Community radio as development radio: A critical look at third sector radio in south Asia

To attend this event online via Zoom, please use the link below.

Date: Tuesday 27 September 2022, 17:00-18:30 BST

Join Zoom Meeting: https://Universityofexeter.zoom.us/j/99118343702?pwd=Z2dFQmFqa2dmWE1OVUtpd1FzdzhxQT09

Meeting ID: 991 1834 3702
Password: 524914

To attend in person, the venue details are:

TS2, Alexander Building, Streatham Campus, Univeristy of Exeter

About this event:

This talk offers a critical examination of the so-called third-sector radio (public and private radios being the other two) in South Asia. The evolution and growth of radio in the region, from about the 1920s during the colonial period, has been quite firmly embedded in a development paradigm. Community radio, whose history is about 20 years old in the subcontinent, has been predicated upon the development and social change imperative. This framework has not only defined community radio in this part of the world but also inhibited its evolution into a truly alternative medium based on communication rights. Using examples, primarily, from India and Bangladesh, and, secondarily, from Sri Lanka and Bhutan, I argue that both the state and civil society have been complicitous in framing community radio within a post-World War II discourse of development communication. While grassroots media initiatives such as community radio emerged globally as a challenge to the dominant paradigm of linear, top-down communication from the elites to the marginalized, in South Asia, even as the rhetoric is grafted on to a participatory communication perspective, community radio has been co-opted into a fairly benign model of ‘development radio’.

Vinod Pavarala is Senior Professor of Communication and UNESCO Chair on Community Media (since 2011) at the University of Hyderabad, India. After obtaining a Ph.D degree in Sociology from University of Pittsburgh, USA, Prof. Pavarala taught at Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, USA and IIT-Bombay, India before joining the University of Hyderabad. His teaching and research have been mainly in the areas of communication for social change and community media. He has been actively involved in research, policy advocacy, and capacity building in the field of community media not only in India and elsewhere in South Asia, but also in East and West Africa and parts of Europe. He is the author of Interpreting Corruption: Elite Perspectives in India (Sage, 1997); Other Voices: the struggle for community radio in India (Sage, 2007; with Kanchan K. Malik). His most recent book, Community Radio in South Asia: Reclaiming the Airwaves (Routledge, 2020) is co-edited with Kanchan K. Malik. He has published several articles in scholarly journals and contributed book chapters to a number of edited volumes. Prof. Pavarala currently chairs the Community Communication Section of IAMCR.