"The major earthquake that struck central Nepal in April 2015 inspired a flurry of literary and cultural production, including the creation and online publication of over 50 earthquake-related music videos. Although they share a common thematic focus, these videos’ representations of the earthquak
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e aftermath and the Nepali people’s response to the disaster diverge from one another in some important respects. Through a detailed analysis of the lyrical, musical and visual content of a selection of five of these videos, and drawing upon recent research on digital cultures, the article asks to what extent these divergences reflect an attempt by online content creators to address Nepali publics (whether domestic, diasporic, urban, rural or gendered) that they imagine and construct in different ways." (Abstract)
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"This book, produced on behalf of the IFLA Copyright and other Legal Matters (CLM) Advisory Committee, provides basic and advanced information about copyright, outlines limitations and exceptions, discusses communicating with users and highlights emerging copyright issues. The chapters note the sign
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ificance of the topic; describe salient points of the law and legal concepts; present selected comparisons of approaches around the world; highlight opportunities for reform and advocacy; and help libraries and librarians find their way through the copyright maze." (Publisher description)
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"Music and Digital Media is the first comparative ethnographic study of the impact of digital media on music worldwide. It offers a radical and lucid new theoretical framework for understanding digital media through music, showing that music is today where the promises and problems of the digital as
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sume clamouring audibility. The book contains ten chapters, eight of which present comprehensive original ethnographies; they are bookended by an authoritative introduction and a comparative postlude. Five chapters address popular, folk, art and crossover musics in the global South and North, including Kenya, Argentina, India, Canada and the UK. Three chapters bring the digital experimentally to the fore, presenting pioneering ethnographies of an extra-legal peer-to-peer site and the streaming platform Spotify, a series of prominent internet-mediated music genres, and the first ethnography of a global software package, the interactive music platform Max. The book is unique in bringing ethnographic research on popular, folk, art and crossover musics from the global North and South into a comparative framework on a large scale, and creates an innovative new paradigm for comparative anthropology. It shows how music enlarges anthropology while demanding to be understood with reference to classic themes of anthropological theory." (Publisher description)
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"Global Sceptical Publics is the first major study of the significance of different media for the (re)production of non-religious publics and publicity. While much work has documented how religious subjectivities are shaped by media, until now the crucial role of diverse media for producing and part
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icipating in religion-sceptical publics and debates has remained under-researched. With some chapters focusing on locations hitherto barely considered by scholarship on non-religion, the book places in comparative perspective how atheists, secularists and humanists engage with media – as means of communication and forming non-religious publics, but also on occasion as something to be resisted. Its conceptually rich interdisciplinary chapters thereby contribute important new insights to the growing field of non-religion studies and to scholarship on media and materiality more generally." (uclpress.co.uk)
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"Beyond Access was the first major global attempt to connect the international development and public library worlds. Taking the form of a series of projects in a dozen countries meant to help catalyze library development around national goals, the program operated from 2011 to 2018. Starting from a
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point at which libraries in most low – and middle-income countries were neglected, disused and staffed by librarians with outdated skills, it effectively launched public libraries into national dialogue in some countries and failed to do so in others. This article explores the conditions and actions that led to effective projects and what lessons for future library development efforts might be gleaned from the program’s work. In Myanmar and Georgia, the program attracted new investment into public libraries aligned with central government digital strategies. In Bangladesh and the Philippines, the program integrated public libraries into education efforts where they had been previously ignored. With more than a quarter million public libraries in low – and middle-income countries, there remains vast potential for library systems to reinforce their relevancy in the 21st century, attract new resources, and provide vital services. Library leaders around the world can build on the experience of Beyond Access to help inform initiatives to revive libraries around modern needs." (Abstract)
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"The Brazilian educator Paulo Freire (1921-1997) is one of the most important thinkers of the 21st century, figuring among the most quoted authors in the fields of education and social sciences all over the world. He is also a core reference to an infinite number of grassroots and activist initiativ
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es globally. This book celebrates his birth centennial with a collection of 19 contributions from both experienced and young media and communication scholars and activists working in 11 countries. They reflect and debate Freire’s principles and ideas, revisiting their origins and interrogating their relevance to current challenges and struggles. The result can be summarized as a claim for affect as the core feature of social change and a tool for yielding resistance." (Publisher description)
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"This book documents the journalistic career of Mohandas K. Gandhi. Known as the Mahatma and the Father of India, Gandhi was also a journalist. However, he was a not a journalist in the same vein as those working for the New York Times or the BBC. Rather, Gandhi was what is called an advocacy journa
