Media Studies Colloquium

RTF Ph.D. Candidate Briana Barner research talk:
‘It’s A Reckoning’: Black Podcasts and the Cultural Responses to Surviving R. Kelly

Abstract:
Building upon Stuart Hall’s essay critically engaging with the ‘Black’ in Black popular culture, I have a particular interest in exploring Blackness within this current cultural moment. Various representations of Blackness within media has increased over the last few years. My work argues that this has also spilled over into the podcast industry. Although podcasts are not a new medium, they have grown increasingly popular, thanks to the success of NPR’s true crime podcast Serial in 2014 and the increased usage of smartphones, which have made them much more accessible. I situate Black podcasts within the tradition of Black media serving as publics. The focus of this research is a textual analysis of three podcasts’ responses to the 2019 premiere of the Lifetime documentary Surviving R.Kelly, which details the sexual abuse allegations against the R&B superstar. The podcasts--Tea with Queen & J, The Clubhouse with Mouse Jones, and Marsha’s Plate--present a unique opportunity to take the temperature of how various segments of Black popular culture responded to the documentary, which saw the #MeToo movement intersect with race, gender and class with Black girls and women centered . Each of the episodes were recorded and published within days of the premiere, allowing for nuanced and complex reactions. These episodes are also unique because the perspectives are steeped in various Black perspectives that offer keen intersectional insight. The podcast medium allowed for in depth conversations and the assertion and development of intersectional Black identities that were absent from many of the mainstream coverage of the documentary. The podcast platform, which does not have to adhere to strict publishing deadlines, also allowed for the podcasts to bring in various guests to further complicate the analysis of the impact of the documentary. This research will illuminate the platform’s ability to be an audio archive of sorts of important Black cultural happenings.

Bio:
Briana Barner is an advanced PhD candidate and critical media scholar in the Department of Radio-Television-Film at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research interests include new media and the intersections of race, gender and sexuality, Black cultural production, popular culture and Black feminism. Her dissertation focuses on the performance and articulation of Blackness and Black feminism within podcasts. Briana has a Master’s degree in Women’s and Gender Studies from UT, and is a proud graduate of Bennett College, a small women’s historically Black college, with dual degrees in Journalism and Media Studies, and Africana Women’s Studies.

Presented by Latino Media Arts & Studies. Co-sponsored by Mexican American and Latina/o Studies and the Department of Radio-Television-Film.
REGISTER TO ATTEND: http://bit.ly/Selena-panel-reg

Texas writing talent shines bright on Selena: The Series, one of Netflix’s most anticipated shows of the year. UT alum Raymond Arturo Perez, Seguin native Marcelena Campos Mayhorn (DC’s Legends of Tomorrow), and Aaron Serna (Cristela and Malibu County), from South Texas, are Los Angeles-based writers who are bringing their experiences to the writers’ room and diversifying the television landscape. They will talk about what it was like to write the story of Tejano music star and Texas legend Selena Quintanilla for a global audience, and more! Moderated by RTF Associate Professor Mary Beltrán, this is a panel Selena fans and everyone interested in Latina/o/x and Tejana/o/x visibility won’t want to miss.

Join via Zoom

Hitchcock in America: Shadow of a Doubt's "Family Values"
An unconventionally female-centered Hitchcock text consistently marginalized in the massive scholarly canon on the director’s body of work, Shadow of a Doubt, argues Negra, is a milestone film not only because it marks the director’s emergent engagement with the pathologies of violence in American life but because it opens a window into the placement of femininity in World War II consensus culture and more broadly into the politics of mid-century gender and family life.

Diane Negra is Professor of Film Studies and Screen Culture at University College Dublin. A member of the Royal Irish Academy, she has served as Guest Professor at Brown University, the Free University of Berlin, the University of Reims and Aristotle University in Thessaloniki. She is the author, editor or co-editor of twelve books including Off-White Hollywood: American Culture and Ethnic Female Stardom (2001) which originated as a Ph.D at UT, What a Girl Wants?: The Reclamation of Self in Postfeminism (2008), The Irish in Us: Irishness, Performativity and Popular Culture (2006), Extreme Weather and Global Media (2015) , The Aesthetics and Affects of Cuteness (2016), Shadow of A Doubt (forthcoming, 2021) and Imagining "We" in the Age of "I:" Romance and Social Bonding in Contemporary Culture (forthcoming, 2021). She is Chair of the Irish Fulbright Commission.

