Community Radio’s Amplification of Communication for Social Change by Juliet Fox

Author:Juliet Fox
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030173166
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Political Citizenship

As outlined in Chapter 3, a citizens’ media approach places emphasis on the active nature of citizens as media-makers rather than passive media consumers. Within this discussion on participation it is important to return to the idea of the citizen and what makes an engaged, active participant within media and communication systems, along with what enables effective political citizenship.

Such a discussion necessarily connects to the concept of communication rights —a concept I spent some time articulating back in Chapter 2. How, and where, can the rights of citizens to communicate—to freely be informed, as well as to speak—be enacted, and what role can community radio play? This leads us to question how we assess effective active citizenship and participation within a community radio station. Access, place and community building play a role as I have already explored, and shortly I will turn to the role of structure in facilitating individual agency. But for now I want to consider the experience of political citizenship both behind the microphone and by listeners.

For Clemencia Rodríguez, citizens’ media ‘accounts for the processes of empowerment, concientisation and fragmentation of power that result when men, women, and children gain access to and reclaim their own media’ (2003, p. 190). We need to take into account the type of active citizen—and resulting power—that Rodríguez envisages, which is based on Chantal Mouffe’s conceptions of radical democracy and ‘the political’. Political citizenship, antagonism and the ‘radicalisation of democracy’ provide important lenses through which to consider the community radio experience; and the space of community radio arguably provides a forum for ‘agonism’ rather than ‘antagonism’. As Mouffe describes:It is not in our power to eliminate conflicts and escape our human condition, but it is in our power to create the practices, discourses, and institutions that would allow those conflicts to take an agonistic form (2005, p. 130).

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