Sadie Couture

Sadie Couture is a media historian and a cultural theorist of sound, ecology, and space drawing insights from media theory, science and technology studies, and sound studies to make sense of our media landscapes. Sadie is a PhD candidate in the Department of Communication Studies at McGill University. She speaks and publishes widely, and regularly produces audio media for both scholarly and popular audiences. Sadie has held research residencies and fellowships at the Smithsonian Institution, The Radio Preservation Task Force, and McGill University, and her research has been supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Fonds de recherche du Québec – Société et culture, The Wolfe Chair in Scientific and Technological Literacy, and The Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation.

Projects 
Her dissertation, entitled “Long Time, First Time: A History of Call-In Radio in the United States and Canada, 1945-1975”  focuses on the origins, development, and conventionalization of call-in radio and demonstrates how the format has been a pre-digital prototype for the types of participatory media and user-generated content which are so central to our contemporary media ecosystems.

Publications 
Couture, Sadie. "Melodies of the toppling trees: the tree farm pastoral, extractivism, and attachment in British Columbia, Canada." Cultural Studies (2025): 1-22.

Rolandsson, Torbjörn, and Sadie Couture. "Becoming Spectral: Toward a Media History of Ghosting." Social Media+ Society 10.4 (2024): 20563051241301200.

 Couture, Sadie. "Forging a format: Advertising, attention and intimacy on the Mary Margaret McBride Program, 1941–54." Radio Journal: International Studies in Broadcast & Audio Media 21.2 (2023): 155-170.

 Couture, Sadie, and Russell Gendron. "Charting a Different World: Sound Mapping Together on Coast Salish Territories." MAST: The Journal of Media Art Study and Theory. 2.2, (2021).

Couture, Sadie, et al. "Sensate sovereignty: A dialogue on Dylan Robinson's hungry listening." Amodern. (2020).

Hern, Matt, Sadie Couture, et al. On this patch of grass: City parks on occupied land. Fernwood Publishing, (2018).