Co-sponsored by Global Media Industry Speaker Series.
"Diversity Narratives in Media Industries"
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Converging technologies and multi-platform global media environments of the 21st century are generating the need for new business models and revenue streams for media industries. In the US, the demographic, technological, and cultural changes of the past few decades have led to the emergence of a new discourse of the ‘multicultural mainstream,’ which is produced and circulated through institutional narratives about diversity. This presentation will focus on the strategies of diversity narratives and consider their implications for the politics of race in contemporary media industries.

Co-sponsored by Global Media Industry Speaker Series.
Associate Professor, UT Austin School of Journalism & Media
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"(Perhaps) the Final Verdict on U.S. Newspapers’ Paywall Experiment: The Impact of COVID-19"
Research has documented a persistent problem facing U.S. newspapers -- that is, users’ lukewarm response to digital news offerings. In contrast, the print edition, despite continued disinvestment and dramatic price hikes, to everyone’s surprise, remained the most consumed format and the primary revenue driver for the vast majority of newspapers. Has COVID-19 dramatically changed that and narrowed the persistent print-digital gap? The answer is likely the final verdict on newspapers’ paywall experiment, carrying important implications for the future of newspapers.

Co-sponsored by Global Media Industry Speaker Series.
"Instagrammable Places: Aesthetic Representation and Contested Urban Transformation"
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This presentation explores how Instagram mediates the meanings of place by discussing two cases: Ihwa Mural Village in Seoul and the Woljeong beach on Jeju island in South Korea. The functional protocols of Instagram—its graphic-oriented nature, ability to promote inter-subjective communication of self-reflexivity, and role as an individual and collective archive of particular place images—construct the place myth centering on aesthetic representational qualities. Both influenced by and participating in the Instagram culture, tourists have flowed to those places to achieve visually captivating photos. Such interactions between representational practices and subsequent influx of tourists reshape the material and spatial realities of place involving construction boom, land use change, property value hikes, gentrification and displacement. The talk tackles the contrasts between contested place transformations reconfigured by social media and non-contested media representations.

Youjeong Oh is Associate Professor of Asian Studies and Geography and the Environment at the University of Texas at Austin. She received her Ph.D. in geography from University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Oh is the author of Pop City: Korean Popular Culture and the Selling of Place (Cornell, 2018). Her research explores urbanism, development and dispossession, social movement, and media, tourism, and place in East Asia. Dr. Oh’s current research is about (over)development, dispossession, and desires in Jeju, South Korea.

Co-sponsored by Global Media Industry Speaker Series.
"Failure Analysis as Industry Study; or, How Do You Solve a Problem like Mulan?"
via Zoom: 95663771025

Within engineering, failure analysis anticipates or assesses failure during product development in the hopes of preventing it for the future. What value, if any, might this kind of thinking offer media industry studies? In this presentation, I consider Disney’s live-action remake Mulan as a “media failure”—a rare fumble from the global media conglomerate that has produced in recent years a majority of the world’s blockbuster successes. Considering a range of factors and stakeholders, including the Covid-19 pandemic, the political statements of the film’s star, the reception and legacy of the earlier film version, and Disney’s complex relationship with the Chinese government, I intend to show how studying failure often can be as generative as studying major successes—and how media failure itself is often a situated, tentative phenomenon. But failure analysis also risks serving the interests of the media conglomerate that one hopes to examine and critique, so I will also explore what a counterhegemonic praxis may look like.

