This paper deals with the Deaf community in sub-Saharan Africa, with particular focus on the Republic of Congo, and Senegal. It explores how the humanitarian sector is reaching out to this community, especially regarding Sexual and Reproductive Health. Projects set up by UNFPA Congo and Senegal’s ONG Jeunesse Et Dévelopment, are examined within the framework of communication for development. By researching the nexus between the international organizational world and the deaf community, the plan is to gain understanding through methodological approaches such as semi structured interviews, a focus groups and document analysis including videos, that eventually will provide input that can lead to a more comprehensive and informative communication strategy for this group. As a large part of the Deaf community in the developing world isn’t able to read and write, their fundamental human rights are undermined, this is especially true when it comes to Sexual and Reproductive Health. Research from Kenya and Senegal have shown that people living with disabilities got slightly higher HIV seroprevalence compared to the rest of the population, while a study from Cameroun demonstrates that deaf individuals are three times more likely to contract an STI. Communication for development, behavior change communication, communication for social change as well as media development, got a significant role to play to lead the deaf community towards integration, inclusion and better access to information on Sexual and Reproductive Health. By including the deaf community and let them define their own needs through genuine participation, it is possible to strengthen their rights. Researching the deaf community in the developing world is like studying a micro-cosmos of the entire development debate, as many of the main challenges are present. By empowering the deaf community in Africa, the whole continent is empowered.

The media have power: they create frames of conceptions, influence attitudes and behaviour, and monitor the conduct of government officials. For women, the media can suggest ways and means to defend civil rights and gain access to society’s resources and opportunities. Indeed, Media Development offers three levels of interventions to promote gender equality. (1) Increasing female number and roles in the media labour markets. (2) Promoting the production and circulation of content that challenge stereotypical portrayals of women and men. (3) Addressing the entire society to raise awareness and commitment for equal contributions in sustainable development. However, even though media development efforts have been popular during the last two decades in the global South (UNESCO), the Arab region is ranked the lowest in the world for achieving gender equality (CRS, 2020).  This project aims to investigate the role of media development to achieve gender equality and women’s empowerment through a case study of two gender strategies driven by two main models of media development (Scott, 2014; Manyozo, 2012), in the Arab region. One is led by external interventions, the other is supported by domestic authorities and local governments. The time period of the research is limited to the last decade, which has seen radical changes in terms of women’s participation in the public sphere.  The findings are based on 10 in-depth interviews with media professionals directly involved in these strategies across different Arab countries, from Algeria, Iraq, and Palestine, to the United Arab Emirates and Yemen. Despite the differences between the strategies in terms of political affiliations and territories of interest, the interviews show that gender (in)equality in the media is not a phenomenon isolated from people’s daily lives. Correspondingly, women’s empowerment is the result of different power struggles in society in which media development could potentially make a real difference if based on gendered pluralistic participatory approaches, which include the internal and external environments of media organisations, as well as all actors of society’s systems and structures.

Social media has been idealised as a valuable tool for supporting democratic change, with digital advocates and international development organisations encouraging the mass adoption of internet-based technology to assist in giving voice to citizens, as a central constituent of the democratisation process. However, it is evident that many fragile states experience challenges posed by digital transitions. This thesis examines how digital transformation as a social process has affected the social cohesion and development of Myanmar. It further examines if the ‘Free Basics’ initiative played a role in the rapid digital transformation of Myanmar, and if there were ensuing effects on the social cohesion of the country. It also examines the role of social media in amplifying ‘voice’, and further analyses what voices are heard within the discourse. The comprehensive literature review, discourse analysis, and insight gained from interviewing a Rohingya community leader suggest that Myanmar underwent an extraordinarily rapid digital transformation which impacted the way information, socio-political events and national identity were mediated, created, and disseminated. This research demonstrates that social media did play a role in amplifying voice, which had been heralded by techno-optimists as a beacon of hope in democratisation. However, the platform amplified voices regardless of their veracity or potential to incite controversies, which led to a cataclysmic fuelling of existing ethnic tensions, and subsequently translated into an act of genocide being committed against the Rohingya population.

