Media Studies Colloquium

PhD practice job talk
"Cheerful Compliance: Working Actors’ Professional Practices in the Age of Streaming and Social Media"
Talk held via Zoom.
Zoom link: https://utexas.zoom.us/j/5469261029

Cheerful Compliance examines how the dual transformations wrought by the rise of streamers and social media have intersected to shape the gendered labor of working actors in contemporary Hollywood. Combining methods and approaches from media industries and feminist media studies, the project illuminates how internalized and institutionalized expectations, beliefs, and professional practices surrounding film and television acting work have been shifting in the contemporary industrial context and how, in turn, these shifts affect working actors at different stages in their careers. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Los Angeles, and applying an affect studies lens on labor, I argue that in navigating these industrial and discursive shifts, working actors are continuously compelled to practice what I term “cheerful compliance.” A performance of professionalism, cheerful compliance can be traced back to the Hollywood studio system. However, it is exacerbated in the contemporary gig economy, where cheerful compliance functions as an affective-discursive mechanism to minimize complaint and enforce enthusiastic complaisance amidst escalating precarity. Attending to the emotional dimensions of working actors’ professional practices, this project contributes to understandings of gendered creative labor in the 21st century.

Kristina’s presentation will focus on how established actors adopt and reject professional practices and discourses based in creator culture, such as aspirational labor, that have seeped into traditional media industries and production cultures. Personal interviews and close readings of public interviews with established actors illuminate that in the streaming era, promotional labor for TV and film projects on social media platforms has become an additional, uncompensated, yet ambiguously expected aspect of a working actor’s job. In navigating this new expectation, actors contend with the pervasive professional ethos that prescribes gratitude upon any actor who is lucky to even be in the position to have a job they can promote.

Bio:
Kristina Brüning is a PhD candidate in media studies at UT Austin. She received her BA and MA in American Studies from Freie Universität Berlin and an MA in German Studies from the University of Michigan. Kristina has published articles in Feminist Media Studies, Television & New Media, Media Industries Journal, and The Velvet Light Trap.

PhD practice job talk
"Camera Work: The Professional and Social Networks of Classical Hollywood Camera Departments"

This presentation will explore the ways in which classical Hollywood movie studio camera departments excluded women from their professional networks, gendering the job of cinematography in the US for decades to come. But before we understand how these camera departments functioned as exclusive organizations, we must also understand how they functioned. Led by the department head, the camera department hierarchy formed a network of creative labor where assistants gained access to the members’ collective knowledge, learned the production process, gained problem-solving skills, and, if their work and learning curve were satisfactory, ascended the ranks of assistants.

This presentation seeks to explain how these networks used their infrastructure, hierarchy, and leadership to construct homogenous social and professional networks within the classical Hollywood studio system. Foremost, this is a media industries study that incorporates archival conjunction, combining the analysis of studio archives, trade publications, and professional interviews. Through the many printed interviews, oral histories, and biographies these cinematographers provided in their careers, we can use production studies methods to explore these intradepartmental networks as exchanges of social and cultural capital, and thus power. Through examining the materials these technicians left behind, we can observe many of these key elements that guide and steer ethnographic research. And while we can’t observe these creative laborers in their workplace environment, we can access archives that shed light on how these workers operated within their networks, shared information, navigated the promotional hierarchy, found their specialized niche in the industry, and cultivated network homogeneity. We can also explore trailblazing women cinematographers or technicians that came incredibly close to breaking into these homogenous networks, and outline how the universally male studio camera departments marginalized them on set or in the press.

Only by understanding how these networks functioned in these specific ways can we also understand how they were able to restrict access to the network, keeping it almost universally homogenous for decades. A historical perspective of the origins of this exclusivity and restrictiveness can help us understand how this history continues to repeat itself even today, where despite optimism about the future, the slow pace of progress continues to frustrate those advocating for more equitable representation in cinematographic professions in the US media production industries.

Bio:
Casey Walker is a doctoral candidate in the Radio-Television-Film Department at The University of Texas at Austin. He also received his MA and BS in Media Studies from UT Austin. His work can be found in New Review of Film and Television Studies, Journal of 20th Century Media History, Monstrum, Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy, and Unbound: A Journal of Digital Scholarship.

