Glocal Times

In (and about) this issue

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Looking back and looking forward: 10 years of Glocal Times

When the first issue of Glocal Times was published in 2005, we stated a moderate ambition that in retrospect we seem to have achieved:

"Globala Tider –a Communication for Development web magazine and an archive of Master thesis in Communication for Development developed by graduates from Malmö University in Sweden (ComDev)- will attempt to become a steady forum in which academics, practitioners and students can come together to share and discuss relevant issues for the advancement of the field."

The 23 issues published during the past 10 years bear witness to the web magazine's steadiness. Thanks to the engagement of academics, practitioners and graduates from Malmö University's Master's program in Communication for Development (from now on, ComDev) and the unfailing support of ComDev staff members, it gradually became a forum known and taken into account in other spaces in the world where communication for development is taught, practiced and discussed. Low-tech and low-key, the medium grew thanks to the volunteer contributions of each and every author. To our surprise, those contributions haven't faltered in recent years despite the meteoric rise of the publish-or-perish approach to managing academic work in the context of neoliberal capitalism.

Keen as we were on promoting public conversation, we were pleased when Glocal Times' 2012 Special Issue, co-published in collaboration with the well-established academic journal Nordicom Review and featuring an internationally recognized academic expert as guest co-editor, was expanded in 2015 into a companion Special Issue produced by our colleagues at the Centre for Communication and Social Change in the University of Queensland in Australia.

The 2012 Special Issue was a tentative step in the direction of adopting a peer review policy for academic articles, while continuing to include invited pieces authored by recognized practitioners and articles written by ComDev graduates based on their theses. The idea was to move towards a mixed model, such that the forum quality of Glocal Times wouldn't be lost (we thought, and we still think, that contributions written by practitioners do not need to abide by the rules of academic peer review) and at the same time the scholarly stringency of the project would be strengthened.

The idea of integrating scholarly work with practitioners' views and accounts remains desirable, and we hope that Glocal Times' tenth anniversary will constitute an opportunity to garner the approval and support required to go ahead from Malmö University's Faculty of Culture and Society. However, in the context of dwindling budgets and the publish-or-perish imperative (compounded by arguments in favor of directing the scant resources available towards short-cycle, hyper-active engagement with so-called 'social media'), this vision may not materialize. The future of Glocal Times as from 2016 will be shaped by these factors. That there are important reasons for the web magazine not only to continue to exist, but also to restate its ambitions and continue to play an improved role as a glocal forum, is what our contributors to this Anniversary Issue told us when we invited them to join us in reflecting about the past ten years, and in imagining the ten years to come.

Celebrating the present: In this issue

The first thing to be said about this issue's contents is that their arrangement in a static list -the format allowed by our Open Access publishing tool, typical of academic journals - does not do justice to their richness. Importantly, the particular sequence adopted to arrange the list of contents is one among several possible others, and therefore should not be read as representative of a hierarchy.

Given the many possibilities, choosing how to go about arranging this index was not easy. Eventually, inspired by Anders Høg Hansen's reference to vinyl records in his article, I decided to adopt the structure of a music album in order to introduce the Anniversary Issue. From this perspective, the ensemble of contributions can be thought of as the 'soundtrack' of a celebration.

Anniversary Issue: Side A

'Side A' includes four articles derived from the 2014 Glocal Conference on Communication for Development organized by the Ørecomm Centre for Communication and Glocal Change. Authored by Ph.D. candidates and by recently graduated Ph.D.s, the articles look into participatory audiovisual media.

The first two articles start from the practice and consider how to improve it. Tamara Plush asks who listens to the marginalized civic voices presumably raised through participatory video production, calling attention to the need to strengthen efforts to elicit meaningful response from the targeted audiences. Mary Mitchell introduces us to work in progress that explores the potential of collaborative interactive documentary-making as a strategy to support the struggle for justice of citizens affected by state malpractice in Peru.

