Modernization, Africanization, diversification and indigenization: A trajectory through 60 years of African journalism and media research
This paper is an offspring of a project which has sought to map the history of African media/journalism/communication study from the 1950s until the present day. Our suggestion is that media research in Sub-Saharan Africa can be divided into three major phases, comprising the modernization, Africanization and diversification paradigms. The modernization phase (1950–70) was marked by an idea of knowledge transfer from the West, ultimately aiming to modernize African societies. Declining trust in the modernization paradigm led communication study on the continent to emerge into the second phase which could be described as a period of Africanization (1970–90). The phase coincided with growing emphasis on indigenous communication and a call for counter-flows in global communication. Meanwhile, the continent became a battlefield for political influence by outside actors, resulting in dissimilar routes in research and education for different African countries. The third phase (1990 onwards) has witnessed further expansion of African media/journalism/communication study and could be described as a phase of diversification. Collaboration with global research environments has increased and the range of scholarly approaches has widened, although media programmes on the continent still suffers from shortage of resources, fragmentation of competence and, to some extent, continuing dependency on external support.
the shifting paradigms, the discussion of an indigenous communication paradigm stands out as one of the overarching themes through nearly six decades of African media research. Initially sparked by an anti-colonial sentiment in the 1950s and 1960s, the debate later was fuelled by different political, ideological and professional concerns (exemplified by the NWICO debate). While we aim to avoid an essentialist framework, it is also imperative that we take the specific African context into consideration without merely imposing a western-derived framework. A recent repositioning of media studies vis-a-vis Africa examines the long-standing trajectory of communication and media studies in the ‘south’ unacknowledged by media scholars in the global ‘north’. This includes a critique of calls made by U.S. and Europe-based scholars to ‘de-westernize’ the field as this stance does not take into account the alternative epistemologies that have been locally originated and practiced at the periphery of communication scholarship in the global ‘south’.
the shifting paradigms, the discussion of an indigenous communication paradigm stands out as one of the overarching themes through nearly six decades of African media research. Initially sparked by an anti-colonial sentiment in the 1950s and 1960s, the debate later was fuelled by different political, ideological and professional concerns (exemplified by the NWICO debate). While we aim to avoid an essentialist framework, it is also imperative that we take the specific African context into consideration without merely imposing a western-derived framework. A recent repositioning of media studies vis-a-vis Africa examines the long-standing trajectory of communication and media studies in the ‘south’ unacknowledged by media scholars in the global ‘north’. This includes a critique of calls made by U.S. and Europe-based scholars to ‘de-westernize’ the field as this stance does not take into account the alternative epistemologies that have been locally originated and practiced at the periphery of communication scholarship in the global ‘south’.
Publisert i Paper presented at Global Journalism Symposium, Kristiansand, Norway, 2015
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