Core Community Media 2:
Exploring Power in Community Media: From ‘Free Speech’ to ‘Collective Empowerment’

ACM 2025 National Conference
Boston College
24 June 2025, 2:00 - 3:30pm

Presentations and Resources

CM2: Values - Google Drive Folder Contents, and Links:         

Presenters

BIOS
-John W. Higgins, Retired Prof & Union Prez, University of San Francisco
-Martha Fuentes-Batista, Senior Lecturer, Director of Engaged Research & Learning, University of Massachusetts Amherst
-Chad Johnston,  Chief Executive Officer, CreaTV San Jose
-Michael Eisenmenger, Executive Director, Community Media Center of Marin
-Antoine Haywood, Assistant Professor, University of Florida

Description

The session explores current access philosophies and values. For example, how do notions of ‘power,’ ‘democracy,’ and ‘empowerment’ underly today’s community media beliefs and practices after five decades of access existence? 

We continue a discussion started in Core CM session 1: History. It’s adapted from ACM ‘White Papers’ sessions in the past where practitioners and scholars discussed practices and underlying tenets of access and community media.   

At the time, US public access was shifting from the initial perspective of “first come, first served” to targeting marginalized communities, given access experiences and a deeper understanding of how power works in communities. 

The discussion also extended to the pages of the Community Media Review, in particular the 2002 “Rethinking Access Philosophy” issue, available at the Internet Archive's CMR   collection.  

 

CM1 & CM2: ACM 2025
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