Introduction

Chapters

Each of the four main chapters of this dissertation is, to again refer to Appadurai, based on a different “perspectival construct” of community radio. I imagine radio as taking different forms based on the aspects and functions I foreground. By looking at a few distinct shapes that emerge from the complexities of community radio as a scape, it becomes easier to navigate the whole of the system in which they are inextricably connected to one another. In addition to employing analogy in this way, the chapters are laced with examples from popular media and art—television, film, graphic novels, books, architecture, etc.—that I find important for what they represent as public discourses relevant to countercultural movements and radio’s role in society.

Chapter One, “Radio as Lightning Rod,” explores some of the contextual layers in which WFHB operates and the station’s relationship to them to establish the particular stakes of its existence and its position as a channel of widespread communication that should not, in theory, be subject to the influence of outside capitalist interests. I trace a history of media capitalism and broadcasting in the United States from which arise various experimental and non-commercial radio initiatives, including community radio. The community radio movement in the U.S. lays the foundation for Bloomington community stations WQAX, a breakaway operation from Indiana University’s student station, and WFHB. Through oral histories from some of my colleagues and information from archival resources, I discuss the history of these stations and in doing so interrogate the social dynamics and narratives that shape Bloomington, in particular the relationships between the university and everything “outside” of it to complicate that very distinction and the sometimes-tense connections between WFHB and Indiana University. As the chapter moves into the present day and discusses current events and discourses surrounding free speech and non-commercial media in local and national contexts, the idea of the station as independent from outside institutions becomes crucial, especially as the station faces natural disasters and political attacks. This historical account begins to address questions often posed to me as a radio scholar: who still listens to radio, and why?

I delve deeper into WFHB’s day-to-day operations in Chapter Two, “Radio as Resonance Chamber.” Here, I invoke architect Juan Navarro Baldeweg’s concept of a physical resonance chamber and others’ implementations of the concept to argue for the idea that WFHB as a community radio space offers new senses of local place through sonic practices that produce expansive aural imaginaries capable of countering top-down geographies and cartographies of South-Central Indiana that often take shape in echo chambers. Not only do WFHB’s sonic practices revise imagined mapping processes, they have the potential to undo them by bringing in voices, musicking practices, and other sounds that expand ideas of what belongs on local Hoosier airwaves. Spatial elements come to the forefront as I examine WFHB’s broadcast region and narratives of space and place that resonate over the station’s airwaves. I focus on case studies that represent two categories of programming, day-to-day music broadcasts and live in-studio performances, and analyze them within a framework informed in large part by performance geographies. Against an influx of “America First” rhetoric in the state and country during the 21^st century, the presence of a resonance chamber that allows for the circulation of music and narratives from outside of the narrowly defined local and frames them as welcome in the Hoosier radioscape has, at least in theory, radical potentials—though also the potential to reify hegemonic senses of place.

Chapter Three, “Radio as Collective Improvisation,” engages with WFHB’s sounds and sonic practices in minute detail. After analyzing public discourses of improvisation, liveness, and automation in radio and the sociocultural implications of such spheres of practice, I identify relation and experimentation as key values shaping community radio practices. Through these values, I connect community radio to improvisational musicking broadly. I frame improvisation as a practice of emergence, a phenomenon characteristic of complex adaptive systems, and thus follow a throughline from ethics to aesthetics in radio that allows me to theorize even the most minute sonic irregularities—technical glitches, operator errors—as expressions of community radio ideologies. The significance of the sonically unexpected becomes especially vivid when I examine WFHB’s response to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, which involved multiple major logistical and sonic shifts noticeable on the air. While these shifts often resulted in undesirable aural experiences, I argue that, as improvisatory acts on various scales of time and magnitude, the early pandemic-era textures of the station’s output also signaled community care, embracing foundational community radio values of accessibility and diversity through acts of relation and experimentation.

The fourth and final body chapter, “Radio as Collage Art,” brings together questions of aesthetics, inclusion, and history in a discussion of community radio archives that asks why such things might be constructed for a medium typically thought of as valuing synchronicity and how community radio operations might use them. After discussing writings on political dimensions of archives and their relationships to community and performance, I establish a framework of radiophonic archival systems of knowledge production that I derive from my own experiences with two radio-related archives in Bloomington: the Vrabely Collection at the Archives of Traditional Music, where I first began developing an archival skillset; and WFHB’s ongoing archival initiative. I elaborate on this framework, comprising archival frameworks, live broadcast events, and sound objects, with examples from my work with these collections that I see as productive encounters with space and place. This leads me to a discussion of how WFHB archival materials have been repurposed in various settings inflected by the metacommunicative phenomena of (de/re)contextualization and nostalgia in the program WFHB Rewind and in the 2025 fundraising event WFHB Past and Present, respectively. The specifics of all these collections and their uses suggest viewing radio as a collage-like art form, its practices bringing together spaces, times, and people in the form of already existing sonic and often multimodal material to express something new and to make the case for sustaining the station.

Taken together, these chapters aim to offer a multidimensional perspective on the complex system of community radio that argues for its continued and perhaps heightened relevance as a medium of sonic social-spatial narratives in the 21^st century United States. Archival research, oral narratives, performance analysis, and firsthand participation all contribute to a case for the model as having a critical role to play in a nuanced media ecosystem. At the time of this writing, there is no sign that the federal government plans to make any changes to their decisions on defunding the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Listener support is thus more important to WFHB and similar stations than ever before in ensuring their independence from outside corporate interests, a reliance that is fraught, to say the least. It is my hope that this dissertation makes it clear that the “old medium” of community radio is still worth attention.