Mawja Radio
Mawja Radio is a humanitarian collective founded in 2017 working with radio and sound media narratives in Jordan. The first project was Zaatari Radio, establishing a radio station in Zaatari Village in 2018. Zaatari Village is in North-East Jordan, broadcasting distance to the Civil War in Syria. There is a large refugee camp managed by UNHCR and SRAD and an informal refugee settlement that has doubled the population of Zaatari Village since 2011. Zaatari Radio is hosted at a school in Zaatari Village that provides remedial education to Syrian and Jordanian children. We use the radio infrastructure to support the curriculum at the school and offer further workshops that are creative and exploratory, utilising the enchantment of broadcasting to explore life within and beyond Zaatari Village.
Unlike the camp where many large organisations have operations, Zaatari Village as an informal refugee camp and is unsupported by NGOs on a permanent basis. The project Zaatari Radio looked to broadcast stories of migration from Zaatari Village itself. Alongside radio workshops, we have hosted exhibitions, commentary of sporting events, and worked alongside Jordanian radio broadcasters and podcasters - opportunities the children would otherwise would not have living as refugees in Zaatari Village. In 2022, the Aswat al Raseef project in Amman organised prominent regional musicians and artists around radio infrastructure to broadcast sonic ecologies of SWANA as a site of activism and resistance.
Photos by Clare Thompson
Radio has a long history of producing empowered sonic ecologies that support social organisation and reorder inequitable spatial hierarchies. I am particularly interested in how this has unfolded within London through pirate radio and the musical genres of reggae, rave, jungle, grime and drill to name a few. As with these communities that exist on the fringes of the city’s societal ordering and mainstream cultural production, the people of Zaatari Village live in a liminal space of humanitarianism in which uncertainty is shaped by near-by war, policing practices, policymakers and refugee attitudes in Jordan and Europe. This creates a violent deficit in aid and a sense of perpetual inbetweenness, insecurity and uncertainty in which futures are shaped by more powerful actors. Yet broadcasting from 97.3FM, Zaatari Radio aims to playfully interject, subvert and reimagine futures within Zaatari Village.