Radio and Podcast Geopolitics: Exploring sonic and affective geographies of news and current affairs journalism on migration, conflict and diplomacy

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

A principal aim of this fellowship is to publish my doctoral research. Whilst geographers have studied the history and geopolitical power of radio broadcasting, there has been little interest in contemporary radio journalism and its capacity to shape listeners' geographical imaginations; that is to say, how audiences picture the spaces, places, and people they hear on the airwaves. This is surprising given the ubiquity and popularity of the medium, and recent work on the framing and status of voices in the media. My thesis addresses this research gap by exploring how BBC Radio 4 portrayed Europe's migration 'crisis' between 2014 and 2019, and by examining how selected broadcasts were produced by journalists and are heard, interpreted and imagined by listeners. The protracted Syrian conflict, drownings in the Mediterranean, and rise of populism raise important questions about the power of media to shape perceptions of distant people and places, and condition a sense of responsibility and care for 'vulnerable' others. Analysing Radio 4 matters, not only because the network is a popular space of broadcasting that reaches millions of listeners and claims to produce journalism in the public interest, but because the imaginative geographies it articulates can shape how audiences understand, imagine and participate in the world. My thesis contributes to these debates by exploring spoken narratives and soundscapes of migration and revealing the discursive, affective and imaginative power of radio. My research with audiences provides a particularly compelling and original contribution to this field. I discovered a preference among listeners for stories articulated by named refugees who re-appear in the geographical imagination as tangible and relatable human beings; confirming the view of political philosopher Hannah Arendt that voice is "instrumental in endowing the refugee with personhood and historicity - and hence with the potential for recognition" (Chouliaraki and Zaborowski, 2017, p.16). The act of hearing people's voices therefore plays a crucial part in conditioning emotional and socio-political responses as listeners are engaged and moved by those they hear from. Audiences also respond to live, in-situ, multi-sensory journalism, which enables them to envision people and places in their mind's eye, and feel like they are transported to where the recording was made. Put simply, radio is experiential, affective and imaginative, and elicits from many listeners "a leap to the realisation that 'this could have been us'" (Chouliaraki and Stolic, 2019, p.320). This is not a universal response; however, in successfully evoking the geographical imaginations of a majority, I argue that radio participates in the affective work necessary to establish a sense of relatability between listeners and refugees, and forge meaningful connections with others. These conclusions inspire my interest in conducting further limited research on sonic and affective geographies, and multi-sensory storytelling, specifically through the lens of podcasts. Low-cost production and on-demand listening has led to a recent boom in podcasts and to suggestions we are living in a "golden age of audio" (Ganesh, 2016). There is rich potential to engage with this audio archive of popular culture and explore how news and current affairs podcasts intervene in the geopolitical debates of our time. Potent examples are the BBC's 'Ukrainecast', which discusses the latest machinations of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and the World Service's 'Global News', which reports on politics, international relations and diplomacy from a global perspective. Questions of interest are: why are podcasts an appealing medium for journalists to tell news stories? What are the emerging geographies of producing and listening to this new 'everywhere' medium? And how do the geopolitical imaginaries articulated within them capture audience attention and shape their geographical imaginations?