"This book brings together a vast range of pre-eminent experts, academics, and practitioners to interrogate the role of media in representing economic inequality. It explores and deconstructs the concept of economic inequality by examining the different dimensions of inequality and how it has evolve...d historically; how it has been represented and portrayed in the media; and how, in turn, those representations have informed the public's knowledge of and attitudes towards poverty, class and welfare, and political discourse. Taking a multi-disciplinary, comparative, and historical approach, and using a variety of new and original data sets to inform the research, studies herein examine the relationship between media and inequality in UK, Western Europe, and USA. In addition to generating new knowledge and research agendas, the book generates suggestions of ways to improve news coverage on this topic and raise the level of the debate, and will improve understanding about economic inequality, as it has evolved, and as it continues to develop in academic, political and media discourses. This book will be of interest to academics and practitioners alike in the areas of journalism, media studies, economics, and the social sciences, as well as political commentators and those interested more broadly in social policy." (Publisher)
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"La pobreza constituye un problema estructural en Argentina, realidad que se evidencia, más allá de las controversias en torno a su delimitación conceptual y su medición, desde diversos enfoques teórico metodológicos que abordan el fenómeno. Este trabajo busca aportar a la explicación de est...a agenda urgente desde el análisis de la representación mediática de la problemática. El artículo presenta los primeros resultados de un estudio en curso sobre un sector de la prensa de la ciudad de Bahía Blanca, Argentina. Se analizan las agendas y noticias construidas sobre el tema en la actualidad focalizando en los criterios de selección informativa, los temas jerarquizados, y las ocurrencias y regularidades discursivas. En el período analizado, la pobreza en la región no constituye una agenda jerarquizada en el diario La Nueva, hecho que invisibiliza, de algún modo, la problemática social. La pobreza y los sujetos pobres son representados en la publicación desde una categoría amplia y abstracta, ligada a cifras que legitiman los discursos y son útiles para el conocimiento del problema, a la vez que lo despersonalizan y deshistorizan. Las noticias se presentan de manera descontextualizada, sin información sobre las causas de emergencia y profundización del fenómeno, ni acerca de posibles soluciones, con el riesgo de que se resienta la capacidad de interpretación y comprensión por parte del lectorado, ergo, el debate público y político sobre el tema." (Resumen)
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"Debates about the visual representations of global poverty have been going on for many years, yet the experiences and views of those featured have been notably absent. 'The People in the Pictures' addresses that gap. Save the Children commissioned research in the UK, Jordan, Bangladesh and Niger, t...o listen to and learn from those who contribute their images and stories, as well as members of their communities. The research explored: what motivated people to agree to Save the Children filming or photographing them or their children; how people experienced and perceived the image-making process; how people felt about their portrayal in the resulting Save the Children communications. The research highlighted many areas of good practice, as well as some concerns and challenges. It has resulted in a set of recommendations to embed greater agency and accountability for contributors into Save the Children’s image making." (Back cover)
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"Combining approaches from the social sciences and the humanities, the book provides an interdisciplinary perspective while outlining a transnational history of films that either document or fictionalise the favelas, shantytowns, Elendsviertel, gecekondu, barrios populares or chawls of our diverse '...planet of slums', exploring the way accelerated urbanisation has intersected with an increasingly interconnected global film and media culture. From Jacob Riis's How The Other Half Lives (1890) to Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire (2008), the volume provides a number of close readings of slum representations of different historical periods and regions to outline how contemporary film and media practices relate to their past predecessors. It focuses thereby particularly on the way filmmakers, both north and south of the equator, have repeatedly grappled with, rejected or continuously modified documentary and realist modes of representation to convey life in our 'planet of slums'." (Publisher)
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"Based on an ethnographic study of television and audiences in class-divided Philippines, this is the first book to take a bottom-up approach in considering how people respond to images and narratives of suffering and poverty on television." (Publisher)
"Through the efforts of increasingly media-aware NGOs, people in the west are bombarded with images of poverty and inequality in the developing world. Representations of Poverty is the first comprehensive study of the communications and imagery used by international NGOs to represent the developing ...world. In this meticulously researched and original book, Nandita Dogra examines the full cycle of representation - integrating analyses of the public messages of international development NGOs in the UK with the views of their staff and audiences. Exploring the Europeanised discourses inherent in appeals to this notion of a 'common humanity', she argues for a greater acknowledgment of NGOs as significant mediating institutions which can expand understandings of global inequalities and their historical causation." (Publisher)
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"This paper examines how banks can translate the potential of mobile phones into greater financial access for poor people. Although mobile phone operators have been able to use the mobile phone for mobile remittance and bill payment services in several countries, banks have had little success in usi...ng mobile phones as part of a growth or outreach strategy. This paper focuses on smaller banks or microfinance institutions (MFIs) that face a much higher cost-of-service delivery because of the smaller transaction values they handle and the likely more remote and dispersed location of at least some of their customers. The opportunity seems particularly great for them, but implementation challenges also loom larger because of their small scale. This discussion assumes these banks and MFIs have adequate back office and transaction switching capability and sufficient internal controls, whether managed in-house or outsourced." (p.1)
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"¿Cómo se muestra la pobreza en los noticieros?, ¿Qué recursos periodísticos son utilizados en la construcción noticiosa?, ¿hablan técnicos o pobres?, ¿cuánto tiempo duran en promedio?, ¿qué temas específicos tratan? Son algunas de las interrogantes que se formularon al inicio de este e...studio, que analizó los noticieros centrales de los cinco canales de TV abierta. Contamos con importantes apoyos para su desarrollo, en especial, del Consejo Nacional de Televisión que entregó su patrocinio y asesoramiento técnico, lo que fue fundamental para visionar los 565 noticieros que fueron objeto de este análisis ... Descubrimos que habían más noticias en pobreza de lo que suponíamos, que la gran mayoría se emitían en el primer bloque de los noticieros y que las personas en situación de pobreza son una fuente de información abundante en la construcción de las noticias, en conjunto con los periodistas. Sin embargo, confirmamos que la mayoría de las noticias no tenían el foco informativo en la pobreza o en personas en situación de pobreza, sino en hechos con foco en otros temas pero en los cuales aparecían dimensiones del mundo de la pobreza, tales como problemas de cobertura y calidad de la Vivienda, noticias sobre personas en situación de pobreza tras hechos de Tragedias y Desastres Naturales y Delincuencia, sin duda temas de alto impacto humano, que explican el por qué aparecen en el principal bloque noticioso. Confirmamos asimismo, que la gran mayoría de las noticias corresponden a notas informativas, que no ahondan en el problema que buscan informar, sino más bien privilegian la constatación pura. En general, no se explora en las posibles soluciones a los problemas de la pobreza, ni tampoco se relevan sus causas. En su mayoría, las noticias analizadas parecen responder a pautas informativas pre-fijadas y no al producto de la iniciativa y/o investigación periodística. Cabe destacar también que los periodistas son claramente voceros privilegiados de sus propias construcciones periodísticas." (Presentación, p.7-8)
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