UKZN delegates – including students – from the Centre for Communication, Media and Society (CCMS) presented papers at the 2017 joint conference of the South African Communication Association (SACOMM) and Highway Africa 2017 held at Rhodes University in Grahamstown.
SACOMM – an annual conference of academics working in different fields of communication – and Highways Africa – Africa’s largest annual gathering of journalists – brought together media practitioners, scholars, journalists and academics from Africa and beyond.
CCMS sent its largest ever representation comprising eight postgraduate students, four lecturers and a postdoctoral researcher who each presented papers on various themes, including decolonisation of the media in a digital age, media accountability and power of communication in the post-truth world.
The two-day gathering was preceded by a pre-conference for emerging scholars where a CCMS PhD candidate Ms Rhoda Abiolu was nominated for the position of Deputy Convener of next year’s conference. In her presentation, Abiolu spoke on: Young people, Mobile Phones and the Public Sphere: the Role of Social Media in New Forms of Communication in Lusaka.
UKZN lecturer Dr Sarah Gibson, presented on the politics and poetics of mobility in the films of Sara Blecher, while another lecturer, Dr Lauren Dyll, presented several co-authored papers with her students.
Other CCMS presenters were:
- Musara Lubombo and Lauren Dyll: Sawubona, Beware! Meaning and Communicative Functions of HIV Disclosure among South African People Living with HIV
- Ndu Ngcobo and Lauren Dyll: Fashioning Meaning in South African Fashion Brand Magents Lifestyle Apparel: the Graphic T-shirt as Socio-Political Communication
- Nqobile Ndzinisa: Demystifying the Epidemic: Understanding Educated Perceptions of Zulu Cultural Beliefs about HIV and AIDS Communication
- Olutola Fasakin: Parent-Adolescent Communication Approaches for Behavioural Change
- Professor Ruth Teer-Tomaselli: Boy on the Beach: A Semiotic Reading of Photographs and Cartoon Memes of Two Syrian Refugee Children
- Rhoda Abiolu: Influence of Christian Music Consumption on Identity Construction Among Diasporic Nigerians in Durban
- Shannon Leigh Landers: The Construction of [Lead] Female Characters in South African Soap Opera: A Case Study of Uzalo
The following CCMS members also chaired parallel sessions: Dr Eliza Govender (Health Communication), Dr Musara Lubombo (Political Communication), Ms Mary Okocha (Development Communication), Ms Olutola Fasakin (Behaviour Change) and Ms Rhoda Abiolu (Media, Identity and Texts).
*Located in the School of Applied Human Sciences at the Howard College Campus, CCMS is a research and educational unit that offers graduate programmes (honours, masters and PhD) in Culture, Communication and Media Studies.
