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Storytelling is ordinarily trivialised as an antiquated oramedia genre, and of less significance in Zimbabwean mainstream media and communication studies, hence it is understudied. Recent studies largely take a literary gaze on storytelling, and do not theorise it from an indigenous media viewpoint or appreciate its convergence with social media. Drawing on concepts of media convergence and the digital public sphere, this netnographic study examines the adaptation of storytelling on Twitter, SoundCloud and YouTube, focusing on patterns of production, delivery, participation, language forms, reception and audiences. The article shows inventive re-embodiment and adaptation of storytelling on online spaces, that is, the endurance and remaking of indigenous media in the context of new media and communication technologies. The manifestation of the folktale narrative style on social media exhibits the rise of a secondary form of orality recreated, reproduced and applied in the digital form and on social media. While digital and social media are perceived as threatening the continued existence of indigenous media, this article attests social media as breathing spaces for indigenous media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a theoretical model to analyse an example of Indigenous media through an Indigenous lens and discusses its potential to increase audiences in other alternative media. Adapted from New Zealand Māori filmmaker and philosopher Barry Barclay's idea of the 'fourth cinema' and a metaphorical 'communications marae', 1 the model has been applied to New Zealand's Indigenous broadcaster, Māori Television. This article discusses the model and suggests that the 'communications marae' has the potential to be used by non-mainstream media providers to, not only address their own audiences, but also to enrol wider communities in alternative perspectives to the 'mainstream'. Research has demonstrated how Indigenous broadcasting can serve its own audience while also attracting wider, non-Indigenous audiences. However, this paper's focus is a case study of migrants engaging with Māori Television because it is migrants who frequently operate outside of established power relationships and represent an often unrecognised niche audience segment in mainstream media. The model demonstrates the potential pedagogical role of the broadcaster and how its content can make a positive difference to migrants' lives and attitudes towards Indigenous people through its ability to counter the, often negative, representations of Indigeneity in mainstream media. Outside of Māori Television, migrants have limited access to an Indigenous perspective on the nation's issues and concerns, which calls into question both democracy and migrants' ability to engage in civic society. Migrants need information to negotiate and weigh up important tensions and polarities, to understand multiple perspectives inherent to democratic living and to evaluate issues of social justice and to solve problems based on the principles of equity. Indigenous media, as in all alternative media, has a role to play in questioning or challenging accepted thinking and to present counter hegemonic discourses to all citizens in participatory democratic societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gavan Titley's book Racism and Media (2019) is a much needed and compelling intervention on this enduring topic. One of the many significant contributions of the book is to develop an account of racisms as multiple and contextually specific, and to advocate for situated arguments rather than abstract principals. In this response, I attempt to extend Titley's transnational and locally specific approach. In order to resist or complicate the potential for Eurocentrism, I argue for further attention to scholarship and practice on racism and settler colonialism; on intersectionality; and on the crucial decolonial and self-determination work of Indigenous, community and alternative media. Writing from Australia on the anniversary of the Christchurch massacre and against resurgent Sinophobia during the global covid-19 pandemic, Titley's impressive and comprehensive book provides an ideal springboard for further developing the vital themes of racism and media across transnational contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study focuses on indigenous radio practices in Argentina under the implementation of the 2009 Law 26.522 on Audiovisual Communication Services, currently undergoing reform. This pioneering law recognised indigenous broadcasters, thereby satisfying the call of indigenous organisations, during the legislative process, for their right to 'communication with identity' to be included. Nevertheless, we believe that the application of the law has been weak overall, and that the legal definition of media is questionable. Furthermore, we have hypothesised that indigenous media are caught between de jure public ownership and de facto communal belonging. This hypothesis derives from a comparative analysis of the Argentinian legal framework and similar reforms implemented throughout Latin America, as well as from a dialogue between international studies on community media and the literature on indigenous media. In order to determine whether and in what terms indigenous media can be considered as community media, we carried out semi-structured interviews with key informants from indigenous communities who had been authorised to broadcast under the law's implementation. We explored the genesis and objectives of their communication