Introduction

(Radio) Communities

Demarcating a community is risky in any context. Community is conceptually slippery and fraught; Raymond Williams wrote of it as a “warmly persuasive word” that “never seems to be used unfavourably” (1983 [1976]. 76). Indeed, community is frequently imagined as socially and geographically static, romantically evoking “rootedness in place, with warm and stable human relationships” (Tuan 1992, 47). Such utopian imaginaries risk “smoothing out (or erasing) the differences within groups” (Breunlin and Regis 2009, 125) to problematic ends. In 1994, Doreen Massey wrote about the longing for imagined “coherent and homogeneous communities [as] a sign of the geographic fragmentation, the spatial disruption, of our times… [and] part of what has given rise to defensive and reactionary responses—certain forms of nationalism, sentimentalized recovering of sanitized ‘heritages,’ and outright antagonism to newcomers and ‘outsiders’” (146-147). These dimensions make reifying community dangerously capable of perpetuating inequities—a reason the concept has, for many ethnomusicologists, largely fallen out of favor. It nonetheless remains “a persistent, pervasive concept” (Moylan 2023, 248) that generates “the strongest of passions” as “one of the most motivating discourses and practices circulating in contemporary society” (Joseph 2002, xxx). Community is both conceptually nebulous and affectively powerful, leaving it open to be mobilized to conservative and revolutionary ends alike. In the case of community radio, the question of what constitutes a community is central and the answers often fraught.

In the following section of this introduction, I briefly examine two dimensions of community that I feel are key to consider in studying community radio: geography and affinity. These are partial introductions to concepts that will continue to expand and morph throughout this section and the whole dissertation.