Media policymaking at the core of anthropological concerns in South Asia

Preeti Raghunath’s monograph Community Radio Policies in South Asia examines the Community Radio policymaking process in four South Asian countries – India, Nepal, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka – on Community Radios. This cross-disciplinary project draws from multiple traditions ranging from political economy and history to grounded theory and anthropology and proposes a new theoretical paradigm – the Deliberative Policy Ecology Approach – to study policy formulation in postcolonial societies with a ground-up, holistic perspective in South Asia. The book is published by Palgrave Macmillan as part of their series ‘Palgrave Studies in Communication for Social Change’. This review of her book discusses her argument and treatment of ethnographic material in the context of scholarship on media anthropology.