The Media Activism of Latin America’s Leftist Governments: Does Ideology Matter?

Has Latin America’s left turn mattered in media politics? Does ideology impact governments’ practices and policies regarding media and journalistic institutions? Through an empirical assessment of discourses on the media, of direct-communication practices, and of media regulation policies on the part of the recent leftist governments of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, Uruguay, and Venezuela, this paper stresses the existence of a specific media activism on the part of leftist governments in Latin America. While showing that the current binary distinctions that stress the existence of two lefts—“populist” and “nonpopulist”—obscure important commonalities and continuities, the author also demonstrates that it is the existence of certain institutional and structural constraints that best accounts for the differ-ences among the various leftist governments in Latin America. In sum, the paper challenges the prevailing neglect of ideology as a relevant factor in explaining developments in gov-ernment–media relationships in the region.media, journalism, Latin America, government, ideology, leftism

Women and radio - airing differences. On the importance of community radio as a space for women’s representation, participation and resistance.

The submission and commentary document an original and significant contribution to knowledge about the history, praxis and methods of how women have found their voice in community radio through participation at structural and symbolic levels; that is, by setting up their own radio station structures and programming, using community radio as a place to contest identity and produce new media narratives for themselves beyond male discourses. The submission finds that women’s community radio can be a place for individual empowerment, representation and creativity, as well as a space for resistance – including collective and transnational feminist campaigning and activism. The submission documents historical and contemporary case studies of feminist interventions and women’s radio programming in multiple global contexts. It demonstrates how this work has been instrumental in establishing the field of radio studies and within that, the sub-theme of women’s community radio practice. Discussion of methodologies of critical educational pedagogy runs throughout the commentary and demonstrates that specific, holistic, women-centred approaches to radio training and production can enable more women to access and participate in radio, thus raising the status of their on-air ‘voice’. It demonstrates that adoption and adaptation of the methodology of ethnographic and participatory action research in partnerships between community radio stations, women´s projects and voluntary organisations have developed new ways of understanding how women participate in and engage with radio and radio production. The submission is situated in the context of its intervention in current and recent debates about women´s public voice and the representation of women in media industries. It makes a significant contribution to knowledge about women’s community radio as part of radical and alternative cultural production and offers new directions for women´s radio practice, education and training

Community media : field, theory, policy

The submission consists of twenty-three outputs, spanning over three decades. These range from books and chapters to reports, journal articles and edited publications. The accompanying commentary aims to set the submitted work in context, demonstrate that it constitutes a coherent whole, and that it makes an independent and original contribution to knowledge and the advancement of the academic field of community media within the discipline of media studies. A number of overlapping contexts are summarised: the socio-historical setting in which the practice of electronic community media first emerged; the ‘personal/professional’ context in which reflection on practical experience led to developments in theory and policy analysis; the academic context of the development of British media studies where at first radio was marginalised and there was no discursive space for the notion of community media, then a later stage where a wider range of theoretical contexts brought community and alternative media into the academic frame. Three main sections discuss, respectively, the candidate’s contribution to the identification and categorisation of community media, the application to it of theoretical perspectives, and the development of policy analysis. All three areas, it is argued, were part of a wider strategy aimed at bringing recognition to the field and which involved activities outside the scope of the submission (advocacy, interventions in mainstream media) but which are part of the context of the submitted work. For that reason an appendix (B) lists all the candidate’s publications on the subject, while others list conference presentations and other relevant activities. In addition, the documentation includes a brief career summary and statements by co-authors

Twitter or Radio Revolutions? The Central Role of Açık Radyo in the Gezi Protests of 2013

Radio has been employed as a communication tool during all the social movements and protests of the last decades of the past century, from the student movements of May 1968 in Paris and Mexico City to the 1999 Seattle WTO protests, while the political protests and uprisings at the beginning of the twenty-first century have mostly been supported by social media (Howard and Hussain, 2013). Is Twitter the radio of the twenty-first century? Another, more complex, reality lies beyond the surface of the representation of the protests shaped by the mainstream media: the mediascape in which political movements such as Occupy, the Arab Spring and the Indignados have emerged is a mixed one, a mediascape where old and new, mainstream and underground media co-exist, interact and shape each other. In this paper, we will focus on the case of Açık Radyo, the only independent and listener-supported radio station based in Istanbul, and the role it played in the Gezi Park protests of June 2013. This study is based on an ethnographic investigation undertaken between December 2014 and January 2015 that used a mix of participant observation (Spradley, 1980) and in-depth interviews (Patton, 2001) with 15 Açık Radyo workers and volunteers and 10 Açık Radyo listeners. We will show how radio has not lost the value that it gained as a tool for political and social change during the twentieth century, but how it has only repositioned itself within the changing digital mediascape of the twenty-first century, mixing itself with social media in order to continue amplifying radical political discourses and networking protesters together

Discursive absence: the case for community radio

The case for community radio must address a range of different areas - legislation, frequencies, regulatory structures, finance, public demand and political will – which, taken together, may be regarded as the discursive field of dominant mainstream broadcasting. Without campaigning pressure there is no discursive space for a notion which challenges the established norms. The article illustrates this with the example of the British campaign for community radio which had to overcome obstacles that can still be found in many settings today. In the early 1980s British activists faced the additional problem that radio received little attention within academic media studies

Community Radio in Guatemala: A Half-Century of Resistance in the Face of Repression

While Guatemalan community radio stations have been legally repressed or “criminalized” since 1996, there is a longer trend of military repression of community radio stations that reaches back to the 1970s. Looking at an extended narrative of repression lends context to the present day fight for policy change in favor of community radio rights; it illustrates a continual exclusion and sustained repression by the state against the institution of Guatemalan community radio and the Maya campesino population