Sasha Costanza-Chock (University of Southern California) and Amanda Garcés (Instituto de Educacion Popular del Sur de California - IDEPSCA), share lessons from ‘Migrant Voices’ — a participatory research project with IDEPSCA and the Garment Worker Center to develop new strategies for broad-based communication among low-wage immigrants in Los Angeles. The work resulted in an ongoing audio/radio content production workshop for workers at GWC. Additionally, one main finding from the study – the accessibility and multimedia potential of mobile phones – resulted in a second project, also funded by the SSRC. ‘Mobile Voices,’ an academic-community partnership between IDEPSCA and USC Annenberg, builds on the team’s previous work to research and design a platform for low-wage immigrants to publish stories about their communities, directly from their mobile phones.

In an interview with the SSRC, the project team describes their popular communication methodology and how the collaboration helped build the capacity of partner organizations.

The Power of Popular Communication

Sasha Costanza-Chock: “There’s such a rich history of different forms of popular communication -- community technology centers, public access, radio, newsletters -- and I think one of the things that’s been frustrating is that in both the mass media and the academic context, you have so much attention and visibility now to the ‘latest and greatest and best’, and it’s all framed according to a business-speak of web 2.0 media. In the past, there’s been a lot of ‘job-skill training,’ which has historically been translated in community technology centers and computer labs into, ‘We’ll teach you Microsoft Word and Excel'. And those skills are fine and valuable, but all of the people who come through those labs are not going to become office workers!" 

"I think that focusing on what people can actually do in terms of popular communication and media production could really be a better approach, and resourcing that could be really important.”

Amanda Garcés: “As an organizer, it was extremely helpful that I could envision the role of this new technology in our daily work. I see now how important it is to be able to show our own stories. Because even though we do this at IDEPSCA, we do it on a very small scale, and these technologies are letting us grow. If the anti-immigrant movement is using technology to detect our day laborers or our immigrant community, how are we contrasting that? Looking at it from the political context that we’re living, that’s why it was powerful. It was so empowering for the workers to be able to just have the digital recorder at GWC, and I think that’s one of the things we showed: these are people who don’t know how to read and write, some of them, who are empowered in using these technologies.”

Research Needs

A: “IDEPSCA is a perfect example. We’ve been doing popular communication since 1992. But for some projects, like newsletters and newspapers, we do one or two papers, and then we can’t do it anymore because we don’t have the resources. All that information that is there and that is so rich, like an archival, historical project of each organization -- of how they developed this technology, how they got from having one computer to five, which members have taken advantage of that? Who’s learning? What are they learning? -- we don’t have a way to evaluate that and what it is doing for the workers in the long-term process.”

Stories from the Field – How Do Workers Really Use ICTs?

S: “We’re constantly learning from these different groups about what it is they actually do with ICTs. In our preliminary survey with day laborers about mobile phone availability and use, one guy said, ‘Yeah, I have a mobile phone and I take pictures with it. I take a picture before I do a job, then I do the job, and then I take a picture when I’m done. Because, then, if the employer tries to short me a job, I can just show him these pictures. I have proof.’ That’s something you would never think of as a researcher. You have to actually go and discuss with people what it is they’re doing with these tools.”

Sasha also mentions a time soon after the production of the first audio CD at the Garment Worker Center, when the workers took the research initiative: 

“I left town for a week or two, and when I came back, one of the things they had done, which is something we had discussed, but hadn’t actually developed together, was the workers had created a survey of the reception of that CD – which was an evaluation! So the same workers who went and distributed the CD also asked when they went back later: Did you listen to it? And what did you like about it? What could be better on the next one? And did you learn these specific things from the CD?’ -- because there was specific information on it about labor rights and your rights during raids. So they had done about 80 of these surveys! They had gone and developed their own evaluation process and brought it back. That really impressed me a lot and was a concrete outcome of our developing this whole process together.”

Collaboration and Organizing

A: “I think for us, one of the challenges is how do we ensure that the mission and way we do our work in an organization is not being changed?  Not so much the mission, but the methodologies that different organizations use."

S: “I agree and I think that there’s always competing goals that can be really difficult to navigate – you have the goals of the two partner organizations, you have the goals of the individual researchers and organizers who are engaged, and then you have the goals of the individual workers who might be participating in the workshop, too, and that can be for different reasons. I think sometimes when we just talk about ‘the workers’ and ‘the workshops', we can forget that these are also individuals and they have different ideas about why they’re participating and what they might get out of it... But I would go so far as to say it’s the most valuable approach for any researcher who’s actually interested in understanding anything about technology adoption and appropriation – what really happens ‘on the ground’, so to speak. I just don’t think you can understand what’s happening with communication technologies and how they actually interface with people’s lives, with organizing processes, with anything, without actually going out and working with people and seeing day-to-day what really happens.”

Small Grants to Leverage Large Ones

S: “Another thing that the Small Grant did that helped us develop the next stage of the project was it allowed us to have something concrete to show and talk to potential allies about what it is we were trying to do. We see that with François and the other students at USC who have now become involved in the project and are playing really important roles in taking the research component a whole stage further. It allowed us to generate more interest and also to leverage some of the University resources to support it in a way that we never would have been able to do if we just went with our ideas about what it was we wanted to generate and said, ‘We have this vision.’ Having the Small Grant actually enabled us to do the test workshops and develop a plan, and then we had something to bring and show people.”

A: “Going back to my organizing perspective – I was never very comfortable with the researchers that go and extract information out of the places and never give anything back. This was very powerful of this collaboration: that as an organization, we knew that we felt comfortable and that we would not lose our mission just because we wanted to do this research. It’s not just researchers coming in, asking questions, writing their dissertation… and then the organization has just used resources that they didn’t have to be able to accommodate that. Instead, this collaboration that’s really committed to the mission of those organizations strengthens our work – our daily work – as well. It’s very important to be able to strengthen our organization’s capacity. It’s great to be able to have that. I’m very lucky.”