Janaan Hashim

Radio Talk Show Host, Radio Islam

RCCongress 2010 Workshop:

Broadcast Radio: How to Get Started and Offer Quality Programs

RCCongress 2010 Panel Member:

Although professionally Janaan Hashim is an attorney, her first love (discovered during her undergraduate days) is broadcast.

Janaan has been at the helm of WCEV's Radio Islam program as a producer, host, and chair of its advisory board committee. As a host, she has interviewed a wide variety of guests including ambassadors, Nobel Peace laureates, a former Guantanamo Bay detainee, former CIA analysts and vocal critics of Islam. The two-way conversation created on Radio Islam between guests and call-ins drives Janaan each week to continue her volunteer effort to educate Americans about the often misunderstood faith of Islam.

Janaan is also an adjunct professor at McCormick Theological Seminary, team-teaching "Religious Pluralism and the Ministry."

Janaan earned her undergraduate degree magna cum laude and With Distinction from Mary Baldwin College majoring in Communications-Broadcasting and Sociology-Social Work. She earned her Juris Doctor degree cum laude from DePaul University College of Law.

Broadcast Radio: How to Get Started and Offer Quality Programs

Radio is an often underutilized tool in the broadcasting toolbox, yet can be an affordable and efficient tool in reaching a mass market.

This workshop will go through the basic steps of starting a community radio program in the nation's third largest radio market and how to set high programming goals and meet them.

The workshop will address challenges faced by producers in pulling together creative shows and proven techniques for meeting those challenges.

Cultural Diversity and Communication

In all modern societies, one of the most difficult contemporary debates is about "social cohesion" and "cultural diversity," the integration of different cultural and religious groups into an increasingly pluralistic society in which it seems harder than ever to find common ground and values. This topic is especially important to religious communicators because religion plays such an important part in shaping the identities of individuals and groups.

These issues are played out day-by-day in the media which both reflects the unfolding situation and at the same time has an important role in framing the debate and shaping perceptions, especially of minorities and other groups deemed to be "outsiders."

What, then, are the responsibilities of religious communicators within this context? How can religious communicators influence the debates about cultural diversity? To what extent is religious communication itself a problem? How have different societies balanced the demands for diversity and for cohesion? What can religious communicators from different countries learn from each other?

This panel, made up of people from different cultures and countries, will seek to open up these questions and challenge religious communicators as how best they can respond.