projects; programming and agendas; external relationships; internal organisation (with a focus on the sustainability strategies adopted); respondents' definitions of 'community communication', 'indigenous communication' and 'communication with identity'; and respondents' opinions on the application of the law and its media definition. We found that many indigenous broadcasters in Argentina act as community media and resemble them ontically – that is to say, in how and why they remain in the (mediatised) public space. Nevertheless, indigenous radio is ontologically different from community media because it is often shaped by its ethnic identity, namely, who the indigenous peoples are and how they represent themselves in the (mediatised) public space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Professional communicators produce a diverse range of global Indigenous media while balancing professional journalistic conventions such as ‘objectivity’ against community and organizational responsibilities. Despite their work being tarred as biased, soft or preaching to the converted, Indigenous media producers argue that their work counterbalances biased mainstream media coverage that hampers Indigenous public sphere participation and denigrates Indigenous communities and individuals. Through interviews with 42 Indigenous media producers from Australia, Canada, Finland, Sweden and New Zealand, this study investigates their journalistic processes and attitudes to professional norms such as objectivity, source choices and news values. The article interrogates how Indigenous media producers navigate the tensions between their professional obligations and community responsibilities. It argues Indigenous media producers apply a modified version of objectivity to produce fact-driven content that promotes Indigenous perspectives, prioritizes Indigenous voices and serves the needs of their communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background This article draws upon findings from interviews and participant-observation in Nunavut, Canada, to analyze internet's place within the communication landscape. Analysis The author situates the newer medium of broadband internet within the context of television, radio, the postal service, and satellite dishes in Nunavut. She argues that focusing on these persisting platforms provides insight into how internet and its issues are experienced by Nunavummiut users. Conclusions and implications Contrary to prevalent notions of innovation that privilege newness of form, the usage of persisting media can be dynamic and innovative. The evidence presented builds upon existing research on media usage by Indigenous peoples; it also suggests the potential for Indigenous-media research to reconceptualize innovation, oldness, and newness within the broader field of media and communications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article conceptualizes New Ecuadorian cinema as small, glocal and plurinational. It makes the case that it is a propitious time to study this emergent cinema. However, while it is a heterogeneous film scene, this article argues that it is still traversed by long-standing ethno-racial, class and regional inequalities. After inserting Ecuador's largely unknown film history into regional trends, different spheres of production are analysed, including mestizo fictionalized narratives, activist documentaries, indigenous and community filmmaking and coastal 'guerilla' filmmaking. The article looks at both the accomplishments of the sector and current challenges. It proposes that more state and private funds invest in fostering plurinational and regional initiatives, and cultivating diverse makers and audiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The revitalisation of the Māori language has been a major ground to argue for the establishment of Māori edia. This poses the question of how exactly Māori media can assist people who are learning the language. The current media landscape in Aotearoa/New Zealand provides ample opportunities for language learning through television, radio and online resources. Participants in our interview study narrated how they navigate different media but also discussed barriers that they encounter in doing so. For all participants, language learning has been a long, complicated and difficult process. The undoing of attitudes of disadvantage related to speaking Māori is frequently at the heart of the struggle. The long-term effects of colonisation and policies of assimilation have had devastating consequences for Māori families and communities, specifically in terms of learning and speaking the language. Participants’ stories highlight that reconnecting with the Māori language can be a life-changing experience, in which the negative impacts of a history of colonisation are resisted and refracted. The participants who were interviewed in prison were particularly motivated to engage in language learning. Ironically, as a ‘captive audience’, not only did they have the time to commit to language learning, they were also in a unique position to reflect on their current and future realities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Indigenous communities in Australia have fought for access to the airwaves, despite resistance from the dominant European population. The uncertainty of the government policymaking process has created challenges for Indigenous media producers in appropriating a range of media technologies to serve Indigenous interests. Indigenous-produced media provides a first level of service to communities across the continent but the struggle to maintain this complex communication system continues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on the communities of Eténhiritipa-Pimentel Barbosa of eastern Mato Grosso, Brazil, this article considers the tremendous shift that has taken place over the last twenty-five years in A'uw?