"Based on 16-month ethnographic fieldwork in Shanghai, Ageing with Smartphones in Urban China tackles the intersection between the ‘two revolutions’ experienced by the older generation in Shanghai: the contemporary smartphone-based digital revolution and the earlier communist revolutions. We fin
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d that we can only explain the smartphone revolution if we first appreciate the long-term consequences of these people’s experiences during the communist revolutions. The context of this book is a wide range of dramatic social transformations in China, from the Cultural Revolution to the individualism and Confucianism in Digital China. Supported by detailed ethnographic material, the observations and analyses provide a panoramic view of the social landscape of contemporary China, including topics such as the digital and everyday life, ageing and healthcare, intergenerational relations and family development, community building and grassroots organizations, collective memories and political attitudes among ordinary Chinese people." (Publisher description).
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"Ageing with Smartphones in Uganda is based on a 16-month ethnography about experiences of ageing in a neighbourhood in a diverse neighbourhood in Kampala, Uganda. It examines the impact of smartphones and mobile phones on older people’s health and everyday lives as part of the global 'Anthropolog
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y of Smartphones and Smart Ageing' project. In taking the lens of the smartphone to understand experiences of ageing in this context, the monograph presents the articulation and practice of ‘togetherness in the dotcom age’. Taking a ‘convivial’ approach, which celebrates multiple ways of knowing about social life, Charlotte Hawkins draws from these expressions about cooperative morality and modernity to consider the everyday mitigation of profound social change. ‘Dotcom’ is understood to encompass everything from the influence of social media to urban migration and lifestyles in the city, to shifts in ways of knowing and relating. At the same time, dotcom tools such as mobile phones and smartphones facilitate elder care through, for example, regular mobile money remittances. This book explores how dotcom relates to older people’s health, in particular their care norms, social standing, values of respect and relatedness, and intergenerational relationships – both political and personal. It also re-frames the youth-centricity of research on the city and work, new media and technology, politics and service provision in Uganda. Through ethnographic consideration of everyday life and self-formation in this context, the monograph seeks to contribute to an ever-incomplete understanding of how we relate to each other and to the world around us." (Publisher description).
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"Based on 16 months of ethnographic fieldwork, Ageing with Smartphones in Urban Chile analyses the experience of ageing for Peruvian migrants aged around 60, who have lived in Chile for over 20 years. Their lives are informed by a series of experiences of being in between. They live between two coun
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tries, two generations (their Peruvian parents and their Chilean children), two different stages in life (retained youth and menacing old age), between giving care (to their parents) and not wanting care (from their children) and between a continuing legacy (through their children, who have a promising future) and not transmitting legacy (some traditions will not pass on to the next generation). Peruvian migration has been one of the most studied in Chile. However, neither the experience of ageing of migrants in Chile nor the experience of late middle age has been fully addressed yet. By focusing on the entanglement of ageing, migration and technology, this monograph is an ethnographic contribution to an unexplored subject in the vast literature on migration studies in Chile." (Publisher description).
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"With people living longer all over the world, ageing has been framed as a socio-economic problem. In Brazil, older people are expected to remain healthy and autonomous while actively participating in society. Based on ethnographic research in São Paulo, Ageing with Smartphones in Urban Brazil show
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s how older people in a middle-class neighbourhood conciliate these expectations with the freedom and pleasures reserved for the Third Age. Work is what bonds this community together, providing a sense of dignity and citizenship." (Publisher description).
