21 pages, This article reconsiders the concept of `alternative media', and describes a set of alternative media projects produced over six years in and around migrant farm worker camps in southern California. The media projects described here (small-format videos within marginalized labor communities), challenge assumptions about `alternative media' on three levels - as a theoretical concept, as media practice and as a political project. The article argues the need to attend to the complex spatial and institutional contexts that inflect and complicate any local alternative media project. This examination of how the lived spaces of the migrant camps are both avowed and effaced by local residents and contractors underscores the tortured logic of the region. The study reveals not just how the landed status quo organizes workers lives as parts of its `scenic' landscape. It also describes how indigenous `Mixteco' labor organizers simultaneously work to exploit and resist the same conditions. Occupying semi-public contact-zones and no-man's lands (legally ambiguous spaces), provides migrants with a material beach-head from which to claim other rights that have more legal teeth (including fair labor, health and safety, and civil rights laws). Compared to the conventional video forms the producers/researchers set out to produce, these practices suggested that migrants' unauthorized occupation of space is a consequential form of `alternative media' in its own right; a transnational community response to policies of globalization and `free-trade'.
7 pages., via online journal article, The complexities of Melanesian customary land tenure greatly influence the adoption of community-based reforestation (CBR) in Papua New Guinea (PNG). CBR has recently become a focus for the PNG government due to declining yield from native forests which has renewed attention on developing timber plantations to augment villagers' livelihoods. In this paper, we investigate the factors which affect adoption of timber tree-growing by farmers and communities. We assess the efficacy of a policy frequently employed by non-government organisations (NGOs) in which single or multi-clan based seedling nurseries are used to encourage tree growing. A key finding is that people's need for technical assistance is subordinate to social and cultural factors, principally the need for community harmony. Farmers' motivation to plant trees is adversely influenced by uncertainties inherent in PNG's system of customary land tenure. Interventions – in this case extension assistance to grow trees – may create or exacerbate intra- and inter-clan conflict by bringing long term uncertainties into short term focus. For villagers in PNG, as in other cultures, we conclude that key enabling conditions for collective action revolve around strengthening villagers' bridging social capital in a manner which is sensitive to their longstanding social traditions. Targeted, do-it-yourself, family assistance may be as effective as attempts to encourage collective action. The implications of our findings for Forest Landscape Restoration (FLR) which envisages a participatory approach to community engagement, are that cross-community initiatives may not be feasible without extensive investment in building social capital. Initiatives targeted at families or family-groups may be most successful.
