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30 oct 2017
Selected Abstract
What makes you happy?
Insights into feelings and muses of community radio practitioners
Stefania Milan
Department of Political and Social Sciences
European University Institute
San Domenico di Fiesole, Italy
Keywords: community radio, framing, emotions, social change, voice,
empowerment.
Abstract: What makes you happy in your daily activity at the radio? This question was asked to more than forty community radio practitioners from all over the world in the framework of a research on community radios as a social movement. People were encouraged to reveal their feelings and elaborate on their inner motivations for joining the radio station. Three main points could be singled out from the interviews: the idea of the radio as a ‘free space’ for the articulation of views and opinions, the role of community radio as amplifier of voices of other social groups, and the collective dimension of projects. This article draws on interview texts using the method of discourse analysis to illustrate motivational frames of community radios activists, providing an original view of the radios, often considered ‘only’ as producers of alternative audio material or mere ‘infrastructures’, while the dimension of motivations and feelings is often neglected.
Introduction
By community radio I refer to small-scale media projects providing public (‘made
available to everyone’) communication within a specific context: the community,
understood not only as a geographic but as a social setting (Hollander et al. 2002). In
this sense, community media are devoted to the ‘reproduction and representation
of common (shared) interests’ and ‘the community serves as a frame of reference
for a shared interpretation’ (Ibid., 23). It is not a matter of size or geography, as
much as of a ‘special relationship between senders, receivers and messages’.
Emphasis is on the symbolic experience: in other words, on the transformation of
‘private individual experience into public collective experience’ (Ibid., 23-26). The
sector is highly diversified, and stations embody different organising principles
and operating values. Nevertheless, they tend to share some core features, such
as not-for-profit status, locally oriented and produced content, editorial
independence, social mission, presence of volunteer and non-professional staff.
As Girard puts it, community radio ‘aims not only to participate in the life of the
community, but also to allow the community to participate in the life of the
station… at the level of ownership, programming, management, direction and
financing’ (Girard, 1992:13, see also Dunaway, 2002). In relation to the
aforementioned social mission, community media are about access to information
and voice for marginalised groups (Buckley 2003), as well as community
participation (Berrigan 1977), and often work as a vehicle for social change and
citizens’ empowerment (Buckley 2006, Milan 2007).
In November 2006 over 300 members of the World Association of Community
Broadcasters (AMARC) met in Amman, Jordan, for the 9th world conference of
the association. The conference theme was “Voices of the World – Free the
Airwaves.” AMARC is a non-governmental organisation bringing together
community radio practitioners from about 110 countries. Interviews were
conducted with over forty community radio activists1 in the framework of a
research on the community radio sector as a transnational social movement. The
aim was to gather information about the motivations of community radio
practitioners, and the emotional side of their activism. The same questions were
later asked to community radio practitioners – mainly board members of the
Community Media Forum Europe (CMFE), an advocacy organisation, and of the
European section of AMARC – gathered in Budapest, Hungary, in occasion of a
workshop on community broadcasting in Europe in May 2007.
Drawing upon the data collected in Amman and Budapest, this paper will provide
an overview on motivations and emotions linked to being active in a community
radio station, and shed light on the ‘special relationship between senders, received
and messages’ which Hollander et al. talk about. The aim is threefold. First, I seek
to understand how community radio practitioners make sense of their action and
of the relations that bind them together. Second, I attempt to answer the question
which forms does this ‘special relationship’ between producers and the community
take. Finally, I look at the meanings which are attributed to this relationship by
practitioners in order to uncover the emotions and feelings that are involved in
these processes.
Community radio seen through the lenses of social mobilisation theory
This research is inspired and informed by social movement literature and in
particular by the works on identity formation and meaning attribution, and the
function of emotions in social actors’ making sense of their activism. Participating
in a community station is here considered a collective action, since it entails ‘a set
of practices (i) involving simultaneously a number of individuals and groups, (ii)
exhibiting similar morphological characteristics in contiguity of time and space, (iii)
implying a social field of relationships and (iv) the capacity of the people involved
of making sense of what they are doing’ (Melucci, 1996, 20). Accordingly, each of
the radio stations, and, by extension, the community radio sector, can be seen as a
‘field of shared action’ (Ibid, 16). Drawing on social mobilisation theory, the
following paragraphs will provide a brief overview of concepts that can help to
unpack the meaning production processes by community radio practitioners.
