My Thesis on Participatory Communication

My thesis for my course in Mass Communications focuses on participatory communication. It particularly examines participatory radio and video as processes and tools for dialogue and empowerment. It is grounded on two assumptions: (1) that the process (the act of people coming together to decide who they are, what they want and how they will obtain what they want through participatory radio and video) is as important as the finished products (in this case, video and radio productions), and (2) that participatory radio and video can be used as tools to facilitate dialogue and empowerment.

My research begins by exploring two opposites theories, namely the Top-Down and the Horizontal approaches to participatory communication and by defining key concepts in participatory communication (i.e., catalyst, collective action, community dialogue, empowerment, participation, process). The Top-Down Approach considers participation as a vertical one-way input from the knowledgeable (top) to the less-knowledgeable (down) while the Horizontal Model recognizes participation as a two-way mutual process by which people are agents of their own change.

I believe that my study is important because it is a relevant and useful contribution to the endeavor of facilitating dialogue and empowerment through participatory communication processes at the grassroots level and thereby transforming rhetoric into a reality. It is an unfortunate fact that even though the Top-Down approach is almost always rejected on conceptual ground it is still very much in practice. That is why the theme of my research paper centers on how participatory radio and video can be utilized to facilitate dialogue and empowerment.

My personal experiences in making a participatory documentary video with Filipino migrants in Italy and in doing participatory radio with them at the Vatican Radio will be widely used in this research. It is argued in this study that genuine dialogue can be facilitated through the process of coming together, decision-making, writing, producing, shooting, recording, editing, and broadcasting radio and video. And in turn, this dialogue will bring about the empowerment of the people involved in the participatory process.