Many Voices, Many Worlds: Critical Perspectives on Community Media in India

Community media has the potential for deepening democracy by creating spaces for people to raise and discuss their concerns. However, its practice in India tends to be based on top-down decision-making, which is the legacy of the Development Communication paradigms, thus ignoring the creative and transformative possibilities of marginalized community voices. The perspectives in this book, rooted in years of fieldwork experience, by scholars and practitioners of community media, both question and offer alternatives to the dominant paradigms. Many Voices, Many Worlds: Critical Perspectives on Community Media in India is a critical reflection on governance and policymaking, development, disability, knowledge and other social markers in the context of community media. Bringing together different modes of community media―such as video, radio, theatre, information and communication technologies (ICTs) and new media―into a productive conversation with each other, the book focuses on how communities through their communicative practices, negotiate the politics of caste, class, gender, and access to funding and technology.