RTF Ph.D. Candidate Selena Dickey research talk.
Cables and Relays: Localizing Early Television Distribution, 1947-1978
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Abstract: The cables stretched along poles (or buried beneath our feet), the antennas mounted on towers (or orbiting in space above us) mostly escape our vision—despite the fact they carry the very media signals that take up so much of our attention. This talk brings those distribution technologies into focus by examining how various communities made sense of the microwave relay antennas, coaxial cables, and communications satellites that brought television signals to their homes. And it does this by drawing on archival research situated in an array of places that posed a challenge to the circulation of TV signals—the expansive Texas plains, the formidable Rocky Mountains, and the remote islands of Hawai’i. Altogether, through a geographic cross-section of early television distribution, I offer up a U.S. TV history that moves beyond narratives of homogenous and simultaneous access. Instead, I examine how the actions of local communities in these “fringe areas” reshaped federal telecommunication policy and large-scale infrastructural logics, making them more responsive to the needs of diverse environments, topographies, and publics.

Note time: 3:30-5:00pm
Register to attend.
Resisting Visual Biopolitics: The Story of Annah la Javanaise
Co-sponsored by Center for Women and Gender Studies, South Asia Institute, Center for East Asian Studies, and Global Exchange Studies at Moody College

Through the story of Annah la Javanaise, a trafficked 13-year-old girl who was found wandering the streets of Paris in 1893 and who became the maid and model of painter Paul Gauguin, Fatimah Tobing Rony introduces theories of visual biopolitics to examine those who are allowed to live and those who are allowed to die, in representations of Indonesian women. In her talk, she will introduce strategies of resistance to visual biopolitics in writing, photography, and film up to the present day. She will be screening her short film Annah la Javanaise which was an official selection of the 2020 Annecy International Festival of Film.

Fatimah Tobing Rony is Professor and Chair of Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Irvine. Her book, How Do We Look? Resisting Visual Biopolitics, is forthcoming from Duke University Press.

Join the Department of Radio-Television-Film for a panel discussion on Dr. Alfred L. Martin, Jr.’s new book, The Generic Closet: Black Gayness and the Black-Cast Sitcom (University of Indiana Press).
Join via Zoom.

The Generic Closet: Black Gayness and the Black-Cast Sitcom examines the tensions related to Black gay television representation by examining the sites where meaning is/can be made: production, post-production, and audience reception. Using case studies from five Black-cast sitcoms, Martin argues that the Black-cast sitcom is industrially imagined as a representation of a set of monolithically held Black conservative ideologies with respect to sexuality, which structures how the genre engages with Black gayness. It is not that Black viewers are necessarily anti-gay; it is that the media industries imagine them as such. The Generic Closet examines the socio-industrial context from which these Black-cast sitcoms emerge, the placement and use of the laugh track, the production of Black gay images via interviews with episode writers and series showrunners, and audience reception via interviews with 25 Black gay men. Ultimately, The Generic Closet exposes how Black gayness, Black audience imaginations and the machinations of the media industries converge to shape and re-shape Black viewers as homophobic.

Alfred L. Martin, Jr. is Assistant Professor of media studies at the University of Iowa. Martin is a media and cultural studies scholar whose work is concerned with the complex interplay between media industry studies and audience/fandom studies as related to television and film studies, critical black studies, sexuality and gender studies.

Panelists
• Dr. Alfred L. Martin Jr., Author, Assistant Professor of Media Studies, University of Iowa
• Dr. Mary Beltrán, Associate Professor, Department of Radio-Television-Film
• Dr. Curran Nault, Assistant Professor, Department of Radio-Television-Film
• Dr. Adrien Sebro, Assistant Professor, Department of Radio-Television-Film
• Ash Kinney d’Harcourt, PhD Student, Department of Radio-Television-Film

Co-sponsored by Global Media Industry Speaker Series.
"Star power, Cinephilia and Cultural Diplomacy: Unpacking the affective, industrial, and technological contours of Bollywood's inroads into China"
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“If today’s Chinese audience has any kind of loyalty toward foreign films, Hollywood films rank No.1, Japanese anime No.2., and No.3 undoubtedly goes to Aamir Khan’s films”

- Feng Jian Ji (Ji, 2017)

China’s love affair with Bollywood is not completely new. It is said that after the first Indian film festival in China in the late fifties, Mao Zedong declared Raj Kapoor’s Awara his favorite film. However, the romance was cut short by Indo-Chinese political hostility and subsequent Sino-Indian war in 1962. The resurgence of Bollywood in China started in 2010 with the film 3 Idiots, starring Bollywood superstar Aamir Khan. His recent films Dangal (2016) and Secret Super Star (2017) dominated the Chinese box office, earning $190 million and $109 million respectively (D’Cunha 2018).