The next two articles are instead concerned with establishing the legitimacy of studies of participatory audiovisual media within wider academic fields. Montero Sánchez and Moreno Domínguez focus on the interface between theory and practice characteristic of participatory video in order to attempt an analytically productive (re)definition of the term attentive to empirical variations. Villanueva Baselga argues for the validity of considering participatory video studies as a rightful component of film studies, showing that the analysis of empirical examples of collaborative video production add nuance to well-established taxonomies of documentary film.

Altogether, the four articles speak of a concern with assessing and theorizing practice in politically effective ways and invite further work in order to refine research methodologies, analyze praxis and strengthen conceptual formulations.

Interlude

Anders Høg Hansen's article works as an interlude, linking 'Side A' and 'Side B' of this Anniversary Issue. The author proposes that the relationship between musical practices and social movements in contexts of socio-political disruption deserves to be investigated through the lens of communication for social change, and explores existing studies of cases across the globe that speak to his claim. His article brings to the fore the potential for cross-disciplinary integration between cultural studies and communication for development, and exemplifies ComDev's forward-looking approach to expanding the field's boundaries in the past ten years.

Anniversary Issue: Side B

'Side B' of this Anniversary Issue includes sixteen "bonus" short articles. We invited authors to choose a theme or angle to reflect on the past and next ten years in connection with Glocal Times, and are delighted to share their responses.

We begin with the views of expert practitioners. Silvia Balit argues for the importance of maintaining a balance between adjusting to the 'new' and retaining what worked about the 'old' in seeking to address the current challenges facing commdev practitioners at present. Gordon Adam discusses the achievements of media development aimed at fostering public interest journalism in fragile states in the wider context of short-term allocations of resources and shrinking funding, calling attention to pending tasks. Wendy Quarry and Ricardo Ramírez engage in dialogue about their shared praxis and exemplify how to team up in a self-reflexive manner. Jackie Davies retraces the steps that took her from practitioner work in the field to the creation of the C4D Network via ComDev, calling for more outspoken and better strategized advocacy for commdev.

We continue with the views of academics. Thomas Hylland Eriksen draws on the notions of superdiversity and overheating to reflect on the challenge of communicating across differences and imagining a global community in contexts of increasing complexity and accelerated change. Pradip Thomas stresses the need for renewing the critical analysis of the exercise of power in the practice and the project of commdev, arguing for theorization that is contextually grounded. Thomas Tufte makes a plea for scholarly attention to bottom-up, citizen-driven communication initiatives for social change. Martin Scott calls attention to the political nature of the rhetorical struggle over the substance of commdev, highlighting that academics are responsible for the narratives they bring into play in the public arena. Karin Wilkins argues for explicating the politics contained in our conceptualizations of commdev as a productive strategy to broaden our ability to analyze interventions in socially productive ways.

The remainder of the "bonus" articles blur the boundaries between communication for development as a professional practice and a scholarly endeavor. Combining a sharp contextual analysis with hands-on knowledge of the field of professional practice, Peter da Costa discusses opportunities and challenges for communicators working with development issues in African countries. Particularly concerned with the glocal communicational needs of people living in rural and remote locations, Helen Hambly reflects on the difficult but crucial task of training a new generation of actor scholars prepared to meet those needs. Equally concerned with the pedagogy of communication for development, ComDev staff member Hugo Boothby weaves selected articles from previous issues of Glocal Times into a self-reflexive account of his trajectory as a teacher, suggesting a future agenda for the theorization of the Master's program as a particular communicative ecology.

Alumna extraordinaire Rasna Warah recalls the transformative power of the very first international instance of the ComDev program back in 2002, reflecting on the specific mix of equal opportunity across borders, critical openness and technical imagination at the service of human relationships that characterized the course at the time. Exemplifying how the academic field has expanded in recent years, two ComDev alumni currently in the process of becoming PhDs -Erliza Lopez Pedersen and Rebecca Bengtsson- share their research projects and discuss how they connect to their personal, educational and professional backgrounds. To round up the ensemble of "bonus" articles, ComDev's specialist librarian Linda Karlsson reflects on how to find and share information today, combining pedagogy and service in a way that has been characteristic of the Master's program in the past ten years.

