You can access the Glocal Times/Nordicom Review special issue online at Glocal Times and Nordicom Review. This journal is also available in a printed journal format published this month. This publication is the result of a collaboration between Glocal Times, the ComDev web-magazine and Nordicom Review, the refereed media and communication academic journal published by Gothenburg University. Conceived and Edited by Florencia Enghel, Ph.D. candidate at Karlstad University, Sweden and Karin Wilkins, professor at the University of Texas, US. This Global Times/Nordicom special issue has many points of contact with the ComDev programme and we are very proud to be involved in this important contribution to the continuing discussions around the field of Communication for Development. One of the editors Florencia Enghel is a ComDev alumnus, who continues to be closely involved with ComDev returning frequently as a guest lecture. Co-editor Karin Wilkins is also a regular contributor to the ComDev programme both as guest lecturer and examiner.
Several of the authors involved in this publication work with the ComDev programme at Malmö University. Programme Coordinator Oscar Hemer has contributed an article, written together with Thomas Tufte, titled “ComDev in the Mediatized World”. You can read the foreword Oscar has written for the Glocal Times edition here. ComDev teachers Ylva Ekström, Anders Høg Hansen and Hugo Boothby have also contributed the article ”The Globalization of the Pavement: a Tanzanian case study”.
This publication can in some ways be considered as a continuation of the debates and discussions presented in the Nordicom published anthology ”Media and Glocal Change: Rethinking Communication for Development” and we hope that ”Communication, media and development: problems and perspectives” will become a resource for ComDev students as indispensible as the Media and Glocal Change anthology has been.
Comdev professor Oscar Hemer is one of the contributors to the anthology Africa Inside Out – Stories, Tales and Testimonies (UKZN Press), which was launched last week at the Time of the Writer Festival in Durban. The book, edited by South African writer and critic Michael Chapman, is the result of a call sent out to participants of previous Time of the Writer festivals. The call asked for “stories, tales and testimonies” about Africa. According to the editor, , the 18 stories in the volume contain “dislocations and affirmations” about Africa, which generate a kind of “restless energy”. He did not want to create the sense of a “Mbeki-esque African Renaissance, but to rather turn to the living challenges of ‘Africa Inside Out’.” The book includes contributions by the following authors: Doreen Baingana, Lauren Beukes, Elana Bregin, Marie Darrieussecq, Max du Preez, Ronnie Govender, Oscar Hemer, Deon Meyer, Kirsten Miller, Kagiso Lesego Molope, Kobus Moolman, Andile Mngxitama, Sally-Ann Murray, Patrice Nganang, Kole Omotoso, Zachariah Rapola, Albie Sachs, Angelina Sithebe and Chika Unigwe.
Oscar’s own book Fiction and Truth in Transition : Writing the present past in South Africa and Argentina (Lit Verlag), based on his dissertation last year, has also just come off the presses. It will be launched at a seminar at K3 (Medea) on 11 April, 10-12. The book will be available for sale at a 50 % discount, that is 25 € or 225 SEK. 
Bob Dylan 1961-1967. Kærlighed, krig og historie [in Danish], by Anders Høg Hansen (lecturer at ComDevat Malmö University and Ørecomm participant) explores early 1960s artistic, cultural and social change in the USA and the Western World through the lens of Bob Dylan songs and the musical and social context they appeared in. The book pays particular attention to the articulation of three key themes, love, war and history in Dylan’s early songs, and the blending of cultural influences – from e.g. American and European stage traditions, literature, the bible and popular culture – in the midst of social and artistic upheaval, civil rights and other movement activity of the 1960s. Dylan’s songs, reflected media and cultural changes. They fused the popular and the fine art, the past and the contemporary. The songs inspiration from a range of old and new movements and folk heritage, and mythologies of outlaws and misfits, are of relevance also today in an era of renewed global movement activity and interest in the cultural activity and changes that the 1960s brought about – and those that the era could have created. TEXT From orecomm.net/
Out now (February 2012) at Frydenlund, Copenhagen, here.
For More from Anders see The Reading Room of the Civil Rights Movement
