Mediating representations of poverty and development: a help or a hindrance?

Abstract

This paper explores the role of media, and in particular Comic Relief plea films (2013), in scripting understandings of poverty and development. The films represent a coding of poverty that is embedded with wider geographical imaginings that essentially abstract knowledge and produce assumptions about particular places that remain premised on hegemonic Global North ideas about the world and how it works. As a result the Global South is often constructed and represented through images that are ambiguous and uncritical, and greatly hamper understandings of everyday life in the South. Through the Comic Relief (2013) films, the paper explores soft understandings of poverty and development, considering Northern complicity in the (re)production of representations and the challenge of constructing causal responsibility through media discourses of problem-solving. This paper unpacks hegemonic Global North scripting of poverty and development through an examination of visual discourses, critiquing the construction of prioritised narratives and, by extension, pointing towards those knowledges that remain silenced.