Front Matter

Abstract

In this dissertation, I explore community radio as a complex system of social, sonic, and spatial practices capable of producing counterhegemonic imaginaries of community. I take as my central case study Bloomington, Indiana-based station WFHB, an organization at which I have participated as a volunteer since 2011. Through ethnographic and archival research based largely at WFHB, I seek to understand why the “old medium” of community radio still matters to those who engage with it and how it adapts to changing local, regional, national, and global circumstances in the digital age. I argue that, as a grassroots organization that prioritizes accessibility and multivocality, community radio has radical potentials that, while not always fully realized, are critical in the 21st century media landscape. Further, I theorize the “radioscape” as a means of understanding that radio and other broadcast media are inextricable from broader social and political phenomena, emphasizing the importance of reflecting on radiophonic practices.

Each section of this dissertation focuses on a different facet of community radio work based in ethnographic and autoethnographic insights gleaned both on and off the air. I begin by situating WFHB in sociopolitical histories of broadcasting paradigms and of its primary listening audience in South-Central Indiana. With this foundation established, I listen to examples of live sessions and everyday programming for their ability to reify or provide alternatives to dominant sonic narratives of place. Cases of operational shifts during extraordinary circumstances such as COVID-19 shed light on the centrality of improvisation to community radio and the importance of this experimental nature. I establish a framework for understanding how practices of preserving and repurposing community radio archives produce knowledge and speak to the medium’s collage logics. This culminates in an understanding of how, for whom, and to what ends communities emerge from community radio.