Transnationalizing Radio Research

Front matter

Golo Féllmer, Alexander Badenoch (eds.)

NEW APPROACHES TO AN OLD MEDIUM

Golo Follmer, Alexander Badenoch (eds.) Transnationalizing Radio Research

SECTION 1: ASSERTING IDENTITY: MINORITIES’ USE oF COMMUNITY RADIO

Community Radio and Transnational Identities Caroline Mitchell and Peter M. Lewis | 33

Accented Radio in Miami and New Orleans Katie Moylan | 47

Radio, Refugees and Migrants Workshop: TRE Conference, Utrecht, 2016 | 57

You Can’t Tell My Story for Me!

Community Media as a Means of Expression in Multilingual Local and Globalized Contexts

Desi Radio by and for the Panjabi Community: Citizens’ Media, Gender, and Participation Nazan Haydari | 65

Gaywaves: Transcending Boundaries — the Rise and Demise of Britain’s First Gay Radio Program Paul Wilson and Matthew Linfoot | 73

Section 2: Transnational Communities Of Aesthetic Practice

Transnational Encounters and Peregrinations of the Radio Documentary Imagination Virginia Madsen | 83

Production and Use of Packaging Elements in Radio: Concepts, Functions and Styles in Transnational Comparison Golo Féllmer | 101

Makrolab as an Apparatus for Global Observation Heather Contant | 117

Transcultural Audio Storytelling: When German, Australian and African Voices Meet Siobhan McHugh | 125

Section 3: Staging Encounters: Translating Places And Identities

A Transnational Approach to Radio Amateurism in the 1910s Maria Rikitianskaia | 133

Radiophonic Cities The City Portrait in Transnational Radio Collaborations Jacob Kreutzfeldt | 143

European Music?

The International Broadcasting Union’s 1930s Concert Series Concerts Européens

From Enzensberger to Clausen: An Auditive Transformation Ib Poulsen | 163

Section 4: Doing Transnational Radio Research And The Digital Archive

Transnational Radio Research and the Digital Archive: Promises and Pitfalls Sonja de Leeuw | 171

Cultural Memory in the Digital Age Nanna Bonde Thylstrup | 183

Worlding the Archive: Radio Collections, Heritage Frameworks, and Selection Principles Carolyn Birdsall | 197

Radio Diffusion: Re-collecting International Broadcasting in the Archive of Radio Netherlands Worldwide Alexander Badenoch | 209

Promising Prospects, and the Hurdles Along the Way: Sharing and Archiving Community Media Content Online Joost van Beek | 223

SECTION 5: DiciTAL RADIO LANDSCAPES — TRANSNATIONAL CHALLENGES, NATIONAL SOLUTIONS?

Making DAB Work: New Opportunities for Digital Radio in Europe Lawrie Hallett | 233

Opening up the Debate: Irish Radio, Facebook, and the Creation of Transnational Cultural Public Spheres Daithi McMahon | 247

New Radio and Social Media: Public Service Radio Forms of User Participation and Inclusion Per Jauert | 257

The Role of Boundary Objects in Collaborative Radio Production Bruce Berryman | 271

Researching Podcast Production — an Australian Podcast Study About Women and Work in Are We There Yet?

Mia Lindgren | 283

Surveying International Public Radio: Some Practical Insights David Fernandez-Quijada | 293

OUTRO

The Future of Radio Studies Michele Hilmes and Mia Lindgren | 301

New Encounters with an Old Medium

Alexander Badenoch and Golo Féllmer

Over the course of the last decade, radio scholars have increasingly demonstrated that radio has long been entwined in networks and relationships beyond those framed by nations — and that even the national structures of radio were formed in transnational processes (Hilmes 2004, 2012; Fickers 2012b; Lommers 2012; Cronqvist and Hilgert 2017; Vaillant 2017). Building on these insights, as well as results of current state-of-the-art research, Transnationalizing Radio Research presents a theoretical, methodological and historical guide to ‘going transnational’ (Saunier 2006) in radio research. It explores various key transnational arenas, issues, and encounters that structure, and are structured by, radio. For radio scholars, it aims to provide both inspiration and concrete tools for breaking through the methodological nationalism that in many ways still structures our research. For scholars and students in related disciplines, this book provides insights and tools that will allow them to incorporate radio’s vital voices into their broader investigations of transnational institutions, communities, histories and identities.

