Digital Storytelling Discourses in International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies’ Mobile Cinema Campaign Against the 2024 Cholera Outbreak in Nigeria
Article
This study examines the potential of mobile cinema and digital storytelling as innovative strategies for public health campaigns in response to the 2024 cholera outbreak in Nigeria. Employing the critical discourse analysis (CDA) method, the study undertook three layers of analysis of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies’ (IFRC’s) mobile cinema titled How Cholera Spreads (produced in collaboration with the Global Health Media Project). Besides the video’s popularity and wide circulation across digital media platforms in Nigeria, its rich treatment of thematic issues relating to the nature, history, symptoms, spread, and prevention of cholera necessitated its adoption for analysis. The health-themed narratives embedded in the mobile cinema suggest the need to create awareness and orient the public to make informed decisions in the face of the cholera outbreak. The study revealed the IFRC mobile cinema’s portrayal of the significance of systemic and socio-environmental approaches as key to addressing the underlying causes of the cholera outbreak. From an interpretive standpoint, the digital storytelling discourses sustained in the mobile cinema reflect strategies for behaviour change through the tendentious portrayal of preventive measures that, when adhered to, may have a profound impact in preventing/reducing further incidence of cholera disease.
Alliance Building as a Communicative Action by Anti-Mining Advocates in the Philippines
Article
As we assert the role of communication as an empowerment tool (Rowlands, 1997) and perceive how effective democracies depend on an understanding of the sources and mechanisms of public discontent (Matejova, 2023), this study mainly focuses on how communication enables alliance building of environment advocates, especially in a deeply polarized issue of anti-mining as applied by Alyansa Tigil Mina (ATM). In gathering the data, a combination of procedures was employed to capture a rich picture of the phenomenon: (1) document analysis, (2) participant observation, (3) photo-elicitation, and (4) in-depth interview. Data analysis was performed by following the steps in grounded theory. The findings of this study are presented in a theoretical model that demonstrates that the advocates’ communicative approach is a complex process consisting of motivations of the advocates for joining in the campaign, intervening conditions, use of various communication strategies, and outcomes, which are all constitutive to how alliance building as communication for development operates.
