Mass Media Access and Indigenous Communal Engagement

Open and free mass media provide important information, connection, and protections to communities in rural and remote areas. Many Indigenous communities have utilized radio strategies to protect their language, to preserve cultural lifeways and heritage, and to communicate within and across Indigenous groups about issues distinctive to these uniquely marginalized communities.

As a counterweight to outside social and economic forces that advance individualism and commodity-driven lifestyles, Indigenous mass media programs have a dynamic position in the tides of culture change. Better anthropological research on the impact of Indigenous radio on traditional, communal values is important to our understanding of positive, self-determined culture change.

Such work will also build collaborative ties with Indigenous communities and researchers, so that Indigenous capacity for self-governance, self-sufficiency, and informed engagement is ensured. The project trains a postdoctoral researcher and includes several collaborators from underrepresented backgrounds.

This project explores what impact of publicly accessible and free media has on communalism and engagement in Indigenous communities. It specifically examines radio-based mass media communication within Indigenous communities to understand what role communications infrastructure might have in understanding pathways for Indigenous legal protections and sovereignty.

Research will focus on five communities with varying levels of radio access and coverage and will include surveys (n=47 for each community), interviews with a smaller subsample from each community, and community-based methods. Content analysis will include collaborative development of codes and validation of the findings. The strategies and targets of this research will substantially improve anthropological understanding of communalism.

The collaborative and community-based methods will contribute to a more respectful, equitable science of anthropology, fostering ownership of research data and co-production of knowledge by Indigenous scholars.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.