Listening to Europe's migration ‘crisis’: The discursive, affective and imaginative responses of audiences to BBC Radio 4 broadcasts

Abstract

Whilst geography has a long tradition of examining geopolitical discourses and imaginaries in media and popular culture, audiences remain understudied. A preoccupation with the site of representation is coupled with a disciplinary bias towards analysing visual media and culture, which obscures alternative ways of knowing, representing and engaging in the world. This paper redresses these imbalances by exploring radio and its capacity to shape audiences' geographical imaginations. An innovative ‘playlist-diary’ method is used to reveal how listeners hear, interpret and imagine BBC Radio 4 broadcasts on Europe's migration ‘crisis’ between 2014 and 2019; a novel approach which answers calls for geographers to engage with sounds and methodologies of listening, and better understand audience responses to journalistic storytelling on migration. The paper makes a significant conceptual contribution to the field by illustrating how listeners hear broadcasts in discursive, affective and imaginative registers, and by identifying the pivotal role of refugee voices and stories in forging a politics of recognition; that is to say, how and under what conditions radio journalism collapses discourses of ‘us’ and ‘them’, expands imaginative communities of belonging, and leads to instances of identification and connection between listeners and refugees. It therefore pushes beyond research that focuses on discursive and affective invitations in media by uncovering how radio shapes audiences' geographical imaginations around migration and regulates fields of perceptibility, recognition and relatability with people on the move.