Radio Soap Opera Research Articles

Fictionalizing and researching: An approach from collaborative ethnography

This article describes the process of making a radio soap opera with Stop Desahucios Granada 15M, a movement fighting for the right to decent housing in southern Spain. The production of the radio soap opera has allowed us to: (i) investigate the affective and political implications of the problem of evictions after the financial crisis of 2008; (ii) reflect on how to produce meanings through co-research (using collaborative ethnography and fiction); (iii) experiment with the use of fiction as a research device, to “do” research and not only to transmit its results; and (iv) investigate the potential of fiction to facilitate new creative forms of knowledge construction.

Promoting HIV/AIDS Prevention through Soap Operas

In the past three decades television soap operas have been used as a means of healtheducation and persuasion. In recent years, the proliferation of entertainment televisionworldwide has made the soap opera a powerful source of educational and social messages.One of the most critical global health issues of today is the need to reduce HIV/AIDSinfection, particularly on the continent of Africa. In the 1990s, the country of Tanzaniabroadcast a highly effective radio soap opera to promote HIV/AIDS prevention. In 2000,Tanzania again employed the use of the soap opera to address HIV/AIDS as well as othersocial issues, this time through television. Our research indicates that the Tanzaniantelevision soap opera employed in this effort, Maisha, effectively promoted HIV/AIDSprevention among television viewers. In particular, those who were more involved withMashaka, the star of Maisha, were more powerfully influenced by the health messagescommunicated through the programme. The implications of this research for usingentertainment for HIV/AIDS prevention are discussed

Methodological Experiences in Collaborative Ethnography. Communication and Participation as Frameworks for Constructing in Common

In this article, we will analyze how we built the research process of a collaborative ethnography with the Stop Evictions Granada 15M Movement (SEG15M). We will begin with a brief contextualization of the housing issues in Spain and the SEG15M movement to explain why we started the co-research experience with the movement. Next, we will clarify the composition, function, and main purposes of the ‘debate groups’ in our research, as well as their particular differences and dynamics concerning other qualitative techniques. Finally, we will focus on two main aspects, participation and communication, which emerged within the debates and later materialized into a transmedia project and the development of a radio soap opera. The latter is a product, and a process, of collaborative work that bridges communication and participation at the intra- and inter-group levels. It is a fictional story that emerges from the common lived experiences of the groups.

Feeling at home: Sound, affect and domesticity on radio soap operas

This article introduces the concept of ‘the everyday implausible’, asserting that, between 1930 and 1960, US radio serial aesthetics produced a tug-of-war between the familiar and the unfamiliar that was simultaneously radical and reactionary. This aesthetic created a space for the listener to place new versions of herself within the narrative, inviting the imagined woman-at-home to re-envisioning the possibilities of reality. However, re-envisioning reality produced its own set of limitations. The sonic features of the radio serial soundscape created imaginary spaces within the home, but these imaginary spaces were – as often as not – also homes, making the potential of escape wholly illusory. In giving attention to the specific aesthetic features of these programmes, this article interrogates the meaningful work produced by a sparse soundscape, alongside an emphasis on domesticity and emotional conversation.

Colonial Imaginary and Radio Soap Opera: The Case of Se abren las nubes and the Spanish Guinea

Colonial Imaginary and Radio Soap Opera: The Case of Se abren las nubes and the Spanish Guinea

Agnes Nixon (Soap Opera Creator)

Agnes Nixon (1927–2016) started her career in radio soap operas under the tutelage of Irna Philllps, the “Queen of Soaps.” Nixon honed her craft in the early days of television, writing for Phillips’s The Guiding Light and Another World, and co-creating As the World Turns before eventually creating her own soap operas, One Life to Live, All My Children, and Loving. She gained a reputation for incorporating social issues and topical material into her programs, operating under the idea that you could both educate and entertain an audience at the same time. Connie Passalacqua conducted the interview on October 21, 1997, in New York City, New York.

