Alternatives on media content, journalism and regulation
the grassroots discussion panels at the 2007 ICA Conference.

"[...] Eventually we came up with the idea to organize three so-called grassroots discussion panels, bringing in activists and alternative media people into the ivory tower that academia often still is. Our aim was to organize a dialogue between the people that actually organize, realize, and live the participatory and bottom-up processes that we so eagerly analyze. By asking a wide variety of people from the evenly diverse alternative (or counter-hegemonic) worlds, we maneuvered us academics in the position of the audience, which was (at first) forced to listen to the presentations of our guests. And we were silent, and listened to the fascinating stories about how civil society intervened (sometimes successfully, sometimes less successfully) in the creation of alternative content, in the organization of alternative journalisms and in the attempts to influence the regulation that impacts upon the communicative processes. Only after the presentations, our and their questions came, in successful attempts to discover the areas where our interests met. We found many. When looking back at these dialogues, we decided that the civil society narrations were too relevant and too fascinating to leave them unpublished. Hence this book, which captures almost all of the narrations we listened to at the grassroots discussion panels during the ICA’s 57th conference. Moreover, Steve Rhodes1, who took pictures at these panels, kindly agreed to have his work included, so that our dialogues materialized even more. I hope you enjoy reading them with the same enthusiasm that we had in listening to them." [Information des Anbieters]