"Described as the biggest migration in human history, an estimated 250 million Chinese people have left their villages in recent decades to live and work in urban areas. Xinyuan Wang spent 15 months living among a community of these migrants in a small factory town in southeast China to track their
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use of social media. It was here she witnessed a second migration taking place: a movement from offline to online. As Wang argues, this is not simply a convenient analogy but represents the convergence of two phenomena as profound and consequential as each other, where the online world now provides a home for the migrant workers who feel otherwise ‘homeless’." (Back cover)
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"Anhand einer repräsentativen Umfrage mit 404 Flüchtlingen, die vorwiegend aus Syrien, Irak, Afghanistan, Pakistan und Iran kamen, liefert die vorliegende Studie erstens Erkenntnisse dazu, wie sich Flüchtlinge in ihren Herkunftsländern, auf ihrem Fluchtweg und in Deutschland Informationen versch
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affen und welchen Quellen sie vertrauen. Zweitens interessiert die aktive Nutzung von mobilen Medien zur Verbreitung von Informationen sowie zur Kommunikation mit anderen über die eigene Flucht. Drittens soll die Aufdeckung von Zusammenhängen der Mediennutzung mit Erwartungen, Bewertungen und Entscheidungen der Geflüchteten in Bezug zum Zielland Deutschland dazu dienen, konkretes Verhalten vor und während der Flucht besser verstehbar (und ggf. prognostizierbar) zu machen." (Executive summary)
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"The argument offered in this book is that new technology, as opposed to traditional media such as television, radio, and newspaper, is working against the national grain to weaken its imagined community. Online activities and communications between people and across borders suggest that digital med
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ia has strong implications for different articulations of identity and belongingness, which open new ways of thinking about the imagined community. The findings are based on transnational activities by Kurdish diaspora members across borders that have pushed them to rethink notions of belonging and identity." (Palgrave Macmillan website)
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"This book considers how Moroccan-Dutch youth, mostly born in the Netherlands, navigate digital spaces to articulate their politicized identities in a time when claims over the failure of multiculturalism, anti-immigration sentiments and Islamophobia sweep across Europe. Digital Passages: Migrant Yo
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uth 2.0 addresses not only to how these mostly second-generation migrant youth navigate across digital spaces, but also considers the digitization of key identity-formation processes, such as coming of age, rites of passage and the negotiation of offline/online gender, diaspora, religious and youth cultural expectations." (Introduction, page 14)
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"Drawn from multisited fieldwork conducted among Cameroonians in Germany and Cameroon, the article reveals that the liveness of mobile phone communication influences expectations and narratives of remittances in Cameroonian transnational social relationships. These expectations are meaningful within
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a cultural context where economic resources are expected to flow from migrants to nonmigrants. As this case demonstrates, the general belief in nonmigrants' entitlement to the achievements of those who migrate regardless of their status abroad, also means migrant students are involved in remittances practices. The students are expected to remit and at the same time, they are conscious of their obligation to support people who stay back in the home country. As such, the mobile phone ideally provides an infrastructure through which monetary resources could be coordinated and channeled to Cameroon. While exploring this possibility of remittances transfer, I argue that instant communication contradictorily generates and fuels conflicts mainly as a result of unmet expectations of deploying the phone to directly request money from abroad." (Abstract)
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"This collection takes the study of diasporic communication beyond the level of simply praising its existence, to offering critical engagements and analysis with the systems of journalistic production, process and consumption practices as they relate to people who are living outside the borders of t
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heir birth nation." (Publisher description)
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"The paper focuses on the social media use in religious communication by Kerala Christians who largely migrated after India's independence to Ahmedabat, Gujarat, India. Further, the paper attempts to analyze the way digital and social media are accessed and utilized by the migrant Kerala Christians
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in Ahmedabat for religious as well as non-religious purposes. The paper is basedon a survey of social media and a pilot study was carried out by interns of a business school in Ahmedabat which was followed by a large survey of three religious groups namely Hindu, Muslim and Christian during February-April 2015. The present paper is based on a survey of 211 Christian respondents in the total sample of 711." (Page 67)
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"With essays on audiences in ancient Greece, early modern Germany, Soviet and post-Soviet Russia, Zimbabwe, contemporary Egypt, Bengali India, China, Taiwan, and immigrant diaspora in Belgium, each chapter examines the ways in which audiences are embedded in discourses of power, representation, and
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regulation in different yet overlapping ways according to specific socio-historical contexts." (Publisher description)
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"Today the relations between Arab audiences and Arab media are characterised by pluralism and fragmentation. More than a thousand Arab satellite TV channels alongside other new media platforms are offering all kinds of programming. Religion has also found a vital place as a topic in mainstream media
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or in one of the approximately 135 religious satellite channels that broadcast guidance and entertainment with an Islamic frame of reference. How do Arab audiences make use of mediated religion in negotiations of identity and belonging? The empirical based case studies in this interdisciplinary volume explore audience-media relations with a focus on religious identity in different countries such as Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, Great Britain, Germany, Denmark, and the United States." (Publisher description)
