MEDIA PARTICIPATION AND CULTURAL NORMS AROUND MUGAMBO JWETU FMCOMMUNITY MULTIMEDIA CENTRE IN TIGANIA WEST, MERU, KENYA

Abstract

Community media have been lauded for the opportunity they provide to enhance participation and therefore democratic culture. In Kenya, several community radio stations have been founded partly under this logic since 2004. As of 2017, there were about 25 operational community radio stations. However, exactly what participation consists of or what bottlenecks participation faces is not extensively laid out in either the country’s legislation or the stations’ best practices. This paper explores the daily interactions of a Kenyan ‘community radio community’ with the programmes of a radio station in their midst. It examines the media rituals at different times of the day by various sections of the community in relation to the content of the station, Mugambo Jwetu FM. Through this, social norms that determine participation, and the new social formations that occur through participation, are revealed. The data used are drawn from field research conducted in 2014 and 2015 in the context of a broader research project spanning 2014 to 2017. The project examined the roles and reception of community radio in the Kenyan media landscape and found that among other roles, community radio is a contested performance site for diverse social identities and that participation is subject to cultural norms.