Abstract
Deriving from the fourth biennial Ørecomm Festival in September 2014, this anthology seeks to move beyond the old Communication for Development (ComDev) model and reinvent the research field associated with it. The effort after this is made in connection with social media and social movements, the dynamic relation between voice and matter, the ethnographic turn, and attention to and from the margins. The first section involves an attempt to rethink communication in a theoretical framework of culture and development, rather than seeing the former as an obstacle to the latter, as in the post-war modernisation paradigm, while the second offers a set of case studies emphasising the role of ethnography in exploring agency and citizen engagement at the margins. A third and final section asks whether and how hope informs citizen engagement and struggles for freedom, equality and justice. It is based on a dialogue between anthropologists Ronald Stade and Arjun Appadurai around what the latter calls ‘the capacity to aspire’. Oscar Hemer and Thomas Tufte have put together a rich and challenging assembly of essays.