ways in which we research communication for development. ************** ... tendency has been to understand culture as a matter of the past, tradition or custom, .... According to Monica her mother would call her mobile every half hour to find.
DRAFT version of Tacchi, J. (forthcoming) ‘Stillness, Voice, Listening: diachronic approaches to researching communication for development’ In Tufte, T. Hemer, O. and Hansen, A.H. (Eds.) Memory on Trial: Media, Citizenship and Social Justice. Berlin and London: Lit Verlag. Jo Tacchi Stillness, Voice, Listening: diachronic approaches to researching communication for development. Abstract In this paper I will focus on a diachronic notion of 'stillness' evoked through media and communication for development practices. I consider how notions of voice and listening might be understood as moments of stillness in a fast moving and mobile world. I draw upon Bissell and Fuller's (2010) idea of stillness as referring to practices and states of contemplation, halting, reflecting and stepping back from the fully social flow of life. I also draw on Seremetakis (1994), whose work points to the occasional stilling of the senses paying an important personal and social role in the context of official cultures and memories. I’m interested in the ways in which practices of voice and listening can be thought about as achieving stillness, and what this means for the ways in which we research communication for development. ************** Within development there is a concern for the future, with economists rather than social scientists or humanities scholars capturing the agenda. This is because the tendency has been to understand culture as a matter of the past, tradition or custom, something to be challenged and changed in a development that has an orientation to the future (Appadurai 2004). Economics is seen as ‘the science of the future, and when human beings are seen as having a future, the keywords such as wants, needs, expectations, calculations, have become hardwired into the discourse of economics’ (ibid:60). Notions of a developed future contribute to a public memory -‐ in Scott’s 1
(2008) sense as mutable and transitory -‐ connected to ideals of progress. My contention is that this misses a great deal, and that communication scholars have much to contribute to understanding humanity in all its richness and complexity in order to influence development agendas. The association of cultural actors with the past, and economic actors with the future serves to oppose culture to development. Appadurai argues that the future and people’s aspirations are in fact cultural capacities. Within a development context, culture can be seen as a capacity worth strengthening, linked to aspirations of the future (plans, hopes and goals), and rooted in the past (habit, custom, tradition) (Appadurai 2004). Development models the past and the future by framing it within certain paradigms, and a logic of linear progress. Development is a central organizing concept of our time, framing our thinking about much of the world, an interpretive grid providing meaning for a range of observations (Ferguson, 1990). Buskens (2010:19) suggests that while development is well aware of the need to acknowledge and strengthen the agency of the beneficiaries of development, it is the agency of other parties that define its discourses and practices. Donors, practitioners, researchers, and scholars influence theoretical, methodological, and normative concepts, ‘[a]lthough their agency may be less visible, and definitely under less scrutiny, their frames of mind impact directly the way meaning is made of … experiences, dreams, and perspectives in the context of human development, poverty, and ICTs’. The ways we make sense of what we research ‘impact the reality that we study because of the ways that power and knowledge construction interact and intersect’ (Buskens, 2010:20). We must therefore recognize and challenge our theoretical, methodological and normative positions and acknowledge and take account of their impact on those we research. The questions and topics of development tend to be restrictive. They are overly determined by the framework of economic development and growth that dominates ideas of and approaches to development. As media and communications scholars we have something more to bring to the debates. How might we step back and think about other ways of framing development, and pay attention to things that apparently do not relate very much at all to development per se – for example, broader cultural and gendered contexts, memories and changing sensibilities? In development research, what happens if we ask different questions? 2
