Commoning through Sound: An Ethnographic Study on Online Community Radio in Copenhagen and Palestine

Abstract

This thesis explores the commons-as-social-imaginary through ethnographic research conducted on music-focussed online community radios Drift Radio and Radio Alhara from a feminist, transnational perspective. To move away from the singular focus on property relations, I approach the commons as imaginary that is “not yet here” but that provides aspirational capacities to envision alternative realities to neoliberal capitalism (Berlant 2016; Muñoz 2009). Therefore, commoning is interpreted as a set of practices that foregrounds an embodied ethics of relating. Through this theoretical perspective, the study investigates how community radios operate as socio-material networks shaped by the relations between humans, technologies, and institutions that crystallize through sound and sounding practices (Hsieh 2021).

Both cases have explanatory power on their own terms and offer urban and online sociopolitical contexts for analyzing the relationalities that shape the commons-as-social-imaginary in dialogue with each other. Drift Radio broadcasts weekly radio from a publicly accessible space in Nørrebro, Copenhagen. Palestinian Radio Alhara was established amid the covid-19 pandemic to digitally connect the Palestinian diaspora through daily broadcasts. The analyses of these case-studies move from spatial politics to media infrastructures to community formation to explore the ways in which the two radios contest dominant power structures. Drift Radio employs a drifting position to challenge normative and striated urban formations, while Radio Alhara navigates media infrastructures, subjected to cyber-colonialism, to amplify voices and sounds of resistance. Both radios function as platforms for emerging counterpublics, fostering alternative knowledge networks through sound.

In conclusion, I argue that online community radio holds transformative potential in imagining post-capitalist, decolonial and/or queer futurities, while challenging neoliberal discourses on urbanity and digitality. Thus, this thesis contributes to the study of radio and radio’s potential for constructing alternative imaginaries through sound.