Decolonising Approaches to Users and Audiences in the Global South

This edited collection offers an unprecedented focus on decolonising audience and user studies in the global South, challenging essentialist discourses of media imperialism and technological determinism.

Including original essays and contemporary case studies spanning Africa, Middle East, Latin America, and Asia, this book provides a nuanced double critique of both local and West‑centric approaches, pushing back against historically extractive audience research logics that have marginalised global South perspectives. This volume emphasises the importance of everyday experiences and advocates for building bridges between emerging philosophical discourses of modernity, postmodernity, and digitality from the global South and diverse ways of being digital. By critiquing narrowly defined methodologies and recovering previously delegitimised experiences, this book reimagines audience research through new evidence, methods, and theories that centre previously discarded voices and contexts.

This essential resource serves both as a rallying call for epistemic justice and as a practical guide for decolonial approaches in media and communication studies. It will be invaluable for practitioners, activists, scholars, researchers, policymakers, and students across various disciplines, including anthropology, sociology, political science, psychology, Global South studies, media, communication, and cultural studies.

Tarik Sabry is Full Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Westminster where he is a member of the Communication and Media Research Institute. He is co-founder and co-editor of the Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication. He is an author of Cultural Encounters in the Arab World: On Media, the Modern and the Everyday (2010) and a co-author of Children and Screen Media in Changing Arab Contexts: An Ethnographic Perspective (2019). Sabry has also edited three books in the area of Arab Cultural Studies.

Winston Mano is Full Professor and a member of the University of Westminster’s top-rated Communication and Media Research Institute (CAMRI). He is Course Director for the MA in Media and Development and Founder/Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of African Media Studies. He is Director of the Africa Media Centre and was Co-Director of the Chevening Africa Media Freedom Fellowship programme (2020–2023).

Andrea Medrado is a Senior Lecturer in Global Communications and Co-Director of Research for the Department of Communications, Drama and Film of the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom. Her book Media Activism, Artivism and the Fight Against Marginalisation in the Global South, co-authored with Isabella Rega, was published by Routledge in 2023. She has also published widely in academic journals, such as Big Data & Society, Information Communication & Society, and Tapuya: Latin American Science Technology & Society.