Dr Wendy Willems

This course is available on the MSc in Global Media and Communications (LSE and Fudan), MSc in Global Media and Communications (LSE and UCT), MSc in Global Media and Communications (LSE and USC), MSc in Media, Communication and Development and MSc in Politics and Communication. This course is available with permission as an outside option to students on other programmes where regulations permit.

This course is 'controlled access', meaning that there is a limit to the number of students who can be accepted. If the course is oversubscribed, offers will be made via a random ballot process, with priority given to students with the course listed on their Programme Regulations. Whilst we do our best to accommodate all requests, we cannot guarantee you a place on this course.

There are no pre-requisites for this course. Students should apply via LSE for You without submitting a statement.

Please do not email the teacher with personal expressions of interest as these are not required and do not influence who is offered a place.

This course offers a comparative perspective on changing media culture in the Global South in the context of the neoliberal turn. The course not only considers neoliberalism as a crucial factor that has brought media industries such as private broadcasting stations, mobile phone companies and digital platforms into existence but also examines the extent to which these new forms of media and technology have played a role in reproducing neoliberalism as a process. It provides an understanding of how shifting economic policy regimes have impacted on the way in which people engage with media and technology, and how media and technology engage with people in the Global South. The first part of the course introduces the key concepts of ‘media culture’, ‘neoliberalism’ and ‘Global South’ which will be deployed throughout the course. The second part of the course discusses how key processes of social change in the Global South are linked to changing media culture, including the commodification of national imaginaries, informality, crime and the rising middle class, religion and the prosperity gospel, self-help media and the neoliberal subject, and mobility and social relations. The course examines these themes through a series of empirically-grounded, mostly ethnographic case studies. The course encourages students to critically question, assess and evaluate the extent to which the three key concepts in the course are helpful in gaining an understanding of changing media culture in the Global South.

10 hours of lectures and 10 hours of seminars in the WT.

This course includes a reading week in Week 6 of term.

Students will complete a formative 1500 word essay based on a case study.

• Arora, P. (2019). The next billion users: digital life beyond the West. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Dunn, H. S., Moyo, D., Lesitaokana, W. O., & Barnabas, S. B. (Eds.). (2021). Re-imagining communication in Africa and the Caribbean: Global south issues in media, culture and technology. New York: Springer International Publishing AG.
• Eckstein, L., & Schwarz, A. (2014). Postcolonial piracy: media distribution and cultural production in the Global South. London: Bloomsbury.
• Gómez-Cruz, E., Horst, H., Siles, I., & Soriano, C. (2023). Beyond the tropicalization of concepts: theorizing digital realities with and from the Global South. Communication, Culture and Critique, 16(4), 217-220.
• Iqani, M. (2016). Consumption, media and the Global South: aspiration contested. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan.
• Prashad, V. (2013). The poorer nations: a possible history of the global South. London: Verso.
• Shome, R. (2019). When postcolonial studies interrupts media studies. Communication, Culture & Critique, 12(3), 305-322.
• Wilson, J. A. (2018). Neoliberalism. New York: Routledge.
• Zhang, W., & Neyazi, T. A. (2020). Communication and technology theories from the South: the cases of China and India. Annals of the International Communication Association, 44(1), 34-49.

Essay (100%, 3000 words) in the ST.