Alternatives on media content, journalism and regulation – The grassroots discussion panels at the 2007 ICA Conference é nome do pequeno livro online editado por Seeta Peña Gangadharan, Benjamin De Cleen e Nico Carpentier. O trabalho é resultado de um dos painéis do congresso da International Communication Association realizado em maio em Chicago.

A gênese da publicação é explicada por Nico Carpentier:

“(…) we came up with the idea to organize three so-called grassroots discussion panels, bringing in activists and alternative media people into the ivory tower that academia often still is. Our aim was to organize a dialogue between the people that actually organize, realize, and live the participatory and bottom-up processes that we so eagerly analyze. By asking a wide variety of people from the evenly diverse alternative (or counter-hegemonic) worlds, we maneuvered us academics in the position of the audience, which was (at first) forced to listen to the presentations of our guests. And we were silent, and listened to the fascinating stories about how civil society intervened (sometimes successfully, sometimes less successfully) in the creation of alternative content, in the organization of alternative journalisms and in the attempts to influence the regulation that impacts upon the communicative processes. Only after the presentations, our and their questions came, in successful attempts to discover the areas where our interests met. We found many. When looking back at these dialogues, we decided that the civil society narrations were too relevant and too fascinating to leave them unpublished. Hence this book (…)”.

Além dessa publicação, o professor e pesquisador Manuel Pinto sugere outra obra: Researching Media, democracy and participation. The intellectual work of the 2006 European media and communication doctoral summer school, editado por Nico Carpentier, Pille Pruulmann-Vengerfeldt, Kaarle Nordenstreng, Maren Hartmann, Peeter Vihalemm and Bart Cammaerts.

Alberto Marques