Kristi Rhead

This project examines Radio FreeDom, a hugely popular call-in station on La Réunion, a French overseas department in the Indian Ocean. FreeDom’s defining feature is its “free antenna”: callers are not screened before going live. Listeners report missing children, ask for help with housing or welfare paperwork, debate politics, announce accidents, mourn the dead, and narrate everyday island life in French and Réunion Creole. Through ethnographic fieldwork, interviews, archival research, and access to more than 300,000 internal radio recordings, this research asks what constant public calling-in produces over time. It argues that Radio FreeDom remaps public life beyond familiar frameworks such as France, Europe, or the nation-state, revealing how Réunionese listeners negotiate belonging across mainland France, the European Union, and the wider Indian Ocean. It also shows how the station functions as vernacular governance and an “analog algorithmic platform”: an island-wide communication network where hosts help translate distant French administration into local terms. Yet the same openness that enables solidarity can also amplify rumor, grievance, misinformation, and exclusion. By treating FreeDom as an auditory archive, this project shows how everyday radio sustains public voice and care while also revealing the fragile, contested politics of belonging in a non-sovereign island society.