Rather than ask about the economic benefits of the take up of media and communication technologies, with implicit assumptions about what constitutes ‘correct’ usage of these technologies, can we perhaps focus on how people ‘think and feel’ through them? Can we, through this kind of understanding, better appreciate how to positively influence lives that have a past as well as aspirations for the future? Here I will explore notions of past, present and future in relation to communications research and development, and suggest that a diachronic notion of stillness might help us reflect on what are and might be considered suitable topics for development research. The three sections in this chapter indicate some ways in which this might be done. First I will discuss the concept of stillness as it emerged from research on the consumption of radio in the UK, and as I’d like to explore it in communication for development studies in South Asia. I argue that this concept helps us to take a diachronic approach to communication and development. Stillness represents contemplation rather than lack of movement, emphasizes non-‐contemporaneous aspects of everyday life, and draws upon unrecognized and unmarked events and aspects of life that are not always registered officially. Secondly I discuss the concept of voice in relation to communication and development and consider how we might think of it as a moment of stillness that represents a basic component of citizenship. Finally I discuss the concept of listening, and how this can signal the moment of recognition in communication and development, demonstrating a role of media and communication in enriching social justice. To contemplate, speak out, be heard, and to listen are internal and external states that speak to the present, the past and the future. My argument here has been built from combining studies with different objectives, disciplinary settings, and research questions. One set of research I draw upon briefly below is about radio consumption in Bristol, a city in the South West of England. From there I take the concept of stillness and see how it fits with other studies about communication for development, set in a range of locations in South Asia. In the work on radio in the UK, I focused on how the affordances of radio allow listeners to establish affective rhythm in their everyday lives and how moments of stillness contribute to this. In the communication for development work in Asia I focused in a range of ways on how media, communication and ICTs can help people move out of poverty. These are the 3
kinds of focus areas in each case that seem perfectly appropriate within their different disciplinary and theoretical frameworks. This chapter is an effort to explore the usefulness of disrupting and blurring those frameworks. Stillness In the 1990s I carried out an ethnographic study on the role of radio in domestic lives1. I was interested to understand what radio sound contributed to people’s lives, why they often talked about radio as a friend or companion. I found radio to be central to domestic soundscapes and the senses of being in the world these engendered. In addition to finding that radio sound has particular characteristics or affordances that make it suitable for the affective management of the everyday, my ethnographic work showed that radio sound was appealing partly because it allowed for moments of what I sometimes called ‘social silence’ (Tacchi, 2003; 2002), or ‘stillness’ (Tacchi, 2012). In the Bristol study social silence did not refer to a lack of sound, but to spaces or zones that allowed a form of stillness, or a stilling of the senses (Seremetakis, 1994) – for example a woman who talked about blasting the radio at high volume to banish tensions or disturbing thoughts, or the woman for whom a certain song reminded her of her childhood and her long dead father, as she pictured him shaving at the kitchen sink while he listened to the morning radio show. Another woman talked of the way reggae music stations connected her to a culture that she was never fully part of, but always longed to belong to. The concept of stillness refers to a range of ways that people connect with different aspects of their lives, to momentarily disengage from the social flow and order, in order to – inevitably -‐ reengage. This is a different way of thinking about connection to the one usually referred to in new media work. It is not the connectivity implied by new media as the ‘always on’ phenomena. Connectivity in that sense considers being connected and having access as the part of new and social media that deserves attention, especially in development studies. The flip side would be the use of media to disconnect. Stillness can be thought of 1
This was my doctoral research, for a PhD in social anthropology from University College London, completed in 1997. The research was funded through an award from the Economic and Social Research Council. I studied the consumption of radio sound and soundscapes as part of the material culture of domestic spaces. 4