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list; that is, his journalism served various political, social, and cultural causes—most importantly, in the long run, the Indian independence movement. Among the other key causes were equality, human rights, Muslim-Hindu relations, vegetarianism, chastity, poverty, and hygiene. The chapters in this book were written by authors who attended a conference on Gandhi and media at the University of St. Andrews on the 150th anniversary of Gandhi’s birthday, in October 2019. It relies on careful analysis of his newspapers, produced in both South Africa and India, including Indian Opinion, Young India, the Gujarati newspaper Navajivan, and three versions of Harijan, which were in English, Gujarati, and Hindi. The authors also place Gandhi’s version of journalism in a historical context of small, family-operated weekly newspapers that were commonplace in the nineteenth century. Finally, the book looks at other media tools Gandhi used to transmit his messages to the public, including his recorded voice for gramophone." (Publisher description)
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"This Media Landscape Guide provides a snapshot of the media in Afghanistan, including the audiences, the producers, the preferences of different groups in the community, the communications culture, and the languages associated with the media. It gives an insight into the role of media in developmen
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t work, crisis preparedness, recent disasters, and the (at time of writing1) ongoing COVID-19 response. The guide also gives an overview of each media sector including, digital and social media, radio, television, print and other traditional forms of mass communication." (Introduction, page 4)
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"In the mid-1990s, the Taliban took control of Afghanistan for the first time. They banned photography, TV, music, and all forms of entertainment. Soon after, the Taliban banned the internet in early 2001, and then-Foreign Minister Mawlavi Wakil Ahmad Muttawakil famously stated, “We want to establ
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ish a system in Afghanistan through which we can control all those things that are wrong, obscene, immoral, and against Islam.”
After being dislodged from Afghanistan following the 2001 U.S. intervention, however, the Taliban’s approach to media changed dramatically. Over the course of the movement’s two-decade insurgency, the Taliban developed a complex media strategy that contributed significantly to its rapid military advance and takeover of Afghanistan by August 2021. Since then, their media strategy has shifted again as the movement attempts to transition from insurgency to a governing body. As such, the Taliban’s current strategy builds on the ideological foundation from the 1990s combined with a continuation of certain tactics and approaches adopted during two decades of insurgency. This article divides the Taliban’s media strategy into three phases accordingly: the movement’s first period of rule from 1996 to 2001, the 2001-2021 insurgency, and their return to power following the fall of Kabul in August 2021. It discusses each phases’ distinct characteristics, shared aspects with other phases, and what the evolution in the Taliban’s media strategy reveals about the future trajectory of the information environment in Afghanistan." (Page 1)
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"The aim of this volume is to interpret photography as a specific tool that reifies reality, subjectively frames it, and fits it into various political, ideological, commercial, scientific, and artistic contexts. Without reducing the entire argument to the binary of ‘photography and power’, the
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authors reveal the different modes of seeing that involve distinct cultural norms, social practices, power relations, levels of technology, and networks for circulating photography, and that determined the manner of its (re)use in constructing various images of Central Asia. The volume demonstrates that photography was the cornerstone of imperial media governance and discourse construction in colonial Turkestan of the tsarist and early Soviet periods. The various cases show the complex mechanisms by which images of Turkestan were created, remembered, or forgotten from the nineteenth until the twenty-first century." (Publisher description)
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"This volume presents a comparative exploration of Dalit autobiographical writing from India and of Latin American testimonio as subaltern voices from two regions of the Global South. Offering frames for linking global subalternity today, the chapters address Siddalingaiah's Ooru Keri; Muli's Life H
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istory; Manoranjan Byapari and Manju Bala's narratives; and Yashica Dutt's Coming Out as Dalit; among others, alongside foundational texts of the testimonio genre.While embedded in their specific experiences, the shared history of oppression and resistance on the basis of race/ethnicity and caste from where these subaltern life histories arise constitutes an alternative epistemological locus. The chapters point to the inadequacy of reading them within existing critical frameworks in autobiography studies." (Publisher description)
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"An international line-up of authors first discuss communication practices, strategies, and media uses by NGOs, providing insights into the specifics of NGO programs for social change goals and reveal particular sets of tactics NGOs commonly employ. The book then presents a set of case studies of NG
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O organizing from all over the world—ranging from Sudan via Brazil to China – to illustrate the particular contexts that make NGO advocacy necessary, while also highlighting successful initiatives to illuminate the important spaces NGOs occupy in civil society." (Publisher description)
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"Media, during Taliban five years period from 1996–2001, had been totally suffocated. Only limited number of print media would publish to spread the propaganda of Taliban Emirate under Sharia Law. Post-Taliban era, media landscape obtained new image with the establishment of democratic government.
