Conclusion
Radio as Community
Places of the Possible
In this dissertation, I have drawn on historical research, ethnographic fieldwork, and listening experiences to make a case for understanding 21st century U.S. American community radio as a vital and complex system with the potential to effect grassroots change in perceptions of what constitutes belongingness and the local through sonic practices and the aesthetics that emerge from them. The 2024 return of the Firehouse Follies and the 2025 WFHB fall fund drive are examples of community radio in action. They demonstrate how people use and interact with community radio in times of trouble or unrest as a means of expression, dialogue, and doing. Through it, people assert their beliefs in the events that shape their senses of place and community. They make mediated contact through music and voice and practical care. “WFHB creates an invisible community of listeners,” reads one page of the 90s pitch packet John Westhues brought me. It is a sentiment that is still at the heart of WFHB fund drive pitches and participation in the 2020s. Reads another: “The audience is… part of the conversation—not just outsiders or students in a lecture hall.” These beliefs become realized in actions and practices like those discussed in the previous chapters: exposure to new music, featuring of previously unheard narratives, improvisatory care, preservation and reuse of archives, public presentations and celebrations.
The history of community radio in the United States positions the model as a prime site and tool of counterhegemonic placemaking, at least potentially. In my introduction, I acknowledged that much of my work looks at ideals and ideologies of community radio and examples of how those emerge from and in practice. Both potentials and practices are crucial in understanding the why of 21st century community radio. Community radio is not something that people are forced to listen to en masse. Many people in Bloomington likely know little if anything about the local radioscape, much less about the non-profit community station tucked within it. Even so, WFHB has a presence that stands as an alternative to narrow ideas of the local. WFHB is a space in which there does not necessarily need to be a town/gown division, in which anyone from anywhere can theoretically come into the WFHB space and perform music or learn to broadcast or engineer with substantial creative freedom. Not everybody does, of course, and not everybody who tries ultimately enjoys it. It is a human-run organization that is constantly in flux. Not every experiment works as intended. But there is space to try.
In his 1968 work “The Right to the City” (“Le droit à la ville”), Henri Lefebvre argues that the city as object no longer exists as it has been understood and written about in the past, and the urban is instead dispersed and virtual. He argues for the adoption of new schools of thought in understanding urban and social-spatial phenomena and points to the idea of experimental utopia as one worth using, albeit with caution:
Who is not a utopian today? Only narrowly specialized practitioners working to order without the slightest critical examination of stipulated norms and constraints… Utopia is to be considered experimentally by studying its implications and consequences on the ground. These can surprise. What are and what would be the most successful places? How can they be discovered? According to which criteria? What are the times and rhythms of daily life which are inscribed and prescribed in these ‘successful’ spaces favourable to happiness? That is interesting. (151)
Lefebvre goes on to discuss the “holes and chasms” left by this apparent disintegration of urban structuring as previously understood as “the places of the possible. They contain the floating and dispersed elements of the possible, but not the power which could assemble them” (156). This metaphor translates almost literally into the electromagnetic spectrum that radio uses. In the case of radio, “holes and chasms” in the spectrum—i.e., unoccupied frequencies—are also opportunities, rarer as time goes on. Unclaimed spaces in what Berge and Kranakis have described as the “technology-dependent commons” of the radio frequency spectrum (2011, 86) provide respite from the common phenomenon of radio interference often referred to the first half of the twentieth century as “chaos in the ether” (87). Milam writes, on the other hand, that “the spectrum is as big as all outdoors—and there is a nitch [sic] here, a crack here, for those who care to try to squeeze some of the art back into radio” and, more practically, points out that “there is a portion of the FM band which has been set aside for commercial-free operations” in the United States (1975, 19). The particular nature of the radio spectrum as a resource makes all these things true. It has finite space for broadcasting operations, easy as it is to overcrowd a frequency band. At the same time, the radio spectrum cannot be ‘used up’ as many other natural resources can. When one operation goes off the air, it leaves an opening for another station to begin broadcasting on the frequency it was previously using. The deregulation of broadcasting in the United States over the last several decades has made it possible for large companies to grow larger by buying up more licenses to broadcast on more frequencies, an ability amplified by the larger companies’ abilities to outlive smaller companies. For the time being, though, there are still places in which it is indeed possible to appropriate radio space, and community radio organizations like WFHB provide the literal and figurative power needed to make use of them.
