Alexander (Alec) Badenoch (1971) is Assistant Professor in Media and Cultural studies. He is also the Beeld en Geluid Endowed Professor of Transnational Media at the VU Amsterdam,where he is PI on the JPI-CH project "Polyvocal Interpretations of Contested Colonial Heritage" and was member of the NWA Route Kunst small project "Artists' Community Knowledge (ACKnowledge)". He has a BA from the University of the South (1993), an MA in Social Science from the University of Chicago (1995) and a PhD in Modern Languages from the University of Southampton (2004). He was the leading researcher on the HERA-project “ Transnational Radio Encounters (TRE)” 2013-2016, and member of the NWA VWData Project "Capturing Bias: Diversity-aware Computation for Accurate Big Media Data Analysis" led by Prof Lora Aroyo of the VU Amsterdam 2017-2018. He is author of Voices in Ruins: West German Radio across the 1945 Divide (winner, 2007-8 IAMHIST Prize), and was chief editor of the Inventing Europe Digital Museum (www.inventingeurope.eu). He sits on the steering committee of the Entangled Media Histories (EMHIS) network co-founder of the Women’s Radio in Europe (WREN) and Transmitting and Receiving Europe (TRANS) research networks, and was a is longtime board member (including Vice President and President) of the Studienkreis Rundfunk und Geschichte (German broadcasting History Society). His research covers a range of topics in 20th Century transnational history, and draws on disciplines ranging from media and cultural studies, cultural geography, gender studies, and history of technology.
Badenoch's research falls into three key strands:
- Broadcasting and (trans)national identities. As the leading media of the 20th century, radio and television have simultaneously consolidated ideas of national belonging and provided access to imagined global spheres. Radio and television (and their multiply-mediated forms) are approached less as objects of study in themselves than as privileged pathways into broader social questions and intermedial entanglements. Current research looks into the entanglements of radio broadcasting and international women's movements in the post-WWII era.
- Digital heritage and networked constructions of the past Building on experiences editing an online virtual exhibit, as well as the new exhibition and navigation platform radio.garden, this strand of research focuses on the problems and possibilities of networking heritage in the age of aggregation and convergence.
- Infrastructures, territories and transnational mobility, focusing on the way the building of networks both envisages and enables forms of mobility in European spaces. What are the technologies, insitutions and discourses that allows things, people and ideas to circulate, and how are they mediated? This also includes alternative or counter-spaces, such as the offshore broadcasters in the North Sea, and the squatted spaces in Amsterdam and their key links to the rise of internet culture there.