This website documents some of the outcomes arising from Dr Tanja Dreher’s Future Fellowship “Listening In: improving recognition of community media to support democratic participation and wellbeing”, funded by the Australian Research Council (FT140100515, 2015–2020).

About the project

New media forms and digital communication technologies are rapidly transforming the media landscape. The community media sector in Australia is dynamic and diverse. These parallel developments promise increasing opportunities for marginalised communities to speak up, share stories and find a voice. Yet research increasingly suggests that greater capacity for media production does not always guarantee that diverse voices will be heard.  Burgess (2006) argues, ‘The question that we ask about ‘democratic’ media participation can no longer be limited to ‘who gets to speak?’. We must also ask ‘who is heard, and to what end?’. 

This project analyses the political listening practices necessary to support the potential for voice in this changing media environment. It analyses the ways in which Indigenous and community media is heard or attended to in key institutions of the mainstream public sphere.  The project aims to contribute to community wellbeing by asking to what extent community media is heard in key mainstream institutions. Case studies examine the ways in which policymakers and journalists listen in to media produced by Indigenous, Muslim and Sudanese Australians. 

The project was hosted in the Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts at the University of Wollongong (2015 – 2017 and the Media Futures Hub, School of Arts and Media, UNSW University of New South Wales (2017 – 2020).

The full Project Report is available here.

Contact: For further details please contact Dr Tanja Dreher at t.dreher@unsw.edu.au