Grant winners - 14 November 2013

In detail

Humanities

Award winner: Stephen Parker
Institution: University of Worcester
Value: £219,050

Faith on the air: A religious educational broadcasting history c.1920 to present

This project focuses on a hitherto neglected aspect of religious, educational and media history, surveying religious educational broadcasting from its beginnings on radio in the 1920s through the television era and into the digital present. The aim is to reconstruct this aspect of cross-disciplinary history and to map and detail “the purpose and nature of broadcasts to children and young people across a period of technological development, increased religious pluralism and wider religious and cultural change”. It will examine the language and imagery deployed to convey particular messages, the nature of the agendas that informed this “design” and the negotiations that took place between broadcasters, educators, the churches and other faith and interest groups about the content and priorities of religious educational programming. “I am interested in the changing nature and purpose of education and the media in the context of a pluralising and secularising religious culture in the latter part of the century,” said Stephen Parker, professor of the history of religion and education. “It will fill a historiographical lacuna with regard to this aspect of media and educational history. I hope [to discover] the extent to which religious education and religious broadcasting influenced one another. Broadcasting has shaped how many children see religion, what they understand about it; for some, it has even sought to style their religious devotion.”