"This study analyses the content of the messages on the Facebook Page 'Support for Farmers' from the premise of Habermas's 'Public Sphere'. The results show that the discussions in support of the farmers' protest on Facebook galvanized the public interest on the problematic issues faced by farmers a
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nd rally support for their cause." (Abstract)
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"The Routledge Companion to Media and Activism is a wide-ranging collection of 42 original and authoritative essays by leading contributors from a variety of academic disciplines. Introducing and exploring central debates about the diverse relationships between both media and protest, and communicat
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ion and social change, the book offers readers a reliable and informed guide to understanding how media and activism influence one another. The expert contributors examine the tactics and strategies of protest movements, and how activists organize themselves and each other; they investigate the dilemmas of media coverage and the creation of alternative media spaces and platforms; and they emphasize the importance of creativity and art in social change. Bringing together case studies and contributors from six continents, the collection is organized around themes that address past, present and future developments from around the world." (Publisher description)
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"This policy brief examines the work of civil society activists struggling for peace by using social media around the world. Drawing from extensive field research, as well as the social media actions of activists and civil society members of India, Pakistan and beyond, this brief explains how the so
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cial media strategies of civil society activists can ease the risk of war and violence and improve the prospect for long-term peaceful relations between both countries. The South Asia region, including Afghanistan, India and Pakistan, has been known for intractable regional conflict. The conflict between India and Pakistan over Kashmir led to four wars (1948, 1965, 1971, and 1999) between these countries. Although peace efforts on the part of civil society activists have existed for many years, civil society’s use of social media for peace between both the countries is a new trend. This policy brief endeavours to add new insights on civil society’s use of social media to support peace. The brief also looks at how the civil society members deploy innovative strategies of communication—mixing social media and other methods—to plan, coordinate and practice actions, such as protests, talks, and marches. This policy brief attempts to enhance existing dimensions to the ques-tion of how to respond to the rising conflicts between nuclear countries India and Pakistan – an issue that can no longer remain unnoticed by members of civil society and the interna-tional community." (Summary)
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"This book highlights key words for modern India in everyday usage as well as in scholarly contexts. Encompassing over 250 key words across a wide range of topics, including aesthetics and ceremony, gender, technology and economics, past memories and future imaginaries, these entries introduce some
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of the basic concepts that inform the 'cultural unconscious' of the Indian subcontinent in order to translate them into critical tools for literary, political, cultural and cognitive studies. Inspired by Raymond Williams' pioneering exploration of English culture and society through the study of keywords, Keywords for India brings together more than 200 leading sub-continental scholars to form a polyphonic collective." (Publisher description)
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"The book has covered a wide range of topics within a specific area of mobile journalism. It presents the case studies and first-hand experiences from different parts of the country. As the chapters are written by the academicians, proessionals and practitioners, it has an appropriate blend of theor
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etical and practical aspects of mobile jornalism. It is a pioneering work in the are of mobile journalism and mobile film making." (Foreword, page 6)
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"This article analyses female journalists’ perceptions of their own role, their power in the newsroom, their influence over the news agenda and the challenges they face on a daily basis in two large media-saturated countries and emerging democracies, India and South Africa. India and South Africa
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are both nations that are trying to overcome historical legacies of patriarchal structures and gendered attitudes about women’s role. The authors conclude that female journalists articulated their experiences of newsroom culture as hegemonically masculine. While it appears that female journalists believe that women have made some strides in covering political news, they still see their influence as limited and continue to battle pre-existing professional stereotypes." (Abstract)
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"An increasing number of governments around the world are forcing internet service providers to slow their services during critical sociopolitical junctures—a practice known as throttling—infringing on citizens’ right to information and freedom of expression. Despite its deleterious impact on
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media development and foundational rights, throttling remains an often-neglected topic and risks becoming a pervasive, yet hidden, threat to press freedoms, democracy, and human rights. Throttling refers to the intentional slowing of an internet service by an internet service provider. It stifles the free flow of information during critical moments and prevents journalists from providing vital information to citizens abroad and at home. Due to its difficulty to detect, throttling shields authorities from public scrutiny. Businesses have a duty to be transparent about how and when governments force them to disrupt their services, yet often remain silent on the issue." (Key findings)
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"This book presents five cases that reflect on the experiences of using practices consistent with the 'Evaluating C4D framework' [published by June Lennie and Jo Tacchi in 2013]. Case studies are important to help move from a set of ideal principles to an understanding of how the framework may be op
