Daniel Fisher – författare

Radio is the most widespread electronic medium in the world today. As a form of technology that is both durable and relatively cheap, radio remains central to the everyday lives of billions of people around the globe. It is used as a call for prayer in Argentina and Appalachia, to organize political protest in Mexico and Libya, and for wartime communication in Iraq and Afghanistan. In urban centers it is played constantly in shopping malls, waiting rooms, and classrooms. Yet despite its omnipresence, it remains the media form least studied by anthropologists. Radio Fields employs ethnographic methods to reveal the diverse domains in which radio is imagined, deployed, and understood. Drawing on research from six continents, the volume demonstrates how the particular capacities and practices of radio provide singular insight into diverse social worlds, ranging from aboriginal Australia to urban Zambia. Together, the contributors address how radio creates distinct possibilities for rethinking such fundamental concepts as culture, communication, community, and collective agency.

Radio is the most widespread electronic medium in the world today. As a form of technology that is both durable and relatively cheap, radio remains central to the everyday lives of billions of people around the globe. It is used as a call for prayer in Argentina and Appalachia, to organize political protest in Mexico and Libya, and for wartime communication in Iraq and Afghanistan. In urban centers it is played constantly in shopping malls, waiting rooms, and classrooms. Yet despite its omnipresence, it remains the media form least studied by anthropologists. Radio Fields employs ethnographic methods to reveal the diverse domains in which radio is imagined, deployed, and understood. Drawing on research from six continents, the volume demonstrates how the particular capacities and practices of radio provide singular insight into diverse social worlds, ranging from aboriginal Australia to urban Zambia. Together, the contributors address how radio creates distinct possibilities for rethinking such fundamental concepts as culture, communication, community, and collective agency.

Beginning in the early 1980s Aboriginal Australians found in music, radio, and filmic media a means to make themselves heard across the country and to insert themselves into the center of Australian political life. In The Voice and Its Doubles Daniel Fisher analyzes the great success of this endeavor, asking what is at stake in the sounds of such media for Aboriginal Australians. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research in northern Australia, Fisher describes the close proximity of musical media, shifting forms of governmental intervention, and those public expressions of intimacy and kinship that suffuse Aboriginal Australian social life. Today’s Aboriginal media include genres of country music and hip-hop; radio requests and broadcast speech; visual graphs of a digital audio timeline; as well as the statistical media of audience research and the discursive and numerical figures of state audits and cultural policy formation. In each of these diverse instances the mediatized voice has become a site for overlapping and at times discordant forms of political, expressive, and institutional creativity.

Beginning in the early 1980s Aboriginal Australians found in music, radio, and filmic media a means to make themselves heard across the country and to insert themselves into the center of Australian political life. In The Voice and Its Doubles Daniel Fisher analyzes the great success of this endeavor, asking what is at stake in the sounds of such media for Aboriginal Australians. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research in northern Australia, Fisher describes the close proximity of musical media, shifting forms of governmental intervention, and those public expressions of intimacy and kinship that suffuse Aboriginal Australian social life. Today’s Aboriginal media include genres of country music and hip-hop; radio requests and broadcast speech; visual graphs of a digital audio timeline; as well as the statistical media of audience research and the discursive and numerical figures of state audits and cultural policy formation. In each of these diverse instances the mediatized voice has become a site for overlapping and at times discordant forms of political, expressive, and institutional creativity.

Appeals are a crucial part of Europe’s asylum system but they remain poorly understood. Building on insights and perspectives from legal geography and socio-legal studies, this book shines a light on what takes place during asylum appeals and puts forward suggestions for improving their fairness and accessibility. Drawing on hundreds of ethnographic observations of appeal hearings, as well as research interviews, the authors paint a detailed picture of the limitations of refugee protection available through asylum appeals. Refugee law can appear dependable and reliable in policy documents and legal texts. However, this work reveals that, in reality, myriad social, political, psychological, linguistic, contextual and economic factors interfere with and frequently confound the protection that refugee law promises during its concrete enactment. Drawing on evidence from Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Greece, Italy and the United Kingdom, the book equips readers with a clear sense of the fragility of legal protection for people forced to migrate to Europe. The book will appeal to scholars of migration studies, legal studies, legal geography and the social sciences generally, as well as practitioners in asylum law throughout Europe and beyond.This book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Appeals are a crucial part of Europe’s asylum system but they remain poorly understood. Building on insights and perspectives from legal geography and socio-legal studies, this book shines a light on what takes place during asylum appeals and puts forward suggestions for improving their fairness and accessibility. Drawing on hundreds of ethnographic observations of appeal hearings, as well as research interviews, the authors paint a detailed picture of the limitations of refugee protection available through asylum appeals. Refugee law can appear dependable and reliable in policy documents and legal texts. However, this work reveals that, in reality, myriad social, political, psychological, linguistic, contextual and economic factors interfere with and frequently confound the protection that refugee law promises during its concrete enactment. Drawing on evidence from Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Greece, Italy and the United Kingdom, the book equips readers with a clear sense of the fragility of legal protection for people forced to migrate to Europe. The book will appeal to scholars of migration studies, legal studies, legal geography and the social sciences generally, as well as practitioners in asylum law throughout Europe and beyond.This book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.