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This article explores some of the semantic linkages that exist between the producers and consumers of a BBC World Service radio soap opera, produced for Afghanistan. Few ethnographic studies of mass media have tackled both production and consumption; the dominant preference within this emerging sub-discipline favours audience studies and makes unsubstantiated inferences concerning production regimes. This article takes analysis a crucial step forward to examine how the dramatic context of radio soap opera is defined and represented by producers, and appropriated and manipulated by listeners. Via discussion of the opposed categories of vagueness and familiarity, the social realist pretensions of the production - addressed through the criteria of place, voice, sound and language - are assessed against a range of audience readings of this representation of reality. The article concludes by stating that whilst social realism is aspired to and actively pursued by the soap opera's writers and producers, it is only invested with meanings that are specific and socially located, upon contact with the audience.

This article examines urban telecommunications access and use by poor households in the township of Khayelitsha, Cape Town, South Africa. Analysis draws upon a broad range of quantitative and qualitative data and in doing so seeks to reveal the complexities of how this access and use underpins a wide range of social and economic processes critical to processes of social development. By way of example, the issue of informal urbanisation and housing tenure is addressed, as is the critical role that telecommunications play in facilitating and maintaining important social networks, both across Cape Town and beyond. Further, this article gives consideration to how telecommunications support and enhance livelihood opportunities, and the fact that they are embedded in existing modes of social communication and manifestations of social, cultural and symbolic capital.

This paper examines struggles for urban permanency in an informal settlement on the fringes of Cape Town in the run up to the South African national election of 2004. It focuses on the rapid emergence of the settlement of Nkanini (Forceful) and the key social, cultural, political and communicative dynamics that framed the ensuing bitter struggle between residents and local City of Cape Town authorities over claims to occupy the land. Analysis frames this struggle in terms of a local appropriation of basic human rights legislation that informs community action and therein claims to residential formality.

This article examines rural telecommunications access and use among poor village households in the Eastern Cape, South Africa. Discussion is based upon a content analysis of 165 telephone calls, as well as a broader information and communication technology (ICT) ownership, access and use survey undertaken in 50 poor households within a number of rural villages in the Mount Frere district. These data are complimented and supported by qualitative data emerging from a longer-term UK Department for International Development-funded study of ICT use and social communication practices among the urban and rural poor in South Africa. The purpose of the article is to: (i) question existing notions of telecommunications access; (ii) assess the extent to which rural inequalities are exacerbated or ameliorated by telecommunications access; and (iii) examine the extent to which telecommunications are enlisted as a strategic tool by poor households for maintaining kin-based redistributive networks and enhancing livelihood sustainability.

A research collaboration between the The Open University, the University of Adelaide and the BBC World Service Trust (WST), this book is a first-of-its-kind initiative that offers a window into the social and media worlds that typically remain closed to academic inquiry. This book offers unprecedented insights into the production and consumption of a range of popular radio and television drama serials, broadcast in places as diverse as Afghanistan, Burma, Cambodia, Nepal, Pakistan, India, Nigeria and Rwanda. It brings into dialogue the perspectives of the creative teams who make 'dramas for development', the donors who pay for them, and the audiences who consume them. It also highlights the crucial role of audience research as a tool for making drama and as a resource for translating cultures.