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This article provides an original and timely contribution to current cutting-edge methodological debates by discussing the ongoing need to ensure communities in zones which are inaccessible through war, conflict or disease still have a voice and are not side-lined. As seen during Covid-19, traditional methods of gaining opinions from these communities, such as face-to-face interviews and focus groups, may be restricted and even impossible. Instead, remote methods using WhatsApp provide many additional benefits, providing qualitative and quantitative data (not always simultaneously provided by surveys or interviews), and allowing voice and text messages to be used. This article draws out the generic implications for the methodology using the substantive findings of a study conducted in the Sahel in 2019–20. Whilst also providing ‘how to’ discussions on this novel approach, the article critically reflects on the advantages and disadvantages of using WhatsApp as it relates to conducting social research in general.

This article explores ‘ecologies of affect’ in literary representations of disaster—earthquakes, flash floods and cyclones—with reference to Nina Bouraoui’s Le jour du seisme (1999) and Nathacha Ap...

Does radio programming by Studio Tamani in Mali create an empowering environment for women’s voices? Contributing to existing theoretical discussions on radio and women’s empowerment, this article examines the need to discuss women’s empowerment not from the perspective of women as individuals, but from the perspective of ‘webs of relations’ (Kabeer 1999; Sholkamy, 2010), thus allowing intersubjectivity and evolving relationships with others to be considered. ‘Webs of relations’ refers to the broader societal, institutional, and structural inequalities and injustices that women face in their everyday lives and which shape women’s agency and decision-making power. To achieve this aim, the article draws on two rounds of focus group discussions (FGDs) conducted in 2019-2020 and content analyses of a series of women-related radio programmes broadcast in Mali by Studio Tamani, the radio studio created by the Swiss-based media organisation Fondation Hirondelle. It suggests that the plurivocality of Malian women, as a diverse and heterogenous group, must be reflected in radio debates on women’s issues in order to reflect the ‘web of relations’ that delimit women’s empowerment.

This article discusses participatory methods for data gathering in the context of a partnership between a Swiss-based media development organization, Fondation Hirondelle, and a research team at the University of Sheffield. In 2018–2019, the partnership conducted fieldwork which focused on the impact of radio on women listeners in Niger. The project used participatory methods of data gathering in the form of workshops and focus group discussions (FGDs). The article examines the advantages and limitations of combining the practical experience of international development organizations and the in-depth research capabilities of academia. To triangulate this collaboration and to navigate the limitations of FGDs, the use of workshops is discussed as an important method for providing feedback among the radio practitioners and experts in Niger. The article examines the usefulness of combining these methods and reshaping their application to promote participatory research with radio audiences and practitioners.

Community radio in Mali and Niger represents important hubs through which organized groups (such as listening clubs or associations) access information and participate in broadcasting through active and formalized channels. Drawing on radio listener focus groups conducted in Mali and Niger between 2018 and 2020, this article discusses the importance, to community radio, of ‘loud’ participation (formalized spaces) and ‘quiet’ participation (informal discussion spaces) amongst audiences. We argue that these ‘quiet’ forms of participation are important as they reinforce and support existing networks of solidarity in the community. Community radio stations rarely ‘hear’ listener participation via these informal spaces of discussion ‐ which are more closely associated with women ‐ but they are nonetheless crucial, yet overlooked, alternative forms of audience participation.

In Women Write, Women Fight, Mildred Mortimer brings together and examines Algerian women’s war stories. The study of Algerian women’s role in the history and memory of anti-colonial struggle has b...

This article explores the affective and gendered transmission of ‘postmemory’ in Garcon manque (2000) and Sauvages (2010) by Nina Bouraoui. These two narratives take place at the end of the 1970s in Algiers, a transitional period in Algerian history, but also a key moment where the generation born after independence in 1962 express and create their own memories of colonialism and the Algerian Revolution. The focus of the article will be to reveal the representation of postmemorial transmission across forms of mediation that are simultaneously affective, embodied and gendered. From this perspective, it analyses generational memory as a ‘mauvais cadeau’, photographs and other affective objects, and gendered multidirectional memory to show how Bouraoui’s novels trouble singular, normative expressions of gendered and national identity. Bouraoui’s protagonists from the post-generation are thus characterized as ‘mnemonic agents’ who cross gendered and national borders.

What are the legacies of the Algerian War of Independence in the present? More specifically, how do the Algerian War of Independence and its subsequent memorializations force us to reconceptualize historical temporality itself (of which the ‘legacy’ is but one variation)? The following introduction to this special issue provides an overarching framework for multiple answers to these questions. The first half of the introduction focuses on the philosophical and conceptual afterlives of the Algerian War in contemporary French critical thought. In doing so, it attempts to delineate the significant political import of historical temporality as such, setting out a basic problematic to which the articles that follow can be seen variously to respond. In the second part of the introduction, the general cultural and historical legacies of the Algerian War of Independence, and the ‘mnemonic forms’ (Erll 2011) of rupture, repression and repetition that mediate them, come into focus: the ‘rupture’ from a colonial past, the Freudian ‘repression’ of traumatic history, and the ostensible ‘repetition’ of violence in the present. In general, the introduction hopes to open a dialogue with works conducted on these ‘forms’, scrutinizing the effects they have had on the various re-imaginings of the war and its transnational legacies, yet without foreclosing other forms this history may take.