Working for the Wireless World: Radio Uganda Technicians and the Wo/manpower of 1970s Cosmopolitanism (2024)
This article argues that technicians’ working lives and workplaces are crucial to conceptualizing the inequalities that characterized the ‘wireless world’ of radio broadcasting during a period of demands for a new information order. Taking Uganda’s national broadcaster and the files it has preserved as a focus, I follow calls to move beyond the exceptionalism of 1970s Uganda to locate it in global histories of technology and work. Like many broadcasters in decolonizing countries, Radio Uganda struggled to secure space on the electromagnetic spectrum, challenge neo-colonial information monopolies, balance its internationalist ambitions with its reliance on foreign equipment and training agreements, and fill vacancies. In the same years, its technicians responded to hundreds of reception reports sent by amateur distant listeners – most from Western Europe. The labour of responding to these reports and their cosmopolitan pronouncements represents a hitherto unexplored window onto the exchanges that underscored the globalization of radio technology and its limits in the 1970s.
...MoreSimilar Citations
Article
Emily M. Kern;
(2024)
Alternate Edens: History, Evolution, and Origins in UNESCO's Cultural and Scientific History of Mankind
Article
Veronica della Dora;
(2023)
From the Radio Shack to the Cosmos: Listening to Sputnik during the International Geophysical Year (1957–1958)
Article
Michiel Leezenberg;
(2023)
From Cosmopolitan to Vernacular in the Language Sciences: A Global History Perspective
Book
Marcel van der Linden;
(2019)
The Global History of Work: Critical Readings, 4 vols
Book
Jan Lucassen;
(2021)
The story of work : A new history of humankind
Article
Waqar H. Zaidi;
(2023)
The Pugwash scientists’ conferences, Cyrus Eaton and the clash of internationalisms, 1954–1961
Article
Sven Widmalm;
(2023)
‘Super Bowl of the world conference circuit’? A network approach to high-level science and policy conferencing
Article
Michitake Aso;
(2024)
Performing national independence through medical diplomacy: Tuberculosis control and socialist internationalism in Cold War Vietnam
Article
Efrat Keidar;
(2023)
The psychiatric work villages in Israel: a micro working community
Article
Jonathan Leach;
Peter Agulnik;
Neil Armstrong;
(2023)
The development of a creative work rehabilitation organisation
Book
Nitsan Chorev;
(2019)
Give and Take: Developmental Foreign Aid and the Pharmaceutical Industry in East Africa
Chapter
Herbert Muyinda;
(2014)
Negotiating Disability: Mobilization and Organization among Landmine Survivors in Late Twentieth-Century Northern Uganda
Article
Pringle, Yolana;
(2015)
Investigating “Mass Hysteria” in Early Postcolonial Uganda: Benjamin H. Kagwa, East African Psychiatry, and the Gisu
Chapter
Whyte, Susan Reynolds;
(2013)
Therapeutic Clientship: Belonging in Uganda's Projectified Landscape of AIDS Care
Article
Marissa Mika;
(2020)
The Half-Life of Radiotherapy and Other Transferred Technologies
Article
Julia Cummiskey;
(2020)
Early AIDS Research in Rakai: Ugandan Experiences and Expertise in the Creation of the African AIDS Paradigm
Article
Gwen Ottinger;
(2022)
Misunderstanding Citizen Science: Hermeneutic Ignorance in U.S. Environmental Regulation
Article
Phil Brown;
(2021)
From the Radical Psychology Movement to STS: A Journey From the 1960s in Multiple Parts
Article
Rick Bonney;
Tina B. Phillips;
Heidi L. Ballard;
Jody W. Enck;
(2016)
Can Citizen Science Enhance Public Understanding of Science?
Thesis
Matthew Hayden Anthony;
(2020)
‘Surgical and Rigorous (Yet Always Fun)’: Science, Sport, and Community in American Birding, 1950-1980
Be the first to comment!