LASA CONGRESS (Barcelona)

Program Track: Mass Media and Popular Culture

Panel:
Media and Democratization in Latin America (Numero especial de LAP)

Coordinadores:
Javier Campo (CONICET) y Tomas Crowder-Taraborrelli (SUA)

Abstract:
In the last decades, the governments of Venezuela, Brazil, Bolivia, Ecuador, Uruguay, and Argentina have sought, through media reform, more participation in the production and distribution of media in principle to assure a plurality of voices. This political undertaking, which supporters of these elected governments see as an instrumental part of the process of re-democratization, is at the center of a controversial endeavor to overcome inequality in Latin America. Our focus is on analyzing how different types of media (corporate, state/public, party, community, social, etc.) play a role in current struggles and on how particular types of media restructuring reshape power relations at all levels. This panel will focus on the critical intersections of media, democratization, and social struggles in recent Latin American political experience. It seeks to analyze the media as key political-economic institutions, as the public sphere or contested political-cultural arenas within which political and social struggles are waged. We are particularly interested in the theoretical and empirical questions about media raised by attempts to theorize and construct new political, economic, social and cultural systems that are more participatory and egalitarian and by the centrality of the need to communicate for the development of movements for social change. In other parts of Latin America governed by center and right wing governments, such sweeping media democratization projects are not underway, however, the wide range of social struggles in progress have generated innovative media forms and communication strategies, such as those linking the Zapatistas to international solidarity networks.

Presenters:
Kathryn Lehman
Beyond Pluralism and Media Rights: Indigenous Communication for Transformation in Latin America and Abya Yala. 

Abstract
In resisting genocidal projects of modernity since the Conquest and the most recent phase, neoliberalism, indigenous peoples have provided leadership in maintaining pluralist societies and protecting the rights of all living beings. This role is little known, including by many on the left, because of the history of the nation-state and current communications and research practices (Paillán, Smith, Schiwy). This article provides examples of the role of indigenous media in twenty-first century Latin American participatory democracy and plurinational socialism, focusing on their defence of autonomy of thought, and of communication as a basic human right. Drawing on community-based autonomous alternatives to neoliberalism, these media evoke a long history of indigenous placed-based narratives whose values are encoded in language, and their epistemologies are strengthened by transnational indigenous communication networks and practices. Moving beyond pluralism and media rights, indigenous communication transforms media practices in order to decolonize relations among humans, living beings, and the environment that sustains life.

Keywords: Indigenous media, participatory democracy, plurinationalism, UNDRIP, NWICO, CLACPI, decolonization, Mapuche