Decolonising Approaches to Users and Audiences in the Global South: Context, Theory and Method

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.