Communication Theory ISSN 1050-3293 ORIGINAL ARTICLE Citizens’ Media in the Favelas: Finding a Place for Community-Based Digital Media Production in Social Change Processes Stuart Davis Radio-TV-Film, University of Texas-Austin, TX, USA hough theories of citizens’ media ofer fruitful discussions on how to encourage marginal- ized communities to participate in media production, they oten do not consider the role of material produced in larger social change projects. Drawing on the case of Viva Favela, a digital journalism project based in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, we can see a conlict between two views on how to orient material produced locally with larger social change agendas: one that seeks to make the site a network for collaborators in favelas across Brazil and another that seeks to use it as an advocacy tool for addressing problems facing Rio’s favelas. Addressing this conlict entails reconsidering how citizens’ media projects coordi- nate between opposing interests and goals. Keywords: Citizens’ Media, Communication and Social Change, New Communication Technologies, Developmental Communication, Latin American Studies. doi:10.1111/comt.12069 his piece addresses the major contributions and potential areas for further dis- cussion ofered by the citizens’ media approach to the way community-based media production in marginalized areas can be understood and implemented. Coined by Clemencia Rodríguez (2001) and expanded upon by others (Bosch, 2010; Gumucio-Dagron, 2009), citizens’ media ofers a sophisticated theoretical framework for explaining how to empower individuals within marginalized com- munities to create media that relects the complexity of their lived experiences of subjugation or oppression (Rennie, 2005, p. 118). While many theories of alternative or community-based media struggle with deining their central terminology (Atton, 2002; Downing, 2000), citizens’ media achieves a signiicant degree of clarity through anchoring “citizenship” to a speciic body of political theory. Drawing on work by Moufe (1988) and Wolin (1989) that attempts to expand the concept of “citizenship” outside of traditional avenues of political representation and into facets of every- day life, Rodríguez (2001) lays out three fundamental characteristics: “First that a Corresponding author: Stuart Davis; e-mail: stuart.davis@utexas.edu 230 Communication Theory 25 (2015) 230–243 © 2015 International Communication Association