Khan enjoys a cult stardom in China with over a million followers on the Chinese social media site Weibo. The youth dub him their favorite uncle. Their terms of affective engagement with Khan center around his socially conscious star persona and the willingness to create cinema that attempts to “make a difference”. Focusing on Chinese film and social media platforms such as Douban, M-Time and Weibo, this paper offers a discursive analysis of Khan’s fandom in China. It hones in on the affective terms of engagement of the Chinese users and their fandom’s intersections with India’s intangible, affective soft power and the circulation of Bollywood as a malleable cultural form. It also explicates the ways in which this discursive fandom points to an inclusion of democratic values and a perception of parallel modernities in relation to larger issues pertaining to education, women empowerment, infrastructural divide between rural and urban regions that both neighboring Asian economies contend with. While cinema is often thought to be peripheral to geo-politics, the case of Aamir Khan’s fandom in China carves out a new discursive space for star-led affective power that extends star power to the realm of cultural diplomacy.

Join the Department of Radio-Television-Film and the Center for Sports Communication & Media for a panel discussion on Jennifer McClearen's new book, Fighting Visibility: Sports Media and Female Athletes in the UFC.

Ronda Rousey famously convinced the world’s largest mixed-martial arts (MMA) promotion, the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC), to include female fighters in the early 2010s, which heralded a new fervor for sportswomen in an infamously hypermasculine cultural milieu. The contemporary popularity of women in the UFC might suggest that female fighters are breaking the barriers of a notoriously stubborn glass ceiling. However, as the first academic book on the UFC, Fighting Visibility urges advocates of women’s sports to consider the limits of representation for cultural change and urges caution against discourses celebrating visibility. Part cultural history of the UFC as a media juggernaut and part cautionary tale for the future of women as sports laborers, Fighting Visibility argues that the UFC’s promotion of diverse female athletes actually serves as a seductive mirage of progress that enables the brand’s exploitative labor practices. The UFC’s labor model disproportionately taxes female athletes, particularly women of color and gender non-normative women, despite also promoting them at unprecedented levels. Fighting Visibility complicates a prevalent cultural notion the increased visibility of female athletes will lead to greater equity in sports media and instead urges us to question who ultimately benefits from that visibility in neoliberal brand culture.

Jennifer McClearen is a feminist media scholar whose research examines the cultural production of difference in popular media with a focus on sports and consumer culture. She is an assistant professor of media studies in the Department of Radio-Television-Film at the University of Texas at Austin where she is also affiliated faculty with the Center for Sports Communication and Media and the Center for Media and Entertainment Industries.

Panelists:
• Dr. Maryam Aziz, Postdoctoral Scholar, Africana Research Center, Penn State University
• Dr. Michael Butterworth, Professor, Communication Studies
• Dr. Madhavi Mallapragada, Associate Professor, Department of Radio-Television-Film
• Dr. Travis Vogan, Associate Professor, Department of American Studies, University of Iowa

This roundtable conversation series will feature media studies scholars working in an array of professions outside of the academy. In addition to offering advice on how to best translate the skills you are developing in grad school to potential employers, the panelists will discuss both the benefits and challenges of moving into new professions and how they navigated or broadened their own sense of their identity as "academics" in the process. We encourage all grad students to attend these panels and bring questions about pursuing alt-ac career paths, even if you ultimately plan to pursue careers in the academy.

PANELISTS:
Dr. Lara Bradshaw, Communications Program Manager for Facebook
Lara is a communications consultant who delivers program and communication strategies in a variety of settings, most recently through her work in tech for Facebook as an internal communications strategist that builds out culture, programs, and messaging for an employee audience. Prior to Facebook, Lara worked as an executive communications specialist for Stephen Spielberg's Foundation where she focused on new media technologies like augmented and virtual reality to tell powerful and groundbreaking stories of individuals impacted by genocide. Lara received her PhD from USC's Cinema and Media Studies program and wrote a dissertation on wellness culture across the digital media landscape.

