Media, reception and memory: female audiences in the New State

The project “Media, reception and memory: female audiences in the New State” aims to launch the research about media reception history in Portugal – a field quite uninvestigated – through a set of case studies on media reception (press, radio and television) by women between the 1930´s and the 1960´s, in a context of female cultural subordination.

The project allies oral history methods to a theoretical approach on media reception, as a way to research social appropriations of the media by certain female audiences in the past in Lisbon and in the industrial town of Covilhã.

In Portugal, the New State regime (1930-74) coincided with considerable changes in the ways individuals could experience the world – as radio and television were introduced. But the same period was a time of ideological supervision on those new sources of experience, and also comprised limitations and unequal access to the media in a context of relative political and cultural isolation. The project intends to identify what was the real media consumption in different groups and to understand how they appropriated technologies and symbolic forms.

Project coordinator: José Ricardo Carvalheiro

Research team: João Carlos Correia, Maria João Silveirinha, Catarina Valdigem

Starting date: 02/05/2012

Duration: 24 months

Funding: FCT