The Cultural Work of Community Radio

Abstract

eration within the community-owned, volunteer-run stations. Yet, this inevitably results in conflict arising during egalitarian decision-making. Although within this cycle, both community and personal transformation occurs through the stations’ affordance of communicative agency. Partly through communicative agency, marginalized people and their concerns are given a powerful media outlet—one that is not commercial or public—for self-representation and reality (re)construction, subsequently supporting counter-hegemonic perspectives on social and political economic issues. Fox concludes by confirming how a community radio setting—with its principles of community ownership, content control, and self-determination; financial independence; and voice as agency —can facilitate a non-commodified, participatory, and political “regenerative voice” (p. 191) to further communicative democracy. As a result, Fox makes apparent how community radio can contribute to a more equitable, vibrant tapestry of voices. Community radio’s amplification of communication for social change therefore brings us closer to understanding how community radio may hold the potential to resist global and digital capitalist systems that have emerged with the proliferation of neoliberal ideology, in an effort to solidify the status of communication as a societal good.