In social movement research, feeling and emotions are acknowledged to play a role
in the formation of a collective identity. However, research tends to emphasise
external structural factors and the role of leadership in shaping collective identity
and not much empirical investigation has been conducted on emotions and
feelings. Italian scholar Alberto Melucci constitutes an exception: within his
constructivist view of collective action, he highlights the importance of the
psychology of collective emotional experiences in the process of construction of a
collective identity. Melucci argues that there is ‘a certain degree of emotional
investment… which enables individuals to feel themselves part of a common
unity… Passions and feelings, love and hate, faith and fear are all part of a body
acting collectively… There is no cognition without feeling and no meaning without
emotion’ (Melucci, 1996, 71). Emotions are first and foremost individual but they
are also a relational experience. Accordingly, the relational aspect is central to the
emergence and maintenance of a collective identity, conceptualised as ‘an
interactive and shared definition produced by a number of individuals (or groups
at a more complex level) concerning the orientations of their action and the field of
opportunities and constraints in which such action is to take place. By “interactive
and shared” I mean that these elements are constructed and negotiated through a
recurrent process of activation of the relations that bind actors together’ (Ibid, 70,
italics in the original text). Furthermore, collective identity refers to a ‘network of
active relationships between actors who interact, communicate, influence each
other, negotiate and make decisions’ (Ibid, 70-71).
Melucci highlights the relational significance of emotions and individual
motivations. Even though this paper does not concentrate on the collective level
or discuss the process by which individual perceptions come together to produce a
unity (of collective action), it is important to keep in mind that individual
emotions, feelings and meanings do combine and influence each other. Thus, the
subjective accounts about radio-making reported in this paper should be seen in
the context of the ‘network of active relationships’ between individuals. Collective
experiences such as actively taking part in a community radio station involve
people’s feelings and emotions and ‘the possibility of referring to a love-object
(‘Us’ against ‘Them’) is a strong and preliminary condition for collective action, as
it continuously reduces ambivalence and fuels action with positive energies’ (Ibid,
83).
A second concept informing this research is that of ‘frame’, which will be used in
this article as an analytical category. In social movement research the process of
meaning attribution by social actors is called ‘framing’ and allows individuals and
groups to make sense of their experiences. A frame is defined as an ‘interpretative
schema that simplifies and condenses the “world out there” by selectively
punctuating and encoding objects, situations, events, experiences, and sequences
of action’ (Snow and Benford, 1988, 137). According to William Gamson, who
looked at the motivations of potential participants to collective action, frames can
be interpreted as the psychological components of collective action (Gamson,
1982).2 Looking at frames allows the researcher to bring into the analysis of
collective action the element of perception and consciousness, that is to say the
social-psychological process of interpretation which intervenes between
opportunities for action and the actual action (Noakes and Johnson, 2005). In this
paper, frames will be used to indicate the meaning attributed to action by social
actors – that is to say, the meaning given by individuals to their participation in a
community radio. In other words, it is the label given by the researcher to the
socio-psychological element of social action.
Methodological notes
Data were collected using the technique of qualitative interviewing, either
individually or collectively. Respondents covered a wide range of age clusters and
countries and were selected according to the potential interest of their stories or
through snow-ball sampling. Thus the research does not have any statistical value
and does not aim at being representative of the sector. Individual interviews were
designed to let the respondent, encouraged by ad-hoc questions, speak freely on
selected topics. In collective interviews, in the form of peer group conversations,
participants were selected at random amongst the participants at the Amman
conference, following the principle of most different geographical origin and
gender balance. The researcher introduced a question from time to time, and
people were invited to engage in a conversation among each other. The researcher
acted as a moderator, with the aim of grasping negotiation processes between
people with different stories and backgrounds but sharing a similar experience.
Interviews were conducted in English and Spanish.
“What makes you happy…?” was the first of 6-8 questions, and was designed to
put the interviewee at ease with the interviewer – and with the group in the case of
peer-group conversations – and make his/her feelings and emotions emerge. It
also served the purpose of turning over the expectations of community radio
practitioners by asking them what they feel instead of what they do, avoiding the
dry relating of facts or the repetition of catch-phrases.
Interview transcripts were analysed using manual discourse analysis. Interviewees
are indicated by a system of two- or three-letter codes not necessarily
correspondent to their initials. While their name is not made explicit, the projects
they are part of are sometimes described and taken as an example of a particular
function or activity of community stations. A list of interviewees and the full
interview transcripts are available upon request.
A methodological drawback of interview data is the assumption that verbal
representations by the actors (for instance of the meaning attributed to an action)
coincide with the actual object (in this case, the actual meaning). We can overcome
this limitation by considering representations – that is to say how social actors
verbally explain and justify their behaviour – as subjective accounts with no
explanatory value. The focus is on individuals and their perceptions: thus, data
should be intended as personal narratives. Despite this paper bringing into play
collective action concepts, it does not aim at explaining the process by which unity
in collective action is produced and how this unity, and the associated collective
identity, looks like. It focuses instead on the micro level, and thus takes into
consideration individuals who are indeed part of collective experiences but are
seen here as expressing their personal views and recalling the emotional side of
their own activism. Furthermore, concerning the individual level, the paper does
not aim at explaining the process of meaning attribution, but pictures the final
result, and analyses it.
