Farooq Kperogi
Farooq Kperogi is Professor of Journalism and Emerging Media. His award-winning research broadly explores the intersection between communication in a global context and the singularities of the communicative practices of marginal groups within this context. He has a keen interest, for instance, in how linguistic minorities in peripheral, transnational societies deploy their indigenous languages for mass communication.
He is also interested in the transnational, mass-mediated, online discourses of marginalized diasporas in the West. He studies this by looking at the alternative and citizen online journalistic practices of previously disempowered Third World ethnoscapes whose voluntary geographic displacement to the Western core imbues them with the cultural and social capital to be vanguards for potentially transformative cross-border exchanges with their homelands.
Professor Kperogi also researches and writes on international Englishes, especially the deviations of the non-native varieties of the English language from American and British English, the world’s two most dominant native varieties.
Very broadly, his scholarly and pedagogical interests revolve around Online Journalism, Globalization and New Media, Communication/Media Theory, Media Management, Alternative and Citizen/Community Media, Diaspora Media, Online Communities, Online Sociability, Political Economy of Mass Communication, Media English, Grammar, Comparative English Grammar, Mass Media and Society, and International Mass Media
Professor Kperogi received his bachelor's degree in mass communication from Bayero University, Kano, Nigeria, where he won the Nigerian Television Authority Prize for the Best Graduating Student in Mass Communication.
He got his Masters of Science in Communication (with a minor in English) from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and won the Outstanding Master's Student in Communication award.
He earned his Ph.D. in Communication at Georgia State University's Department of Communication where he won the top Ph.D. student prize called the "Outstanding Academic Achievement in Graduate Studies Award."
While at Georgia State, he was Managing Editor of the Atlanta Review of Journalism History, a refereed academic journal.
Supervisors: Michael L Bruner, Leonard Teel, Ted Friedman, Debra Spitulnik
Phone: 470-578-7735
Address: School of Communication and Media,
Kennesaw State University,
402 Bartow Ave, MD 2207
Social Science Building 22 Room 5092
Kennesaw, Georgia, USA 30144
He is also interested in the transnational, mass-mediated, online discourses of marginalized diasporas in the West. He studies this by looking at the alternative and citizen online journalistic practices of previously disempowered Third World ethnoscapes whose voluntary geographic displacement to the Western core imbues them with the cultural and social capital to be vanguards for potentially transformative cross-border exchanges with their homelands.
Professor Kperogi also researches and writes on international Englishes, especially the deviations of the non-native varieties of the English language from American and British English, the world’s two most dominant native varieties.
Very broadly, his scholarly and pedagogical interests revolve around Online Journalism, Globalization and New Media, Communication/Media Theory, Media Management, Alternative and Citizen/Community Media, Diaspora Media, Online Communities, Online Sociability, Political Economy of Mass Communication, Media English, Grammar, Comparative English Grammar, Mass Media and Society, and International Mass Media
Professor Kperogi received his bachelor's degree in mass communication from Bayero University, Kano, Nigeria, where he won the Nigerian Television Authority Prize for the Best Graduating Student in Mass Communication.
He got his Masters of Science in Communication (with a minor in English) from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and won the Outstanding Master's Student in Communication award.
He earned his Ph.D. in Communication at Georgia State University's Department of Communication where he won the top Ph.D. student prize called the "Outstanding Academic Achievement in Graduate Studies Award."
While at Georgia State, he was Managing Editor of the Atlanta Review of Journalism History, a refereed academic journal.
Supervisors: Michael L Bruner, Leonard Teel, Ted Friedman, Debra Spitulnik
Phone: 470-578-7735
Address: School of Communication and Media,
Kennesaw State University,
402 Bartow Ave, MD 2207
Social Science Building 22 Room 5092
Kennesaw, Georgia, USA 30144
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The study makes the case that while it is customary in the scholarship on sovereignty, state-civil society relations, and diaspora studies to emphasize domination and one-dimensionality in cultural flows, the participation of members of the Nigerian digital diaspora in the politics and discourses of their homeland, from their exilic locations in the West through the instrumentality of online citizen media, illustrates that citizens, especially in the age of the Internet, are not mere powerless subjects and receivers of informational flows from the institutions of the state and corporate mass media but can be active consumers and producers of informational resources and even purveyors of political power in ways that amply exemplify trans-local reciprocality.
It also argues that the Nigerian diaspora media might very well be a prototype of an evolving, Internet-enabled, trans-local, and mutual informational and cultural exchange between the educated deterritorialized ethnoscapes of peripheral nations whose exile in the West endues them with symbolic and cultural capital and the private institutions and governments of their homelands. The study recommends a comparative study of the online citizen journalism of Third World virtual diasporas in the West.
