Diasporas and Diplomacy ─ Cosmopolitan contact zones at the BBC World Service (1932-2012)

Diasporic broadcasters have always been at the heart of the BBC’s foreign language services. Yet, across 80 years of overseas broadcasting they have remained largely absent from the public and academic understanding of the BBC’s World Service and its international, intellectual and diplomatic impact. Bringing together leading scholars, this innovative book provides a multi-disciplinary analysis of the contribution of diasporic broadcasters to the exercise of British public diplomacy and cultural exchange.

This book offers the first historical and comparative analysis of the ‘corporate cosmopolitanism’ that has characterised the work of the BBC’s international services since the inception of its Empire Service in 1932. Through a series of empirically-grounded case studies the book interrogates transformations in, and assumptions about, international broadcasting relating to:

• the intersections of colonialism and cosmopolitanism;
• cultural and public diplomacy;
• national and diasporic imaginaries;
• journalism and strategic communication.

Demonstrating multi-disciplinary collaborative methods, the book will be of interest to students and scholars of sociology, media studies, history, politics, international relations, cultural studies, digital and new media studies, as well as research methods that cross habitual boundaries between the Social Sciences and Humanities.

Marie Gillespie is Professor of Sociology at The Open University and Co-Director of the Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change.

Alban Webb is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change (CRESC) at The Open University.