Beyond Myopic Perspectives in Audience Research. Ethnographic Inquiries into Non-Western Audiences in the Digital Era: The Áfrican Case

This paper argues for a decolonization and provincializing of audience research. The tendencies within audience research reflect on one hand a dominant Anglo-Saxon discourse and use of concepts that emerge from particular Anglo-Saxon realities. On the other hand, studies from other regions, África and Latin America in particular, are presented and discussed in this paper, offering other insights, challenging what is articulated as myopia within audience studies, myopia both in the empirical focus, but in particular in the nature of the knowledge production emerging in contemporary audience studies. The paper seeks not just to celebrate and document diversity within global audience research. By drawing on Boaventura de Sousa Santos’ notions of epistemologies of the south and epistemology of blindness, and of seeing the paper argues for a sensitivity, breadth and nuance in knowledge production that can contribute to a truly global understanding of audiences in the digital era.