Abstract
This piece explores radio’s potential as a space and form for autoethnography. Radio offers the possibility of random encounters and of reaching a wider (and non-academic) audience. Radio isolates and concentrates the expressive qualities of the voice and the associative meanings of sound. Radiophonic space has distinct poetic, political, and relational features that shape the quality of knowledge produced in it. A quantum space, radio is discontinuous and diffracted, much like the boundaries of a self.
Fade in: Radio static
In praise, in praise of the radio autoethnography. Our bodies don’t end with our skin (Haraway, 1991). Our bodies don’t end with our skin. There’s another way in which radio and the body . . . Our bodies don’t end with our skin. It basically frees us from the limits of how far a voice can reach. Our bodies don’t end with our skin. Radio frees us from the limits of how far a voice reaches.
Throat clearing
Radio static, melody
Autoethnography is a social science research and writing methodology that focuses on personal experience as a way of understanding cultural experience. So the autoethnographer puts a mirror on themselves.
Bringing stories and secrecy into public awareness (Poulos, 2008). So this is like a really, really public space; it’s like legally public.
Because of the random nature of tuning in,
Moving radio dial
we can reach beyond our familiar community.
Pulsing static
The nature of radio is that it’s a surprise encounter. A lot of the time, the people who are listening is going to be a surprise.
We get to isolate and really focus on the quality of a voice. There’s no visual to distract us, no smell, no body, no touch, no sweat.
Children’s voices, the sounds of their skateboards
Our bodies don’t end with our skin.
Faint accordion
Cough, throat clearing
Radio is relationship. Radio artist and theorist Gregory Whitehead (Alvarado, 2007) describes radio as a relationship between the radio producer, or artist, the listener, and the system. The system is . . .
Faint text being read about the science of antennas
Radio static
I started making radio four years ago. It was when my father died, and I let myself play in the airwaves.
Walky talky sound
Voice of father: “You know, the old Greeks used to call it the ultmao, the big unknown.”
Fainter voice of mother: “They were deportiert . . .”
It’s interesting. I’m one of these people who needed the father to die to broadcast my voice.
Throat clearing
The system is the world of media ownership and media regulation. The system is also the cultural voice of authority that we have internalized.
1940s recording
3
of a woman reading
Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 1837
essay, “The American Scholar”: “The first in time and the first in importance of the influences upon the mind is that of nature. Every day, the sun and after sunset . . .”
Radio invites us to embody a different politics of voice and authority and knowledge. We can riff off of a system of vocal expectation.
How knowledge SOUNDS.
Light static, faint voice reading indecipherable words
Feminist radio practitioners such as Anna Friz (2009) have looked at radio as a space of resonance. Radio as a space of both transmission and reception.
In 1932, Bertold Brecht (1932/1993) coined the term transception (transmission and reception.)
Radio static
We can infuse radio with this spirit of transception. Transmission and reception, so he called it transception.
Faint throat clearing
Radio vibration brings people into relationship.
Faint sound machine
Radio is relationship.
Accordion
Radiophonic space is quantum space. The transistor radio works because of quantum mechanics.
Throat clearing
As the philosopher and physicist Karen Barad (2010) says, quantum space is discontinuous and diffracted.
Moving radio dial
Quantum offers an ethics of entanglement. It is a “relation[] of obligation—being bound to the other” (Barad, 2010, p. 265). Our bodies don’t end with our skin. Being bound to the other. There is so much to play with here in autoethnography and the narration and dispersal of a self . . . in radiophonic space.
Radio static
Radio brings people into relationship. Radio is relationship. In praise (echo), in praise (echo) of the radio autoethnography.
Fade out
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
