Opening Presentation CAMRA 2021

CAMRA 2021 A snapshot of community and alternative media research in Australia 26 February 2021 9.30am – 5pm Online Zoom Workshop Opening Presentation Dr Juliet Fox Hi everyone, thanks for your participation, and thanks to today’s organisers – Tanja, Bridget and Heather, and also Diana, for pulling together a great day. Just to firstly acknowledge that I’m in Melbourne, Naarm, on the stolen lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation and I pay my respects to Elders past, present and emerging and to any First Nations participants here today. Sovereignty was never ceded and there is unfinished business right across all the First Nations communities here in so-called Australia and this is deeply relevant to our field of community and alternative media research and it’s important for us to constantly be looking for ways that our work can make change in this area. So, I’m going to cover a couple of things in the next 20 minutes or so before our first panel session. I’m going to briefly talk about CAMRA – what it is, and where it came from, and then I’m going to propose a few priority research areas for community and alternative media research into the future. I’ll also be back at the end of the day with others to draw together some of the research ideas and priorities that emerge throughout the day – so my aim in raising a few early on, is to get the brain cells flowing in this regard. Ok, so firstly just a few words about CAMRA. What is CAMRA and how did it come about. CAMRA stands for Community and Alternative Media Research Australia and was established relatively informally at the 2017 Community Broadcasting Association of Australia meeting on the Gold Coast. Professor Ellie Rennie and myself convened the meeting and I’m sure at least some of you were there … ** in fact if you were there, please let me know. It was a very small meeting held in the hallway of the conference centre but Ellie and I are struggling to remember who exactly was there … At the meeting it was agreed that: ‘CAMRA is a network of researchers seeking to positively contribute to the direction and capacity of community and alternative media in Australia through engaged and relevant research. We collaborate on research ideas and projects, and identify and work on the research needs of the wider community media sector. CAMRA also coordinates gatherings including a research stream as part of the Community Broadcasting Association of Australia (CBAA) conference. The CBAA research stream moves beyond standard academic papers to engage sector-related organisations in research discussions. CAMRA will establish connections with similar national and international networks, including the OURMedia Network and the Community Communication and Alternative Media Section of IAMCR and the Australia New Zealand Communication Association.’ Since then we have aimed to run a research stream every second year at the CBAA conference. In 2018 Charlotte Bedford, Heather Anderson and myself convened a session focused on digital disruption that Susan Forde chaired. Papers from the session were published as part of the 3CMedia online journal in 2019 under the title of ‘Digital disruption in the Australian community radio sector’. And I’ll share a link on the whiteboard to remind people where to find those papers. https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rcrp20/3/1 I want to note here that the work of CAMRA in recent years does, of course, build off a long and strong history of academic research focused primarily on the community broadcasting sector here in Australia. Christina Spurgeon of the Queensland University of Technology, in particular, has led and driven many CBAA conference academic and research sessions dating back to the early 2000s. So CAMRA’s work has tried to build off that significant body of work in contributing to research in the field. Indeed, in 2015 at the CBAA conference in Terrigal, Christina Spurgeon and Ellie Rennie facilitated an extended session on ‘The Social Impact of Community Media’. The papers from that session were published in a special edition of Communication Practice and Research in 2017. Again, I’ll share a link on the whiteboard in the course of the day to where you can find those papers. https://www.cbaa.org.au/3c-media/all-issues/issue-8-%E2%80%93-october-2019 In part my purpose in mentioning some of the recent sessions and papers is to encourage us all to familiarise ourselves with the considerable body of work and effort that comes before us. In 2020 we were due to have our bi-annual research stream at the CBAA conference. Of course, due to COVID and all the restrictions that conference was moved online, but CAMRA did support the conference panel – ‘Decentring white privilege: Decolonising and diversifying the airwaves’ with Catherine Liddle, Priya Kunjan, Nicola Joseph and Areej Nur. This was an important session that we’re hoping to make available perhaps once we set up a CAMRA website – which will be a very exciting development. So please keep an eye out for that. A final point perhaps to make is that in setting up CAMRA we were clear that we didn’t want it associated with one single institution, or to necessarily formalise it through making it an official association or the like. It really needed to be a collaboration of academics, researchers, and those active within community media organisations. And I think it would be worthwhile discussing this further and bedding down CAMRA’s independence. CAMRA is an important research network for us all to engage in, and it would be good to see if we can take on some of the research needs of the sector, and I want to turn now to discuss research needs and priority areas more broadly … Research themes for the future So I think that today it’s important to reflect on the breadth of research within the community radio / community media sector