State Broadcasting and Minority Languages: the Case of Irish in Ireland

Abstract

The scale and content of minority language programmes in State broadcasting services reflect (a) technical/operational, (b) language planning and (c) ideological considerations. These three elements form the environment within which broadcasting policy is formulated and within which, over time, it changes. Irish language broadcasting in Ireland is discussed from this viewpoint.     

The Heroic Importance of Sport: The GAA in the 1930s

This article examines the cultural importance accorded to sporting activity by Ireland's largest sporting organisation, the Gaelic Athletic Association, during the 1930s. Making use of the source material provided by a short-lived paper funded by the GAA, as well as the minutes of its central organisational bodies, it examines the paradigm of opposed Irish and British civilisations which underpinned ideas of the cultural role of sport. The article suggests that many of the attitudes evinced by the GAA actually derived from nineteenth century and contemporary British notions of team games and athletic competition. Nevertheless, by transforming sporting choice and preference into a badge of national identity, the article suggests that the GAA performed an important role within the touchy nationalism of the newly independent Irish Free State, and its conviction of its own importance helped fuel the elaboration of a genuinely distinctive variant of the European practice of sport.     

The British State’s production of the Muslim School: A simultaneity of categories of difference analysis

Recently, national populist politics has been translated with the emergence of two overlapping narratives of Islamophobia and anti-EU immigration media discourses. Such discourses have been made highly visible in the increased spike in hate crimes that have been a hidden cost of the national(ist) debate about Britain leaving the European Union (Brexit). This is the context in which we can trace a remarkable shift in the state representation of the schooling of the South Asian/Muslim community and the reclassification from promoting South Asians as central to the future of a modernised multicultural Britain (1970s) to positioning Muslims as a ‘suspect community’ (2020). This article unpacks two cultural moments in the critical exploration of the State production of the Muslim School within a post-Trojan Horse era. First, a national dominant image of the Muslim School operating within the State ascribed ‘no-go’ ethno-religious Muslim neighbourhoods, as a repository of regressive (extreme) Islamist religiosity; thus, reconstructing their religious belief as racialised identities, as they disconnect from British values. Second, the No Outsiders programme, with the accompanying framing of intolerant (Muslim) parents. In this case, the ensuing tension between ‘homophobic Muslims’ and ‘British values’ sets in place a homogenisation of differences. Deploying a simultaneity of categories of difference perspective, we address an underlying discursive re-politicising of South Asian ethnic communities as religious communities, which is resulting in a perpetual negotiation of the meanings attached to being Muslim. This will enable an international application of the article beyond the specific focus on the city of Birmingham, identified in the international media as the Jihadi capital of Europe.     

Copyright,Community Radio,and Change: How the U.S. Community Radio Sector is Negotiating Changing Copyright Rules and the Rollout of Digital Distribution

Radio has been regulated in the United States by the Federal Communications Commission, and previously the Federal Radio Commission, since the 1920s. Now, community radio operators and producers find themselves operating within a range of regulatory frameworks, depending on the platforms (over-the-air or online) on which they place their content. This article reviews how the impact of copyright regulation on community radio is changing as that sector expands into internet distribution. The article draws on a number of case studies of U.S.-based community radio stations, and forms part of a larger study of the changing structure of that sector. A significant lesson from this case study is a better understanding of the manner in which community stations are not only negotiating the platforms on which they distribute their content, based in large part on regulatory constraints on different platforms, but also are often fringe actors in policy debates dominated by larger economic groupings, such as corporate broadcasters and recording industry lobby groups.