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"Somaliland needs legal, policy and institutional reforms in order to avoid arbitrary and politically motivated interference with the dissemination of information and opinions to the public. This is the conclusion of one of the papers presented at the 4th Annual Conference organized by the Social Re
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search and Development Institute (SORADI). With a focus on media development, the conference in Hargeisa on August 24 and 25 [2013] brought together representatives from government institutions, policy makers, civil society as well as academics, journalists, international scholars, and traditional leaders to discuss, debate and exchange ideas on press freedom in Somaliland's young democracy. With 57 licensed newspapers, 8 TV stations, 108 news websites but only one public radio station the first contribution to the discussion centered on the media industry, its practices and the lack of enforcement of regulatory frameworks. Lessons from what the author of the second paper called "Africa's freedom of speech dilemma" guided the conversation on what there is to learn for Somaliland. Further afield, the third paper dealt with the role of the Diaspora in shaping the media landscape in Somaliland. As part of the discussion on professional media practices, the fourth presentation looked at challenges of Somaliland Universities to offer relevant studies programmes. Debating the intricate issue of balancing rights and responsibilities of media, the fifth paper looked at the performance of the media during the time of elections. The final paper summarised promises and challenges of media freedom in Somaliland." (https://ke.boell.org)
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"This article focuses on the psycho-social dimension of the diaspora through an examination of the online news consumption practices of the Zimbabwean diaspora. The objective is to contribute on theoretical debates about the way in which the diaspora imagine their citizenship in the digital age. Dat
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a were elicited through an open-ended questionnaire e-mailed to Zimbabweans in the diaspora selected using the snowball sampling method. In addition, in-depth interviews with five of the respondents based in South Africa were also held to complement the survey data. The article argues that Zimbabwean diaspora use online newspapers to assert their membership to the Zimbabwean political community. This active information-seeking disposition of the diaspora is an affirmation of their loyalty to the homeland regardless of the social, economic and political reality in the homeland. The symbolic assertion of transnational loyalty by the Zimbabwean diaspora to the homeland could be viewed as a performance of patriotic citizenship through seeking of collective identification around the nation state." (Abstract)
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"In this article, I analyse the changing nature and meaning of ‘community’ in community radio in the digital age using insights from literature on imagined communities, translocality and liminality. I argue that new media technologies are opening up new spaces for community radio that go beyond
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the geographical and community of interest to embrace translocal and diasporic communities. There is thus need to interrogate the meaning of community radio in terms of audiences and programming in such new configurations. I use two community radio stations in South Africa [Bush Radio and Radio Islam] to make my arguments. I conclude by pointing to the need for new research avenues on community radio in the digital age." (Abstract)
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"This book is about the workings of networks of the mobile in Africa, a continent usually associated with the ‘global shadows’ of the world. How do changes in the possibilities for communication, with the recent hype of mobile technology, influence the social and economic dynamics in Africa’s
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mobile margins? To what extent is the freedom associated with new Information and Communication Technologies reality or disillusion for people dwelling in the margins? Are ordinary Africans increasingly Side@Ways? How social are these emergent Side@Ways? Contributions to answering these and related questions are harvested from ethnographic insights by team members of the WOTRO funded ‘Mobile Africa revisited’ research programme hosted by the African Studies Centre, Leiden, The Netherlands." (Publisher description)
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"Este informe analiza las prácticas y consumos mediático-culturales del colectivo marroquí en España, uno de los más numerosos y con un evidente grado de asentamiento como resultado de un ciclo migratorio que ya acumula más de cuatro décadas. Las condiciones objetivas que muestran tal grado d
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e asentamiento contrastan con las percepciones sociales negativas que sigue recibiendo por parte de la sociedad española. Unas percepciones, también de larga trayectoria histórica, que son resultado de una intensa relación de vecindad e intercambio entre Marruecos y España. Hemos estructurado este informe en cinco apartados temáticos. El primero de ellos es básicamente descriptivo, y pretende hacer una somera radiografía de la presencia del colectivo marroquí en España, destacando aquellos elementos que caracterizan su proceso de asentamiento. En segundo lugar, abordamos las tendencias generales que se muestran en el seno de este colectivo en relación al consumo mediático-cultural. Nos hemos basado en sondeos estadísticos, complementados con entrevistas en profundidad/cuestionarios, material que ha sido explotado con la intención de establecer ese perfil de consumo. A continuación, hemos abordado el tema desde una perspectiva religiosa, al entender que ésta alberga nuevas formas de expresión de acceso a productos y contenidos mediáticoculturales. Los dos siguientes apartados, con una vocación también temática, se centran, respectivamente, en el estudio del seguimiento de esta oferta mediático-cultural entre la juventud de origen marroquí y en la oferta disponible de medios de comunicación que han sido producidos por y/o para la población oriunda de Marruecos en el contexto de la sociedad española. Finalizamos con una síntesis de conclusiones y de propuestas generales." (Introducción, página 3-4)
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"Television is the most widely used media among this population: 9 out of 10 interviewed reported watching it at least once last month; satellite dishes are the dominant way of receiving television signal in rural areas (Cable more prevalent in urban areas). Chinese channels are largely reserved for
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entertainment (Distrust the news on most Chinese television channels). Local dialect programming [is] important (Amke, Khamke, or Uke): No single dialect is dominant across all regions; Chinese and English broadcasting has limited audience." (Slide 30)
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