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.

Drawing on both theoretical and practical case studies, this collection moves from developing attempts at local media to case studies and on to cyber-examples. The contributors, all distinguished international communications scholars, present a range of perspectives on the ever-burgeoning area of grassroots, local media.

This is the first title in a new series of volumes examining different dimensions of the media and culture in small nations. Whether at a local, national or international level, radio has played and continues to play a key role in nurturing or denying – even destroying – people’s sense of ‘belonging’ to a particular community, whether it be defined in terms of place, ethnicity, language or patterns of consumption. Typically, the radio has been used for purposes of propaganda and as a means of forging national identity both at home and also further afield in the case of colonial exploits. Drawing on examples of four models of, the chapters in this volume will provide an historical and contemporary overview of radio in a number of small nations. The authors propose a stimulating discussion on the role radio has played in a variety of nation contexts worldwide.

Northern Ireland is frequently characterised in terms of a two traditions paradigm, representing the conflict as being between two discrete cultures. Demonstrating the reductionist nature of this argument, this book highlights the complexity of reality.

Small-scale electronic media (local radio and television stations) have experienced much turbulence and change in the 1990s. In western Europe, local and regional stations have achieved legitimation in national media policies; in central and eastern Europe, stations have been emerging at an explosive rate; and elsewhere in the world, developments have been no less substantial. These changes, taken as a whole, signal substantial albeit diverse forms of engagement and utilization of small-scale electronic media. These developments have been recorded in only a handful of academic studies. No scholarly consideration of these media developments has appeared, despite the range of development and widespread acknowledgement of their place in the media landscape. This volume is intended to fill this void through an integrated series of contributions emphasizing theoretical perspectives, empirical research findings and developments regarding policy and practice. It reflects the state of scholarly work in this niche of the media landscape and charts areas for further investigations.

Drawing examples from the UK and the US, this volume offers an introduction to alternative media. It includes radical media as well as newer cultural forms such as zines, fanzines, and personal Web sites.

This volume examines the critical factors and processes by which the Provisional Irish Republican movement campaign from 1969 to 1998 transformed a once acquiescent nationalist population in Northern Ireland into a counterpublic of resistance demanding national self-determination and social justice. Considering the establishment of Irish Republican community institutions, prison protests, Republican Feminism, and Provisional IRA media and communications, this volume explores the emergence of Republicanism as a mass social movement in the nationalist Catholic ghettos and rural regions of Northern Ireland in the 1970s – a development that helped to sustain the armed struggle of the Provisional Irish Republican Army for three decades. An examination of the emergence and transformative power of the counterpublic discourse and action of the Irish Republican movement, this volume provides a framework for conceptualizing counterpublics in social movement studies. As such it will appeal to scholars of sociology, history, and politics with interests in social movements and mobilization.

Talk is crucial to the way our identities are constructed, altered, and defended. These essays bring together feminist scholars in the area of language and gender to tackle such topics as African-American drag queens, gender and class on the shopping channel, and talk in the workplace.

This timely book examines language on social media sites including Facebook and Twitter. Studies from leading language researchers, and experts on social media, explore how social media is having an impact on how we relate to each other, the communities we live in, and the way we present a sense of self in twenty-first century society.