There were, and are, of course good reasons for framing radio research nationally, especially in Europe. National institutions have remained important players in media industries, and nations have provided important frameworks. When it comes to methods, it was also a question of relative ease. Before the digital revolution, most sources could only be accessed on site: transnational research often meant international travel; knowing your way around the relevant archives was not an easy task for a foreigner; and in certain cases access is still today only granted to locally employed scholars, at least on a manageable and affordable basis. Even more importantly, it often proved so much easier to approach a question if you had a natural understanding of the radio landscape in which your subject was located, that is: if you had grown up in the midst of its structural conditions, listening to it and thus acquiring an intuitive understanding of its workings and specificities. After all, as Michele Hilmes pointed out, since radio’s original conditions were defined in an era of nationalism, “state/public broadcasters defined their mission as promoting, protecting, and producing their own distinct national identities through the means of radio programming, carefully addressing their own national publics and screening out unwelcome, foreign influences.” (Hilmes 2004: iv) Above all, of course you had to speak the local language at a high level in order not to run into misunderstandings.

Given such difficulties, why take a transnational approach all? The simplest answer to this is that we live — and have lived — in a transnational world, and radio is intricately interwoven within the various transnational flows that structure it. Our communities and experiences, our mediated and material surroundings, not to mention many of the major issues filling our newspapers and public debates, all reflect connections that span across national borders. Nearly two decades ago, David Hendy (2000) spoke of “Radio in the Global Age” — but of course radio has been implicated in many globalizing arenas since its earliest years.

The transnational historian Pierre-Yves Saunier (2013) highlights three characteristic uses of transnational approaches, each of which has specific counterparts in the study of radio. First, it asks specific questions about the rise, change and occasional demise in connections between different communities, polities and societies — to which we could fruitfully add ‘audiences’ — to start to give “an empirical answer to what is, and when was, globalization”. (Saunier 2013: 3) Translating this concern to radio studies, it means developing and maintaining a view of radio as a rich ecology entwined on multiple scales, through which a number of relationships can be traced. What things actually travel on a global scale? Who does ‘the global’ really reach and in what form? Second, because transnational approaches focus on exchanges, flows and projections across the boundaries of the entities often considered ‘natural’ units of analysis (the city, the nation, the continent, the globe), they help us to gain a much subtler view of what actually makes up these entities as structures, processes or experiences. What does it mean, at any given point in time and space, to be ‘national’ in the first place? Quite apart from the study of nations, this also helps us to come to grips with the medium of radio as well. As scholars have pointed out increasingly during the last decade, a transnational approach to radio research helps identify more precisely the medium-specific qualities of radio, since only the greater picture of different local, regional, national or continental radio cultures in comparison enables researchers to evaluate whether their observed standard is specific to the medium, and not primarily for instance to a specific social or political sphere.

