Chapter 3: Radio as Collective Improvisation

Airborne Transmissions

The first confirmed case of COVID-19 in Indiana was reported on March 6, leading state governor Eric Holcomb to declare a public health emergency. Many institutions throughout the state followed this example, with school districts and universities in particular cancelling in-person classes in favor of online classes (King 2021). On March 10, the last week of in-person classes before Indiana University’s scheduled, week-long spring break, university president Michael McRobbie advised all students, staff, and faculty to prepare for two weeks of remote, virtual instruction following the end of spring break, asking students traveling home to remain there until in-class teaching resumed.

I was enrolled that semester in Fieldwork in Ethnomusicology, a required seminar for ethnomusicology graduate students in the Indiana University Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology. Under the direction of Dr. Daniel Reed, each enrolled student spent the first weeks of the semester discussing histories and theories of ethnography and developing individual small, locally based projects to develop and practice our fieldwork skills from IRB approval to scholarly analysis. As the pandemic’s impact on daily life grew more pronounced, we were all forced to adjust our plans. My intended project, an investigation into the experiences of WFHB Youth Radio programmers hoping to understand how younger participants make meaning under the auspices of a so-called “old” medium, took on a new and more urgent dimension as the station faced the same unprecedented existential threats as the rest of the world.

Because I was conducting this fieldwork project, because of my long and varied tenure with WFHB, and because my partner, Jar Turner, was (and, at the time of this writing, still is) the station’s general manager, I was in the unique position of being one of the two people present at the radio station on the evening of Saturday, March 14, 2020. Taking his cues from Indiana University and other community stations in the U.S. Midwest, Jar had already made the decision to halt live programming indefinitely in keeping with recommended protocols to minimize the spread of COVID-19. Because of spring break, it was already an unusual weekend; the Youth Radio coordinator, an IU student, had planned to be out of town and to run pre-recorded programming during the usual 6-10 p.m. Youth Radio block. It was an opportune time for us to go to the station’s physical premises and shut them down.