This panel explores the cultural significance of radio as a communications medium in its unique ability to bridge “audience” and “community.” As a broadcast outlet, radio is often incorrectly viewed as one-way communication, with a sender casting their message broadly to individual receivers. And it does afford its listeners with a degree of anonymity and privacy that is more difficult to secure with other broadcast media. Yet time and time again, we find evidence of radio engendering a sophisticated feedback loop, with a radio station acting as a hub for community action, real and virtual.

Informed variously by sound studies, oral historical methods, and Cold War cultural studies, the papers here will provide several case studies of the intense connections that a station can foster. From “underground” listening in the Soviet Union to the antiracist politics of freeform college radio; from a small heritage station in Peoria to the kaleidoscopic diversity of pirate radio in New York City, this panel will investigate the ways that stations and their listener-communities navigated, and continue to navigate, their relationships with structures of power and authority.

In “Collective Farm Drivers Also Like the Beatles,” Jessica Brandt uses listener mail to examine the active participation of listeners behind the Iron Curtain in the creation of a transnational community surrounding Radio Liberty in the mid-Cold War. Elena Razlogova takes as her focal point WFMU, the flagship freeform radio station based at Upsala College in New Jersey. In the late 1960s, the station’s anticapitalist sensibility intersected with militant antiracist politics, as the black power struggle in the surrounding community took hold on campus. Tom Arbogast then presents his extensive oral history project on WWCT, the one traditional commercial station in the lineup. Through interviews that are housed at the Internet Archive, Arbogast constructs an image of the station’s significance in the Peoria area in the latter decades of the 20^th century. And in “Pirates, I see you on my frequency!” David Goren explores the history and persistence of NYC’s broadcast subculture in the face of government enforcement. Such unlicensed, “pirate” radio has for decades provided a refuge for countercultural, activist, and immigrant communities throughout the five boroughs.

Several of the presentations are tied to digital projects that the various presenters have assembled. The participants represent a diverse array of those involved in radio history, including academic historians, independent researchers and radio professionals. Each presentation will last approximately 15 minutes followed by open, interactive discussion.