Speaking Up and Talking Back? Media Empowerment and Civic Engagement among East and Southern African Youth is a new book edited by Örecomm participants Thomas Tufte, Norbert Wildermuth, Anne Sofie Hansen-Skovmoes and Winnie Mitullah. Published by Nordicom as a yearbook from the International Clearinghouse on Children, Youth and Media, this book surveys and explores the dynamic processes of media development and the enlargement of youth driven, deliberative spaces which sub-Saharan Africa is currently experiencing
Speaking Up and Talking Back? Includes a chapter written by ComDev alumnus Rosalind Yarde. In her contribution Hidden Voices on Air. Empowering Tanzanian Youth through Participatory Radio Rosalind draws on her ComDev degree project work in which she collaborated with a group of former street children in the town of Moshi, northern Tanzania to produce participatory radio.
For more information about Speaking Up and Talking Back? Go Here!
To read more about Rosalind’s work in Tanzania and her studies with ComDev Go Here!
To read Rosalind’s ComDev degree project Go Here!
ComDev students that have submitted their degree project work for examination this term will present them orally in the period 22 – 24 May 2012. The presentations will be on a 90% completed draft version which will not be graded yet. During the oral presentations the students will receive feedback and comments from a fellow student and a senior lecturer/professor. After that the students will have 2 weeks to do the revisions and submit a final version of the project work which will be the base for a grade.
Many of the submitted works this year focus on various aspects of using Information and Communication Technologies for social change. A number of students have chosen to work on issues related to the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings, others look at the role of media played in issues related to development in African and Latin American countries.
If you want to follow the oral presentations live they will be streamed here on the ComDev portal (a streaming window will be available here during the sessions) from Malmö, School of Art, Culture and Communicaiton, Östra Varvsgatan 11A. You are welcome to join either online here or in Malmö!
The presentation schedule is available here: PW May 2012 schedule.
ComDev09 students are now finishing up their final thesis projects ready for submission on Monday. A ComDev thesis often involves original field research and enables students to apply theory in practice. This is exactly what ComDev08 alumnus Rosalind Yarde did when she conducted her field research for her final masters thesis with Mkombozi, an NGO in Moshi, northern Tanzania that supports children living on the street. The field work for Rosalind’s thesis was a pilot study that explored how a participatory approach to radio production might become a vehicle for social change. Rosalind worked with a group of young people to make a one-off radio programme. The programme presented issues that were important to the young producers from their own perspective. The positive response to the show form the participants, the Mkombozi project and even local authorities was an indication of how successful the ‘experiment’ had been but Rosalind did not initially anticipate taking the project further than the pilot stage. However soon after she completed her thesis Rosalind was approached by Mkombozi and asked if would be interested in developing her pilot study into regular programming for a Youth Radio Network initiated by UNICEF Dar es Salaam.
The 15 children that Rosalind is working with have now produced 9 editions of their radio programme and in this piece for the ComDev Blog she describes the rewarding experience of moving from pilot study to continuing project and how satisfying it is to see the research she did for her masters thesis validated as as theory is proved in practice.