-Xavante peoples' use of audio-visual media to achieve greater representational sovereignty. It discusses the adoption of video in the context of A'uw?- Xavante ideologies and gendered patterns of dealing with the outside and their prior use of cassette technology. This case demonstrates that, while the adoption of new media has not proven to be the final assault in a Faustian bargain with modernity, media makers face a number of significant challenges and dilemmas, specifically curating, archiving, and also securing and sustaining financial and technological support. Partnerships and collaborations are essential but their often-precarious nature presents difficulties. Dedication, persistence, creativity and adaptability are assets community members draw upon in responding to challenges. Media makers are increasingly gaining more control and are now training the next generation of youths; young people are using new social media, as well as video and film, to achieve greater representational sovereignty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The apparent democratic shift unfolding in Latin America, from Venezuela and Bolivia to Ecuador and Nicaragua has been quite uneven. Public access to media provides one measurement of the extent to which social movements have been able to alter the relations of power. In nations where working classes, indigenous peoples, women, youth, and diverse ethnic groups have mobilized and organized constituent assemblies and other social and political organizations, political economies of radical democratic media have been introduced, communicating other progressive national policies for a new cultural hegemony of solidarity. Moments of rupture caused by social movements have introduced new social and political norms challenging capitalist cultural hegemony across the continent, with deep connections between media communication and social power revealed in every case. Public access to media production and distribution is a key indicator of democratic citizen participation and social transformation. Those societies that have advanced the farthest towards 21st century socialism and participatory democracy have also established the most extensive democratic and participatory media systems. These media reach far beyond community and alternative media forms to become central to an emerging hegemonic discourse advocating social transformation and working class power. Community media in Nicaragua, Bolivia, and Ecuador demonstrate how radical political power can encourage mass working class participation, including acquiring and using mass communication for social change and social justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars in communication especially in mass communication have their views reflected in Western communication and see no serious business in discussing African communication in African context as if Africans had no means of communication before their contact with the western world. Assumptions of such scholars are just an attempt to cannibalise the effective traditional media which Africans have explored over the ages to reach and achieve their target within a specific culture. This paper through personal interviews explores the African flute, its uses, limitations and how it can be combined with other media in traditional settings to achieve the maximum effect. It however recommends, among other things, the support of African governments (both at a local and national level) to find experts on traditional media in order to develop and advance the hardwares. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Indigenous news media have experienced significant growth across the globe in recent years, but they have received only limited attention in mainstream society or the journalism and communication research community. Yet, Indigenous journalism is playing an arguably increasingly important role in contributing to Indigenous politics and identities, and is worthy of closer analysis. Using in-depth interviews, this article provides an overview of the main dimensions of Indigenous journalism as they can be found in the journalism culture of Ma¯ori journalists in Aotearoa New Zealand. It argues that Ma¯ori journalists see their role as providing a counter-narrative to mainstream media reporting and as contributing to Indigenous empowerment and revitalization of their language. At the same time, they view themselves as watchdogs, albeit within a culturally specific framework that has its own constraints. The article argues that the identified dimensions are reflective of evidence on Indigenous journalism from across the globe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the summer of 1966, seven Navajo community members from Pine Springs, Arizona, were the subjects of one of the most provocative experiments in cognitive and visual anthropology yet completed, the Navajo Film Project, resulting in Sol Worth and John Adair's seminal work Through Navajo Eyes, as well as seven short films produced by Navajo filmmakers that garnered worldwide attention in their own right. In 2011, the films were repaired and returned to the Navajo Nation for public screenings, the first step in a process of repatriation and resignification that mirrors the repatriation of other visual media to Navajo and indigenous