A transnational perspective also helps identify peculiarities which would not catch one’s eye (or ear) without a comparative approach. Taking a transnational perspective can also alert us to the ways practitioners themselves come to cross-cultural understandings of what the medium is and does, as in the interactions between the BBC and US broadcasters (Hilmes 2012) the European Broadcasting Union’s (EBU) radio program committee (Badenoch 2010). Zeroing in on such discussions raises a third aspect: transnational research opens up our analytical eye to patterns, organizations and people who have moved beyond and between those entities we normally take for granted and renders them visible. We are able to “recover the history of projects, individuals, groups, concepts, activities, processes and institutions that have often been invisible [...] because they have thrived in between, across and through polities and societies.” (Saunier 2013: 3) Such actors and stories often take place beyond the margins of what often appears as ‘mainstream’ or hegemonic stories of broadcasting, and are especially prone to ‘disappear’ when they belong to ethnic or linguistic minorities, but also groups often under-represented in broadcasting, such as women. (Mitchell 2015; Skoog and Badenoch 2016; Birdsall 2017) There are a vast number of phenomena in radio which are transnational by nature, whether broadcasting and listening to international services via shortwave programming and listening (not to mention international broadcasters sharing audience research methods and data, eg. Zöllner 2005, and Quijada in this volume), community radio stations for diasporic or refugee communities, online radio distribution via stream and podcasting, the travel of program content and aesthetic practices, or peculiarities like collaborative productions across borders.

ALWAYS ALREADY TRANSNATIONAL

In talking about radio as an ‘old’ medium, as we do in the title, we run both the risk of speaking of it as irrelevant or old-fashioned, or instead of harkening back to a specific, essential era of its existence when its form and meanings were fixed. (Lacey 2009) This ‘essential’ era tends to be the ‘classical’ era of radio, between its full social embedding as a point-to-mass medium, mostly received through loudspeakers (as opposed to headphones) in the home, and the advent of television. In Europe, this is roughly 1930-1960. Radio in this era is then often seen as serving the purpose revitalizing senses of the nation as an “imagined community” in Benedict Anderson’s (1991) famous idea of a group of people imagining each other stepping forward together in time, and indeed strongly synchronizing the boundaries of the home with the boundaries of the nation, though in complicated ways (cf. Lacey 1996; Morley 2000). In other words, the very idea of the medium is bound up with the nation. Making radio ‘old’ by looking at it in longue durée through a transnational lens can quickly alter that idea. When radio first came into being — which it did in multiple forms, times and places (Ernst 2012; Balbi/Natale 2015; see also Rikitianskaia in this volume) — it was a technically obvious, but nevertheless a culturally baffling observation how effortlessly it crossed national borders, and how easily it covered and linked remote parts of the globe. The idea of radiogenic (or radiophonic)

B communication across geographical and cultural borders developed into utopian visions, into experimental wireless settings and into regular broadcasts, initiated to enable encounters of unusual qualities and to allow access to formerly unreachable sources of information and auditive experience. Utopian visions of radio uniting the world beyond borders have never been far away.

The BBC’s international guide World Radio speculated that after the First Word War international broadcasting had “broken down countless decrepid [sic] and dangerous barriers” and looked to the medium to create a new, peaceful generation of world citizens, particularly through children’s broadcasts.

By means of Continental relays the Children’s Hour could become an hour of preparation for world citizenship. First-hand knowledge is the best means of promoting interest, and the child mind is so receptive when it is interested. Radio can bring this interest to the children, and with it the thought that the spirit of world friendship is growing stronger. (“World Citizenship and Radio” 1926)

Rudolf Arnheim famously emphasized the invigorating aesthetic experience and immediacy of vocal encounters, bringing foreign sounds and voices unusually close, allowing the listener to approach the source’s intimate personal sphere: “This is the great miracle of wireless. The omnipresence of what people are singing or saying anywhere, the overlapping of frontiers, the conquest of spatial isolation, the importation of culture on the waves of the ether [...]” (Arnheim 1936: 14). Arnheim found great pleasure in the wireless world of transnational culture, where one could listen to pure sound and tune in to foreign national cultures: “If one listens in to an Italian station, one can still experience how speech sings.” (Arnheim 1936: 31). This transnational promise of radio was materialized — if not always realized (Falkenberg 2005: 186) — during radio’s ‘classical’ era in the form of tuning dials featuring foreign cities (Fickers 2012a). In his 1995 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, for example, the poet Seamus Heaney credited such a dial, along “those first encounters with the gutturals and sibilants of European speech,” he discovered from turning it, “even though I did not understand what was being said,” with starting him on “a journey into the wideness of the world beyond.” (Heaney 1995) Radio, then has come with the promise of listening in to intended voices from over borders, but also to do what Kate Lacey called listening out: “an attentive and anticipatory communicative disposition” toward the broader unknown world. (Lacey 2013: 8)

