Performing identity at the arts edge: Developing radio memoir through the excavation of living inquiry

In this thesis, I explore how community radio is a pedagogical and artistic platform that fosters personal agency, memoir, transformation and the unfolding of identity. Within the forum of an arts-based radio program, I witness how music, lyrics, broadcasting and personal reflections merge to inspire the surfacing of life’s lost moments, a collection of personal memories. This discovery evolves into a narrative loop between broadcaster and self, which leads to the excavation and interweaving of music and memory, and the alchemy of the radio tales. To this end, I explore autobiography, my mother’s lived experience and personal agency which unfold to become a storied musical memoir. While my research is largely informed by the scholarly work of Jerome Bruner, Lynn Fels, Walter Gershon, Mary Karr, Karen Meyer, Celeste Snowber, Sean Street, and Maxwell van Manen, it is further influenced by scholars whose work reflects arts and music education and is punctuated by songs and song lyrics. Research data for the radio tales and thesis is generated through several avenues: (1) Performative Inquiry explores how radio surfaces musical soundscape while unfolding musical lost moments that reflect lived experience. (2) Living Inquiry explores how writing a living document alongside radio production inspires the surfacing of lost moments and a collection of twenty-seven radio tales; (3) Acousmatic Modality, explores how reflective listening practices unpack contextual insights of lived experience. New understandings emerge through acousmatic dialogue, is comprised of living inquiry, lost moments. radio tales and one’s musical soundscape. My research reveals that everyone has a living story and a musical soundscape, thereby illustrating the universality of radio tales. Within this pedagogical and artistic platform, community radio acts as a springboard for the surfacing of musical soundscapes, the excavation of lost moments, the alchemy of radio tales and the unfolding of identity. The radio tales are offered throughout the thesis, as text and audio, with attached hyperlinks to redirect the reader to the SFU Repository where the audio files are stored.