Introduction

On Position

During our interview, one of my WFHB colleagues referred to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle in giving me a piece of semi-cautionary advice about conducting my research:

With the electron, you can know its position exactly. You can know its, what’s the word, spin exactly, but you have to make a choice. You can’t know them both exactly. You get to choose. And then the corollary is, the scarier one is, that the electron has position, it has velocity, it has spin, it has charge—charge is sort of a given—it has mass, whatever. If you measure it, it does. If you don’t measure it, those things do not exist, it does not have those properties. The process of measuring it is invasive and determinative. As soon as you measure something, then you’ve determined what it is going to be or what it was at that moment. And that’s a definition that actually changes reality. Reality before then was amorphous… the danger with researching non-vertical organizations or things that operate by organic good feelings and vibes is that once you start interviewing everybody and measuring it and trying to define it, you destroy it, or you fix it in time so that it doesn’t naturally morph the way it’s supposed to morph. (Interview 20)

In conducting this research and writing about the shapes and scapes of radio—the perspectival constructs—I am imposing my own views and imaginaries on an organization within which I am embedded but which is not mine. I find the comparisons with which I frame each chapter useful as I try to package some of my experiences with community radio for the purposes of this dissertation. It may, though, be worth stating the obvious: none of the accounts here are or can be complete or objective. As I write, I have to select what details I wish to include and thus determine the reality I depict. Sound and practice do not translate perfectly into written word. To transcribe and analyze the details of semi-structured interviews as fact is de rigueur for ethnography and yet unnatural as a way of handling conversation. Even in discussing ethnographic case studies, I spend much of this dissertation writing in terms of community radio ideals and WFHB’s values, knowing that there is never going to be a perfect one-to-one correlation between these and the actions that emerge from them.

There is a tendency in literature, media, and other public forms of discourse to romanticize community radio tied to the tendency to romanticize community. When I first began this dissertation, I wanted to rectify this by taking a decidedly more critical point of view. I am not interested in perpetuating a falsely positive narrative of a mass media communication model, even one with which I typically find myself politically and ideologically aligned. When I began formally conducting fieldwork for this dissertation, the station was in an especially prosperous era, with more staff, money, and operational vigor than in recent memory. Emergency funds received during COVID-19 (discussed in chapter three), a federal government willing to support the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, an influx of new volunteers, and a greater emphasis on financial planning (we hired a full-time development director in 2021) meant WFHB was building forward, an unusual position for a small, non-profit operation. Many of the colleagues I interviewed in the summer of 2024 said that they believed WFHB had never been in better shape. When the U.S. presidential election in November 2024 ushered in a Republican majority on the federal level and it became evident that federal CPB funding was likely near an end, though, this changed. While I still do not want to reify the “good vibes” with an uncritical description of the station’s operations, I also have no desire to destroy them outright. As such, I temper my critique with my belief in WFHB as deserving of support. Right now, WFHB and non-commercial stations around the country are facing existential threats the likes of which seemed unthinkable until recently. The most urgent question for researchers and practitioners at this moment is not about improvement, but basic survival. This, to me, is a more important purpose for my research at this time. I hope, but do not expect, that there will be room for constructive criticism in the near future.

I should close this introduction with a direct acknowledgment of my relationship to the station and its impact on my work as a scholar, which I hope will clarify my position without fixing it too rigidly to allow me to serve as a somewhat reliable narrator of my own experiences. Earlier in this section, I told the story of my first encounter with community radio, which I imagine makes clear the fact of my emotional attachment to WFHB. I want to emphasize this connection even further. WFHB is how I first came to know Bloomington. It was in the WFHB studios that I first learned about Indiana University’s ethnomusicology program. It was on the WFHB airwaves that I began to conquer a deeply rooted insecurity about the sound of my own voice. As I navigated my first years living thousands of miles from home, I was able to stay connected with friends and family who listened to my programs via the WFHB webstream. In 2016, when I left Bloomington for what was, at the time, meant to be a permanent move out of the country, WFHB personnel gave me the warmest sendoff. When I moved back in 2017, I stepped off an airport shuttle and straight into the station, where I was immediately asked to step in as a last-minute substitute for a no-show programmer. My experience with WFHB has helped me get jobs. My partner works at WFHB. My colleagues at WFHB have helped me move. They have driven me home from medical procedures. I can’t begin to imagine my adult life without WFHB, nor do I want to. This is not because my experiences at WFHB have been uniformly easy—I have been present for some of the station’s most turbulent times, in addition to its most prosperous—but because it has informed so much of my worldview in these ways and in others perhaps best left undefined for the sake of maintaining at least a little of the amorphousness. WFHB as an experience cannot be bracketed from any other part of my life. Everything that follows grows, organically, from that truth.