Journal of Alternative & Community Media - Volume 6, Issue 2, 2021

Climate crisis, fuelled by dominant social, political and economic structures, causes a rift in the Earth’s metabolism. In the built environment, where people live and work, social-ecological communities, such as ecovillages and cohousing, model and pursue alternative, interconnected relations with nature. This study examines five social-ecological communities in the Pacific Northwest of the United States and their use of strategic communication to pursue structural change. Long interviews identified three themes and eight sub-themes through which community members influence the mainstream that surrounds them and enrich their own membership and infrastructure. This study demonstrates that postmodern approaches to strategic communication active on the local level, while in tension with modernist approaches, provide an effective means to respond to climate crisis in the built environment.

From 2017 to 2019, I wrote several news stories about an Indigenous woman’s struggle, with others, in Western Australia’s oldest European settlement of Albany to maintain a ban on water skiing at a culturally significant swamp by the banks of which her mother was born. Until my stories were published, news reports had focused on the needs of skiers. The headline of my first story, ‘The sacred and profane’, invoked Bourdieu’s conception of social space as a field constructed by tensions between holders of unequal levels of cultural and economic capital. This is consistent with Massey’s observations of places as contested social constructs. Both theories are complementary frameworks from which to interrogate and inform journalistic practice. This article shows how critically reflexive articulation of place, through journalism, enabled Indigenous voices to be heard in a regional city that had been ground zero for colonialism in Australia’s largest state by area.

Community radio in Mali and Niger represents important hubs through which organized groups (such as listening clubs or associations) access information and participate in broadcasting through active and formalized channels. Drawing on radio listener focus groups conducted in Mali and Niger between 2018 and 2020, this article discusses the importance, to community radio, of ‘loud’ participation (formalized spaces) and ‘quiet’ participation (informal discussion spaces) amongst audiences. We argue that these ‘quiet’ forms of participation are important as they reinforce and support existing networks of solidarity in the community. Community radio stations rarely ‘hear’ listener participation via these informal spaces of discussion – which are more closely associated with women – but they are nonetheless crucial, yet overlooked, alternative forms of audience participation.

This article engages with the history of Swedish prison papers, situating them as alternative media within the broader media landscape shaped by the emergence and dismantling of the welfare state. The article not only aims to give a descriptive account of the history of Swedish prison papers but also builds and further develops theorizations of alternative media by constructing them not in opposition to established media but as in dialogue and exchange with them. As we show, prison papers have had repercussions for mainstream discourses beyond catering to niche audiences. Therefore, we suggest that alternative media should be understood as part of the broader media landscape rather than being situated outside of it. This also has implications for how we conceptualize newly emerging alternative media, also called alt-media, that are not progressive but populist and right-wing oriented, as well as supportive of conspiracy theories.