A conference with specialists from over 20 countries was held at the Gabriela Mistral Cultural Center on November 28th to 30th to discuss and reflect on cultural policies at a local and global level.
The event, which featured the participation of our lead researcher Chiara Sáez, was organized by the Ministry of Culture, Arts and Heritage together with Universidad de Chile through the Artistic Creation Office of the Research and Development Vice-Rectory (VID) and the Faculty of Communication and Image, following a call for papers from the prestigious English journal Cultural Trends.
In the conference, Sáez, an FCEI academic with various studies on community media and cultural policy, “showed her research work focused on supporting the Chilean Association of Community Channels in identifying relevant public agents to strengthen the sector”.
In this sense, she delved into the role of communications in safeguarding democracy, pointing out that it “tends to be left out of the equation or addressed only in an instrumental way, focusing only on messages and not on a more comprehensive perspective”. Sáez also stressed that “community media can play a much more important role than the one they currently play”.
Sáez was a speaker in the panel about cultural democracy and policy, where she presented her research “Community Media as Cultural Community Organizations: Proposal on a Cross-Sectoral Public Policy for the Sector’s Sustainability in Chile”, funded by the PROA Fund of Universidad de Chile’s VID. She stated that “this research systematizes work to support the Chilean Association of Community Channels in identifying relevant public agents to strengthen the sector, obstacles and difficulties identified in this regard and some improvement proposals”. The researcher added that “the research’s conclusion is that although addressing the sector’s sustainability in a cross-sectoral manner is required, the Ministry of Culture also needs a more relevant role in a constituent aspect of the channels, which is their capacity as cultural community organizations”.
When asked about the importance of reflecting on the role of culture in a political and democratic context, Sáez noted that “in the case of community communication, the struggle for legal recognition has tended to disregard the question about the social legitimacy of the experiences as spaces for creating and exchanging the representations a community makes of itself. In this sense, community media can play a much more important role than the one they play today, but this entails conceiving them as cultural community organizations that exercise cultural democracy using communications as a stimulation tool.”
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