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Please join us next Tuesday, April 19th for an STS Brown Bag Lunch
Talk: <br><br>
<div align="center"><font size=4 color="#0000FF"><b>Pretuning the Gospel:
International Radio and Evangelical Modernity<br><br>
</font><font size=4>Tim Stoneman, NSF Postdoctoral Fellow,
STS<br><br>
12:00 noon, E51-275<br><br>
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In the decade following WWII, conservative evangelical groups based in
the United States established a network of radio outlets around the world
for the purpose of global evangelization. Due to the shortage of radio
receivers in developing countries, missionary broadcasters organized
sociologically and technologically innovative programs in the area of
reception in order to produce captive audiences for their stations.
Preeminent among missionary methods was the use of pretuned, or
fixed-circuit, radios. Drawing on case<br>
studies in Ecuador and West Africa, the current paper examines how
missionary insistence on pretuning both facilitated and constrained
broadcasting activity, defining the evangelical radio mission prior to
1970. The paper also uses the practice of pretuning as a lens to explore
tensions in the larger, ambivalent relationship between American
evangelical groups, missionary praxis, and processes of modernity both
within the United States and on a global scale. <br><br>
Tim Stoneman received his M.Phil. in International Relations in 1986 from
Cambridge University and his Ph.D. in History and Sociology of Technology
and Science from the Georgia Institute of Technology in November 2005. He
is currently an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow with MIT's Science, Technology,
and Society Program.<br>
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Feel free to bring your lunch; coffee and dessert will be
provided.<br><br>
<br><br>
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Debbie Meinbresse<br>
STS Program, MIT<br>
617-452-2390<br>
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