Dr. Alice Daer, founder of Quick Brown Fox Consulting
Dr. Daer is a former university professor with 25 years' worth of experience teaching writing and argumentation to undergraduate and graduate students across the U.S. As a scholar, she helped pioneer the nascent field of video game studies and published several academic articles on video game design as a writing process. In 2015 she left academia to work in digital marketing as a content strategist and technical writer. Then, in 2018 she launched Quick Brown Fox, a small consultancy based in Phoenix that offers writing coaching services to academics and technologists across the globe. At Quick Brown Fox, Dr. Daer specializes in working with Silicon Valley companies by helping their teams become better written communicators. She remains an avid gamer: these days she plays a lot of Minecraft and Animal Crossing with her two kids, ages 7 and 9. She also makes a lot of sourdough bread.

Dr. Nina Huntemann, Vice President of Learning, edX
Nina Huntemann is Vice President of Learning at edX. In this role, Nina drives edX’s instructional and pedagogical strategy to maximize the capabilities of the edX platform to improve learner outcomes. Nina has over 15 years of college-level teaching, program administration, and faculty development experience. Prior to joining edX, she was an associate professor in the Department of Communication and Journalism at Suffolk University in Boston where she taught courses and published research in digital media studies. Nina received her Ph.D. in communication at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Outside of work, Nina enjoys cycling, baking, and hiking with her Welsh terrier, Penny.

American Life in the Midst of Crisis: How People are Using Technology as Their Lives Are Upended
3:30 -4:45 via Zoom: 910 2391 2219
Co-sponsored by Global Media Industry Speaker Series.

Lee Rainie, director of internet and technology research at the Pew Research Center, will speak about the latest Center public opinion surveys since mid-March related to COVID-19, racial justice protests and the endgame of the 2020 presidential election and how people are using the internet in the midst of multiple national crises.
After the talk concludes at 4:45, Lee will chat with interested grad students for an additional half hour about careers, research, professional development and more. He welcomes questions!

For currently enrolled MA & PhD students only.
*Note time: 1–5 pm CT*

Hosted by Global Media Industry Speaker Series.

Comparing US and China’s soft power in the EU and ASEAN
By Irene S. Wu, Ph.D.
Georgetown University and Federal Communications Commission

Soft power is a country’s ability to persuade others to its point of view and is usually related to its cultural influence. Hard power by contrast is a country’s ability to coerce others, usually with military and some kinds of economic action. The Soft Power Rubric is a framework to track changes in the volume and direction of interactions people have with foreigners. Three elements are direct people-to-people interactions -emigration, study abroad and traveling abroad; the fourth is a mediated interaction -watching foreign movies. The Soft Power Rubric emphasizes the audience's perspective, rather than the viewpoint of the country projecting power. To assess US and China’s soft power, then, this presentation will consider two regions: the European Union (EU) and the Association for Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). Data from 2000 to the present show how many people from EU and ASEAN emigrated to, enrolled in university in, and traveled to the US and China. While the US is a major destination in all categories for both the EU and ASEAN, people’s interest in China is growing, although more in ASEAN than in the EU.

Bio: Irene S. Wu is a lecturer in the Communications, Culture, and Technology program at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. She is also a senior economist at the US Federal Communications Commission. From 2017-2018 she was a fellow at the Wilson Center for International Scholars. Her publications include Forging trust communities: how technology changes politics (Johns Hopkins, 2015) and From iron fist to invisible hand: the uneven path of telecommunications reform in China (Stanford, 2009). Currently, she is constructing the Soft Power Rubric, a framework for measuring soft power in the international system. For more information see “Applying the Soft Power Rubric: how study abroad reveal international cultural relations” in Cultural values in political economy, J.P. Singh, ed. (Stanford, 2020). She holds degrees from Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and Harvard University.

Panel discussion, Co-sponsored with the Center for Sports Communication and Media.
Join via Zoom.

To discuss her new book, Sporting Blackness, Dr. Samantha N. Sheppard will be joined by Dr. Michael Butterworth (Director of the Center for Sports Communication and Media in Moody), Dr. Adrien Sebro (Assistant Professor in RTF), Dr. Jennifer McClearen (Assistant Professor in RTF), and Brett Siegel (PhD Candidate in RTF).

