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The head of a football playing robot. © Nikolas Golsch​​/​​TU Dort­mund
Migration Reporting

Research Project with Universities in Sub-Saharan Africa has Started

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Eine große Gruppe afrikanischer und europäischer Wissenschaftler*innen steht halbkreisförmig in einem Konferenzraum, der Kamera zugewandt. © Erich-Brost-Institut
To launch the project, representatives of the participating universities and institutes came together for a conference in Kampala, Uganda.
With TU Dortmund University as consortium leader, a joint project with ISCTE – University Institute of Lisbon in Portugal and six university partners from Uganda, Malawi and Burkina Faso started in June: “Communicating Migration and Mobility – E-Learning Programs and Newsroom Applications for Sub-Saharan Africa” (CoMMPASS). The consortium, which the EU is funding with €800,000 within the ERASMUS program, is looking at how media in countries of origin and transit countries in Sub-Saharan Africa report on mobility and migration.

To launch the project, the consortium members came together for a conference in Kampala, Uganda. As the project’s Principal Investigator, Professor Susanne Fengler, Professor for International Journalism at TU Dortmund University and Academic Director of the Erich Brost Institute (EBI), has assumed overall responsibility for the scientific side of the planned research. “To date, research findings on migration reporting have been predominantly Eurocentric, whereas only a few studies on media reporting in Sub-Saharan Africa have been presented. In addition, the reasons why young generations choose to migrate have so far scarcely been addressed in newsrooms or in journalism education at universities,” explains Professor Fengler. That is why one of the consortium’s joint objectives is to develop an innovative, science-based and practice-oriented model for researching and reporting on mobility and migration in a responsible way.

One focus of CoMMPASS is journalism education at universities. In a pilot project, the researchers involved are developing an online course for large numbers of participants. Once completed, the e-learning portal will also target other partner institutes in Cameroon, Ethiopia, Ghana, Nigeria and Kenya. “Here, we are reaching out to lecturers, students and journalists in four languages – English, French, Portuguese and Kiswahili,” explains Michel Leroy, doctoral fellow at the Institute for Journalism at TU Dortmund University and the project’s academic coordinator. In his doctoral research project, Leroy dealt with development cooperation in the area of media, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Non-university partners are also participating in the project. In addition to local and international journalists’ organizations, UNESCO is also involved. In 2021, Professor Fengler and her team published the “Reporting on Migrants and Refugees: Handbook for Journalism Educators” within the UNESCO series on journalism education. The handbook has been translated into Arabic, French, Spanish, Kiswahili and Russian

Further Information about the Project

 

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