Media Studies Colloquium

UT Press Jim Burr and Sarah McGavick on Best Practices for Book Proposals

University of Illinois
Latino Media Arts & Studies Series

“What’s Up with Disney and Latinidad? Princesses and Girls Who are Stuck in the Middle.”

What do Gabriella from High School Musical, Miranda from the Lizzie McGuire Show, Selena Gomez, Demi Lovato, Sofia Carson, Jenna Ortega, Sofia the First, and Elena of Avalor have in common? They represent Disney’s efforts to include Latinas in their children’s and tween programming. This presentation explores the internally conflicted and contradictory deployment of gendered Latinidad by Disney, which avows and disavows the presence of Latinidad and produces an ambiguous ethnicity that displaces Latinas outside national boundaries or into a flattened, nearly imperceptible cultural specificity.

Bio
Angharad N. Valdivia is a Research Professor of the Institute of Communications Research and the Department of Media and Cinema Studies at the University of Illinois. Her books include The Gender of Latinidad: Uses and Abuses of Hybridity, A Latina in the Land of Hollywood, Feminism, Multiculturalism and the Media, A Companion to Media Studies, Latina/o Communication Studies Today, Mapping Latina/o Studies, and Latina/os and the Media. She served as the editor of Communication Theory and edited the seven-volume International Encyclopedia of Media Studies. She served as the inaugural head of the Department of Media and Cinema Studies and as Interim Director of the Institute of Communications Research.

Northwestern University
Open Platforms: Developing Culture in the Age of Big Data
co-sponsored by the Global Media Industries Speaker Series

Can we achieve equity and justice through big data-driven platforms? Developing culture in collaboration with artists and communities aligned by intersectionality can reveal the promise and limitations of social media for bridging disparate, segregated communities. As platforms segregate us, advancing intersectionality on and outside of platforms can organically build the solidarity necessary to achieve equity and justice. Scholars can pair research with the community-based development to understand the conditions for "networked solidarity" in the era of big data. This talk exposes the challenges and triumphs of this organic R&D process through OTV | Open Television, a platform for intersectional television based in Chicago with over 60 programs, 20 award wins and nominations, and 100 exhibitions locally, nationally and globally. OTV programs have received recognition from HBO, the Television Academy (Emmy Awards), New York Television Festival, City of Chicago, Streamy Awards, and Independent Filmmaker Project (Gotham Awards). Its programming partners have included the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Art Institute of Chicago, Block Museum of Art, and City of Chicago, along with numerous galleries, community organizations, and universities.

*CMB Studio 4C – 5-7 pm
Annual RTF Gender and Sexuality lecture, co-sponsored by OUTsider
Screening of Reeder's film "Knives & Skin" and discussion.

IndieWire lists "Knives & Skin" as one of the "12 best female-helmed horror films of the last decade."

Jennifer Reeder constructs personal fiction films about relationships, trauma and coping. Her award-winning narratives are innovative and borrow from a range of forms including after school specials, amateur music videos and magical realism. These films have shown consistently around the world, including the Sundance Film Festival, The Berlin Film Festival, The Tribeca Film Festival, The Rotterdam Film Festival, The London Film Festival, SXSW, The Venice Biennale and The Whitney Biennial. Her awards include several that have qualified her films for Oscar nomination. She won a Creative Capital Grant in Moving Image in 2015, short film funding from Rooftop/Adrienne Shelly Foundation in 2016 and short film funding from the Hamburg Film Fund in 2016. She was a USA Artist nominee for 2008, 2015, 2016, and 2017. She was a Herb Alpert Film Award nominee in 2018. She won a 2018/19 scriptwriting award from SFFIM/Rainin Foundation. She is the 2019 recipient of the Alpert Film Award residency at the MacDowell Colony. Her most recent film, Knives and Skin will be theatrically released in France in November through UFO and in the US in December through IFC Midnight.

New York University
Bright Signals: Color Television as a New Way of Seeing
co-sponsored by the Global Media Industries Speaker Series

Before the transition to digital, color was the most significant technological development in television. Electronic color represented transformation, modernity, and media sensory integrity, which means that its history is not only one of industry, but also of a larger perceptual shift corresponding with post-war cultural and political changes. In this talk, Susan Murray will discuss the ways in which color television was imagined and sold as a new way of seeing—on multiple fronts---distinct from both monochrome television and other forms of color media. It not only represented a new aesthetic for television but also promised a peculiar viewing experience for audiences.

This event will be rescheduled.

CHILDREN, MIGRANTS, REFUGEES AND THE TEXAS BORDER ON FILM, a panel with screenings chaired by Dr. Stephanie Hemelryk Donald, University of Lincoln (“There’s No Place Like Home: The Migrant Child in World Cinema”), with films by RTF alumni Amy Bench (“A Line Birds Cannot See”) and Chelsea Hernandez (“Building the American Dream”).

