December 21, 2015
Spotlight on CiTR’s Women’s Collective
I spoke with Elizabeth Holliday, the coordinator of CiTR’s Women’s Collective, about the backstory behind this new programming initiative at the station. After a month on air, the collective’s members have highlighted their expansive approach to audio through their show Lady Radio. Episodes to date have included music, in-studio interviews, and interviews with UBC and Vancouver community members including Charlene Sayo of the MsRepresent podcast and musician Sarah Jickling.
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How did the idea for a women’s collective at CiTR come about? How does Lady Radio fit into CITR’s “All Our Voices” project?
The idea for a Women’s Collective at CiTR had been circulating for a while, before I got involved at the station. I know Erica Dolman, a DJ on FemConcept and the current CiTR VP, was particularly adamant about getting something like this started. But since the station is a not-for-profit and most of us are volunteers, it’s hard to have the time to get a project like this off the ground. We finally got the resources to make it happen through the “All Our Voices” project, which was started after receiving a grant from the UBC Equity Enhancement Fund. “All Our Voices” is centered on establishing three collectives – the women’s collective as well as an indigenous collective and an accessibility collective – to enhance the diversity of our programming.
There are a lot of amazing feminist women who are directly involved with running the station, but we experience the same dearth of female programmers as most of modern media, and the collective is a way to provide an entry point for women who want to be involved in radio, and help build up the community of female programmers.
After three episodes, Lady Radio has already included a broad array of interviews and reportage – how does this diversity in programming reflect the goals of the collective?
The diversity of our programming is important because the members of the collective are diverse. We all have different backgrounds and interests; we’re all coming to the show from a different place. The point of the women’s collective is to center women’s voices and issues, but as women, as people, we have different issues and different things we need to say. There is no one ‘women’s voice,’ and I hope the diversity of our programming reflects that. To an extent, we’re also just excited about and interested in a lot of different things, and it’s great to have a space where we can talk about them from our perspectives.
The show is also an explicitly feminist program, and as a feature of our feminism we know that our content can’t be limited to only certain areas. The power structures of the world touch everything. We may not be talking explicitly about feminism or ‘women’s issues’ all the time, but we’re very aware of how it plays into the different facets of everything we’re talking about.
Lady Radio airs each Friday from 6-7 PM on CiTR, UBC’s Campus-Community Radio Station. Listen at 101.9 FM or online at www.citr.ca, where you can stream live or download past shows as mp3 files. Find them on Facebook. If you are female-identified or an ally and want to get involved,
e-mail womenscollective@citr.ca for more information.