Historicizing The Received Tradition of Community Media

Jay Hamilton. “Historicizing The Received Tradition of Community Media.” In Community Media, Sustainability, and Crisis; Lessons from Covid and Beyond, edited by Andrew Ó Baoill and Salvatore Scifo. New York: Rowman & Littlefield International.

Abstract: This chapter radically historicizes community media in order to enlarge the accepted range of practice. The overt, explicit emergence of “community media” as a conceptual label for a particular range of practice marks an important watershed in ways that will be discussed. To complement the many useful conceptual discussions, this chapter summarizes the historical and contextual conditions of the emergence in the U.S. of “community media” as a determinate label, concept and touchstone for practice. Although focusing on the emergence of the concept and definition of “community media” primarily in the United States, it seeks to spur parallel inquiry of many different specific cases globally.