Manoeuvring in Uncertainty : On Agency, Strategies and Negotiations
Sub-Saharan Africa has seen wide-ranging economic and political change alongside civil and international wars. This volume focuses on the radical social uncertainties there, and how social actors perceive and cope with them in their everyday lives. It also suggests some ways to conceptualize both the actions and the environment of uncertainty.
Uncertain Future(s) : Perceptions on Time between the Immediate and the Imagined
In the last decade, the notion of uncertainty has gained prominence in anthropological debates. So has the debate on future. Yet, the conceptualisation of uncertainty has barely been linked to the future(s) and its temporal relations. This lack of linkage seems astonishing in so far as uncertainty relates closely to the unpredictability of the future. Uncertain situations engender ambivalent experiences and affects towards an unknown future embracing hope, desire and opportunity as well as fear, despair and suffering. Theoretically, the future is always unknown and unpredictable, but usually people are able to anticipate the future as it is more conversant than in uncertain situations, which challenge future outlooks and knowledge practices. Anthropologists have dedicated attention to uncertain situations ranging from everyday uncertainties under precarious conditions to crises and critical events of individual or collective existential uncertainty. Various ethnographies have described, for instance, responses to (natural) disasters (Hastrup 2011, Luig 2012), displacement/ migration (Colson 1971, Hänsch 2012, Jackson 2013), famine (Spittler 1989), diseases, especially HIV/AIDS (Haram & Yamba 2009, Jenkins et al. 2005, Kroeker 2015), as well as being young and becoming an adult during times of war, violent conflict and decline (Vigh 2006, Christiansen et al. 2006, Oldenburg 2016).
Same Same But Different - also in Europe! A New Methodological Approach in Cross-Country Analysis of Communication Structuresapplied to five EU member states
The EU still lacks a truly European public sphere. On this level, there is still a clear lack of integration between individual member states. This means that national public spheres and cultures are still of great importance for European communication and media professionals. Comparative research into the similarities and differences between different nations is therefore valuable for cross-border PR communication activities. This paper lays out the methodological foundation for such research, discussing possible approaches and difficulties associated with comparative research. The author then introduces a potential heuristic framework for comparative analysis: the International Corporate Communication Compass. This framework is applied to five case-study EU countries (Denmark, Germany, France, Poland and the UK), showing the differences and similarities in a range of different contexts that affect public communication in all its forms. The conclusion examines how the results of such studies could be used in order to compare communication identities of different countries. This can potentially help in the development of a European public identity on the long run and in a first step can led towards a better, more adapted communication structure about European citizenship. Ultimately, communication structures within the EU might become more Europeanized than they