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WiSe 19/20: Reaching the People: How to Write Global Histories of Communication

Valeska Huber

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Communication is everywhere. It not only structures our everyday encounters, but also connects people across borders, consolidates communities, and creates global orders. This seminar explores the double role of global communication in opening up new spaces of interaction and serving as an instrument of political control in late colonial and postcolonial contexts. Beyond infrastructures and media of global communication, for instance the telegraph, press, radio or television, we will focus on the human side of technology, such as audiences and participants. We will critically examine the tensions between openness (communication that creates connections and globality) and control (in surveillance, censorship, propaganda) as well as subverting such control (for instance in revolutionary counter-publics). Covering the period from the 1870s to the 1970s, we will look at how empires used communication to control their possessions, how anticolonial activists created wide-ranging networks and promoted their cause at international organizations, and how in the Cold War and decolonization era, propaganda and mass campaigns were used to win “hearts and minds”. Throughout the course we will ask: What are the means and messages of reaching the people? How has communication strengthened and challenged power (of the state, gender norms etc.)? In what ways have debates about communication and access to information changed over time and space? Beyond surveying the current state of the art, this course also serves as a laboratory exploring new ways of investigating global communication. As such, it encourages students to think about communication both as a tool of understanding, and of writing, history. The topic leads us to approach unusual sources, particularly visual and audio, which we will sample in excursions to radio and film archives. It also invites students to critically reflect on how historians communicate beyond the classroom, using social media and public history. close