The Radio Conference 2009A Transnational Forum, York University, Toronto, Canada, July 27–30, 2009 Jason Loviglio (bio) This biennial gathering, which has crisscrossed the Anglophone world for nearly a decade, making stops in the United Kingdom, Australia, the United States, and now Canada, has always straddled competing aims: to be a small coherent conversation about a shared object of knowledge and, at the same time, to be an inclusive, international program, with participants from academe, industry, governments, and the world of activism. The conference has also straddled a broad range of disciplinary and thematic work, which has led to a challenging and at times confusing taxonomy of panel topics in the conference schedule and has occasionally made for strange bedfellows. For example, in the summer of 2009 in Toronto, presentations on Citizens Band radio, college campus call-in shows, and 1930s classical music performances on Major Bowes’ Original Amateur Hour awkwardly shared the stage in one session, presumably joined together by a common focus on African American listeners, broadcasters, and performers. Such odd juxtapositions are part of the pleasure and pain of conferences in the humanities these days. And the intellectual problems behind the taxonomic difficulties facing program committees for the Radio Conference have been elucidated in some of the most interesting work presented at the conferences themselves. In July of 2007, for example, Kate Lacey, of the University of Sussex, argued persuasively at the conference gathering in Lincoln, UK, that radio, the object of [End Page 131] knowledge around which the conference orbits, does not really exist, at least not as an unchanging platform, apparatus, or cultural form. Given such challenges, it’s always surprising how well these conferences finally come off. Last summer’s meeting, chaired by York University’s indefatigable Anne MacLennan and organized with the help of an international program committee hailing from five countries and three continents, offered concurrent sessions over three and a half days addressing “History,” “Technology,” “Social Impact,” and “Latest Trends.” And while there was substantial overlap among the categories, they provided a serviceable map for the work being presented. One could imagine an alternative schema, organized around thematic concerns, like “radio and community,” or more clunkily, “radio and communities in/and development”; as well as “radio and social identity” and “beyond radio: sound studies.” Of course, these thematic groupings too would not be sufficiently subtle to capture the range of work presented. If there has been a single unifying trope in the history of this conference and in the modern era of radio studies in the Anglophone world, it has been “Radio as the Invisible Medium.” The paucity of research on radio compared to that on film and television in terms of industrial structures, program content, audience reception, and political impact has proved a galvanizing rallying cry for years. And, indeed, in the keynote address for the conference in Toronto, Michael Keith, of Boston College, sounded this theme. In particular, Keith lamented the dearth of college curricula in U.S. universities devoted to the study of the social impact of radio. The presentation took the form of a defense, which Keith acknowledged his audience was already well-versed in, of the ways that radio has been a significant feature in the development of U.S. culture and society over the last century. Keith’s defense referred to the four horsemen of the modern U.S. radio studies revival: Susan J. Douglas’s Listening In: Radio and the American Imagination (1999); Michele Hilmes’s Radio Voices: American Broadcasting, 1922–1952 (1997); Susan Smulyan’s Selling Radio: The Commercialization of American Broadcasting, 1920–1934 (1994); and Robert W. McChesney’s Telecommunications, Mass Media, and Democracy: The Battle for the Control of US Broadcasting, 1928–1935 (1993). The presentation, despite its U.S.-centric focus, served as an occasion to more broadly revisit the usefulness of the trope of invisibility and to reexamine radio’s status as an overlooked medium in Media Studies scholarship. Keith’s keynote was also an opportunity to explore the extent to which the utility of medium-specific scholarship continues to make sense in a time when media platforms, delivery networks, and content are so quickly changing. Even so...
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Sep 1, 2019
John Lee + 1
Open Access