- Media literacy and fact-checking in Kenya and Senegal
How can media professionals respond to misinformation before and after it spreads? In this article, F. Matanji and colleagues draw on 42 interviews with journalists, fact-checkers and media policymakers in Kenya and Senegal. They find that professionals use fact-checking to verify claims, images and videos, while promoting media literacy to help producers and audiences assess content more critically.
The article’s useful contribution is its attention to both responses: fact-checking addresses questionable information already in circulation, and media literacy builds skills that may help people recognise it earlier. Based on participants’ views, the authors argue that the two strategies work best together. For readers interested in African journalism, the study offers a grounded look at how media professionals understand their role in tackling misinformation.
2. Religion, Media, and Marginality in Modern Africa
Edited by Felicitas Becker, Joel Cabrita and Marie Rodet, this collection brings Christian and Muslim experiences in Africa into the same discussion of religion and media. It explores forms of communication ranging from written texts and vernacular translation to digital media, asking how they intersect with religious life in different social and political settings.
The book challenges the assumption that a particular technology produces the same kind of religious expression everywhere. For readers interested in African media, religion and culture, it offers a way to think across faith traditions and across older and newer media.
Read or download the book free from Ohio University Press
3. The Palgrave Handbook of Media and Communication Research in Africa
Edited by Bruce Mutsvairo, this 2018 handbook brings together scholars from Africa and the diaspora to examine how media and communication are studied on the continent. Its Africanist perspective challenges the dominance of Western frameworks and asks whether research methods developed elsewhere adequately capture African experiences.
For researchers and students, the collection provides a starting point for thinking critically about theory, methods and knowledge production in African media studies. It also surveys the challenges and opportunities facing the field.
Explore the book on the publisher’s website
4. African Media and Communication: Foundational Conversations
Who helped shape African media and communication studies, and how did their ideas develop? Edited by viola c. milton and Winston Mano, this open-access book uses life story interviews to revisit the work of influential scholars in the field.
The conversations place their ideas alongside the institutions, collaborations and historical moments that shaped them. For researchers and students, the book offers an accessible introduction to key thinkers while making a case for taking African perspectives seriously in global media scholarship.
5. Whose voices count in participatory communication?
In “Whose voices count? Participation, power, and communication in the Global South,” Vinod Pavarala asks what participation means when communities are invited to speak but have limited power over decisions. Drawing on scholarship from Africa, Asia and Latin America, the article traces how participatory communication has developed from grassroots approaches to its use in development programmes shaped by donors, governments and social hierarchies.
Pavarala argues that meaningful participation requires attention to who is heard, who listens and who can act on what is said. The article offers a valuable prompt for anyone working in communication for social change: inviting people into a project is only a first step if they cannot help shape its direction.