Description
In Nigeria, academic conversations that intersect religion, media and education are mostly framed from a formal school perspective. Moreover, the dominant narrative on religious media is approached from Christian's Pentecostal paradigm. It entails the commodification and commercialisation of religion, proselytisation and religious globalisation. However, the Nigerian religious media landscape is not monolithic but a convergence of multiple religious interactions. The multiplicity of religious media sites offers scholars opportunities to extend academic conversations beyond Pentecostalism and outside the context of formal schooling. This qualitative study explores the socio-political economy of an Anglican media site, the Advent Cable Network Nigeria (ACNN). It focuses on how religious media respond to socio-political issues and their contribution to literacy development.The study is guided by concepts of the mediatisation of religion and public pedagogy. Mediatisation deals with the fundamental question of the media's relationships, functions, and influences in society. Public pedagogy recognises religious media as a site for public knowledge production, circulation and contestation beyond formal schooling. The study applies a structural functionalism approach to link the programming contents of the ACNN with its social function. Findings from this research project reveal that religious media reconstruct, represent, and contest socio-political issues in Nigeria. As sites for public education, religious media contributes to civic and political literacy, media literacy and religious literacy. It complements the mass media literacy campaign of the Nigerian government. By situating the ACNN in academic conversation, the study contributes to African media historiography that bridges the gap of the dearth in the academic literature of Anglican media activities in Nigeria.
| Period | 2023 |
|---|---|
| Event title | Public pedagogy and the socio-political economy of religious media: A qualitative study of the Advent Cable Network Nigeria (ACNN) |
| Event type | PhD defence |
| Location | Gent, BelgiumShow on map |
| Degree of Recognition | International |