Introduction

(Community) Radio

Radio often appears as a small part of ethnomusicological studies, typically in the forms of background or archival sounds. I have encountered studies of radio far more frequently in works situated in history-oriented disciplines like historical musicology and art history. There is crucial work to be found in such fields on the ways people have used radio over time and across the globe since its inception as a communicative technology. In anthropology, the work of Lucas Bessire and Daniel Fisher has been pivotal in arguing for new studies of “radio fields—the specific constellations of cultural, political, and socioeconomic ‘relations of force’” (2013, 364). By setting the stage for research that treats radio as sensorial experience, socially mediated object, site, technology, and world shaping force, Bessire and Fisher present a 21^st century definition of radio as “a vibrant, complex field of mediation whose durability and social power are inextricable from its technological plasticity, sensorial particularity, and always emergent character” (ibid.). Their approach is expansive enough to lend itself well to a range of ethnographic disciplines, ethnomusicology among them. Tom Western writes that the histories of ethnomusicology and radio have long been entwined, with radio long serving as a platform for musical preservation, performance, and dissemination, but that its capacities as an ethnographic site have long been neglected. He argues that the medium’s diversity as “a vector of modernity… but one always embedded in culture, and thus playing out differently in different times and places” (2018, 256) necessitates multiple ethnomusicologies of radio. It is a sensible proposition. Radio is not a single site, a single genre, or even truly a unified medium.

There are many organizational, aesthetic, and, in the digital age, technological models that can come together in each radio operation. What, then, can we take for granted in understanding the concept of radio? Ultimately, very little. Kate Lacey advises that trying to come up with a singular definition is futile. Radio, she writes, “is not just a historical or material artefact, but is, at root, an intellectual artefact” (2018, 110). The idea of radio no longer automatically indicates the use of radio waves, liveness, or even the primacy of sound. Even so, it has connotations that exceed its content, and there is an interdisciplinary body of scholarship that explores this. For example, William Boddy (2004) has figuratively excavated countless short stories centered around fictitious uses of radio in tracing early 20^th century discourses surrounding radio and the anxieties and curiosities embedded therein. Fiona Boyd (2025) has analyzed pop superstar Beyoncé’s deployment of radiophonic iconicity in GRAMMY Award-winning album Cowboy Carter as a maneuver against racial oppression in the mainstream of the U.S. country music industry and fandom. Carolyn Birdsall has written an entire book centered around the idea of radiophilia, which she defines as “the love for, or strong attachment to, radio” and in the process illuminates an immense range of radio practices (2023, 2). These social, political, and affective dimensions of radio do not point to a single definition of radio, but rather to the fact of its significance. Radio is evocative, and it is variable in what it evokes.

My dissertation focuses on examples of the community radio model, which is both slippery and galvanizing and thus does not lend itself well to concrete technical definitions. I point instead to an ethos of community radio that suggests but does not prescribe certain organizational similarities, inflected by factors of an individual operation’s immediate social context. This ethos, broadly, is one of an accessible alternative to mainstream media outlets. In UNESCO’s 2011 handbook on the subject, Steve Buckley writes of community media, including community radio, “as independent, civil society-based media that operate for social benefit and not for profit… [such media organizations] set out to create an alternative both to national public broadcasters, which are often under government control, and to private commercial media. They provide communities with access to information and voice, facilitating community-level debate, information and knowledge sharing and input into public decision-making” (7). Such an expansive understanding leaves ample space for interrogation and interpretation, surely as intended, depending on what emerges from combinations of these shared principles and the regimes of value of the specific social context that comprises a given community.