The book examines issues of race and representation in sports films, exploring what it means to embody, perform, play out, and contest blackness by representations of Black athletes on screen. By presenting new critical terms, Professor Sheppard analyzes not only “skin in the game,” or how racial representation shapes the genre’s imagery, but also “skin in the genre,” or the formal consequences of blackness on the sport film genre’s modes, codes, and conventions. Through a rich interdisciplinary approach, Sheppard argues that representations of Black sporting bodies contain “critical muscle memories”: embodied, kinesthetic, and cinematic histories that go beyond a film’s plot to index, circulate, and reproduce broader narratives about Black sporting and non-sporting experiences in American society.

Dr. Sheppard is the Mary Armstrong Meduski '80 Assistant Professor of Cinema and Media Studies in the Department of Performing and Media Arts at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY. A cinema and media studies scholar, professor, and writer, her research interests include Black cultural production and production cultures, African American representation in cinema, sports films, and feminist media studies.

*Note time: 5-7 p.m. CT*
Register to attend.

The Bad AI and Beyond Festival presents a conversation with Laeta Kalogridis (creator and showrunner of Altered Carbon and screenwriter of Alita: Battle Angel and Terminator Genisys). Radio-Television-Film Associate Professor Suzanne Scott will moderate the discussion.

BAD AI AND BEYOND FESTIVAL OF SCHOLARSHIP & CREATIVE WORK

Bringing together academics and industry experts in artificial intelligence, literature and media studies, and game design, the Bad AI and Beyond Festival invites dialogue on how media representations have shaped public perceptions of artificial intelligence, and how a new generation of creatives find innovative ways to represent AI and its impact on society.

The two-day program will introduce faculty research into how we understand AI, and showcase student fictional and non-fictional accounts—through video, prose, and even poetry—of the social impact of AI. Also premiering at the fest will be a student-built computer game, Buddi-Bot, that dramatizes the introduction of AI into everyday life.

Festival sponsored by Good Systems, a UT Grand Challenge.
Hosted by Samuel Baker, Associate Professor of English and Good Systems Executive Team Member;
Suzanne Scott, Associate Professor of Radio-Television-Film;

Hosted by Global Media Industry Speaker Series.

“On With the Dance”: The Convergence of Recording, Radio and Film Cultures, 1925-1935

Between the waning days of the jazz-age 1920s and the depression-era 1930s, U.S. recording companies’ corporate, technological, and cultural ties to the radio and film industries grew ever closer. In the span of roughly a decade, the biggest recording companies, Victor and Columbia, became RCA-Victor and CBS, subsidiaries of radio (and later, television) companies at the center of twentieth-century American media culture. Musical performers sought opportunities beyond sound recordings and the stage, as hosting radio shows and appearing in movies became commonplace celebrity strategies. Film and radio stars in turn sought out opportunities via sound recordings. Through a discursive analysis of the recording-industry trade press and an examination of emerging stars' careers, this presentation outlines the largely-unexamined intermedial ties between phonography, radio and film that led to the first major conglomeration of entertainment media in the twentieth century.
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Kyle Barnett is an associate professor of media studies in the Department of Communication at Bellarmine University. His research focuses on media history, cultural industries, popular music and sound across media. He has published in the Journal of Popular Music Studies, Music, Sound and the Moving Image, the Journal of Material Culture, and several book anthologies. Barnett is a former co-editor of The Velvet Light Trap and columnist for Flow, Antenna, and In Media Res. He is the author of Record Cultures: the Transformation of the U.S. Recording Industry (University of Michigan Press).

Presented by Latino Media Arts & Studies. Co-sponsored by Mexican American and Latina/o Studies, LGBTQ Studies, and the Department of Radio-Television-Film

Moderated by Iliana Sosa, Filmmaker and Assistant Professor of Radio-Television-Film
Register for Webinar.

