Media Studies Colloquium

BMC 5.102 - Doctoral candidate research presentation
“Playing in Licensed Storyworlds: Games, Franchises, and Fans”

In recent years, scholars of transmedia storytelling have increasingly turned toward worldbuilding as a framework for understanding and examining the creative, cultural, and economic processes that encompass the production and consumption of transmedia franchises. Embracing the inherent playfulness of transmediality, my dissertation examines digital and analog games based in popular storyworlds, surveying both the underlying worldbuilding creativity of these licensed media extensions and how players use these extensions to reenact and rework the storyworld. In adapting and remediating an existing world into an interactive media text, licensed games are uniquely situated to demonstrate how popular storyworlds are built and shared, expanded and sustained, explored and negotiated.

Professor, University of Michigan
11 AM - CMA 5.136
Part of Global Media Industry Speaker Series
*Note: time change

"Evolution or Revolution? Television in Transformation"

Is television in the midst of typical change—evolution—or is something more profound occurring? This talk explores the change and continuity characteristic of the contemporary television industry based on the disruptions introduced by internet distribution to consider strategies for understanding television today.

Bio

Amanda D. Lotz is Professor at the University of Michigan and Fellow at the Media Center at Peabody. Her most recent book, Portals: A Treatise on Internet-Distributed Television, explores 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. We Now Disrupt This Broadcast: How Cable Transformed Television and the Internet Revolutionized It All looks at how and why the business of television changed between 1996 and 2016 to adjust television's storytelling possibilities, and will be released by MIT Press in early 2018

Her award-winning book, The Television Will Be Revolutionized, now in its second edition, has been translated into Mandarin, Korean, Italian, and Polish. She is frequently interviewed by NPR’s Marketplace, has appeared on BBC, CNN's The Nineties, HuffPost Live, and ZDF (German television network) and been interviewed for articles in the Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, The Atlantic, Christian Science Monitor, the Associated Press, Wired, and Men’s Health among many others. She publishes articles about the business of television at Quartz, Salon, The New Republic, hosts the Media Business Matters podcast, and tweets about television and media @DrTVLotz.

3:30-4:45 PM - CMB Studio 4C
*Note: On a Friday
Co-presented by OUTsider, Center for Asian American Studies (CAAS), LGBTQ Studies, and The John L. Warfield Center for African and African American Studies

Writer/ director Lizzie Borden will speak about her work, including the seminal film "Born in Flames," which will be celebrating its 35th anniversary this year.

Abstract:

Considered a classic of radical agit-prop cinema, Born in Flames (Lizzie Borden, 1983) is an experimental flick of feminist fury that delivers a rousing rebel cry aimed at the intertwined forces of racism, homophobia and misogyny. A dystopic tale of a future United States in which feminist (and mostly woc) insurgents must rise against the fascist patriarchs who rule them, Flames could not seem more prophetic or urgently relevant thirty-five years later. Join UT Assistant Professor PJ Raval (RTF) in conversation with director Lizzie Borden as they discuss radical feminism, agit-prop aesthetics and Flames remarkable role as a harbinger of today’s queer, third wave and intersectional politics.

Note: Born in Flames will be screening 7:30pm at the VORTEX as part of the OUTsider festival.

Bio:

In her first act of rebellion, at age eleven, Lizzie Borden adopted the name of the infamous 19^th century patricide-matricide. She studied art at Wellesley College, moved to New York City in the 70s, wrote criticism for the prestigious Art Forum magazine, worked on her own paintings, and then shifted to experimental filmmaking after seeing a retrospective of works by Jean-Luc Godard. Her films have dealt with themes of race, class, power, capitalism, and sex—including Sundance Special Jury Prize winner Working Girls (1986) and Born in Flames (1983), named one of "The Most Important 50 Independent Films" by Filmmaker magazine.

Associate Professor, University of California Santa Barbara
5:00-6:30 PM - BMC 5.102
*Note: time change

"Rosetta Stone, Inglés Sin Barreras and the Racial Politics of Language Learning Media"
Co-Sponsors: Department of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies, Center for Mexican American Studies, and Latino Research Initiative.

