Abstract
The book and the special issue of Nordicom Review are paired here because, beyond the coinciding year of publication, they contribute to the articulation of the expansion of the field of development communication at its intersection with media and social change. Saving the World offers a historical overview of the discipline, while Communication, Media and Development takes on recent case studies to theorize about the present status of the field. The meeting of these two publications, at least in this review, should point to the growth of the discipline.
Both are well written and edited, and clearly organized. Saving the World, authored by Emile G. McAnany, the former Walter E. Schmidt Professor of Communication at Santa Clara University, belongs to the “History of Communication” series edited by Robert McChesney and John Nerone. It documents the history of communication’s role in social change, ascertains the present moment in this context, and offers a scheme for judging the successes and failures of such projects. The editors of Communication, Media and Development are Florencia Enghel, PhD, candidate at Karlstad University, Sweden, and Karin Wilkins, professor at the University of Texas, Austin. The two assembled an impressive group of authors to feature in the special issue, which is a collaboration between the peer-reviewed journal for media and communication researchers in the Nordic countries, Nordicom Review, and the Swedish web magazine Glocal Times.
Drawing from the author’s professional experience with communication for development and social change, Saving the World starts from Daniel Lerner’s 1958 primer on modernization (which, interestingly, is only referenced once in the Nordicom Review collection). It then acknowledges the early names of the field and examines the conceptualization of the discourse on communication for development and the UN and UNESCO’s “institutional assumptions and beliefs carried into practice” (p. 45). The book then moves through the 1970s and early 1980s dependency phase, initiated in academic discussions and (very) gradually translated into policy, to the participatory paradigm traced to Brazilian Paulo Freire and his 1968 Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and it ends with the most recent paradigm shift toward social entrepreneurship.
The book chooses specific case studies to illustrate the historical stages, including rural Indian radio; educational television in American Samoa, El Salvador, and Mexico; Tanzanian farm forums; Brazilian, Ecuadorian, and Canadian literacy and media participatory projects; and the model of social entrepreneurship in sites such as an Indonesian news agency, the Ugandan village phone project, Indian technology training, and the human rights advocacy group Witness.
A notable shortcoming in McAnany’s narrative is the absence of context prior to Lerner’s initial theorizing, and even prior to President Truman’s 1949 proclamation “to help developing countries modernize,” which the author “arbitrarily” takes as starting point for the historicizing of the new field (p. 13). The colonial past is ignored in the book, despite the wealth of scholarship in a variety of disciplines that has traced colonial thinking to the present. Pre-modern thought continues to motivate, ground, factor into, and affect modernizing (and assimilationist) voices in the contemporary layout of the field (both theoretical and practical). Likewise, the colonial experience continues to be evident in the resistance to, and the slowness in adopting, participatory approaches, as well as in ongoing challenges in areas such as human rights and health intervention, to name just a few—and therefore should be included in a book that attempts a history of the field of communication for development.
Enghel and Wilkins edit a strong collection, with seventeen essays that range in scope from examining the purpose and audience of global communication projects, to engaging with complex concepts such as democracy, development, dependency, technology, power, identity, gender, inequality, and diaspora. The book contributes pedagogical and theoretical insights, as it attempts to tackle the future of communication for development. This diversity of projects is the book’s clearest strength. Perhaps the most impactful are the forward-looking analyses that examine possible routes toward the betterment of the world society. Such articles include Thomas Hylland Eriksen’s article on transnational struggle; Rosa María Alfaro Moreno’s attention to dialogue toward national development that must incorporate citizens, the government, the business community, and the organized civil society; and Silvia Balit’s case study of the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, which also concludes with emphasizing the need for multi-agent collaborations.
Clearly and concisely written, the essays in the Nordicom Review collection are (co-)authored by a variety of international scholarly (19) and industry-affiliated voices (8). This is one of the issue’s chief contributions, as is the variety of case studies from Africa (Kenya, Mozambique, Rwanda, Senegal, South Africa, Sudan, Tanzania, and Zambia), South-East Asia (India, the Philippines), North America (Canada), and South America (Peru). The reach of the volume is impressive for this reason. Yet, overall, the research attention comes mostly from the North America (the United States and Canada) and Northern Europe (Sweden, Denmark, Norway, and the Netherlands), raising a familiar concern about the authorship of work that—while necessary and significant—continues to originate within Western thought (with some notable exceptions, for instance the chapter on reality television in South Africa).
The two publications promise to be a valuable resource for academic and activist conversations. At the same time, I encourage scholars of the field (and the authors featured in the two books) to engage more broadly with contemporary communication projects across the world. That engagement should go beyond the initial loci of investigation of Africa, Latin America, and Asia—and to thus recognize the postcolonial legacies embedded in, and the continued influence of, the cited paradigms and discourses (modernization, participatory communication for development, sustainability for social change, etc.) onto current projects of intervention (in, say, Romani/Traveller/Gypsy or Native American communities, to name just two.)