Still decades later, the world of shortwave listening was still deeply rooted in this optimistic longing. As Grundig’s ‘shortwave primer’, designed to market the firm’s models at the beginning of the 1980s, remarked,

We have to learn to understand each other better by communicating better. Listening to radio internationally: that builds bridges between peoples and continents. That means: news and commentary the way foreign countries perceive them. Or language lessons directly from the Motherland. (Grundig Kurzwellenfibel, 1980: 3, translated by the authors)

Even while these grand visions of a connected, mutually attentive globe were being articulated, radio itself was increasingly taking on a material form (point to mass) and institutional structure (broadcasters and regulatory frameworks) that allied broadcasting closely with nations and nationalisms. Nevertheless, transnational aspects of radio continued in parallel, interwoven with national aspects, even as the medium evolved. As national broadcasting was being re-established after the Second World War, cross-border reception was simultaneously re-formulated as a human right rather than a diplomatic provocation (cf. Hamelink 1994; Spohrer 2013). UNESCO’s first director-general Julian Huxley insisted (somewhat in vain) in an urgent telegram to the powers discussing use of the shortwave band in 1948 that it was “uniquely adapted to free flow of ideas across borders [...] Universally accepted high frequency broadcasting plan is prerequisite to right of listeners everywhere to be informed about each other.” (Huxley 1948, emphasis added) Beyond such explicitly transnational spheres, even the national systems of broadcasting were constantly shaped, challenged and contested by various transnational forces. When faced with commercial challenges, public service broadcasters in bodies like the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) and its pre-war predecessor the International Broadcasting Union (IBU) have turned constantly to transnational exchange and major simultaneous events to improve the quality of their offerings. (cf. Fickers and Lommers 2010; Badenoch 2013; Kreutzfeldt and Michelsen in this volume) As Caroline Mitchell and Peter Lewis outline here, transnational migrant and diasporic communities not served by either public service or commercial institutions have fruitfully turned to local community radio to foster new forms of participation and give voice to transnational communities and cultures. (cf. Lewis 2008)

This admittedly very Euro-centric historical sketch of some of radio’s recurring transnationalisms highlights the fact that radio’s transnational dimensions tend to be even more ‘invisible’ (Lewis/Booth 1990) than then ‘regular’ radio. As Jacob Kreutzfeld points out in this volume, drawing on the work of Arjun Appadurai (1996), radio has thus always been key in not just in imagined communities, but helping to form imagined worlds within various global mediascapes. Thus, as we will see, exploring the transnational aspects of radio requires a certain degree of ‘un-learning’ what we take for granted about radio and rethinking some of how we study it. With this book, we want to offer a conceptual and methodological toolkit for doing just that. Though broad in its focus, it neither intends to present a single global history, nor a single theoretical framework, nor a complete cross-section of the diverse and incredibly fluid global radio landscape today. We would argue that the need to carefully situate radio demanded by a transnational approach would actually militate against such a single frame. Instead, it identifies a number of vital phenomena and questions touching upon the parallel national and transnational development of radio in its history and in its different facets and explores them through a number of conceptual overviews and an empirical case studies.

TRANSNATIONAL/RADIO/ENCOUNTERS

Even two decades ago, the term ‘transnational’ was already seen to be booming in academic scholarship — and indeed proliferating into a range of meanings and phenomena (Vertovec 1999) and indeed, as Kiran Patel (2015) has stated, historians who picked up the term were late to the discussion. Aimed at grasping the implications of transborder, globalizing flows, the term aimed to describe, variously, spatially dispersed diasporic communities, new forms of hybrid cultural belonging, the transborder reach and flow of capital and commodities, not to mention media content and a broad range of phenomena. Radio intersects with each one of these ‘transnational’ things in different ways: as a medium capable of quickly transcending national borders that can address geographically dispersed communities simultaneously; as a mode of cultural production based on both sound and language that can strengthen local bonds within transnational communities; as transnational institution (even when rooted in a nation or local community) generating transnational communities of practice and standardizing transnational sounds.

