International Services between expatriates, empire and education

IP4: International Services between expatriates, empire and education focuses on radio services of nations designed for reception beyond national boundaries. The IP will compare international services of European nations from a range of sizes, as well as varying positions as (former) colonial and geopolitical powers, and examine how they interact with each other in constructing concepts such as European-ness and ‘whiteness’ (Arrow 2007) in addition to national identity. These will include the BBC World Service, Deutsche Welle, and the Dutch Wereldomroep as well as Denmark’s Greenlandic Radio Corporation, Kalaallit Nunaata Radio.

IP4 will begin with a long-term technological and institutional mapping of the evolving mediascape of international broadcasting, with both an eye toward internal perceptions and questions of “electronic colonialism” (McPhail 1987). Technical mapping will use available reports of transmission and reception to map overlapping coverage and on-the-ground potential for tuning in. Institutional mapping will trace

  • a) changing missions
  • b) relations between different international services; and
  • c) the (trans)national background and educations of station staff.

The resulting ‘maps’ will be explored in a co-authored article with IP postdoc and contributing researchers. In terms of Aesthetics and Territoriality, IP4 will compare the evolution of aesthetic practices in two areas:

  • a) Acoustic icons and other forms of ‘station identification’. This will result in a comparative article on transnational acoustic icons prepared by post-doc with IP3;
  • b) services for specific target (identity) groups: women, farmers, children or youth.

Questions here will surround both acoustic markers of space and place, as well, as markers of personal identity, looking at aural constructions of ‘whiteness’ or hybrid identities. This will result in an article co-authored with IP6. In terms of Archive & Cultural Memory the project will explore the extent to which archive material from international services influence cultural memory of contested pasts, or to what extent it can open new possibilities for revisiting shared pasts and rethinking dominant narratives. In particular, it will explore how interaction and dialogue in broadcasting can be mobilized to this end. The results of this part of the project will be realized in material and concepts for the exhibition, the curation of which falls under this IP, as well as a chapter for the TRE book, authored solely or jointly by the PI and Postdoc.