"Lesson one: Put people and principles at the centre of COVID-19 decision-making, not politics. Lesson two: Reframe discussions about responsibility in a pandemic so that those who are considered vulnerable are a priority rather than an afterthought. Lesson three: Prepare ways to share sophisticated
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information quickly in complex, but predictable emergencies so that knowledge, trust, and resources in the population can be leveraged when it happens. Lesson four: Have communication channels and cooperation plans for all governmental and non-governmental authorities and organisations so that the response is coordinated and understandable to the community. Lesson five: Find ways for people to get involved and have a meaningful say in the response: make this the cornerstone of any COVID-19 communication plan. Lesson six: Work to re-engage communities as participating partners; have mechanisms to leverage local and volunteer groups to maximise their knowledge expertise to increase the effectiveness of the COVID-19 response. Lesson seven: Move to more participatory, two-way communications and feedback with vulnerable communities; find out what channels they really use, not just what we want them to use. Lesson eight: Empower local agencies and communities to take a lead role in the response, so they can truly supplement the response and take charge at a local level." (Summary of lessons learned, page 2)
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"The guide aims to make what community engagement practitioners do visible and demonstrate why it matters. We’re not walking Rolodexes for reporters to tap, nor are we party planners or social media administrators. We create spaces and processes for the people we want to serve to articulate their
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experiences and collaborate with our newsrooms to report them. This takes more time and effort than you might think. It involves a lot of unglamorous labor, such as coordinating meetings, taking and distributing notes, following up with people about tasks, facilitating group processes, and developing partnerships — skill sets that are not often celebrated in newsroom culture, but whose absence is felt acutely when they are missing. This guide is about what engagement looks like and what it takes to do it well. My hope is that it fuels colleagues’ efforts nationwide who struggle for recognition and support in newsroom workflows, as well as helps editors and reporters realize that engagement is not separate from editorial, but plays a fundamental role in crafting relevant, powerful, and nuanced journalism." (Page 5)
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"This study examines the social consequences of an ethnic migrant community radio station, Map Radio FM 99, to explore its role for the Shan migrant community in Chiang Mai, Thailand. Fieldwork was conducted for seven weeks between December 2015 and January 2016 to collect data using semi-structured
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interviews, participant observation and relevant documents. Employing a qualitative approach, this study found that participation in community radio helps participants be socially active in Thai society by maximising their participation in the social sphere using media. This study concludes that participation in Map Radio enables the Shan migrant community to better adapt to Thai society by providing and obtaining information necessary for their lives in Thailand and by contributing to the formation of a collective identity as ethnic migrant workers, thereby creating community cohesion. Nonetheless, lack of political efficacy as a result of the challenging political environment in Thailand might partly prevent Map Radio from functioning completely as an alternative public sphere." (Abstract)
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"An innovative new set of citizen engagement practices—collectively known as deliberative democracy—offers important lessons that, when applied to the media development efforts, can help improve media assistance efforts and strengthen independent media environments around the world [...] Through
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a series of five illustrative case studies, the report demonstrates how deliberative democracy practices can be employed in both media development and democracy assistance efforts, particularly in the Global South. Such initiatives produce recommendations that take into account a plurality of voices while building trust between citizens and decision-makers by demonstrating to participants that their issues will be heard and addressed. Ultimately, this process can enable media development funders and practitioners to identify priorities and design locally relevant projects that have a higher likelihood for long-term impact." (Executive summary)
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"[...] this pilot study in Siaya County sought to assess what makes for more effective public participation in Kenya. In contributing to a timely policy concern about how to best meet the imperatives/aspirations of devolution, it sought also to address the limited empirical evidence in scholarship a
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bout how to design effective public participation. The pilot study had two operational components, designed to generate new insights into public participation in the context of devolution in Kenya: 1) implementation of an intervention, designed to generate citizen engagement and feed insights from citizen voice into a Country policy process; 2) a study into the intervention, examining the extent to which its distinct elements make it an effective means of providing for public participation with County governments in Kenya." (Introduction, page 4)
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"Civic life today is mediated. Communities small and large are now using connective platforms to share information, engage in local issues, facilitate vibrant debate, and advocate for social causes. In this timely book, Paul Mihailidis explores the texture of daily engagement in civic life, and the
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resources-human, technological, and practical that citizens employ when engaging in civic actions for positive social impact. In addition to examining the daily civic actions that are embedded in media and digital literacies and human connectedness, Mihailidis outlines a model for empowering young citizens to use media to meaningfully engage in daily life." (Publisher description)
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"Digitization has transformed the way we interact with our social, political and economic environments. While it has enhanced the potential for citizen agency, it has also enabled the collection and analysis of unprecedented amounts of personal data. This requires us to fundamentally rethink our und
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erstanding of digital citizenship, based on an awareness of the ways in which citizens are increasingly monitored, categorized, sorted and profiled. Drawing on extensive empirical research, Digital Citizenship in a Datafied Society offers a new understanding of citizenship in an age defined by data collection and processing. The book traces the social forces that shape digital citizenship by investigating regulatory frameworks, mediated public debate, citizens' knowledge and understanding, and possibilities for dissent and resistance." (Back cover)
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"This article examines the role of local radio in the contemporary media environment, specifically as a site for community engagement. Previous research finds journalistic organisations, at the local level, are critical to the functioning of society and more needs to be understood about their contem
