Katie Moylan - The Cultural Work of Community Radio

The Cultural Work of Community Radio

Katie Moylan

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Copyright 2019 by Katie Moylan

All rights reserved . No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: HB 978-1-7834-8932-9

PB 978-1-7834-8933-6

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Moylan, Katie, author.

Title: The cultural work of community radio / Katie Moylan.

Description: London ; New York : Rowman & Littlefield International, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018047911 (print) | LCCN 2018060313 (ebook) | ISBN 9781783489343 (electronic) | ISBN 9781783489329 (cloth : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Community radioUnited States. | Community radioUnited States.

Classification: LCC HE8697.95.U6 (ebook) | LCC HE8697.95.U6 M69 2019 (print) | DDC 384.540973dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018047911

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

This book was created in significant part from the insights of the radio and community practitioners I talked with in Arizona, Miami, Montreal, New Orleans and Toronto: Dave Ankers, Ayesha Baig, Louise Burns, Daryn Caister, Fabiola Charles, Rhonel Cinous, Jaime Cole, Rose-Philippe Coriolan, Suzanne Corley, Richard Davis, Maryse Djean, Dr Mark-Alain Dery, Anthony Dukepoo, Colonel Matias Farias, Carline Faustin, Tamara Filyavich, Jorge Fuentes, Luis Fust, Aldric George, Natalia Gonzalez, Blanca T. Greenwood, Justin Ya Favourite Lightskin Gunderson, Thomas Humeyestewa, Terri Hutchens, Richard Ives, Curtis Action Jackson, Sylvia DJ Sugarbear Jackson, Joseph H. Louis Jeune, Gary Johnson, Sawssan Kaddoura, Rebecca Laratte, Theresa Lombardi, Judge Alberto Milian, Sandra E. Munoz, John-Hoa Nguyen, Daniel Ondrejka, Gabriel Otero, Jon Pressick, Wanda Quasula, Joni Sadler, Ken Stowar, Bruce Talawyma, Mark Tara, Andrew Ward, Stephanie Womble and Hector Youtsey. Thank you again for your generous and illuminating contributions.

So many thanks to Alec Badenoch, Hilary Chan, John Downing, Kathleen Eull, Anthony Gonzalez, Rachel Grahame, Alison Harvey, Carolyn Kohl, Peter Lewis, Caroline Mitchell, Chrystie Mytekiak, Maria Touri and Mary Wells for crucial conversations, critical suggestions and support. Thanks too to colleagues at the University of Leicester for support throughout the process.

My love and thanks to Sarah Moylan, Kathleen Adamson and Tom Moylan for their ongoing care and understanding. Finally, gratitude and love to Peter for multifaceted love and support at home and on the road.

The Miami and Toronto fieldwork in this research was funded by a British Academy Small Grant awarded in 2015. I gratefully acknowledge support provided by the University of Leicester College Research Fund for the New Orleans, Montreal and Arizona fieldwork and to the Research Institute for Cultural and Media Economies (CAMEo) for further assistance with the Montreal and Arizona research.

Introduction

(Re-)considering Community Radio

Community radio is often greater than the sum of its under-resourced parts. It mobilises the expressive capacities of broadcast and online radio for nuanced representation of community concerns and experiences on their own terms and in their own voices. Community radio shows and stations enable and facilitate cultural and political representation of marginalised groups when mainstream radio often fails to do so. Community radio constitutes a realised forum for debate and discussion of acute community problems, and curates and preserves local and situated art, culture, heritage, language and music. It can challenge damaging, limiting and stereotypical representations of marginalised communities. It provides a comprehensive training ground for anyone who wants to work in broadcast radio. It is often fuelled by free labour. It is analogue and digital. Critically analysing community radio crucially incorporates considering what is meant by community, examining cultural labor practices, identifying and unpacking complex modes of production, recognising the importance of on-air translation and exploring the aesthetics of radio. Because of the proliferation of community radio stations in the world, there is no universal format for a community radio show or station. Instead, I suggest that the comparative study of specific community radio content, production practice and structural specificities in their multiplicity can comprise a useful lens for a global scrutiny of media and culture. Considering that media forms can embody contradictory components within their productive capacities and user experiences, community radio uniquely combines what Daniel Fisher describes as medias peculiar entanglement of material culture (technology), communicative protocol (expressive practice), and the normative pre-suppositions such media acquire (media ideology) (Fisher 2013: 374) and knits these components together in diverse waysoften with the joins showing, revealing the mechanics and materialities of production. In diverse manifestations of this unconscious reflexivity, the community radio form embodies a multiplicity of possible meanings produced through localised practicesin contrast to consolidated and commercialised media forms in which localised differences are more often glossed over and streamlined into a cohesive rationalising and universalising whole. In recognition of the possibilities of community sites of broadcast production, John Downing identifies the historically situated quality of the radical expressive and representative capacities of such media, generally small-scale and in many different forms, that express an alternative vision to hegemonic policies, priorities and perspectives, which he locates on a historicised trajectory: In this multifarious, seething broth that we name society, what counts as politically oppositional, as personally expressive, as experimental, as embedded in the cultural present, as heralding the publics future, as reclaiming the forgotten merits of the past? (Downing 2001: v, vii).

In their localised scale and through an alternativism situated in grassroots production practices, community radio shows and stations can embody radical possibilities for community-led content to counter normative and reductive representations of marginalised communities circulating in the mainstream. At the same time, in its capacity for producing such diversityof content, of production practices, of station and studio spacescommunity radio reminds us of the wide and deep capacities of media form in general.