The movement Caravana de Madres de Migrantes Desaparecidos; a transnational social movement uniting Central American mothers from Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador and Nicaragua whose children have disappeared in Mexico while migrating to the US, is part of a Latin American tradition where a mother-centered kinship system is at the center. The movement has managed to reunite more than 300 families. The concept of motherhood is important in forming the identity of this particular movement, when making their voices heard in the public sphere to find their disappeared children, fight for migrants rights and for social change. In what ways does the concept of motherhood influence the Caravana de Madres de Migrantes Desaparecidos’s struggle and communication for social change? How does the movement’s use of motherhood as a primary identity marker contribute to or hinder the movement's struggle for human rights and development?  To explore these questions we have collected data primarily through semi-structured interviews with members of the movement. We have also included other material such as recorded meetings, articles and videos for the contextual data in our content analysis. Our theoretical framework spans from more general theories on social movements and transnational movements to post-colonial theories on feminism and development, especially the Women Culture Development Approach (Bhavnani et al. 2016). Theories that concern cultural trauma and collective identity are also included since these are of specific relevance to the particular social movement of our case study.  We found that besides spreading awareness on the widespread issues of migration and enforced disappearances, the movement is contributing to both gender autonomy and empowerment for the mothers of the Caravana de Madres de Migrantes Desaparecidos. In the process of joining the movement many women undergo a journey from being a victim in mourning to becoming a social activist who encourages the engagement of even more women in social change initiatives. This in turn has long lasting effects on social change in their home countries. Unfortunately, we found that since their male spouses often are not part of this process, when returning home many mothers experience a backlash in terms of gender equality.

During the so-called ‘migration crisis’ of 2015, 51,338 Syrians applied for asylum in Sweden. First, Swedish politicians called for Swedes to ‘open their hearts’, public support was strong, and media coverage was full of possibilities and humanizing images. As the crisis developed, Sweden’s generous asylum legislation switched to the EU minimum, the political climate toughened and media’s positive frames soon shifted to discussing negative consequences. This degree project focuses on those least visible in the media’s representation of the migration crisis – refugee women. By using Chouliaraki and Zaborowski’s (2017) model ‘voice by narrative’, it answers the research question; How are refugee women from Syria represented in national and local Swedish newspapers?, as well as the following sub-questions: What news frames are used in texts where Syrian women are featured? In what ways are refugee women given visibility and space to speak? What types of representations, wording, and stereotypes are used? What differences can be found between 2015 and 2020, national and local newspapers? The project examines news frames, gendered representations, typical stereotypes, visibility, and space given to Syrian women in Swedish newspapers. It does so by content analysis of newspaper articles from three newspapers published in 2015 and 2020. The project uses theories of othering, intersectionality, and post-colonial power structures as well as literature on representations in European media during the migration crisis to understand representations, voice, and news frames in Swedish newspapers. The results indicated that refugee women are often silenced and spoken of instead of given space to speak. The most commonly used news frames among the analyzed texts were negative geopolitical and women were often decontextualized. Victimization and normalization were the most commonly used stereotypes assigned to refugee women. The majority of representations of refugee women were collective and the women were in many ways othered. Refugee women are othered, decontextualized, silenced, and collectivized, which will have its consequences as they are methods that limit refugee women’s status and position in society – maintaining their position as ‘others’ in Swedish society.