Saying thanks

As I mentioned at the start of this column, the 23 issues of Glocal Times published throughout the past 10 years would not have been possible without the engagement of academics, practitioners and ComDev graduates, and the unfailing support of ComDev staff members. I'd like to take the anniversary as an opportunity to express my gratitude to each and every one of them.

Thanks are due in particular to Oscar Hemer, who had the idea to create Glocal Times in 2005 and invited me to become its editor shortly after I graduated from ComDev; to Micke Rundberg, who oversaw the creation of our first publishing platform; to Linda Karlsson, who liaised with the University of Gothenburg to assist us in the transition to a new platform in 2012; and to Ulla Carlsson, Jesper Falkheimer and Karin Wilkins for making the 2012 Special Issue possible. I am also grateful to Kerstin Gossé, Ann-Charlotte Ek, Ylva Ekström, Anders Høg Hansen and Hugo Boothby, who over the years have encouraged ComDev graduates to distill their Master's theses into articles for Glocal Times, and resorted to the web magazine as a pedagogical tool. Last but not least, thanks to Becca Bengtsson, who worked hard to ready this Anniversary Issue for publication.

The very first Glocal Times in 2005 included articles from Karin Wilkins, Thomas Hylland Eriksen, Thomas Tufte, Gordon Adam, Linda Karlsson, Rasna Warah and Kerstin Gossé, and I am particularly delighted that all of them are part of this Anniversary Issue (Kerstin was too busy with work to write herself, but is still present through Hugo Boothby's discussion of her prior contribution to the web magazine). Moreover, all of the authors in this issue but one are returning contributors (with Martin Scott as a welcome addition).

I take the fact that we have all remained engaged in the conversation for ten years as proof of Glocal Times' capacity to invite dialogue, and to listen. Whatever shape the publication takes from now on, I hope those characteristics will live on.

Glocal Times

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Index 2005-2015

Participatory video and citizen voice – We’ve raised their voices: is anyone listening?

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Sheathed in the glamour of filmmaking and technical innovation, participatory video (PV) is often evangelised as a communication for development methodology that intrinsically fosters transformative social and political change. Such celebratory notions, however, can obscure the complexity facing participatory video practice in achieving significant response to the inequities PV participants face. In reply, I offer the principles of representation, recognition and response as a potential pathway for more meaningful citizen engagement and action. Doing so challenges the idea that using PV primarily to help people on the margins represent their concerns through film is enough to shift deep-rooted inequities of power. Rather, my argument suggests that participatory video approaches aimed at raising citizen voice require a broader framing of practice: one that positions key decision-makers watching the films to both value marginalised voice, and responsively listen.

Where voice and listening meet: participation in and through interactive documentary in Peru

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Interactive documentaries are exploring new possibilities for audience engagement through collaborative digital projects that view an 'outside' audience and the 'insiders' from the storytelling community as equals, valuing production process and audiovisual product equally. This exploratory study of the strategy and production methods of the Quipu project (Chaka Films, 2015) proposes OpenICT4D as a framework through which to analyse collaborative interactive documentary. Three modes of communication are identified in the Quipu project (speaking, listening and responding), which link diverse stakeholders in Peru and beyond through an online artifact.

Rethinking the definition of participatory video at the interface of theory and practice

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Since at least the 1960s, participatory video (PV) has aimed to readdress film’s traditional focus on entertainment and the media’s interest in global news with the intention of promoting local and community development. This has usually meant empowering communities to work via consensus to elaborate different audiovisual products which reflect community problems and aspirations in various ways. In the words of Shirley White, author of Participatory Video. Images that Transform and Empower, PV acts as “a powerful force for people to see themselves in relation to the community (…). It brings about a critical awareness that forms the foundation for creativity and communication” (White, 2003: 64).