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"How does donor funding affect the independence, role perceptions, and ideology of the journalism it supports? We begin to answer this increasingly important but underresearched question with a year-long case study of the humanitarian news organisation IRIN as it transitioned from being funded by th
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e United Nations to a private foundation, run by a Malaysian billionaire. Using content analysis, in-depth interviews, and ethnographic research, we document the changes that occurred in IRIN’s outputs, target audience, and public service values, and the complex interplay of influences that produced these changes. We find that, in this case, donor power operated entirely indirectly and always in concert with the dominant professional values within IRIN. In doing so, this case study highlights the importance of journalistic agency and contextual variables in the journalist–donor relationship, as well as the potential significance of contradictory dynamics. We also use this case to test whether Benson, Hessérus and Sedel’s model of media owner power can help to explain the workings of donor power." (Abstract)
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"This article presents an ethnographic approach to how low-income Brazilians of impoverished urban areas have engaged in community journalism and media activism. Exploring empirical materials collected during a seven-year research process (2009-2016), the article has two main objectives. One is to a
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nalyze how low-income youth reflect on their own processes of engagement in communication for social change (CFSC). Another objective is to demonstrate how ethnography can provide in-depth analyses of trajectories and initiatives in CFSC. The article primarily focuses on retrospective accounts of young adults who had participated in media-educational projects by nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and subsequently became active agents of change in, through and about media. The analysis of these accounts indicates how the participation in NGO projects characterize actions for self-development. It also demonstrates how interactions among participants–not necessarily anticipated by NGOs –are crucial for low-income youth to engage in activist media and journalism in peripheral Rio de Janeiro. The article ends with a reflection about how ethnography is a useful method to add in-depth qualitative layers to the evaluation of CFSC initiatives." (Abstract)
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"[...] This thesis contributes to the emerging academic literature on media development and its role in statebuilding. It does so by investigating media development in the new state of South Sudan. Ethnographic observations, a social survey, and unstructured interviews have been applied during a fie
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ldwork spell in Juba, which lasted from November 2014 to August 2015. The application of three methods allowed for an in-depth investigation of the South Sudanese understanding of media, which differed significantly from the aims of western media experts implementing media development projects. Furthermore, the thesis compares the strengths and weaknesses, and the results delivered, by each utilised research method, and thus investigates how these methods perform in a country of the global South. I argue that the various understandings of media in South Sudan differ significantly from the thinking and practices of western media practitioners. In South Sudan, this resulted in a deteriorating relationship between the country’s government and its international donors and led to problems for the newly trained journalists. Furthermore, my results show the limitations of using just one method in a country of the global South; and they provide an argument for bricolage, a research approach that combines perspectives, theories, and methods, when researching policy-relevant questions in environments where the researcher is not a cultural native." (Abstract)
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"Community Radio is still nascent in Bangladesh while in India it has completed a decade and in Nepal it has existed in its myriad forms without a policy for much longer [...] The existence or non-existence of a guiding national CR policy plays an important role in determining the kind of Community
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Radio being sustained in the country. The policy has impacted the kinds of institution that is eligible to establish Community Radio as well as the kind of institutions the Community Radios themselves are evolving into. The practices at the stations in the three countries are quite diverse with CR stations in Nepal having a slight edge over those in India and Bangladesh from the point of having evolved as ‘media’ organizations’ rather than as ‘development’ organizations. Communities in all three countries are conceived of as geographic communities and not as communities of interest. All stations work on principles of not for profit in India and Bangladesh where as the underlying principles in Nepal seems to be community shareholding at least in the CR stations that were part of the study." (Conclusions, page 33)
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"The purpose of this thesis is to investigate and analyse the role of community-based media in information distribution in the Riverside community, Chanthaburi province, Eastern Thailand. Recently, this strong community has been identified as a cultural tourism destination. The community has started
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to produce its own media, and to use social networks to promote itself and its attractions to the nation. This project advances knowledge of the role of community-based media in a community environment in the Thai public sphere. Furthermore, it strengthens knowledge of the role of community-based media in its broadest sense as an important form of cultural production. By using ethnographic action research, this research gains strength through a rich understanding of the community by following an ongoing research cycle of planning, doing, observing and reflecting. Beyond that, this study reflects the idea of "hyperlocal" media. With approximately a hundred households on which to focus, it is much easier for hyperlocal media to reach local people by providing local news, covering local politics and engaging local people in the affairs relevant to their area. As a result, the findings of this paper will reinforce the idea that "hyperlocal" communication has played a much more proactive role in the community context." (Abstract)
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