(Person) Percentage - Sabanci University Research Database

The Asian Conference on Media & Mass Communication Osaka, Japan
industrial Western cities, a complex relationship between social conditions,
geographic location and the ethnic and racial background of people create a culture of
disadvantage (Power and Wilson, 2001; Hardill et al., 2001), this study based on a
critique of the modernisation model, developed a multi-disciplinary framework that
allowed the people’s experiences, knowledge and points of views to develop a
dynamic, holistic and engaging theory.
With Radio Ramzan providing a context, this study developed a dynamic framework
by bringing feminist, poststructuralist and liberation theology perspectives closer.
This approach, though uncertain, nevertheless opened up the ways for thinking
outside the disciplinary rigidities and essentialist reading of community and
communication. This framework, on the one hand, helped to raise a critical
consciousness about the causes and consequences of marginalisation, and on the other
explored the possibilities of dealing with.
The case study of the Health Education Awareness Project (HEAP) campaign on
Radio Ramzan, which brought into focus the inequalities in health faced by the people
belonging to the Mirpuri community living in inner city Nottingham, helped to
ground the concept of communication as a process of social interaction for sharing
experiences and formulating actions. Although this was not a straight- forward
process, as many conflicts came to the surface, the radio station, however, provided
the context for the members of the Mirpuri community to engage through mediated
and interpersonal communication to reproduce and represent their shared interest. It
will be naïve to assume though, that the community-based communication initiatives
like Radio Ramzan can offer solutions to the complex problems of social exclusion
but, as was demonstrated during the month of Ramadan, the radio station provided a
‘frame of reference for a shared interpretation’ of the community life (Hollander and
Stappers, 1992:19-20).
Radio Ramzan was not only a platform that debated the bigger issue but it also helped
people to keep a focus on the everyday life matters like sharing information on
cultural events, car boot sales, births, deaths, funerals, weddings, lost and found, and
so on. This was possible in a situation where the medium was embedded in the social
and cultural life of the community it served.
This implies that participation becomes meaningful and empowering when there is a
shift from the media to the people and from persuasion to participation. This
paradigm shift cannot take place within the existing mass media where the whole
emphasis, in the war of ratings, is on increasing numbers; on quantity rather than on
quality. While the BBC is not commercial in the sense that it does not allow
advertising on its domestic services, it follows the principles of commercial media to
determine its popularity. It uses the Radio Joint Audience Research (RAJAR) 4 figures
to show how many people are listening to its services. While the commercial stations
use these figures to determine their advertising rates, the BBC uses them to justify
licence fees which every British resident pays. Many people ‘othered’ due to their
immigration status, cultural background, ethnicity, sexual orientation and socio-
4 RAJAR is the official body in charge of measuring radio audiences in the UK owned by the BBC and the RadioCentre
on behalf of the commercial sector, uses quantitative methods to figure out how many people are listening to various
national and regional BBC and commercial radio station.
587