January CommQuote

Let's ring (hint hint) in the new year with a poem called Cell Phone by Ernesto Cardenal (transl. by John Lyons). It's from his 2011 collection titled The Origin of the Species and Other Poems (Texas Tech University Press).

Cell Phone

You talk on your cell phone

and talk and talk

and laugh into your cell phone

never knowing how it was made

and much less how it works

but what does that matter

trouble is you don’t know

just as I didn’t

that many people die in the Congo

thousands upon thousands

for that cellphone

they die in the Congo

in its mountains there is coltan

(besides gold and diamonds)

used for cell phone

condensers

for the control of the minerals

multinational corporations

wage this unending war

5 million dead in 15 years

and they don’t want it to be known

country of immense wealth

with poverty-stricken population

80% of the world’s coltan

reserves are in the Congo

the coltan has lain there for

three thousand million years

Nokia, Motorola, Compaq, Sony

buy the coltan

the Pentagon too, the New York

Times corporation too

and they don’t want it to be known

nor do they want the war to stop

so as to carry on grabbing the coltan

children of 7 to 10 years extract the coltan

because their tiny bodies

fit into the tiny holes

for 25 cents a day

and loads of children die

due to the coltan powder

or hammering the rock

that collapses on top of them

The New York Times too

that doesn’t want it to be known

and that’s how it remains unknown

this organized crime

of the multinationals

the Bible identifies

truth and justice

and love and the truth

the importance of the truth then

that will set us free

also the truth about coltan

coltan inside your cell phone

on which you talk and talk

and laugh into your cell phone

 

Article Feature: Content Analysis of Africa-affiliated Authors in Comm Journals

Work by African-affiliated authors continues to be underrepresented in Communication journals, so find the authors Ann Neville Miller, Christine Deeter, Anne Trelstad, Matthew Hawk, Grece Ingram   and Annie Ramirez in Still the Dark Continent: A Content Analysis of Research About Africa and by African Scholars in 18 Major Communication-Related Journals in the Journal of International and Intercultural Communication  (Volume 6, Number 4, November 2013).

ABSTRACT
Research about African communication and studies by African-affiliated authors remain scarce in the field of communication. To establish a comprehensive picture of the state of scholarship, 5,228 articles published in 18 top communication journals between 2004 and 2010 were reviewed. Articles were coded for topic nation, author affiliation, article type, category of communication studied, and research method. Thirty-nine Africa-focused articles including 25 authored by researchers from African institutions were found. Over half addressed health communication; most focused on Kenya and South Africa. Means are suggested by which the international scholarly community can partner to encourage African scholarship.

Introducing: Journal of African Media Studies

The Journal of African Media Studies has launched this year (2009) with two issues so far. The editors (Winston Mano, principal; Monica Chibita and Wendy Wilems, associates) describe the "imperatives" of the Journal in Issue Number One's opening Editorial:

"The Journal of African Media Studies (JAMS) provides a new platform to debate issues about media, communication and culture in Africa. Our first goal is to promote the often neglected but important area of media research in Africa....

The second imperative for JAMS derives from our desire to contribute to the growing body of empirical work in media, communication and cultural studies. In this regard, JAMS complements other existing English-language and area-focused media, communication and cultural studies journals that promote research on marginalized and often ignored contexts (e.g., Latin America, Middle East and Asia)....

The third related, and more political, imperative for JAMS arose from the now firm realization that the bulk of work in media theory is ‘based upon data from just two spots, Britain and the United States, which have remarkably similar leitmotifs in their cultural, economic and political history that mark them out from other nations on the planet’ (Downing 1996). We see the role of JAMS as providing perspectives that help free the field from the stranglehold of theories from one particular context (see also Ake 1982; Sparks 1998; Nuttall and Michael 1999; Park and Curran 2000; Hart and Young 2003; Abbas and Erni 2004; McMillin 2006; Thussu 2007). We aim to contribute to the ongoing re-positioning of media and cultural studies outside the Anglo-American axis. Left unchallenged, this gives rise to ‘the most often mistaken impression that the Western text and Western ways of making meaning are universal, and, therefore, to be copied by academics the world over’ (Nyamnjoh 1999)."

