scholarly journals Community radio, democratic participation and the public sphere

2017 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-47 ◽  
Author(s):  
Niamh Gaynor ◽  
Anne O’Brien
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Local Community ◽  
Policy Framework ◽  
Democratic Participation ◽  
Community Radio ◽  
Radio Stations ◽  
Non Profit ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Training Programmes

Community radio is unique when compared to its commercial and public service counterparts in that, as a non-profit activity, it is owned, managed and controlled by local communities, In theory therefore, community radio offers the potential for more broad-based participation in deliberation and debate within the public sphere engaging multiple voices and perspectives and contributing towards progressive social change. Drawing on a study of four community radio stations in Ireland within a framework drawn from the evolving work of Habermas and associated deliberative, social and media theorists, in this article we examine the extent to which this is the case in practice. We find that democratic participation is still not optimised within the four stations studied. We argue that the reasons for this lie in four main areas: a somewhat limited policy framework; a focus within training programmes on technical competencies over content; the weakness of linkages between stations and their local community groups; and the failure of the latter to understand the unique remit of community radio. The article draws lessons of specific interest to researchers and activists in these domains, as well as offering a framework to those interested in examining community media’s contribution to the re-animation of the public sphere more broadly.

scholarly journals Winter Solstice Celebrations in Denmark: A Growing Non-Religious Ritualisation

Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 74
Author(s):  
Astrid Krabbe Trolle
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Local Community ◽  
Community Level ◽  
Winter Solstice ◽  
The Public ◽  
Religious Rituals ◽  
Local Newspaper ◽  
Level I ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Over Time

During the last decade, local celebrations of winter solstice on the 21st of December have increased all over Denmark. These events refer to the Old Norse ritual of celebrating the return of the light, and their appeal is very broad on a local community level. By presenting two cases of Danish winter solstice celebrations, I aim to unfold how we can understand these new ritualisations as non-religious rituals simultaneously contesting and supplementing the overarching seasonal celebration of Christmas. My material for this study is local newspaper sources that convey the public sphere on a municipality level. I analyse the development in solstice ritualisations over time from 1990 to 2020. Although different in location and content, similarities unite the new solstice celebrations: they emphasise the local community and the natural surroundings. My argument is that the winter solstice celebrations have grown out of a religiously diversified public sphere and should be understood as non-religious rituals in a secular context.

Policing Space and Defying the Mainstream: Gender and the Creation of a Traditional Music Public Sphere in Twentieth-Century Ireland

2019 ◽  
Vol 51 ◽  
pp. 247-268
Author(s):  
TES SLOMINSKI
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Lower Class ◽  
Traditional Music ◽  
Non Profit ◽  
The Public ◽  
Music Making ◽  
Irish Traditional Music ◽  
People First ◽  
The Public Sphere

Whether in Ireland or elsewhere, most people first encounter Irish traditional music in public spaces such as pub sessions or concerts, or through the recorded traces of music-making produced for a listening public.1 For those who become more involved in the scene as players, dancers, or avid listeners, festivals, schools, non-profit organisations, archives, and other instruments of the public sphere of Irish traditional music shape perceptions of the genre’s style, history, and participants. But while public and semi-public music-making has been a vital part of the transnational Irish traditional music scene for at least a century, the genre’s self-understanding still relies on its associations with a domestic, private past. In this article, I locate the roots of this contradiction in the historiographical problems presented by the 1935 Public Dance Halls Act—a piece of legislation that has had profound effects on musical practice and discourse in Ireland.2 I examine the ways this law and the frequent retrospective overemphasis of its effects have contributed to the idealisation of Irish traditional music as rooted in a domestic, rural, and lower-class past. Combined with social and governmental restrictions on the activities of women during most of the twentieth century, this alignment of domesticity with imagined “authenticity” has shaped the reception of women’s public Irish traditional musical performance in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

scholarly journals When a Place Becomes a Community: Music, radio and the reach of social aesthetics

2009 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles Fairchild
Keyword(s):  
Radio Station ◽  
Community Music ◽  
Community Radio ◽  
Simple Fact ◽  
Radio Stations ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Aesthetics ◽  
Explicit Recognition ◽  
The Public Sphere

