, and to address at least a few of the obvious potential objections or critiques. In analysis after analysis, the predicted relationship was found: aid levels and media coverage are clearly correlated." (Page 137)
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"Which global injustices gain your sympathy, attention, and money? Rarely the most deserving. For every Tibetan monk or Central American indigenous activist you see on the evening news, countless other worthy causes languish in obscurity. The groups that reach the global limelight often do so at dea
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r cost—by distorting their principles and alienating their constituencies for the sake of appealing to self-interested donors in rich nations." (Abstract)
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"Diese Publikation beschreibt über 140 in der Bundesrepublik erscheinende Periodika. Neben bibliographischen Hinweisen werden Themenschwerpunkte, Zielsetzung und Anspruch der Zeitschrift benannt." (commbox)