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'.
Agricultural Communications Documentation Center, Funk Library, University of Illinois Document Number: D08813
Notes:
Pages 117-143 in Patrick D. Murphy, The media commons: globalization and environmental discourses. United States: University of Illinois Press, Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield. 192 pages.
Agricultural Communications Documentation Center, Funk Library, University of Illinois Box: 199 Document Number: D09935
Notes:
NCR-90 Collection, From Document D09933, "Department of agricultural journalism University of Wisconsin-Madison: Faculty and graduate student research, 1993". Pages 4-5.
Abbott, Eric A. (author / Greenlee School of Journalism and Communication) and Iowa State University
Format:
Paper
Publication Date:
2004-06-20
Published:
USA
Location:
Agricultural Communications Documentation Center, Funk Library, University of Illinois Box: 139 Document Number: C21022
Notes:
Paper presented to Research Special Interest Group, Association for Communication Excellence, for presentation at its international meeting, Lake Tahoe, Nevada, June 20-24. Paul Yarbrough, emeritus professor, Cornell University, contributed to the design of the study., 16 p., A total of 226 Iowa farm households with computers were surveyed in 2001 about their use of the Internet for both farm and non-farm uses. Of the 111 farmers (49%) that responded, 87 (78%) used the Internet. Results showed heavy Internet use by multiple household members (farmer, spouse and children), especially for information-seeking and email activities. Use of the Internet for transactions was limited. Farmers were more likely to seek farm decision information, whereas children were more likely to play games and use the Internet for school activities. Spouses used the Internet mostly for email. Farmers now regard the Internet as an essential tool for gathering information they couldn't find elsewhere. Implications for communicators are that the Internet should now be part of the information plan for all communicators serving rural farm audiences, both for farm and non-farm information. Extension and other trusted sources should spend more time guiding clients to trustworthy sites for information.
21 pages, via online journal, How an agricultural organization handles the way the media reports a crisis can have an impact on the public’s perceptions of the organization, and sometimes the industry as a whole. The popularity of social media outlets as a venue for disseminating and gathering information and news makes the use of social media surrounding agricultural crises an important topic to investigate (Glynn, Huge, & Hoffman 2012; Hermida, 2010). A qualitative case study was conducted to investigate the use of social media tools during an agricultural crisis. The participants – communications directors, social media managers, and individuals with a close connection to the crisis under study – reported that social media was a major component of their communication efforts surrounding each crisis. Participants felt social media was very effective in these situations and had a major impact on their communication efforts. Although no participants reported using a structured social media strategy or crisis communication plan, they stated a need for such guidelines in the agricultural industry. From the data analyzed in this study, a model for using social media during a crisis situation, aimed specifically for use by those in the agricultural industry, was developed. This project was funded through the USDA's Beginning Farmers & Ranchers Project.
Agricultural Communications Documentation Center, Funk Library, University of Illinois Document Number: D08797
Notes:
Pages 255-267 in Dillon, Justin, Towards a convergence between science and environmental education: the selected works of Justin Dillon. United States: Routledge, New York City, New York, 2017. 361 pages.