Inspired by recent work on value-based messaging in migration-relatedcampaigning to elicit sympathy, this project explores theoretical rationale foremploying values in the field of communication for social change (C4SC),understood in its broad sense as aspiring to engender prosocial behaviour. The project is framed by the main question of how values, emotions and(prosocial) action relate to one another. Historic and more recent sociologytheories related to values, emotions and action such as the Jamesian Theory of Action, Bandura’s Social Cognitive Theory, Schwartz’s Refined Theory ofValues, Caprara et al’s Prosociality, inform my theoretical hypothesis that for anindividual responding to a stimulus values are relatively stable frames whichguide goal setting, whilst emotions perform a cognitive function of evaluation,combined they create the impetus for (prosocial) action, though do notguarantee the impetus will be acted upon. Whether evidence that this hypothesis is enacted by traditional C4SC actors is the second endeavour of this project, for which a 42-text comparative analysisis performed to observe whether and how calls to action (CTA), values and emotions are present in existing prosocial campaigning. The texts are sourced from Instagram, the growing visual-first social media platform that offerscomparable units and serves as symbolic representation of the actors’communication. The main finding of this analysis is that values and emotions are present acrossthe range of themes and content producers. Whilst values associated withprosocial behaviour feature strongly across the board, values are present in a multitude of ways, sometimes in provocative or counter-intuitive ways within anindividual text. This diversity is positive for the potential of individual texts to engage a wider audience by reflecting the complexity of each person’s ownvalue profile. Being more subjective, the types of emotions elicited is less clear than valuesspoken to/challenged. Nonetheless the ways emotions are employed provideample food for thought for researchers and practitioners, and there is credible proof that each text will evoke some form of emotional engagement, whichanswers to the criteria in the hypothesis for emotion-facilitated evaluation. The findings on CTAs are informative, particularly when compared between thedifferent C4SC actors studied; there is a tendency for global level campaigningto be more general and national and local level more specific, whilst governmental level demonstrates limited CTAs for social change, focusing oncelebration of progress instead. The findings on the three units of interest in this project demonstrate fertileground for further research into the interplay between values, emotions andaction, as well as demonstrating to practitioners that understanding the value profile of target audiences is a worthwhile step in campaign design, and toconsider how a campaign might provoke certain emotional responses leadingeither to heightened engagement or risking emotional dissonance.  The project contributes to C4SC by testing a methodology for decoding CTAs,values and emotions, providing a baseline on how these units are used incurrent campaigning, and proposing various avenues of follow-up research,including connecting this work to intent and impact i.e. the extent to which thecampaigns motivated prosocial action. It builds on the work that inspired me bydefining why an emotional response is useful in prosocial campaigning and howthis relates to values and action.

The demand and consumption of food products created by the livestock- and fishing industries, have a major environmental impact, affecting climate change, biodiversity, and ecosystems. Yet, there seems to be a lack of public awareness of the direct impact one’s choice of food has on the environment, which suggests that more effective efforts are needed in order to introduce the concept to consumers. By the influence of a post-humanist perspective, this thesis investigates how the environmental impact of consuming animal-based food is communicated by Swedish environmental non-governmental organizations, and how the organizations are actively working to change consumers’ dietary habits by selecting more sustainable options. The research has focused on the external communication channels of the organizations, where verbiage and imagery have been analyzed in context, by using an analytical perspective of a constructionist view of communication, of where I acknowledge that communication has changed in our digital society. The findings indicated that the organizations are showing clear efforts and willingness of communicating the environmental impact of consuming animal-based food, although these efforts remain quite limited. The promotion of a plant-based diet as a way to help mitigate climate change was also communicated to a fair extent, but the organizations seemed to be privileging the preferences of consumers for animal-based food products over the actual need for them. Given that scientific evidence has shown that human consumption of animal-based food products has a major environmental impact, the overall produced knowledge by the organizations’ communication of consuming such products is still lacking. This suggests that more effective communication efforts are still needed, given the severity of the issue, which requires a drastic social change in eating habits as currently practiced in developed nations, in order to effectively mitigate climate change.