as both a kind of connection and disengagement, and in the cases discussed here, through the mechanism of media. While it emerged as important for me through the research in Bristol, it might apply just as well, in this sense, to some of the women I met in later work in India. Monica is 21 and lives in a slum in Delhi2. Her parents run a general store, which does good trade. They also own three slum dwellings that they rent out, and so are comparatively well off in the area. Her mother is the head of the household, and monitors Monica closely. She is especially concerned about Monica because she is beautiful, educated, and attracts a lot of male attention. Monica found a job in an export house on the outskirts of Delhi and commuted an hour each way. She loved her job, and the experience and exposure that it brought, especially considering her lack of independence as a young woman from the slum, and in this period of time before her parents arranged her marriage. It gave her access to a different experience of life. Monica left the job after just a few months because her mother had made it too difficult for her. According to Monica her mother would call her mobile every half hour to find out what she was doing, and if she did not answer she would call the office number. It became unbearable for Monica one day, when her mother turned up in person at her work because she had not answered the mobile. Now that Monica is no longer employed and spends all of her time at home, her mobile phone connection with the outside world both allows her mother to stay constantly connected, and stops Monica from ‘going mad’. This is because she spends hours online. She uses Facebook, Orkut, Twitter and Skype. Monica knows that her mother would prohibit the use of the phone if she knew what she did with it, including flirtations with ‘friends’ she has never met in person, but for her it provides a way of managing the severe restrictions placed upon her, and imagining a different life. While offline her social life is highly monitored and she has little to keep her engaged, online she is free to roam wherever she wants, and contemplate a different future. She is in this way able to sequentially connect and disconnect, to exist on different planes. 2
This is based on research undertaken with Tripta Chandola in a slum cluster in Delhi since 2004. The research includes Chandola’s ethnographic work with the author (funded by the Department for International Development – DFID -‐ from 2003 to 2005), and further ethnographic work undertaken by Chandola first for her doctorate, supervised by the author, and subsequently through postdoctoral work. 5
Exploring the concept of stillness further, to try and understand its implications for ideas of the past and the future, we might think of the wider context of ‘official cultures and memories’ (Seremetakis, 1994:13). Seremetakis sees everyday life as having been ‘colonized’ as a ‘repository of passivity’ by political powers and official definitions, and a site of forgetfulness and inattention. She regards it as the site where there are harboured ‘elusive depths, obscure corners, transient corridors’ that evade political observation and control (ibid.). It is within this devalued space that stillness can be generated, as a ‘resting point’, ‘against the flow of the present’ (ibid.:12); There are substances, spaces and times that can trigger stillness. I think of the old Greek who halted from his daily activities in the heat of the mid-‐day to slowly sip his coffee, each sip followed by a sigh of release. This was a ‘resting point’, a moment of contemplation, the moment he began to re-‐taste the day. Introduced by aroma and taste, this was a moment of stillness ... a moment of meta-‐ commentary in which the entire scenography of present and past social landscapes are arrayed before his consciousness... There is a perceptual compression of space and time that is encapsulated in the small coffee cup, from which he takes a sip every other minute, and while feeling the sediments on his tongue, he makes his passage through this diversity.
Seremetakis 1994:13
Such experiences emphasise the non-‐contemporaneous aspects of everyday life, drawing on unrecognised and unmarked events and aspects of life. Against the flow of the present, in the offline world, Monica uses her mobile to connect with virtual friends. According to Seremetakis, such moments ‘are expressions of non-‐synchronicity which become material encounters with cultural absence and possibility’ (ibid.), where the imperceptible may become perceptible in a marked way. Such moments can provide opportunities to create alternative understandings and rationales, and give depth to the experience of everyday life, which is otherwise given little attention. For Monica the online space gives her a chance to express herself, and provides plenty of listeners. But we might ask how her experience of digital media relates to notions of voice and listening as imagined in development. 6
