Free Access to Citizens’ Media journal issue, and films from an Indigenous Multimedia Campaign at COP15

The journal Development in Practice is enabling free full-text access and reduced price print copies of the recent special issue on Citizens' Media to support and highlight Conversations with the Earth, an indigenous-led multimedia campaign exhibiting in Copenhagen at COP15.

For more information visit http://www.developmentinpractice.org/

Conversations with the Earth (CWE) is an indigenous-led multimedia campaign to amplify indigenous voices on Climate Change. A collaboration between indigenous communities, journalists, photographers, designers, and participatory video facilitators. CWE is initially present as an exhibition in Copenhagen, supporting live presentations by representatives of several indigenous communities as delegates gather for the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Conference of the Parties meeting (COP15).

The Citizens' Media special issue, Volume 19 (4&5) is guest edited by Jethro Pettit, Juan Francisco Salazar, and Alfonso Gumucio Dagron.

Citizens’ media and communication are still poorly understood in the mainstream of development policy and practice – and are prone to simplistic forms of implementation, because of the lack of a coherent grasp of the social, cultural, and political processes that make them transformative. Introducing the articles in this guest issue, the authors find that citizens’ media is about more than bringing diverse voices into pluralist politics: it contributes to processes of social and cultural construction, redefining norms and power relations that exclude people. Local ownership and control of their own media can allow people to reshape the spaces in which their voices find expression.