So in ‘transnationalizing’ our view of radio, we are explicitly broadening the horizons of what can be studied with radio, but also of the radio itself. Already a decade ago, reflecting on what was then a decade of radio studies, Kate Lacey insisted that the importance of studying radio lies not in placing it at the center of the inquiry, but in radically de-centering the radio. This means above all the refusal to treat ‘radio’ as a discrete object, but to accommodate its porous and shifting boundaries, be that in terms of its technologies, its institutions, its texts, or its listeners. It is also an argument about contextualizing ‘radio’ in the broadest terms, understanding how the discourses of broadcasting have been interwoven with — produced by and reproducing — discourses of technology, class, gender, nation, public and private, sense perceptions and so on. (Lacey 2009: 22)

Relating this to the idea of transnational radio, rather than taking an a priori view of an ‘essence’ of radio, a transnational approach follows the way that transnational flows move through, shape, and are shaped by radio. To put this another way, just as our perceptions of ‘nation’ and ‘culture’ are observed to open up under a transnational lens, so does the concept of ‘radio’ itself. Once it was largely defined through its specifics of signal distribution via electromagnetic oscillations emitted and received terrestrially via antennas, through its one-to-many communication principles and through the use of a dedicated device for reception. The historians and media archaeologists mentioned above — not to mention contemporary observers (Brecht 1979) — have pointed out that none of these forms were either technological necessary, entirely exclusive of other forms, or uncontested in their becoming. Meanwhile, large market- and usage-related advantages of online distribution via audio streams and podcasting as well as new technical possibilities to realize participative, many-to-many approaches in radio production widen what once was radio to a larger set of media products, data formats and receptive uses. To put this another way: access to the means of sound production and distribution, and arenas of participation has never been greater. Software on literally any digital communication device can form a receiver, thus multiplying, mobilizing and modifying radio uses, for instance through options to personalize programming and radio listening time schedules individually.

The occasional breadth, bordering on to vagueness, of the term ‘transnational’ can be fruitful for exploding taken-for-granted categories as outlined above, but it does not always do more precise conceptual work in helping us to conceive of what is at stake in the encounters of radio. The authors assembled here offer many more precise tools, but here we want to briefly outline the concept of ‘transculturality’ in capturing and understanding these encounters. In the course of extending Benedict Anderson’s challenge of the concept of nationality into the sphere of radio, ‘transculturality’ serves as a helpful concept to differentiate many encounters staged by radio. Wolfgang Welsch (1999) sketches the term as an answer to modernity’s concepts of a) ‘interculturality’, which, in his eyes, acknowledged cultural differences, but failed to offer any solutions for integrating them, and b) ‘multiculturality’, which objects to the desire to delimit national cultures from each other, but holds tight to the ideas of detached cultural spheres and an ethnic foundation of culture, which cannot be overcome from within itself. As it has been shown, historical radio structures built around the idea of unique national identities did indeed tend to deny the tremendous degree of horizontal and vertical cultural differentiation within nation states as well as the strength of transcultural connections through the many traces of migration, social or generational bonds and communities of interest and style. A transcultural approach, in contrast, regards open-ended interaction with foreignness to be at core of a constructive approach to cultural encounters, following Wittgenstein’s dictum of culture as a shared way of life (Welsch 1999). Describing processes that produce what has been termed ‘soups’ — synthetic conjunctions — as opposed to ‘stews’ — additive mixtures —

(Antweiler 1999), many cases of radio culture observed in this volume turn out to represent elements of a ‘lingua franca radiophonica’, mediating in varied ways between different nations and cultures.