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erationalized within the actual realities of development institutions, organizations, and communities. The authors of each chapter focus on a few key principles from the framework and contextualize how they interpreted those principles in relation to various methods, models, and projects. As well as showing the usefulness and opportunities, they illustrate the challenges of balancing the various principles as well as real-world practical needs." (Overview of the book, page 10)
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"At Video Volunteers, we will always remember this year as the year that our network of correspondents came of age. They demonstrated their commitment not just to the work but to the organization; they proved to the world that Video Volunteers is a resilient organization, and thanks to them, we fini
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shed the year stronger than we began it. Though we did launch several new initiatives, this was a year where we consolidated our core work and reaffirmed our commitment to: Building the strongest network of activist journalists in rural India; Creating concrete, tangible impact in people's lives through local action campaigns; Broadening society's ideas of who is an expert, who deserves our attention and whose voice should be listened to." (Introduction)
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"This toolkit aims to assist community radio stations to understand each of the 17 Goals, engage with different actors and stakeholders, map policies and initiatives at the level of both, central and state governments in India, and provide ideas for design of content and outreach campaigns. After re
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ading this manual and completing the exercises listed we are confident that the community radio station representatives will be able to: 1. Understand and appreciate the SDGs; 2. Identify stakeholders within the geographical area of the station’s broadcast; 3. Create discussion points with the community members and actively engage with other key stakeholders to produce relevant content and outreach activities." (Introduction, page 23)
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"Im Jahr 2000 gründeten drei junge Männer das Internetportal »Indernet« – einen deutschsprachigen Raum von »Indern der zweiten Generation« für »Inder der zweiten Generation«. Aufbauend auf Material, das sie über 17 Jahre gesammelt hat, legt Urmila Goel in ihrer Ethnografie drei Mosaike d
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ieses virtuellen Raums. Sie beschreibt, wie die unterschiedlichen Teile des Portals (Artikel, Forum, Gästebuch, etc.) genutzt wurden und zeichnet die Entwicklungsschritte des Community-Portals von seiner Gründung bis zum Umzug ins Web 2.0 nach. Dabei analysiert sie rassismuskritisch, wie das »Indernet« zu einem Raum der natio-ethno-kulturellen (Mehrfach-)Zugehörigkeit wurde und welche Ausschlüsse damit einhergingen." (Verlagsbeschreibung)
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"This collection charts the emergence of modern science communication across the world. This is the first volume to map investment around the globe in science centres, university courses and research, publications and conferences as well as tell the national stories of science communication. How did
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it all begin? How has development varied from one country to another? What motivated governments, institutions and people to see science communication as an answer to questions of the social place of science? Communicating Science describes the pathways followed by 39 different countries. All continents and many cultures are represented. For some countries, this is the first time that their science communication story has been told." (Publisher description)
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"This report was commissioned by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to examine women’s representation in COVID-19/coronavirus newsgathering and news coverage in India, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, the UK, and the US. It is rooted in a computational news content analysis of 11,913 publications an
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d 1.9 million stories between 1st March and 15th April 2020 undertaken by Media Ecosystems Analysis Group; an in-depth qualitative portrayal analysis of 175 highly ranked COVID-19/coronavirus stories across the six countries; quantitative analysis of eight public-facing bespoke Google surveys, as well as multi-country secondary surveys; a pronoun content analysis of COVID-19 headlines; story frames analyses using Google’s news search engine, the Internet TV News Archive in 2020 and the GDELT Project global online news archive for 2017 to 2020; and interrogation of a number of global statistical databases [...] The report has examined the news coverage of the COVID-19/coronavirus story through the lenses of three indicators of gender equality: women as sources of news expertise; news stories leading with women protagonists; and coverage of gender equality issues. The insights from the report have led to the creation of 21 recommendations which aim to support news providers who wish to amplify the substantially muted voices of women in news coverage of the COVID19/coronavirus story. The report has uncovered a substantial bias towards men’s perspectives in the newsgathering and news coverage of this pandemic across both the global north (the UK and US) and the global south (India, Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa). This bias operates against a backdrop of women’s effective political invisibility within the COVID-19-related decision-making process in the countries analyzed and the unique socioeconomic, health and psychological challenges that women face globally. Every individual woman’s voice in the news on COVID19 is drowned out by the voices of at least three, four, or five men. The women who are given a platform in the COVID-19/coronavirus story are rarely portrayed as authoritative experts or as empowered individuals but more frequently as sources of personal opinion or as victims/people affected by the disease." (Executive summary)
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"The new militant movement in Kashmir, which began with Burhan Wani in the southern areas, has escalated the conflict in the Valley. While militancy is not new in Kashmir, the Pulwama attack put the conflict back on the radar of the international community. This paper examines the changing nature of
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militancy in Kashmir, specifically with regard to training, recruitment patterns and the use of social media, public support for militants, and an apparent ideological drift. The paper identifies four new variables that have changed the contours of militancy in Kashmir, further complicating the security threats to the Indian state." (Abstract)
