Doing Development Alongside the People
Hello everyone, meet me, Linje Manyozo, a Lecturer in Media, Communication and Development in the Department of Media and Communications, here at the London School of Economics and Political Science. My research, conducted largely in Southern Africa, centres on questions of voice, participation and authority of communities in development policy formulation and implementation. I have examined the uses of communication and media as engagement strategies for challenging people to, as Paulo Freire (1996) would suggest, speak and unspeak their world - to intervene in recreating their world. Both my research and teaching span participatory development, community engagement, participatory action research, development communication and media development. I have worked as a development journalist on initiatives funded by international development institutions such as UNICEF, USAID, UNESCO, FAO, GTZ and UNDP.
It is a wonderful experience to be working with well-published academics and researchers. The new MSc in Media, Communications and Development seems to have just opened another growth chamber for the LSE, and I am glad to be playing a part in contributing to the legacy of this School. I have also worked at the Universities of Malawi (in Malawi) and Fort Hare (in South Africa), where I taught in the undergraduate and postgraduate programs in Media and Communications. I completed my doctorate and post doctorate research in communication for development at the University of La Trobe, Bundoora, Melbourne. My doctorate study built on the sustainable livelihoods, participatory development and development communication approaches in examining blueprints which would facilitate community engagement strategies for challenging and empowering people, to undertake decisions that would improve their livelihoods and communities.
Teaching Communication for Development is a challenging experience, because one does not have all the answers, probably because one does not know everything. Interestingly, it is this lack of "complete" knowledge of issues that becomes a subject of collaborative investigation by educators and their students. Here, education becomes interesting, as it requires that an educator accepts the limitations of their understanding of a subject matter. Education then becomes a journey that educator and educatee should all undertake as they attempt to define the boundaries of their ignorance; and as such, knowledge becomes that encounter, when ignorance is confronted by reality.
Local People and the Bio-Ethics Debate
How does the media engage the largely indigenous-language speaking, rural and poor public in critical dialogue over scientifically complex phenomena like genetically modified organisms including food? How challenging is it for the media to translate and inteprete such scientific research into local, traditional and indiegenous knowledge? In an attempt to answer this development dilemma, Pascal Mwale, a Bio-Ethics PhD Fellow at Witwatersrand University appraises the notion of scientific communication, whilst building on Habermasean concepts of sphere and dialogue. The article, Societal deliberation on genetically modified maize in southern Africa: the debateness and publicness of the Zambian national consultation on genetically modified maize food aid in 2002 appeared in the Journal of Public Understanding of Science It is featured here with the kind permission of the author. Full article.