But, where, precisely, do we find such moments and processes? Decades of transnational research not necessarily focused on radio has generated fruitful debates on ways in which the study of the transnational can be localized and studied in its interwoven complexity, either by following transnational flows to multi-sited research, or by pinpointing vital points of contact and exchange. (Vertovec 1999) In that sense, a transnational approach can also imply a narrower empirical focus on points of contact in single buildings, such as the BBC World Service’s Bush House (cf. Gillespie and Webb 2013), the microphone and phone-in interface of a single community station (cf. Moylan 2013 and in this volume), or the behind-the-scenes work of broadcasting archive, as outlined in the work of Carolyn Birdsall (2017 and in this volume). It is precisely this situatedness of transnational flows that we seek to capture in the idea of a transnational radio encounter.

This book grows out of the collaborative — and itself transnational — research project Transnational Radio Encounters (TRE), funded under the Humanities in the European Research Area (HERA) joint research program (transnationalradio.org). This exploratory project examined radio’s transnationality across various technological and institutional forms of broadcasting (public service, community, and international services, among others) in a range of times. The common ground of these projects involved exploring transnational radio encounters across three realms of inquiry. Aesthetics and territoriality involves the intersections between auditory expression and feelings of belonging evoked by radio. It is concerned with auditory performance of radio is constructed to express territorial belonging or otherness, how culturally specific auditive styles are developed and maintained. Infrastructures and public spheres concerns how both technical and institutional aspects (ownership, access, training) of infrastructures shape spaces of participation. How and where do transnational spaces emerge? How do ideas of public service operate at local, national and transnational levels, and among diverse populations within increasingly globalized mediascapes? What kinds of infrastructures support or constrain the emergence of minority communities in radio? Finally, considering radio in its aspect as archive and cultural memory, means asking how archival practices preserve or erase transnational radio encounters, and how might archival knowledge be networked to restore such aspects? How can the increased availability of archival material be used to generate new transnational spaces of dialogue? As scholars begin to think increasingly in terms of transnational memory (De Cesari and Rigney 2014), broadcasting archives have nevertheless been central to practices of national cultural memory. The chapters here assembled draw both on the research of the project members as well as participants in its three workshops, as well as the Radio Conference Transnational Forum held in Utrecht in July of 2016.

THE BooK SECTIONS

Developing on the basic questions from the TRE project outlined above, the book is structured a number of areas of enquiry that emerged over the course of research and transnational dialogues over the course of the project.

Section1: Asserting Identity: Minorities’ Use of Community Radio

Since the birth of the Italian free radio movement in the 1970s, which spread in various forms throughout Europe and beyond, community (sometimes pirate) radio has offered an alternative voice to groups not always well-served in the public service or commercial radio sector. This section highlights the ways in which often-marginalized transnational communities use community radio to create on-air and local spaces where their experiences are given central meaning.

Peter Lewis and Caroline Mitchell give an overview of their participatory action research (PAR) with a number of radio stations serving black, minority and ethnic communities in Britain and other parts of Europe. They engaged communities directly with the issues outlined above: how certain forms of aesthetic practice, including language, helped to carve out spaces apart from mainstream media, what barriers to access and participation presented themselves, and how such communities or stations archive the stories and experiences of communities they articulate in daily practice.

Katie Moylan shows how Hamid Naficy’s notion of ‘accented’ cultural production can be specifically adapted to critically examine “accented radio” practices of marginalized and minority groups on community radio. Presenting case studies from community radio in the USA, she shows how aspects of community radio such as spoken accent and fluid flow between two languages serve to give voice in real time to the experience of the transnational community.

Judith Purkarthofer reports on a workshop looking specifically at the use of community radio in addressing recent migrants and refugees. The workshop itself gave voice to migrant practitioners from a number of countries who through their stories and experiences gave a rich sense of the work that radio can do for welcoming migrants, in ways ranging from practical knowledge of host country institutions to giving migrants themselves a voice and a ‘visibility’ within society that can be vital at what can be a “key moment of doubt” in their place in society.