Abstract

A host of language learning media tools explicitly market themselves as necessities for the "new" global economy, often correlating bilingualism with economic opportunities. Ironically, while bilingual education holds a precarious existence in several states' public schools, private companies have capitalized by offering a host of language learning options to adults. This project documents how language learning has largely shifted from school sites and traditional language laboratories to popular, at-home and, at times, social sites of media such as computer software, DVD sets, smartphone applications and YouTube tutorials. While studies have examined theories of language learning within mediated contexts, few focus on how these media tools communicate ideas about language, race, and citizenship to consumers. Interest in learning Spanish and English in the United States have spurred two of the fastest growing language learning companies: Rosetta Stone and Inglés Sin Barreras, distinguishable leaders within this lucrative, niche market. While Rosetta Stone frames language learning, specifically Spanish, as key to middle class workplace promotions and for more culturally relevant travel, Inglés Sin Barreras directs its English-language lessons as mandatory for healthy economic livelihoods for their immigrant-based clientele.

Bio
Dolores Inés Casillas is Associate Professor in the Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies and a Faculty Affiliate of Film & Media Studies and Applied Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is the author of Sounds of Belonging: U.S. Spanish-language Radio and Public Advocacy (NYU Press, 2014) and co-editor with María Elena Cepeda (Williams College) of the Routledge Companion for Latina/o Media (Routledge, 2016) as well as co-editor with Mary Bucholtz and Jin Sook Lee (UC Santa Barbara) of Feeling It: Language, Race, and Affect in Latinx Youth Learning (Routledge, 2018).

BMC 5.208 - Doctoral candidate research presentation
"Reel South(s): Race, Region, and the American Film Industry in the Era of Black Civil Rights (1954-1975)"

This presentation uses the southern imaginary to critically interrogate how the commercial American film industry responded to the racial and cultural anxieties, as well as the industrial transformations and destabilizations, of the civil rights era, attempting to negotiate through popular film the period’s rapidly shifting and increasingly contentious meanings of race, region, and nation. It explores the conflicted and evolving logics and strategies that marked the industry’s transition from the studio era to the New Hollywood by considering the ways in which the studios and a proliferating number of alternatives – including independent and exploitation films and foreign imports – variously responded to the twinned problems of race and region, both increasingly contentious at this time. In particular, this project examines how whiteness, blackness, and the U.S. South were mutually informed and co-produced throughout the production and promotion of different generic cycles within the period's expanding landscape of popular film, thereby collectively participating in and contributing to dominant conceptions of race, place, gender, and sexuality at a time when all were being actively renegotiated. Thus, Reel South(s) ultimately explores not only the industrial and discursive function which the southern imaginary served for the American film industry, but also the ideological and cultural work which the resultant cinematic constructions of race, gender, and region performed for national audiences throughout this tumultuous era.

BMC 5.208 - C.V. Starr Transnational China Fellow | Jesse Jones Leadership Center Summer Intern Program Coordinator, Rice University's Baker Institute for Public Policy
https://www.bakerinstitute.org/experts/steven-w-lewis/
"Making a Path in the Wilderness: The Media of Self-Participation in LGBTQ+ Pride Parades in Hong Kong and Taipei, 2016 and 2017"

Many social scientific theories of collective action assume that the media and language of demonstration and protest are commonly shared, a ubiquitous and easily understandable connection between protestor and state. These assumptions can be problematic, however, as participants in protests and demonstrations may have multiple, competing reasons for participating in protests, and some of these reasons may be more about strengthening group cohesion and identity, or even individual expression, than about shared communication with the state or society as a whole. To put it pithily, how much of the parade is about the parade? LGBTQ+ Pride parades in Taipei and Hong Kong provide an interesting set of examples to test the usefulness of theories of the media of collection action, as they are designed both to increase cohesion across groups that do not necessarily identify with each other, and to demonstrate to local society and state rising support for political rights for LGBTQ+ members in general. As a first step toward understanding the media of LGBTQ+ collective action in general, we analyze the similarities and differences in the banners, posters, placards and other ephemera carried by marchers in Pride parades in Hong Kong and Taiwan in 2016 and 2017.

