Journal Articles

Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://localhost:4000/handle/20.500.12504/53

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The metaphor of war in political discourse on covid-19 in Uganda
(Frontiers in Communication, 2022-02) Dorothy, Atuhura
The article examines the use of the metaphor of war in political communication on the novel COVID-19 pandemic in Uganda using two analytical tools of the social representation theory, anchoring and objectification. Drawing data for analysis from six widely televised presidential addresses to the nation on COVID-19 made by Uganda’s president, H.E. Yoweri Kaguta Museveni during the months of March 2020 to September 2020, the article argues that during the time of the COVID-19 pandemic, there was a persistent dominant use of the metaphor of war by government representatives as a rhetorical device to communicate about and to make intelligible an emerging unknown virus as a threat that should be managed through combat behavior. In so doing, the use of the war metaphor and its implied call for combat behavior to control, manage, and eradicate the virus spread engendered consequences such as standardizing hegemonic understanding of the nature and causes of the virus as well as normalizing and legitimizing interventions that the government adopted to manage it.
Landscapes of distant suffering: interrogating humanitarian documentary film representation of “harmful” cultural practices
(Journal of African Cultural Studies, 2022) Dorothy, Atuhura
Although a wide range of media interventions have been at the forefront of global humanitarian campaigns aimed at eradicating cultural body modification practices categorized as “harmful” in global health and development policy, such practices continue to persist. In this article, I single out one such domain of intervention – transnational humanitarian documentaries – to interrogate how they visualize the spatial landscape within which women and girls participate in these practices and the implications of such visualization for interventions aimed at eradicating them. I articulate the landscape as: the body which is the ultimate inescapable place where women and girls must live, and as a geo-spatial location where that body lives. With illustrations from documentary films on one specific “harmful” practice, female genital mutilation, I show how the visual framing of the landscape engenders: a (mis)conception of the harmed body as only a dystopic place, thus foreclosing the utopic dreams that motivate persistence of mutilation as a path to inhabiting (an)other (heterotopic) place; a spatialized hierarchy of coercive paternalistic interventions with counter-productive effects that have not only compromised the efficacy of mediated eradication campaigns, but have, by extension, inadvertently contributed to the very persistence of those “harmful” practices.
Examining the use of technology in literature teaching and learning at university in Uganda
(Taylor & Francis Group, 2023) Dorothy, Atuhura; Rebecca, Nambi
Even though the use of digital media and technologies has become a dominant ubiquitous norm in teaching and learning experiences at higher education levels in Uganda, there remains a significant dearth of scholarship on their use in a literature classroom. The full effects of digital media and technologies on literary studies remains unexamined. This chapter thus explores the use of ICTs (i.e., electronic teaching and learning materials accessed online and/or local media technology or platforms) in a Literature in English classroom at Kyambogo University, Uganda, using data drawn from oral interviews with key informant interviewees, focus group discussions and questionnaires administered to lecturers and pre-service trainee teachers of Literature in English at Kyambogo University. Results from the study show that the use of technology in teaching and learning of Literature in English at university in Uganda engenders both positive and negative results, providing unimaginable opportunities (e.g., increasing access to study materials) and challenges (e.g., low ICT self-efficacy) for teachers and learners, but also presenting serious threats to the teaching and learning of Literature (e.g., increasing the digital divide between marginalized and privileged learners and between skilled and unskilled learners).
Interrogating transnational documentary film evidence on Uganda’s homophobia
(Intellect, 2016-06-01) Atuhura, Dorothy
The over conspicuousness of Uganda’s homophobia in international media of the twenty-first century is highly commendable for foregrounding the severe abuse of human rights of homosexuals in Uganda. Although this medium establishes its space as an agent of human rights activism and as a record of what happened to homosexuals in Uganda, it is important to interrogate the process involved in producing it, as well as what this mediated index forecloses as it signifies the severe abuse of human rights of homosexuals in Uganda. Focusing on three filmic documentaries on Uganda’s homophobia, I argue this media hypervisibility is a global phenomenon – a transnational media collective implicated in rebranding and networking historical transnational processes, tropes and ideologies that have not only produced conditions necessary for homophobia to thrive in Uganda, but also established Uganda’s anti-homosexuality violence as the new signature of Africa’s ‘Darkness’.
Schizophrenic aesthetics in music videos about the LRA atrocities in northern Uganda
(Eastern African Literary and Cultural Studies., 2016-07-04) Dokotum, Okaka O.
This article examines the use of what I term ‘schizophrenic aesthetics’ in memory construction and the search for justice, peace, and reconciliation in contemporary music videos about the LRA war. I seek to establish how the deep memory of trauma is packaged in videos that have disturbing content due to the use of B-roll and stock footage of war, yet they are also highly entertaining through their use of music, dramatic performances, and erotic young female dancers often referred to as ‘queen dancers’. ‘Schizophrenic aesthetics’ is used in this article in reference to both the trauma represented and the syncretised and disjunctured form of the music video in a postmodernist context. The heterogeneous clash between the oral and written words on the one hand, with the images on the other, is examined as traumatic subject matter is interrogated in the context of brisk entertainment. These song videos are produced by a younger post-war generation of artists who problematise postcolonial African trauma using diasporic music forms like hip-hop and reggae. While examining the subject matter of these videos, a parallel analysis shows the complex relationship between the message of the songs, performativity, and the cinematic apparatus. This article deploys schizophrenic aesthetics to examine how the wordscape, soundscape, and imagescape of the selected music videos collaborate to convey the poetic message and essence of the songs and how memory is constructed in a post-war context as therapy and entertainment.

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