The aim of the project is to understand how early Soviet transnational broadcasts at he height of the Cold War form the idea of television and thereby broaden the perspectives on transnational broadcasting by studying its early history in Europe. By analysing the role of the Soviet broadcasts in the European television landscape the project thus seeks to problematize the received history of transnational television as being dominated by Anglo-American broadcasting. The project set out to analyse archive material, TV-broadcasts and contextual media in four countries. The main focus of the analysis has, though, been on archive material from two transnational organisations (EBU and OIRT) and BBC, as well as the TV-broadcasts preserved through portals such as EUScreeen. The chosen delimitation has not restricted the possibilities of fulfilling the aim of the project.

Results
1)    The project plan states the importance of conducting empirical research about early transnational broadcasting and the relations between eastern and western Europe. I have specifically addressed this issue in two of the published articles. In ‘Live from Moscow’ (2012) I argue that the transnational broadcast organisations European Broadcasting Union (EBU) and International Organisation for Radio and Television (OIRT) provide a framework for cooperation and programme exchange across the Iron Curtain (regarding technical, legal and cultural aspects), but that TV-production also relied heavily on the national broadcast organisations. ‘Transnational Television in Europe’ (2015b) has a wider focus and analyse how EBU and OIRT was in fierce competition on the global media market (especially in their attempts to establish cooperation with broadcasters in Africa and Asia), but that they at the same time established a deepened cooperation within the European borders in the 1950s and 1960s. The two most important arguments of the chapter are 1) that the image of a strictly divided Europe during the Cold War must be problematized in the case of broadcasting, and 2) that the development of the global media market shows how the Cold War had far more arenas than the ones usually discussed.

2)    The main theoretical contribution of the project originates from the aim to problematize the received history of transnational television. The results are to some extent specific to research on the history of television, but may also me relevant to a more general discussion on historiography. In ‘Forerunners of a New Era’ (2015a) I problematize the practises of conducting media history research by investigating the relation between historicity and historiography in the field. The vantage point of the article is the observation that early transnational broadcasting is rarely mentioned even in specialised literature on television history in Europe. By examining cooperation between BBC and Soviet Central Television during the early 1960s I analyse the contemporary claims of historicity which are then discussed in relation to the received history of the field. The main argument is that the claims of the TV-producers (‘we are the forerunners of a new era’) are uncalled for and can be regarded a ruin of the future; that satellite television and a global TV-system was developed in quite a different way than the producers imagined. The historiography of television has not been able to address this complexity and instead produced a received history of television where early transnational initiatives are muted. In ‘(Un)Familiar Spaces of Television Production’ I use the above as a vantage point, and as a way of addressing production practises and spatiality. While the first article address historiography generally, the second article sets out to demonstrate how the received history of television neglects production practises that can contribute to and develop our theoretical perspectives on television. In ‘Producing Global Media Memories’ (Lundgren & Evans, 2016, in print) the theoretical perspectives are developed further, this time by conducting a comparative analysis of transnational TV-production from Soviet Central Television and the BBC, with a particular focus on the production of global media memories.

3)    Some of the greatest challenges to the study of transnational television are linked to methodology. The diversity of the archive material demands a linguistic competence that is rarely found in individual researchers and which explains the need for international networks of researchers. Questions of access and use of archives in any (trans)national contexts is another great challenge. In ‘Transnational Broadcasts from Eastern Europe and the Issue of Transnational Archive Practises’ I discuss archive practises and their consequences by example of the empirical work conducted in the project. In a forthcoming article I apply a more methodological oriented perspective in order to critically engage in media historiography, suggesting that research on media history could learn from developments in the field of historical anthropology.
New perspectives
During the course of the project it has become increasingly evident that television infrastructures in particular, and communication infrastructures in general are of great importance. Questions of infrastructure is therefore at the core of my new project – Via Satellite: Transnational Infrastructures in European Television History (2016-18) – together with Christine Evans, and founded by the Foundation for Baltic and East European Studies (Östersjöstiftelsen).

International relations
Given the international character of the project itself it is almost self-evident that it relies on international relations. The project started already in fall 2011 when I was a visiting research fellow at Utrecht University, funded by Nils-Eric Svenssons scholarship. During the stay I established several important contacts and in 2013 co-founded The European (Post)Socialist Television History Network together with Dana Mustata (then Utrecht University, today Groningen). Today the network has about 130 members. The network was inaugurated at a conference at Södertörn University in fall 2013 with participants mainly from Europe but also the USA and Japan. The network has organized conferences, conference panels and edited a themed issue in the journal VIEW.

I have presented around 20 papers at international conferences in the years 2011-2016. The presentations have mainly been based on individual papers, but also a number of panels organised by the above network and via cooperation with other research project, such as Screening Socialism led by professor Sabina Mihelj at Loughborough University.

As already noted I head a new project, Via Satellite, in which I work together with Christine Evans, a historian at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. As part of the project I will spend the fall 2016 in Milwaukee as a visiting researcher and Christine will spend fall 2017 in Stockholm.

External contacts
Two of the publications are published in non-academic contexts. One is published in Glänta (Lundgren & Mustata 2013) and one in Counter Screens (2014) which is published by International Federation of Television Archives (FIAT/IFTA). I have also participated in two conferences aiming to bridge the gap between the academy and media organisations. In October 2014 I participated in EUScreenXL, and in March 2015 the above mentioned network organised a conference in Bucharest together with Televiziunea Româna and FIAT/IFTA. During the conferences researchers, archivists, TV-workers and other actors met to discuss challenges of working with, and researching television.

Important publications
I would like to present two articles in particular.

1)    ‘Forerunners of a New Era’ was originally presented a conference paper and was awarded Top Paper Award at the ICA 2014 in Seattle. The article was later published in the journal Media History, Vol. 21(2). I have already described the content of the article but may add that the strength of the article lies in its combination of an empirically anchored analysis and a theoretically driven discussion illuminating the prerequisites of media historiography.

2)    ‘(Un)Familiar Spaces of Television Production’ is to a large extent based on an analysis of a travel report written by a BBC delegation after a two-week long visit to Soviet Central Television in spring 1956. The report is especially intriguing since it provides a detailed and initiated observations of television production and practises within Soviet television. The article has a particular focus on ‘spaces of television production’, for instance studio use, outside broadcasts and media events. The conclusion of the article argues that theories of television and spatiality has almost exclusively been based on western experiences but that they can be developed and nuanced by using empirical data from other contexts. Furthermore, the report is an interesting material that open up for a number of methodological questions concerning how the observations of the BBC can be understood. The relation between observations, report and the observed practises is of course immensely complicated given that the visit took place at the height of the Cold War. In my future work I will explore this further and develop perspectives inspired by research carried out in the tradition of historical anthropology.

Publication plan
So far the project has published five peer review articles, four in international journals, and one as a chapter in an edited book. I have also co-edited a theme issue of the journal VIEW, with immediate relevance to the project. I have also published a couple of articles without peer review and a couple of book reviews of relevant literature. Some of the articles are available as OA, the others made available in pre-print versions.

In addition to the published articles I am currently planning a book length study, partly based on this project, together with Christine Evans.