A further clarification concerns the impact of different cultural and national
contexts on the views of the interviewed practitioners, since in this research
interviewees of different backgrounds were treated as homogeneous actors.
Despite acknowledging that national political life and media systems indeed play an
important role in the way practitioners frame their participation in a community
radio station, especially with regard to the notion of radio as a tool for selfexpression and for social change, the variable was considered to be of secondary
significance to the project, which looks at community radios as an emerging
transnational social movement. In addition, the snow-ball selection does not allow
for a statistically relevant comparison across countries. In the following
paragraphs, however, national specifications will be introduced to complement and
contextualise some of the practitioners’ quotes.
Making sense of participation in a community radio station: insights from
the field
Emotions seem to play a crucial role in sustaining an activity, like that of ‘making
radio’ on a voluntary and not-for-profit basis, that is not rewarding in classical
economic terms. Practitioners are indeed ‘happy’ of their involvement in a
community station and of being part of a collective experience, and enjoy
explaining to outsiders what they find appealing about their activity, often recalling
how they got into radio, what they feel when they hold the microphone or go on
air, or explaining the social implications of ‘their’ radio.
In my effort to make sense of the interview data, I have singled out eight frames,
which can be condensed into three ‘umbrella’ frames: 1) community radio as a free
space, 2) community radio as political tool for social change, and 3) community
radio as a collective experience. For each of the eight frames I will provide a
detailed description using quotes from the interviews combined with concrete
examples from the projects.
Community radio as a free space
Happiness evokes relaxation, feeling at ease, positive feelings. To get involved,
beyond any political value or ideal, people must ‘like it.’ One of the main reasons
for this affection seems to be the sense of freedom that derives from an
environment that is self-organised like that of a community radio station.
Community radio is a free space that allows people to express themselves in the
way they want, and to have fun, as outlined in the following sections.
A free space for expression and self-determination
‘The radio is my friend, and my life as well. I make programs, I make news report,
so many issues I can talk about,’ says DY from Radio Samargatha, in Kathmandu,
Nepal. Strikingly, in 2005, during a period of social turmoil in the country, the
station, was temporarily closed down for broadcasting voices critical of the
government. But also in less turbulent contexts, community radio is seen as a free
space for expression and self-expression: a radio producer can play music and
discuss topics with a freedom that cannot be found in any mainstream media,
constrained by commercial requirements and/or by the owner’s beliefs. The value
of freedom and the intertwined value (and social practice) of self-determination
seem to be central in the decision to join a community station, and one of the main
sources of gratification. Freedom originates from the sense of ownership of the
project: practitioners perceive themselves as an integral part of a project in which
they can have a say and that can be developed according to their own will, provide
they respect the collective decision-making and in a context where (allegedly) there
is no (formal) leadership.
Many activists frame this freedom in terms of ‘alternative’ content, either issues
that are underreported or niche music. ‘We are doing things that you can’t hear
elsewhere. And that makes me feel very good, when I know that we’ve either
covered something or given voice to someone on a issue that nobody else is giving
space to,’ reports ER from Radio KCSB in Santa Barbara, California. ‘Freedom’
allows for diversity of content: KCSB’s mission statement reads that ‘it strives to provide programming substantially different from that carried by commercial
broadcast media.’ Not surprisingly, emphasis on the free space notion differs
according to the structural features of the station and in particular to the degree of
horizontality implemented in the different projects, but overall it seems to be a
core value:
‘Very often I hear from people who have done radio at KCSB who say things like I have never been able to have a freer space to operate as I did while I was there. This is even for people who are in community media, who say I don’t get to do the kind of programming I want, somebody else determines a lot of it’ [ER].
Nevertheless, as these two examples highlight, freedom and self-expression are
framed in different ways according to national contexts: in a environment where
freedom of speech is (temporarily) at risk, being able to discuss political issues
becomes crucial, while in a context of over-exposition to media messages, it
becomes important to provide content that is different from the mainstream and
relevant to the community.
Community radio as fun
A frequent motivation for joining a community radio station seems to be that
‘community radio is fun’: listening to people and recording and broadcasting their
stories, editing audio and providing entertainment are all rewarding activities. FW,
engaged in a campus radio in Canada and producing the bulletin Women’s
International News Gathering Service (WINGS), says that she enjoys making radio
because she can listen to other people’s stories and work with them: ‘I like to
listen, listen to women especially… I am also very interested in the view points of
people that are not reflected usually in the mainstream media because I think that
you get to know more. I like to edit audio too, it is really really fun’: curiously, in
her account, the producer becomes ‘listener’. This notion of the ‘producer as a
listener’ seems to be linked to the idea of the community station as a voice
amplifier serving other disempowered social groups, that will be discussed later in
this paper. Nevertheless, there seems to be also a component of enjoyment
involved in listening to other people’s stories.
