Academic interests
- Independent / community Radio
- Sound Studies
- Music and Politics
- Eastern European, Ukrainian studies
- Popular Musicology
Research
My PhD project looks at how people listen to war through community radio in Ukraine, and beyond. By focusing on the independent online community radios in Kyiv (20ft Radio and Gasoline Radio), their collaborators in Berlin (Cashmere Radio), Warsaw (Kapitał Radio), and others, I look at the how musicians and semi-professional music enthusiasts mobilise around a variety of radio related sound practices to meaningfully engage in public cultural life through listening, and why such practices are a suitable way for them to do so at war.
Concentrating on the first two years after the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the thesis asks what happens to such small, niche, non-commercial radio stations and their team members at war. It then delves deeper into the diverse ways in which people listen to war and communicate their wartime experiences through radio shows, events, sound installations, music albums, radio plays, and other formats related to radio media. Here, the radio station is conceptualized as having a dual function. First, as a site for people to gather and collectively make sense of their changed realities through sound. Second, as a channel for sharing the complexity and ambivalence of living and listening with wartime to broader audiences. Radio media thus become a way to regain agency in otherwise precarious conditions and to express that agency through aural knowledge production and transfer. In this context, questions of epistemic justice, collective responsibility, and moral dilemmas around sonic entertainment in war appear, offering away to better understand the complex experiences of wartime through sound, including violence, trauma, and hope, but also frustration, boredom, and curiosity.
Beyond the current PhD project, my work involves radio practice and other writing on the intersection on sound, radio and civil society, especially in contexts of Central and Eastern Europe.
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