Latinos and Media Project
BIO
In 1984, Clemencia finished a B.A. in Communication at Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá, Colombia, her hometown and country. After graduation she became a communication researcher and popular educator at CINEP, a Colombian non-governmental organization run by Jesuits inspired by liberation theology. Also, she started teaching communication courses at Universidad Javeriana.
By this time, mass communication had already become the main focus of her research and teaching. She approached (and still does) communication research as an interpretive venture more than a search for objective truths; she also believed (and still does) that her research should contribute to the empowerment of underprivileged communities.
The main research projects Clemencia developed at the time were all inspired by Latin American scholars. Based on Paulo Freire's theories on communication and education, she conducted several projects on participatory media, participatory research and action research. Alternative media became her main research area.
She edited a book that documents four cases of participatory communication and/or action research in Colombia; this text, published in 1987 is called Contando Historias, Tejiendo Identidades: Experiencias en Comunicación Popular (Telling Stories, Weaving Identities: Case Studies on Popular Communication ).
Based on popular culture theories developed by Jesús Martín Barbero and Néstor García Canclini, she developed a major research project on the history of Colombian telenovelas. The final text, co-authored with Patricia Téllez and published by CINEP in 1989 is entitled La Telenovela en Colombia: Mucho Más que Amor y Lágrimas (The Colombian Telenovela: Much More than Love and Tears).
In 1988, Clemencia came to the United States to further pursue her studies. She graduated from Ohio University with a M.A. in Communication and International Development (1990) and a Ph.D. in International Telecommunications (1994). Her doctoral dissertation is a comparative analysis of four case studies of alternative media, which she rather calls citizens' media. In 1991, Clemencia interrupted her graduate studies for a year; the Universidad Centroamericana at Managua, Nicaragua had invited her to join their communication faculty as visiting professor. There she taught mass communication courses (theory, research, media criticism) and conducted research on alternative media and participatory communication.
While in Nicaragua in 1991, she conducted a study on participatory radio during the Sandinista revolution. Later, this was to become one of the four case studies analyzed in her dissertation. Also, the study's results were published by the British journal Media, Culture and Society.
Today, after more than ten years researching alternative media in different international contexts she has published Fissures in the Mediascape: An International Study of Citizens' Media, (Hampton Press 2001). In this text, she coined the term citizens' media as a way out of the binary thinking an essentializing categories characteristic of traditional theories of alternative media.
Currently Clemencia’s research explores the role(s) of citizens’ media in contexts of war and armed conflict. She is completing several case studies in Colombia. The case studies analyze different citizens’ media (community radio, video, television and/or Internet) in regions of Colombia particularly ravaged by armed groups that include left-wing guerrillas, right-wing paramilitaries, drug traffickers, and the Colombian army. Conceptually, the book states that instead of developing a formula, each of the citizens’ media investigated emerged as an organic product of the social, political, and cultural context in which it operates. Thus, each case is different and can only be understood examining the historical dynamics that brought armed conflict to the region and the responses of local grassroots organizations, civic groups, and community leaders. Each chapter documents how guerrilla, paramilitary, drug-trafficking, or military violence emerged in the region and how local leaders and groups use media and communication to carve a symbolic space not permeated by the logic of war. Each chapter offers an insight into how armed conflict came to the region and how local social forces are using media to survive and overcome violence.
In the summer of 2001, Clemencia Rodríguez and Dr. John Downing (Southern Illinois University) organized the first Our Media, Not Theirs (OMNT) meeting, a one-day meeting of about fifty national and international communication academics with a common research interest: alternative media. The goal of OMNT I was to re-instate alternative media back to the central place they deserve on the academic and media policy agenda. Following OMNT I and with the purpose of bridging the gap between alternative media academics and practitioners and bringing the discussion outside of academia and into the international information and communication policy arena, Clemencia and Dr. Nick Couldry (Goldsmith College) organized the second meeting of OMNT, as a pre-conference of the International Association of Mass Communication Research (IAMCR) Convention last summer. OMNT II was held at the University Ramon Llull in Barcelona, July 20, 2002. More than fifty people from around the world attended the meeting and discussed how they can work together to support, strengthen, and have an impact on civil society’s use of media.
In 2003 the members of OMNT decided to change the network’s name to OURMedia/NuestrosMedios. The third annual meeting of OURMedia was held in Barranquilla, Colombia; the fourth in Porto Alegre, Brazil (2004), and the fifth in Bangalore, India (2005). Today, OURMedia includes more than 400 members spread throughout the world.