Media Studies Colloquium

Reception to thank Professor Emeritus Janet Staiger for her invaluable service as the faculty advisor to The Velvet Light Trap journal for over three decades.

Hosted by the editors of The Velvet Light Trap,  Shanti Kumar (incoming faculty advisor), the Department of Radio-Television-Film, University of Texas-Austin.

The Velvet Light Trap is collectively edited by graduate students at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and The University of Texas at Austin.

A presentation, Q&A and reception to celebrate the publication of Suzanne Scott’s new book, Fake Geek Girls: Fandom, Gender, and the Convergence Culture Industry.

"Fake Geek Girls: Fandom, Gender, and the Convergence Culture Industry" by Suzanne Scott, Assistant Professor, Department of Radio-Television-Film, The University of Texas at Austin.

When Ghostbusters returned to the screen in 2016, some male fans of the original film boycotted the all-female adaptation of the cult classic, turning to Twitter to express their disapproval and making it clear that they considered the film’s “real” fans to be white, straight men. While extreme, these responses are far from unusual, with similar uproars around the female protagonists of the new Star Wars films to full-fledged geek culture wars and harassment campaigns, as exemplified by the #GamerGate controversy that began in 2014.

Over the past decade, fan and geek culture has moved from the margins to the mainstream as fans have become tastemakers and promotional partners, with fan art transformed into official merchandise and fan fiction launching new franchises. But this shift has left some people behind. Suzanne Scott points to the ways in which the “men’s rights” movement and antifeminist pushback against “social justice warriors” connect to new mainstream fandom, where female casting in geek-nostalgia reboots is vilified and historically feminized forms of fan engagement—like cosplay and fan fiction—are treated as less worthy than male-dominant expressions of fandom like collection, possession, and cataloguing. While this gender bias harkens back to the origins of fandom itself, Fake Geek Girls contends that the current view of women in fandom as either inauthentic masqueraders or unwelcome interlopers has been tacitly endorsed by Hollywood franchises and the viewer demographics they selectively champion. It offers a view into the inner workings of how digital fan culture converges with old media and its biases in new and novel ways.

Assistant Professor, School of Theatre, Film and Television, University of Arizona
Co-sponsored with Global Media Industry Speaker Series.

Hollywood in San Francisco: Location Shooting as Industry Practice and Urban Aesthetic

From the mid-1940s to the mid-1970s, San Francisco was the third most popular American city for Hollywood location work. Yet unlike filmmaking centers like Los Angeles and New York, it lacked state-of the-art production facilities. Unlike today, it offered no direct financial incentives. Instead, San Francisco promised scenery, proximity, and by the late 1960s, a countercultural zeitgeist. The city’s popular heyday coincided with another milestone: two decades of changes in technology, industry structure, and filmmaking practice finally put the cost of location shooting on par with soundstage production. These factors also coincided with America’s deepening urban crisis. Offscreen, San Francisco was an exception to urban blight, but onscreen, a boom in the police genre depicted an increasingly violent and downtrodden city in Bullitt, Dirty Harry, andThe Streets of San Francisco.

In this talk, Josh Gleich will present research from his book, Hollywood in San Francisco: Location Shooting and the Aesthetics of Urban Decline . He will address some of the larger questions that animate his research. How did location shooting develop from an ancillary to a dominant filmmaking practice? How has location shooting helped crystalize the popular urban imaginary? And how has the tension between the control of the studio and the dramatic appeal of locations impacted Hollywood film and television production in the past and present?

Doctoral candidate, research presentation

The Theater of Adaptation: Cross-Industrial Exchange in Postwar American Culture

Some of the most enduring cultural works of the American postwar period, here defined as roughly 1945-1960, have a distinctly theatrical touch. Think Marty, on film or television. Think Mary Martin in Peter Pan, on Broadway or television. While the two works differ widely in content and histories of adaptation, they share a certain indebtedness to the styles and traditions of the American theater. Most scholarly work on the adaptations of this era has examined the texts as notable but somewhat isolated cases in an era of great change in American culture. This dissertation aims to reframe that discussion, arguing instead that it is more productive to look at adaptation as a trans-industrial phenomenon, in which the barriers to the transfer of texts, talent, and creative practices were significantly lowered for a time. This project argues that many of the traits we now associate with contemporary digital convergence were present in the exchanges among the theater, film, and television industries in the postwar period.