Fun is often linked to music. ‘What makes me happy at the radio is to broadcast
music. The radio is my favourite place, thanks to the songs,’ says enthusiastically
MPM from Radio Tierra, in Chile. This vision is shared by many other
respondents, but not in isolation: in most cases music and entertainment are
mentioned alongside with the social or political objectives of the station. About
music and entertainment there seem to be mixed feelings; most respondents do see
community radio as a tool for political action, and tend to emphasize that aspect at
the expenses of the fun side of it. This might be linked to the context in which the
interviews were conducted: particularly in the case of interviews performed in
Amman, the role of the organisation (AMARC) in framing what is community
radio-making about, and the prolonged exposure to certain themes and refrains
(for example, community radio as ‘voice of the voiceless’, which was one of the
core themes of the meeting) might have reinforced the practitioners’ elaborations.
On the other hand, some respondents acknowledge that music and entertainment
are often considered less relevant than political or social content. According to ER,
‘sometimes that [the music] gets neglected when we talk about community radio
because we talk above all about the news and public affairs, those kinds of
things… but I think music is extremely important because it conveys culture, it’s
truly universal’. Music, ER says, makes the language of the radio accessible to a
larger group, including those who do not speak the language. This point was
stressed in particular by practitioners engaged in stations in urban areas, with high
presence of migrant communities for which the music provides a universal
language. ER framed it also in terms of ‘freedom of the listeners’, since music and
sounds leave space to personal interpretation much more than spoken words: with
music ‘even if you don’t understand a word that you are hearing you can imagine
things. Radio is about imagination as well, since you don’t have all the visual cues’.
Music was also singled out as central in his involvement by JE, a young man
broadcasting from a station within an indigenous reserve in Canada. He affirmed
that the radio is significant for his hip-hop group: ‘We can broadcast our music,
talk to each other. It is a matter of speaking out to the masses, be able to let out
my point of view, my people’s point of view, be able to affect people’s life’.
Community radio as a tool for social change
FW from WINGS, whose slogan reads ‘Raising Women's Voices Through Radio
Worldwide’ says: ‘I like ideas, and so.. at the radio I am always working for the
ideas that would be the keys to social change for the better’. The social mission of
community radio and its function as a promoter of social change are
unquestionably the most recurrent references for the radio practitioners
interviewed in the framework of this research. We can single out four main
dimensions of social change. In the first place, community radio is explicitly linked
to a dynamic of political engagement and the possibility to express ideas and pass
them on to the listeners is considered very efficient in terms of generating positive
social outcomes. Secondly, community radio allows amplifying voices that would
otherwise be silent or shut down, be it for the speakers’ social conditions or for the
impossibility of accessing mainstream media. It is seen as a ‘power’ in the hands of
radio practitioners to ‘give voice’ to underrepresented, poor or disempowered
social groups, and voice is perceived to have a transformative impact on those
benefited. Thirdly, community radio can serve the needs of other social groups or
social movements: the radio is seen as an infrastructure that can also be utilised by
groups other than the collective running it. The radio becomes a ‘service’ provided
to other groups and thus a way of supporting other struggles. Fourthly, community
radio is a tool for empowerment: the radio station can work as a vehicle for
alternative narratives, hence working for social change at the cultural and symbolic
level. Besides, producing radio can positively impact on the personal sphere:
speaking on the microphone, operating the mixing board, going on air can
strengthen self-confidence, especially in young people. In this context, teaching to
newcomers is often indicated as a source of gratification. The following sections
will illustrate further these four sub-frames related to community radio as a tool
for social change.
Community radio as a political tool to involve and affect listeners
Freedom in broadcasting as a working rule allows the radio station to be much
more than a place where one can have fun: community radio is often considered a
political tool through which practitioners articulate, express and share their
political views and values, where politics is intended in the broadest sense of
‘working for a better world’ and never as party politics or ideology. Talking about a
community radio set up in the ‘80s by his group, a commune, and broadcasting to
a rural area nearby their farm, HR explains: ‘for me [community] radio is a very organic kind of communication that can reach a bigger group. It creates social dynamics, because people are making programs, searching topics, but they are also obliged to go out to meet other people and keep in contact, otherwise it would not make sense to have such a radio. So for me it has a lot to do with political engagement, with relations with other people and all that.. it’s a kind of social living.’
Radio is seen not only as a technical device to broadcast widely, like a loudspeaker, one’s own ideas, but also as a proper space of articulation of views and
values, and it is organic to an individual’s or a group’s political engagement,
fostering connections and exchanges with other communities and groups around.