This paper addresses the concept of PV comprehensively by mobilizing critically both academic takes on the subject and the professional views of a variety of practitioners and experts. It aims to outline a number of uses and modes which coexist within PV with the aim of generating a more fruitful discussion on its defining features and the relation between canonical and marginal examples of participatory videomaking. To that effect, our methodological approach combines a literature review (including key works in English as well as theoretical contributions in the field of Latin American critical communication studies) with data obtained from a number of in-depth interviews with experts and experienced practitioners. Three key areas are identified as major elements within a PV experience: process, communication and results. Focusing on the analysis of how productive tensions between participants and facilitators play out in each of these areas, we propose a broad instrumental definition in the hope of contributing to the ongoing theoretical discussion on PV. Finally, the main areas of debate as perceived by video practitioners -format, genre and the role of the Internet- are discussed with a view to establish how these issues are currently being negotiated within the field.

Can we study participatory video within film studies? A succinct approach

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Participatory Video (PV) have been widely used by activists and filmmakers for almost thirty years. But the debate concerning its nature has not penetrated yet in academic discussions. The few theoretical works that already exist point out the role of PV as a process for capacity-building and community empowerment, but obliterate its importance as a specific form of audiovisual product. The aim of this article is therefore demonstrating, through filmic analysis of several PV developed by local organizations, that these videos produced by communities can be considered as filmic objects and conceptualized into the Film Studies field. Moreover, the article sets out to redefine Nichols participatory mode of representation to avoid the theoretical exclusion it supposes towards collectively produced videos.

Music, movements and conflict

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This article introduces a research project to be used in a larger study that aims to investigate how around-the-globe musical practices have become tied up with political movements and functioned as conflict-coping mechanisms in contexts of social and political upheaval. A series of historical as well as recent cases are explored in this preliminary study, drawing from research undertaken separately on Solentiname Islands, Nicaragua (by Mery A. Pérez), Zanzibar, Tanzania (by Shani Omari), Australia (by Lesley J. Pruitt) and from the USA (the author). This piece in particular is concerned with the different musical movement’s engagement with tradition and change.

Towards a global conversation

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The Internet came into the world in earnest a little more than twenty years ago, and it came with a vengeance, criss-crossing the planet with invisible ties of connectedness and seemingly heralding a new era in global communication. From one day to the next, you could correspond with colleagues and friends on the other side of the planet; you could read newspapers from Australia and Botswana; you could join special interest groups and build professional networks. It was an exhilarating time for many of us, one which appeared to hold out a promise of truly global communication for the first time in human history.

Broadening our perspectives in communication and in development

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As Glocal Times celebrates its tenth year of publication, I applaud the contributions of this journal to ongoing dialogue on communication and development within academic and professional communities. Oscar Hemer and Florencia Enghel have championed an inclusive, interdisciplinary approach to considering the key critical questions that matter to our field. Their explicit attention to integrating research with practice signifies an open framework that includes varied experiences in published conversations, distributed through open access digital formats that strengthen their appeal to broad global constituencies.

Looking back, looking forward: on the renewal of CSC theory

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One of the interesting developments over the last decade in communication and social change theory is the beginnings of efforts to engage with theoretical traditions and concerns that have not typically provided frameworks for understanding CSC. The special issue of Glocal Times (2012) simultaneously published with the Nordicom Review with its articles on causumerism and the politics of international development is perhaps the best example available of new thinking in the field.