Associate Professor, University of Michigan
"Television and the Gentrification of New York City"

Hollis’s talk is drawn from his current book project: Securing the Big Apple: Television Reimagines New York City, 1975-2001. Using archival research and close reading, he uses New York as a case study for examining the medium’s role in gentrification, a series of transformations that benefit affluent residents while occurring at the expense of poor residents, local businesses, and minority communities. Crucially, television’s role in those processes involves obfuscating the dynamics of power at work therein. In this work, Hollis endeavors to frame television as part of broader efforts undertaken across public and private sectors in New York City after its fiscal crisis of 1975 to keep businesses from relocating out of state, stop “white flight,” curb street crime, and promote investment in blighted neighborhoods. Looking across production contexts and programming genres, Hollis documents how television participated in shifting public perceptions of what the city is, means, and does for the people who live there as well as the people who visit. At the same time, the medium’s role in the gentrification of New York City is a story about the gentrification of the television industry, as well. Broad shifts in network ownership, financial mandates, labor oversight, and audience appeals shaped how television constructed city life and space during the period in question. Hollis will give an overview of the project as a whole and share work on chapters related to public service announcements and sitcoms.

Bio:
Hollis Griffin is Associate Professor at the University of Michigan, where he teaches and researches television, the internet, and social media, particularly as they intersect with questions of affect, sexuality, and space/place. His book, Feeling Normal: Sexuality and Media Criticism in the Digital Age (Indiana, 2017), was named an Outstanding Academic Title for 2017 by Choice, the publication of the American Library Association. Hollis is also the editor of the anthology Television Studies in Queer Times (Routledge, 2023). He has served on the editorial boards of Journal of Cinema and Media Studies; Communication, Culture, and Critique; Television & New Media; Film Criticism, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, and Queer Studies in Media & Popular Culture. Hollis was elected to a three-year term on the Board of Directors for the Society for Cinema and Media Studies from 2018 to 2021; he served as secretary from 2019 to 2021. He is currently at work on a monograph about the relationship between television and the gentrification of New York City.

PhD practice job talk
“How Many Caucasian Seconds Must Pass?!” Silly Humor, Kaleidoscopic Blackness, and Affirming Spectatorship in A Black Lady Sketch Show

Abstract
“When the situation is ridiculous, you deal with it through silliness and irony” -Robert Colescott

ailish’s dissertation research examines silliness as an underexplored mode of comedy, believed to be a vibrant element in contemporary Black cultural production and a form of radical resistance to hegemonic ideologies often found in parody and satire. Although other chapters analyze The Wayans Siblings’ contributions to the mode as well as the use of the mockumentary subgenre to tackle silliness through the intersection of the rise of 90’s gangsta rap and police brutality, this presentation employs a Black feminist epistemological framework to foreground Black women’s roles in sketch comedy. It distinguishes silliness as a unique comedic strategy and demonstrates how A Black Lady Sketch Show exemplifies this mode within television, highlighting the power of affirmational Black image-making over ambivalence.

Bio
ailish elzy is a Ph.D. Candidate in Media Studies at The University of Texas at Austin. She completed her MFA in Writing and Producing for Television at Loyola Marymount University and her MA in Cinema Studies at San Francisco State University. Her forthcoming dissertation is titled “Message! Silliness as a Tool of Radical Resistance in the Black Satiric Mode” which explores the intersection of Black authorship, humor studies and genre theory.

PhD practice job talk
"How Apple Brands the Notification as Part of Everyday Life
Talk held via Zoom.

Our daily lives have been saturated by media and mobile devices for decades, yet in this time the push notification has largely escaped academic scrutiny. Informed by a cultural studies lens, this dissertation project interrogates the ubiquitous media object as a pathway to understanding the wider condition of everyday life. Andy’s dissertation project moves first through a history of this technology before establishing how Apple has constructed the iPhone push notification, then through an ethnography of smartphone users using notifications and Do Not Disturb functions before and since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. The end goal of this project is to find a hopeful path for notification usage that escapes dystopian discussions of technological determinism.

This talk examines texts that contain depictions of push notifications that have been produced by Apple for various audiences which can be broken down into four general categories: commercials, press conferences, Apple TV+ shows, and instructional manuals produced for educational purposes. If these cultural products have all been produced by the same company about the same suite of products, why should we view them as isolated from each other? Considering these disparate media as possessing a singular intention allows us to understand the brand story of what Apple products are meant to be and do. By analyzing these productions, we may gain a lens into the organizational strategies that seek to control everyday life.