Interviewees often recall the notion that community radio, as a media working
under rules other than the mainstream’s, can actually change the way people think
about the world. A community radio station is seen as a simple but potentially very
influential tool to promote social change. It is the case of Radio La Tribu, in
Buenos Aires, Argentina, whose slogans read ‘Acostumbrarse es morir’ (‘to be
accustomed is to die’). La Tribu was started as a pirate radio during the
dictatorship by a group of communication students, and is now run by a horizontal
collective and open to everybody’s participation. It intends to be, reads the
website, ‘A collective storytelling that circulates to discuss amongst us. A radio
with consequences. With witnesses, declarations and dialogues. A radio that
reports the reality to be able to transform it.’ HL from La Tribu says:
‘It makes me happy of making radio when someone says something in this small place that usually community radios have and something passes on to the other side. When someone says, or does, or provoke, or the music you play or the questions that are asked generate consequences on the other side; and when they generate consequences of participation, I am even happier. This possibility keeps seeming magic to me.’
Community radio as voice amplifier with a transformative impact
Within the frame of radio for social change, the idea of community radio as an
amplifier of voices that ‘are excluded from the mainstream media’ – as DX from
Nepal puts it – is definitely the most popular among the respondents, both from
the Northern and Southern hemisphere. As mentioned above, this might have
been influenced by framing within AMARC, as many of the interviewees are
members of the organisation, but it seems to be more than that. GG says, talking
about his experience at Radio El Puente, in Uruguay, recalling his initiation to
radio as a child: ‘I started doing radio when I was 13, and I was very scared. I started taking pleasure in making radio when I started to speak, but not for how I was speaking, because in fact I was very afraid of how I was speaking.. but the happiness of making radio was the possibility to approach microphones to people and let the others speak. (…) having the radio gave me power, the power of letting the others speak, speaking myself just a little. Giving space to all these little experiences that a local radio like ours could give, people of very different social conditions who in turn had never thought they could speak over the radio, till we told them they could do it… this made me happy.’
The same concept of ‘power’ has been reversed, and gratification comes from
giving up the power of the microphone holder. This is a recurrent scheme
amongst the practitioners interviewed in this research: the radio activist considers
himself/herself a vehicle through which ‘others’, and especially deprived people,
can speak.
Often ‘the others’ are disadvantaged groups and the community radio station is a
vehicle for their social inclusion. It is the case for Radio Villardevoz, in
Montevideo, Uruguay, working with psychiatric patients. It makes possible ‘the
inclusion of a voice, that of psychiatric patients, that has been silent for many
years, spoken by others. This makes me very happy, not only what concerns the
communicative aspect but also the other objectives of the radio, which have to do
with its therapeutic ends and the rehabilitation of the word of crazy people’, said
MS. Sometimes ‘the others’ are indigenous communities, as reports JE, an
indigenous young man: ‘What I like of making radio is to give a voice to our native
speaker population, and contribute to the preservation of our cultures, that are
really being lost due to the influx of Western civilisation. It is a matter of giving
our people a voice and let our voice be heard.’
Community radio gives space to underrepresented voices, and does it in an
unobtrusive was. JA, an American radio producer based in Lebanon, who has been
working with young people expressed it in the following way: ‘I like the opportunity to bring out voices that are underrepresented, and the idea that those voices can be transmitted to a number of people in their own community but hopefully in communities that aren’t yet familiar with them. What I like about radio is that, unlike television, it is less obtrusive, it seems to be less of an invasion in someone’s life and because people are not worried of what they look like, they feel more free to discuss about the things that impact them’
Community radio is not only a venue for those social groups that have been made
invisible by the silencing practices of mainstream media, but can also have a
transformative impact on them, as evokes RB, from Bangalore, India, where he
works with a non-governmental organisation to sustain local community radio
projects: ‘It makes me happy when I see people whom I wouldn’t normally
otherwise notice, like small shop owners, or farmers, when I see that they take a
small radio station and speak about all things which they think are important, and
the transformation you see in those people, how they feel happy when they talk
about something or exchange ideas. Just seeing that is my main motivation for
being involved with radio.’
Community radio serving other social groups
Community radio stations are often seen as infrastructures that other groups can
use to express themselves and advance their demands. ‘What attracted me to radio
was my activism in social movements. I just came to believe that none of the
things that I worked for would succeed until there was a change in the way that the
media was owned, controlled and operated. When working at the radio, I can serve
all issues I care about by giving all these activists a way to talk and make an impact
on the debate about their issues,’ says PT from the Prometheus Radio Project.
Prometheus is a fluid collective based in Philadelphia, United States, that has been
working in the radio field since the ‘90s but – interestingly enough – does not have
its own radio. Its activists train other groups to build their own low-cost
transmitter from a kit bought over the Internet, and lobby the U.S. regulator, the
Federal Communication Commission, to adjust legislation so that more groups can
operate their station. The very name of the project recalls the notion of
empowering other groups: ‘Prometheus was a semi-god, who saw that the gods
had fire and regular people did not… and he saw this injustice, and so he stole the
flames and taught any other to make fire,’ says PT. ‘Stealing the fire’ is a metaphor
for giving people the control over their communication means to enable them to
control also their messages. The same concept is highlighted by EL, who operates
in a campus radio in Canada: ‘I think we work more for the others than for
ourselves and this is for me making radio. I have been a programmer in radio for
two-three years, but for me it is more important to provide a good infrastructure
for the society in general than to speak about my issues.’
