The Cultural Work of Community Radio

Katie Moylan

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield International
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781783489343
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Community radio is an established and key site for negotiations of social and political issues for marginalised communities. Given its inherently local nature (both geographically and ideologically), community radio is perfectly placed as a site for articulating community concerns. At the same time, given this local quality, the diverse ways in which stations—and broadcasters—negotiate their community concerns vary substantially from city to city and region to region across Canada and the US.

The Cultural Work of Community Radio investigates the multiple modes of community and broadcasting practice at selected community stations, explores how these draw from and reflect ongoing concerns of their host city or region, and examines how on the ground practice maps on to overarching broadcast policy directives and guidelines. Focusing on community production practices with reference to policy frameworks around community representation, this book examines and compares differences in community radio production practices in Alaska, Arizona, Miami, New Orleans and Toronto.

Chapter One

Complexities in New Orleans Community Radio

New Orleans is in some ways an anomalous US city. First established in 1718, New Orleans has been incorporated in its current municipal form longer than almost any other North American city. Possessing a unique historical and geographical claim to a distinct cultural identity and richness, it is regularly described (by locals and outsiders alike) as the northernmost Caribbean city, imbued with characteristics of a Caribbean identity in its diversity and emphasis on musical cultures, local festivals and vivid cuisine. Yet in other ways it is quintessentially of the United States; the established infrastructural problems negotiated by New Orleans are characteristic of those faced by other struggling US cities: declining and insufficient schools, grocery deserts, inadequate health care, neglected municipal spaces, unreliable public transport. These fundamental municipal problems have only become more pronounced following the devastation of Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

Within this rich but troubled and under-resourced context, New Orleans community radio harnesses and expands on radio’s capacity to produce locality (Hartley 2000) in multiple yet intrinsically collective ways. The modes through which a sense of locality is (re)produced anywhere is inevitably determined by the specificities of the individual city, region and/or neighbourhood. In New Orleans locality is performed, celebrated and reinforced through inclusive and regular community events and activities such as Mardi Gras and Second Line parades. Much of everyday life in New Orleans is shaped and informed by engagement with and performances of local music—widely defined, live (in venues or the French Quarter streets) or on air. New Orleans community radio programming and practices are imbued with a sense of collectivity and of shared local cultures and resonate with the city’s deep relationship with music. This chapter maps and explores the diverse ways in which three community radio stations (WHIV, WRBH, WWOZ) reinforce collective structures of community, itself here widely defined and experienced. Community radio is recognised for its capacity for ‘circumventing the power imbalances inherent in mass media outlets by providing a space for the traditionally voiceless and marginalised to participate in and own the media’ (Ali and Conrad 2015: 7). New Orleans community stations enable articulation of marginalised experiences from the ground up, in diverse and innovative ways.

WRBH’s ‘first language’ programming (Langer 2005, Moylan 2013) for Haitian, Spanish and Vietnamese communities reflects to some extent the city’s linguistic and cultural diversity; and the station’s commitment to reading to the blind on air reinforces a collective civic spirit evident in New Orleans, in community support groups across the city and in seasonal parades such as those held by the Second Line and Mardi Gras Indians. The emphasis on playing local jazz at WWOZ mines New Orleans’s historical and ongoing relationship with regional forms of jazz created by intersecting histories, cultures and currents of the city and of the surrounding Louisiana regions, and incorporates interviews and live performances in the WWOZ studios by local musicians. At low-power (LP) station WHIV, founded in December 2014, the comprehensive and nuanced provision of health advice for everyday life for those living with HIV builds on recognition of the city’s significantly high population of HIV-positive people, while the station’s emphasis on social justice programming and content enables critique of New Orleans’s ongoing infrastructural issues.

Through diverse production practices of producing community radio, New Orleans’s three community radio stations (re)produce and reinforce their constituent communities in distinct and nuanced ways. At the same time, through the particularities of their broadcast practices, each station reproduces but also reworks expressions and understandings of ‘community’ itself. Community is a persistent and pervasive concept with multiple connotations, which I will briefly unpack here to situate the discussion of the three stations that follows. ‘Community’ is a fuzzy concept because of its diverse and often divergent discursive deployments, yet its fuzziness also means it is commonly used as a catch-all descriptor. Broadly, ‘community’ can be used in a geographically specific sense (to refer to a specific neighbourhood ‘community’); in a global sense (as a unifying discursive device: ‘the international community’); as a professional designation (the ‘intelligence community’) and as a top-down signifier of cultural, ethnic and/or linguistic affiliations, employing the definite article to infer singularity: the black community, the feminist community (Downing 2001). The notion of ‘community’ is often deployed in romanticised and often celebratory narratives of self-subsistence and unity, but also of inclusivity. ‘Community’ remains ‘one of the most motivating discourses and practices circulating in contemporary society’ (Joseph 2002: xxx), thus communities can be ‘our sites of hope in a difficult world’ (Joseph 2002: ix). However again, ‘community’ has also been bound up with narrow definitions of identity, and in this sense the concept can be deployed institutionally for exclusionary purposes. Considering ‘community’ through lenses of enforced unity and directed identity can therefore be limiting and problematic. In recognition of this dialectical function of community as concept, I draw on David Harvey’s (2001) and Miranda Joseph’s (2002) reframing of community as comprised of, and produced through, a series of practices. Collective cultural practices can be mobilised to reproduce and reinforce a (nonetheless fluid) communal subjectivity, which can usefully and dynamically unsettle and replace the static role of ‘identity’ as a determining factor in defining a given community:

