Community News
Community Week Think-in about the Future of the West Cork Islands: University-Island conversations as a method for social innovation and sustainability
As we watch Greta Thunberg in New York this week, and the emerging movement #FridaysforFuture, there are constant reminders that the world is now in what Manzini (2016a) calls the long transition towards sustainability, where the way we live our lives will need to be reinvented. Nowhere is this more evident than in rural communities, whose populations have slowly declined due to urbanisation, and economic policy. As a result, there is a corresponding decline in services, and an aging population. Community survival is a matter of urgency for rural communities.
Together with the decline in services, we see a decline in community media across the world, decreasing the spaces for communities to deliberate about their futures and to find sustainable ways to navigate this transition. Research shows that when communities have a space to share local news and deliberate on issues important to them, this can lead to social change (Csíkszentmihályi & Mukundane, 2016). While novel information platforms have been co-designed with communities in the developing world and have been successful in supporting community needs, very little is known about what types of technology could support sustainable information platforms in the global north. This blog post will explain more about the design and implementation of community media platforms on the West Cork islands.
Community Week Think-in about the Future of the West Cork Islands: University-Island conversations as a method for social innovation and sustainability
On 11 October, UCC, the West Cork Island Community Council and the Grassroots radio project https://grassrootsradio.eu will host a think-in about the future and sustainability of the West Cork islands. The event will be at the Rotunda, the School of Applied Psychology, North Mall Campus UCC between 11.30 and 3.30 and will involve islanders, academics and community members in conversation together about how to sustain community viability on the islands, and how a community information radio platform might support these ideas at the local level. To find out more about the event and to register participation click here https://www.eventbrite.ie/e/think-in-about-the-future-of-the-west-cork-islands-tickets-73549525611
Why is this important: As we watch Greta Thunberg in New York this week, and the emerging movement #FridaysforFuture, there are constant reminders that the world is now in what Manzini (2016a) calls the long transition towards sustainability, where the way we live our lives will need to be reinvented. Nowhere is this more evident than in rural communities, whose populations have slowly declined due to urbanisation, and economic policy. As a result, there is a corresponding decline in services, and an aging population. Community survival is a matter of urgency for rural communities. Together with the decline in services, we see a decline in community media across the world, decreasing the spaces for communities to deliberate about their futures and to find sustainable ways to navigate this transition. Research shows that when communities have a space to share local news and deliberate on issues important to them, this can lead to social change (Csíkszentmihályi & Mukundane, 2016). While novel information platforms have been co-designed with communities in the developing world and have been successful in supporting community needs, very little is known about what types of technology could support sustainable information platforms in the global north.
The Grassroots Project seeks to pilot low cost, low tech solutions for rural communities on the edge of Europe, to have a community information platform. These platforms combine FM and digital technology, and provide a hyper-local community radio where communities can deliberate matters of concern and sustain the radio through affordable and easy to use technology. We have partnered with geographically remote rural communities in three countries Romania, Portugal and Ireland and are documenting the community needs, and how these platforms might support these needs.
In Ireland, we are working with the West Cork Islands – one of the main needs of these communities is the need to maintain their populations and sustain community viability. As people leave and population numbers decline, so too do the services that sustain the community – as one islander says:
Like you have to maintain the school, now like, I only there was, programme on the radio like… on a Sunday morning like, they would be talking – they’d a documentary a couple of weeks ago on the islands, and it was on three islands up the west, and the theme was, you must not lose your pub, you must not lose your church. If you lose those you’re on, you’re on the way to losing your identity. And it’s a valid point right……And sorry, the school. Sorry, there was three. That was the school, right. (West Cork island resident)
So there is an urgency to find ways to preserve the islands. In Ireland, we have a strong history of community radio, however, research suggests that communities often view community radio as a service rather than as a tool for social change, and as a space for inclusive collective deliberation on matters of concern (Gaynor & O’Brien, 2011). Our research is interested in how the technology designed through the grassroots project might support communities to engage in a different way, and to create spaces to deliberate and take collective action.
Another group of research talks about the need for dialogic cooperation between communities and designers (experts from different walks of life) to share their unique positions and knowledge and to find the best strategies to navigate this transition. Finding ways for community platforms to bring these different voices together could foster socially innovative ways of doing things. By social innovation, we draw on Manzini (2014) to mean:
a process of change emerging from the creative re- combination of existing assets (from social capital to historical heritage, from traditional craftsmanship to accessible advanced technology), the aim of which is to achieve socially recognised goals in a new way (2014, p. 57).
At the think-in event on 11 October, we hope that academics and islanders will define socially recognised goals for the future of the islands, and then share their ideas about how these could be advanced, how the combination of university, community and others assets could be recombined to forge sustainability. And importantly, how community information platforms through radio might carry on these partnerships and conversations.
For more on this story contact:
To find out more about the grassroots project – click here https://grassrootsradio.eu
References
Csíkszentmihályi, C., & Mukundane, J. (2016, May). RootIO: ICT+ telephony for grassroots radio. In 2016 IST-Africa Week Conference (pp. 1-13). IEEE.
Gaynor, N., & O’Brien, A. (2011). Community radio in Ireland:“defeudalising” the public sphere?. Javnost-The Public, 18(3), 23-28.
Manzini, E. (2016a). Design: when everybody designs: an introduction to design for social innovation, MIT Press
Manzini, E. (2014). Making things happen: Social Innovation and Design. Design Issues, 30(1), 57-66.