Media and governance in Latin America: The role of communication for development
Abstract
A group of around sixty researchers interested in Latin American issues gathered in May 2014 at the University of Sheffield, in the United Kingdom, for the conference “Media and Governance in Latin America – Exploring the role of communication for development”. Hosted jointly by the University of Sheffield’s Departments of Journalism Studies and of Hispanic Studies and the Sheffield Institute for International Development, the conference was organised by Jairo Lugo-Ocando, lecturer in Journalism Studies at Sheffield University, and a number of his PhD students who are currently doing research on Latin America. Of the sixty-five submissions received, forty were accepted for presentation and organized in ten panels. I participated in the conference with my paper “Voices from the margins – people and the media in the struggle for land in Brazil”, which was included in the panel session Media and Policy Struggles.
The conference sought to provide a forum for academic debates about the role of communication in processes of governance and development, focusing on recent events in the Latin American region including protests and widespread civil society demonstrations. The papers presented covered a variety of questions related to media, development, citizen participation, civil society and governance in Latin American countries. There was a clear predominance of papers addressing news media in the region. Many of them focused particularly on issues of political coverage and the roles of news media in reporting social problems such as poverty, violence and drug trafficking. Some also presented research on community media exploring the possibilities that they represent for minorities, children and marginalized communities. In my paper on the Brazilian Landless Workers’ Movement (MST), included in the latter, I discuss MST’s communicative processes focusing on how media play a role in mobilization and representation, based on the findings from my doctoral fieldwork in Brazil.
