This article examines the participatory-democratic dimensions of community media in relationship with conflict transformation, building on the theory of agonistic pluralism (Mouffe, 2000; 2005). Focusing on the ethno-politically divided island of Cyprus, this inquiry is made through a research intervention that locates community media content production as a participatory contact zone (Torre, 2010) to explore how these potentially maximalist-participatory processes support transformations of antagonism into agonism, with an ethnographic study of a series of community media workshops that brought together Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot teenagers to collectively produce multimedia content. Findings, based on qualitative content analysis (Silverman, 2011) of the collected data, indicate that the teenagers’ participation in this contact zone generated different forms and degrees of conflict transformation at personal, interpersonal and intergroup levels, distinguished with an awareness of difference, pluralist self-identifications, and confrontation against a homogeneous view of the self, while interactions with the “other” were characterized by non-violence, dialogue and teamwork, translating into new collective identifications and alliances based on, and advocating, respect for difference. The participatory-democratic dimensions of community media production, along with the embodied knowledges, supported these transformations by fostering critical thinking, free self-expression and collaborative action on shared grounds, while giving space to conflicts, which were handled by means of self-introduced decision-making tools.
