With original contributions from an international team of well-known experts, media activists, and promising young scholars, this comprehensive volume examines community media from theoretical, empirical, historical, and practitioner perspectives. Organized thematically, this collection explores the intersection between community media and issues of democratic theory and the public sphere, cultural politics and social movement theory, neoliberal communication policy and media reform efforts, as well as media activism and international solidarity building. Foregrounding the relationship between symbolic and material relations of power in an increasingly interdependent world, this collection examines the role of alternative, independent, and community-based media in the global struggle for communicative democracy. Understanding Community Media explores a wide range of media forms and practice. Each essay considers the particular and distinctive ways local populations make use of various technologies for purposes of community communication. Taken together, this distinctive collection provides an incisive and timely analysis of the relationship between media and society, technology and culture, and communication and community. * Features more than 35 original, cutting-edge essays * Provides a comprehensive overview of community media around the world including essays on women's video collectives in India, indigenous radio in Colombia, street newspapers in Canada, and independent media in Nigeria. * Makes a timely and important contribution to a burgeoning sub-field of media and cultural studies.