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Independent media were allowed to operate in accordance with the formation of new constitution of 2004. Since the two decades of war after 9/11, media have still been maintaining its responsibility in Afghanistan to rise and promote the voice of right, equality and justice, defend human rights and spread public awareness in order to serve for social responsibilities. Despite continued challenges media outlets and journalists have made tremendous progress which it has resulted in harm of their personal life from time to time due to threats of insecurity, war, warlords, strongmen, corrupted actors in government as well as in attacks of Taliban and ISIS insurgents. Hence, media outlets and journalists have been carrying on their responsibilities despite of availed risks to them and their families. In this paper, it has been viewed the status of media freedom, process of development and continued challenges to media freedom and journalists." (Abstract)
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"In the past decade, Bangladesh has witnessed severe erosion of democratic practices and weakening of democratic institutions. Incumbent has demonstrated its penchant for executive aggrandizement. These have transformed Bangladesh into a hybrid regime, which is marked with various characteristics in
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cluding the limited freedom of expression. International human rights organizations and organizations for press freedom have noted the continuous decline of freedom of expression in Bangladesh. The decline is due to both legal and extra-legal measures adopted by the incumbent Awami League since 2011. This chapter seeks to understand how journalists and media organizations operate in a hybrid regime. How do journalist and editors in Bangladesh negotiate between journalistic obligations and restricted freedom of press freedom by the state? What strategies do journalists undertake in their everyday professional duties to safeguard freedom? By utilizing an ethnographic approach, this chapter highlights personal and professional challenges faced by the editors and journalist in a hybrid regime." (Abstract)
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"The current article explores journalism practice amid waning press freedom in Indian Kashmir. Contextualising the recent renovation and introduction of authoritative new media policy 2020, the article maps the constant struggles of the journalists in the region. I consulted five working journalists
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to have a broader understanding of press freedom in Indian Kashmir, one of the world’s most dangerous places for journalists. I argue that frequent internet shutdowns, disinformation, declining dissent and direct control on the press contribute to the amassing struggles of Kashmiri journalists. The strategic politics endorse jingoism and punitive populism, which affects the overall image of Kashmiris including the journalists. Constructive journalism practice, however, aids Chomsky’s claim of “openings”, which keep the press viable during the severe authoritarian siege on the press freedom in Kashmir." (Abstract)
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"Following seminal study on journalistic attitudes towards wars and peace journalism, in this study we investigated the perceptions of conflict reporters in the three most deadly countries in the world including Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. A total of 317 journalists participated in this study. T
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hough generally we found support for the earlier study, the analysis shows journalists engage in wider practices than predicted that overlap war and peace journalism approaches. A closer examination showed that journalists favored active war journalism practices and passive peace journalism practices. Finally, we did not find that journalistic experience and contextual factors influenced preferences towards war and peace journalism substantially." (Abstract)
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"The majority of current political communication studies focus on discursive dimensions of communications and disregard how communications partake in the governing of populations through economic, material and institutional practices. By focusing on Turkey’s case, here I move beyond this approach
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and examine the role of communications in the development of neoliberal capital accumulation, authoritarian welfare politics, political repression and the production of popular support. The article provides an empirical analysis of policy developments and plans and the restructuring of ownership and control of networks between 2002 and 2016 in Erdogan’sTurkey." (Abstract)
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