The Oxford Handbook of Radio and Podcasting

Radio remains the most accessible and widely available communication medium worldwide, despite technological shifts and a host of upstart challengers. Since its origins in the 1920s, radio has innovated a new world of sound culture—now expanded into the digital realm of podcasting—that is enabling the medium to reach larger audiences than ever before. Yet radio remains one of the least studied of the major areas of communication arts, largely because of its broadcast-era ephemerality. With the advent of digital technology, radio’s past has been unlocked and soundwork is exploding as a creative field, creating a lively and diverse sonic present while making critical historical analysis possible at last. This volume offers newly commissioned chapters, giving readers a wide-ranging view of current critical work in the fields of radio and podcasting, employing specific case studies to analyze sound media’s engagement with the arts; with the factual world of news, talk, and documentary programming; as a primary means of forging community along with national, transnational, and alternative identities; and as a subject of academic and critical research. Its historical scope extends from radio’s earliest days, through the mid-twentieth-century decades when it was the powerful voice of nations and empires, to its transformation into a secondary medium during the television era, and into the expanding digital present. Throughout, The Oxford Handbook of Radio and Podcasting connects radio’s broadcast past to its digital present and traces themes of creativity, identity, community, nation, and transnationality across more than a century of audio media.