HA Chair in Media and Information Society
In 2009, Highway Africa (HA) established a Chair in Media and Information Society. This five-year position linked to the HA Centre is sponsored by the Department of Communications. The work entails research, teaching and outreach programmes targeting both journalism students and working media professionals. The aim of the position is to produce and disseminate new knowledge about media and information society interfaces in Africa, and thereby also to heighten the impact of HA activities. The Chair is held by Professor Jane Duncan.
The Chair is an intervention to enable African journalists to engage critically with issues around the information society. The Chair also undertakes academic work in the School of Journalism and Media Studies, by supervising postgraduate students, running a Master’s level course in Media Policy and Institutions, and undertaking occasional undergraduate teaching.
The Chair also produces accredited publications, and disseminates work through the media. The Chair also coordinates the Digital Citizen’s Indaba (DCI), which constitutes the third day of the Highway Africa conference.
The Chair is also developing an area of specialisation around media policy in Africa, which involves the production of research and publications, undertaking academic teaching, research supervision and research training, consultancies, policy advocacy through the media and other institutions (like Parliament) and capacity building in academia and civil society.
Africa has a media policy environment that is in flux. In addition, in many African countries, the threat of state re-regulation of the media looms large. In spite of flaws in ‘information society/ knowledge economy’
discourses, many African governments are reproducing these discourses in the hope of increasing their global relevance, at times leading to the adoption of inappropriate development paradigms that seize on ICT-driven initiatives, while failing to address basic development needs.
The pace of developments is so fast that many media organisations and individuals find it difficult to keep up. Those organisations with the capacity to do so are often industry bodies with regulatory offices, which can lead to their voices dominating the policy space, raising the danger of elite capture of policy-making, where policy outcomes are skewed towards their interests (which may not necessarily coincide with the public interest).
Media policy research is a highly specialised area, yet academic work on the African media policy is lacking. This impoverishes the policy environment, as the intellectual resources available in academia are not being brought to bear on media policy in a systematic way. Furthermore, much public commentary that takes place on policy matters is often not informed by research, leading to public debate that lacks depth. The purpose of the Chair is attempting to address this gap, and to ensure that media policy constitutes a serious academic endeavour.
