Communications Research in Action: Scholar-Activist Collaborations for a Democratic Public Sphere

1. Digital Inclusion: Working Both Sides of the Equation

CHAPTER 1 Digital Inclusion Working Both Sides of the Equation dorothy kidd with eloise lee This action research project examined efforts to enhance digital inclusion in San Antonio, a working-class immigrant neighborhood of East Oakland, California. Part of a longer-term collaboration between the researcher (Department of Media Studies at the University of San Francisco) and an advocacy organization (Media Alliance), it took place during the fall of 2008 and first half of 2009. The research encompassed the design, implementation, and evaluation of three interconnected initiatives: a media training program for women community leaders called Raising Our Voices (ROV); the planning of a local digital media production and distribution site; and municipal and national policy interventions regarding broadband communications. The study is the latest in a series of academic-activist research collaborations involving Media Alliance, a thirty-three-year-old regional media resource , training, and advocacy organization. The first study analyzed the role of Media Alliance in advocating for the participation of underserved communities in the planning and implementation of municipal broadband, and the resultant widening of the frame of digital inclusion in a campaign in San Francisco (Ganghadaran 2007). The second study incorporated the lessons from the San Francisco municipal broadband campaign in a citizens’ advocacy toolkit (Levy et al. 2007). The principal investigator, Dorothy Kidd, consulted on the two earlier studies. She has worked with Media Alliance for over ten years in many capacities, and now describes this approach as embedded research.1 Her own research agenda is focused on documenting the changing relations between mediascapes, movements concerning media change, and dominant and 11 12 d o ro t h y k i d d w i t h e l o is e l ee counter-public spheres in the San Francisco Bay region. Most recently, she has compared the current movements to democratize broadband and the Internet with the citizens’ telecommunications movements of the progressive era; she has also documented earlier versions of ROV and their contribution to antipoverty counter-public spheres (Kidd and Barker-Plummer 2009). Building on this earlier body of research, the current study was based on two broad premises. First, efforts to democratize broadband communications (to provide universal service for all) needed to go beyond concepts of digital divide, or of the corporate and government-centered notions of digital inclusion (Gangadharan 2007). Although the provision of Internet access , computer training, and appropriate content for marginalized communities was necessary, Media Alliance argued that the vector of broadband development should be the development of communications capacity for marginalized communities themselves. Broadband planning for marginalized neighborhoods would then start from the community as producers of meaning for the public sphere, rather than as consumers of commercial content or of e-government information. Second, U.S. citizens’ efforts at media reform in general—and in municipal broadband campaigns in particular—had suffered, in part, from fragmentation and division among activists working to bolster the media representation of marginalized communities seeking economic and racial justice; computer and Internet technology designers and trainers; and government policy reformers. Action research, a participatory approach that expressly promotes social analysis and citizens’ action for democratic social change, was chosen as the most appropriate methodology. Action research is a form of participatory community-based research, based on generating knowledge for the ‘‘express purpose of taking action to promote social analysis and democratic social change’’ (Hearn et al. 2009, 46). This approach differs from some other social science research methodologies, in the ‘‘nature of the enquiry process, which is . . . an attempt to take action or provoke change or improvements of some kind (e.g., to design, implement or evaluate a new media application )’’ (49). Following from this approach, and consistent with her own skills, the principal investigator participated in all stages of the project, including planning, course design, workshop development and implementation , and evaluation. A methodological pluralism was adopted, employing a mix of methods, including informal in-person interviews, in-class discussions , written commentaries and evaluations, survey instruments, participant observation, and video/multimedia observation. This chapter reviews the origins of the project, the results, and the specific implications for communications policy and academic-activist research collaborations. media alliance and the background to the project Begun by radical journalists in 1976, Media Alliance is one of the oldest membership-based media activist organizations in the United States. Its original goal was ‘‘system change from within the media field—reforming corporate...