Taking Culture and Context Seriously: Advancing Health Communication Research on HIV/AIDS Prevention in Tanzania with the PEN-3 Cultural Model

Although health communication research on the effects of a radio soap opera on HIV/AIDS prevention in Tanzania was groundbreaking, it was conducted from individualistic and Western perspectives that either ignored Tanzania’s cultural context or implicitly conflated it with barriers to health; furthermore, adult HIV/AIDS prevalence rates in Tanzania and other nations of Africa remain the highest in the world. This study of HIV/AIDS prevention in Tanzania drew on the PEN-3 cultural model to foreground the cultural contexts of HIV/AIDS. Interviews with 36 leaders of community-based HIV/AIDS non-governmental organizations in Dar es Salaam pointed to the PEN-3 dimension of ‘nurturers’ (i.e., cultural practices in families and marriages). Through a PEN-3 assessment that crossed this dimension with the ‘cultural empowerment’ domain, the study found the positive nurturers of changing circumcision practices and rites of passage before marriages, the existential nurturers of privacy in the African extended family and grandparents caring for people living with HIV/AIDS, and the negative nurturers of families (e.g., female genital mutilation), marriages (e.g., arranged marriages of young girls), and late-night celebrations. The study concludes with implications for research and practice.

Luiz Maranhão Filho: um ícone do rádio brasileiro

Luiz Beltrão Cavalcanti de Albuquerque Maranhão Filho, é pernambucano, nascido na capital Recife, em 01 de janeiro de 1933. Do pai herdou o nome e a vocação profissional. Ambos com atuação na centenária Rádio Clube de Pernambuco. A emissora tem como data de fundação o dia 06 de abril de 1919. Foi na citada estação de rádio, que o pai, diretor de dramaturgia, contava com o filho para interpretar vozes infantis nos radiodramas que produzia. Os primeiros passos do então garoto, rumo à profissão, foram iniciados no ano de 1940, de onde a caminhada não mais parou. Tornou-se dramaturgo, jornalista, advogado, professor universitário, doutor em comunicação e autor de trinta livros. Sendo que a atividade de escritor prossegue, assim como o trabalho no cargo de presidente do Instituto Histórico de Olinda.

The Kennedys of Castleross: Soap Opera and Sponsorship on Irish Radio

This article explores the use of advertising and sponsored programming on Irish radio from its inception in 1926 until the arrival of Irish television in the 1960s. It discusses the financial dependence of 2RN (later Radio Éireann) on advertising money and the ways this operated in tension with official concerns about that money’s influence on programmes and audiences. There is a particular focus on the hugely popular radio soap opera The Kennedys of Castleross, which was sponsored by chocolate company Fry-Cadbury’s and ran for 18 years from 1955. Using production archives, the article discusses the structures and economics of the programme, including the ways in which the sponsor and their advertising agency were directly involved in its writing. It also examines the ways in which, aside from the direct advertising for Cadbury products, The Kennedys of Castleross carried within its storylines values of the industrialisation, consumer culture and new economic models which were beginning to emerge in Ireland of the late 1950s. The discussion concludes by exploring the ways in which the arrival of television broadcasting in Ireland after 1961 changed the political economy of sponsored radio programming such as The Kennedys.

El reportaje de historias de vida como punto de partida de la radio dramatizada y el 'podcast' de no ficción en el ecosistema digital. Estudio de caso: 'Sin mi identidad' (Cadena COPE), 'Lo conocí en un Corpus' (Podium Podcast) y 'Las tres muertes de mi padre' (Cuonda).

En el ecosistema digital actual el sonido está alcanzando protagonismo a través de nuevos formatos como el podcasting, nacidos en la era de la movilidad. Formatos que pueden compartir elementos, características, dinámicas de trabajo y consumo con otros formatos tradicionalmente radiofónicos, como el reportaje, el docudrama o la radionovela. En este artículo se pretende analizar si la fuerza del human reach storytelling es un punto de partida común en los reportajes analógicos y en los podcasts de ficción y no ficción, tanto en plataformas de audio como en la radio convencional. Para ello, se plantea el estudio de caso de tres podcasts: ‘Sin mi identidad’ (2018, Cadena COPE), ‘Lo conocí en un Corpus’ (2017, Podium Podcast) y ‘Las tres muertes de mi padre’ (2017, Cuonda). La metodología utilizada es cualitativa descriptiva e incluye entrevistas semiestructuradas con sujetos clave en el proceso de los tres espacios objeto de estudio. En los casos analizados se puede afirmar que, si bien el reportaje y el podcast de ficción y no ficción son productos sonoros diferentes, comparten similitudes de producción, documentación y grabación. Asimismo, todos tienen como punto de partida común una historia real, incluso cuando el podcast es de ficción.