Human consumption of dog meat in South Korea has been a topic of international scrutiny since the 1980s. This paper presents the findings of a research into how Korean and international animal welfare organizations design and implement initiatives that aim to bring an end to the dog meat trade, increase civic engagement and affect social change. Fourteen animal welfare organizations’ strategies and activities were analyzed complemented by qualitative interviews with animal welfare professionals. Results were informed by the school of thought of advocacy, participatory versus diffusion approaches, social change, and civic engagement; elements often found in Communication for Development. Given the complexities inherent in measuring social change, this is largely an explorative study. Furthermore, literature on animal welfare in the field of Communication for Development is scarce; this research attempts to bridge this gap. This research finds that Korean and international animal welfare organizations have employed a multitude of different strategies and engagement of civil society to mobilize social change and bring an end to the dog meat trade in South Korea. Yet as advocates for a specific cause there are limitations in conducting fully participatory based models. Nevertheless, these efforts contribute to a holistic approach that reaches different stakeholder groups, each with unique needs and motivations, for a greater impact than the sum of each organization’s efforts on its own.

As media organisations dedicate less money and resources to journalism covering issuesrelating to development and social change, NGO’s are becoming increasingly visible as newscreators, funders and enablers. NGOs and media organisations are now frequentlycollaborating and even making partnerships to produce news content, which is having wide-ranging effects on the field of journalism.These phenomena coincide with the wide diversification of the news media landscape overthe past 2 decades, with a generation of ‘new media’ organisations rising up to challengethe dominance of legacy media entities, and bringing with them new practices andunderstandings of journalistic values.Where previous research has centred on the ‘blurring of roles’ between traditionalmainstream media outlets and NGOs, this thesis explores partnerships between NGOs and‘new media’ organisations which are not necessarily grounded upon the core practices ofprofessional journalism, using a case study of a recent ‘content partnership’ between the UShuman rights NGO Human Rights Watch, and the viral content website Upworthy.Given the vertiginous rise of digital media organisations over the past two decades, suchpartnerships could have a significant impact on how both NGOs communicate, and howmedia entities interact with NGOs, raising questions over journalistic standards, the powerdynamics between NGOs and the media, and even the viability of ‘objective’ news coveragein the future.To interrogate these issues, this thesis studies articles and videos produced as part of thepartnership between Human Rights Watch and Upworthy through statistical and textualanalyses, taking primary theoretical inspiration from Kate Wright’s “Moral Economies:Interrogating the Interactions of NGOs, Journalists and Freelancers”, (2016) and MatthewPowers’ Beyond Boon or Bane; Using normative theories to evaluate the newsmakingefforts of NGOs (2017).The findings of this study could be of use to NGO practitioners and journalists who areconsidering engaging in an NGO-media partnership, as well as to journalism, media anddevelopment researchers.

Denmark has one of the toughest immigration laws in Europe and legislation has become even tighter. Amid this political climate, a gleam of hope in the form of a refugee and asylum-seeker community centre was established. This centre is called Trampoline House and works to provide refugees and asylum-seekers a place of refuge, hope and community. Inside this centre, we find an art gallery, Centre for Art on Migration Politics (CAMP) dedicated to exhibiting artworks discussing questions of displacement, migration, immigration and asylum. The gallery, in partnership with Trampoline House, hosts events, workshops and talks that encourage cultural exchange between artists, users of Trampoline House and others.Focusing on a particular exhibition, Decolonising Appearance, curated by Nicholas Mirzoeff, that deals with migration and decolonialism, this study attempts to unpack the art gallery’s communication approaches in order to identify strategies for transformative dialogue and social change. Issues of how political and artistic practices intersect are discussed within the framework of voice and appearance (Appadurai 2004, Couldry 2010 & Arendt 1958). By focusing on appearance and re-appearance, this paper examines how notions of voice and capacity may inform the gallery’s decolonial artistic practices.The study finds that while CAMP has ambitions to create dialogue through strategies of artistic interventions, art events and an art gallery guide programme where participants are recruited from Trampoline House, there is a disconnect between what it strives to be, and what it is. Although the vision of CAMP is to build bridges and create cultural exchanges these are only successful to varying degrees. In order to succeed in this vision, the approaches must be more inclusionary and embrace a wider segment of society.