Voice Voice is about the agency to represent oneself and the right to express an opinion, and is widely considered to be a basic aspect of citizenship. Couldry (2010) expands on this to think about voice as both a process and a value. As a process it is giving an account of one’s life and its conditions, as a value it is the act of valuing those frameworks for organizing human life and resources that themselves value voice (as a process). If voice is valued in development, it suggests not simply acknowledging processes for voice. It also necessitates a form of listening, as will be discussed below. Voice is inextricably linked to ideas of dialogic approaches to communication for development and to participatory development. In the latter in particular, voice is often understood with specific reference to process, so that giving people the opportunity to have a voice is often paid more attention than thinking about the broader frameworks for recognition, for the valuing of voice. Thinking about communication and development broadly this difference can be explained by contrasting ideas of allowing people a space to express opinions and share experiences with ensuring voices are heard in the places and spaces where they might influence decision makers. Opportunity for voice might also be considered as a moment of stillness – an opportunity for contemplation and reflection. In itself this is of value, both as an internal act of contemplation and then of expression, and as a process to think about and formulate communication on the things that matter. We can explore this through the project Finding a Voice3. Finding a Voice was made up of a research network of 15 pre-‐existing local media and ICT initiatives in India, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Indonesia. This included community radio stations, video projects, computer and resource centres and community libraries. All were equipped with computers and Internet. The goal of Finding a Voice was to increase understanding of how ICT can be effective and empowering in local contexts at a time when many development agencies were investing in ICT4D initiatives and keenly 3
The full title of the project is Finding a Voice: Making Technological Change Socially Effective and Culturally Empowering. Funded by the Australian Research Council (www.arc.gov.au) through their Linkage Grant scheme (LP0561848), with strong collaboration and further funds and in-‐kind support coming from UNESCO and UNDP. www.findingavoice.org. The project ran from 2006-‐2009. 7
interested in understanding the development potential of new technologies. We experimented with ways to get more involvement from local people in the creation of content used within the media and ICT initiatives, to communicate a range of voices within and beyond marginalized communities. In Finding a Voice, voice referred to ideas around self-‐expression, inclusion and participation in social, political and economic processes, and ‘voice poverty’ was understood as the inability of people to influence the decisions that affect their lives, and the right to participate in that decision making (Lister 2004). According to Appadurai (2004:63) one of the poor’s ‘gravest lacks’ is ‘the lack of resources with which to give “voice”’. So voice in this understanding is about being able to express themselves in order to influence political debates so that their own welfare is given due attention. Finding a Voice worked with members of the local media initiatives to develop capacity in digital content creation. Content creation techniques and formats were explored through a series of workshops where the techniques and processes were adapted according to local strategies and conditions. One format that was taken up, adapted and applied in a variety of ways across the sites, was digital storytelling. Digital stories are 3-‐5 minute multimedia creations using digital images and voiceovers, narrated in the first person (Hartley and McWilliam 2009). It was found to be an interesting way to encourage participation and engage the voices of people who otherwise have no access to the media, to express concerns about various social or personal issues (Tacchi, 2009). What was interesting about this particular format was the community workshop method used to produce the digital stories. A 3-‐5 day workshop involved story circles and script development, which in effect meant creating, considering, developing, critiquing, reflecting and recreating stories. This was done individually and in groups, and included a lot of whole group discussion and feedback sessions. The stories were honed through individual work, and wider group inputs. This in itself created a space for contemplation and reflection on aspects of life that were of concern to the participants. The workshop took them out of the daily flow of events and pressures, to temporarily give them a chance to reflect upon and come up with the story that they wanted to tell. It was discussed and (hopefully) improved with critique from their peers. 8
