[Air-L] CFP: ​Sustaining Community Media: Challenges and Strategies

Joly MacFie joly at punkcast.com
Fri Sep 22 09:35:23 PDT 2017


Via Jane Coffin  <coffin at isoc.org>




---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: *Salvatore Scifo* <sscifo at bournemouth.ac.uk>
Date: Thu, Sep 21, 2017 at 12:12 PM



Dear Colleagues,

we will be editing a special issue of the Journal of Alternative and
Community Media (JoACM), with Dr Andrew O' Baoill of the National
University of Ireland at Galway. Our topic is Sustaining Community Media:
Challenges and Strategies. We are seeking short abstracts (100-150 words)
by 15th November, with full texts of accepted articles due next March.

Further below, and in the attached pdf, you can find the full call for
papers. We welcome your proposals and informal inquiries. Please circulate
to others you think might be interested.

Best Regards,

Salvatore

-----------------------------------

Journal of Alternative and Community Media

SPECIAL ISSUE -  CALL FOR PAPERS

Guest Editors:
Andrew Ó Baoill, National University of Ireland, Ireland (
andrew.obaoill at nuigalway.ie)
Salvatore Scifo, Bournemouth University, United Kingdom (
sscifo at bournemouth.ac.uk)


​​
Sustaining Community Media: Challenges and Strategies

Maintaining community media organisations requires ongoing attention to a
number of factors.
Radio and TV stations, as well as national and international community
media organisations must
consider funding, governance structures, changing political and economic
conditions, while
building, consolidating and extending relationships with their listening
communities. The concept of
sustainability has been widely used in the context of communication for
development paradigms,
as a lens for assessing the health and success of that sector.

This special issue will provide an opportunity to reflect on questions of
resilience and endurance as they arise in alternative, radical,
oppositional, and community-grounded media, and to explore the various
interdependent factors
that can impact the ongoing stability and health of community media
projects. Concurrently, the
association of the term with questions of ecology prompts a reflective and
ethical concern that
extends beyond the immediate or parochial, and we expect papers that will,
in a holistic fashion,
explore the role and operation of the sector in the context of broader
socio-political concerns.

Community media have been the focus of an increasing amount of scholarly
attention as they have
grown in size, from social movement theorists, to political economists, to
those focused on
governance and organisational communication. As Atton and Hamilton (2008:
26) note in their
analysis of the political economy of alternative journalism, the “general
political-economic dilemma
for any critical project is that it needs resources with which to work, but
those crucial resources are
present only in the very society that it seeks to change or dissolve.”

This special issue will build on existing knowledge, together with
exploration of contemporary case studies, to explore the
numerous challenges faced by community media activists and organisations in
nurturing long-term
projects, and identify strategies and best practices for building a
sustainable sector.

Questions of sustainability have an immediate practical relevance to those
working in the field of
community communication - many projects that emerge from the context of
short-term tactical
media projects struggle with questions of funding and volunteer engagement
as the focus of their
horizon changes.

Also, the workforce and paperwork required by some funding schemes might be
a barrier to the search of medium and long-term support. Beyond this, we
encourage submissions
that tackle the ethical tensions that arise, for instance, for those
looking to create media that is at
once independent, critical, and financially stable. To what extent is it
possible to have a media
project that is both oppositional and institutionalised? What compromises
or additional work is
necessary? How to balance the possible conflict between aims of the
stations and those of funding
bodies?

In challenging contributors to focus on the interplay of practical
considerations of funding and
resources, together with questions of mission, key commitments, and values,
we expect to foster a
constructive debate that has the potential to draw on a range of historical
examples, as well as
explore some distinctive issues arising in the contemporary context.

In what ways do the lower barriers to entry for digital publishing support
and challenge the development of enduring
oppositional projects? With neoliberalism prompting the expansion of
commercial logic into ever
more areas of human activity, what are the pressures faced by projects
grounded in an opposition
to commodification and capitalism more broadly?

Areas of focus might include the following, with projects that draw
together a number of tensions in
creative and challenging ways particularly welcome:
• Capital and recurrent funding; building revenue streams
• Regulatory challenges and solutions
• Governance and organisation
• Cooperation and health of the sector
• Localism and defining community
• Maintaining and refreshing relationships with communities
• Pragmatism versus idealism

Abstracts due: 15 November 2017
Notification of acceptance: 1 December 2017
Publication: mid-to-late 2018

Submission Guidelines:
Please send an electronic copy of your 100-150 word abstract via e-mail
text to both Guest
Editors, Andrew Ó Baoill (andrew.obaoill at nuigalway.ie) and Salvatore Scifo
(sscifo at bournemouth.ac.uk), by Wednesday, 15 November 2017.

Authors will be informed about the acceptance (or not) of their proposal by
Friday 1 December
2017 and will be expected to submit their full paper according to JOACM
guidelines (see
https://joacm.org/index.php/JOACM/pages/view/authors) by 15 March 2018. The
issue is expected
to be released in mid-to-late 2018.

We encourage you to circulate this email among your networks.
-- 
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Joly MacFie  218 565 9365 Skype:punkcast
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