"Cryptocurrencies, and the blockchain technology that underlies them, have attracted much attention over the last decade from scholars, tech communities, financial institutions, states and more. The extreme volatility of the cryptocurrency market has made some people very rich and cost others almost
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everything.Importantly, there are many indications that marginalized communities are especially attracted to this new technology while being more vulnerable to issues such as fraud and exploitation in this field. This paper reviews academic research –predominantly social scientific – on cryptocurrencies and financial blockchain to determine the extent to which they engage with the experiences, agencies, and knowledges of marginalized communities. Overall, the findings show that, bar a few important exceptions that take seriously marginalized communities, academic research has largely focused on traditionally dominant actors such as crypto evangelists, fintech developers, states, and banks. Furthermore, the knowledges of marginalized communities are almost entirely absent while research privileges already dominant theories and research methodologies. Such trends in academic research on cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology reproduce existing knowledge hierarchies and lead to the further material marginalization of already vulnerable communities. In light of these findings, we conclude with some recommendations for further research that can challenge these problematic dynamics."(Abstract)
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"A dominant monitorial reporting method means that journalism shines a spotlight on officials’ activities, plans, and statements. While this reporting method has brought official wrongdoing to light, monitorial reporting has also participated in amplifying, emphasizing, and normalizing problematic
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official definitions that neglect structural factors contributing to persistent issues of marginalization. Using qualitative textual analysis, this study articulates a grounded alternative called a solidarity reporting method for covering marginalization. A solidarity reporting method means that journalism prioritizes marginalized people’s definitions, shared conditions, and ongoing struggles—which may challenge the definitional parameters that officials attempt to set. A case study of a 2016 journalistic collaboration called the San Francisco Homeless Project demonstrates how a solidarity reporting method enriches journalism on homelessness by representing the firsthand observations and perspectives of people subjected to social injustice, and accounting for structural conditions. Solidarity reporting helps advance journalism’s pursuit of truth." (Abstract)
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"In this chapter we have offered an interpretation of the first twenty years of mobile telephony in marginal zones in Africa. With case-studies from central Mali, anglophone Cameroon and south-east Angola, we focused on the changes in both communication and mobility patterns, specifically in connect
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ion with marginality and social hierarchies. We started the chapter with a discussion of the concepts of marginality and mobility. The two next sections offered both positive evaluations of mobile telephony and more balanced or even negative views. Our subsequent discussion of social hierarchies made it clear that the mobile phone has indeed offered possibilities for marginalised people in Africa. Yet at the same time, social hierarchies have been reinforced through the new means of communication, and in some cases even deepened. We then showed that the changes in the realm of mobility have not overcome the patterns of inequality. Social hierarchies may even be exported into new contexts, and the possibilities therefore have not increased." (Conclusion, page 237)
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"This book explores historical and cultural aspects of modern and contemporary Bengal through the performance-centred study of a particular repertoire: the songs of the saint-composer Bhaba Pagla (1902-1984), who is particularly revered among Baul and Fakir singers. The author shows how songs, if ex
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amined as 'sacred scriptures', represent multi-dimensional texts for the study of South Asian religions. Revealing how previous studies about Bauls mirror the history of folkloristics in Bengal, this book presents sacred songs as a precious symbolic capital for a marginalized community of dislocated and unorthodox Hindus, who consider the practice of singing in itself an integral part of the path towards self-realization." (Publisher description)
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"Based on 15 months of ethnographic research in the city of Alto Hospicio in northern Chile, this book describes how the residents use social media, and the consequences of this use in their daily lives. Nell Haynes argues that social media is a place where Alto Hospicio’s residents – or Hospice
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ños – express their feelings of marginalisation that result from living in city far from the national capital, and with a notoriously low quality of life compared to other urban areas in Chile. In actively distancing themselves from residents in cities such as Santiago, Hospiceños identify as marginalised citizens, and express a new kind of social norm. Yet Haynes finds that by contrasting their own lived experiences with those of people in metropolitan areas, Hospiceños are strengthening their own sense of community and the sense of normativity that shapes their daily lives." (Back cover)
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"How should scholars approach study of the processes that characterize voice production among subaltern groups? The study builds on both Marxist and non-Marxist frameworks as theoretical trajectories for conducting class analyses that define how subaltern groups conceive, produce and consume their o
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wn voices. The discussion, a semiotics analysis in itself, aims to make significant contribution to communication studies, through demonstrating the fragile, slippery and class-based politics that are prevalent when marginalized groups use various art forms, even their bodies, as battlegrounds for contesting oppressive power relationships." (Abstract)
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"The role of communication in planned social change is portrayed as a linear conduit for inducing pro-development behavior change in the "undeveloped" world. Later versions of social change communication started incorporating culture and participation into multicultural participatory development pro
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grams. This essay suggests that development discourses, including their later incarnations incorporating culture and participation, serve as vehicles for capitalist market promotion. These new forms of planned social change communication, scripted in the narratives of local empowerment, community-based participation, and entrepreneurship, work to systematically erase subaltern communities. Building on the theoretical framework of the culture-Centered approach (CCA), I examine the ways in which dialogues with the margins of development discourse resist these dominant conceptual categories of development. The subaltern, standing in for the popular, resists neoliberal interventions through her active participation in popular politics." (Abstract)
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"This book is about the workings of networks of the mobile in Africa, a continent usually associated with the ‘global shadows’ of the world. How do changes in the possibilities for communication, with the recent hype of mobile technology, influence the social and economic dynamics in Africa’s
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mobile margins? To what extent is the freedom associated with new Information and Communication Technologies reality or disillusion for people dwelling in the margins? Are ordinary Africans increasingly Side@Ways? How social are these emergent Side@Ways? Contributions to answering these and related questions are harvested from ethnographic insights by team members of the WOTRO funded ‘Mobile Africa revisited’ research programme hosted by the African Studies Centre, Leiden, The Netherlands." (Publisher description)
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"Vol.1: Capitalism, Imperialism (1979); Vol.2: Liberation, Socialism. 'Communication and Class Struggle' is an anthology containing more than 120 articles originating in over 50 countries since the mid-nineteenth century which were selected by the editors to explain three interrelated questions abou
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t the mass communication process from the Marxist viewpoint: 1) how communication is conditioned by basic economic, social, ideological and cultural factors; 2) how capitalistic production affects communication practice and theory in bourgeois society; and 3) how the underprivileged and the working classes have reacted in certain countries by developing their own communication theory and practice. Selected bibliography." (Eleanor Blum, Frances G. Wilhoit: Mass media bibliography. 3rd ed. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990 Nr. 273)
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