By Anubhuti Vashist
One must relentlessly pursue new knowledge and trends in the development sector. There is just so much to learn!
In a world inundated with information, aspiring ComDev practitioners can easily feel overwhelmed by the sheer volume of content coming their way. Selection and organization skills are crucial for students like me to manage this constant influx of information and can be used to curate a diverse repository of digital content on ComDev.
I actively bookmark and review sites that help me check, what my professor calls, “the pulse of … digital networks” (Denskus, 2019). It was his blog post that inspired me to reflect critically on my curating practices as a ComDev student.
In his blog, Aidnography, Prof. Denskus views curating as a practice with a decolonizing capacity. Describing it as an “informal way of featuring new and different authors and their stories,” he writes, “Every tweet, every ‘Like’ on Facebook, every additional minute spent reading a blogpost … has the power of ‘micro-decolonisation’, of embracing new knowledge, of listening to voices outside the loud and powerful information flow, of being reminded of different experiences, be they painful or joyful” (Denskus, 2019).
Identifying and curating digital content has allowed me to find materials that reject “epistemological frames furnished by the West” (Shome, 2017). Sources used, referred to, and widely promoted in academic settings often result from a preference for content by experts, academics, or organizations located within the Anglo-American traditions of knowledge production and circulation.
For students who are just starting in the field, it is common to read online journals, blogs, and development news websites by multilateral organizations and independent media platforms in the ‘Global North’. These sources are generally regarded as authoritative references for all things development and ComDev. Critics argue that many of these sources portray, at times covertly, the role of development and communication for social change from the ‘savior of the Global South’ perspective. They are frequently criticized by decolonial thinkers for promoting ideas, paradigms, values, practices, and assumptions of the ‘Global North’ (Shome, 2017; Behar, 2022).
As this information is commonly available (though not necessarily accessible), I label it as the knowledge that is out there and can be found without spending much time and effort. It is the knowledge that search engines display as top results. The information also makes its way to students as core readings selected by their professors. Awareness of this content, which is out there, is essential for students to establish themselves as experts in the field. Ironically, this information that will turn us into experts is also largely behind a paywall and requires institutional access.
Inspired by the critical discourse within development studies, university reading lists have started to include diverse voices from the ‘Majority World‘,’ but a lot depends on the professor’s familiarity with this scholarship. For instance, it doesn’t surprise me when I encounter, Amitav Ghosh, Dipesh Chakrabarty, or Gayatri Spivak on my course reading lists. Their inclusion indicates to me the ‘canonization’ of scholars from the Global South. It is a reminder of the creative detours needed to include regional and local voices in the non-Western academic and development spaces.
It then becomes necessary for ComDev students to train themselves to look elsewhere for content that discusses communication for development initiatives from diverse socio-geographical and cultural perspectives. Seeking open-access digital content by people working at the grassroots, can help students undercut the hegemonic knowledge networks shaped by power differentials, organizational agendas, limited knowledge of the scholarship from the ‘Global South’, selfish interests, educational capital, and economic flows.
The motivation to look elsewhere comes from a meta-reflection on how we as ComDev students identify, organize, consume, and share information. As an aspiring ComDev practitioner from India, I have continuously engaged with curating as a practice to go beyond what is out there by looking elsewhere. I also realized while writing this post that I don’t see these practices as binaries and frequently use the latter to complement knowledge derived from the former. Engaging in these practices, provided me with a broader understanding of how communication strategies work or fail within changing social and geographical contexts. For instance, the challenges encountered by dalit or adivasi social workers or journalists wanting to create change at the community level in India.
However, I’ve found that curating by looking elsewhere can be time-consuming and requires patience. What keeps me going despite these hurdles is the joy of discovering voices I might not have known existed had I not put in the effort and time to seek them out. Most importantly, they give me hope that a lot is happening despite the rapidly exacerbating economic, gender, and social inequalities.
In the remainder of the post, I’ll share a list of digital content which I found while looking elsewhere. In my content curation journey, I am also guided by personal politics and interests. My interest in digital media for gender development in the Indian context is one of the reasons that led me to these sources. Also, some content will be widely known to Indian students or practitioners working in the social sector. However, I believe that many of these are largely restricted to people connected with development-focused media-sharing networks in India. Using every opportunity to share them with classmates, teachers, and readers increases the chance of cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary engagement.