to date, to hear from the great range of researchers today on their current and recent findings, but to also look forward to what sort of priority areas CAMRA might pursue in the coming years either as part of sessions like this, or with the CBAA research stream or other activities. To this end I want to make a few comments and highlight a few key areas which I would like to see prioritised. So I’m just going to touch on three areas very briefly. Building off last year’s panel discussion on decolonisation and the work required to ‘decolonise the sector’ and I think we need to see more research and action in this area. So I’m calling my first research priority area 1. White supremacy and racism - - - - - - I think it’s fair to say that white supremacy is on the rise globally, and if we consider that throughout history we are often a few years behind the political trends of the United States of America then we certainly need to be addressing this issue. Separate to any external influence of course, we also need to consider and acknowledge some of the deeply racist attitudes that are the very foundation of the country that we live in. And I just want to be clear that I’m talking about the everyday white supremacy that exists across all facets of our society, in our institutions, in our stations, in the academy. That means interrogating how the community broadcasting sector might remain silent, tolerate, or even embolden, white supremacy, including the role of the Christian-Right, conspiracy theorists and others who identify as marginalised and under-represented within the media, but simultaneously who’s values sit at odds with the wider aims of the community broadcasting sector. How do Australian community broadcasting sector bodies, stations, volunteers and broadcasters address racism in their practices, in their programming, in the make-up of the staff and Boards? And of course, the prevalence of white supremacy is not just about the make-up of people at our stations, or within our sector bodies, it is also about the ubiquitous and insidious attitudes and assumptions that permeate media coverage. How does this playout within our sector and its production of media content? In relation to this it’s worth considering the current review of the community broadcasting’s Codes of Practice. Section 2 of the Codes – Principles of diversity and independence 2.5 states that: ‘In all station activities and our behaviour we will oppose and break down prejudice on the basis of ethnicity, race, language, gender, sexuality, age, physical or mental ability, occupation, religious, cultural or political beliefs.’ There is a wealth of research opportunities right there in relation to how we are faring against that stated aim. Section 3 – General programming 3.3 states that: ‘We will not broadcast material that is likely to stereotype, incite, vilify, or perpetuate hatred against, or attempt to demean any person or group, on the basis of ethnicity, nationality, race, language, gender, sexuality, religion, age, physical or mental ability, occupation, cultural belief or political affiliation.’ Again, a plethora of issues to investigate there for community broadcasting in Australia. As I mentioned, the Codes of Practice are currently under review, a process that the CBAA coordinates – how might white supremacy and racism be addressed within this current revision process? And how can research and researchers contribute to this process? Moving on to my second research priority area – 2. Digital logic and democratic communication - I’m not going to say too much about this as it was the subject of a previous CAMRA session at the 2018 conference and there are a series of papers related to this topic – but just briefly - The research theme relates to the question: is digital logic compatible with the democratic aims of community broadcasting? - Many of you would be familiar with scholar Nick Couldry (2010) who observes that neoliberalism – and we could perhaps add here neoliberal logic, or digital logic – spawns a ‘crisis of voice’, wherein social communicative processes and the value placed on democratic communication is reprioritised within a society dominated by commercial imperatives.’ - And further to that, media and communications scholar Mohan J. Dutta (2012) observes that: - ‘The neoliberal logic is fundamentally an economic logic that operates on the basis of the idea that opening up markets to competitions among global corporations accompanied by minimum interventions of the state would ensure the more efficient and effective political economic system (Havery 2005)’ (p.16). - It really is imperative at this stage – this stage being late capitalism – that as researchers we engage with the potential conflict, or contradictions, that exist between the wider values and democratic aims of community broadcasting more broadly, and the intrinsic aims of digital technologies embedded in capitalist frameworks. - Within this wider research priority focused on digital technologies, digital logic, I think we also need to engage with Harvard scholar Shoshana Zuboff’s (2019) work on surveillance capitalism and behavioural surplus and what she calls ‘profound psychic numbing’, and the - And just to quote her briefly on this – ‘surveillance capitalism is not technology; it is a logic that imbues technology and commands it into action … the digital can take many forms depending upon the social and economic logics that bring it to life. It is capitalism that assigns the price tag of subjugation and helplessness, not the technology’ (p.15). - So this speaks to a wider collision of democratic and capitalist values and of interest to us is how they play out within the media and communications sector, and more specifically within the community broadcasting sector. And my third and final research priority area 3. Progressive content and practice - How progressive is the