About
My dissertation examines how Radio FreeDom, Réunion Island’s most influential call-in radio station, shapes everyday understandings of freedom, governance, and belonging. Réunion is a French overseas department in the Indian Ocean: formally part of France and the European Union, yet geographically and historically tied to Africa, Madagascar, and the wider Indian Ocean world. This non-sovereign status, together with the island’s Creole language and multicultural history, creates a rich setting to explore how people negotiate postcolonial identity, bureaucratic power, and transoceanic connections.
Focusing on Radio FreeDom’s open “free antenna” format, where anyone can speak live on air, I analyze how listeners use radio to navigate their relationships with the French state, articulate Creole identity, and participate in grassroots forms of problem-solving and public debate. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, archival research, and large-scale listening to FreeDom’s 300,000-recording sound archive, my work theorizes radio as an auditory archive, a transoceanic public, and a form of vernacular governance.
In addition to my dissertation research, I contribute to public and multimodal scholarship as a Project Manager and Researcher for The Oceans Lab and ReConnect/ReCollect: Reparative Connections to Philippine Collections at the University of Michigan. Both initiatives develop digital tools that bring academic research into accessible, collaborative public forms.
