MANY VOICES, MANY WORLDS: Critical Perspectives on Community Media in India

Description

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.

Faiz Ullah, Assistant Professor, School of Media and Cultural Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), Mumbai

K.P. Jayasankar and Anjali Monteiro are Professors at the School of Media and Cultural Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, India, since 1983 and 1988, respectively. They have made over 40 documentaries, and their work has been screened at many film festivals across the world. Jointly, they have won 32 national and international awards for their films, the most recent being the Basil Wright Award for Like Here Like There at the 13th RAI International Ethnographic Film Festival, Edinburgh 2013. They have had four retrospectives of their films: Vibgyor Film Festival, Kerala (2006), Bangalore Film Society (2010), Madurai International Film Festival (2012) and Parramasala, Sydney (2013). They write in the broad area of media and cultural studies, with focus on documentary film, censorship, critical theory and issues of media representation.