While identity is often named as the bond among community members, it is a false name in that communal participants are not identical and many of those to whom an identity is attributed do not participate in communal activities. I argue that communal subjectivity is constituted not by identity but rather through practices of production and consumption. (Joseph 2002: viii)

Harvey argues for the importance of understanding ‘the processes that produce, sustain and dissolve the contingent patterns of solidarity that lie at the basis of this “thing” we call a “community”’ and insists therefore that community itself be considered as ‘a process of coming together not as a thing’ (Harvey 2001: 192). It is this sense of community as determined and shaped by ongoing processes that I find useful in considering the diverse cultural particularities of community radio practices here.

The project and work of community radio necessarily combines the idealism of romantic conceptualizations of community with pragmatism, making community radio stations sites where the practice and (re-)production of sustained community are dialectically informed both by ideals of community (as experienced by the communities on the ground) and requirements of station infrastructure (as determined by legislative and material conditions, from the top down). For community media generally, the designation of ‘community’ has served to define these media in particular ‘as institutions responsive to demands and priorities from below’ (Downing 2001: 39). If it is the case that ‘to invoke community is immediately to raise questions of belonging and of power’, as Joseph argues (2002: xxiii), we need to recognise that ongoing negotiations of power and representation are also central to the community radio project, traceable through work such as maintaining the ongoing flow of resources and balancing representation of diverse groups in the schedule—to give two examples from everyday community radio practice. Each of the three stations under discussion here works with and within the networks and structures of the city to maintain and preserve their existence and to reinforce—and sometimes revisit—their remit. The driving force of community radio is the need for community representation: representing the needs, problems and interests of the community on air in sustained equitable ways. I suggest that two New Orleans community stations perform this function and remit through talk programming enabling participatory representation: WRBH and WHIV. A third, WWOZ, performs its representative functions in a less immediately direct but no less effective way, through music programming showcasing the diverse musical cultures of the city.

Figure 1.1. WRBH radio station and studios, Garden District, New Orleans, May 2015. Photo supplied by the author.

Cultural Specificity, Reading Aloud and Broadcasting Linguistic Diversity: WRBH FM

WRBH was established in 1982 with a remit to provide an on-air reading service for blind listeners; the station’s call letters reference the full station name of ‘Reading Radio for the Blind and Print Handicapped.’1 Broadcasting 24 hours a day on 88.3 FM, WRBH at the time of writing is the only radio station in the United States providing a reading service for the blind on the FM frequency. WRBH is located in a spacious house on Magazine Street in leafy uptown New Orleans and as of 2015 had four full-time paid staff. Station listenership extends well beyond the blind community the station targets; while station resources do not stretch to research into listener numbers (as with most community stations), recurring anecdotal evidence from conversations I had in the city indicated that WRBH’s live reading of three local newspapers on air each morning was a favourite feature for local professionals who listened in their cars en route to work.2 WRBH’s reading service also includes reading aloud from brand-new bestsellers, which the station receives regularly due to their established relationships with several publishers. The station is supported by famous New Orleanians such as actor Wendell Pierce and journalist and author Cokie Roberts, who come in as studio guests on return trips to New Orleans. Many of WRBH’s volunteer practitioners have been producing and presenting their programmes for several years despite the precarity of this unpaid work, suggesting a dedication not only to their shows but to the station. Programmes are prerecorded and then edited, which gives volunteers, including volunteer readers, greater flexibility to arrange their recordings for the station with other commitments. Station manager Natalia Gonzalez confirms the importance and centrality of volunteers to WRBH’s ongoing broadcasts:

Without our volunteers we have no audience. And we have no listeners. And our volunteers are the people who help make us viable. . . . And nobody complains. They’re underpaid and overworked. . . .

Our community is so defined by our volunteers. That is why I feel this overwhelming debt of gratitude towards them. . . . We have some volunteers who have been here since the begi...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: (Re-)considering Community Radio
• Chapter 1: Complexities in New Orleans Community Radio
• Chapter 2: Transcultural Radio in Miami
• Chapter 3: Social Justice Practices and Programming in Montreal Campus-Community Radio
• Chapter 4: Producing Alternative Publics in Toronto Campus-Community Radio
• Chapter 5: The Cultural Work of Community Radio
• Conclusion
• Bibliography