Las tres etapas del radioteatro en Chile: de la época dorada al nuevo auge de las series de ficción

A raíz del aumento, desde 2016, de nuevas series de ficción y no ficción sonora en gran parte de Iberoamérica, gracias al podcast y a la radio on demand, se plantea la tarea de analizar la historia del género del radioteatro en Chile, desde sus raíces y su importancia sociocultural, hasta las nuevas formas de producir y pensar este género en el siglo XXI. Sobre la base de información documental, compuesta por archivos de prensa, audios y libretos de radiodramas y los escasos estudios sobre la radio y el radioteatro, se logra dilucidar tres etapas: la época dorada (1940-1970); el renacimiento del radioteatro (2003-2015) y el periodo de auge actual del género (2016 al presente). Si bien existen ciertas continuidades entre el primer y segundo periodo, pese al salto temporal y tecnológico, en la tercera etapa se da una nueva manera de crear y diseñar estas producciones, con temáticas que responden a luchas sociales y políticas de grupos invisibilizados o discriminados del espacio público, como también en la forma de difundirlos, sin que la antena sea el lugar por excelencia para la transmisión como ocurrió con las antiguas radionovelas.

El radioteatro en España: marco de referencia para una aproximación diacrónica

El objetivo del presente artículo es ofrecer una contextualización del radioteatro en España entre las décadas de los años cuarenta a los años setenta del siglo pasado. A través de un análisis retrospectivo de su historia, se hace hincapié en algunas de las claves de su implantación como género narrativo y dramático. Se utiliza una metodología teórico-conceptual, basada en el análisis documental, que ha permitido circunscribir y referenciar temporalmente el radioteatro en el periodo señalado. El resultado del análisis pone de manifiesto la relación de los radioteatros con la situación social y la importancia de su legado literario y cultural. Igualmente, se referencian las aportaciones de los autores y realizadores españoles de radioteatro en esas décadas. La conclusión pone de manifiesto que, a lo largo de la historia de la radio, el radiodrama aparece y desaparece condicionado por sus programadores y por la demanda del público. A pesar de la apuesta de la radio por los contenidos informativos en su programación, a partir de finales de los años setenta, se mantuvieron en antena algunos seriales, como La saga de los Porretas (1976-1988), en la Cadena SER, y Sobrenatural (1994-1996), o Historias (1997-2003), en Radio Nacional de España.

Hidden Gem of the Cairo Consensus: Helping to End Population Growth with Entertainment Media

In 1994, the Programme of Action of the International Conference on Population and Development was adopted. The Programme conveys anthropocentric sensibilities when discussing the idea of sustainable development. Moreover, the Programme has largely been interpreted in such a way that it fails to hold the goal of ending population growth at the same level of esteem as the goal of ensuring reproductive health and rights. Despite some unfavorable outcomes, the Programme’s orientation around gender equality is to be celebrated. In section 11.23, the Programme highlights a key tactic to help achieve gender equality: effective use of the entertainment media, including radio and television soap operas and drama. Since 1998, Population Media Center has successfully used mission-driven entertainment to confront the most powerful drivers of ongoing rapid population growth: the social norms, attitudes and behaviors related to the status of women in various societies around the world; misinformation about contraception and cultural barriers to its use (such as male opposition); and perceived norms with regard to ideal family size.

Mediação familiar: apropriações, usos midiáticos e socioculturais na telenovela e no bumba meu boi

Artigo objetiva analisar a constituição das identidades familiares através das relações vivenciadas com o gênero melodramático, exploradas em suas várias dimensões e manifestações, o que inclui a telenovela e o bumba meu boi; tendo como ponto de partida o estudo de uma família em três gerações. O referencial teórico apoia-se nos estudos culturais e nos estudos de recepção. Optou-se pela pesquisa de abordagem qualitativa e trabalhou-se com o método da história oral em seu desdobramento na técnica história de família. Entre outros resultados, destaca-se: a caracterização das práticas culturais evidenciou, na trajetória da família, o contato com as narrativas ficcionais e melodramáticas, isto é, outros modos da família conviver com a novela, com outros formatos que têm por gênero o melodrama; a história de família revelou que a novela (o folhetim, a radionovela e a fotonovela), enquanto tradição popular melodramática antecede à telenovela, isto é, a novela vista na televisão.Palavras-chave: Identidade. Estudos de recepção. Telenovela. Bumba meu boi. História oral.Link: http://seer.ufrgs.br/index.php/intexto/article/view/57129