Papers
The study makes the case that while it is customary in the scholarship on sovereignty, state-civil society relations, and diaspora studies to emphasize domination and one-dimensionality in cultural flows, the participation of members of the Nigerian digital diaspora in the politics and discourses of their homeland, from their exilic locations in the West through the instrumentality of online citizen media, illustrates that citizens, especially in the age of the Internet, are not mere powerless subjects and receivers of informational flows from the institutions of the state and corporate mass media but can be active consumers and producers of informational resources and even purveyors of political power in ways that amply exemplify trans-local reciprocality.
It also argues that the Nigerian diaspora media might very well be a prototype of an evolving, Internet-enabled, trans-local, and mutual informational and cultural exchange between the educated deterritorialized ethnoscapes of peripheral nations whose exile in the West endues them with symbolic and cultural capital and the private institutions and governments of their homelands. The study recommends a comparative study of the online citizen journalism of Third World virtual diasporas in the West.
Editor: Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D., School of Communication and Media, Kennesaw State University, USA. Email: fkperogi@kennesaw.edu
Introduction
Africa used to be characterized as the abandoned child that vegetated on the desolate fringes of the information society. Emmanuel Castells (1998) even once characterized the continent as a constituent of the “black hole of informational capitalism.” However, the advent and democratization of the Internet and, with it, the evolution of social media have leapfrogged the continent to the global, internet-fueled network society. This fact has expanded and deepened Africa’s deliberative space, inspired digital activism, and enabled robust citizen participation in and engagement with governance. It has also animated social movements, actuated transnational connections, disrupted settled cultural certainties, and threatened the security and smug self-satisfaction of autocracies.
The centrality of social media in Africa is actuated by the enormous growth and explosion of mobile technology, particularly the rise of broadband technology, and the progressive lowering of the cost of access to the internet. Every projection for the future of Internet-ready mobile telephony in Africa points to the inexorable certainty of its continued growth and flowering and for the central role it will continue to play in powering Africa’s frenetic social media scene.
Nonetheless, amid the triumphalism that the expansion of the discursive space that social media has stirred is a potent threat from various African governments to constrict and constrain its luxuriance. From Tanzania requiring bloggers to pay $900 a year for the privilege to blog, to Uganda imposing a tax on citizens to use social media, to Cameroon’s periodic shutting down of the internet to stall the spread of digital rebellion against the government, to various African leaders deploying surveillance technology to spy on citizens critical of governments, to restrictive laws designed to asphyxiate dissent in such countries as Nigeria, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Mali, Rwanda, Ethiopia, Sudan, and other countries, there is a war on Internet freedom on the continent. This fact has also activated pushback against governments and has centralized a tensile push and pull between citizens and governments in the African public sphere. For instance, apart from creating transnational publicity against social media censorship, activists and everyday citizens have also embraced subversive technologies such as virtual private networks, or VPN, to circumvent government censorship.
No systematic scholarly inquiry has investigated this emergent phenomenon. An edited volume that aggregates the research of scholars from across the continent on social media uses in different African countries and the legal and extra-legal efforts governments have invented to contain the vibrance of the social media scene on the continent would be a significant contribution to the literature on social media activism, digital rebellion, discursive democracy in transitional societies, and censorship on the Internet. I invite contributions from scholars of different disciplinary and methodological orientations on various dimensions of the unfolding phenomenon of social media censorship from all regions of Africa.
Recommended topics:
Below are suggested, but by no means exhaustive, themes contributors are encouraged to explore:
• Theoretical explorations of Internet censorship
• Social media and government censorship
• Case studies of anti-social media laws in African countries
• The rhetoric of “fake news” as a smokescreen to muzzle critical voices on social media
• Chinese influence in African governments’ clampdown on social media
• Spyware attacks on social media activists
• State cybersurveillance
• Israeli NSO Group Technologies and digital espionage
• Subversive technologies to circumvent social media censorship
• WhatsApp as one of Africa’s most consequential social media platforms
• Political dissidence on social media
• Transnational social media activism
• Bullying of voices of dissent on social media
• State-sponsored troll factories on social media
• The Panoptic gaze on social media
• Social media and radical social movement
Target Audience
I solicit contributions that will deepen, broaden, and extend the disciplinary conversations on the intersections of social media use and government censorship. This volume will be helpful to scholars in communication, sociology, political science, African studies, etc., media professionals and policy makers, and everyday citizens who are interested in the emerging tensile stress between social media activism and governmental restrictions across Africa.
Timelines
Interested contributors should send a 250- to 350-word abstract of their proposed chapters and their short bios by or before May 1, 2020 to: fkperogi@kennesaw.edu
Notification of acceptance or rejection: June 1, 2020
Submission of full chapters: September 30, 2020
Peer-review of contributions returned to authors: November 30, 2020
Revised contributions submission: January 5, 2021
The book is expected to be released in 2021
Publisher:
Routledge, a well-regarded British academic publisher, has accepted my proposal to publish the volume.