Output details

Positioning Education within Community Media

The chapter draws upon extensive research to provide a diagnostic overview delineating the role of educational activities (such as workshops/clubs/training schemes and short projects) within community media. It provides a detailed analysis of a particular project, a youth video production summer programme Channel Zer0, which Sobers organised in 2003, together with subsequent interviews with the participants in 2007, to track longitudinally the ways in which they engaged with media production and community stories and how or if these activities and knowledges had been sustained. The chapter analyses the multi-layered impact resulting from informal learning interventions and the diffuse, often indirect value of participatory youth media projects. It argues for the continuing importance of such initiatives in an era when the hopes of increased access to the media through digital technologies seem to be giving way to a new form of mass media controlled by huge corporations. The chapter’s distinctiveness was to construct a methodology to record measurable effects of specific forms of participation, in contradistinction to conventional accounts that focus on the claims made by community media organisations.

The chapter was reviewed by Jill E. Hopke in ‘Exploring the Promise of Community Media in the Twenty-first Century’, Global Media Journal, vol. 10, no.17 (Fall 2010), describing Sobers as an ‘notable exception’ for writing about empirically measured outputs of community media projects and providing a model for other researchers to follow. An initial version of the chapter was delivered at the OurMedia conference in Accra, Ghana (August 2008); the completed research was also presented at the Community Media Symposium, University of Gloucestershire (March 2012); 198 Contemporary Gallery, London (April 2012). The chapter’s publication led to Sober’s invitation to speak at the International Visual Sociology Conference (July 2013).