Educational radio and its role in the radicalization of democracy

Abstract

One of the main contributions of this article, which is part of a broader investigation called “Radio Sutatenza and Popular Cultural Action in the digital age” (2019), is to see the rural inhabitants of Colombia as political and research subjects, with the purpose of promoting the representation and construction of political identities among that population, one of the most invisible and ignored in the country. It is about describing, from the postulates of civic humanism, radical democracy and comunicación /educacion, proposals and ways to qualify or improve the exercise of new citizenships, in the Digital Campesino Schools (EDC) of ACPO (the old Radio Sutatenza).

The method applied in this work is Investigación Acción Participativa (IAP), which is characterized by promoting the subject-subject relationship for the production, dissemination and collective recognition of knowledge and knowledge. It is worth pointing out that, due to its very nature, IAP privileges the search for meanings in specific contexts, not laws.

And as far as methodological tools are concerned, they are associated with literary journalism; the ecology of knowledge and the reading contract, the latter postulated and developed by the Argentine semiologist Eliseo Verón.

In view of the results and conclusions, we can highlight the weekly radio program “Mundo Rural” —from 2013 to date— and the podcast Las Cartas del campo. From there, conclusions such as these are derived: the importance of the practical and daily exercise of new citizenships that arise in the territories, with the direct voices and daily actions of rural inhabitants, who are in charge of giving meaning to radical democracy, humanism civic and communication / education. It should be noted that these three currents of thought and political action have in common considering citizens as the center and reason for being of civic and educational life. Thus, while in civic humanism and radical democracy individual or collective identity is constituted in the symbolic order, that is, in language, comunicación/educación postulates the expressive universe of students as the axis of the inter-learning process, thanks to the great knowledge and popular knowledge.