Thesis (M.A.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1983. / Typescript. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 138-142).

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My dissertation is a story of journey. In one sense it speaks to the ways in which my assistant, Fei, and I decided to attempt research inside a very small internet radio station that I came to call Youth Web Radio (YWR) for the purposes of this dissertation. YWR was the first licensed internet radio station in China. It was a station intended for a young audience. It was also the brainchild of the Beijing Communist Youth League and the product of university-educated creatives. It operated out of Beijing from 2005 to 2018, and fully closed down due to a lack of the resources necessary to make a full transition from a project of the party-state to a viable profit-generating commercial organization. At times the story I write moves around the idea of fieldwork. The actual time I spent in the field was from November 2014 to July 2015. But the journey that I write in this dissertation entails more than the days when we were on the ground in Beijing for the research. It includes narrative that speaks to how previous trips and life experiences started to build an energy and desire in me to do some kind of post graduate work in China, or rather on an aspect of what I had been experiencing in China, which had much to do with education. It also includes narrative that speaks to the circuitous path it took to find YWR as a field site, but also as a focus or draw for an attempt at ethnography. At other times the story I write moves around the conception of time though never in a straightforward explicated sense—more so in the way the narratives reach into different pockets of my life at different moments, and find their way into the story. I somehow couldn’t write this dissertation without including pieces from moments in my life that in one sense felt removed from the task at hand, which was to tell an ethnographic tale of a sole fieldwork experience. Yet in the sense of lens and connection, they felt utterly important to our story and as if to leave them out meant leaving out a piece of the truth of the writing. Though this story is about my personal journey, I write it as our story due to the ways in which it is also about the different people I have encountered in my life in time and in place, to of course include the fieldwork experience, and who I see as contributors to the way the story unfolds—scholars, thinkers, friends—and in the sense of this being an anthropological endeavor as interlocutors as well. In this dissertation, lived transition is about both interlocutor and anthropologist, the story the interlocutor tells and that the anthropologist writes is also about the transition in which the anthropologist herself is engaged. Through this lens of lived transition the dissertation speaks to my own life and in doing so speaks to how a group of young people narrated “becoming a company” and “internet radio” in China’s government-monitored media industry, and as to how I came to write their story as our own.

This thesis examines propaganda and educational campaigns in the Brezhnev-era USSR, where the Party-state continued the longstanding Soviet attempt to form the country's youth into conscientious builders and defenders of communism. Focusing on the military, military-historical and physical-cultural activity that the state identified as areas of strategic importance in a period of intensifying competition with the capitalist world, the thesis analyses the interactions between propaganda and its producers, and the ordinary and extraordinary young people at whom it was aimed. It finds that state agencies and organisations of the Brezhnev era followed tradition in employing heroic motifs and discourses to elicit heroic behaviour amongst the population, often seeking to apply themes and material from earlier periods directly to the situation of late-1960s and 1970s youth. In particular, propaganda emphasised the importance of both models of wartime heroism, and the characteristics articulated in the 1961 Moral Code of the Builder of Communism - but in a political and social environment now much changed from those in which they had originally emerged. The thesis begins with a study of material surrounding the reinstatement of universal conscription after Khrushchev's army reforms, before examining youth involvement in one of the flagship military-patriotic education campaigns of the period. The second part of the thesis then shifts the focus to a more symbolic, yet no less significant site of the 'defence of the honour of the Motherland': the international sporting arena, particularly during the 1972 Olympiads in 'hostile' West Germany and Japan. Through a case study of coverage of the gymnast Olga Korbut, the thesis argues that, while propaganda-makers still sought to control the Soviet definition of 'heroism', conditions increasingly allowed for the emergence of celebrity and a popular heroism based more on self-advancement and public acclaim than on established Soviet ethical models.

This thesis examines the National Socialists' ultimate designs for Germany's youth, conveniently organized within the Hitlerjugend. Prevailing scholarship portrays the Hitler Youth as a place for ideological indoctrination and activities akin to the modern Boy Scouts. Furthermore, it often implies that the Hitler Youth was paramilitary but always lacks support for this claim. These claims are not incorrect, but in regard to the paramilitary nature of the organization, they do not delve nearly deeply enough. The National Socialists ultimately desired to consolidate their control over the nation and to prepare the nation for a future war. Therefore, they needed to simultaneously indoctrinate German youth, securing the future existence of National Socialism but also ensuring that German youth carry out their orders and defend Germany, and train the youth in premilitary skills, deliberately attempting to increase the quality of the Wehrmacht and furnish it with a massive, trained reserve in case of war. This paper relies on published training manuals, translated propaganda, memoirs of former Hitler Youth members and secondary literature to examine the form and extent of the ideological indoctrination and premilitary training--which included the general Hitler Youth, special Hitler Youth subdivisions, military preparedness camps akin to boot camp, and elaborate war games which tested the youths' military knowledge. This thesis clearly demonstrates that the National Socialists desired to train the youth in skills that assisted them later in the Wehrmacht and reveals the process implemented by the National Socialists to instill these abilities in Germany's impressionable youth.