Caroline Mitchell

Community Radio and Transnational Identities

The area of the Transnational Radio Encounters (TRE) project that was concerned with minorities found its natural focus in community radio, an area in which the co-authors and editors of this section, both specialists in the field, collaborated. Although some minority programming can be found in the schedules of national broadcasters, community radio is the sector where the voices and opinions, for the most part ignored or misrepresented in the mainstream, can be expressed. (Mitchell 2011) Community radio, non-profit in aim, controlled by and representative of a community, can provide the space for the social, cultural and political discourses which are often echoed in, sometime deliberately linked to, places beyond national borders. Among minority ethnic groups – whether historically settled communities, or more recent refugee and migrant communities – radio encounters include connections with a homeland or with a diaspora in Europe and beyond.