VPW, a community-access television station in Winnipeg, Manitoba, hosted an array of programming ranging from the pragmatic to the truly bizarre, from 1971 until the station was bought out and dismantled in 2001. Grassroots media does not have the same institutional and archival frameworks as its mainstream counterpart; its losses often go unremarked, or must be reconstituted and memorialized in improvisational, provisional ways. In recent years, several Winnipeg artists have begun a kind of reclamation project around the station. This paper considers the various threads of nostalgia, political economy, and decline narratives at work in VPW's reclamation. It argues that thinking about why certain things are celebrated and others thrown away is itself a problem of aesthetics, politics, and publics. It examines why certain shows are remembered and others not, and the role of unanticipated uses of public infrastructure in such a dynamic.

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This study focused on the televisual and cultural practices of Iranians via public access television in Dallas, Texas. It includes analysis of format and content. It combines demographic, structural, and statistical information with a culturalist and interpretive viewpoint in examining the efforts of Iranians, via access television programs, in preserving their culture and the formation of a coherent and active community in the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex.

Though largely overlooked in academia, Manhattan public access television became a forum that allowed a variety of behaviors, sexualities, and genders to invade a highly controlled hegemonic apparatus in the 1970s and early 1980s. In this thesis, I argue that Anton Perich’s Anton Perich Presents (1973-c.1978) and Glenn O’Brien’s TV Party (1978-1982) worked to actively queer the form and content of television. Since these shows grew from rather exclusive underground communities, I argue that the broadcasting of these fringe personalities, genders, sexualities, and behaviors to a broader, cable-viewing public formed unique queer counterpublics. I situate Anton Perich Presents and TV Party in relation to the norms of broadcast television in order to establish the limits, norms, and codes of these diverse genres and in order to ascertain viewer’s expectations of them. By positioning Anton Perich Presents and TV Party in conversation with mainstream television shows, I identify a queerness these public access shows lent to television and its viewers through their deliberate manipulations of the medium. / text

The purpose of this study was twofold. Primarily, the study was conducted to establish the extent to which the local public access television programs produced by the Wayne County Health Department, Richmond, Indiana had been an effective source of health information in helping raise health awareness for adult residents who have access to cable television. The secondary purpose of the study was to gather information for the department's future television programming. Five face-to-face interview participants and twenty-five telephone survey participants responded to seventeen questions. The questions concerned health information acquired by watching public access television programs, participants' preferences for certain health topics and formats for the television presentations, and whether they had taken any specific actions that were a result of the health related information gained through watching the public access television programs. In addition, the participants were asked about their respective demographic characteristics.The study produced two major findings regarding the adult participants' opinions or whether they obtained health information through public access television and how their demographic characteristics correlated to previous research done regarding viewing habits and the utilization of television as a source of health information.1. The majority of the Wayne County adults interviewed both in person and by telephone reported at least one piece of health information acquired by watching public access television health programs.2. The demographic findings were mixed as it pertained to some of the major research related to this study.The results of this study indicated that adult or public health educators may, where appropriate, consider the use of public access television as a method to help raise health awareness with adults. It is suggested that additional research should be done on this particular topic because of the dearth of previous research done on this specific topic. / Department of Educational Leadership