As one of the oldest and most pervasive forms of mass communications, radio has formed an integral but often unnoticed part of the background of everyday life in the 20th and 21st centuries. Located in the borderland between public discourse and private enjoyment, radio can be a device for communication and a medium for artistic practice and experimentation. It may serve as a tool for propaganda or protest, a collector's item, or a site for familial and community building. Today, new trends in radio programming, controversies over broadcast content and regulation, and technologies such as digital and satellite radio have brought the long-invisible landscape of radio back into public focus.

Although radio has been studied in traditional mass communications research, it is often with an emphasis on industrial, technical, and policy structures of broadcasting that gives little sense of listeners' complex responses to and interactions with the medium. Only quite recently have a few humanities scholars begun to examine the social, cultural, material and artistic dimensions of radio; this project will make a substantive contribution to this emergent scholarly field.

As the title indicates, the Engaging Radio project will focus on the qualitative dimensions of people's historical and contemporary interactions with radio as a mass medium, a vehicle of expression, and a series of ubiquitous material objects. Drawing on the diverse expertise of scholars in literary and cultural history, media studies, anthropology, design, and science and technology studies, Engaging Radio will explore the social, cultural and material experience of radio from a variety of perspectives. These include:

• Radio as material object, a product of processes of design and manufacturing, a ubiquitous physical presence in homes, cars, public spaces, and even attached to people's moving bodies

• Radio as a mass medium produced by competing commercial, governmental, and nonprofit interests, with content ranging from news to music to serial drama.

• Experimental and artistic uses of radio from its inception to the present.

• Implications of new technological developments (e.g. digital radio and satellite radio) for altering the social relations and contexts of the medium.