Wendy Willems is Assistant Professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science, UK and Associate and an Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of Media Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. She is co-editor of Civic Agency in Africa: Arts of Resistance in the 21^st Century.

Winston Mano is Director of the Africa Media Centre and Reader in Media and Communication Studies at the University of Westminster in London, UK and Editor of the Journal of African Media Studies. He is also a Senior Research Associate in the School of Communication at the University of Johannesburg in South Africa.

Foreword

Paddy Scannell

1. Decolonizing and provincializing audience and internet studies: contextual approaches from African vantage points

Wendy Willems and Winston Mano

2. Media culture in Africa? A practice-ethnographic approach

Jo Helle Valle

3. 'The African listener': state-controlled radio, subjectivity, and agency in colonial and post-colonial Zambia

Robert Heinze

4. Popular engagement with tabloid TV: a Zambian case study

Herman Wasserman and Loisa Mbatha

5. 'Our own WikiLeaks': popularity, moral panic and tabloid journalism in Zimbabwe

Admire Mare

6. Audience perceptions of radio stations and journalists in the Great Lakes region

Marie-Soleil Frère

7. Audience participation and BBC's digital quest in Nigeria

Abdullahi Tasiu Abubakar

8. 'Radio locked on @Citi973': Twitter use by FM radio listeners in Ghana

Seyram Avle

9. Mixing with MXit when you're 'mix': mobile phones and identity in a small South African town

Alette Schoon and Larry Strelitz

10. Brokers of belonging: elders and intermediaries in Kinshasa's mobile phone culture

Katrien Pype

11. Agency behind the veil: gender, digital media and being 'ninja' in Zanzibar

Thembi Mutch

African audiences and users are rapidly gaining in importance and increasingly targeted by global media companies, social media platforms and mobile phone operators. This is the first edited volume that addresses the everyday lived experiences of Africans in their interaction with different kinds of media: old and new, state and private, elite and popular, global and national, material and virtual. So far, the bulk of academic research on media and communication in Africa has studied media through the lens of media-state relations, thereby adopting liberal democracy as the normative ideal and examining the potential contribution of African media to development and democratization. Focusing instead on everyday media culture in a range of African countries, this volume contributes to the broader project of provincializing and decolonizing audience and internet studies.