Alasdair Pinkerton

Radio geopolitics: broadcasting, listening and the struggle for acoustic spaces

This paper considers some of the interdisciplinary scholarship on radio and sound more generally for the purposes of considering how geopolitical scholarship might reconsider its predominantly visual focus. The first part considers radio and its relationship to studies of propaganda, international diplomacy and even everyday life. Thereafter, attention is given to new themes such as researching radio cultures, broadcasting infrastructure and technology and, finally, the affective impacts of radio on audiences. The conclusion of this paper urges further critical consideration of radio, sound and broadcasting/listener engagement with the well-established geographical literature on music.

Radio and the Raj: broadcasting in British India (1920–1940)

India offers special opportunities for the development of broadcasting. Its distances and wide spaces alone make it a promising field. In Indias remote villages there are many who, after the days work is done, find time hangs nearly enough upon their hands, and there must be many officials and others whose duties carry them into out-of-the-way places where they crave for the company of their friends and the solace of human companionship . There are of course, too, in many households, those whom social custom debars from taking part in recreation outside their own homes. To all these and many more broadcasting will be a blessing and a boon of real value. Both for entertainment and for education its possibilities are great, and yet we perhaps scarcely realise how great they are. Broadcasting in India is today in its infancy, but I have little doubt that before many years are past, the numbers of its audience will have increased tenfold, and that this new application of science will have its devotees in every part of India.

A new kind of imperialism? The BBC, cold war broadcasting and the contested geopolitics of south asia

The relationship between the BBC and Indian listeners has been one of love and hate. Love for the professional competence and hate as it represented the voice of a colonial empire. Even during the post-freedom period, more often than not a bias against India was discernable in BBC broadcasts in our conflicts with Pakistan, particularly on the Kashmir issue. The BBC also did not miss an opportunity to project the seamy side of our people and polity.

The Falkland Islands referendum 2013

This note considers the 10–11th March 2013 Falkland Islands referendum. As accredited observers, the authors were granted access not only to the work of the international observation mission but also the actual organisation of the referendum itself. The background to the referendum is explained and thereafter the result and longer-term significance is considered. Notwithstanding Argentine opposition to the referendum, the latter was widely considered within the Falkland Islands and beyond to be the most significant event since the 1982 South Atlantic conflict.

Introduction - South Asian diasporas and the BBC World Service: contacts, conflicts, and contestations

This article sets out the analytical framework of this special issue and outlines the development of BBC radio broadcasting in South Asia. It analyses the ways in which the BBC in South Asia is integrally and indissolubly intertwined with ‘critical events’ and shifting geopolitical priorities: from the imperial and diasporic imaginings of the Empire Service, to its dissolution and the expansion of South Asian language services during World War II for the purpose of countering ‘enemy broadcasts’; from independence, partition and decolonisation, including the BBCs subsequent role in mediating postcolonial conflicts and wars and Cold War tensions, to its most recent ‘war on terror’ phase with its unspoken aim of promoting a British version liberal democracy around the globe. The article highlights how the often intimate engagements of diverse audiences in South Asia and its diasporas with the BBC have changed in response to technological innovation and geopolitics. We emphasise the distinctiveness of the BBC voice, especially the ‘right kind of diasporic voice’, and its acoustic power and presence in South Asia. We highlight how the rapid expansion of South Asian mediascapes – especially in India is unsettling the privileged position that the BBC South Asian services have enjoyed for nearly eight decades. Digital technologies are facilitating the emergence of ‘digital diasporas’ as South Asians across the world log on to consume news with alternative perspectives to news providers in South Asia and to engage in diasporic debates, often with unintended and unforeseen consequences.

Rethinking expeditions: On critical expeditionary practice

The expedition’s complicity in the imperial project of conquest, extraction and settlement has placed it as an object of critique, but largely discredited its significance as a valid research method in the critical social sciences. Yet dismissing the expedition merely as an imperial remnant risks ignoring more nuanced histories that bear no resemblance to myths of conquest and masculine heroics. Instead, this paper considers the expedition as a malleable practice that can be critically appropriated and manipulated in ways that retain and further the critique of violence and knowledge production, while also experimenting with creative alternatives to some of its conventions.

Blurred lines: intimacy, mobility, and the social military

ABSTRACT This paper, whilst drawing on a wide-scale exploration of social media use within the UK Armed Forces, narrates the visit of two academic researchers to a very particular military space: a Royal Navy warship. It does so in order to experience, question, and understand the extent to which social media cuts through the private, domestic or public, personal and familial, work and home in an intimate clinch of relations. We do so by exploring how the now-familiar story of the befuddlement of distance in contemporary conflict is complicated by remote communications and autonomous technologies. And we do so to explore the ways in which social media might reconfigure quite intimate and gender ed social relations and practices. This narrative, we suggest, needs nuancing through the military lives, however far removed, who live closeness and distance in differentiated ways, particularly through their mobile phones, tablets, and computers. We explore, through a number of focus groups with naval personnel on board a military ship, how the reworking of military life is producing feelings of distance and isolation, but also togetherness and community. Indeed, as opposed to simply opening up once-intimate places to exposure and, thus, erasing geography, instead, places and spaces, and bodies, matter differently. Crucial to uncovering and understanding these relations are our own embodiments as researchers. We explore how we as academic researchers erode and rework these distinctions as we navigate, and inhabit, particular military spaces.

The Origins, Development and Practice of Economic and Social Strategies in the Middle East from Earliest Times to the Modern Day

We returned in spring 2009 to continue excavating the 40 × 15 m trench we opened in 2008. The team of 20 professional archaeologists was almost exactly the same as that in 2008, and this year Mohammad al-Najjar was able to be on site almost full-time, which allowed a fl ying start to the season. Our new representative from the DoA, Ashraf al-Khresheh, had little previous experience of prehistoric archaeology, but was an enthusiastic hard worker. There must have been something infectious about the team’s good spirit as our team of 25 Rashaydah, ‘Azazma and Sa‘idiyyin workmen, who normally fi nd the rather slow and fi ddly work on a prehistoric site increasingly tedious, all played an extremely positive and active role in the season. We were also very fortunate in the group of 16 students who joined us for the Easter vacation part of the season, who not only learned something of Neolithic archaeology, but also about Bedouin culture; sadly, although the humour translates very well it is not really suitable for putting into print. Friendships made in the fi eld are now easily maintained by mobile phone and SMS message, but it still surprises me to fi nd a group of Bedouin in Faynan roaring in laughter at a cryptic reference to one of their jokes being transmitted to them from a muddy archaeological trench in the UK.