In a time when refugee populations are exploding around the world and the plight of migrants on our southern border remains one of the biggest issues in American election-year politics, how are migrants and refugees, particularly children, treated in film? Stephanie Hemelryk Donald, whose work has focused on international justice, arts and migration in film, will lead a discussion that will include screenings of award-winning film work by RTF alumni Chelsea Hernandez, from her documentary on immigrant labor in Texas, and Amy Bench, in her powerful animated short about a young girl abducted as she tried to enter the United States.

U of Copenhagen. Co-sponsored by Global Media Industries Speaker Series.
Small Nation Television Series with Global Appeal: The Recent Rise of Danish Television Drama

The production of Danish television series has traditionally been a national affair with the public service broadcaster DR making series that rarely traveled beyond the neighboring Nordic countries. This changed in the 2010s when global audiences suddenly took an interest in crime series such as Forbrydelsen/The Killing and the political drama Borgen. Focusing on issues of screenwriting and production, this talk discusses the major changes in the production framework at DR that led to the creation of series with both a national and an international appeal. The talk also addresses how to understand the recent appetite for ‘Nordic Noir’ in the current television landscape. The talk ends by introducing a new research project on fiction for children and young audiences (funded by Independent Research Fund Denmark for 2019-2023) since a major focus in Danish television production in the 2020s is to find the best ways to reach and retain young viewers in an age of increased competition for their time and attention. The Norwegian web series SKAM – with the American remake SKAM Austin – showed that this it is still possible for small nation content to compete, but there are no easy recipes ...

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Eva Novrup Redvall is Associate Professor in Film and Media Studies at the University of Copenhagen and head of the Section for Film and Creative Media Industries. Her research focuses on film and media production, particularly screenwriting and creative collaboration. She also studies broader issues related to Danish/Nordic cinema and drama series, among them questions of industry structures, of practitioners’ agency and authorship and of cultural and film policy. She has published many peer reviewed books, articles and edited collections, among them the monograph Writing and Producing Television Drama in Denmark: From The Kingdom to The Killing (2013) and the edited collections European Film and Television Co-production: Policy and Practice (with Julia Hammett-Jamart and Petar Mitric, 2018) and European Film and Television: Cultural Policy and Everyday Life (with Ib Bondebjerg and Andrew Higson, 2015). The anthology Danish Television Drama: Global Lessons from a Small Nation (co-ed. with Anne Marit Waade and Pia Majbritt-Jensen) will be out in 2020. From 2019-2023, she is the Principal Investigator of the research project Reaching Young Audiences: Serial fiction and cross-media storyworlds for children and young audiences supported by Independent Research Fund Denmark.

LATINO MEDIA ARTS & STUDIES SERIES: FILMMAKER DEBORAH ESQUENAZI
SOUTHWEST OF SALEM: THE STORY OF THE SAN ANTONIO FOUR
5:30-8pm - CMB 2.102
"Southwest of Salem: The Story of the San Antonio Four" is a 2016 documentary directed by Deborah Equenazi and produced by Sam Tabet. It investigates the wrongful convictions of four Latina lesbians accused of sexually abusing two young girls in the midst of the "Satanic panic" of the 1980s and 1990s. It showcases the women's fight to prove their innocence throughout the 15 years in which they were in prison and the court case which ultimately overturned their convictions. After the 90-minute screening, we'll have a Q&A with the filmmaker and members of The Innocence Project, which fought for justice in the case. Refreshments will be provided.

Dartmouth College

”So Much Water: Lucrecia Martel’s Cinema of the Senses”

The feature films and shorts of acclaimed Argentine auteur Lucrecia Martel insist on the ephemeral, fortuitous, fragmentary and endless quality of human experience. For Martel, film is not just a visual medium; it also encompasses a strong aural and haptic dimension that physically involves viewers and viscerally affects their engagement with the screen. As a result, watching Martel’s films is at times a hypnotic and deeply immersive experience, often continuing long after they have ended. This talk will focus on the role of water in Martel’s oeuvre, as the single most important symbol to encompass its major themes, moods, and formal registers, emphasizing the fluidity or blurring of borders while defying fixed, concrete identities. At times foreboding or ominous, water also connotes exuberance and sensuality, channeling multi-directional desires that break the limits imposed by patriarchy, Catholicism, or normative hetero-sexuality.

Bio
Gerd Gemünden is the Sherman Fairchild Professor of the Humanities, and Professor of Film and Media Studies, German Studies, and Comparative Literature. His interests include German and European cinema, Latin American and global art cinema, and the study of exile, migration and diaspora. His publications include Framed Visions: Popular Culture, Americanization, and the Contemporary German and Austrian Imagination (1998), A Foreign Affair: Billy Wilder's American Films (2008), Continental Strangers: German Exile Cinema, 1933-1951  (2014) as well as the co-edited volumes Dietrich Icon  (2007), and Culture in the Anteroom: The Legacies of Siegfried Kracauer  (2012). He serves on the editorial board of New German Critique and Film Criticism , for which he has been covering the Berlin Film festival for the last twenty years. His latest monograph, on the Argentine director Lucrecia Martel, was published by University of Illinois Press in October 2019.

Three 15-minute presentations.