community broadcasting sector? - Many within the sector talk about radical media, or progressive media, what does that mean in the current context of both station operations and also programming content production? - I’m sure you’re all familiar with the sector’s 6 guiding principles, the second one being 2. Pursue the principles of democracy, access and equity, especially for people and issues not adequately represented in other media. This is, as are the others, a guide for progressive media practice. And it’s also a call to action right – ‘pursue the principles of democracy, access and equity … ‘, don’t just think about them, do something about it … - So what is the sector doing? How democratic, accessible and equitable are we? - Does the sector openly advocate on some of the pressing issues of our time? Does it pursue equity? How does it, for example, engage with advocacy around climate change and the climate emergency that the world faces – clearly the most significant threat that humanity and the natural world confront right now? How does it pursue equity in relation to gender and sexuality – we could reflect on the sector’s activities in the recent same sex marriage plebiscite of 2017? Equally, going back to my first research priority, how does it pursue equity in relation to race and racism? So they’re my three – White supremacy and racism Digital logic and democratic communication Progressive content and practice - and I know that many of our presentations talk to these themes today which is very exciting. Ok, so in the last few minutes before our panel begins, I just want to advocate for a particular approach in our research as we address any of the questions above or indeed other pertinent research questions. And that is to employ a critical political economy of communication lens to our research. Political economy has a focus on ‘the production, distribution, exchange, and consumption of wealth and the consequences for the welfare of individuals and society’ (Wasko 2004, p. 309). As communication scholar Janet Wasko articulates, ‘a careful analysis of capitalism, its structures, the consequences of those structures and the contradictions that abound is more than ever relevant and needed’ (2014, p. 268). And that is what a political economy of communication framework encourages us to do. A political economy framework helps us to interrogate participation, democratic communication and power and to understand the nuances of a digital logic. It focuses our attention on the extraction and exploitation that occurs across the ‘corporate internet’ and the ‘capitalist social media’ platforms, as critical theorist Christian Fuchs would describe them. It provokes us to question the impact and consequences of enclosed digital interactions and commercialised community engagement that occur online. Across media and communication studies the scope and accessibility of big data—Twitter feeds, Facebook usage, online digital participation—contributes to the prioritization of data-led research. This in turn results in significant funding allocations, dedicated subjects, research focus and prioritisation of quantitative, computational approaches over qualitative interpretative ones (Fuchs 2017b). Further still, it contributes to a broader trend of ‘digital positivism’, as Vincent Mosco would describe it, that can lead to amnesia with regard to media’s embeddedness ‘into society’s power structures and social struggles’ (that phrase comes again from Christian Fuchs). A critical political economy of communication framework leads us to question and interrogate these priorities and assumptions. Critical political economy of communication prompts us to question whether data-led community broadcasting under digital capitalism skews our priorities towards popularity by numbers rather than social progress through community-led communication. So I encourage you to engage with the wealth of scholarship in the political economy of communication field. Wrap up – I will leave it there, but I encourage you to think throughout the course of the day about what you see as research priorities for the community broadcasting sector. We’ll look to draw together some of these priority areas at the end of the day. And don’t forget you can use the virtual whiteboard to scribble down your thoughts as we go along. References CBAA, Community Broadcasting Association of Australia ‘Community Radio Broadcasting Codes of Practice’ https://www.cbaa.org.au/resource/community-radio-broadcasting-codes-practice ‘Community broadcasters are united by six guiding principles’ https://www.cbaa.org.au/about/about-community-broadcasting Couldry, N. (2010). Why voice matters: Culture and politics after neoliberalism. London, UK: Sage. Dutta, M. J. (2012). Voices of resistance: Communication and social change. Purdue University Press. Fuchs, C. (2013). Social media and capitalism. In Producing the Internet. Critical perspectives of social media, ed. Tobias Olsson, 25–44. Göteborg, Sweden: Nordicom. —— (2017a). ‘Capitalism, Patriarchy, Slavery, and Racism in the Age of Digital Capitalism and Digital Labour’, Critical Sociology, pp. 1–26. doi.org/10.1177/0896920517691108 —— (2017b). ‘From digital positivism and administrative big data analytics towards critical digital and social media research!’ European Journal of Communication, 32(1), pp. 37–49. doi.org/10.1177/0267323116682804 Harvey, D. (2007). A brief history of neoliberalism. Oxford University Press, USA. Wasko, J. (2004). The political economy of communications. The SAGE handbook of media studies, 309-330. —— (2014), ‘The study of the political economy of the media in the twenty-first century’, International Journal of Media and Cultural Politics 10(3), pp. 259–271, doi.org/10.1386/macp.10.3.259_1 Zuboff, S. (2019). The age of surveillance capitalism: The fight for a human future at the new frontier of power. Profile books.