It is the notion of community radio practitioners as ‘service providers’: the
community radio is seen here as an infrastructure that can be used by different
groups to express their views, while the individuals or group with the expertise –
either in building transmitters or in radio production or sound editing– put
themselves at the service of the groups that need infrastructures and skills to
convey their messages. Most of the practitioners addressed in this research declare
that their station organises training programs to help other groups or individuals
less skilled in broadcasting to get engaged. Beside the training courses in radio
production, support is offered also in lobbying for better conditions for
community media in national media laws, as does e.g. the Prometheus Radio
Group and the Legislation Program of AMARC Latin America. GG, who works in
the project, says: ‘It is already a year I am not making radio, because I am working on the area of legislation... and actually I did found a vocation in serving even better the whole Latin American community movement because in many countries there are very difficult conditions [for community radios]. It makes me happy to have this program on legislation that can put at disposal of the radios an ear to listen and a hand to help, so that they don’t feel so alone, they don’t feel like they are fighting against enormous enemies and there is nobody close.’
Community radio as an empowering tool
Community radio contributes to empowering people, either by promoting
alternative narratives for social change or by developing the personality of those
involved. IDC from Colombia says: ‘Garcia Marquez said in his writings that reality is not made up of facts but of the ways we relate them. Amongst the things that make me passionate about radio is that it is an excellent place to tell in public stories coming from points of views that generally communication means doesn’t put into play. What we try to do in the type of radio we do, in the formation and trainings, is to strengthen this capacity of telling stories, fortify this capacity of narrating that all men and women have (…) in a way that through the radio we can enrich our own way of looking at things with the stories that all people have to tell.’
Radio is here seen as a vehicle to articulate and disseminate alternative narratives:
exercising listening and story-telling, people go through a change of perspective
about their life and their environment and can be encouraged to take action to
improve their conditions.
An alternative perspective on empowerment consider instead the personality and
skills of those involved in running the station. Respondents, particularly those
working with young people or problematic groups, emphasise that radio as a
means of expression, being so accessible and somehow simple to use, can have a
decisive impact on people’s character, improving self-confidence and the capacity
of speaking in public. AS, a volunteer in a youth radio in the United States, says:
‘One of the things that I enjoy the most is seeing new people engaged, discovering
that they can actually create something which they were totally intimidated by
before. Take for example young people: often their personality changes from being
a very quiet kid to somebody who can express himself, not only behind the mic. It
passes over into their personal life and they become a more outgoing person.’ The
experience of AS with young people seems to recall that similar to that of
psychiatric patients in the aforementioned Radio Villadervoz.
Teaching and passing on one’s one skills becomes an integral part of a community
radio and seems to generate a lot of excitement, as well as being an important
source of gratification. ‘I like to teach people to produce radio, get them to catch
the spirit of a community radio’, says FW. ER likes ‘the excitement of people who
are new in hearing their own voices, or finding out when I am training somebody
that you can bring sound out from two different sources at the same time… it is
this kind of discovery thing that makes me very happy.’
Community radio as a collective experience
A community radio station is a complex universe of exchanges and relationships: it
is not only about the relations between those engaged in the everyday of the radio,
but also about the ‘special relationship between senders, receivers and messages’
mentioned at the beginning. Concerning the radio as a collective, that is to say the
practitioners and the way the radio project sustain itself, interviewees have
highlighted how being part of a collective experience is a strong motivation for
getting engaged and how the peculiar working rules of a community project – such
as access, horizontality, consensus and participation – make collaboration a very
pleasant adventure and makes it possible for the radio to sustain itself over time. In
relation to the community of reference and the external environment, radio
activists have emphasised the role of the station as community revitaliser, that is to
say a collective experience where the ‘collective’ goes beyond the studio walls: the
radio fosters exchanges and linkages amongst community members, promotes
dialogue between citizens and local government, and encourages transparency.
Community radio as a collaborative project
A community radio is a ‘product of many hands’ collaborating with a common
objective in mind. Being part of a collaborative project seems to reinforce
substantially activists’ motivations and be a significant source of gratification.
‘What makes me happy at the radio is to carry out a project jointly with all radio
members,’ says MS from Uruguay. ‘Indeed, it is a big challenge to make it in a
democratic and participatory way’. Community radio is perceived to be a free space
that potentially welcomes a wide range of opinions, making collaboration between
people of different backgrounds possible. OA from Chile puts it in this way: ‘What
makes me happy is the possibility to do stuff jointly with other people and that
there isn’t the precondition that we think all in the same way …starting from
different ways of seeing the world we can articulate ourselves in function of
common objectives.’
