The Satellite at the End of the World:Infrastructural Encounters in North Greenland

In this chapter, I examine processes of place-making in Qaanaaq, North Greenland which display how its marginality is produced on different scales. I focus on the mutual co-shaping of local everyday practices and infrastructural systems, which I term ‘infrastructural encounters’. Through stories of key infrastructural sites in Qaanaaq, such as its hotel, satellite ground station and telecommunication station, as well as the local concept “down south” which describes the world south of Qaanaaq, the chapter highlights how infrastructural encounters act in the ongoing making of Qaanaaq, leading to extractive processes in the circulation of people and information, marginalization of Qaanaaq’s internet users and remote control of infrastructure. I draw on fieldwork conducted across multiple sites in Greenland, including interviews with locals and representatives from various functions in Qaanaaq. Through this exploration of infrastructure and everyday life, the chapter sheds light on the ways in which marginality is produced and sustained, and the role that telecommunication infrastructures play in shaping the experiences of those positioned as living ‘on the margins’.In this chapter, I examine processes of place-making in Qaanaaq, North Greenland which display how its marginality is produced on different scales. I focus on the mutual co-shaping of local everyday practices and infrastructural systems, which I term ‘infrastructural encounters’. Through stories of key infrastructural sites in Qaanaaq, such as its hotel, satellite ground station and telecommunication station, as well as the local concept “down south” which describes the world south of Qaanaaq, the chapter highlights how infrastructural encounters act in the ongoing making of Qaanaaq, leading to extractive processes in the circulation of people and information, marginalization of Qaanaaq’s internet users and remote control of infrastructure. I draw on fieldwork conducted across multiple sites in Greenland, including interviews with locals and representatives from various functions in Qaanaaq. Through this exploration of infrastructure and everyday life, the chapter sheds light on the ways in which marginality is produced and sustained, and the role that telecommunication infrastructures play in shaping the experiences of those positioned as living ‘on the margins’

Constituents of a hit parade: Questioning democracy and listener participation in P4 i P1’s Det elektriske barometer

Due to their historically inaccessible nature, public service broadcasters’ media archives have lent themselves primarily to internal refl ection while historical contextualisation of the cultural heritage in these archives has been broadcasters’ prerogative. In this study, digitised material from the Danish youth radio programme P4 i P1’s Det elektriske barometer forms the basis for an experiment into how access to digital archives can inform humanities scholarship. We argue that one important implication of the new digital archives is that they enable approaches independent of broadcasters’ own narratives since they off er the possibility for autonomous study of large quantities of material. The character of listener participation in Det elektriske barometer, which had the slogan ‘the listener-determined hit parade’, is approached from a micro-, meso-, and macro-level employing Carpentier’s concept of participation (2011b), to explore how diff erent approaches to digital archives can provide new answers to media’s self-presentation

My Whole Life in Telephones

In this article, I address a methodological issue that has come into focus after the advent of the “material turn”; the matter of how to study historical, sociomaterial practices. In response, I propose a method for materially oriented qualitative interviews, in which historical artifacts are used as elicitation devices. I focus on three ways in which material devices can aid historical research in interviews: I first emphasize that materiality can aid the qualitative interviewer by providing specificity, as the material presence of historical artifacts can urge participants to remember details, directing the conversation toward the specificity of mundane artifacts whose characteristics can be difficult to recollect. Second, I suggest that such artifacts may be used also to aid narrative structure, guiding and prompting participants to follow the story they infer from a particular setup of artifacts. Third, I propose that the active engagement with historical artifacts in the qualitative interview allows participants to access body memories of using these artifacts, eliciting the particulars of abandoned bodily practices. I end by discussing the possibilities for improving the “materially oriented qualitative interview”—method and applying it in other contexts

P4 i P1

P4 i P1 var et ungdomsradioprogram, der fra 1. april 1973 til 1. april 1997 blev sendt på DR P1 (undtaget en indledningsvis toårig prøveperiode på P2) søndag aften. I starten havde P4 i P1 undertitlen “En aften for unge”, og programmet udgjorde det første danske eksperiment med et samlet flertimersforløb med radioindhold målrettet unge. Målgruppen var lyttere mellem 14 og 18 år. Denne tænkning i flade- eller flowradio brød med den forudgående periodes programplanlægning, som ikke var tilrettelagt ud fra hensyn til flow mellem programmer, men målrettet samme gruppe af lyttere