"The primary objective of this book is to present a wide range of community radio projects, not so that the “ideal” model can be identified, but in the hope that the book will serve as a useful tool for community broadcasters and potential community broadcasters looking to create or adapt models
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of community radio that are suited to the specific conditions they face. This objective of facilitating an international exchange of experiences and ideas has been AMARC’s primary motivator since the first World Conference of Community Radio Broadcasters took place in 1983. The use of radio as a tool for cultural and political change, while a growing phenomena, is not new. Indeed, the first participatory community radio stations surfaced almost simultaneously in Colombia and the United States over forty years ago. Since that time, innumerable participatory radio projects have attempted to promote community-led change in a variety of ways. Some of these projects have attempted to foster this change by providing formal education in areas such as literacy and mathematics, or by promoting agricultural techniques suited to a particular vision of development defined by the central government. This type of project has been common in the Third World, especially in Africa and Asia. Sri Lanka’s Mahaweli Community Radio (chapter 13) is one example of such a project. Other projects have been more political and have attempted to support the organisational and cultural initiatives of marginalised communities. These are the projects that tend to involve listeners in a participatory process. Haiti’s Radio Soleil (chapter 9) and Zoom Black Magic Liberation Radio in the United States (chapter 10) are two examples. Following the tradition of participatory communication, most of the chapters in this book are not written by impartial observers but by people with first-hand knowledge of community radio and with direct experience in the projects they write about." (Introduction)
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"This book records and interprets, in a narrative form, how groups of villagers and fisherfolk in Manila (Philippines), in West Bengal and Tamil Nadu (India) and in the states of Tlaxacala, Oaxaca and Michoacan and in a suburb of Mexico City (all in Mexico) tried to bring about social change through
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what one may call "people's communication". "People's communication" is a mode of communication which depends for its efficacy on people's energies rather than on technology." (Introduction)
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"A survey of the various communication strategies through which the Latin American people as a whole can participate in national development and which gives the Latin American perspective toward the problem. It tells the role of international aid agencies, lists and discusses participatory projects
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country by country, and in conclusion assembles a 65-page annotated bibliography of literature on the subject." (Eleanor Blum, Frances G. Wilhoit: Mass media bibliography. 3rd ed. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990 Nr. 329)
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