Media Studies Colloquium

sebro colloquium

Media Studies Colloquium

Designed to expose students to the diversity of media studies scholarship, the Radio-Television-Film (RTF) department's Media Studies Colloquium enables advanced graduate students to present work related to their dissertation projects, provides models for research presentations, and offers a platform for discourse.

The Colloquium’s programming also includes presentations from RTF faculty and visiting scholars.

All RTF faculty and graduate students are encouraged to attend, while others are welcome as well.

These talks will be held from 3:30–4:45 pm CT in DMC 5.208, unless otherwise noted. A Q&A session will follow each 40-minute presentation. Check back in the coming weeks for more event details.

Spring 2024

2020_Photo_dHarcourt_Ash_Kinney.gr

JAN 25 - ASH d'HARCOURT

PhD Candidate, UT Department of Radio-Television-Film, research presentation.

"Of Men and Monsters: The Messy Anatomy of Drag Kings and Media Iconography"

Abstract: In this talk, Ash will present portions of their dissertation, “Of Men and Monsters: A Messy Anatomy of Drag Kings and Media Iconography,” which investigates the role of media imagery in resistance and survival within contemporary performance art and nightlife subcultures. Synthesizing critical media approaches with sociocultural accounts, genre and ideological analyses, and interviews with performers, this project examines how drag kings respond to prescriptive constructions of masculinity in mass media by naming, imagining, and transforming them into new gendered sites of resistance. Each chapter of this project focuses on a distinct genre in film history. This presentation centers the strategies of drag kings whose cultural (re)productions of the western genre's folk hero lay bare its colonial and capitalist-driven construction and add to ongoing discourses of masculinity in media and culture. As part of this project, Ash is building a digital archive of experience, performance and cultural memory of queer and transgender communities.

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FEB 8 - SHUMONA GOEL

Janet Staiger Lecture in Gender and Sexuality

Filmmaker Screening and Talk: Shumona Goel
CMB 4.122 Studio 4C

Shumona Goel is a filmmaker based in Uttrakhand, India. In 1997, she graduated in Film from Bard College (USA). She also studied Anthropology at the School of Oriental and African Studies (UK). Shumona's films have been screened in many film festivals, including the Toronto International Film Festival and The Berlin International Film Festival. Her films have won awards such as the Best Short Film Award at the London International Film Festival and The Stan Brakhage Film at Wit's End Award at the Ann Arbor Film Festival. Her work has also been exhibited at the Guggenheim Museum and the Tate Modern. For over twenty years, Shumona has worked with various people’s movements for land and labour rights in India. She is also been a member of feminist groups working on different issues like sexuality, health, poverty, and education.

•••••••
About the Janet Staiger Lecture in Gender and Sexuality
Beginning in 1994, faculty members in the Department of Radio-Television-Film have annually organized the visit and lecture by guest scholars and filmmakers to emphasize our critical focus on gender and sexuality in film and TV, including feminist and queer media theory, criticism, and production. World-class scholars and filmmakers continue to bring diversity of thinking in humanities and social science research and innovative practices in fiction and documentary filmmaking, inspiring all of us to reach further and grow together in our work.

The series has been endowed by Janet Staiger, the William P. Hobby Centennial Professor Emeritus of Communication and Professor Emeritus of Women's and Gender Studies at The University of Texas at Austin. Staiger is a pioneer in film studies with ground-breaking research and publications in authorship theory, modes of production, cultural and political issue of representation, genre theory, the historical reception of cinema and television, and historiographical issues in writing media histories.

Dan Herbert

FEB 15 - DAN HERBERT

Professor, Department of Film, Television, and Media at the University of Michigan
Co-sponsored by the Center for Entertainment and Media Industries.

"Modern Hollywood from the Outside In: New Line Cinema and the Transformation of American Film"

Abstract:
Founded in 1967 as a tiny distributor of art films to college campuses, New Line Cinema grew to become a film industry powerhouse that entered the new millennium with the billion-dollar Lord of the Rings franchise. This talk provides an overview of this maverick movie company and its zigzag history of huge achievements, massive setbacks, and crazy comebacks. Releasing films as diverse as Pink Flamingos, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday, and The Golden Compass, New Line Cinema offers an unusual but compelling case for understanding the modern movie business.

Bio:
Daniel Herbert is a professor in the Department of Film, Television, and Media at the University of Michigan. He is the author of Maverick Movies: New Line Cinema and the Transformation of American Film (2023), Videoland: Movie Culture at the American Video Store (2014), and several other books about film and media culture.

Luis Rivera-Figueroa

FEB 22 - LUIS RIVERA-FIGUEROA

PhD Candidate research presentation.