Community media and translocalism in Latin America: cultural production at a Mexican community radio station

This article investigates the role that community media play in the translocal negotiation of local culture in Latin America. Translocal is a concept that captures the way that local cultural producers engage with national and transnational forces in shaping everyday cultural practices. This study focuses on community radio station Ecos de Manantlán in Zapotitlán de Vadillo, Mexico (Radio Zapotitlán), during the years 2006–2012. Radio Zapotitlán is officially categorized as a campesino or agricultural laborer/peasant station and presents its campesino identity through radio and Internet content. Analyses of that content, along with interviews with station associates and listeners, reveal the complex cultural mediations between local media producers, national regulators, and transnational donors. This study investigates the local production of a transnationally funded radionovela, or radio soap opera, as a window onto the station’s role as a cultural mediator. This article argues that station participants used the radionovela to express local values and meanings and to marginalize the educational goals of the transnational agency funding the project. Radio Zapotitlán offers a concrete case of cultural negotiation in which local interests engage with – and transform – donor-funded content aimed at the local community.

Mediação familiar: apropriações, usos midiáticos e socioculturais na telenovela e no bumba meu boi

Este artigo objetiva analisar a constituição das identidades familiares através das relações vivenciadas com o gênero melodramático, exploradas em suas várias dimensões e manifestações, o que inclui a telenovela e o bumba meu boi; tendo como ponto de partida o estudo de uma família em três gerações. O referencial teórico apoia-se nos estudos culturais e nos estudos de recepção. Optou-se pela pesquisa de abordagem qualitativa e trabalhou-se com o método da história oral em seu desdobramento na técnica história de família. Entre outros resultados, destaca-se: a caracterização das práticas culturais evidenciou, na trajetória da família, o contato com as narrativas ficcionais e melodramáticas, isto é, outros modos da família conviver com a novela, com outros formatos que têm por gênero o melodrama; a história de família revelou que a novela (o folhetim, a radionovela e a fotonovela), enquanto tradição popular melodramática antecede à telenovela, isto é, a novela vista na televisão.

Reading Judy and Jane in the Archive

Reading transcripts of Judy and Jane, an obscure radio soap opera with a short network run and only midwestern distribution, has a lot to tell us about the challenges to understanding serial dramas historically and in the contemporary context of their discovery. The scripts tell the story of Judy and Jane, two domestic, political, and business partners, who struggled against a host of threats to their unorthodox family. This article explores how reading the program as part of the radical Cultural Front of the 1930s, may be a very different thing than hearing it that way.