After the session, join us for happy hour at the Hole in the Wall

BMC 5.208 - Doctoral candidate, research presentation:

“Broadway (Re)Bound: Howard Ashman and the Disney Renaissance”

The received accounts of the Disney Renaissance -- many produced by Disney itself -- often celebrate the visionary executive leadership and therefore marginalize the essential contribution of creatives to Disney’s resurgence in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Through a case study of lyricist Howard Ashman’s work at Disney, I offer a revisionist history of this period that aims to flesh out changes in animation authorship while also tracing the influence of Broadway—as a cultural center, a production culture, and a mode of musical storytelling—on the narratives Disney produced, beginning with The Little Mermaid (Musker and Clements, 1989). My study draws on archival research, discourse analysis, interviews with participants, and textual analysis to recast our understanding of this time as one of creative innovation, cross-collaboration, and appropriation. As a result, Ashman and other Broadway-honed talent unintentionally laid the groundwork for Disney’s expansion into new cultural industries, including theater, in the early 1990s and further catalyzed developments in narrative, labor organization, and production practices within the U.S. theater industry. Such a study, therefore, reveals not only the tenuous opposition that has long been used to define both media, but also how it becomes increasingly precarious in an age of conglomeration and convergence.

BMC 5.208 - Visiting Lecturer. Co-sponsored by the Center for Sports Communication and Media
After the session, join us for happy hour at the Hole in the Wall

"Branded Difference: Promoting Female Athletes in the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC)"

This presentation examines the Ultimate Fighting Championship’s (UFC’s) promotion of female athletes throughout its mixed-martial arts (MMA) transmedia empire. I weave textual analysis of UFC media with interviews with UFC staff to understand how the organization integrates minoritized fighters, such as diverse women, into its various media ventures. “Branded difference” is the term I employ to theorize communication strategies media organizations such as the UFC utilize to entice new fan demographics. Representations of difference become a bonafide economic strategy that the UFC can herald as groundbreaking or egalitarian. Nevertheless, I argue that branded difference is an ambivalent cultural discourse that fluctuates between depicting identities as essentialized and presenting difference as a homogenous feature of all human beings. The UFC focuses on representing individualized identity categories, i.e. we are all different in some way, while masking the disparities that minoritized fighters face. Difference itself becomes flattened through market forces while producing a veneer of progress that obscures structural inequalities in neoliberal media culture.
• • • • •
Jennifer McClearen is a feminist media scholar and visiting lecturer in the Department of Radio-Television-Film at the University of Texas at Austin. Her scholarly work examines the cultural production of difference in contemporary society with an emphasis on the mediation of gender, race, and sexuality. She researches how intersecting subjectivities are written onto active female bodies in popular media such as action films or sports. Some of her work can be found in the International Journal of Communication; New Formations: A Journal of Culture, Theory, and Politics; and Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies.

Associate Professor, Texas A&M University
https://comm.tamu.edu/heidi-campbell/
CMA 5.136 (LBJ Room)
After the session, join us for happy hour at the Hole in the Wall

"Religion's New Interpreters: Negotiating Religious Authority in Digital Culture"

This presentation discusses the rise of new religious interpreters facilitated by the Internet and their relationship to established religious authority offline. A struggle often exists between established leaders and those who gain social influence online through their work as webmasters, forum moderators, or bloggers (Religious Digital Creatives, or RDCs). How RDCs address such tensions in relation to online-offline religious institutions will be addressed.

BMC 5.102
Screening and presentation by the filmmaker, followed by a Q & A. An informal reception will follow.

“The Border as Spectacle and Performance”

In popular discourse, the US-Mexico border is a no-man’s land of militarization, drug wars and ‘illegal’ immigration. In opposition to this dominant view, my films are rooted in a border landscape that myself, and my family, know as home. There is a popular Tejano saying, “We didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us.” Our community has been living in, and crossing the border, for generations. Gloria Anzaldúa called this place in between nations a “third space.” Like many people with family on both sides, I see a border that is as playful as it is dramatic. My films seek to challenge assumptions about the border, and to illuminate the performance and spectacle in this space known for political tension. I will present how my filmmaking practice tilts the lens to create a border aesthetic rooted in place.

Cristina Ibarra has been making award-winning films that explore the US-Mexico border for the past 16 years. The New York Times called her newest, Las Marthas, set in Laredo, Texas, during the annual Martha Washington debutante pageant, “a striking alternative portrait of border life.” It premiered on PBS’s Independent Lens and won the jury award at CineFestival and Best Latino Film at CinemaTropical and NBC Latino. Her documentary collaboration The Last Conquistador had a national broadcast on POV; USA Today called the film “heroic.” Dirty Laundry: A Homemade Telelenovela also won multiple awards at film festivals and was broadcast on PBS. She’s a Sundance Women’s Initiative fellow and on the Sundance Alumni Diversity Outreach Committee. Her new documentary feature, The Infiltrators, focused on undocumented Americans and for-profit detention facilities, will be completed next year.

