A Christmas letter to the ComDev community

At this very moment you must be wrapping up Christmas presents and making wish lists for 2016.  Meanwhile, we at Ørecomm are wrapping up our research findings and setting aims for projects in the upcoming year. Here is what Oscar Hemer and Thomas Tufte, directors of Ørecomm, have to say.

Dear colleagues and friends,

2015 is drawing to an end, and it is time to take stock of the year that has passed. It has been a seminal year in terms of development and development challenges, with the new Sustainable Development Goals 2030 and the first ever Global Climate Agreement made. Meanwhile, it was marked by terrorist attacks and a refugee crisis. Ørecomm has sought to respond to some of these contemporary challenges consolidating itself as a transnational research platform. This year Ørecomm has had a variety of activities in collaboration with many stakeholders: we have progressed with research projects, published a number of books and journal articles, organized seminars and courses.

Our partnership with UNICEF has both started and reached its steerageway: evaluation on C4D strategies in the Eastern European and Central Asian regions is about to be concluded. Another project in Tanzania is coming up in spring 2016. Educational collaboration with UNICEF is also making significant progress, with a second group of C4D officers signed up for the Advances in ComDev course in Malmö, and a fresh agreement on internships at UNICEF offices for students from Malmö and Roskilde universitites.

After 5 years of work, in February we held a concluding seminar at Roskilde University on research project Media, Empowerment and Democracy in East Africa, having discussed our findings from Kenya and Tanzania. Project’s insights about the role of media in citizen engagement have also fed into our large Nordic-Kenyan research initiative Critical Perspectives on New Media and Social Change in the Global South, which is in the midst of its progress. 7 of the 9 participating researchers have conducted fieldwork in Kenya in 2015, exploring use of new media in everyday life of different social groups.

Although not formally part of Ørecomm, but closely associated to the ComDev programme in Malmö, the Glocal Classroom – sharing the ComDev experience project has also come to a successful conclusion in 2015, with a symposium in Malmö this September. It was arranged in connection to the 15^th anniversary celebration of the ComDev MA programme. The Glocal Classroom has established a global network for exchange in web-based pedagogy, having universities of Malmö, Guelph (Canada), Flinders (Australia) and Stellenbosch (South Africa) as four nodes on four continents. Collaboration is continuing without external funding, and will eventually be extended to other partners, especially in the Global South.

Interconnection of social movements and social media has also remained a priority theme for Ørecomm throughout the year.  For example, together with MICS, a Swedish-funded research network for studies on Migration, Identity, Communication, and Security, We have, co-organized a seminar in Istanbul in May. Our focus was on dynamics between social movements and social media, having Gezi uprisings in 2013 as a vivid example. Our partnership with the Danish Embassy in Indonesia led to an Ørecomm seminar at RUC a few months ago, focusing upon the role of social media (Twitter in particular) in the Indonesian elections last year. Finally, Thomas Tufte’s book ‘Communicación para el cambio social – la participación y el empoderamiento como base para el desarrollo mundial’ about linkage between social media and social movements was presented during a conference in Spain in May.

A fundamental component of the research base in Ørecomm is constituted by our PhD-students. Florencia Enghel, who completed her PhD in December 2014, received the FSMK (The Swedish Association for Media and Communication Research) Doctoral Dissertation 2015 award in May. Erliza Lopez Pedersen , Marco Zoppi and Jonas Agerbæk Jeppesen have progressed in their respective theses, while Nina Grønlykke completed her thesis, submitting it to Roskilde University on 22 December. It is entitled ‘Media and place in revolutionary Egypt. An anthropological exploration of information activism and journalism’, and will be defended around March 2016.

2015 has been a very active year for Ørecomm in terms of publications. ‘Memory on Trial – Media, Citizenship and Social Justice’ was published in spring, as a result of the third Ørecomm Festival. The jubilee issue of Glocal Times (22-23) was published in September, indicating the 10^th anniversary of Glocal Times. The Voice & Matter anthology, based on the 2014 Festival, was submitted to Nordicom in December, and will be published in 2016. It will mark a late tenth anniversary of our first joint publication, Media and Glocal Change from 2005.

Fundraising is also a fundamental but less visible activity of Ørecomm. It is what keeps us running thus we put a lot of effort into fundraising. During 2015 we had a few unsuccessful applications. GoComm project supposed to spur social entrepreneurship in ComDev in the Öresund region did not receive renewed Interreg funding; two major research projects with Ørecomm profile were rejected in high competition. Likewise was a large proposal to the secretariat of the UN World Humanitarian Summit 2016. In spite of insecure funding, we continued consolidating our position as a transnational research platform. Moreover, many of our applications sparked new collaborations and ideas we indeed will pursue in 2016. We also had our heads of department sign a new agreement between RUC and Malmö University, reaffirming the institutional platform upon which Ørecomm is based.

Some fortnight ago (10-11 December), a ComDev delegation from Malmö visited Bard College in Berlin for an open workshop on the ways of addressing current so-called ‘refugee crisis’ from a ComDev perspective. Discussion was held around European situation and the current turning tide, when Germany and Sweden are adapting to a policy of restriction, if not hostility, towards the continuing wave of refugees and migrants from Syria and other war-torn countries in Asia and Africa. Urgency of the current situation around refugees and migrants, not only in Europe but globally, calls for convergence of many strands of thought and practice. It also calls for ComDev to play a crucial role in that process. This will therefore be our over-arching aim for 2016.

Finally, and maybe most importantly to our broader community: Ørecomm Festival is going to be a biannual event. We are therefore happy to announce that a Festival will be held on 15-17 September 2016 with a title Voice and Mobility. With these plans in our mind, we want to wish you all happy holiday time and a good start of 2016, which is, undoubtedly, going to be a fruitful one in terms of theory and practice in ComDev.

Oscar and Thomas