Nazan Haydari explores the entanglements of gender and Panjabi identities in her study of Desi radio, a community radio station in London. Drawing on the citizen’s participation framework, her study focuses less on the media products themselves as the participatory practices, and here explores the various ways in which women use the radio to bridge the divisions of caste, religion, and gender among Panjabi speakers, and shape new identities as a community within them.

Paul Wilson and Matthew Linfoot take up a different set of transnational entanglements of marginalized communities in their case study of Gaywaves, a short-lived but seminal program on pirate radio in the UK in the early 1980s. They situate the program richly within the international experiences both of the pirate radio movement, as well as the gay activist movements, over against a local and national media landscape that was essentially closed to gay representation beyond stereotypical characters They show how the program provided a window onto a transnational community in the localized setting of London.

Section 2: Transnational Communities of Aesthetic Practice

Increasingly, scholars have turned to teaming up transnationally when it comes to researching aesthetic practices in radio, be it original radio art focusing on the inner workings and sensual appearance of radio itself, or forms of factual or fictional storytelling in radio feature, or radio drama and podcasting, or everyday radio’s aesthetics as incarnated in jingles, the radio hour’s build-up and the technical design of voices or the broadcast signal.

Regarding the radio documentary as a genre with large influences on radio in general, Virginia Madsen explores how the documentary imagination in radio developed historically across, and within, a range of broadcasting cultures, highlighting narrative and aesthetic strategies in ‘feature’ and audio documentary productions from the 1940s to the 1970s with a focus on the significant influence of the BBC. Madsen tracks central figures, institutions and conceptual influences, foremostly from documentary film, and characterizes the feature as a central field of experiment in radio and a form especially close to the outer world.

By questioning 21 experts from five countries about their terminology, concepts and work procedures in ‘packaging’ (or ‘imaging’, that is the use of ‘jingles’ etc.) individual radio programs, Golo Féllmer discusses in how far radio stations design their sound aesthetics along national traditions, or whether they are more likely to follow transnational fashions. He goes on to identify three central functions of packaging and concludes that this omnipresent practice is much more than self-promotion or branding of a radio program, since it offers a range of crucial elements for the orientation of listeners in the program.

Heather Contant reflects on the nature of radio waves surrounding us from all corners of the world, indeed transnationally and in fact even transplanetarily. She analyses the unique example of Marko Peljhan’s Makrolab, a mobile art project travelling around the globe from 1997 to 2007 in order to collect all sorts of radio waves, atmospheric events and psychic moments. Contant shows how artistic investigations into the nature of electromagnetic waves, including aesthetic outputs like a music CD based on the recordings from Makrolab, offer opportunities to reflect on the cultural and political uses and impacts of transnational radio transmission and reception.

Turning to today’s most vital developments in radio storytelling, Siobhan McHugh discusses influential traits of present day radio feature, bearing in mind the success of its youngest offspring, the podcast. She describes how an originally German feature by Jens Jarisch underwent changes when adapted to the new cultural surrounding of the Australian feature tradition, for instance by replacing narrators typical for the German style by alternative formal elements. McHugh shows how the process of translation, bearing elements of transculturation, implies a transformation which contains the potential for aesthetic development and growth and encourages transnational exchange.

Section 3: Staging Encounters: Translating Places and Identities

From the earliest years of radio broadcasting, international collaboration, particularly in programming, has been a staple of the landscape. This immediately raises the questions of how — and as what — to make radio, and radio programs, intelligible to a transnational audience. As noted above, broadcasting federations such as the IBU before the Second World War, and its successor, the EBU, developed a number of program exchanges. This is only one level of exchange, however — sometimes individual programs have traveled, sometimes bilateral exchanges dominated, and sometimes, it was notions of radio itself that traveled. This section explores on various levels how identities and affiliations were worked out on sonic and discursive levels as radio traveled over borders.