Introduction

Human Geographies

Earlier in this introduction, I pointed to geography as an important aspect of community radio communities. The relationships between place and community, of course, are fraught, as human geographers have long explored by taking critical approaches to notions of place, localism, and spatial practice. Yi-Fu Tuan has written about modern communities as based in opposition to external others “perceived as alien and hostile,” an alignment “that gives people a glowing sense of solidarity” within the intimacy of the community (1992, 49). Framed as such, local communities are fragile and dependent on processes of alienation. I have already alluded to the supposed university/town binary of Bloomington. As I will explore later on in this dissertation, the idea of this divide has been mobilized in the area for decades through media representations and actions of institutional officials, perpetuating a fragmentation that serves the interests of specific corporate powers. Tuan espouses the ideals of a truly open society in which “the ‘us-and-them’ syndrome and local chauvinism will weaken” into relatively minor differences between groups (55). There is indeed an inherent sense of difference baked into the foundations of community radio, which exists in reaction to other media and thus other senses of place. WFHB and its predecessor station, WQAX (discussed in chapter one) have specifically worked against the maintenance of such a boundary. How such reactions can take constructive directions is crucial.

A first step is to take multimodal knowledge of space and community seriously. Tuan wrote that all human senses “constantly reinforce each other to provide the intricately ordered and emotion-charged world in which we live” (2001 [1977], 11). Though Tuan ultimately struggles in that same piece to push against the sensory primacy of sight, his interest in experiential ways of knowing is an intervention against prescriptive senses of place. In much the same vein, De Certeau offers practices of presence as a means of knowledge production when he writes of walking in the city as “a process of appropriation of the topographical system on the part of the pedestrian… a spatial acting-out of the place… [that] implies relations among differentiated positions” (1984, 98). The pedestrian-as-agent transforms the space through which they move, creating palimpsest after palimpsest. The “acting-out” that takes place on WFHB’s airwaves is sonic, not confined to the urban but mobile over a variety of social-spatial formations, including imagined ones. These are performances of lived space that counter the perceived binary of “real” and “imagined” spaces by containing them all simultaneously, making for what Edward Soja wrote about as “a limitless composition of lifeworlds that are radically open and openly radicalizable; that are all-inclusive and transdisciplinary in scope yet politically focused and susceptible to strategic choice; that are never completely knowable but whose knowledge none the less guides our search for emancipatory change and freedom from domination” (1996, 70). In terms of human knowledge, there has never been a true separation between “real” and “imagined” in comprehending space. This is critical to understand in untangling the narratives of place within and against which community radio operates.

Whose imaginations of space and place, then, are given power? Doreen Massey writes in detail about the power geometry of space-time compression in her argument for progressive senses of place in which place is understood as emerging from social processes in many and often conflicting forms. It is never naturalized or isolated, but a sense “which can only be constructed by linking that place to places beyond… a global sense of the local, a global sense of place” (1994, 156). This is a more critical approach to ideas of localism and community, one necessary to make any kind of real intervention against statuses quo. Many geographers focusing on race in particular have done important and often overlooked work that understands the global forces that shape even the smallest units of geography. Camilla Hawthorne articulates a critical lineage of Black Geographies that, she notes, has centuries-deep roots often excluded from the geographic canon. Though not new, she finds it all the more important to foreground this work in the academic mainstream amid the 21^st century rise of the far right in global politics, noting that “the deadly entanglements of white supremacy, capitalism, settler colonialism, patriarchy, and heteronormativity today call for careful attention to the connections between space, place, and power” (2019, 2). One of the key figures she cites is Katherine McKittrick, who has written extensively about how Black social lives “are often displaced, rendered ungeographic” by colonial and imperial illusions of “predetermined stabilities, such as boundaries, color-lines, ‘proper’ places, fixed and settled infrastructures and streets, oceanic containers… safely secure and unwavering” (2006, x-xi). The politics of personhood have always been inseparable from senses of place. At WFHB, understanding whose narratives are valued in a given space and whose are not is crucial in order to intervene against unequal power structures. Accordingly, some of the most promising sources of engagement with such problems spring forth from the intersection of human geographies and performance studies.