Assistant Professor, Department of Radio-Television-Film, The University of Texas at Austin

"DIY Death: Currents and Continuations in the Queer Artivist Underground"

In his 2003 essay, “Necropolitics,” Achille Mbembe coins the titular term as a rejoinder to Michel Foucault’s “biopower”: a disciplinary mode of power centered on regulating life via the body. Mbembe maintains that modern power is not so much concerned with life, but with making death: stipulating how some may live and others may die. Inferring more than a right to kill, necropolitics excavates an array of intensities that mark certain demographics for death—past-present violences of racism, trans-/misogyny, queerphobia and colonization chief among them—and that condemn persecuted parties to the status of the eternally walking wounded. In my recent research, which extends my scholarship on subcultural studies and grassroots queer artivism (Queercore: Queer Punk Media Subculture), I build on the necropolitical grounds of Mbembe and his philosophic queer progeny (e.g., Jasbir Puar, C. Riley Snorton), to theorize a node of resistant potentiality: the intentional, hauntological inhabitation of spectral subjectivity within the DIY artivism of subaltern queer media creatives. Such a defiant donning of necro-subjectivity is perhaps most patently observed in the protest strategies of Black Lives Matter: summoning the slain with persistent political savvy and, against authoritarian impositions of black nonexistence, taking up camera technologies and online video sharing platforms to circulate unsettling mediations of black death(lessness): raising the dead as damning visual evidence of police violence and state repression.

In this presentation, I dig into my past writings on queercore (queer punk) and current scholarship on the spectral strategies of the queer underground, from the die-ins of ACT-UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), to the modern transmedia assemblage designated “doom soul”: queer black artists like M. Lamar (NegroGothic), Moor Mother (Fetish Bones) and Debby Friday (Death Drive) who (re-)animate the afterlife of slavery in their oppositional media art. In so doing, I delineate a death-defying thesis: By deploying necro-subjectivity, or performatively populating the “space of death,” today’s DIY queer creatives conjure a nuanced and appropriate allegory, unearthing what is at stake for bodies and communities that continue to be consigned to the coffin in a necropolitical/neoliberal age.

Co-hosted with Latino Media Arts & Studies

"HBO’s 'Los Espookys' and the Future of Latinx and Spanish-Language TV for U.S. Audiences"
*Note time and location: 3:30-5pm • BMC 5.208

This Halloween, watch an episode of HBO’s "Los Espookys" with faculty and graduate students of Latino Media Arts & Studies and share in a discussion of what the success of this oddball, mostly-in-Spanish horror-comedy means for U.S. popular media and for Latinx and non-Latinx viewers.

Halloween-style food and refreshments provided!

Doctoral candidate, research presentation

"Fandom and/as Industry: Fan Professionalization in the Post-Network Television Industry"
On July 30, 2012, the official Tumblr account for MTV’s Teen Wolf began “live giffing,” posting gifs made from television episode footage synchronously with its live broadcasts. Two Teen Wolf fans, qhiunn and Neptunepirate, were hired by MTV to create the gifs that were later published through the show’s official Tumblr account—and pointedly credited to their in-house fan artists. While this practice has since gained prominence with other teen-focused channels and networks, so did another practice MTV popularized that night: fan professionalization.

While MTV’s promotional gambit highlights a recent shift in terms of transparency, fans and fan practices have long provided fodder for televisual advertising campaigns (intentionally and unintentionally). Now, fan artists are contracted as both freelance promotional labor and brand ambassadors; they are hired as much for their subjectivity (age, gender, authenticity, literacies, networks) as their productivity. By professionalizing fan artists—combining their labor and authenticity with industrial logics and platform affordances—the U.S. television industry is able to deputize fans to promote and legitimize their content, invaluable reach at minimal cost.

