Sociedad civil, políticas de comunicación y medios comunitarios

MARÍA SOLEDAD SEGURA

Conferencia; Special Session: ?ALAIC-Contemporary Perspectives on Communication Studies in Latin America; 2016

The title of this session isContemporary Perspectives on Communication Studies and the title of mypresentation is Community and public media in Latin America. So, first, I?lltell you which are the general questions and perspectives that my research groupand I are working in. Then I?ll speak about recent reforms on community andpublic media in Latin America.We work on two main linesthat link communication policies and civil society. We are interested inunderstand how disempowered actors, in some specific historical junctures,achieve to impact on media policies and media systems. In other words, we tryto understand how, when and why David, sometimes, defeats Goliat. We look foranswers to this question by analyzing the top and the roots: the socialparticipation on communication policy-making process, and the social strategiesto make community communication.So, on one hand, I study thesocial participation in communication and culture policies in Argentina andLatin America, from a critical perspective. This approach is one of thefounding traditions of the field of communication studies in the region. It is developedsince the beginning of the field institutionalization in the 1960s during the discussionsabout the New World Information and Communication Order. In this perspective,communication rights and democratization of communications are key concepts, aswell as the principles of access, participation, diversity, plurality andequity.On the other hand, to answerour general question, we also study community communication. This is another foundationalarea of studies in communication field in Latin America. The key concepts are:community, participation, citizenship, education, people, alternative.