Deborah S. Esquenazi is an award-winning film director, screenwriter, and investigative journalist, based in Austin, Texas. Her interest in upending the oftentimes sensationalist True Crime genre informs the neorealist approach she takes to her work and her films foreground issues of identity within queer, Latino, and other marginalized communities in the United States.​ Her latest documentary, El Vacío, which is part of the New York Times’s Op-Doc Series, is nominated for a 2020 Emmy award. Esquenazi’s first feature, Southwest of Salem: The Story of the San Antonio Four, was also nominated for an Emmy and earned a variety of other distinctions, including the Peabody Award (2016). Southwest of Salem played a key role in the exoneration of four Latina lesbians who spent over a decade in prison for a crime they did not commit. The film is currently being adapted for television.

Please email any questions you have for our special guest and moderator to latinx_media@utexas.edu, in advance of the event.

Before the talk, we encourage you to watch the following two films:

1. Southwest of Salem: The Story of the San Antonio Four
– Available to current UT students here.
– Available on demand for the general public: Amazon, Hulu, Apple, Kanopy

2. El Vacío
– Available via NYT Op-Docs.

Hosted by Global Media Industry Speaker Series.

*Note time: 9:00- 10:00 am CT

Investigative journalism and digital communication technologies in China
Join via Zoom.
This talk, based on Tong’s recent publications, will discuss how digital communication technologies are contributing to limiting the space for practicing investigative journalism in China. In the current political and economic environments, the empowering potential of digital communication technologies is outperformed by the capitalisation of digital platforms. A hostile political climate and the pursuit of profit have radically diminished the necessary conditions for sustaining investigative journalism. After the talk concludes at 10:00, Jingrong will chat with interested grad students for an additional half hour about careers, research, professional development and more. She welcomes questions!

Hosted by Global Media Industry Speaker Series.

Digital Media and Human Capital in Rural America: Differentiating the role of Access, Skills, and Excessive Media Use for Educational Performance and Aspirations
Join via Zoom.

Compared with their urban and suburban peers, rural students are less likely to complete higher education. If access and use of digital technologies are supportive of students’ human capital, deficits in Internet access may further concentrate the inequalities of rural youth. However, there is mixed evidence that Internet use plays a supportive role in the formation of young peoples’ human capital. This presentation discusses implications for rural students’ access to human capital, and how the unequal relationship between digital skills and performance in the classroom and the SAT may perpetuate rural inequalities. After the talk concludes at 4:45, Keith will chat with interested grad students for an additional half hour about careers, research, professional development and more. He welcomes questions!

Bio: Keith N. Hampton is a professor in the Department of Media and Information, in the College of Communication Arts and Sciences at Michigan State University, where he is also Associate Director for Academic Research at the Quello Center for Media and Information Policy, and Affiliate Faculty in the Department of Sociology.Before joining the faculty at MSU, he held the position of Endowed Professor in Communication and Public Policy and Co-Chair of the Social Media & Society Cluster in the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers University; Assistant Professor at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania; and Assistant Professor of Technology, Urban and Community Sociology & Class of '43 Chair in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He received his Ph.D. and M.A. in sociology from the University ofToronto, and a B.A. (Hons) in sociology from the University of Calgary.

RTF Ph.D. Candidate Kate Cronin research talk:
“Yesterday’s News: Broadcast Film Libraries and the Commercial Afterlife of Television News"“

Abstract:
This talk will highlight the fundamental contributions of network newsfilm libraries to the development of US television news practices. While broadcasters were still experimenting with what television news could be and should do, television libraries (and librarians), were quietly shaping industrial processes and ideological infrastructures that would underlie television news production for decades to come. Approaching media libraries and archives first and foremost as dynamic organizational instruments embedded within the supply chain of audiovisual media production, this talk chronicles how commercially-motivated organizational schemas, workflows, and labor practices within network film libraries merged with evolving professional journalistic ethics in early television news departments.

This roundtable conversation series will feature media studies scholars working in an array of professions outside of the academy. In addition to offering advice on how to best translate the skills you are developing in grad school to potential employers, the panelists will discuss both the benefits and challenges of moving into new professions and how they navigated or broadened their own sense of their identity as "academics" in the process. We encourage all grad students to attend these panels and bring questions about pursuing alt-ac career paths, even if you ultimately plan to pursue careers in the academy.