Drama for Development
Cultural Translation and Social Change
- Andrew Skuse - University of Adelaide, Australia
- Marie Gillespie - The Open University
- Gerry Power - InterMedia, London
This book emerges from a unique research collaboration over a three year period between The Open University, the University of Adelaide, and the BBC World Service Trust. This path-breaking initiative opens windows on the intertwined worlds of media and development for academics and audiences alike.
Cultural translation means different things for dramatists, development practitioners, donors, audiences, and scholars. Their interests may collude or collide. What accommodations and adjustments are entailed in transnational circuits of serial drama production? What imaginative investments are required on the part of dramatists unfamiliar with local cultures? What cultural assumptions need to be exploded to reach audiences? This book offers an innovative framework for analysing drama for development that will appeal to practitioners and academics alike.
Students, lecturers and practitioners alike should find this and other contrasts in the volume to be useful triggers to debate and comparison as the field continues to change and rising nations…. Drama for Development is a powerful reminder that we should not overlook radio or television in our fascination with the newer technologies, for both ‘old’ media remains as central to the lives and aspirations of billions of people across the global South – and indeed the North – as they were in pre-Facebook times.
A collection of 13 essays, the book analyses serials produced in India between 1999 and 2010 to track how entertainment can be used for education.