Rural Radio Program Becomes Mental Health Outreach to Youth

Back to table of contents Previous article Next article International NewsFull AccessRural Radio Program Becomes Mental Health Outreach to YouthAaron LevinAaron LevinSearch for more papers by this authorPublished Online:19 May 2016https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.pn.2016.5b9AbstractMore must be done globally to address mental health issues among young people to avoid worse personal and societal outcomes in future years.Greater investment in mental health around the world should have moved well beyond the talking stage by now, said Stan Kutcher, M.D., a professor of psychiatry at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia.Engaging young people on their own ground is essential for connecting them to mental health care, according to Stan Kutcher, M.D., of Canada’s Dalhousie University.Aaron LevinKutcher spoke at a meeting convened in Washington, D.C., by the World Bank Group and the World Health Organization titled “Out of the Shadows,” an effort to make mental health a priority in the global development process. “The 2001 World Health Organization report took mental illness out of the shadows, so at this point we should not be talking about investing in mental health; we should actually be investing,” said Kutcher.Putting more into mental health systems, especially those targeted at young people in low- and middle-income countries, is critical, he said. Conditions that at onset among young people are mild to moderate in intensity, like depression and anxiety, respond very well to existing treatments.“We’re the only branch of medicine that waits until stage 4 to offer intervention,” said Kutcher. “The problem is not that we don’t know what to do; the problem is that we’re not doing what we know.”As infectious diseases decline as sources of morbidity and mortality in young people, noncommunicable diseases like mental illness will create an increased burden as the population ages without some interventions.“It’s not good enough to put treatment in clinics,” he said. “Kids don’t wake up in the morning and decide to go to clinics, and they often don’t understand that they have a disorder.”Kutcher discussed an approach tested in Malawi and Tanzania, where, as in many developing countries, half the population is under 15 years old. In the two African countries, Kutcher and colleagues from Farm Radio International and TeenMentalHealth.org developed an integrated pathway to mental health care and tested it with case-control cohort studies. The first step was the creation of melodramatic radio soap operas aimed at young people. Story lines about depression and other mental health topics were woven into the scripts. “Mental health by stealth,” Kutcher called it.Listening clubs then were set up in schools where students gathered around a radio set. Teachers were taught to identify children with symptoms of mental illness and to train older children in ways to mentor younger ones. Finally local health care providers were trained in ways to screen, identify, diagnose, and effectively treat illnesses like depression and anxiety.“The process reached 500,000 people on the radio and 15,000 in schools,” he said. “About 3,000 asked their teachers for help, and 1,000 were referred to community health clinics.”Pre- and post-testing and comparison with control villages showed increases in knowledge about mental illness, decreases in stigma, enhanced help seeking, and better health care outcomes, he said.In low- and middle-income countries, such locally delivered interventions can provide a disproportionate population dividend, said Kutcher. Early intervention and effective treatment of youth depression, for instance, can decrease premature mortality by reducing suicide, cardiovascular disease, and diabetes as the population ages. Early intervention also increases labor force participation and workplace productivity, benefiting both individuals and the society in which they live.His experience in both Africa and Canada have led Kutcher to conclude that developing ways to improve access to mental health care can be assisted from the outside, but not imposed.“We have to meet young people where they are, using their language and the vernacular of their subculture,” he said. “We also need to meet them in the institutions where they live, starting with schools. Better to invest in schools rather than jails.”Finally, all community health care providers should have the competency to provide mental health care appropriate to their roles, he said.“There’s no excuse today for any health care provider not to have the ability to screen, identify, and diagnose mental illness,” he said. “No medical professional should graduate without knowledge of mental health.” ■“Mental Health on the Air,” Farm Radio International’s documentary about the rural mental health intervention, can be accessed here. An NPR story, “This Radio Soap Opera Isn’t Your Typical Tearjerker,” is available here. ISSUES NewArchived

Die Radiofamilie by Ingeborg Bachmann (review)

