This article addresses Listening with Elephant Ears, a contemporary music composition and performance created by the author together with the Elefantöra (Elephant Ear) ensemble. Elefantöra is a norm-critical music ensemble that includes both disabled and non-disabled musicians. When musicians are defined as disabled, normative assumptions regarding the correct use of musical instruments and expert definitions of good sound generate rehabilitative approaches to music that perpetuate exclusions of ableism. This article examines the intersections that exist between exclusions of ableism and exclusions based on musical virtuosity. It focuses on the ways in which Elefantöra contests both exclusions of ableism and virtuosity in their creative reappropriations of sound technology. Composed in the fall of 2020 as a collaborative artistic research engagement, Listening with Elephant Ears was first performed at the Lund Contemporary Music Festival in Sweden, October 2021. The article draws on ethnographic and sound material generated from my artistic research engagement with Elefantöra. Created during the COVID-19 pandemic, Listening with Elephant Ears actively reappropriates the Zoom video conference software as a music technology. The piece embraces Zoom’s limitations and emphasizes the aesthetic value of the audio distortions and digital interference that Zoom introduces into musical performance. Critiquing regimes of regulation that situate disabled musicians differently to non-disabled musicians, Listening with Elephant Ears applies care as a theoretical perspective from which to reflect critically on rehabilitative approaches to music and the associated exclusions of ableism and musical virtuosity.

Working at the intersection of migration studies and radio studies, we interrogate podcasting’s potential as a practice-based activist research method. This article documents podcasting’s role in an ethnographic project conducted together with Konstkupan (The Art Hive), a migrant-focused community arts space in Malmö, Sweden. We argue that the value of podcasting as a practice-based research method exists in its potential to function as a boundary object. Boundary objects are technologies and processes bridging social worlds and providing sites of communication and translation between groups. Challenging narratives that detect a decline in podcasting’s radical potential, we argue that as a boundary object, podcasting’s political significance continues in how it convenes small, diverse, but attentive ‘listening publics’. A boundary object does not demand consensus on the meanings or representations it produces, affording space for both the synchrony and dissonance of narratives produced by migrants.

This article investigates examples of citizen media production and communication (blogs and social media sites in Tanzania and its diasporas) in the immediate aftermath of the Gongo la Mboto blasts in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, February 2011. At the centre is the relationship between media use and communication practices of the pavement - drawing from the notion of pavement radio - and the spaceship, i.e. a metaphor for traditional mass media, exemplified by policies and practices of the BBC and its World Service. We argue that new social media practices as digital pavement radio are converging with traditional forms of street buzz and media use. Forms of oral communication are adapting towards the digital and filling information voids in an informal economy of news and stories in which media practices are stimulated by already ingrained traditions. An existing oral culture is paving the way for a globalization of the pavement.

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This article draws upon research done as part of a formative evaluation of a radio project on children’s rights in Tanzania. Fieldwork was conducted etween January and June 2016 followed by a longer period of analysis. In this article we take the project as a case study of applied Communication for Development (ComDev) and examine the insights it offers into this field of both theory and practice. Making use of data generated during the evaluation process we reflect critically on the project, and the evaluation processes itself, taking participation, community radio, selection, involvement, community exchange and radio practice as our points of departure. The empirical work and analysis revealed a strong potential in the project’s activation of crucial local contexts and webs of communication, but also vulnerability and uncertainty in terms of vision as well as practical models for a sustainable continuation and impact.