Bio:
Andy is the Assistant Executive Director of the Los Alamos Arts Council, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit based in Northern New Mexico. His daily work involves curating an art gallery located in the historic Fuller Lodge, programming cultural events and concerts for the region, and teaching and coordinating art classes for youth and adults. While at UT, Andy has presented and published on topics ranging from non-fungible tokens to professional development of young people to surveillance in social media app notifications. Andy has a bachelors from Pitzer College in English & World Literature and Media Studies, and a masters in Media Studies from UT Austin’s Radio-TV-Film Department.

The Texas Entertainment and Media Industries Symposium will showcase the breadth of film, TV, music, gaming, and digital media opportunities available in Texas. This all-day event will take place on Friday, September 20, at the Moody College of Communication on the UT Austin campus. We welcome students, industry leaders, and members of the Texas film community to celebrate and investigate the media ecosystem of the Lone Star State.

Professor, Queensland University of Technology

"Screen Stories and Media Microcultures: Navigating Industrial and Critical Challenges"

Amanda’s talk draws from her forthcoming book After Mass Media: Storytelling for Microaudiences in the Twenty-first Century (NYU Press, April 2025) that explores how the dominant and “normal” operation of commercial screen storytelling becomes a business of attracting microaudiences, what that means for the stories that can be told, and the implications for the cultural roles of screen storytelling. The project connects two decades of research about television industry change to shifts and expansion in the universe of commercially viable stories. The project aims to trouble conventional understandings tied to norms now past and pave a way to investigating and theorizing the cultural roles of screen stories beyond those of mass consumption.

Bio:
Amanda D. Lotz is a Professor in the Digital Media Research Centre and School of Communication at Queensland University of Technology, where she leads the Transforming Media Industries and Cultures research program. She is the author, coauthor, or editor of fourteen books that explore television and media industries – which includes the forthcoming Media Industries in the Digital Age with Timothy Havens (Nov 2024) and After Mass Media: Storytelling for Microaudiences in the Twenty-first Century (April 2025).

Her most recent books explore the connections between internet-distributed services such as Netflix and the legacy television industry, as well as the business strategies and revenue models that differ. Her books have been translated into Mandarin, Korean, Russian, Italian, and Polish. She is frequently interviewed by press around the globe and has consulted for a range of government and industry clients for more than a decade. She is a Fellow of the International Communication Association.

Assistant Professor, University of Alabama

Can’t Get Enough of Myself: The Feminization of Collaborative Music Merchandise

Despite the hypervisibility of a constellation of female pop stars, the music business is structured around gender inequality. As a result, women in the music industry often seize on self-branding opportunities in fashion, cosmetics, food, and technology for the purposes of professional longevity. Extending Play examines the ubiquity of brand partnerships in the contemporary music industry through the lens of feminized labor, to demonstrate how female artists use them as a resource for artistic expression and to articulate forms of popular feminism through self-commodification. In this book, author Alyxandra Vesey examines this type of promotional work and examines its proliferation in the early 21st century.

Though brand partnerships exist across all media industries, they are a distinct phenomenon for the music business because of their associations with fan club merchandise, concert merchandise, and lifestyle branding, often foregrounding women’s participation in shaping these economies through fan labor and image management. Through textual and discourse analysis of artists’ songs, music videos, interviews, social media usage, promotional campaigns, marketing strategies, and business decisions, Extending Play investigates how female musicians co-create branded feminine-coded products like perfume, clothes, makeup, and cookbooks and masculine-coded products like music equipment as resources to work through their own ideas about gender and femininity as workers in industries that often use sexism and ageism to diminish women’s creative authority and diminish the value of the recording in order to incentivize musicians to internalize the demands of industrial convergence.

By merging star studies, popular music studies, and media industry studies, this book proposes an integrated methodology for approaching contemporary cultural history that demonstrates how female-identified musicians have operated as both a hub for industrial convergence and as music industry professionals who use their extramusical skills to reassert their creative acumen.

Bio:
Alyxandra Vesey is an associate professor in Journalism and Creative Media at the
University of Alabama. Her research focuses on the gendered dynamics of creative labor in the music industries. She is the author of Extending Play: The Feminization of Collaborative Music Merchandise in the Early Twenty-First Century (Oxford University Press, 2023). Her work has also appeared in Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Feminist Media Studies, Television and New Media, Camera Obscura, Velvet Light Trap, and Journal of Popular Music Studies.

