Introduction

Methods

Overview

My ongoing involvement with WFHB can make it difficult to demarcate the specific temporal and practical boundaries of my fieldwork. The first formal research project I conducted with institutional IRB approval took place in the first half of 2020 as part of a required graduate seminar on fieldwork in ethnomusicology taught by Dr. Daniel Reed. When I initially undertook this project, I was still working toward my master’s degree and was not intending to study community radio in the long term. I chose WFHB as a subject because it was accessible to me as a topic on which to practice conducting ethnography, the purpose of the course assignment. The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic that year drastically upended the parameters of the class project, and my findings from it serve in part as the basis for my third chapter.

The bulk of my fieldwork for this dissertation took place in 2024 and 2025. In 2024, the Indiana University Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology granted me a summer research fellowship that was invaluable in giving me the necessary resources to spend time conducting recorded interviews with many of my WFHB colleagues and being present at the station and available to work during daytime hours. In addition to these two periods of ethnographic work and my general (and not explicitly research-related) work with the station, I have also spent considerable time during and beyond the formal fieldwork periods listening carefully to station broadcasts. I elaborate on each of these methods—interviewing, participation, and listening—in the sub-sections that follow.