Developing the Streaming Latin(x) American Market

Luis will discuss portions of his dissertation “The International Urban Latin Music Industry Networks: Streaming Services, Geocultural Markets, and Media Workers” which studies how streaming technologies, transnational market structures, and the increasing influence of Latin(x) American media workers have led to independent Latin music record labels’ increasing networking power within the dominant media industry networks. Drawing from media industry, popular music, and global media approaches, Luis contextualizes how the “Latin Takeover” discourse of the late 2010s reflects transformations and restructuration of relations between streaming services, record labels, and media workers in the international music industry networks.

In this presentation, Luis discusses how streaming services -particularly YouTube and Spotify- function as international music and media distribution infrastructures. By contextualizing YouTube’s and Spotify’s expansion throughout the US and Latin America, Luis discusses how streamers strengthened the Latin(x) American geocultural market by combatting piracy, monetizing consumption, and datafying consumer behavior.

Netfllix's The Black Beauty Effect

FEB 29 - "THE BLACK BEAUTY EFFECT" Screening & Discussion

7 pm - DMC 2.106
Netflix's "The Black Beauty Effect" screening and discussion with series creator/executive producer Andrea Lewis and executive producer CJ Faison

Moody College of Communication, in partnership with The Warfield Center, the Department of Radio-Television-Film, and the Center for Women's and Gender Studies, is holding a special screening on Feb. 29 of the new, highly-engaging Netflix docuseries "The Black Beauty Effect." The event, which begins at 7 p.m. in DMC 2.106, will kick off by airing Episode 2, titled "The Skin Effect," and will follow with a conversation with series creator Andrea Lewis and executive producer CJ Faison. Dr. Adewole Adamson from the Division of Dermatology at Dell Medical School will also add expertise on Black skincare and Jersey Robinson, RTF student and co-president of Black Lens, will also join the conversation, which will be moderated by RTF Assistant Professor Adrien Sebro.

Sponsored by the John L. Warfield Center for African and African American Studies, Moody College of Communication, the Department of Radio-Television-Film, and the Center for Women's and Gender Studies.

Margaret Steinhauer Headshot

MAR 7- MAGGIE STEINHAUER

PhD Candidate research presentation.
via Zoom (ID = 94362580177)

"Check Your Local Listings! Perspectives on Broadcasting’s Schedule, 1920-1934

Abstract:
In this talk, Maggie will present portions of her dissertation, “Check Your Local Listings! Perspectives on Broadcasting’s Schedule, 1920-1934,” which explores alternative approaches to and forgotten traditions of U.S. broadcast radio scheduling in the pre-network years. Specifically, this talk will focus on key studies conducted by the federal Bureau of Standards in the early 1920s to understand how the peculiarities of the ionosphere interacted with broadcasting. The Bureau’s collaborative work revealed a technical “earthborne” schedule that maximizes broadcasting’s spatial and temporal potential, upon which broadcast scheduling would grow. Though scientific advances and wired interconnection would diminish the limitations of the natural environment over time, the development of broadcasting (as seen through the schedule) is intrinsically tied to this period via these standardization efforts. By disconnecting the idea of a broadcast schedule from print listings or commercial practice in this way, the origins of broadcast scheduling are shown to be industrial and cultural, as well as scientific. As industrial historiography using archival research and discourse analysis, this project aims to de-center the commercial networks and push federal agencies/regulators and broadcasting engineers to the forefront as industry stakeholders, alongside stations, program producers, and amateurs.

Austin Based Film Fetivals Panel

MAR 21 - AUSTIN-BASED FILM FESTIVALS PANEL

4:00 pm CT • Zoom & In Person
RSVP for Zoom link and room location.

Co-sponsored by the Center for Entertainment and Media Industries.

Join us for this Media Industry Conversation with leaders from five Austin-based independent film festivals. We'll discuss programming strategy and selection criteria, the nuances of operating community-based film festivals, and tips for filmmakers and students wanting to get involved in the festival world. Panelists include Neha Aziz (Artistic Director, Austin Asian American Film Festival), Alka Bhanot (Co-Founder, Indie Meme), David Finkel (Director, Austin Jewish Film Festival), Todd Hogan (President, aGLIFF), and Gabriel Ornelas (Executive Director, Cine Las Americas).

Alessandra Raengo headshot

MAR 28 - ALESSANDRA RAENGO

Janet Staiger Lecture in Gender and Sexuality
co-sponsored by African & African American Diaspora Studies Department

“How Much Fuller?” Jenn Nkiru’s Cosmic Archaeologies

Visual artist and filmmaker Jenn Nkiru describes her artmaking as a “cosmic archeology,” an excavation of radical insights from the unruly archives of black expressive culture that seek to activate their radical energy. Harnessing insights from both jazz and hip-hop, her 10-minute film Rebirth is Necessary (2017) samples from Panafrican sonic and visual archives of black radicalism and deploys filmic temporality to activate black futures already imagined in the past.

