Postdoctoral Fellowship - Capturing Listeners: International Radio, Religion, and Reception, 1931-1975

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Capturing Listeners: International Radio, Religion, and Reception, 1931-1975NSF S&S Postdoctoral Fellowship - Project SummaryScholars have paid comparatively little attention to the historical origins and transnational flowsof American religious radio. Grounded in the history of technology, this project focuses on one prong of the post-WWII missionary broadcasting effort: the project to distribute inexpensive radio receivers around the world. Employing extensive new archival sources in the private collections, the project develops case studies of two of the largest missionary receiver distribution programs, as well as the evangelical project to develop a missionary transistor receiver. It demonstrates empirically how international religious broadcasters transformed the shortage of receivers in the developing world into receptivity for American religious programs through a process of capture. Employing the user heuristic from recent STS studies, the project illustrates how capture involved a complicated, often contested, process, since missionaries relied on national listeners to operate receivers and since listeners derived their own set of meanings from radio-mediated religion. Capturing Listeners argues that the routine of everyday radio listening to missionary stations helped to legitimize evangelical religion in numerous developing countries during the postwar period, paving the way for the revival of evangelicalism in Asia, Africa, and Latin America after 1970. The current postdoctoral proposal seeks to extend work on the reception of international religious broadcasting in two directions in preparation for publication of a book manuscript. First, the project evaluates the effectiveness of missionary capture by scrutinizing a rare group of extensive listener sources found in broadcaster archives. These show how missionary audience research methods and conceptions of audiences, as well as listener reports of conversion, shifted along with changes in receiver technology and confirmed broadcaster success in reproducing evangelical experience among listeners. Second, constructing a comparative political economy of international religious broadcasting and reception during the post-WWII era, the project analyzes missionary radio alongside the religion and receiver distribution programs instituted by the Voice of America during the early Cold War period, demonstrating the flexibility of religion as a vehicle for the promotion of American values abroad as well as the constraints which reception demands posed for American broadcasters overseas prior to the advent of the transistor radio.Intellectual Merit and Broader Impact The current postdoctoral proposal possesses clear intellectual merit in several areas. First, it examines a significant area of international broadcasting that has received remarkably little attention from scholars. Second, by problematizing the question of reception as capture, the study highlights the importance of radios material infrastructure. Third, the study of missionary radio activity opens up an important channel for the influence of American culture abroad. Fourth, the study enhances understanding of the experience of selective audiences in developing countries during the historical transition to the transistor radio market. Fifth, it adds to existing scholarship on the VOA by examining areas of VOA activity not previously explored by scholars. As a cross-disciplinary study, this work will build bridges between diverse groups of scholars. It will provide perspective for policy makers in a multicultural, media-saturated society. It will enhance public understanding of the dynamic ways in which traditional religious groups seized the opportunity afforded by modern media and information networks to promote their cause.