Wave Manual to Take Free Radio Into the Classroom

Interesting project in the works: Wave Manual: An Educator’s Micro FM Handbook proposes to “bridge the gap between the theoretical and practical advantages of Free Radio.”
The publication will document the use of community radio to affect sociopolitical change, drawing from the experiences of the U.S. microradio movement and the popular appropriation of radio stations in Oaxaca, Mexico.
Wave Manual plans to take these perspectives and contextualize them so that educators and students alike receive “the tools to construct and maintain a Micro FM station…as a radically democratic space that calls for and develops community participation.”
The project is ambitious as hell: Wave Manual‘s authors would like to raise $8,000 to fund their travel around the U.S. and Mexico for the purposes of ethnographic research and to cover the costs of production and publication. They’re using Kickstarter to collect pledges of support, and at that site there’s a rough introductory video about the project.
If you’re interested in chipping in, you won’t actually have to put up any cash until the funding goal is met, and they offer several creative thank-you gifts for supporters. These include things like hosting a Tetsuo Kogawa-style radio party and/or a “day of personal radio transmission in Los Angeles.”
As of now, there’s about $1,000 of pledged support. However, this hasn’t stopped Wave Manual‘s authors from commencing work, which already includes at least one trip to Mexico this summer.