Richard Rushton, Senior Lecturer, Lancaster University, UK
“On Cinema Memory and the Digital Archive”

Beginning in June 2019, ‘Cinema Memory and the Digital Archive: 1930s Britain and Beyond’ is a three-year project funded by the AHRC. The project will digitise and make freely available, via a dedicated website, materials relating to research conducted by professor Annette Kuhn during the 1990s and 2000s which led to the publication of Kuhn’s book, An Everyday Magic (IB Tauris), in 2002. The materials consist primarily of interviews with British cinemagoers reflecting on their memories and experiences of cinemagoing in the 1930s. Here I explain some of the goals of the new project, how the project was conceived, some of the challenges to be faced, and some of the possible research results.

Richard Rushton is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at Lancaster University. He is author of The Reality of Film (2011, Manchester UP), Cinema After Deleuze (2012, Continuum), and The Politics of Hollywood Cinema (2013, Palgrave). He is also co-editor of a book series, Visionaries: Thinking Through Female Filmmakers, published by Edinburgh UP. Forthcoming publications include Deleuze and Lola Montès(2020, Bloomsbury), and Stolen Kisses, Winter Light: On Nine European Filmmakers (2021, Manchester UP).

Sarah Neely, Senior Lecturer, University of Glasgow, UK
"Cinema Memory, Sound and the Embodiment of Place"

This paper will reflect on the Cinema Memory and the Digital Archive project’s plans to create new audio walking tours drawing from the CCINTB archive’s collection of over 200 hours of interviews relating to memories of cinema-going in the 1930s. Created by sound artist, Suzy Angus, in collaboration with project Co-Investigator, Sarah Neely, two new audio walking tours will be produced in response to the earlier project’s fieldwork in Manchester and Glasgow, combining extracts from the original interviews with contemporary field recordings, alongside more constructed forms of soundscape evoking the particular memories described in the interviews and corresponding to the everyday sounds of the period (e.g. sounds of modern city life, such as trams, automobiles, etc.).

This paper, intended as an initial scoping exercise, will consider the potential for audio walking tours to enable a more embodied engagement with place, bridging the memories of past local cinema audiences with those of the present. The paper will take into account the sensorial dimensions of the user’s experience, including the pre-determined, pre-recorded aspects of the acoustic experience as well as the unforeseen sights and sounds that are likely to be encountered by participants as their own individual journey through the geographical area of the audio tour unfolds.

Sarah Neely is a Senior Lecturer in Film and Television Studies at the University of Glasgow. Her current research focuses on the areas of film history and memory, and artists' moving image. She is co-investigator on the three-year AHRC-funded project, Cinema Memory and the Digital Archive

José Carlos Lozano, Texas A&M International University, USA
"Film at the border: Memories of cinemagoing in Laredo, Texas’"

This article addresses the memories of 28 filmgoers between the ages of 64 and 95 in Laredo, Texas – a city located on the border between the United States and Mexico. It explores respondents’ memories of US and Mexican films, actors and local venues against the historical background of a fluid and complex border. In particular, it examines the negotiation of cultural identities among residents with strong connections to Mexican heritage but who are also influenced by the structural characteristics of the American political, economic and educational systems.

José Carlos Lozano is a full professor and Chair of the Psychology and Communication Department at Texas A&M International University (Laredo, Texas). He got his M.A. in Communication Research from Leicester University, England and his Ph.D. in International Communication and Media Studies from the University of Texas at Austin. He is a Regular Member of the Mexican Academy of Sciences since 2007 and a fellow of the Mexican National System of Researchers (Level 3). He is the author of numerous books and journal articles in the areas of mass and international communication, in particular a textbook in mass communication theories widely used in Mexican and Latin American schools. He is Co-Principal investigator and coordinator of an international research project comparing the historical exhibition of films and cinema going in Laredo, Texas, Barcelona, Spain, Barranquilla, Colombia and the Mexican cities of Monterrey, Torreon, Tampico and Mexico City.

Bellarmine University. Co-sponsored by Global Media Industries Speaker Series.
“I Saw That This Was Really a Business”: Cultural Intermediaries and Genre Formation in Popular Music Media

Between World War I and the rise of the Great Depression, U.S. recording companies recorded a huge swath of music and spoken-word media that they had previously ignored -an output that we have not yet fully mapped. During this period, emerging recording companies in search of niches helped create the foundational genres later known as jazz, blues, and country. But it was so-called “foreign records,” sound recordings made by and targeted to immigrants and ethnic minorities, that led talent scouts to recognize unrecorded niche genres as viable products for U.S. audiences. It was through the vernacular cultures of immigrant groups that scouts began to understand that U.S. vernacular music could be recorded, marketed, and sold. This presentation highlights the work of record company talent scouts of the era and their roles in the understandings and misunderstandings long ago embedded in the cultural organization of American popular music media.

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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).

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 broadcast film libraries to the first decade of US television news production. I argue that 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. In so doing, I challenge media archivists and scholars alike to approach archives as dynamic organizational instruments embedded within the supply chain of audiovisual media production, as opposed to neutral custodians of static content.

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.