ePrints

‘Good contact in spite of static’: advocating a radio geopolitics assemblage approach through analysing the Lindberghs’ 1931 North Pacific flight

Lookup NU author(s): Dr Alison WilliamsORCiD

Downloads

• Published version [.pdf]

Licence

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).

Abstract

In the summer of 1931 famed US aviator Charles Lindbergh and his wife, Anne, flew their Sirius aircraft from Washington DC, westward across northern Canada, Alaska and the Bering Strait to Japan and China. Although touted as a vacation, they were in fact surveying for Pan American Airways’ first trans-pacific air route, an endeavour that would further project US power across the Pacific. This paper uses this example to advance a way of thinking about the capacities of radio to be geopolitical beyond the popular culture mass-media broadcaster focus on much extant work on radio geopolitics. Two examples, focusing on Anne Lindbergh’s role as radio operator for this flight, are used to bring assemblage thinking and radio geopolitics together to advocate for the creation of a radio geopolitics assemblage, which provides a way to engage with how different uses of radio can be inculcated in the projection of power across space.

Publication metadata

Author(s): Williams AJ

Publication type: Article

Publication status: Published

Journal: Geopolitics

Year: 2025

Pages: epub ahead of print

Online publication date: 26/01/2025

Acceptance date: 17/01/2025

Date deposited: 12/12/2024

ISSN (print): 1465-0045

ISSN (electronic): 1557-3028

Publisher: Taylor and Francis

URL: https://doi.org/10.1080/14650045.2025.2456016

DOI: 10.1080/14650045.2025.2456016

Altmetrics

Share