Communication about communication for development: the rhetorical struggle over the history and future of C4D

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There are many different ways of telling the story of the study and practice of communication for development (C4D) over the past ten years. There is clearly a great deal to be said about how social media and mobile technologies have enabled social movements in Brazil, Chile, Egypt, Tunisia, Turkey and elsewhere to mobilise in pursuit of positive social change. From an institutional perspective, we might highlight instead how information, communication and media appears to be gradually achieving a higher profile within the international development community. The most prominent example of this is the potential inclusion of reference to ‘access to information and media’ within the new Sustainable Development goals. There is also a story to be told about the increasing number of postgraduate university courses related to the study of C4D that have been established in the last decade. In the UK, for example, there are now at least eight different postgraduate degree programmes concerned with this subject; signalling a growing appetite amongst students to study these issues.

Communication and social change: reclaiming 'the political'

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What characterizes the multidisciplinary field of communication for development today? And how do the Master's programme in Communication for Development (ComDev) at Malmö University, the Glocal Times web magazine and Malmö University and Roskilde University’s joint bi-national research centre Ørecomm position themselves vis-à-vis this field of research and practice?

From ‘Hopeless Continent’ to ‘Africa Rising’: emerging discourses, opportunities and challenges for development communication

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How can development communicators position their work in response to new and emerging discourses, and how can they ensure that marginalised voices are heard and impact on decision-making at different levels? What are some of the strengths and weaknesses of communication practice today? How can communication be better evaluated?

Media Development – a ten year perspective

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The past ten years have seen rapid developments in terms of media practice, technological advance and the role of the donor agencies. What follows is my brief personal overview of these changes in terms of journalism in fragile states, which are the focus for increasing amounts of development funding.

Another fine mess: communicative ecologies, Glocal Times and me

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Congratulations to Glocal Times! Time to celebrate 10 years of the Communication for Development programme’s (ComDev) web magazine. Indeed we have a number of important anniversaries in 2015: in the autumn the programme will mark 15 years, while I myself will have racked up a more modest five years on the teaching staff -five years that have been intense, productive and rewarding; a fortuitous time to be working with a programme that goes from strength to strength.

Enabling “next generation glocal communicators”

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Vast changes are occurring around the world in the ways in which people living in rural and remote areas are communicating within their communities and beyond them. In part, this is driven by emerging information and communication technologies which are often referred to as “nextgen” (next generation implying a transition from Web 1.0 to 5.0, and plausibly, beyond) because the Internet is increasingly weaving human lives with digital devices, applications, data and blended forms of intelligence that involve different levels of human and machine interaction. This ‘internet of things’ is more than a catch-phrase; it is the deepening connection of human beings, networks and machines creating more complex forms of activism across a range of issues from economic austerity to climate change (Juris, 2008, 2012). The problem is that the Internet is largely urbancentric and structured in such a way that it is biased against less populated areas. This situation led to a dualism referred to as a ‘digital divide’ or who had access to the Internet and who did not. Yet, for rural and remote communities, it is not so much a case of having access to the Internet, or not, but rather, what is being done with that access and why that matters to the lives of rural people and the changing relationship between human beings and the natural environment.

Two practitioners look 10-years back (A Reflection)

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We met in 1984 during a “Methods & Media in Community Development” gathering in Labrador, Canada, an event, organized by Andreas Fuglesang and Dale Chandler with the Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation in Sweden. Here we came across practitioner- champions from around the world who were using media to engage with people in exciting ways. A decade later, we reconnected and collaborated through some FAO work in Pakistan. Since then we have continued our practice working together on various communication strategies, much shared writing, our never-ending Skypes, and our disagreements… How else can one work as a team?

A breath of fresh air

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Reading the first issues of Glocal Times back in 2005 was like a breath of fresh air, coming as I was from years of institutional communication within the UN system. I found articles submitted by colleagues and pioneers of communication for development, well known to me. But, more important were submissions by graduate students, representatives of NGOs and scholars from developed but also developing countries. A good mix from civil society, and the themes covered were timely but also original: You would never find in a UN publication a piece on “mediated and non mediated communication of Filipino au pairs in Denmark”. True to its mission, the publication is thought provoking and an original forum for ideas and issues related to communication for development and social change.

