Introduction

Coincidences and Complexities

I first joined community radio station WFHB as a volunteer in 2011. Freshly graduated from UC Berkeley with a B.A. in Scandinavian and no intention of using it, I had attended an immersive language program in Finland and then moved straight to Bloomington, Indiana, following my then-husband to his new job teaching Finnish language at Indiana University. My first several months in Bloomington were spent unemployed and largely indoors and avoiding the intensity of Midwestern weather. I knew few, if any, people who lived in the U.S. Midwest, much less in the same town as me—not ideal in Bloomington, where, I was repeatedly told, knowing the right people was essential for finding work at the university, where the “good” jobs were.

As my job search wore on, friends suggested I seek out volunteer opportunities. It was almost unbelievably serendipitous when, in doing so, I tuned in to WFHB’s webstream and heard programmer Cindy Beaulé playing “Amurin Tiikeri,” a song by Finnish folk music band Frigg, on the Tuesday afternoon music mix. I sent a stiff email of inquiry to the volunteer coordinator, who warmly directed me to the November volunteer orientation. At the time, I had never heard of community radio and did not realize what it meant to be a volunteer at such an operation. I assumed I would be fully behind the scenes, answering phones, filing music, and performing clerical work.

By December, I was on the air.

It’s not as incredible a story to me now. I was in Bloomington because of the university, albeit indirectly, and its Finnish language program. Like many of Indiana University’s courses in less commonly taught languages, its Finnish courses (then offered through the Central Eurasian Studies Department) were the product of nationwide Cold War-era investments in language instruction with a focus on languages spoken in the U.S.S.R. and surrounding nations (Trotter 2025). Intertwined with these political lineages within Indiana University’s institutional interests at the time I arrived in Bloomington was a longstanding institutional commitment to studies of humanities and arts. As I would learn, WFHB’s existence has always been bound up in the complex system engendered and in turn shaped by such a culture of scholarship, institutional politics, and creativity. The Finnish connection, which seemed so unlikely to me in 2011, is one manifestation of this system within the complex system of Bloomington, in which various human actors have moved themselves and their experiences and knowledge between translocal nodes of university, radio station, and Finnish music scenes.

There is no shortage of such systems at play in community radio, each example of which further complicates the model and deepens the relationships between sound, space, and sociality in the community radio context. This context cannot be reduced to a single body or even a single network. Perhaps radio is better understood as an Appaduraian scape, terminology which “allows us to point to the fluid, irregular shapes” of the cultural flows that take place through/within it and places it as one of “the building blocks of… imagined worlds” (Appadurai 1996, 33). It might also fit well within Deleuzian assemblage theory, exemplifying what DeLanda explains as Deleuze and Guattari’s model of “society as an assemblage of assemblages” (2016, 37). When behind-the-scenes and on-air practices are taken into account together, community radio emerges as having elements of a commons, in which resources are shared and belong to a conception of a public. Influenced by my father’s background in computer programming, I’ve become attached recently to the idea of complex adaptive systems, which scholar John Holland characterized in the realm of computer science as involving “great numbers of parts undergoing a kaleidoscopic array of simultaneous interactions” (1992, 19). Each of these approaches has potential applications for studying radio, as I explore in more detail later in this introduction. I mention them here to explain how, in conducting ethnographic fieldwork with the intent of deepening my understanding of music making on radio through ethnography, the scope of my exploration has necessarily broadened more than I imagined it would, to the point that music sometimes seems to have become a small—but crucial—portion of my research, just as it has become a small-but-crucial aspect of my own radio practices.

Music is nevertheless an important spark in the radio system/assemblage/network/scape, historically and in the case of WFHB (and many of the other radio stations I mention). As an ethnomusicologist and sound studies scholar, I will spend this dissertation engaging with radio musicking, but it will never be separate from radio sounding, which will never be separate from radio sociality and spaces writ broadly. As such, I understand radio as a complex and dynamic system of social-sonic-spatial interactions and relations that is in turn contextualized by other complex systems. From the imaginative interactions specifically constitutive of the sociotechnological phenomenon of community radio, alternative possibilities for space, place, and community itself can emerge within and against ideas of what is local. Community radio allows for a sonic articulation of “a second, poetic geography on top of the geography of the literal” as articulated by mainstream media forces and dominant institutions (De Certeau 1984, 105). The systemic forces of such spatialized and ethereal worldbuilding alternatives as those presented in community radio potentially (though not inevitably) run counter to institutionalized hegemonies of many origins. Amid the rise of 21^st century authoritarianism and technofascism in the United States, it is more important—and difficult—than ever before for community radio to exist as a sonically mediated site and tool of work against top-down social-spatial narratives.

In the remainder of this introduction, I discuss community radio and some of the key dimensions of community at hand in it, explore theories of social connectedness and spatiality I have found useful, explain my methods, and then offer an overview of my following chapters.