Archive for Featured Post

Fragility and Empowerment: Community Television in the Digital Era

Screenshot of article on IJOC website

I’ve a new piece out, with Salvatore Scifo, in the International Journal of Communication, about community television. It focuses on what Hallin and Mancini call the ‘Liberal North Atlantic’ region – USA, Canada, Ireland, and the UK – and provides an overview of the state of the field, along with the various opportunities and challenges facing it. (Thanks to Karen Arriaza Ibarra of Complutense University in Madrid, and the IAMCR International Communication section, for the opportunity.)

Screenshot of the article on the IJOC website.

Using the crisis: media studies pedagogy and the pandemic

Pleased to be able to announce the publication of my latest article, on how critical scholars and educators, can respond to the COVID pandemic, to foster new ways of operating. Out now in Mediální studia / Media Studies 1/2021. PDF of the article available here.

College radio: Beyond a Spot on the Dial

My article on challenges for college radio in the United States, Beyond a Spot on the Dial, has been accepted for publication in a special issue of Radiofonias – Journal of Audio Media Studies.

Close-up view of a mixing console in a college radio station. Image comes from Wikimedia Commons
Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Estudio_de_radio_en_LAUDE_Newton_College.jpg (Licensed under CC-BY-SA)

Open Science Communities

Update: This paper has been accepted for publication in Science and Public Policy.

An article I contributed to, authored by an international group of open science advocates, is now available as a per-print. The article provides an overview of the background to, rationale for, and operation of Open Science Communities.

Elected to CCAM leadership

I am grateful to the membership of the Community Communication and Alternative Media (CCAM) section of IAMCR for electing me to a 4-year term as vice-chair. I look forward to working with my colleagues supporting the work of the section.

Online panel on community radio in the UK and Ireland

The poster advertising the event

I got to co-moderate a panel on community radio in the UK and Ireland this week, with my colleague Salvatore Scifo from Bournemouth University. The panel was organised by Prof Vinod Pavarala, UNESCO Chair in Community Media at the University of Hyderabad, as part of their Global Dialogues series. The video is now available for on-demand viewing.

Sustainable community media

The second of two issues of the Journal of Alternative and Community Media which I guest-edited with Salvatore Scifo is now online. Proud to have collaborated on stewarding this to completion, and of all the amazing contributions we were honoured to include. (Sorry also for the many we couldn’t include, despite being afforded the luxury of two issues.)

Our first issue was 4(4), while the second is 5(1), the first issue of the journal at its new home with Intellect. You may be interested in the editorials we wrote for the first and second of these issues:

Submission to Seanad consultation on Travellers and equality

Last week I made a submission to the Seanad consultation on Travellers, based on my mother’s work in this area.

“Drink until you’re Irish”: tradition and cultural appropriation at the University of Illinois

I spoke today at the Crisis, Migration, and Performance symposium taking place at NUIG. It was a great opportunity to engage with scholars coming to these issues from a different perspective (performance studies and allied areas), and it made for a vibrant and useful encounter.

My presentation was centred around my experiences at the University of Illinois, where the struggle around ‘Chief Illiniwek’ (the problematic athletics mascot) and the the annual ‘Unofficial St. Patrick’s Day’ became entangled, both in terms of iconography and in how they demonstrated problematic cultural appropriation.

GEO Unofficial policyMany of my friends and colleagues will have been familiar with my own one-person campaign against Unofficial, and in this work I both reflect on that and seek to problematise some of the issues that arise, such as cultural authenticity/essentialism; the differing priorities and strategies of various institutional players (University of Illinois, Irish tourism and business interests, global drinks companies, Urbana-Champaign bar owners, etc.); intersectionality of privilege ethnic identity; my own attitude and position in the debate.

Copyright and community radio

I’ve a forthcoming publication in JRAM (the Journal of Radio and Audio Media), titled Copyright, community radio and change: How the U.S. community radio sector is negotiating changing copyright rules and the rollout of digital distribution. It’s expected to be in the May 2014 issue.