Nkiru’s filmmaking sits at the center of what my current book project describes as the “liquidity” of the black arts. Building on Toni Morrison’s demand to attend to the long history of conceiving and practicing one artform in terms of another—for instance, musical rhythms as visual conceits, photography as improvised music, filmmaking as music-making—I am interested in the ways contemporary black visual artists fully inhabit this legacy not only as a matter of artmaking practice, aesthetic sensibility, expanded patronage, and increased high art and popular culture visibility, but also how they negotiate their “freedom dreams” against art’s deep entanglement with finance capital, where artworld inclusion demands constant self-valorization.

Focusing on Nkiru’s Rebirth is Necessary, this talk attends to the informal conceits the artist deploys to engender “fuller” futures in black existence, in the praxis of being a black artist, as well as in scholarly discourses about black art can and cannot do.

Speaker Bio
Alessandra Raengo is Georgia State University Distinguished Professor of Moving Image Studies, the Founding Editor-in-Chief of liquid blackness: journal of aesthetics and black studies (at Duke University Press) and founder of the liquid blackness research group that initiated the journal in 2013. She is the author of On the Sleeve of the Visual: Race as Face Value (Dartmouth College Press, 2013) and of Critical Race Theory and Bamboozled (Bloomsbury Press, 2016). She has published widely on the visual arts and filmmaking of the Black diaspora, racial capitalism, and modes of black “liquidity” in the contemporary arts. Her work has appeared in Camera Obscura, Discourse, Adaptation, The World Picture Journal, Black Camera, The Black Scholar, Flash Art, Refract, Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, and several anthologies, including the award-winning collections LA Rebellion: Creating a New Black American Cinema (2015) and Deep Mediations: Thinking Space in Cinema and Digital Cultures (2021). She is the recipient of a Paul Mellon Senior Fellowship at CASVA (Centre for Advanced Study in the Visual Art, National Gallery of Art), a Terra Foundation of American Art Grant for the liquid blackness Symposium: “Music Video as Black Art: Claiming the B-Side,” Sept. 21-23, 2023 at Georgia State University and a Phoenix Award for Significant Editorial or Design Achievement from the Council of Editors of Learned Journals for editorial and design excellence for the liquid blackness journal she co-edits with Lauren McLeod Cramer.

•••••••
About the Janet Staiger Lecture in Gender and Sexuality
Beginning in 1994, faculty members in the Department of Radio-Television-Film have annually organized the visit and lecture by guest scholars and filmmakers to emphasize our critical focus on gender and sexuality in film and TV, including feminist and queer media theory, criticism, and production. World-class scholars and filmmakers continue to bring diversity of thinking in humanities and social science research and innovative practices in fiction and documentary filmmaking, inspiring all of us to reach further and grow together in our work.

The series has been endowed by Janet Staiger, the William P. Hobby Centennial Professor Emeritus of Communication and Professor Emeritus of Women's and Gender Studies at The University of Texas at Austin. Staiger is a pioneer in film studies with ground-breaking research and publications in authorship theory, modes of production, cultural and political issue of representation, genre theory, the historical reception of cinema and television, and historiographical issues in writing media histories.

2019_Photo_Kunda_Lily

APR 4 - LILY KUNDA

PhD Candidate research presentation.
via Zoom (3:30 pm CT)

“Black joy on full display”: Affect and Exploitation in Target’s 2023 Black History Month Campaign

Abstract
In response to the racial uprisings and protests that spurred in the summer of 2020 following the murder of George Floyd, like many corporations, Target launched an initiative to “stand with Black families and fight against racism.” As part of this initiative, Target committed to “create environments where Black guests feel overtly welcome and see themselves represented across our products, marketing and shopping experiences.” Drawing on Sarah Banet-Weiser’s framework of economies of visibility, Lily interrogates Target’s commitment to making Black guests feel seen by examining their 2023 Black History Month campaign. This paper contributes to a growing body of literature that argues that in the contemporary moment, visual representation is taking the place of tangible activist efforts trading in symbolic gestures for political or governmental intervention. Through textual analysis of Target’s in-store displays, social media platforms, and partnerships with Black influencers, and entrepreneurs, she illustrates the ways Target uses the Black body to brand itself as progressive while not actually tending to systemic racism as they commit to. Moreover, she questions how corporations, like Target, utilize digital media to both resonantly appeal to and communicate with Black consumers while effectively and affectively exploiting their visibility suggesting that Target’s use of Black imagery in physical and digital consumer spaces is indicative of the future of corporate social responsibility that is attempting to reframe corporate marketing tactics as social justice while using media to do so.