[Sci-tech-public] STS Brown Bag Lunch Talk on Wednesday, April 19

[Debbie Meinbresse]

Please join us next Tuesday, April 19th for an STS Brown Bag Lunch Talk:

Pretuning the Gospel: International Radio and Evangelical Modernity

Tim Stoneman,  NSF Postdoctoral Fellow, STS

12:00 noon, E51-275

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.

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.
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Feel free to bring your lunch; coffee and dessert will be provided.




Debbie Meinbresse
STS Program, MIT
617-452-2390
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