communities. The return of the films offers a unique opportunity to reexamine the meanings of the films and the project itself, reframing the discussion around issues of visual sovereignty, community reengagements, and 'reclaiming' Diné/ Navajo histories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The online communicative environment is expected to revolutionize political discourse as it expands to cover underrepresented groups and ideas. In this platform, marginalized groups such as indigenous communities from the developing world can articulate claims, strategically mobilize and participate in the forms of meaning-making that constitute them. However, there is skepticism on the actual value of online spaces in effecting agency in an internet-mediated environment. Using James Scott’s notion of ’hidden transcripts’ and Andrew Feenberg’s ’democratic rationalization of technology’, the paper explores strategic approaches and historical, social, and political conditions embedded in the construction, negotiation, and transformation of indigenous online activist media. In-depth interviews and textual analysis of online spaces were conducted to understand the experiences and online articulations of two indigenous groups based in the Philippines, Tebtebba and Cordillera People’s Alliance with specific attention to the: (a) forms and characteristics of online struggles, (b) dynamics and strategies behind the production and distribution of online dissent, (c) process of negotiation of technological use, and (d) perceived implications of online mediations on group identity, culture and struggle. Problematizing the complex interaction of technology and indigenous identity, the paper finds that indigenous activists’ online media engagement constitutes a sustained balancing act between accommodation and resistance and online spaces are used creatively with reflection on the dangers and benefits of online spaces to the organization and the struggle. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This article draws on notions of networked and multiscalar globalities to explore recent developments around indigenous and Afro-Caribbean media in Nicaragua’s Atlantic Coast region, whose inhabitants are reasserting their collective autonomy by reinvigorating and reformulating a centuries-old ideal of cosmopolitanism forged through a long history of intercultural exchange and the indigenization of foreign elements. The authors argue that their activities are advancing the development of convergent cultures associated with counterinscriptions of a grassroots globalization and the expansion of contexts in which new forms of indigenous and Afro-Caribbean cultural citizenship can emerge and become effective. Hence, mediated practices of cultural persistence on Nicaragua’s Mosquito Coast intensify and broaden the revivification and circulation of relational, nonmodern ontologies whose epistemic force contributes to wider Latin American movements for social transformation and illustrates in new ways the importance and the potential of indigenous media operations and the intercultural global networks within which they are implicated. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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This paper gives an account of the pirate media economy of Ecuador and its role in the emergence of indigenous Quichua-language media spaces, identifying the different parties involved in this economy, discussing their relationship to the parallel “legitimate” media economy, and considering the implications of this informal media market for Quichua linguistic and cultural reproduction. As digital recording and playback technology has become increasingly more affordable and widespread over recent years, black markets have grown up worldwide, based on cheap “illegal” reproduction of commercial media, today sold by informal entrepreneurs in rural markets, shops and street corners around Ecuador. Piggybacking on this pirate infrastructure, Quichua-speaking media producers and consumers have begun to circulate indigenous-language video at an unprecedented rate, helped by small-scale merchants who themselves profit by supplying market demands for positive images of indigenous people. In a context of a national media that has tended to silence indigenous voices rather than amplify them, informal media producers, consumers and vendors are developing relationships that open meaningful media spaces within the particular social, economic and linguistic contexts of Ecuador. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For 12 days in May 2005, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York and the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI), as well as several other screening venues in Washington, D.C., hosted a group of renowned indigenous filmmakers from around the globe for the ground-breaking film showcase, ‘First Nations\First Features: A Showcase of World Indigenous Film and Media.’ This film showcase highlighted the innovative ways in which indigenous filmmakers draw on indigenous storytelling practices to create cinematic visions that honor their long-standing indigenous cultural worlds while reaching local and world audiences. In this essay, I highlight the onscreen impact through an analysis of several films featured in First Nations\First Features, as well as the offscreen impact emphasizing how the indigenous directors used this opportunity to strengthen social networks and share experience in this industry, which may develop into future collaborative film projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]