Grad Prog: talks this Weds (7/11): Re-imagining Articulation: Community Radio and the ‘Return of the Local’

4.10pm-5pm, Room 2.19, MediaCityUK. (Non-Salford students meet 4pm in reception to be signed in).

Guest Speaker: Brilliant Mhlanga

Re-imagining Articulation: Community Radio and the ‘Return of the Local’ 

The rise of community radio in Africa in general and, in particular, South Africa continues to be seen as part of the state’s developmental emancipatory project and part of democratisation. Community radio as the expression of a geographically localised community, with a manageable population, and a third developmental voice existing between the state, public and private commercial radio carries with it the features of; independence, equality, community participation and representation. Operating as the alternative element, community radio offers the dialogic potential of engaging and representing cultural distortions inherent in the majority-controlled media by offering the local communities an opportunity to broadcast their views and vision. Localised broadcasting and allowing communities to use their languages in a community radio station offers a major sketch of representation and conjures feelings of empowerment. XK FM, a radio station for the !Xu and Khwe communities of South Africa will be used as a case study. It will be argued that XK FM as a community radio represents the pre-eminence of value laden participatory approach, re-invigorating the theory of articulation and marks the return of the nativised local through the use of language as the logic of empowerment and as part of inter-state-community dialogue and inter-community forms of engagement.

Brilliant Mhlanga holds a PhD from the University of Westminster. He is a Lecturer in the Department of Mass Media and Communication, University of Hertfordshire, UK, and is also associated with the Africa Media Centre, University of Westminster (London), UK. He is also affiliated with the National University of Science & Technology (NUST), Zimbabwe, and is currently working on a number of topics, among them a book titled: Bondage of Boundaries & the ‘Toxic Other’ in Postcolonial Africa:  The Northern Problem & Identity Politics Today, and another project provisionally titled: On the Banality of Evil: Cultural Particularities & Genocide in Africa. Mhlanga is a recipient of a number of awards and fellowships; chief among them being; the Archbishop Desmond Tutu Fellow (African Leadership Institute & University of Oxford), W. K. Kellogg Foundation Southern African Indigenous Research Fellowship and Distinguished Civil Society Fellow with the Global Network for Africa’s Prosperity (GNAP). His research interests include: media and development communication, community radio, ethnic minority media, ethnicity, nationalism and postcolonial studies, media policies & political economy of the media.