"Reaching the People": Communication and Global Order in the 20th Century

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Valeska Huber
• Subject Area: Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: from 2016 to 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 289213179

The Emmy Noether Group examines the role of communication in twentieth-century conceptions of global order. It moves the question, how broader parts of the world population could be reached, to the centre of analysis. While several studies have examined the contributions of non-Western elites to ideas of global orders, larger sections of the world population have not yet sufficiently figured in this context. Yet the global 'masses' gained increasing importance in debates about the growing world population, decolonization processes and concepts of economic development. In these debates, the global public emerged as a central concept. The research group explores strategies and methods that were developed to give new actors access to the global public and analyses the political aims connected with these strategies and methods. It also looks at groups that wanted to reach the global public through their own initiative. Besides access and new connections, the boundaries of the global public and the limits of information flows will also be highlighted. The central study of the research group deals with actors who wanted to revolutionize the access of individuals to information on a worldwide scale. Scientists, missionaries, colonial officers, American philanthropists and cold warriors developed world languages, propagated large-scale literacy campaigns and supported the spread of information with the help of libraries, film and radio. At the centre of the analysis are British and American actors as well as the application and modification of their methods in India and West Africa. Here the competition with local approaches to communicate with the 'masses' will also be studied. Based on the results of this study, two dissertation projects evaluate the access to the global public in exemplary case studies. They work on specific regions and research how non-Western actors attempted to gain access to the global public. One project analyses women movements in the Middle East and their role in decolonisation processes. It examines when women attempted to use the global public to publicise their agenda and which media they used in this endeavour. The second project looks at initiatives that attempted to include village inhabitants in the Middle East into global information networks. The publication of a collected volume entitled 'The Global Public: Its Power and its Limits' connects the work of the Emmy Noether group with broader research contexts of twentieth-century history.

• DFG Programme: Independent Junior Research Groups