- IDR: Founded in 2017, IDR is a media platform that publishes a range of writings on the development sector in India. Their recently launched humour section, which captures the reality of working in the social sector in India, cracks me up.
- Khabar Lahariya: A grassroots digital media platform driven by feminist practices, KL journalists, who are women from Dalit and Adivasi communities of rural India, use video format to highlight gender-based violence. The journalists also share obstacles faced by them when reporting from the field. Co-founded by Kavita Bundelkhandi, Meera Jataw, and Shalini Joshi, KL’s journalism focuses on social issues plaguing rural communities in Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, and Madhya Pradesh.
- Women in Labor: Co-hosted by Indian comedian Aditi Mittal and American filmmaker Christina MacGillivray, this podcast is one of the first initiatives to engage the Indian public on women’s low workforce participation.
- Living Water Museums: Started in 2017 by Sara Ahmed, LWM is a digital water museum that engages the “youth in visualizing sustainable, inclusive, and equitable water futures.” With countries aiming to achieve sustainable development goals, projects like LWM, through their digital storytelling methods, allow people to reconnect with life-sustaining natural resources like rivers and oceans.
- Namma Maathu, Namma Jaaga: A field project conducted by IT for Change in 2018, Namma Maathu, Namma Jaaga translates to ‘Our discourse, our space.’ One of its unique initiatives was Nodu Sakhi which used short videos to create community awareness around issues like gender rights, equity, and social justice.
- Feminism in India: Started as a Facebook page in 2013 by Japleen Pasricha, FII has taken a digital life of its own. It is now a go-to media platform for gender scholars and anyone interested in learning about intersectionality and developing “feminist sensibility”. FII is a valuable digital resource representing the plurality of voices that locate feminism in everyday and professional contexts in India.
Each finding is a potential site of theory construction about “mediated spheres of Non-Western modernities” (Shome, 2017). To see it in this context is to go beyond the usual approach of viewing digital platforms from the ‘Global South’ as case studies explained using Western theoretical and conceptual frameworks. Moreover, curating content also means training oneself to become a better digital listener, that is, to listen for and learn about plurality, diversity, and inclusion. The objective becomes possible when students are taught to critique development by looking inward and to reflect on their curating skills among other practices.
References:
Behar, A. (2022). Opinion: Decolonizing development is key to avoid path to irrelevance. devex. https://www.devex.com/news/opinion-decolonizing-development-is-key-to-avoid-path-to-irrelevance-103912
Denskus, T. (2019, December 17). Blogging and curating content as strategies to diversify discussions and communicate development differently. Aidnography: Communicating Development. https://aidnography.blogspot.com/
Shome, R. (2017). Going South and Engaging Non-Western Modernities. Media Theory, 1(1), 65–73. Retrieved from https://journalcontent.mediatheoryjournal.org/index.php/mt/article/view/566
Love this topic! I find the idea of micro-decolonization to be an interesting concept, as well as your comments on looking elsewhere to educate ourselves.
When you say “they give me hope that something is happening despite growing economic, gender, and social inequalities”, it does make me wonder if there is actually just as much good happening as their is bad, and if current media is simply amplifying the awareness of the bad without actually showcasing the good (unless, as you mention, you look elsewhere)!
Thank you Jessica for the comment! I feel that the mainstream media, especially in India, loves to sensationalise news on social injustices, especially gender based violence. Somehow the narrative opted by the mainstream media ends up blaming women or marginal communities for their ordeal. However, after actively looking elsewhere, I’ve managed to find local, women-run digital media platforms that focus on the root cause of violence against women. These platforms actually highlight the social and cultural factors that silence and subjugate women and young girls rather than blaming them. BehanBox (Behan is a Hindi word that means Sister) is one such example from India. But as you point out, these local initiatives are rarely acknowledged in the public sphere because of the dominance of the mainstream media that is focused on feeding the citizens with bad news mostly for viewership.