Grassroots Media Project
A collaboration exploring the potentials inherent in multi-cultural networks created through the production and dissemination of independent media.
Project Team
The primary Grassroots Media project team is Mugiko Nishikawa – a professor of cultural anthropology at Konan University in Kobe, Japan – and Thomas Garza, Executive Director of the Preservation and Conservation Association, and President of the CU Immigration Forum in Illinois, US.
Co-hosts and guests of the radio show, interview subjects, and reader-participants in the Zine series are also integral to the progress and momentum of the project.
History
Thomas and Mugiko first met in 2010 when Mugiko was a visiting scholar at the University of Illinois in the US. On one of her daily walks through the neighborhood around her apartment, Mugiko came across the Independent Media Center (IMC), located in downtown Urbana, and was reminded of the Grove Neighbourhood Centre in London, the starting point of her researches into community activities there.
Out of curiosity she dropped into the IMC, was informed of the various activities that took place there, and began visiting each of the working groups in order to discover what they did. The most accessible of these groups for her was the radio project which operated WRFU-LP, a low power FM station. After a chance conversation with radio group member Thomas Garza at one of the meetings, the idea of starting a Japanese language radio program in the middle of the cornfields of Illinois was conceived.
Scope
The Grassroots Media Project explores the use of media by everyday people, and strives to answer some of the various questions that arise whenever work of this sort is undertaken collaboratively. How do people engage across regional, linguistic, or cultural boundaries? Must communities arise spontaneously and organically, or can they be created intentionally?
Process
Presently the Grassroots Media Team produces a Japanese language radio show, and writes and publishes an annual Zine. In the Grassroots Media Project the participants are themselves the producers and disseminators of knowledge. We look primarily at the production and consumption of media, in particular examining the ways that media has been used as a catalyst for group formation in places where few other aspects of daily life promote that kind of networking.
Current Projects
Harukana Show
community radio
Grassroots Media Zine
alternative media
About the Harukana Show
The Harukana Show is a Japanese language talk and music program, broadcasting from WRFU-LP (104.5FM) in Urbana, Illinois - USA.
(listen live on Friday's from 6-7pm (CTZ))
Host Mugiko Nishikawa - and co-hosts in both the US and Japan - share various aspects of society and culture in the daily lives of the Japanese people in Japan, as well as those in the global diaspora.
About the Grassroots Media Zine
Early in the Spring of 2013, Thomas and Mugiko sat down to discuss how they might expand their collaboration and begin organizing and preparing her work in London for publication. A great deal of information had been gathered, but it wasn't initially clear how to fit it all together, and there was an additional problem that the topic was primarily of interest to an English speaking audience, but Mugiko's facility with that language was limited.
Ultimately they settled on the idea of producing a series of essays in ‘Zine’ format, styled somewhat like a travel journal, with each individual Zine representing the various stopping points along the way.
(A ‘Zine’, for those unfamiliar with the term, might be best described as a small-scale, self-produced publication which has been created as an act of self-expression, and which is intended primarily for a limited audience comprised of fellow enthusiasts.)