Senior Acquisitions Editor, University of Texas Press
Note the location: CMA 5.136 LBJ Conference Room
"The Ins & Outs of Academic Publishing"

Jim Burr is a Senior Acquisitions Editor at the University of Texas Press, who acquires books in Film and Media Studies, Classics, and Middle Eastern Studies. He did his undergraduate work at Michigan State University and graduate work at the University of Texas at Austin in Classics. He’s been at the Press since 1996.

PhD Candidate Practice Job Talk
"'Drowning in a Sea of Red Ink': Historicizing the Cultures of Finance in U.S. Television"

In film and television scholarship, financing is often a footnote or merely political economic “background” for other analyses, if it is mentioned at all. Meanwhile, in social scientific research, media financing is a value-neutral practice, free of power and ideology. However, what if we understood media funding practices as inherently symbolic—infused with power, ideology, and discourse? How might this shape our assumptions about the type of texts produced and the types of institutions allowed to produce commercial media?

Integrating archival research, interviews, fieldwork, and discourse analysis, Drowning in a Sea of Red Ink traces the material, discursive, and structural development of television financing in the United States from the early network era to the streaming era. This project finds that industry professionals and trade press coverage often presented the dominant network-era financing practice in television—known as “deficit financing”—as high-risk and burdensome for producers, who often had to assume high upfront debts in the hopes that one day their show would become a big hit and future sales would erase their accumulated debts. However, new archival findings and primary source data prove that this practice was easily mitigated by large conglomerated Hollywood studios, even while it was detrimental to small independent producers, which have never found a meaningful footing in US television. In other words, deficit financing became a “performative” strategy for studios: offering a valuable way to self-mythologize and self-rationalize, particularly during moments of economic and technological change.

Pete’s presentation will focus on the new financial discourses and practices that have emerged in the streaming era. It will offer a case study on the production company Duplass Brothers Productions and consider how its “new” approach to television financing replicates many of the earlier characteristics of the network-era deficit financing model. Altogether, these findings disrupt our traditional understanding of television’s dominant financial model and challenge the ways in which we study risk in cultural production.

Bio:
Pete Johnson is a fourth-year doctoral candidate in Media Studies in the Department of Radio-Television-Film. He received his BS in Business Administration and MFA in Film and Television Studies from Boston University. Prior to graduate school, Pete worked in various areas of film and television development, financing, and sales.

PhD Candidate Practice Job Talk
"IRL+URL: Digital Ecologies of the Global Dance Music Industry"

IRL+URL examines the platformization of live music from 2011-2021 to interrogate the relationship between local music economies and global platform services. From The Cloud to the streets, this dissertation explores how the proliferation of digital tools and platform services inform the practices of local music intermediaries (DJs, promoters, and venue owners) in Austin, TX’s underground dance music scene. Over the time period this dissertation covers, live music gains significance as music streaming destabilizes profit margins for industry gatekeepers and opens up the digital music marketplace to a range of big tech and start-up competitors. Using frameworks from media industry studies and digital media theories, this project makes two primary interventions. IRL+URL nuances the assertion that new media platforms and technologies- data analytics, live streaming, and AI-powered production software- disrupt industry gatekeepers and diversify alternative media production. Secondly, this project demonstrates how live music’s platformization creates complex digital ecologies where global economies of scale materially manifest through the people, places, and practices of local media infrastructures.

Paxton’s presentation will focus on the second chapter of IRL+URL which compares the data-sharing partnerships and discovery algorithms of three ticketing services (Resident Advisor, Posh, and Dice) to reveal a spectrum of ticketing platformization in Austin. For well-financed, industry-backed venues with the resources to master these emergent tools, socially networked event management platforms offer avenues of profit maximization. Yet, for independent promoters and DIY venues, these pay-for-play affordances gradually skim off the top of precarious creative businesses and threaten algorithmic invisibility for those unwilling to play by the platforms’ rules.

Bio:
Paxton Haven is doctoral candidate in the Radio-Television-Film Department at The University of Texas at Austin with an MA in Media Studies from UT Austin and a BA in Political Science from The George Washington University. His work can be found in New Media & Society and Sartorial Fandom: Fashion, Beauty, and Culture.