Social Media and Politics in Africa

Social Media and Politics in Africa

Author: Maggie Dwyer

Publisher: Zed Books Ltd.

Published: 2019-07-15

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 178699500X

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The smartphone and social media have transformed Africa, allowing people across the continent to share ideas, organise, and participate in politics like never before. While both activists and governments alike have turned to social media as a new form of political mobilization, some African states have increasingly sought to clamp down on the technology, introducing restrictive laws or shutting down networks altogether. Drawing on over a dozen new empirical case studies – from Kenya to Somalia, South Africa to Tanzania – this collection explores how rapidly growing social media use is reshaping political engagement in Africa. But while social media has often been hailed as a liberating tool, the book demonstrates how it has often served to reinforce existing power dynamics, rather than challenge them. Featuring experts from a range of disciplines from across the continent, this collection is the first comprehensive overview of social media and politics in Africa. By examining the historical, political, and social context in which these media platforms are used, the book reveals the profound effects of cyber-activism, cyber-crime, state policing and surveillance on political participation.


Media in Postapartheid South Africa

Media in Postapartheid South Africa

Author: Sean Jacobs

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2019-03-11

Total Pages: 206

ISBN-13: 0253040574

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In Media in Postapartheid South Africa, author Sean Jacobs turns to media politics and the consumption of media as a way to understand recent political developments in South Africa and their relations with the African continent and the world. Jacobs looks at how mass media define the physical and human geography of the society and what it means for comprehending changing notions of citizenship in postapartheid South Africa. Jacobs claims that the media have unprecedented control over the distribution of public goods, rights claims, and South Africa's integration into the global political economy in ways that were impossible under the state-controlled media that dominated the apartheid years. Jacobs takes a probing look at television commercials and the representation of South Africans, reality television shows and South African continental expansion, soap operas and postapartheid identity politics, and the internet as a space for reassertions and reconfigurations of identity. As South Africa becomes more integrated into the global economy, Jacobs argues that local media have more weight in shaping how consumers view these products in unexpected and consequential ways.


Press and Politics in Africa

Press and Politics in Africa

Author: Ritchard M'Bayo

Publisher:

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 388

ISBN-13:

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This work deals with the relations between public communications and politics in the context of the nation-state system in Africa. It interweaves theory and practice, and begins with an overview that presents a general theoretical model of communication and influence processes in politics.


Press in the Middle East and North Africa, 1850-1950

Press in the Middle East and North Africa, 1850-1950

Author: Anthony Gorman

Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

Published: 2017-11-22

Total Pages: 393

ISBN-13: 1474430635

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This volume presents twelve detailed studies dealing with cases drawn from the Middle East and North Africa in the period before independence (c.1850-1950).


Youth and Popular Culture in Africa

Youth and Popular Culture in Africa

Author: Paul Ugor

Publisher: Boydell & Brewer

Published: 2021

Total Pages: 419

ISBN-13: 1648250246

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"The edited collection focuses on the links between young people and African popular culture. It explores popular culture produced and consumed by young people in contemporary Africa. And by "culture," we mean all kinds of texts or representations-visual, oral, written, performative, fictional, social, and virtual-created by African youth, mostly about their lives and their immediate societies, and for themselves, but also consumed by the larger public, and shared locally and globally. We proceed from the premise that cultural texts not only function as "social facts" as Karin Barber argues, but that they double as "commentaries upon, and interpretations of, social facts. They are part of social reality, but they also take up an attitude to social reality" (2007, 04). So, the work focuses specifically on what African youth produce as popular culture, under what conditions or contexts they produce such work, how they produce those texts, why they produce them, the aesthetic dimensions of these texts as cultural artifacts, and why these textual practices matter as social facts, as interpretive acts, and as cultural symbols of the general cultural activism of young people in a rapidly changing world, a world where the global cultural economy is the prime terrain for the relentless struggles over the meanings that come to shape political-economic and social systems"--


Bodies, Politics, and African Healing

Bodies, Politics, and African Healing

Author: Stacey A. Langwick

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2011-06-23

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 025300196X

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This subtle and powerful ethnography examines African healing and its relationship to medical science. Stacey A. Langwick investigates the practices of healers in Tanzania who confront the most intractable illnesses in the region, including AIDS and malaria. She reveals how healers generate new therapies and shape the bodies of their patients as they address devils and parasites, anti-witchcraft medicine, and child immunization. Transcending the dualisms between tradition and science, culture and nature, belief and knowledge, Langwick tells a new story about the materiality of healing and postcolonial politics. This important work bridges postcolonial theory, science, public health, and anthropology.


Property and Political Order in Africa

Property and Political Order in Africa

Author: Catherine Boone

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2014-02-10

Total Pages: 439

ISBN-13: 1107040698

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In sub-Saharan Africa, property relationships around land and access to natural resources vary across localities, districts, and farming regions. These differences produce patterned variations in relationships between individuals, communities, and the state. This book captures these patterns in an analysis of structure and variation in rural land tenure regimes. In most farming areas, state authority is deeply embedded in land regimes, drawing farmers, ethnic insiders and outsiders, lineages, villages, and communities into direct and indirect relationships with political authorities at different levels of the state apparatus. The analysis shows how property institutions - institutions that define political authority and hierarchy around land - shape dynamics of great interest to scholars of politics, including the dynamics of land-related competition and conflict, territorial conflict, patron-client relations, electoral cleavage and mobilization, ethnic politics, rural rebellion, and the localization and "nationalization" of political competition.


African Politics in Comparative Perspective

African Politics in Comparative Perspective

Author: Goran Hyden

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 325

ISBN-13: 1107030471

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This revised and expanded second edition of African Politics in Comparative Perspective reviews fifty years of research on politics in Africa and addresses some issues in a new light, keeping in mind the changes in Africa since the first edition was written in 2004. The book synthesizes insights from different scholarly approaches and offers an original interpretation of the knowledge accumulated in the field. Goran Hyden discusses how research on African politics relates to the study of politics in other regions and mainstream theories in comparative politics. He focuses on such key issues as why politics trumps economics, rule is personal, state is weak and policies are made with a communal rather than an individual lens. The book also discusses why in the light of these conditions agriculture is problematic, gender contested, ethnicity manipulated and relations with Western powers a matter of defiance.


Social Media and Elections in Africa, Volume 1

Social Media and Elections in Africa, Volume 1

Author: Martin N. Ndlela

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2020-01-02

Total Pages: 246

ISBN-13: 3030305538

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This book brings together fresh evidence and new theoretical frameworks in a unique analysis of the increasing role of social media in political campaigns and electoral processes across Africa. Supported by contemporary and historical cases studies, it engages with the main drives behind the various appropriations of social media for election campaigns, organization, and voter mobilization. Contributors in this volume delve into changing and complex aspects of social media, offering an appraisal of theoretical perspectives and examining fascinating case studies which social media use is redefining elections across Africa. Contributions show that new media ecologies are resulting in new policy regimes, user behaviors, and communication models that have implications for electoral processes. The book also provides preliminary analysis of emerging forms of algorithm-driven campaigns, fake news, information distortions and other methods that undermine electoral democracy in Africa.