Reviewed by: Die Radiofamilie by Ingeborg Bachmann Katya Krylova Ingeborg Bachmann, Die Radiofamilie. Edited and afterword by Joseph McVeigh. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2011. 411 pp. After the Second World War, radio became an important part of the “psychologische[n] Offensive” (344) of the U.S. in occupied Austria. As the editor of the volume outlines, the Script Department of the U.S.-controlled broadcaster Rot-Weiß-Rot [rwr] was founded in the spring of 1951 with the aim of producing entertaining programs that would win listeners away from the Russian Hour broadcast on the rival ravag station. And it was this department that the twenty-five-year-old Ingeborg Bachmann joined in September 1951. There she worked with colleagues, Jörg Mauthe and Peter Weiser, on [End Page 117] the conception of what would become the hugely popular Radiofamilie. First broadcast on February 2, 1952, the show was aired a total of 330 times until 1960 and, as Joseph McVeigh describes, was one of the few rwr programs taken over by the Österreichischer Rundfunk upon the Allies’ departure in 1955. It was long thought that all the holdings of the rwr had been lost until numerous typescripts were rediscovered in the mid-1990s in the estate of Jörg Mauthe. Among these were fifteen scripts that Bachmann wrote or cowrote for Die Radiofamilie between February 1952 and July 1953. It is these typescripts that have been brought together and expertly edited by McVeigh in this volume. The publication of these scripts for a radio soap opera by the Austrian high modernist writer and poet prompted some excitement in the German-language feuilletons: “es ist ein bisschen so, als würde man in 60 Jahren feststellen, dass Peter Handke an den Drehbüchern für ‘Marienhof’ mitgeschrieben hat,” wrote Jens Dirksen in the Neue Ruhr Zeitung. McVeigh, in the afterword to Die Radiofamilie, asserts that these newly discovered texts “vertiefen […] das Verständnis der Dichterin und ihres Werkes, können es sogar verändern” (337). To anyone unfamiliar with the humorous aspects of Bachmann’s work or her exact depiction of social milieu, this volume may indeed come as a surprise, but it is unlikely to prompt Bachmann scholars to revise their understanding of the writer’s work. Bachmann’s Radiofamilie scripts are characterized by a nuanced, sensitive treatment of social problems, a fine ear for language and dialect, and above all, a wonderful sense of humor, an often-neglected aspect of Bachmann’s writing, which is as present in Malina and the Simultan collection as it is here. Bachmann’s episodes for the radio series are also distinguished by the precise rendering of social milieu that would characterize her uncompleted Viennese comédie humaine, the “Todesarten”-Projekt. Her episodes follow the soap opera genre convention of presenting the everyday concerns of the Floriani family, as indicated by the titles: “Ferienpläne,” “Hexenschuss,” “Schulanfang.” Yet in certain episodes the constraints of the genre are stretched to their limits, as Bachmann treats topics such as the legacy of Nazism, the situation of displaced persons, and conflicting views on modern art. Notwithstanding the fact that all conflicts in Die Radiofamilie are successfully dissolved, Bachmann draws attention to tensions in postwar Austrian society that certainly could not be resolved as easily as they were at the end of a half-hour radio program. The figure of Guido, the brother of the Floriani paterfamilias, was a character that Bachmann in particular developed in her [End Page 118] episodes (361). Unemployed in postwar Austria due to his status as a former Nazi sympathizer, Guido is constantly coming up with hare-brained schemes on how to make his fortune. With his claims to be related to Crown Prince Rudolf in episode twenty-one, Bachmann humorously reflects on the retreat into Habsburg nostalgia in 1950s Austrian popular culture as a diversion from confronting more recent history. Guido is simultaneously the butt of all jokes and rehabilitated into the Floriani family nest, which expresses the postwar consensus of whitewashing the country’s recent past. Yet it would be false to draw biographical parallels between Bachmann’s work on Die Radiofamilie and her own life, as McVeigh does; to read the...

Pest Control: Embrace Marketing

In his News Story “Vietnam turns back a ‘tsunami of pesticides’” (special section on Smarter Pest Control, 16 August, p. [737][1]), D. Normile attributes the increase in pesticide use in Asia to “very powerful marketing forces.” Yet, the campaigns that convinced Vietnamese rice farmers to use less pesticide also used marketing principles and tools, such as strategic use of posters, leaflets, radio soap operas, and television commercials. Although marketing principles are usually used to communicate the value of a commercial product or service to a customer, they can also be applied to promote the social good, as practitioners in the field of social marketing have done for decades in areas such as public health ([ 1 ][2]). It is time that those working to mitigate threats to the environment recognize that marketing principles have much to offer by providing a tried and tested framework that can be used to influence human behavior, a key driver of threats to biodiversity worldwide ([ 2 ][3]). For this to happen, marketing needs to be acknowledged as an amoral set of tools that can be used for a variety of ends, depending on who applies them. It is true that marketing has been traditionally used by businesses, and often to promote behaviors that are environmentally unsustainable. This is exactly why we need to engage with these effective principles and level the playing field. After all, why should the devil have all the best tunes ([ 3 ][4])? 1. [↵][5] 1. J. French, 2. C. Blair-Stevens, 3. D. McVey, 4. R. Merritt , Social Marketing and Public Health: Theory and Practice (Oxford Univ. Press, Oxford, 2009). 2. [↵][6] 1. D. Verissimo , Conserv. Evidence 10 , 29 (2013). 3. [↵][7] 1. G. Hastings , Social Marketing: Why Should the Devil Have All the Best Tunes? (Elsevier, Oxford, 2007). [1]: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/341/6147/737.full [2]: #ref-1 [3]: #ref-2 [4]: #ref-3 [5]: #xref-ref-1-1 View reference 1 in text [6]: #xref-ref-2-1 View reference 2 in text [7]: #xref-ref-3-1 View reference 3 in text