The working rules of a community station vary across a wide spectrum, but most
practitioners declare to implement horizontality, consensus-building and equal
power distribution among all members. Often they take the form of a collective,
where each member takes a share of responsibility in managing the radio, creating
a sense of ownership of the project by those involved. NB, from Radio Lora in
Switzerland, says: ‘Contributing to the success of the project and seeing the
community radio day by day developing and growing (…) being part of the
collective that manages the radio and ensures that the project stays alive is my main
motivation.’ Running a collective project is not immune from problems, but doing
it ‘all together’ is rewarding, as says OT from Austria, evoking his experience in
setting up a radio station from scratch: ‘Creating a radio station has been on the
one side enormously intensive work, but on the other side a very visible work, with
a concrete effect, a concrete impact. In a few years we established beginning from
nothing a community with lots of people involved, and this is our greatest success’.
Community radio as a community revitaliser
Community radio connects practitioners to the community ‘out there’. The final
product is a joint work, by the community for the community, which impacts on
the environment where the radio operates. Most respondents emphasized their
relation with the community and their social mission in terms of amplifying
people’s voices, as outlined in a previous section. Linked to this vision, but going
slightly beyond it, is the idea of community radio as a community revitaliser: the
radio, by creating and reproducing a tight relationship between producers and
listeners, contributes to revitalise community ties which, in turn, are nurtured by
the feeling of being part of a common project. The most poignant expression of
this social function comes from an African radio practitioner working with Radio
Peace, which operates in a deprived area in the central region of Ghana:
‘I am so excited with what I have being doing at Radio Peace! … [we serve] people who are marginalised, who are voiceless, who are diseased, who live in objective poverty... it is so exciting when you get to the community and you see that these people can rely on you but especially when you look at the people who need help and assistance, and these people can call you a brother or a sister, they can look up to you as somebody who can help them… I have the feeling and the satisfaction that I am helping some people to come out of their poverty level, and we are doing it together’ [IKU].
This sense of ‘togetherness’ seems to built upon pre-existing ties, and seems to be
reinforced by means of a common project to work on but how this happens still
needs further investigation. The table below shows the eight community radio
frames and the three resulting ‘umbrella’ frames emerging from the analysis of the
interviews.
Social change, voice, ‘reversed’ power and a bit of entertainment
The questions posed at the beginning of this paper – how do people make sense of
their activism in a community radio? How do practitioners frame the relations that
radio activism produces? – have manifold answers. Three points should be kept in
mind in analysing interview data. First, these are individual narratives: they identify
inclinations and tendencies among community radio practitioners but should not be
considered representative of the whole movement. Second, this paper provides a
extensive collection of enthusiastic voices and positive feelings, the main reason being
that practitioners where not asked what makes them sad, frustrated or angry in their
activity at the radio. The guiding assumption in looking only at optimistic views is that
people get involved if they like it and get some satisfaction out of this activity.
Nevertheless, this is a partial picture. We should also consider the possible distortive
effect deriving from the unconscious attempt by the interviewee to fulfil the alleged
expectations of the researcher, or from the membership in some organisation. Thirdly,
there is no extensive quantitative data available to triangulate it with the qualitative
pictures presented in this paper: for that reason, relevant variables such as age, gender
and country of origin are not taken into consideration. This being said, I believe that
personal narratives provide fascinating windows on ‘meaning work’ and picture a
‘world’ that deserved to be looked at.
Most of the practitioners interviewed link community radio to a political or social
mission, but a considerable amount does connect it with fun. It has to be noted
that the social mission is not antithetic to entertainment, but there seem to be a
general perception that entertainment is less relevant because it is perceived as less
appropriate to convey political and/or social messages. The role of radio as tool
for social change – either as a form of political engagement, a tool for
empowerment, or an infrastructure serving the voiceless or other social groups –
represents the core of all individual narratives. In particular, radio as voice
amplifier seems to be the most widespread concept across the radio activists
interviewed. However, since most of the respondents were part of the same
associations (AMARC and CMFE), they could have been influenced by the issue
framing adopted by the organisation itself. Nevertheless, in more general terms, we
can consider this element as the nucleus of some sort of collective identity, which,
as Melucci argues, relies extensively upon shared emotions. The emphasis on social
change and voice is consistent with the literature on community radio, which tends
to stress the role of community radio stations in development processes and in
fostering a healthy public sphere. Among others, Roncagliolo wrote that “We must
preserve a space for citizens to defend rights and seek equality. I think this is the
challenge facing community media, the reason why they get involved”
(Roncagliolo 1998, see also Buckley 2003).