Community radio is not a utopia. There is utopian thought baked into the roots of U.S. community radio by way of the Pacifica Foundation, whose founders wanted to make space for literally every point of view on one station. Though it did not work in practice, the utopian ideal still lingers. As Howley (2003) has documented, WFHB’s mission statement included a promise of neutrality for several years, a holdover from its Pacifica influences. It is perhaps more productive to consider the role of critical utopianism in driving community radio. Muñoz writes that “critical utopianism is not borne of complacency, of an idle wishing for things to get better. It is borne of the sense of indignation one feels at the harm that is visited upon groups, individuals, cultures, ways of life, and the planet itself” (2020, 6). The locally focused parodies that restarted the Firehouse Follies were certainly borne of such a sense. So, too, are many of the day-to-day programs, the shifts in practice during COVID-19, episodes of WFHB Rewind, the Past and Present event, and most recently, the ferocity with which programmers and listeners alike approached the 2025 fall fund drive. It should not be taken for granted that critical utopianism is part of community radio; there are times and places in which such stations might be able to feel complacent. Against intensifying U.S. neoliberalism and forces of media capitalism in the 21st century, though, there is an undercurrent of critical utopianism that feels always present, to varying degrees, in the idea of sustaining a grassroots, non-commercial radio platform.
The electromagnetic spectrum is not the only aspect of the radioscape in which there are places of the possible that can be activated through practice. Calling back to the beginnings of community radio in the United States in his NARK 2 keynote speech, Lorenzo Milam offered a fundamental takeaway from Lew Hill and the Pacifica Foundation. “You think of your audience as an aesthetic whole,” he said. “You think of them as the possibility, the chance that you have to transmit the great ideas of mankind… I call it an idealization of the listener’s ear. I don’t think we should lose that.” I’ve listened to this talk many times and have gone back and forth about whether I believe he is referring to the audience as an “aesthetic whole” or an “aesthetic hole.” When I inquired via email with one of the maintainers of the KRAB Archive,[1] a largely online compilation of Milam- and KRAB Nebula-related materials, they were strongly of the opinion that Milam had meant “whole,” as he would have been more likely to refer to the audience as much than as nothing. I trust their authority on the matter. Even so, there is a resonance between Lefebvre’s writing on the potentials of “holes and chasms” and the opportunities to be found not only on the airwaves but on the ground, among those tuned in to the radio. The audience, too, is a sphere of potential, albeit one in which actors can actively participate in interpretations and adaptations as parts of the entire complex radio system, whether synchronously, asynchronously, in person, or virtually.
I close by returning once more to Lefebvre and his questions about who can and does and should take part in shaping space and indeed who has the right to the city:
…the right to the city is like a cry and a demand. This right slowly meanders through the surprising detours of nostalgia and tourism, the return to the heart of the traditional city, and the call of existent or recently developed centralities. The claim to nature, and the desire to enjoy it displace the right to the city… The right to the city cannot be conceived of as a simple visiting right or as a return to traditional cities. It can only be formulated as a transformed and renewed right to urban life. (1968, 158)
There are parallels between Lefebvre’s ideas and the ideas behind community radio, but it is worth noting at the close of this dissertation how the radioscape can exceed the urban, spatially and socially. Physical and political features of the landscape undoubtedly impact the contours of the radioscape. It can be difficult for people living in more rural parts of the south-central Indiana region to participate at WFHB to the extent that those living in downtown Bloomington can. There are nonetheless programmers and listeners all around the broadcast area. The dedicated crew of the Brown County Hour puts on an elaborate showcase every month that highlights the issues and people of rural Brown County. Having the right to the community airwaves does not necessarily mean having to choose between rural and urban life but instead offers a means of connection to a community that is not strictly delimited by such categories. The airwaves do not stop at city limits. Nor should broadcast content.
To have access to community radio is to assert a right to the airwaves and, through them, to the cities and other spaces in which they broadcast, and to do so in a way that allows for individual expression to emerge from collective values and initiatives. In Bloomington, the right to the airwaves via community radio is a right to spaces independent from Indiana University and Indiana state government, among other corporate interests. Elsewhere in the United States, this right and these practices work against other dominant structures and institutions. Because of this, such rights face powerful challenges, as the defunding of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting has shown and as have many physical and legislative attacks to community stations over previous decades.
While the first half of the 2020s has seen sizeable blows dealt to non-commercial media in the United States, the future of national and local radioscapes are always in flux. On March 31, 2026, National Public Radio reported that Judge Randolph D. Moss of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ruled that the 2024 executive order demanding the defunding of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting violated the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution guaranteeing freedoms of expression (Folkenflik and Neuman). Moss’s ruling indicates possibilities for future budgets to restore federal funding to non-commercial media, though it could not undo the damage already done in 2025. It is largely a symbolic victory, but it is one that underscores the importance of a diverse radioscape. Community radio in particular has unique affordances as a model of mass media, such as accessibility, sonic variety, and adaptability, all of which contribute to its significant capacity for producing alternative imaginaries. It takes on many shapes and serves many different functions. Through sound, it shapes its participants’ perceptions of space and society. It is a medium that opens up the airwaves and reveals them as places of the possible.
Figure 5.12: Finnish band Frigg’s album Grannen (2010), the first album I ever heard on WFHB.