Minority radio: social & cultural identities and Black and minority ethnic (BME) Radio
In contrast to the other four Independent Projects whose focus is underpinned by the concept of national identity, IPs 5 and 6 are collaborating in research into the use of radio by minorities whose primary identity is with social, cultural or linguistic groupings. Given their lack of representation in mainstream broadcasting, women's radio, too, can be counted as speaking for a 'social minority'. Migration, for centuries a feature which has contributed to urban populations in Europe, acquired another dimension in the post-colonial era and in recent years migration, from South to North and from East to West in Europe, have added to the number of minority ethnic communities; a recent further addition has been the large refugee and asylum-seeking exodus from the Middle East and Africa.
While national broadcasting organisations have given airtime and channels to long-standing minority ethnic groups, it has become increasingly the role of community radio to give voice to the more recently arrived communities. Their links with homeland and diaspora transcend the boundaries of national identity. (We define community radio as radio transmitted over the air or on the internet which is non-profit in aim and controlled by and representative of the community which owns the project/station).
The two IPs are concerned both with geographical and historical perspectives, with the social and political dimensions of cultural encounters and with the way language serves as both a barrier and facilitator for discursive interaction.
Latest activities for this project:
PI6, Caroline Mitchell will present a paper ‘Re-sounding feminist radio: using radio archives as transnational connectors’ at the final CAPTCHA event "Radio Archives in European Community Media" International Conference on Open Radio Archives organized by Radio CORAX 4-6 June 2015 in Halle/Saale (Germany).
28-29 October, 2014, PI6 Caroline Mitchell presented a paper on TRE research at Future Thinking: The AHRC Connected Communities Collection, Archiving the Audio-Visual and Beyond., University of Salford.
14 November, 2014, PI6 Caroline Mitchell presented TRE work about women´s networks and archives at University of Bournemouth’s Centre for Media History WREN (Women´s Radio Research in Europe Network) workshop.
PIs 5 and 6, Peter Lewis and Caroline Mitchell organised a workshop, ‘Crossing boundaries: social. cultural and ethnic minorities in community radio’ at the conference of the Radio Research Section of ECREA at the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, 28-30 October 2015. The pre-conference sessions and AGM on the same day of the Community Media Forum for Europe (CMFE) meant that the workshop's twenty participants included broadcasters and activists as well as academics, making for a fruitful exchange of experience.
At the international conference at the University of Perpignan Via Domitia, June 4 and 5, 2015 The borders of Radio/Les frontières de la radio, the first ‘Sharing Experience’ workshop, piloted in Bristol and Jarrow in 2014, will take place in mainland Europe when PI5, Peter Lewis, with community radio programmers broadcasting in Basque, Catalan and Occitan, will discuss programming that crosses cultural, linguistic or national borders.