Sound, Space and Society

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xvii

   PDF

2. Audible Introductions: Space, Sound, Society

   • Kimberley Peters

   Pages 1-19

3. Contextualising Caroline: The Offshore Pirate

   • Kimberley Peters

   Pages 21-38

4. Offshore Outlaws: Intimate Geopolitics at Sea

   • Kimberley Peters

   Pages 39-55

5. Audio Atmospherics: Listening from Land

   • Kimberley Peters

   Pages 57-73

6. Broadcasting Borders: Controlling the Air

   • Kimberley Peters

   Pages 75-94

7. Sounding Out Conclusions

   • Kimberley Peters

   Pages 95-112

8. Back Matter

   Pages 113-120

   PDF

In 1964, rebel radio stations took to the seas in converted ships to offer listening choice to a young, resistant audience, against a backdrop of restrictive broadcasting policies. This book draws on this exceptional moment in social history, and the decades that followed, teasing out the relations between sound, society and space that were central to ‘pirate’ broadcasting activities. With a turn towards mediated life in geography, studies of radio have been largely absent. However, radio remains the most pervasive mass communications medium. 


This book breaks new ground, discussing in depth the relationship between radio, space and society; considering how space matters in the production, consumption and regulation of audio transmission, through the geophysical spaces of sea, land and air. It is relevant for readers interested in geographies of media, sensory spatial experience, everyday geopolitics and the turn towards elemental and more-than-human geographies.

• radio studies
• radio and society
• Sound studies
• space and sound studies
• geopolitics
• geographies of media
• mobility
• Multi-sensory geographies
• non-representational geography
• Radio Caroline
• British broadcasting history
• pirate radio

“Rebel Radio is a crucial intervention in the academic study of radio. Kim Peters significantly advances our understanding of radio as a distinctly ‘spatial’ and spatialising medium – operating within and in relation to place and space... This book carefully weaves concepts, theory and primary data into a genuinely original account of radio piracy’s heyday, while exploring the legacies of radio piracy through to the present day.” (Alasdair Pinkerton, Senior Lecturer in Geopolitics, Royal Holloway University of London, UK, author of Radio, 2018)

“In exploring the Rebel Radio of the iconic off-shore pirate radio station Radio Caroline, Kim Peters makes a compelling case for why geographers need to take radio seriously. Building on her previous theorizations of the political geographies of the sea, Peters outlines why the geographical study of radio must think through the materiality of the different elements –air, aether, land and sea - that shape the production, consumption, and regulation of radio broadcasts. This beautiful and engaging book explores how the anchoring of Radio Caroline at sea, outside British territorial waters, not only exploited a succession of loopholes in the geopolitical regulation of broadcasting, but shaped the audible quality of its broadcasts and the affective atmospheres in which its audience became enrolled and called to action in defence of ‘rebel radio’.” (Gavin Brown, Associate Professor of Cultural and Political Geography, University of Leicester, UK)

• Department of Geography and Planning, University of Liverpool, Liverpool, United Kingdom

  Kimberley Peters

Kimberley Peters teaches Geography at University of Liverpool, UK. She is co-editor of Water Worlds (2014); The Mobilities of Ships (2015); Carceral Mobilities (2017); and Territory beyond Terra (2018). She is the author of over 30 peer reviewed articles and book chapters and the discipline-wide textbook, Your Human Geography Dissertation (2017).  

Policies and ethics