Developing Critical Citizenship: proposals for a postgraduate module on Community Media (original) (raw)
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[In D. Bossio (Ed), Refereed Proceedings, ISSN 1448-4331]. Beginning with the question “How can the process of developing, producing and disseminating community stories, interests and issues via broadcast and social sharing of digital content be used to engage and mobilise community interests in shared endeavours that will help drive social cohesion?” - research staff, production staff, students and community groups in a tertiary education institute’s urban environs are working together during 2014 to create a series of programmes for broadcast on Face TV. We are interested to assess how, in the process of creating content for wider audiences, a strategic approach to the dissemination of this content may facilitate better communication across community stakeholders and beyond. Influenced by the view that “a strong storytelling network is essential to creating effective reach, outreach, and mobilisation of residents, community organisations and…media” (Annenberg School for Communication USC, 2013), as well as research on the uses and limitations of digital storytelling for empowerment of marginalised voices in community-based projects (Podkalicka and Campbell, 2010, Spurgeon et al., 2009), this paper explains the rationale for a multi-layered, complex methodology, the methods being used and the longer-term vision of outcomes for this type of collaboration involving a variety of shareable as well as “broadcast-able” digital content as tools in community communication strategy.
The Routledge Encyclopedia of Citizen Media
(co-edited with Mona Baker, Bolette Blaagaard and Henry Jones) London & New York: Routledge., 2021
This is the fi rst authoritative reference work to map the multifaceted and vibrant site of citizen media research and practice, incorporating insights from across a wide range of scholarly areas. Citizen media is a fast-evolving terrain that cuts across a variety of disciplines. It explores the physical artefacts, digital content, performative interventions, practices and discursive expressions of aff ective sociality that ordinary citizens produce as they participate in public life to eff ect aesthetic or socio-political change. The seventy-seven entries featured in this pioneering resource provide a rigorous overview of extant scholarship, deliver a robust critique of key research themes and anticipate new directions for research on a variety of topics. Cross-references and recommended reading suggestions are included at the end of each entry to allow scholars from diff erent disciplinary backgrounds to identify relevant connections across diverse areas of citizen media scholarship and explore further avenues of research. Featuring contributions by leading scholars and supported by an international panel of consultant editors, the Encyclopedia is essential reading for undergraduate and postgraduate students as well as researchers in media studies, social movement studies, performance studies, political science and a variety of other disciplines across the humanities and social sciences. It will also be of interest to non-academics involved in activist movements and those working to eff ect change in various areas of social life.
Community Media: People, Places & Communication Technologies
2005
While transnational conglomerates consolidate their control of the global mediascape, local communities struggle to create democratic media systems. This groundbreaking study of community media combines original research with comparative and theoretical analysis in an engaging and accessible style. Kevin Howley explores the different ways in which local communities come to make use of various technologies such as radio, television, print and computer networks for purposes of community communication and considers the ways these technologies shape, and are shaped by, the everyday lived experience of local populations. He also addresses broader theoretical and philosophical issues surrounding the relationship between communication and community, media systems and the public sphere. Case studies illustrate the pivotal role community media play in promoting cultural production and communicative democracy within and between local communities. This book will make a significant contribution to existing scholarship in media and cultural studies on alternative, participatory and community-based media.
Community Media Studies: An Overview
Sociology Compass, 2013
This essay provides an overview of the field of community media studies. Like the study of "alternative media," "citizens' media," "independent," and "radical" mediato mention but a few of the terms applied to participatory communication projectsacademic inquiry into the structures, forms, and practices of community media has surged in recent years. While scholars often use these labels interchangeably, this essay focuses on academic and practitioner perspectives that explicitly and purposefully employ the term "community media." The overview identifies and briefly considers three prominent conceptual frameworksmedia democratization, civil society, and the symbolic construction of communitywhich shape and inform this vibrant field of study. This overview concludes with some thoughts on the limits and possibilities of community media theory, and practice, in the new millennium.
Oxford Bibliographies in Cinema and Media Studies, 2022
Long before digital devices put the means of media production and distribution into “users’” hands, and participatory culture became an academic and industry buzzword, community media have provided everyday people access to the channels of public communication. For purposes of this bibliography, we begin with work that takes up conceptual issues in community media studies. Next, this article considers various forms of community media: broadcast radio and television, cable access TV and participatory video, computer-mediated communication, and more recent innovations associated with digital technologies. Subsequent sections consider ethnic, diasporic, and Indigenous community media respectively. The final section demonstrates that community media is a rich, if somewhat neglected site of local, national, and global cultural politics. Throughout, this bibliography aims to guide readers to some of the more compelling, revealing, and illustrative literature on community media.
FULL PhD thesis - Beyond Project: An Ethnographic Study in Community Media Education
BEYOND PROJECT: An Ethnographic Study in Community Media Education RESEARCH QUESTION: "According to facilitators, participators and trainees of community media educational activity, what are the prime motivations of involvement, and what impacts and areas of sustainability result from the sector’s instances of pedagogy?" RESEARCH CONTEXT: Community Media activities operate in a fragmented landscape of practice, making the notions of impact and sustainability problematic issues to negotiate, and presents difficulties with identifying related evidence. This research presents extensive qualitative ethnographic investigation into the impacts and sustainability in the lives of facilitators, participants and trainees who have been involved in such projects for a minimum of four years. This research evidences the prime motivations of why these stakeholders got involved with the projects from the very beginning, and maps these findings against the impacts and cultural sustainability as articulated, gaining an insight into both the pedagogic journey of the individuals, and the pedagogic qualities of the media projects. This research links practice to theory to address the central research question. It employs methodologies informed by post-colonial theories including auto-ethnography and critical pedagogy to discuss the research findings in context of wider literature drawn from the disciplines of community media, community arts, media education, educational psychology, informal education, anthropology and cultural studies.