Finding a Voice indicated some interesting and promising opportunities for developing mechanisms or a form of stillness to allow for the generation of considered voice. However, we need to think carefully about how to encourage active ‘listening’. If these storytellers were only talking to their peers, and not to the decision making powers that could positively effect the issues their stories raised, how could this be considered any different to Monica’s experience of self expression. What she does can be seen to give her a voice within a certain space, yet it is hard to see how it has a positive influence or impact in the spheres of decision making which effect her. This brings us on to the idea of listening. Listening In development there is an emphasis on the delivery of information from development agencies and ‘experts’ to poor populations. The focus of development monitoring and evaluation is often on whether those poor populations are listening effectively, and whether their lives and behaviours have changed as a result. This is to place the emphasis of listening on poor people, based on the assumption that knowledge resides with the ‘experts’. Ideas around voice challenge this and have contributed to broadening ideas about poverty (Narayan et al 2000) and new ways of engaging with people and their experiences through dialogue (Chambers 1997). Such approaches introduce alternate ways of positioning the speaker-‐listener relationship. Bickford’s writing on politics, conflict and citizenship (1996) points to how political theory has consistently focused on the politics of speaking, paying very little attention to listening. The politics of recognition (Honneth 1995) centres on the esteem, value and attention given to social and cultural difference as questions of justice, and on attention and response as questions of communicative justice. We need to more effectively listen across difference and inequality (Dreher 2009). We learned through Finding a Voice that helping people find ways to create content and express themselves through digital media is not enough, we cannot assume that decision makers who are important to the issue are listening. The institutions that excluded communities might usefully try to communicate with are often structurally unsuited for listening. They too need to find a space of stillness in which to contemplate 9
and reflect on the diverse aspects of the lives of those their decisions impact, and how their decisions are made. As Quarry & Ramirez (2009) put it, they need to become listeners rather than tellers. Such a stilling of the discourses and normative frames, allowing other perspectives and experiences to penetrate might lead to development being far more effective. Who gets to speak, and how their voices are listened to is crucial here. The problem of listening is highlighted through the Listening Project (2009). They talked to development workers and communities across a range of countries globally and found a consistent story of systems of international assistance biasing the ways agencies and aid workers listen and do not listen, what and who they listen to, where and when they listen. This can be seen as requiring the acknowledgement that Buskens (2010) calls for, of their own agency in defining such spaces and the knowledge that is produced and circulated and which in turn creates models of development. Being prepared to accept and respect alternative knowledge and knowledge practices requires a stillness on the part of those with the power, as it may contradict dominant knowledge practices and beliefs in challenging ways. Conclusion The mainstream narrative around the growing penetration of mobile phones in developing countries tends very much to focus on their role in economic growth (Osorio and Postill, 2010). Donner (2009) recognizes the blurring of lives and livelihoods through mobile phone use in developing countries, and calls for more attention to be paid to the way mobiles are used and valued for self-‐expression, agency, and social connection as well as to livelihood and economic activities. Yet economic growth and economics as the pathway to developed futures remains the dominant framework for understanding mobile phones and new technologies in development contexts. Studies of the role of mobile phones and social networking in the West is far more likely to be framed in social and cultural terms. It is rarely accompanied by discussion of GDP and economic growth, but more likely by discussions of communication, social and cultural changes and the everyday lives in which they are experienced (Katz and Aakhus 2002, Ling 2004, Ito et al 2005). It is in such studies that concepts arise that might have something to add to understanding of communication and development. 10
