CITATION AND COPYRIGHT INFORMATION:
Cite as: Huesca, R. T. (1994). Reconceptualizing Latin American theories of alternative communication and media practice: An ethnography of Bolivian tin miners’ radio. Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University. Advisor, Brenda Dervin.
© Robert Thomas Huesca (1994).
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ADVISOR:
Brenda Dervin

ABSTRACT:
This dissertation continues the Latin American communication research tradition of bringing both critical and empirical approaches to bear on the study of media practice. Trends, conceptual contests, and the current intellectual predicament of Latin American alternative communication theory are reviewed. A complementary survey of North Atlantic alternative media research reveals the unique contributions from Latin America, as well as shared, yet unacknowledged, agendas. Both literatures tend to generate theory dualistically, pitting dominant notions—vertical, authoritarian—against alternative concepts—horizontal, liberation, leading to a conflation of process and outcome (beliefs that alternative processes—dialogue—produce alternative outcomes—concientizacion).

This dissertation pulls apart the process-outcome conflation, examining a successful, alternative media exemplar—Bolivian tin miners’ radio—through the lens of a “communication-as-procedure” analytic evident in much empirical research from Latin America but more fully explicated here. Specific research questions were: (1) How are communication procedures related to participation and transformation? (2) How do the relationships between communication, participation, and transformation inform the process-outcome contradictions in the literature? (3) What direction can be given to practitioners concerning participation and transformation?

Ethnographic methods were derived from contemporary debates in postmodern and dialogic anthropology sensitive to multiple perspectives and voices in the collection and presentation of data. I lived and worked one month each in three towns in the Bolivian altiplano. Research sites included a tin miners’ union radio station, a Catholic station identified with the workers’ struggle, and a nongovernmental organization rooted in miners’ communities. Data included field notes, a reflexive journal, interviews based on the Sense-Making method, artifacts, photographic slides, and videotapes.

Findings demonstrated that the use of procedures was intimately linked to the ways that practitioners theorized communication and social change. Although procedures were illuminated by the specific situatedness of Bolivian tin miners’ radio practitioners, general categories of use to participatory media practices for social change were extracted. In general, both alternative and dominant processes were found to be of use at achieving participation and social change but were dependent on the context facing practitioners. Evidence suggested a more ethnographic approach—living, working, sharing in everyday struggles—to alternative media practice.

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See:http://communication.sbs.ohio-state.edu/sense-making/AAauthors/authorlisthuesca.html