Women’s Radio and Transnational Entanglements

Triple presentation by

Alec Badenoch (Utrecht University)
Anya Luscombe (Roosevelt College)
Jose Perez (Universidad Complutense Madrid)

From its beginning as a means of mass communication in the 1920s, radio has been uniquely placed to bring communities of listeners together. Even after its (partial) technological, institutional and ideological embedding within nations, visions and practices of transnational radio have persisted to this day.  But also in ostensibly national or local settings, radio is intricately entangled in transnational processes of production and programming, as well as transnational cultures of listening and identity formation.  Utrecht University is one of the partners in the HERA-funded project TRE, Transnational Radio Encounters, with a subproject “international services between expats, empire and education’ devoted to exploring how radio is implicated in transnational infrastructures and public spheres, aesthetic constructions of territoriality and supporting or suppressing processes of cultural memory.  As a final output of this project this July 5-8, UU will host the Radio Conference Transnational Forum,  and present a first preview of an online exhibition developed together with the Nederlands Instituut voor Beeld en Geluid.
Exploring women’s social participation provides a key entry point toward exploring transnational entanglements of radio history, and it is these that he following meeting of TViT seminar of Monday 9th May is primarily devoted.  Alec and Anya are part of WREN (Women’s Radio in Europe Network, formed in 2012) which aims to explore the way women have made dis/connections over borders in Europe by using the radio – as producers, technicians, experts, amateurs, listeners and a range of other capacities. In this seminar, Alec Badenoch will present an overview of TRE and WREN research.  Anya Luscombe will present her current research project on Eleanor Roosevelt.

We will be joined by Jose Perez , a PhD student at the Contemporary History Department of the Universidad Complutense (Madrid) who will be a guest researcher in Utrecht for two months.  He will present his PhD project on the relationship between women and Radio Nacional de España (the Spanish public radio station) during the final phase of the Franco dictatorship in Spain.