There is after all a contemporary concern for sustainability in international development programmes. Communication for development and social change increasingly thinks about sustainability and the importance of grounding our understandings of development processes within local complex contexts. Community participation and ownership in planning, decision-‐making, evaluation and implementation of C4D are crucial for sustainability (Quarry & Ramirez, 2009). While closer consideration of complex local contexts adds to understandings of processes of social change, within development discourses ideas about culture and tradition can be considered backward looking and contrary to the forward-‐looking, progress oriented goals of development itself. My argument here is that everyday life and media and communication practices as aspects of culture in the everyday can offer insights that are useful to understanding ongoing processes of social change. Notions such as ‘stillness’ as contemplative moments or resistance, might help us to appreciate where and how development programmes might think in more nuanced ways about sustainability. If we understand stillness as encompassing moments of taking stock, contemplation and reflection and consider that these things are important when thinking about voice and listening, then this in turn becomes of interest to development. Officially recorded aspects of life, public memory and development itself are just a part of what is of interest here. They are shaped by the agencies that define them. We might come at these things differently by applying concepts from cultural and communications research that use a different frame and ask different questions. References Appadurai, A. (2004) ‘The Capacity to Aspire: Culture and the terms of recognition’ In Rao, V. & Walton, M. (eds.) Culture and Public Action. Stanford CA: Stanford University Press. Pages 59-‐84. Bickford, S. (1996) The Dissonance of Democracy: Listening, Conflict, and Citizenship. New York: Cornell University Press. 11
Bissell, D. and Fuller, G. (2010) ‘Stillness Unbound’ in Stillness in a Mobile World D. Bissell & G. Fuller (eds.). London: Routledge. Pages 1-‐17. Buskens, I. (2010) ‘Agency and Reflexivity in ICT4D Research: Questioning Women’s Options, Poverty, and Human Development’ Information Technologies & International Development Volume 6, Special Edition, Pages 19–24 Chambers, R (1997) Whose Reality Counts? Putting the First Last, London: Intermediate Technology Publications. Couldry, N. (2010) Why Voice Matters: Culture and Politics after Neoliberalism. London: Sage. Donner, J. (2009) Blurring Livelihoods and Lives: The Social Uses of Mobile Phones and Socioeconomic Development Innovations 4(1) 91-101. Dreher, T (2009) ‘Listening across difference: Media and multiculturalism beyond the politics of voice’ Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies Vol 23 (4) Ferguson, J. (1990) The anti-‐politics machine:“Development”, depoliticization, and bureaucratic power in Lesotho. Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press. Hartley, J. and McWilliam, K. (Eds.) Story Circle: Digital Storytelling Around the World. Oxford: Wiley-‐Blackwell. Ito, M., Okabe, D. and Matsuda, M. (Eds.) (2005) Personal, Portable, Pedestrian: Mobile Phones in Japanese Life, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Katz, J.E. and Aakhus, M.A. (Eds.) (2002) Perpetual Contact: Mobile Communication, Private Talk, Public Performance, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Ling, R. (2004) The Mobile Connection: The Cell Phone’s Impact on Society, San Francisco, CA: Morgan Kaufmann. Lister, R. (2004) Poverty. Cambridge: Polity Press. The Listening Project (2009). LP Factsheet and Timeline. Retrieved January 9, 2010, from http://www.cdainc.com/cdawww/pdf/other/lp_factsheet_20091105_Pdf.pdf. Narayan, D., Chambers, R., Kaul Shah, M & Petesch, P. (2000). Crying out for change. Voices of the Poor series. Oxford: Oxford University Press, World Bank. Osorio, F. and Postill, J. (2010) ‘Mobile rewards: a critical review of the Mobiles for Development (M4D) literature’. EASA2010: Crisis and imagination , Maynooth, Ireland (24-‐27 August 2010). Quarry, W. and Ramirez, R. (2009) Communication for Another Development: Listening Before Telling, London: Zed Books. Scott, C.E. (2008) ‘The Appearance of Public Memory’ In Phillips, K.R. (Ed.) Framing Public Memory. Tuscaloosa, Alabama: The University of Alabama Press. Pages 147-‐156. Seremetakis, C.N. (Ed.) (1994) The Senses Still: Perception and Memory as Material Culture in Modernity. London: University of Chicago Press. Tacchi, J. (2012) ‘Radio in the (i)Home: changing experiences of domestic audio technologies in Britain’. In Bessier, &. L Fisher, D. Radio Fields: Anthropology and Wireless Sound in the 21st Century New York: New York University Press. Tacchi, J. (2009). ‘Finding a Voice: Digital Storytelling as Participatory Development.’ In Hartley, J. and McWilliam, K. (Eds.) Story Circle: Digital Storytelling Around the World. (pp 167-‐175). Oxford: Wiley-‐Blackwell.
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Tacchi, J. (2003) ‘Nostalgia and Radio Sound’. In M. Bull and L.Back (eds.). The Auditory Culture Reader. Oxford. Berg. Tacchi,J. (2002) ‘Radio Texture: Between Self and Others’. In K. Askew and R. Wilk (eds.). The Anthropology of Media: A Reader. London. Blackwell. Pages 241-‐257.
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