We are pleased to announce that Dr Joanna Walewska-Choptiany has been awarded a grant from the National Science Centre under the SONATA BIS 15 scheme. The project, entitled “Cold War feedback loops between Polish Radio and Radio Free Europe, 1952–1990”, has received funding of PLN 2,572,406.
This project aims to present Polish Radio and Radio Free Europe as equal actors in the Cold War information space, who listened closely to one another across the Iron Curtain, as so-called ‘white propaganda’ was one of the most important sources of information.
Both institutions operated within a shared cultural and communicative environment. In relation to them, one can use the concept of cultural mimicry, which comes to the fore in areas such as the mutual adoption of propaganda language, the way in which both institutions structured their programmes, or how they mutually influenced each other’s decisions regarding infrastructure expansion.
In the literature on Cold War radio broadcasting, Polish Radio is often contrasted with the free and impartial Radio Free Europe, creating the impression that the latter was the sole source of information in Poland. Conversely, historians of radio broadcasting in post-war Poland typically consider radio solely within a domestic context. To overcome this epistemological and methodological impasse, I propose adopting a new conceptual framework. I shall use the concept of entanglement to think beyond scales and traditional boundaries, as we urgently need more pluralistic media histories that also take into account the media landscape or media ecology, including various forms of media exchange between radio, newspapers and so on.
Source: NCU Information Portal