This edited volume addresses key debates around African football, identity construction, fan cultures, and both African and global media narratives. Using the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa as a lens, it explores how football in Africa is intimately bound up with deeper social, cultural and political currents.

This book explores sport communication in Africa and the African diaspora. Drawing on multidisciplinary perspectives, it deepens our understanding of the importance of sport in African society as well as the profound and growing influence of the African diaspora in world sport, as athletes, scholars, leaders, and business and media professionals. Including contributions from leading African researchers and experts on sport in Africa across the fields of sociology, history, business, communication studies, media studies, and education, this book examines sport communication across a wide variety of contexts and countries, from the role of radio in developing awareness of the Olympic Games in Nigeria to the impact of Colin Kaepernick’s protest on journalistic practices in Historically Black Colleges and Universities in the USA. Presenting fascinating case studies such as print media and the historiography of football in Cameroon, racism in European football, and the relationship between sport, communication policy-making, and sustainable development in Africa, this book shines new light on key themes in the study of sport communication. This is fascinating reading for anybody with an interest in social-cultural issues in sport, the business and management of sport, sport and the media, African studies, or development studies.

The growing presence of digital technologies has caused significant changes in the protection of digital rights. With the ubiquity of these modern technologies, there is an increasing need for advanced media and rights protection. Media Law, Ethics, and Policy in the Digital Age is a key resource on the challenges, opportunities, issues, controversies, and contradictions of digital technologies in relation to media law and ethics and examines occurrences in different socio-political and economic realities. Highlighting multidisciplinary studies on cybercrime, invasion of privacy, and muckraking, this publication is an ideal reference source for policymakers, academicians, researchers, advanced-level students, government officials, and active media practitioners.

This book explores the 2018 Men's Football World Cup in Russia through a comparison of the host cities of Ekaterinburg and Volgograd - two major but peripheral cities little discussed outside of Russia. It unpacks the World Cup at multiple scales of analysis, from global political economic processes, Russian national state spatial strategies, uneven municipal developments, the creation and distribution of soft power narratives to the domestic audience, and varieties of adoption or refusal of those narratives among host city residents. In so doing, the book offers a light and revisable framework for understanding mega-events regardless of national context. Sven Daniel Wolfe is junior lecturer at the University of Lausanne. He studies mega-events, urban development, and the cultures of protest and resistance.

Despite many negative expectations of the 2018 FIFA World Cup, Russia delivered one of the best World Cups in living memory. This book brings together leading scholars working in Russian studies, sociology and political science to analyse the 2018 World Cup and assess its significance for sport, Russia and the world. The book explores the connections between sport, soft power, populism, protest, and international politics, and investigates topics including security, surveillance, social media and patriotic mobilization, shining new light on key contemporary themes in the social sciences. It reflects upon the importance of sporting mega-events for public diplomacy, and considers what the 2018 World Cup can tell us about the current condition of Russian society and the Russian state. This is fascinating reading for anybody with an interest in soccer, sport and society, Russia, international politics, events, or post-Soviet societies.

The Politics of Laughter in the Social Media Age: Perspectives from the Global South brings to critical and intellectual attention the role of humour in the digital era in the Global South. Many citizens of the Global South live disempowered and precarious lives. Digital media and humour, as chapters in the volume demonstrate, have empowered these citizens through engagement with power and their peers, enabling a pursuit of a better future. Contributors to the volume, while alive to challenges associated with the digital divide, highlight the potentials of social media and humour to engage and seek redress on issues such as corruption, human rights violations, racism and sexism. Contributors expertly analyse memes, videos, cartoons and other social media texts to demonstrate how citizens mimic, disrupt, ridicule and challenge status quo. This book caters for academics and students in media and communication studies, political studies, sociology and Global South studies.

This volume provides an analysis of the history, origins, and development of football in Africa. It brings together an edited assemblage of essays that describe and analyse football in nine African countries, including Cameroon, DRC, Egypt, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa, and Uganda, from a social science perspective. The selection of these countries highlights the three major foreign languages and powers that have governed the continent; The English, the French, and Arabic, and provides a prism through which to analyze and compare how football developed in the various countries throughout Africa. This comparative methodology allow readers to identify similarities and differences in the progression of the game on the continent, and by focusing on football, an important relic of European colonialism in Africa, underscores the continued dependence on, and domination of Europeans on the Africans. In situating the genesis of the game, contributors examine and analyze the history, development, management, and mismanagement by bureaucrats at the political level as well as at various football federations throughout the continent.

This topical volume illuminates ethical issues brought to the fore by the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing on a broad range of case studies from different regions, it provides insights into the multiple and complex ways in which the pandemic has shaped media ethics. The chapters employ a wide range of innovative theoretical and methodological approaches to dissect enduring and emerging ethical questions during the pandemic, providing lucid accounts of axiological dimensions in pandemic discourses, ethics of emotional mood, ethical challenges and dilemmas in news reporting, propaganda, misinformation, disinformation and Othering. While the case studies in this book are unique, the authors have extrapolated common strands from their analysis of ethical issues applicable to any other country or region during the pandemic, contributing unique perspectives on how media ethics are circumscribed by global health pandemics. The book will appeal to researchers, academics and practitioners at all levels in the fields of media studies, journalism, communication, media sociology and public health, as well as general readers and policymakers who are keen to learn more about how global health crises illuminate critical ethical issues confronting the media.

This book explores multiple challenges faced by democratization in Southern Africa. Applying a wider lens to the concept of political transition and employing a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches, the contributions gathered here explore residual political cultural practices that hinder democratic consolidation in Southern Africa. Presenting various case studies, the book tackles themes such as the military-political nexus, leadership renewal, constitutionalism, electoral politics, election violence, marginalization of women, civil society and political transition, media framing and transitional justice. Written from a multidisciplinary perspective and drawing on empirical data from multiple sources, this edited volume challenges orthodox conceptualizations of political transition. The book will be of interest to students and scholars of political science, African studies, and related fields, as well as policy-makers and professionals interested in the latest political developments in Southern Africa.