C4D over ten years

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I was a late comer to C4D. Only when I started the Master's in communication for development at Malmö in 2005 did I discover there was a world of theory and people and background in this area that I had been working on incognito most of my working life.

That had been the case for a lot of us. C4D had been under wraps, unnamed for a long time and to date it's still not easy to figure out why. Because when you are presented with it as a coherent sector with its history, core readings, gurus and strategies it seems logical as a sector, rather than the sort of thing that should be kept secret because it somehow is too complex or challenging to name.

Malmö was the start of an incredibly fulfilling journey for me

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I vividly remember that day in May of 2002 when Oscar Hemer, the head of the Communication for Development (ComDev) Program at Malmö University, sent me an email telling me that I had been selected for the Masters degree programme at the university. I was in my office in Nairobi, having had a particularly frustrating day, and contemplating whether a career in the United Nations was really worth the trouble. Oscar’s email jolted me. I felt a rush of adrenaline followed by a sobering reality check. After having been accepted by several universities to do post-graduate degrees, I inevitably had to decline the offers because I simply couldn’t raise the fees.

Communication for Development is also a way of life

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With some element of introspection, I can disclose that communication for development has not only played a big role, but it has also been a big part of my immigrant life in Sweden. Half of my eleven years in this country have been spent engaging both in the academic study and pragmatic applications of communication for development to varying degrees.

Back to basic

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In academia there is an increased wish to see more analytical attention being paid to images and visual communication, and one reason for this is the rapid changes that have taken place in terms of how images are disseminated throughout the world, and in particular in times of crisis. The constant live coverage of events in the world, both by the media and by citizens, is considered to put a new kind of pressure on policymakers and might in turn lead to faster decision-making. It is also putting pressure on the audience, requiring them to question the images they are exposed to – are they real or fake?

On seeking and sharing info

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There is no doubt we’re living in a time when we expect most things to be available in an instant and with no barriers. When searching the internet for information to support your studies or your research, you want it to be an easy and seamless process, but you’re at risk of stumbling on many steps.

Getting access to the information is one of them. Some of the difficulties come from technical and copyright protection issues. Others have to do with library acquisitions' models and the limits of platforms and search systems. A defining aspect of the type of access you can get access is whether or not you belong to an institution, company or organization that can afford to provide a tailored collection of licensed information resources.

ComDev in the Margins

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Ten years and twenty-one issues ago, when I wrote my first editorial for Glocal Times, the headline “Coming of age” came naturally. It alluded to the then five year old Communication for Development Master programme at Malmö University, for which this Glocal Times has been an indispensable companion ever since. That statement may at the time have seemed prematurely self-assured, but a decade later the MA programme has definitely reached maturity, and arguably even seniority (in the academic sense of the word). Now Glocal Times is coming of age as the “relevant digital reference in the field of communication for development and social change worldwide” it set out to become.

The past decade is an interesting time frame from the perspective of ComDev as an interdisciplinary field of theory and practice, representing both crisis and consolidation – implosion, and a possible new beginning. Glocal Times was launched in 2005 at a meeting at the University of the Philippines in Los Baños, which aimed at founding a global university network in Communication for Social Change and Development. This initiative, driven by the Communication for Social Change Consortium, was one of many in what seemed to be a new momentum for media and communication in development cooperation, in the run-up to the first World Congress on Communication for Development (WCCD) in Rome, 2006.

For some reason, the anticipated breakthrough never happened. On the contrary, the Rome congress was instead followed by a strange fallout of the field. For example, FAO, one of the organizers of WCCD, demoted their C4D department, which has only recently been revitalized. (The university network unfortunately never took off either, although many important bilateral contacts came out of it, such as the long-standing pedagogic collaboration between Malmö University and the University of Guelph.)