Hosted by the Moody College of Communication’s Latino Media Arts & Studies Speaker Series and cosponsored by the Department of Radio-Television-Film, the Center for Mexican American Studies, the Department of Mexican American & Latina/o Studies, and the Latino Research Initiative.

BMC 5.208 - Doctoral candidate research presentation:

“Engaging With the Vernacular: Korean Web Dramas and Independent Productions”

Recently, a new form of web content called web dramas have become popular in South Korea. Web dramas are original professionally-produced dramas that are first-run on Internet platforms. They are usually short in length, 5-20 minutes per episode at most, and aimed at mobile audiences. It has only been a couple of years since the term “web drama” was first mentioned in industrial and popular discourses within Korea but they have grown rapidly in terms of both popularity and volume.

In particular, my dissertation focuses on the independent production producers’ perception of web dramas and how their everyday business decisions shape this emerging content form. Based on in-depth interviews with media professionals who have worked with web dramas, I make the case that web drama producers are critically conscious of the status quo and work to challenge the existing systems through their actions. I expand the concept of the vernacular to include media workers who work within dominant structures and include room for people to interrogate and question the dominant ideas, structures, practices of the status quo. Intervening in media industry studies and global media studies, I bring attention to these independent producers by pointing at how they are aware of the larger implications of their actions, and re-interpret the existing media practices to change the problems of industrial conventions of the existing media industry – both locally and globally.

BMC 5.208 - Doctoral candidate research presentation:

“What’s in a Niche?: Specialty Streaming Services and the OTT Marketplace”

The recent proliferation of specialty subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) services represents a particular industrial moment—characterized by content aggregation and “over-the-top” (OTT) streaming— in which “specialties” are being defined in relation to “mass-market” classifications, and content is being re-classified, re-valued, and re-packaged for the OTT marketplace. Marked by the convergence of old and new media forms, companies, technologies, and industries, specialty SVODs represent competing and complementing agendas, which are potentially altering the taxonomies and values of niche film and TV content in the new media environment.

My dissertation critically analyzes specialty SVODs (e.g., Fandor, Tribeca Shortlist, Sundance Now, Comic-Con HQ, and FilmStruck) in terms of their business models and practices; their professionals’ activities and roles; and their commodification of geography and taste cultures. I base my research on extensive interviews with professionals working in the OTT space across a range of departments including: business development, original program development, content acquisition and programming, product design, and marketing. I present a case study focusing on the roles of acquisition professionals at Fandor—which specializes in the deepest dives of art-house, experimental, foreign, and independent film. My findings show that Fandor acquisition professionals’ relationships and resources have transformed in response to broader industrial developments. More specifically, these professionals increasingly value resources and relationships that are bound to the global TV marketplace, which necessarily influences their conceptualizations of alternative yet sellable cinema. This finding is acutely demonstrated by Fandor’s recent hiring of former TV network professionals and its careful marketing towards both cinephile and millennial audiences. Therefore, this case study shows Fandor’s conflicting agendas—to legitimize its cultural authority in the independent film world while remaining profitable and relevant. In essence, my research maps the restrictive and precarious space in which specialty SVODs operate to reveal how cultural hierarchies and traditional classifications of niche film and TV content are being negotiated and reified in the rapidly changing OTT marketplace.

BMC 5.208 - Doctoral candidate research presentation:

“Livable Lives and Grievable Deaths on the US-Mexico Border: Public Imaginaries of Immigration and Borders and the Work of Reframing the Lives of Others”

Recent mobilizations of fear and nativism in the United States directed toward undocumented immigration from Central America are increasingly politically powerful, and hinge on distributions of lives recognized as needing protection from lives that don’t, and mediated frames of ‘livable’ lives and ‘grievable’ deaths (Butler, 2004). The goal of this dissertation project is to examine the dynamic between the dehumanization of immigrants in political rhetoric and popular imaginaries of the Mexico-U.S. border broadly, and more specifically the efforts of organizations and social actors in the border region of Arizona to recenter debates and reframe immigrant lives as valuable and grievable. This study aims to understand the ways in which nativist nationalism has emerged in the United States and to assist advocacy for immigrants and humane borders by highlighting strategies for enabling the recognition of human life, in its living value and grievable loss.