Global Pandemics in the Media: An African Perspective

Forthcoming ...

In Global Pandemics in the Media: An African Perspective, Nkosinothando Mpofu, Phillip Santos, Admire Mare and Hugh Ellis have expertly put together a tour de force collection of African perspectives on the varied ways in which journalists, communicators, citizens, government communicators and other stakeholders mediated the recent global pandemics. Using the COVID-19 pandemic as a critical juncture, the book underscores the political nature of (mis)representing, (mis)framing and illuminating stories in a pandemic context. Drawing mostly on case studies from Southern, East, and West Africa, the volume foregrounds the various ways in which the media covered the recent global pandemics. It also looks at how public officials were instrumental in communicating about the causes, nature, prevention, and vaccination-related interventions. It also focuses on citizen-initiated communications on social media and how these were implicated in the viral production and circulation of mis/disinformation.

This ground-breaking book, which focuses on three global pandemics—HIV and AIDS, Ebola, and Covid-19—examines a broad spectrum of pandemic reporting and communication dynamics from an African perspective. […].

• Prof. Sarah Chiumbu, Department of Communication and Media Studies, University of Johannesburg, South Africa

[…]. This edited book volume uniquely underscores the importance of centring African perspectives on the mediation of global pandemics within the decolonial turn debate.

It is one of few books to critically interrogate the mediation of the global pandemic from a journalism, communication, and media studies perspective in Africa, […].

• Dr. Jacinta Maweu, Department of Philosophy & Religious Studies, University of Nairobi, Kenya

In Global Pandemics in the Media: An African Perspective, […]. The editors have generated an intellectually stimulating and 'time-defying' resource that centres African experiences in mainstream public health communication discourses, which are heavily dominated and crowded by Western scholarship.

• Dr. Hayes Mawindi Mabweazara, School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Glasgow, United Kingdom