Professor Jo Tacchi discussed ‘Communicative Ecologies as a Concept and Method’ during the Research Roundtable at Department of Communication, Sarojini Naidu School of Arts and Communication in University of Hyderabad (UoH) recently.

Professor Tacchi, Director of Research and Innovation at Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Spain, spoke of the conceptualization of communicative ecologies that started back in 2002 during the study on Ethnographic Monitoring and Evaluation of Community Multimedia Centres in Sri Lanka by her, Don Slater and Peter Lewis. Ethnographic research was used to assess ways in which new technology like the internet helped in development.

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A media anthropologist with an interest in innovative approaches to applications of ethnography in applied research, Professor Jo Tacchi has been working broadly on sound and radio, sensory and affective aspects of contemporary life in a range of settings. Her published work includes Evaluating Communication for Development: A Framework for Social Change and Action Research and New Media: Concepts, Methods and Cases. During the hour long session, she asserted that communication channels and flow of communication differ in every medium and community and each needs to be dealt with accordingly. She presented various instances of communicative ecology mapping from her works that included in depth interviews, physical mapping and diagrams among other tools. She also discussed different forms of ethnographic research such as media and digital ethnographies that have become a common tool for researchers nowadays. Professor Tacchi summed up communicative ecologies as a way of taking a holistic approach to understand and capture the various communication channels, barriers and points of access in everyday lives.

A spirited question and answer session followed the talk during which Professor Vinod Pavarala, Head, Department of Communication, along with other faculty members shared their views on the concept and procedures of communicative ecologies and its application in certain research studies.

-By Shaima Mansoor, MA-Communication