Creating Citizenship Through Community Radio in Rural Thailand
This study seeks to analyze the ongoing social movement to establish community radio in rural Thailand as a participatory communication process in order to transform people into citizens. More specifically, the study analyzes the participatory process inherent in the development of community radio in Thailand since its inception in 1997 to the present and illustrates success cases of citizen empowerment. The study is based on analysis of documents and secondary data, personal observation and interview of key persons, field study and case studies of numerous community radio stations. The study showed that the movement was triggered off by the 1997 Constitution which advocated a participatory democracy and reallocation of radio frequencies for public interests at all levels. To vie for frequency allocation, a number of government, non-government, public and private agencies rushed to set up community radio as a pilot station. As a result of the failure to establish a national broadcasting regulator as stipulated by the Constitution, most small radio stations had been operated illegally and in a chaotic state. However, there was some evidence suggesting that participatory community radio, particularly hill tribe radio, has the potential to transform rural people into active citizens due to radio’s ability to involve and empower the grassroots as well as to treat its listeners as subjects and participants rather than as objects or passive audiences.
Youth voice on the Airwaves: Representations of Young People
Geography, with its natural focus on landscapes over soundscapes, has historically been recognized for its visual bias. In recent years, however, a small number of influential studies have made strides to push the boundaries of geographical thought and praxis in presenting soundscapes as relevant to geographical debate, moving away from previous discussions of space and place which were firmly rooted in visual epistemologies. In particular, this chapter turns attention to the portable soundscape of community radio and considers how young people have the agency to present themselves on the airwaves. Moreover, this chapter extends this analysis by focusing on how community radio functions as a platform for youth voice, thus enabling young people to create cultural (re)presentations of themselves. Synthesizing different studies which explore the power of community radio as a platform for youth voice, relationship-building, and identity formation leads to the contention that, although soundscapes are a relatively new object of geographical research, they are an increasingly important one. By examining the complexities of young people’s explorations of self and youth voice, this chapter makes use of an extended case study of KCC Live, a volunteer youth-led community radio station in Knowsley, UK. This chapter considers a move beyond perceiving youth voice as an ideal outcome, acknowledging the limitations of its conceptualization, and recognizing the ways in which voices are shaped by, and shape, the contexts which produce them.
Migration, Labor Mobility, and Relocation Assistance: The Case of the American Indian
This article, an example of "indirect" program evaluation, utilizes a 1/100 public use sample of American households from the 1970 U.S. census to examine family welfare levels among three categories of Indian families: (1) nonmigrant families living in traditional areas of Indian population concentration; (2) families in areas not receiving relocation assistance through the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA); and (3) migrant families moving to urban areas with BIA relocation assistance. The article concludes that the population of migrants receiving relocation assistance has a substantially higher level of economic welfare in both absolute and relative terms and that earnings are the principal source of increased welfare. It is suggested that such assistance might be utilized on a wider basis to assist other migrating populations.