Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, a growing grassroots movement has registered dissatisfaction with status quo media, which activists perceive as falling short in such areas as providing news and musical programming free of corporate influence. These activists have attempted to counterbalance these perceived shortcomings by making known their critiques and gaining greater access to the means of media production; they aim to change the status quo arrangement of media ownership and are working directly with low power FM (LPFM) technology to do so. This Science and Technology Dissertation Improvement Grant is an ethnographic investigation of social settings and technical practices surrounding LPFM activism. Its goal is to reveal how these actors enact their beliefs about democratic media access and media diversity through low power FM radio (LPFM) activist work; these activities include lobbying, teaching themselves to use transmission and production technologies, and providing the public with technical, logistical, and legal support. The study will focus primarily on a community of LPFM activists in Philadelphia, but data will be collected at a variety of sites where the actors travel for meetings with regulators, community groups, LPFM stations and prospective stations, and other activists. In drawing on scholarship in Science & Technology Studies (STS), this project has the benefit of significant insight into the social life and meaning of LPFM technology. More specifically, four themes will be emphasized in order to explore these actors. conceptions of LPFM and their work with it: 1) identity; 2) expertise; 3) gender; and 4) interpretative flexibility. These themes will be used to make visible (and perhaps audible) the rich and complex interactions between social relations, gender and technical identity, interpretations of technology, and activism. As a small-scale, low-tech, yet widespread technology that has largely been unexamined in STS scholarship or elsewhere, LPFM constitutes an important site of inquiry, which will be especially relevant in the present context of widespread interest in claims about the impact of information technologies. Much work in STS focuses on large-scale, relatively established relationships such as that between science and the state; conversely, this project offers insight into the marginal, smaller-scale, less stable enterprise of technological activism. This is an equally important site for research, and this project aims to reveal the dynamic, highly contingent environment in which activists (attempt to) effect change. These activists are also citizens and they conceive of their work as having a broad relevance and public good, which extends beyond small interest groups or community radio aficionados, into the lives of ordinary citizens, with the potential to enable greater civic participation. This study represents an opportunity to contribute to scholarship in and beyond STS and potentially to activism. It will provide a general understanding of citizens. engagement with technology at a site of resistance to a perceived betrayal of democratic values due to corporate homogenization and control, involving media institutions, activists, publics, corporations, and regulatory bodies.
