Gatherings & Meetings

Online audio and video broadcasts from the 4th National Conference on Media Reform, a gathering of thousands of activists, educators, policymakers, media-makers and scholars in Minneapolis-St. Paul, June 6-8 2008.

Will this innovative use of media and technology by the candidates and
their supporters translate into justice-oriented media and technology
policies by the new administration? Media advocates and funders need to
think and act now in order to have a significant impact on the new
administration’s policies in this area.

We asked several media
advocates for their suggestions on how to prepare for advancing a
media/technology agenda in the new administration. The following
highlights their thoughts and offers some ideas for funders interested
in media.

APC makes recommendations to UN internet governance forum

JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH AFRICA --
The second Internet Governance Forum (IGF) concluded on November 15 and
the Association for Progressive Communications (APC) presents an
initial assessment of the event and makes suggestions for moving
towards the third forum in New Delhi in a year’s time.

The Rio IGF, like the first IGF in Athens, succeeded as a space for
inclusive policy dialogue. The openness of the event’s format and the
quality and diversity of the participants deepened understanding of
complex and controversial issues. The format of the workshops enabled
participants to gain a better grasp of both commonality and difference
in their positions and opinions. It is this nuanced approach that
enables the IGF to influence and inform policy without the constraints
of needing to create consensus on negotiated text.

This being said, the IGF can and should make further progress in
fulfilling its mandate. Based on the outcomes of various workshops at
the second IGF, and our assessment of the process, APC would like to
make the following suggestions: (see website)

“Media is not the issue. Justice is the issue. Media is the
infrastructure for how we communicate about the issue of justice. We
need to be able to use this infrastructure. All of us represent a level
of disenfranchisement. Disenfranchised communities depend on media to
survive. For instance, Native American communities depend on the phone
system – yes, phone systems are a part of media. Net neutrality is also
an issue… we want a community that not only increases access but helps
to create justice.”

The 2007 ICA Conference's theme was Creating Communication:
Content, Control, and Critique. Many interesting academic
contributions about this theme appeared in the Keynote Panels,
Theme Sessions, and many other sessions.

But the 2007 ICA Conference did not just feature academic
reflections. In three so-called grassroots discussion panels,
alternative voices from outside academia also animated the
conference theme. These panels produced interesting dialogues
between academia and the people that actually organize, realize,
and live the participatory and bottom-up processes that we
academics so eagerly analyze.

Now, practitioners' contributions from these panels are available
as an ebook entitled "Alternatives on media content, journalism,
and regulation." Edited by Seeta Peña Gangadharan, Benjamin De
Cleen and Nico Carpentier, and published by the University of Tartu
Press, this book brings together the fascinating stories of how
civil society intervenes (sometimes successfully, sometimes less
successfully) in the creation of alternative content, in the
organization of alternative journalism, and in the attempts to
influence the regulation that impacts upon the communicative
processes.

The pdf version of the book can be downloaded (for free) from this
URL:
http://www.researchingcommunication.eu/reco_book2.pdf
(please note there is an underscore between reco and book2)

It is part of the Researching and Teaching Communication Book
Series, which you can find at this URL:
http://www.researchingcommunication.eu/

Alternatively, you can visit the website we have built on the basis
of all the ebook contributions. The URL of that website is:
http://homepages.vub.ac.be/~ncarpent/grass/grassindex.html

[excerpt] It is one week after the historic first United States Social Forum. 
Both a living monument to a living justice movement inside the most
violent nation in the world, and testimony to the complexities of
sharing power across the lines of race, class, and gender- the USSF
brought tears of joy and frustration to my eyes.  This first attempt on
the part of organizers, activists, artists, academics, the grassroots,
the lobbyists, the policy wonks and the students, the native people,
the immigrants, the queer folk, the Africans in America, the poor, the
struggling working class, the lawyers, the dreamers, the haters, the
survivors of private and public wars, the women, the children- was a
resounding success.  Together we spit a new frame- that another world
is possible, but only through the redefining of the role of the United
States in that brave and beautiful new planet....

Reclaim the Media and many of our friends and allies were in Atlanta June 27-July 1 for the first United States Social Forum,
an ambitious meeting of a "movement of movements," modeled upon the
World Social Forums held for several years in Porto Alegre, Mumbai,
Caracas, Bamako and Nairobi. Thousands of social justice activists are
gathering at the forum, uniting many struggles for social, economic and
environmental justice with a shared vision of a transformed America in
a just and peaceful world. Along with our organizational partners in
the Media Action Grassroots Network (MAG-Net), RTM was there spreading the message that there's no justice without media justice.

Check out a list of media-related workshops at the forum. We've posted some USSF photos here.

P. O.O.R. .

.Scholaz til we die

The Revolution begins with I

QUEENNANDI 2007

excerpt...

The sounds of survival, thrival and subsistence brushed past
the 21 determined faces of poverty, race, disability, inmigrante and
youth scholars from POOR Magazine (and repping the SF Bayview
Newspaper) about to embark on a revolutionary journey to the US Social
Forum in Atlanta. Residue of past and present domestic violence, low
wage jobs, gentrification and homelessness clung to our bodies as we
piled into our rented van, greyhound buses and friends cars .. This was
the first trip our organization had ever taken anywhere, and the first
trip many of us personally had ever taken, which was not a result of a
poverty crime, a crisis, an incarceration or deportation.

We were in pursuit of a dream. A realization of a vision of
cooperative, non-competitive media justice and media production at the
Ida B Wells Media Justice Center at the US Social Forum. A dream we had
launched, worked on and struggled to attain for the last year.

The first conversation

" Have you heard about the US Social Forum? " almost a year ago when Gretchen Hildebran, filmmaker and alumni of POOR Magazine ´ s Race, Poverty and Media Justice Institute
asked me about POOR possibly doing some media for the forum, I
immediately reflected on other social forums that POOR Magazine never
had the financial resources to attend much less make media on.

I had heard about how media centers were structured at these
forums, how they are often completely inaccessible spaces for disabled
media producers, poor folks who are stuck in the crevasses of the
digital divide and folks who haven´t mastered the dominant (oppressors)
language due to global, local poverty, institutional racism and
classism, colonization and border fascism. In other words
notwithstanding the radical goals and objectives of the Forums held all
over the world, the media production is led by the same folks who
always make media, who always have the channels of access and privelege

" Well, why don ´ t we propose a new vision for media
production, you know, based on the model of POOR Magazine ´ s
indigenous media production. "

Gretchen being one of Mama Dee ´ s best students and a truly
creative and radical thinker responded quickly, " that would be great.
" ...