In this job talk, Lesley Willard will present research from her dissertation and address the ongoing industrialization of media fandom. Why is the television industry beginning to sanction and professionalize select fan artists now? What has precipitated this shift? What role do platforms like Tumblr play? How do fans react to professionalization efforts?

*Note new time and location: Tuesday, 5:00-6:30 pm • BMC 5.208

“The Present and Future of Latinx Film and Programming on Public Television”
Sponsored by Latino Media Arts & Studies

Join us for a public conversation with Luis Ortiz, managing director of Latino Public Broadcasting.

Luis Ortiz
As Managing Director of Latino Public Broadcasting, Luis Ortiz oversees the development, financing and production of Latino-themed programming distributed for broadcast on public television. Ortiz also serves as the Series Producer for VOCES, LPB’s signature series on PBS, featuring independent documentaries highlighting the rich spectrum of Latino American stories and culture. He manages the operations of the organization and administers LPB’s Public Media Content Fund and Current Issues Fund, oversees the review process, advises potential applicants, manages contracts and deliverables for funded projects, and supervises the licensing and distribution of LPB-funded programs to PBS. He has been with the organization for 17 years.

Co-sponsored with Global Media Industry Speaker Series.

Professor and Chair of Internet Use and Society, Institute of Communication and Media Research, University of Zurich

“Black Box Measures? The Challenges for Studying Users’ Algorithm Skills”

Considerable scholarship has established that algorithms are an increasingly important part of what information people encounter in everyday life. Much less work has focused on studying users’ experiences with, understandings of, and attitudes toward how algorithms may influence what they see and do. The dearth of research on this topic may be in part due to the difficulty of studying a subject about which there is no ground truth given that details about algorithms are proprietary and rarely made public. In this talk, I will discuss the methodological challenges of studying people’s algorithm skills to shed light on the special considerations required when researching a topic about which even scholars possess limited know-how. I will draw on our interviews with 83 Internet users in five countries and will advocate for more such scholarship to accompany existing system-level analyses of algorithms’ social implications.

Lecturer, Department of Radio-Television-Film

“We Live for Today”: Young Black Men Coming of Age in Good Times and Cooley High

Abstract: This talk will focus on the visualized living conditions of young Black men, particularly in Chicago, in the sitcom Good Times (1974-1979) and the film Cooley High (1975). Both written/created by Eric Monte, these important pieces of work imagine the humanity and struggles of young Black men coming of age, surviving, and hustling in working-class communities. These images portray poignant early examples of the media’s conversation on the living conditions and violence faced by young Black men— a conversation relevant to this temporal moment.
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Adrien Sebro's scholarship specializes in critical media studies at the intersections of television, film, comedy, gender, and African Diaspora studies. Dr. Sebro writes and teaches on U.S. Black television sitcoms, television history, filmmakers of the African Diaspora, and the media's role in initiating social change and activism. In the classroom, he aims to instruct his students on the roles, responsibilities, and powers (social and political) of media over time as a reflection of its temporal moment.

He is currently writing his first book manuscript, To Scratch and Survive: Hustle Economics, Gender Politics, and Creative Dissent at Tandem Productions, which explores a production history and the representation of racial identity formation in the all-Black cast sitcoms of Tandem Productions: Sanford and Son (1972-1977), Good Times (1974-1979), and The Jeffersons (1975-1985).

Professor of Cinema Studies, NYU's Tisch School of the Arts

Into the LEGO-Verse: The Ironic Status of Today’s Entertainment Cinema
Based on a monograph forthcoming from the University of Texas Press, my talk examines The LEGO Movie as an entertainment savvy about fantasies of diversion and spectacle; and how popular entertainment itself works between meaningfulness and pleasure of pure spectacle holding these together in complicated, yet calculated fashion in our cultural moment. The LEGO Movi e is a work of big business: made by a behemoth media company (Time-Warner) to promote the products of a behemoth toy company, The LEGO Group. Yet the movie's plot is all about getting away from corporate control and uncovering your own potential to fashion creative possibility. We can term such contradiction Irony and it's only one of the many ironies that The LEGO Movie explicitly and readily embraces. In its consummate cultivation of such irony, The LEGO Movie stands as essential to key directions in popular film today.