Dr Linje Manyozo

Linje's praxis has involved collaborating with communities in order to understand how media and communication breaks down structures and institutions of inequality in order to ensure democratic formulation and implementation of development policy. As such, his work is guided by one fundamental question: How do we ensure the integration of subaltern voices in policy formulation and implementation?

Dr Linje Manyozo is a Senior Lecturer in Communication for Development within the School of Media and Communication. Linje is a former Lecturer and Director of the MSc Program in Media, Communication and Development at the London School of Economics and Political Science (2008-2012). Prior to that he was Head of Communications in the School of Social Sciences at the University of Fort Hare, Nelson Mandela’s alma mater. He also taught briefly at the University of Malawi, where he introduced Africa’s first fully-fledged Bachelor’s Degree Program in Media for Development.

Linje has published three books: Communicating Development With Communities (Routledge, 2017); Media, Communication and Development (Sage, 2013) and People's Radio (Southbound, 2012). Included in his publication profile are numerous articles, book chapters and conference presentations.

Linje's teaching and research go beyond studying the democratic processes that capture citizen voices as part of policy making. His praxis also explores and actively intervenes in the class contestation of power during the confusion, the violence, the deception and the bullshit that oftentimes govern the official production and integration of citizen voices in development policy formulation and implementation.

As an educator, Linje strongly believes that scholarly endeavors should be strongly linked to social transformation efforts, through an educator’s active involvement in working with the classless to speak and unspeak their world. As Father Gustavo Gutierrez, the founder of Liberation Theology encourages us, we have the moral responsibility to stand with and alongside the downtrodden in the quest for a more just, a more equal and a more democratic society. Linje therefore holds that an ideal educator should challenge society to think the unthought, to imagine the unimaginable and to speak the unspoken.

Recent publications (PDF 57 KB)

Linje teaches two courses on the Masters of Communication Program; Critical Enquiry in Media and Communication; and Communication for Development and Social Change. Nevertheless, within the field of Media and Communication, Linje has a broader and deeper teaching portfolio, that includes, but not limited to, communication for development, visual anthropology, community development, social and behaviour change, public health communication, participatory action research, cultural and postcolonial theory.

His teaching combines three tenets – it is critically pedagogical, participatory and ethically inclusive: Critical because his pedagogy deliberately shakes students out of their intellectual comfort zones, challenging them to unlearn and think beyond the orthodox scholarly horizons that they are accustomed to. It is participatory in Marxist sense, as it is strongly rooted in the idea that remaking the world is a collective responsibility. It is ethically inclusive considering that modern-day teaching requires an increasing interaction and conversations between the global context and the local experiences, hence scenario planning challenges students to bring personal experiences into the classroom.

• Post-Graduate Certificate in Higher Education Teaching, London School of Economics and Political Science, London, United Kingdom, 2011
• PhD in Media Studies (Communication for Development), La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia, 2007
• MA in Media and Development, University of Natal, South Africa, 2003
• BA Hons in Media and Development, University of Natal, South Africa, 2002

In 2012, Linje took a 4-year break from the university teaching in order to engage in development practice in Africa. During this period, he worked as a Communication for Development Specialist for UNICEF and the Global Fund and World Bank- supported National AIDS Commission. Linje’s programmatic portfolio encompassed the strategic design of communication interventions in HIV Prevention, violence against children and women, as well as girls’ education. Linje also founded and run a rights-based village development volunteer program that involved establishing and consolidating income-generating initiatives with marginalized social groups.

Dr Manyozo’s programmatic interventions are informed by his upbringing under extreme poverty on the tea and tobacco plantations where he grew up and worked as a child labourer. As such, his praxis revolves around the generation and honest utilization of subaltern voices in the formulation and implementation of effective and sustainable development policies. He is thus concerned with the democracy of communicative actions that govern the flow and contestation of power in social economies, and this includes how strategic communication is employed as a pathway for authentic representation and not deception.