/ This study analyses Voice for Humanity's (VFH) Sada initiative to promote women's rights, citizen participation and civic education during the Afghan parliamentary elections in 2005. A qualitative assessment was conducted to gain an in-depth understanding of how Afghan women, in particular, utilized the Sada device. This research, positioned within current literature on information communication technology (ICT) and gender, views the Sada device — a solar-powered digital audio player (similar to an MP3 player) — as an ICT. Universally, women have unequal access to ICTs, yet the findings of this study suggest that projects such as this one in Afghanistan can play a powerful role in promoting women's rights. The findings reiterate that information dissemination, spurred by a suitable technology, can lead to family and community dialog. Such dialog, coupled with a more enabling environment for women's concerns, can contribute to women's empowerment and realization of women's human rights.

Concurrent historical shifts in feminist and development theory reflect calls to include men more fully in gender and development work. In this article, we explore the participation of men and women in Taru, a multilayered and participatory entertainment–education based gender and development (GAD) communication initiative in the Indian state of Bihar. The Taru project, co-designed and implemented by one of the present authors with on-the-ground partners, embodied the specific intent of including both females and males in an initiative that would promote better reproductive health, foster more gender equality and spur literacy. By analyzing ethnographic data collected through participatory photography, in-depth and focus interviews and participatory theatre, we work to understand how gendered identities of men and women shift in tandem amidst particular socio-historical, economic and material contexts. As we listened to participants, the politics of space emerged as central to understanding how participants both reproduce and resist hegemonic gendered identities. Adopting a postcolonial feminist stance, we work to understand the gendered politics of space, including tensions between freedom and restriction in movement, and fluid and fixed boundaries.

No abstract

No abstract

The present article compares Indian and American audiences’ interpretations of the Hollywood sitcom Friends. The article is guided by Olson’s narrative transparency theory, which posits transparency as ‘the capability of certain texts to seem familiar regardless of their origin, to seem a part of one’s own culture, even though they have been crafted elsewhere’. Thirty-seven regular viewers of Friends in India and 35 from the US were interviewed personally and in focus groups. Indian viewers questioned the truth-value of the content to conclude that Friends portrayed a universal American culture that is completely different from an Indian standpoint. These interpretations made the media text opaque, and the Indian audience members rejected the safe sex message discussed in the episode studied. The American audience found Friends overly exaggerated, but safe sex and sexuality messages somewhat more culturally proximate.