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porary role amid destabilised and fragmented public discourse. In contrast to unrestrained and untrustworthy social media platforms, the mediation of local radio can assist in encouraging more inclusive, constructive, and respectful views from people from diverse sectors of society. Empirical research from a case study of a locally produced ABC Radio Community Conversation event exploring community tensions about built, heritage and environmental development in the Australian island state of Tasmania provides new insights into how the facilitation of local radio discussion can help build trust, public knowledge and enable greater participation. Listening and transparency from journalists about their practices is important, creating a space where people can connect in a civil and empathetic way not easily afforded by social media." (Abstract)
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"My focus in this chapter is on civil society mobilization in Tanintharyi Region in southern Myanmar, and particularly in Kanbauk, a village of about 1,500 households in the Tanintharyi Hills, eighty kilometres north of the regional capital, Dawei. In recent years, Kanbauk villagers have contended w
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ith Delco Ltd, a Yangon-based company that runs a tin and tungsten mine in their area in a production-sharing agreement with the government-owned Mining Enterprise No. 2. Villagers have been seeking to assert some influence over company practices, especially regarding the release of wastewater into local streams. Tensions intensified after an accident in September 2015 in which a tailing pond embankment collapsed causing a flash flood that led to the death of a child and the destruction of many villagers' houses. I discuss the resistance effort that emerged in the village and the company's strategies to suppress and dismiss it. Specifically, I focus on the work of a Kanbauk writer and activist, Aung Lwin, and an evocative essay he wrote, published in May 2016 in Tanintharyi Weekly, a small regional publication. Written from the perspective of a fish dying in a stream polluted by mining waste, Aung Lwin's essay offers a sardonic view of events in the village and hints at a possible arrangement between the company and local government officials. As part of its larger effort to quash local resistance to the mine, Delco filed (and won) a lawsuit against Aung Lwin for criminal defamation under Article 500 of the Myanmar Penal Code. The case reveals the complexities of the current moment in Myanmar and the uncertain spaces in which actors in civil society are operating. It reveals as well the fraught dynamics of media, as authoritarian forces remain active and unpredictable. Although this particular lawsuit was brought against the writer rather than the publication, it has wider implications for Myanmar media, especially for smaller, more vulnerable, regional outlets." (Page 152)
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"Drawing on available data and literature, this paper begins with an introduction on the media landscape in Ghana and explains how the media have contributed to promoting participatory and accountable governance. It further discusses the trends, barriers of media and governance in Ghana and makes ke
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y recommendations on how participatory governance can be improved." (Introduction, page 2)
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"La idea de este libro surgió durante el evento conmemorativo de los 30 años de la publicación de: De los Medios a las Mediaciones (1987), realizado a finales de noviembre de 2017, en el ámbito del Programa de Pós-Graduação em Comunicação da Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul/ Brasil
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. El encuentro reunió a investigadores vinculados a los cursos de postgrado de Rio Grande do Sul, los investigadores Omar Rincón, Amparo Marroquín y Rosario Sanchez, que vinieron de Colombia, El Salvador y Uruguay, respectivamente, además de Immacolata Lopes de la Escola de Comunicação e Artes da Universidade de São Paulo.
La jornada de presentaciones y debates estimuló al colega Omar Rincón a la invitación para organizar esa publicación, según él porque Brasil desarrolló una perspectiva empírica y metodológica muy pertinente y creativa con relación a los mapas de las mediaciones propuestos por Jesús Martín-Barbero (JMB). El mapa más reciente, objeto de esa publicación, fue presentado por JMB en una entrevista con Omar Rincón en el 2017 (Martín-Barbero, 2017a), y hasta el momento de la invitación de Omar había sido poco discutido en el escenario académico latinoamericano, este libro responde a este desafío. El “mapa para investigar el sensorium contemporáneo”, entre confluencias y divergencias con los modelos anteriores (1987, 1998, 2009), propone nuevos ejes y mediaciones para la comprensión de las mutaciones comunicacionales y culturales de nuestro tiempo. Ellos son temporalidad, espacialidad, sensorialidad, tecnicidad, ciudadanía, identidad, narrativa y redes, algunos ya presentes y otros inéditos en el trazado intelectual del autor.
El libro dedica un capítulo para cada una de esas mediaciones y polos, y todos los capítulos empiezan con un mapa sobre el desarrollo conceptual del término que nombra la mediación en la disciplina donde JMB fue a buscarla para plantear su discusión. Esta introducción fue realizada por especialistas invitados por las autoras de cada capítulo, las cuales, a su vez, fueron invitadas por nosotras. La tarea de cada especialista invitado fue rescatar el origen teórico de la mediación en cuestión. Así, la mediación de la ciudadanía fue introducida por un sociólogo, temporalidad por un historiador, espacialidad por un geógrafo y así sucesivamente." (Presentación, páginas 11-12)
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"The study has concluded that there exists a positive relationship between vernacular radio programming content and participation of community in issues of governance. Therefore, it is recommended that vernacular radio stations should give more attention to the content of these programs. Priority sh
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ould be given to issues that are raised by the audience for they are pertinent to them. This will result in more public participation in matters of county governance in Kenya." (Conclusion)
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"The most important messages on the roles technologies can play in enabling citizen voice and accountable and responsive governance are: 1. Not all voices can be expressed via technologies. 2. Technologies can play decisive roles in improving services where the problem is a lack of planning data or
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user feedback. 3. Common design flaws in tech-for-governance initiatives often limit their effectiveness or their governance outcomes. 4. Transparency, information or open data are not sufficient to generate accountability. 5. Technologies can support social mobilisation and collective action by connecting citizens. 6. Technologies can create new spaces for engagement between citizen and state. 7. Technologies can help to empower citizens and strengthen their agency for engagement. 8. The kinds of democratic deliberation needed to challenge a systemic lack of accountability are rarely well supported by technologies. 9. Technologies alone don’t foster the trusting relationships needed between governments and citizens, and within each group of actors. 10. The capacities needed to transform governance relationships are developed offline and in social and political processes, rather than by technologies." (Conclusions, page 24)
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