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Apologies. On an earlier message, I incorrectly said that Tim
Stoneman's brown bag lunch talk would be held on Tuesday, April
19th. The date is correct, however, on the Schedule of Events I
circulated in a separate message. Note the correct day and date
below. Thank you!<br><br>
<br>
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<blockquote type=cite class=cite cite="">Please join us next
<font color="#FF0000"><b>Wednesday, April 19th</b></font> 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>
</b></font></div>
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 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>
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