What questions do we face when the familiar, informal or semi-formal modes of musical place-making are constituted instead by formal institutions whose explicit recognition by the state and the market are necessary for their existence and survival? A community radio station is one such institution. Their participants’ primary goal is to enact different ways of producing culture, doing so by constructing a series of social relationships crafted through acts of communication and organisation that define the institution itself. The scholarly consensus has it that the ways of producing culture through community media enact a distinctly civil discourse that challenges traditional notions of cultural belonging, citizenship and the public sphere. The bare, simple fact that the vast majority of programming materials on most community radio stations in Australia is music begs a series of questions about the role of the social aesthetics of music in the construction and maintenance of institutions of civil society. I argue that we can draw out of these institutions the core values of a civil or democratic aesthetics specifically through understanding the type and character of the kinds of relationships that constitute them. Moreover, these relationships present an enticing contrast to the commercial relationships which dominate most of consumer culture.

Media setting the agenda

2021 ◽  
pp. 375-382
Author(s):  
Elisabeth Eide
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Media Representation ◽  
Democratic Participation ◽  
Global Inequality ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Public Sphere

Media play an important role in representing people with minority background, migrants and refugees. This chapter addresses how this representation may affect their lives and well-being in Europe, and more particularly in Norway. Currently, the multitude of media platforms seems to open up for increasing polarization in a fragmented public sphere. Simultaneously we witness an increased diversity of media actors, partially reflecting societal diversity. The levels of negative media representation of migrants, as well as serious threats and harassment, may contribute to individual withdrawals from the public sphere, and thus from democratic participation. Such representation may also enhance negative self-images and feelings of non-belonging and exclusion. Furthermore, a lack of media contextualization of the current migrant/refugee situation and the drivers behind it may encourage narratives where those suffering the consequences of war, conflict, and global inequality may be regarded as the ones to blame.

The Electronic-Mediated Public Sphere and Environmental Public Participation in China

2014 ◽  
pp. 134-145
Author(s):  
Ying Xu
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Public Participation ◽  
Critical Analysis ◽  
Information And Communications Technologies ◽  
Non Profit ◽  
Public Discussion ◽  
The Public ◽  
New Information ◽  
Communications Technologies ◽  
The Public Sphere

This chapter offers a critical analysis of the new pattern of public participation in the electronic-mediated public sphere. By reviewing the development of Chinese environmental activities that led to an active, electronic-mediated public discussion concerning environmental protection, the findings reveal that new Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) have made the public sphere more easily seen and heard by everyone, including governmental departments in the bureaucratic system. Thus, the electronic-mediated public sphere is providing a third power that could help Non-Profit Organizations' (NPOs) development in relatively conservative societies such as China. The implications of using ICTs in the management of NPOs are also discussed.

scholarly journals Politisering av religion i norske kommuner? En undersøkelse av religionens rolle i lokale feiringer

Politik ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Pål Ketil Botvar
Keyword(s):  
Public Policy ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Local Community ◽  
Local Politics ◽  
Local Level ◽  
Multicultural Society ◽  
Religious Groups ◽  
The Public ◽  
Local Municipalities ◽  
The Public Sphere

In this article I will take a look at how local municipalities deal with religion when the topic is brought up in local politics. e development towards a multicultural society leads to religion having a more prominent place in the public sphere. During the last 10 years religion has become a theme in public policy at the local level. Such examples are the provision of special rooms or buildings for religious groups to have their ceremo- nies. School children visiting church sermons during school hours is another issue that leads to controversies. In this article I will focus on how representatives for the local community deal with topics related to religion in local festivities and celebrations. e data material relates to how municipalities organize the national day celebration and interact with civil society actors in the preparation of this celebration. 

5 Digitalization: Another Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere?

2016 ◽  
Vol 2016 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Robin Celikates
Keyword(s):  
Collective Action ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Structural Transformation ◽  
21St Century ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Democratic Participation ◽  
Democratic Institutions ◽  
Digital Activism ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Public Sphere

AbstractIs the Internet one of the causes of the crisis of the public sphere or does it rather provide a way to address this crisis? Do new forms of digital activism undermine the functioning of existing democratic institutions or open up new avenues for democratic participation? In this paper I address these questions by discussing the traditional Habermasian notion of the public sphere and the challenge that the digitalization of communication and collective action poses to it. After showing that digitalization indeed leads to a new structural transformation of the public sphere, I distinguish ways in which this development can be both detrimental to and beneficial for the project of a democratic public sphere in the 21st century.

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