Call for volunteers: Community Radio in Action Archive Project
Community radio has long been on the frontlines of intersecting movements for social justice, equity and justice. CKUT 90.3FM as a long standing community radio station has been a home for many community media makers including Stefan Christoff who, since 2000, has regularly produced materials for broadcast at the station.
Stefan’s archives are both local and international. This project aims to facilitate the digitization of the mini disc archives that Stefan has built up through activities as a CKUT volunteer. Additionally, this project will revolve around a series of community events to highlight the archived audio, promote the archive project and also create opportunities for intergenerational learning around the audio archives in question.
In the winter of 2024, CKUT will begin the digitizing of Stefan’s MiniDiscs, which essentially means transferring the audio from MD to a digital format like WAV. We are looking for volunteers interested in archival work and social justice history to be a part of this project.
The audio includes recordings from the 2001 protests against the Summit of the Americas in Quebec City (view a People’s History poster that Stefan worked on via Justseeds here), to Palestine solidarity protests during the second Intifada, to the student strike across Quebec in 2005 and major migrant justice protests post 9/11 that were key moments that led to the formation of Solidarity Across Borders and related efforts surrounding the current #StatusForAll movement. These archive materials also include a number of Arabic language interviews about the Palestinian Nakba in 1948 and the mass displacement again in 1967, interviews recorded in refugee camps in both Jordan and Lebanon.
Having these files digitized will make this important content available for presentation at a series of community events in 2024. Also this material will be shared in a series of new radio broadcasts on Free City Radio, which airs weekly on CKUT 90.3 FM at 11am, as well as shared online.
If you are interested in helping with this digitization project please write to archivist@ckut.ca, cc’ing stefan.christoff@gmail.com.
Also if you have other ideas for how to make use of or share this audio content, do not hesitate to reach out to the emails above.