Citizen Media and Public Space: Diverse Expressions of Citizenship and Dissent, 2016
Much recent commentary on citizen media has focused on online platforms as means through which citizens may disseminate self-produced media content that challenges dominant discourses or makes visible hidden realities. This chapter goes beyond a concern with media content to explore the much broader range of socially situated practices that develop around citizen media. Drawing on Couldry’s proposal for a practice paradigm in media research, it suggests shifting the focus from ‘citizen media’ to ‘citizen media practices’ and demonstrates, through a case study of communication activism in the World Social Forum, how this framework can bring into view a broad range of citizen media practices (beyond those directly concerned with the production and circulation of media content), the different forms of agency that such practices make possible, and the social fabric they can help generate. I conclude by arguing that a practice framework necessitates a rethink of the way that the concept of (counter-) publics is used in the context of citizen media. Citizen media practices of the kind described here can be understood not only as practices of ‘making public’ previously unreported issues and perspectives, but as practices of public-making: practices that support the formation of publics.
Creative Industries Faculty School of Media Entertainment Creative Arts, 2015
This paper investigates how community based media organisations are co-creative storytelling institutions, and how they learn to disseminate knowledge in a social learning system. Organisations involved in story co-creation are learning to create in fluid environments. They are project based, with a constant turnover of volunteers or staff. These organisations have to meet the needs of their funding bodies and their communities to remain sustainable. Learning is seen as dialogical, and this is also reflected in the nature of storytelling itself. These organisations must learn to meet the needs of their communities, who in turn learn from the organisation's expertise in a facilitated setting. This learning is participatory and collaborative, and is often a mix of virtual and offline interaction. Such community-based organisations sit in the realm of a hybrid-learning environment; they are neither a formal educational institution like a college, nor do their volunteers produce outcomes in a professional capacity. Yet, they must maintain a certain level of quality outcomes from their contributors to be of continued value in their communities. Drawing from a larger research study, one particular example is that of the CitizenJ project. CitizenJ is hosted by a state cultural centre, and partnered with publishing partners in the community broadcasting sector. This paper explores how this project is a Community of Practice, and how it promotes ethical and best practice, meets contributors' needs, emphasises the importance of facilitation in achieving quality outcomes, and the creation of projects for wider community and public interest. In recent years, there has been an increased interest in story based community participation media projects in the public broadcasting, community media, arts and cultural sectors. Whilst the Internet has afforded the ease and accessibility of media production technology and platforms in which to disseminate creative media work, such as personal stories, it is through community-based organisations that the practice of grass roots media is going through an important resurgence. No longer solely a stepping-stone to professional media practice for aspiring media producers, many projects are emerging as independent and innovative in their own right, to amplify marginalised voices from diverse communities and provide project participants with the means and skills to continue to do so. Despite the hype that we live in a new media world, and that everyone can have a voice, there are still concerns of a "digital divide" and "participation gap" (Jenkins 2006). In reality, digital technology is not accessible for all, whether than be a matter of circumstance, location, skills, knowledge and general affordability. And, as a result, such grass roots media practice and projects sit in an interesting hybrid learning space. Community-based media organisations have long been at the forefront of participatory and grassroots culture and are important agencies of storytelling. Such organisations have developed considerable capacity and expertise in bridging this gap with co-creative media practices, and increasing opportunities for self-representation to geographically and socially isolated groups and individuals. Community media is generally defined "as media that allows for access and participation" (Rennie, 2006, p. 22). One could suggest that community media is the first sort of participatory media prior to Web 2.0. However, as Ellie Rennie and other community media scholars further suggest, it is difficult to define easily, particularly in this era of new media culture and the nature of user-generated content (Howley, 2009; Milioni, 2009; Rennie, 2006, 2011). Aspects that make community media distinct, according to Howley (2009) is that it offers opportunities for civil society to "talk back" to the larger institutions of public life.
Framing participation in collaborative community media: The living community documentary series
This paper positions the concepts of participation and collaboration for media content creation in the context of a complex, commercialised media landscape that is difficult for community and not-for-profit groups to break into, and focuses on the case of a 2014-2015 community media project funded by Unitec Institute of Technology in New Zealand. The project set out to produce a series of half-hour documentaries, The living community, for broadcast on Face TV, a pay TV channel with a public service/community commitment. Each of the seven programmes was intended to offer insights into a community group or organisation in the Auckland region. The paper explores potential issues in co-creating community stories for media visibility, with few resources. The paper proposes an inclusive co-creation model based on the experience of creating the final filmed piece in 2015, influenced by ‘a subset of planned, intentional participatory media engagements that rely upon professional facilitators to lead collaborative projects with explicit purposes and aims’ (Spurgeon et al. 2009).