JAMS is among the Library's e-resources and can be accessed from the homepage.

New Papers from the Shorenstein Center

Recent papers from The Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy:

Sandra Nyaira, Mugabe's Media War: How New Media Help Zimbabwean Journalists Tell Their Story

Rory O'Connor, Word of Mouse: Credibility, Journalism and Emerging Social Media

Eric Pooley, How Much Would You Pay to Save the Planet? The American Press and the Economics of Climate Change

A full list of papers since 1989 can be searched at the site by author or date.

Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) Daily Reports, 1974 - 1996

Penn Libraries has just added to its e-resource page the Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) Daily Reports, 1974 - 1996 for the regions of the Middle East & Africa, Near East & South Asia and Africa (Sub-Saharan) & South Asia. "The original mission of the FBIS was to monitor, record, transcribe and translate intercepted radio broadcasts from foreign governments, official news services, and clandestine broadcasts from occupied territories. Many of these materials are first-hand reports of events as they occurred." (from the Readex overview page). This fully searchable archive of scanned transcripts from the United States' principal record of political and historical open source intelligence has been recently digitized from the microfiche. Other regions of the world such as China, the former Soviet Union, and Eastern Europe are available at Penn, but only in microfiche. You can use the Foreign Broadcast Information Service Electronic Index (1975-1996) to access the microfiche for these other regions, not ideal, but a step up from the paper indexes that we used to rely on.

Themed issues on TVIII, language and discrimination, and coloniality

The Journal of Language and Social Psychology (Volume 26, Number 2, June 2007) titled Communication, Language, and Discrimination and edited by Richard Clement features articles that aim to draw attention to "current conceptualizations of the links between language and discrimination, delineate communicative features related to discrimination, focus on the experience of victims of discrimination, and outline measures that may contribute to thwarting discriminatory practices or limiting their impact" (writes Itesh Sachdev in the issue's Prologue).


New Review of Film and Television Studies (Volume 5, Number 1, April 2007) is devoted to "TVIII." What is TVIII? "TVI generally refers to the origins of the medium (beginning in the 1930s), a time that John Ellis (2000) has defined as a period of ‘scarcity’ because of its lack of consumer choice. TVII refers to the changes in technologies and institutional structures that took place in the 1980s (deregulation, the introduction of cable and satellite and so on), or what Ellis describes as a period of ‘availability’. TVIII therefore labels television’s present state and beyond; a time of increased fragmentation consumer interactivity and global market economies—what Ellis defines as ‘choice’. As Jane Roscoe has recently put it (2004): Content is more dispersed across… platforms, and our engagement with it is more fleeting. Our experience of contemporary media is fragmented rather than unified or centralised. Instead of our viewing habits being controlled by the ‘flow’ of schedules, our viewing is now clustered around events, and through technologies such as personal video recorders, DVDs, and subscription television services. Choice is the buzzword…" (Issue editors Glen Greeber and Matt Hills in the editorial introduction).


A double issue of Cultural Studies (Volume 21, Numbers 2-3, March/May 2007) is on the subject of coloniality. The issue, edited by Walter D. Mignola is titled Globalization and the De-Colonial Option. Kicking off the issue is "the seminal article by Peruvian sociologist, Anibal Quijano, published at the beginning of the 90s, when the dust of a crumbling Soviet Union was still in everybody eyes. At the beginning of this century [2002], Arturo Escobar (an anthropologist from Columbia current residing in the US) wrote a critical review of what he called ‘the modernity/coloniality research program’." This article follows the one by Quijano. The rest of the issue reflects the research and publications of those participating in the project that continues to meet yearly and exchange research and views, as reported by W.D. Mignolo in the issu'es introduction, Introduction: Coloniality of Power and De-colonial Thinking). The 500+ page issue is divided into five sections: I The Emergence of An-Other Paradigm, II (De)Colonization of Knowledges and of Beings, III The Colonial Nation-States and the Imperial Racial Matrix, IV (De)Coloniality at Large, and V On Empires and colonial/Imperial Differences.