Abstract
International aid agencies often claim to give the poor and disenfranchised a voice by helping them tell their stories to others located far away. But how do aid-workers conceptualise and operationalise a politics of voice in their production of media for mainstream news? What struggles does it shape within news production processes and what are the effects of this?
This article explores two contrasting production case studies which took place in South Sudan and Mali, involving Save the Children, Christian Aid and their local partners. It finds that different approaches to giving voice exist in aid work, create serious tensions within and between agencies. In addition, commercialised notions of value for money, the influence of mediated donor reporting, and aid-workers’ weak understandings of linguistic and intercultural interpretation combined to make aid agencies’ values-in-action far less empowering than they assumed.
This article explores two contrasting production case studies which took place in South Sudan and Mali, involving Save the Children, Christian Aid and their local partners. It finds that different approaches to giving voice exist in aid work, create serious tensions within and between agencies. In addition, commercialised notions of value for money, the influence of mediated donor reporting, and aid-workers’ weak understandings of linguistic and intercultural interpretation combined to make aid agencies’ values-in-action far less empowering than they assumed.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 85-102 |
| Journal | Global Media and Communication |
| Volume | 14 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| Early online date | 2 Mar 2018 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 1 Apr 2018 |
Keywords
- politics
- NGO
- aid
- interpretation
- Africa
- voice
- child soldier