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"The essays collected here are based on two decades of engagement with the residents of the slums of Govindpuri in India’s capital, Delhi. The book presents stories of many kinds, from speculative treatises, via the recollection of a thousand everyday conversations, to an account of the making of
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a radio documentary. Zig-zagging through the lanes of Govindpuri, Listening into Others explores the vibrant sounds emanating from slum culture. Redefining ethnography as listening in passing, Chandola excels at narrating the stories of the everyday. The ubiquity of smartphones, sonic selfies, wailing, the ethics of wearing jeans, the crossroad rituals of elections, the political agency of slum-dwellers, the war of the sexes through bodily gestures, and conflicts over ownership of both property and sound generated in the slums — these are among the many encounters Chandola opens up to the reader. Slums are anxious spaces in the materiality, experience, and imagination of a city. They are the by-products of the violent and exploitative mechanisms of urbanization. What becomes of the slum-dwellers, who universally, across centuries, cities and continents, befall similar fates of being discriminated, reckoned to be the scum of the earth, and a burden on society? By listening to identified others and amplifying their voices in their own vocabularies and grammar, Tripta Chandola’s praxis creates a methodological, political, and poetic rupture. Slums, she finds, are not anathema to the city’s past, present, or future. They are an integral component of urbanization and a foundational part of the city." (Publisher description)
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"Trust in news has eroded worldwide. According to the Reuters Institute’s Digital News Report 2020, fewer than four in ten people (38%) across 40 markets say they typically trust most news. While trust has fallen by double digit margins in recent years in many places, including Brazil and the Unit
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ed Kingdom, in other countries more stable overall trends conceal stark and growing partisan divides. Why is trust eroding, how does it play out across different contexts and different groups, what are the implications, and what might be done about it? These are the organising questions behind the Trust in News Project. This report is the first of many we will publish from the project over the next three years. Because trust is a relationship between trustors and trustees, we anticipate focusing primarily on audiences and the way they think about trust, but we begin the project by taking stock of how those who study journalism and those who practice it think about the subject [...] We focus on media environments in four democracies – Brazil, India, the United Kingdom, and the United States. These countries encompass both the Global South and North, with a range of cultural heterogeneity and political practices that vary in their partisan and populist tendencies. For our purposes, one of the most important differences across these countries is in how audiences have integrated digital and social media practices into how they consume news. Whereas public social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter have rapidly become key conduits of information in democracies worldwide, many of those we interviewed pointed to the popularity of encrypted messaging services like WhatsApp, specifically in Brazil and India, which have combined with deficits in digital literacy to serve as a ‘breeding ground’ for misinformation and disinformation (Chakrabarti et al. 2018). As Irineu Machado, head of content delivery at UOL (Brazil), told us, audiences increasingly ‘distrust organisations who traditionally’ cover news and ‘distrust information in general’, and some rely not just on public social networking sites but also private groups and messaging applications [...] This report is divided into two main sections. First, we outline important lessons from existing research and practitioners’ observations on trust in news. Second, we identify outstanding questions that we expect will guide our project in the years ahead." (Introduction)
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"The study revealed some clear patterns about why people fall for misinformation, regardless of their age, gender or education level. Some of the key trends common across city and village respondents were: 1. Majority of the respondents do not question the source of the information, or assess if the
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source or sender is a credible authority on the subject. Respondents across demographics focus more on the content of the message and rely on personal biases and beliefs while deciding whether they will believe or reject a message. 2. Respondents usually do not verify information from alternative sources on the web. There is a noticeable skepticism against social media, but despite that it is noteworthy that majority respondents are unaware of strategies to evaluate evidence or verify online content. 3. A great deal of trust in mainstream media, to the point that they blindly trust information misattributed to mainstream media. 4. Majority respondents do not realise the extent of manipulated content they access online. Respondents are also oblivious to the absence of gatekeeping on social media and the difference of nature between news versus non-news content. 5. If the sender is a prominent influencer or a person they look upto, respondents were more likely to believe the message. Believability increases if the ideology of person sharing information aligns with that of the audience." (Key insights from user study, page 4)
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"The world is facing an unprecedented climate and environmental emergency. Scientists have identified human activity as primarily responsible for the climate crisis, which together with rampant environmental pollution, and the unbridled activities of the extractive and agricultural industries, pose
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a direct threat to the sustainability of life on this planet. This edition of Global Information Society Watch (GISWatch) seeks to understand the constructive role that technology can play in confronting the crises. It disrupts the normative understanding of technology being an easy panacea to the planet’s environmental challenges and suggests that a nuanced and contextual use of technology is necessary for real sustainability to be achieved. A series of thematic reports frame different aspects of the relationship between digital technology and environmental sustainability from a human rights and social justice perspective, while 46 country and regional reports explore the diverse frontiers where technology meets the needs of both the environment and communities and where technology itself becomes a challenge to a sustainable future." (Back cover)
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