Prof. Vinod Pavarala, Senior Professor of Communication and the UNESCO Chair on Community Media at University of Hyderabad, delivered an invited lecture at Bologna University, Italy, said to be the oldest surviving university in the world, established in 1088 AD. His talk, titled, “The Development Radios of South Asia: the limits of community radio as grassroots resistance,” was given as part of an academic meeting organised by the Department of Political and Social Sciences from December 12-14, 2023.

Prof. Pavarala was at Bologna to attend a meeting of the International Advisory Board of a large, multi-nation, European Research Council-funded research project, led by Prof. Alice Mattoni, a leading social movements scholar, on grassroots digital mobilisations around issues of good governance, transparency, and corruption across nine countries in Europe, Africa, and Asia. The Board includes, among others, Prof. Jennifer Earl, Arizona University (USA), Prof. Paul Heywood, University of Nottingham (UK), Prof. Daniel Bouquet, Universidad de la República (Uruguay), Prof. Katrin Uba, Uppsala University (Sweden), and Prof. Hasan Ashraf, Jahangirnagar University (Bangladesh).

Prof. Pavarala has been researching and publishing on issues around community media and community radio in South Asia and elsewhere since the early 2000s, and has been leading a team of researchers at University of Hyderabad working on these themes as part of the UNESCO Chair on Community Media, established in 2011.