Keynote Panel

Our opening session is a keynote panel with some of the founding figures of the Radio Studies Network.

Biography:

Peter Lewis joined London Met as a Senior Lecturer in Community Media in 2007. From 2017-2019 he was Associate Professor Emeritus. Prof. Lewis holds undergraduate and masters degrees from the University of Oxford (1958), a PGCE from the University of London and a PhD by prior output from London Metropolitan University (2010). Prior to joining London Met he was; Senior Lecturer in Communication Studies, Goldsmiths (1980-1989), Senior Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies, Middlesex University (1994 – 1999), ESRC Research Fellow, London School of Economics (1999-2002) and Visiting Research Associate, Department of Media & Communications (2002-2007). He has taught in primary and secondary schools in both private and state sectors in Berkshire, Bristol, London and Canada and had some ten years’ experience in educational broadcasting for ITV, and in community television as manager of Bristol Channel, before beginning a career in higher education.

Prof. Lewis has published widely on community media, including consultancies and reports for UNESCO and the Council of Europe, contributing to its recognition both politically and as an academic field. An ESRC Research Fellowship at the LSE (1999-2002) enabled him to launch the Radio Studies Network (now affiliated to MeCCSA) which, with a journal (The Radio Journal) and a succession of international conferences, has given the medium an increased profile in the field of media studies, connecting British research and scholarship with work in mainland Europe and beyond. He was a Principal Investigator in the HERA-funded Transnational Radio Encounters project, 2013-2016 and was part of the team which developed Radio Garden.

This paper is offered as a reflection on radio, the field of radio studies and its connection with contemporary themes in communication studies. First, it looks at the way in which repetition was built into the logics of radio production (and reception) in an era when programming was live and ephemeral. Repetition in this sense might take the form not only of programme repeats, but of remediations, generic conventions and routinised listening. Second, it considers the tensions between repetition and renewal in the study of radio in the context of an academy that prizes originality. And finally, it will rehearse the idea that contemporary media developments (including podcasting and platformisation) recursively play out the characteristics set in motion by radio at the dawn of the modern media age. This move involves recognising radio as an exemplary media object that is at once environment and infrastructure, technology, text and commodity form, and that represents a dynamic space of evolving practices of production, circulation and reception. 

This paper builds on my recent research that in various ways takes a medium theoretical approach to understanding radio history (primarily in a Western context) and particularly the ways in which radio has been foundational in the modern mediatisation of time, from the invention of the endless, always-on availability of media to the collapsing of the distinction between subjective and environmental time. To this extent, the paper explores some of the ways in which attending to the repetitiveness of radio provides insights into a defining mode of modern experience.  

Biography:

Kate’s teaching and research reflect her interests in the intersections between History, Politics and Communications. Her first monograph was Feminine Frequencies: Gender, German Radio and the Public Sphere, 1923-1945 (University of Michigan Press, 1996). Her recent publications have focused on the idea of listening as a cultural practice, a category of critique and a form of political action, as in her book, Listening Publics: The Politics and Experience of Listening in the Media Age (Polity: 2013). One strand of her research focuses on listening in the modern mediated public sphere. It asks how listening has changed in relation to successive media innovations and how the act of mediated listening figures in modern public life. She is Editorial Board member of the International Journal of Cultural Studies; The Radio Journal: International Studies in Broadcast and Audio Media and Radio, Sound and Society Journal.

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Over the last 25-years radio studies has been established as a vital discipline in academia. Both radio and its academic study have pushed forward, adapted and been reimagined. As we reflect on what has been achieved, we must also critically determine the frames we will need to tackle radio scholarship in the next twenty-five years. Drawing on some of my own work in synthesising a media and cultural study of radio with insights and approaches from history, sound studies and musicology, I suggest some of the ways these disciplines can enrich the study of radio.

I propose that we have often been limited in the way we understand the past of radio, its place in the wider sphere of listening media and in the role that music has both in defining radio and understanding how this institutional form is changing. Using some worked examples, I offer up concrete and grounded approaches that could build on the strengths that are already apparent in published work in the area.

Biography:

Tim Wall is Professor of Radio and Popular Music Studies at Birmingham City University. He researches into the production and consumption cultures around popular music and radio. He was formerly an AHRC Knowledge Exchange Fellow and the Principal Investigator of the BBC Listeners Online project.

His publications have included the second edition of his book Studying Popular Music Culture (Sage), and the second edition of the jointly authored Media Studies: Texts, Production and Context (Longman). He has also published articles on music radio online, the transistor radio, personal music listening, jazz and Duke Ellington on the radio, and radio sound. He is currently writing the history of Jazz on BBC Radio from 1922 to 1972 (Equinox)

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