Up in the air? The matter of radio studies

Abstract

Ten years ago 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). The Network had come together in 1998 when a group of radio scholars from around the UK responded to a plea, published in The Guardian by Peter Lewis a year earlier, for the academy to take radio seriously (Lewis, 2007). 1 Scholarship on radio had long been under-represented in the field of media and cultural studies in comparison to that on television, film and print, and increasingly, of course, the "new media". The essay acknowledged and celebrated the Network's spur to new research, new collaborations and new spaces for discussion and dissemination, including this journal and the biannual transnational conference. Ten years on, there was a new confidence in our collective endeavours, no need any longer to preface every contribution with an apologetic justification. But the phrase, 'the very idea!' was intended to indicate a certain ambivalence, if not quite incredulity, towards the conception (in both senses of that word), of radio as a separate field of study. 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 in any case just 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. 2 No such thing as radio Of course, I was not seriously claiming that there is no such thing as radio. Rather, I was trying to draw attention to the fact that there is no singular thing called radio. Instead, this singular word, radio, is called upon to describe any number of different thingsmaterial, virtual, institutional, aesthetic, experiential. And, in turn, each of these meanings unfolds over time and in different contexts to reveal anything and everything, from a cat's whisker contraption of minerals and metal, rigged up by pioneering

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