The backlash incidentally coincided with the veritable explosion of social media and the emergence of new forms of social mobilization, building up to the popular uprisings of 2011 that took the world, and not least the development industry, by surprise. At the IAMCR conference held in Istanbul in July 2011, at the height of what was still referred to as the Arab Spring, the social media and the new social movements were discussed in almost every panel. But these world-shattering occurrences were rarely, if at all, associated with ComDev. Hence, ironically, when at last the crucial role of media and communication in social change processes became evident to everyone, the existing field of ComDev theory and practice seemed to be by-passed, unable to seize the momentum.

This startling turn had the dual effect of boosting the field and adding to its crisis at the same time. The urgent need to analyse and understand the new phenomena (that turned out not to be that new, eventually) further underscored the need for new theory and transdisciplinary approaches. The impetus in current media and communication research on social media, civic engagement and spontaneous social change processes has arguably impacted on Media and Communication Studies as a whole. Development Studies has during the same period tended to move from hard-core economics and social sciences towards a humanities orientation, increasingly focusing on cultural aspects and representations of development and globalization. A third clear tendency, linked to the other two, is the rising impact of Anthropology in the field, as can be observed in the attention given to media ethnography, visual and digital storytelling etc. All this speaks in the favour of ComDev, although not in its conventional hands-on conception of communication for development. In this broad, culturally oriented understanding, ComDev is rather the analysis, at meta-level, of the interplay between communication and development. This shift is more important than it may appear to be at a first glance. It is perhaps only now that ComDev is beginning to come of age as a problem-oriented academic field of research in its own right. On the other hand, perhaps partly as a consequence of this reorientation, we may be seeing a resurgence of the original DevCom; that is, the strategic, solution-driven communication practices with roots in agriculture extension. Hard-core development issues are gaining renewed priority in marginalized areas of the globalized world.

These seemingly oppositional tendencies mirror in a way the field’s constitutive tension between theory and practice -academics and practitioners-, and there is not necessarily any contradiction. Colombian media scholar Clemencia Rodriguez, one of the keynote speakers at this year’s IAMCR conference in Montreal, advocates the notion of media at the margin, a concept and approach which may apply to remote rural communities as well as transnational activist networks. Instead of focusing on media technologies, she suggests that we look at the appropriation of media at grassroots’ level. With examples from the geographic margins of Colombia, as well as the Occupy movement in the US, Rodriguez underlined in her address how some of these grassroots’ initiatives have developed “idiosyncratic media pedagogies” based on local languages and aesthetics. Rather than looking for linearity and homogeneity, she says, we should focus on processes of cross-pollination, adaptation, hybridization, and replication, which are often visible in grassroots media.

I find the margins to be an apposite metaphor for Communication for Development as well. ComDev is thriving at the margins, both in theory and practice. Once ‘participatory communication’, ‘empowerment’ and ‘social justice’ become buzzwords in the hegemonic development speak, there is really reason for caution; not only due to the devaluation of the concepts, but because the institutional logic itself tends to be counter-productive and even destructive. There are innumerable examples of NGOs and other agencies that, albeit well-meaning, quell rather than incite citizens’ own initiatives. (As ComDev scholars and practitioners, we must be open to the possibility that the main obstacle to change may be the development industry itself.)

Celebrating its 10^th anniversary, Glocal Times is now evaluating how to take a major new step. We intend to become a fully-fledged peer-reviewed academic journal, yet still remaining a forum for graduate students and professional practitioners. You are, dear reader, most welcome to contact us with suggestions on how to solve that riddle. Meanwhile, enjoy this fully-fledged Jubilee double issue! It looks back on the past ten years, in personal reflections by a selection of the scholars, practitioners and alumni that have contributed to the success of the journal and to the development of ComDev at large. It moreover contains a thematic section on participatory video, which was one of the subjects of last year’s Örecomm Festival (Voice and Matter, 17-20 September 2014). There will be no Festival this year – only a 15^th Anniversary ComDev seminar in Malmö. But the Örecomm Festival is due to be back in 2016. And so, of course, is Glocal Times –