Abstract
Community-Based Media Pedagogies reports a comparative study of three community media projects across New York, Toronto, and Montreal, examining how community-based pedagogies are helping to explore the spaces that facilitate listening and storytelling in community spaces. This research-based examination tries to demystify and comprehend the ways and means of production of ideas and opinions in community spaces. The study looks to understand how these ideas and opinions are locally produced through community-driven pedagogies that contribute to the creation of commons. The study positions “listening” as the key element to examine the select community media projects, including the listening of project facilitator to participants, and of participants to each other.
Primarily, the study explores relational qualities to identify the kind of teaching and learning that happens in the community-based media pedagogies across the select sites. It documents community stories that are untold, marginalized, suppressed, and racialized in nature. Bronwen Low of McGill University, Canada, Chloë Brushwood Rose of York University, Canada, and Paula M. Salvio of the University of New Hampshire, USA, have collaborated for this comparative study of three community-based media pedagogies, funded by the Canadian Social Science Humanities Research Council. The three community media projects they examine involve (a) immigrant women in a leadership program in Toronto working with digital storytelling, (b) youth with refugee experience in Montreal, and (c) a youth group at the Center for Urban Pedagogy in New York City.
This comparative study of community media projects kick-starts with an idea to understand the variety of community stories people were telling in community programs through various participatory media forms. In the preface, the authors mention the irony of building a strong and justified case for listening in education. Making their arguments, the authors go on to justify how listening has paved the way for the production of community stories.
In the opening chapters, the authors situate this comparative study in the existing scholarship on community media and participatory video. They also present their theory of intersubjective listening about the select community media projects, forwarding an understanding that suggests the interdependency of teller and listener, and understands listening as a form of collaboration, a mediation of self and other.
They also seek to understand listening in a more nuanced way than the existing literature. They argue that listening is an interpretive art that involves social, contextual, and cultural sensibilities to produce greater dialogue and discourse in the community spaces. Chapter 3 focuses on asking critical questions related to intersubjective listening and how it can help in holding on to the community environment. Chapter 4 discusses conflict and resistance as methods of listening and how participants see themselves through this process to find their forms of participation and voice.
Subsequent chapters explore the power of storytelling and how specific ways and means of presenting stories forge a sense of community. This volume also concentrates on the teaching and pedagogy of listening, followed by the select community media project. These chapters offer conceptual clarity about how community media projects have been successful in imparting practical lessons to communities. In the concluding chapter, the case for listening in education is again positioned with sharper arguments and logic. Relating intersubjective listening with storytelling provides an overarching scope to explore the marginalized and suppressed stories in the community spaces.
The volume is quite well-organized, and the select cases are comprehensively presented with justified arguments. This work is capable of serving as a potential guide to document and examine particular cases using techniques like ethnographic observation, interviews, focus-group discussions, and document analysis. This work also challenges orthodox understandings of the commons, listening, and storytelling practices in marginalized community spaces by critically analyzing the community storytelling and listening practices. With a particular emphasis on examining how communities are finding their ways of participation and production of their own stories, this comparative study is an important work to understand how listening and storytelling have immensely contributed to the strengthening of commons and their spaces.
Keeping in mind the strengths of this volume, a more detailed and in-depth understanding of community and of alternative media is missing, and could have added more value to this volume. However, the comparative study focuses more on examining the practices that are being followed by the select community media projects to facilitate good listening and storytelling. This volume is a well-examined and documented work that offers many reference points to further this kind of work in other alternative and community media spaces. In general, it is a recommended book for community media practitioners, researchers, and students who want to understand communities and their spaces through their stories and listening practices.
