Academic interests
- Independent / community Music Radio
- Music and Politics
- Sociology of Music
- Popular Musicology
- Sound Studies
Research
My PhD project investigates independent community music radio stations' strategies for participating in civic life and cultural politics during significant socio-political changes, with an explicit focus on Ukraine. Small-scale grassroots music radio stations – physical and metaphorical platforms for opinion exchange – allow a closer reflection of lived realities and ways for more immediate cultural mobilization, often motivated by sociality and feelings of belonging.
Based on interviews and other fieldwork data from independent online music radio communities in Ukraine and several neighbouring countries, this thesis looks at how alternative sound media practices help make sense of everyday civilian life since Russia’s full-scale invasion. It aims to investigate how such radio practices respond to the given socio-political situation of war: by creating stations as self-organized and self-maintained local hubs and contributing to broader alternative (and aural) knowledge-making systems and cultural activist initiatives. It argues for radio stations and their studios as virtual and physical spaces for collective sense-making, where cultural and political imaginaries are played with and tested, enabling emergent forms of aural citizenship, and thus exposing ways people listen and imagine beyond – and against – the immediate existential cultural and material threats.
Background
MA Cultural Musicology, University of Amsterdam (2020)
Thesis: The Invisible Politics of the Radio: the case of Budapest community radios
BSc Physics and Music, University of Edinburgh (2018)
Thesis: Borders of Fun: Decoding rock tradition in Soviet Lithuania