Community radio is also fun and entertainment: despite numerically a smaller
number of the respondents mentioning it, it emerges from the very same
enthusiasm and the words picked by the practitioners that there is indeed a fun
side of it. Fun is linked to music, understood as a an universal language that can
reach even those who do not speak the language – as in the case of community
radios in urban areas serving several migrants groups – and a cohesive element to
create a community across different cultural backgrounds. But fun permeates a
wide range of activities, such as listening to other people’s stories, news
production, editing, and process-related aspects such as being part of a collective
and working together. Regrettably, the entertainment and fun aspect of community
stations has been so far neglected by the literature, which tends to focus on the
social ethos of community radio.
Unusual organisational rules such as free access, horizontality and consensus,
implemented to a different degree by different radio stations, build up a ‘space of
equals’. All this makes community radio clearly distinguishable from mainstream
media. Sense of ownership of the project can be retrieved both in the idea of the
station as a free space for self-organisation and as radio in collective experience
terms: practitioners share responsibilities and make choices, to a different degree
based on consensus, and have the feeling that they can collectively control (‘own’)
the project. This seems to be functional to the very same survival over time of
community stations, usually not-for-profit projects with wavy revenues and light
structures which can jeopardise the continuity of their activities.
Content-wise, community radio is perceived as a free space where one can
broadcast any kind of content consistent with the station’s values and the tastes of
different communities of interests, and not constrained by classical journalistic or
commercial values. Radio can become crucial in situations where freedom of
speech is suspended, and it is also a vehicle for ‘alternative’ content which can not
be found in other media, precisely because they implement different (noncommercial) working rules.
The notion of power comes back frequently in the interviews but it is framed in a
‘reversed’ way: who ‘has the power’ does not directly benefit from it. The
beneficiary of the ‘mic power’ is not the microphone-holder, but ‘others’, specified
as under represented, disadvantaged communities or just people who want to get
engaged. One could respond to that that the microphone-holder still decides who
should speak, if there was not a second element in this reversed definition of
power that intervenes to mitigate the potential distortion effect of microphoneholders: practitioners appear to make frequent efforts to share their expertise with
newcomers, which is to say to literally ‘pass on’ the microphone, not only hold it
to allow other people to speak. Sharing expertise is relevant to the continuity of the
project, but, in particular, it is consistent with the social mission of the radio and
the idea that radio promotes people’s empowerment. A quantitative research
conducted in Germany within the non-commercial radio sector, which by no
means can be considered comparable to the data presented in this paper for the
different questions asked and the different scale of the project, confirmed that
amongst the arguments for participation in a self-produced radio program is the
fact that ‘people directly concerned can express themselves’ (Günnel 2002, 344).
However, more research is needed to explore this multi-faceted ‘reversed’ notion
of power, and to understand how it is relevant to the practice of radio activists.
Curiously – though this study is not statistically representative of the whole
population – there are no significant differences in issue framing between the
industrialised Western countries and the South. Values and emotions seem to be
pretty much the same, and only details and descriptions of the community targeted
by the radio, as well as to some extent organisational values, vary across
continents. Membership in some community radio organisation proved to work as
an homogenizing factor in framing participation and values: for instance, narratives
from Latin American countries are very similar to each other, and this can be
correlated to the extensive presence in the sub-continent of a dynamic AMARC
section.
Which forms do the ‘special relationship between senders, receivers and messages’
take? The shared assumption that community radio works for social change seem
to give a special relevance to the communities served by the radio station:
community members are not mere listeners or users but are expected to get
engaged or more or less directly involved in the radio. The literature is quite rich in
this area. Berrigan spoke of ‘the means of expression of the community, rather
than for the community’ and ‘media to which members of the community have
access (…) when they want access’ (Berrigan, 1977:18). AMARC says: ‘community
radio is not about doing something for the community but about the community
doing something for itself’ [AMARC Africa and Panos South Africa, 1998].
Practitioners justify their activity at the radio being members of the community
serving the community at large. There seem to be an identification between
practitioners, who are community members with expertise in radio-making, and
listeners, who are community members that are expected to get engaged in the
social change adventure from the other side of the antenna.
The emotional side seems to play a relevant role in motivating radio practitioners
in their activities. Making radio in such an environment is a source of gratification,
happiness, excitement, empowerment, fun, which are functional to the social
change objectives but also crucial in sustaining projects which often have instable
financial bases. However, more research is needed to identify the role of emotions
in the process of formation of a shared collective identity.
Notes
1 In this text I refer to community radio actors indifferently as practitioners and
activists. The latter is derived from social mobilisation theory that I am using in the
research. In this context, the two have to considered as synonymous as they both
refer to people engaged in radio production within a strong social change
perspective.
2 A second tradition in the analysis of collective action frames considers frames as
strategic resources of movement organisations: frames would be used by social
movement organisations to mobilise people to act (Benford and Snow, 2000).
Although this perspective could say something for what concerns community
media organisations such as AMARC or the CMFE, it will not be taken into
consideration for this paper that focuses instead on the micro level.
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