This book explores how Ireland’s community media outlets reflect and shape identity at the local level. While aspects of its culture date back centuries, the nation-state of Ireland is less than one hundred years old. Because of this and other elements of the island’s history, Irish identity is a contested topic and the island is a place where culture, identity and geography are tightly intertwined. By addressing how community media serve as agents for community building, the book examines how they in turn influence the way individuals connect with their communities.

Addresses a critical analysis of major media policies in the European Union and Council of Europe at the period of profound changes affecting both media environments and use, as well as the logic of media policy-making and reconfiguration of traditional regulatory models. The analytical problem-related approach seems to better reflect a media policy process as an interrelated part of European integration, formation of European citizenship, and exercise of communication rights within the European communicative space. The question of normative expectations is to be compared in this case with media policy rationales, mechanisms of implementation (transposing rules from EU to national levels), and outcomes.

"This book captures contemporary debates around indigenous languages and social change communication. Contributors bring together voices from the margins to engage in dialogue about common social change issues in Latin America, Africa, and Asia"--

This book traces the turbulent history of queer visibility in the Irish media to explore the processes by which a regionally based media system shaped queer identities within a highly conservative and religious population. The book details the emergence of an LGBTQ rights movement in Ireland and charts how this burgeoning movement utilised the media for the liberatory potential of advancing LGBTQ rights. However, mainstream media institutions also exploited queer identities for economic purposes, which, coupled with the eruption of the AIDS pandemic in the 1980s, disrupted the mainstreaming goals of queer visibility. Drawing on industrial, societal and production culture determinants, the author identifies the shifting contours of queer visibility in the Irish media, uncovering the longstanding relationship between LGBTQ organising and the Irish media. This book is suitable for students and scholars in gender studies, media studies, cultural studies and LGBTQ studies.

Social Identities argues that we have a collection of social selves and that our identities are influenced by such things as class, gender, sexuality, race, nationality, religious views and by the media.

Digital Dialogue and Community 2.0: After avatars, trolls and puppets explores the communities that use digital platforms, portals, and applications from daily life to build relationships beyond geographical locality and family links. The book provides detailed analyses of how technology realigns the boundaries between connection, consciousness and community. This book reveals that alongside every engaged, nurturing and supportive group are those who are excluded, marginalised, ridiculed, or forgotten. It explores the argument that community is not an inevitable result of communication. Following an introduction from the Editor, the book is then divided into four sections exploring communities and resistance, structures of sharing, professional communication and fandom and consumption. Digital Dialogues and Community 2.0 combines ethnographic methods and professional expertise to open new spaces for thinking about language, identity, and social connections. - Provides innovative interdisciplinary research, incorporating Library and Information Management, Internet Studies, Cultural Studies, Media Studies, Disability Studies and Community Management - Offers a balanced approach between the 'bottom up' and 'top down' development of online communities - Demonstrates the consequences on the configuration of a community when consumers become producers and their lives and experiences are commodified

Drawing on case studies, this collection offers international perspectives on how community media serves their audiences. The contributors present perspectives on the ever-burgeoning area of grassroots. Their research represents participant observation, hands-on community involvement, boards of directors, content analysis, and ethical inquiries.

Civilization and culture have traditionally been regarded as mutually exclusive concepts. In this comparative case-study of Northern Ireland, Máiréad Nic Craith explores the commitment of unionists to a civic, 'culture-blind' British state; contrasting this with nationalist demands for official recognition of Irish culture. The 'cultural turn' in Northern Irish politics and the development of a bicultural infrastructure is examined here in the context of differing interpretations of equality and increasing demands for intercultural communication within, as well as between, communities.