Listening in/To Germany, Pale Mother

A newly restored version of Helma Sanders-Brahms’ 1980 film, Deutschland, bleiche Mutter (Germany, Pale Mother), was premiered in 2014 as a “Berlinale Classic”. This article reveals a complex composition of archival and (re)constructed sound that amplifies the film’s problematisation of the relationship between public history and private memory and the competing claims to authenticity and authority in telling the stories of the past

Assassination, insurrection and alien invasion: interwar wireless scares in cross-national comparison

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Publics and prejudice in radio research

An invited essay on the question of what the success of shock radio in America tells us about the act of listening in public lif

Smart radio and audio apps: the politics and paradoxes of listening to (anti-) social media

The recent crop of vocal social media applications tends to appeal to users in terms of getting their voices heard loud and clear. Indeed, it is striking how often verbs like ‘shout’ and ‘boast’ and ‘brag’ are associated with microcasting platforms with such noisy names as Shoutcast, Audioboom, Hubbub, Yappie, Boast and ShoutOmatic. In other words, these audio social media are often promoted in rather unsociable terms, appealing less to the promise of a new communicative exchange than to the fantasy that we will each can be at the centre of attention of an infinite audience. Meanwhile, many of the new forms of online radio sell their services to listeners as offering ‘bespoke’ or ‘responsive’ programming (or ‘audiofeeds’), building up a personal listening experience that meets their individual needs and predilictions. The role of listening in this new media ecology is characterised, then, by similarly contradictory trends. Listening is increasingly personalised, privatised, masterable and measurable, but also newly shareable, networked and, potentially, public. The promotional framing of these new media suggests a key contradiction at play in these new forms of radio and audio, speaking to a neo-liberal desire for a decentralization of broadcasting to the point where every individual has a voice, but where the idea of the audience is invoked as a mass network of anonymous and yet thoroughly privatised listeners. Focusing on the promotion and affordances of these various new radio- and radio-like applications for sharing speech online, this article seeks to interrogate what is at stake in these contradictions in terms of the ongoing politics, experience and ethics of listening in a mediated world

Up in the air? The matter of radio studies

It is ten years since this journal published ‘Ten Years of Radio Studies: The Very Idea!’, a reflection on a decade of work since the launch of the Radio Studies Network (Lacey, 2008). To caricature the main thesis, I argued against the idea of ‘radio studies’ on the grounds that there is no such thing as radio, and that setting up a new intellectual enclave would continue to isolate, distort and marginalise our work pragmatically, intellectually and philosophically. This essay is a response to the editors’ invitation – and challenge - to revisit that argument another ten years on

Radio’s vernacular modernism: the schedule as modernist text

This article explores the modernism of pre-war radio in terms of the framing device of the schedule, rather than exceptional texts or ‘features’. It suggests the flow of broadcasting could be experienced as a montage of remediations that invited reflexive engagement with the conditions and contradictions of modernity. The schedule thus appears not only as a site for the mediation of modern experience and a new sensorium, but as a modernist text in its own right that produced, and was expressive of, a pervasive and insistent vernacular modernism

Listening in the digital age

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H-Diplo Roundtable XXI-28 on Tworek. News from Germany: the competition to control world communications, 1900-1945

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Dynamics and Dilemmas of Women Leading Women

Through examination of transcripts of the first five leadership succession discussions that occurred in a work group designed to empower teachers we explored dynamics and dilemmas associated with women leading a women\u27s group based on feminist principles. We addressed three research questions: How is leadership, as reflected in leadership succession processes, experienced in such a group? What dynamics are associated with leadership succession in this type of group? What are outcomes of the process for members? Results indicated that the experience of leadership shifted considerably during the first six years of the group, with reflective images of leadership moving from the mythical to the pragmatic, from the powerful to the less powerful. Dynamics evolved in ways that were partially consistent and partially inconsistent with organizational life-cycle literature. The group experienced ambivalence and tension surrounding the type of authority given to designated leaders. Members dealt with discomfort by shifting the focus of the group coordinator\u27s attention to external relations and by rotating internal leadership responsibilities. This approach resolved tensions associated with authority and increased members\u27 senses of their own power, even as it decreased the range of initiative-taking that was implicitly allowable within the group. This analysis of leadership succession in a women\u27s group with an empowerment agenda offers a salient case for the study of dilemmas likely to be present in many change efforts. Its results suggest that attempting to resolve contradiction and tensions is less helpful than acknowledging them and working within them