Listening to “The human without a soul” - outline for an audience-centred history of broadcasting in communist Albania

Abstract

The paper proposes a study of broadcasting in one of the most tightly isolated regimes of the communist Eastern Bloc, beyond the paradigms of radio as a pure propaganda medium and of radio history as pure institutional history. Instead of a macro-history from above, this contribution proposes an ethnographically grounded micro-perspective alongside the lines of ?audience studies?, informed by ?oral history? methods. It proposes focusing on the social effects of radio listening and, in a broader perspective, on how radio broadcasting was embedded into larger modernization agendas of the regime of Enver Hoxha.