Media Studies Colloquium

RTF Ph.D. Candidate Briana Barner research talk:
‘It’s A Reckoning’: Black Podcasts and the Cultural Responses to Surviving R. Kelly

Abstract:
Building upon Stuart Hall’s essay critically engaging with the ‘Black’ in Black popular culture, I have a particular interest in exploring Blackness within this current cultural moment. Various representations of Blackness within media has increased over the last few years. My work argues that this has also spilled over into the podcast industry. Although podcasts are not a new medium, they have grown increasingly popular, thanks to the success of NPR’s true crime podcast Serial in 2014 and the increased usage of smartphones, which have made them much more accessible. I situate Black podcasts within the tradition of Black media serving as publics. The focus of this research is a textual analysis of three podcasts’ responses to the 2019 premiere of the Lifetime documentary Surviving R.Kelly, which details the sexual abuse allegations against the R&B superstar. The podcasts--Tea with Queen & J, The Clubhouse with Mouse Jones, and Marsha’s Plate--present a unique opportunity to take the temperature of how various segments of Black popular culture responded to the documentary, which saw the #MeToo movement intersect with race, gender and class with Black girls and women centered . Each of the episodes were recorded and published within days of the premiere, allowing for nuanced and complex reactions. These episodes are also unique because the perspectives are steeped in various Black perspectives that offer keen intersectional insight. The podcast medium allowed for in depth conversations and the assertion and development of intersectional Black identities that were absent from many of the mainstream coverage of the documentary. The podcast platform, which does not have to adhere to strict publishing deadlines, also allowed for the podcasts to bring in various guests to further complicate the analysis of the impact of the documentary. This research will illuminate the platform’s ability to be an audio archive of sorts of important Black cultural happenings.

Bio:
Briana Barner is an advanced PhD candidate and critical media scholar in the Department of Radio-Television-Film at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research interests include new media and the intersections of race, gender and sexuality, Black cultural production, popular culture and Black feminism. Her dissertation focuses on the performance and articulation of Blackness and Black feminism within podcasts. Briana has a Master’s degree in Women’s and Gender Studies from UT, and is a proud graduate of Bennett College, a small women’s historically Black college, with dual degrees in Journalism and Media Studies, and Africana Women’s Studies.

Presented by Latino Media Arts & Studies. Co-sponsored by Mexican American and Latina/o Studies and the Department of Radio-Television-Film.
REGISTER TO ATTEND: http://bit.ly/Selena-panel-reg

Texas writing talent shines bright on Selena: The Series, one of Netflix’s most anticipated shows of the year. UT alum Raymond Arturo Perez, Seguin native Marcelena Campos Mayhorn (DC’s Legends of Tomorrow), and Aaron Serna (Cristela and Malibu County), from South Texas, are Los Angeles-based writers who are bringing their experiences to the writers’ room and diversifying the television landscape. They will talk about what it was like to write the story of Tejano music star and Texas legend Selena Quintanilla for a global audience, and more! Moderated by RTF Associate Professor Mary Beltrán, this is a panel Selena fans and everyone interested in Latina/o/x and Tejana/o/x visibility won’t want to miss.

Co-sponsored by Global Media Industry Speaker Series.

Note time: 3:30-5:00pm

Resisting Visual Biopolitics: The Story of Annah la Javanaise
Co-sponsored by Center for Women and Gender Studies, South Asia Institute, Center for East Asian Studies, and Global Exchange Studies at Moody College

Through the story of Annah la Javanaise, a trafficked 13-year-old girl who was found wandering the streets of Paris in 1893 and who became the maid and model of painter Paul Gauguin, Fatimah Tobing Rony introduces theories of visual biopolitics to examine those who are allowed to live and those who are allowed to die, in representations of Indonesian women. In her talk, she will introduce strategies of resistance to visual biopolitics in writing, photography, and film up to the present day. She will be screening her short film Annah la Javanaise which was an official selection of the 2020 Annecy International Festival of Film.

Fatimah Tobing Rony is Professor and Chair of Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Irvine. Her book, How Do We Look? Resisting Visual Biopolitics, is forthcoming from Duke University Press.

Co-sponsored by Global Media Industry Speaker Series.

Co-sponsored by Global Media Industry Speaker Series.

Co-sponsored by Global Media Industry Speaker Series.

RTF Ph.D. Candidate Selena Dickey research talk.

Co-sponsored by Global Media Industry Speaker Series.

This roundtable conversation series will feature media studies scholars working in an array of professions outside of the academy. In addition to offering advice on how to best translate the skills you are developing in grad school to potential employers, the panelists will discuss both the benefits and challenges of moving into new professions and how they navigated or broadened their own sense of their identity as "academics" in the process. We encourage all grad students to attend these panels and bring questions about pursuing alt-ac career paths, even if you ultimately plan to pursue careers in the academy.

PANELISTS:
Dr. Lara Bradshaw, Communications Program Manager for Facebook
Lara is a communications consultant who delivers program and communication strategies in a variety of settings, most recently through her work in tech for Facebook as an internal communications strategist that builds out culture, programs, and messaging for an employee audience. Prior to Facebook, Lara worked as an executive communications specialist for Stephen Spielberg's Foundation where she focused on new media technologies like augmented and virtual reality to tell powerful and groundbreaking stories of individuals impacted by genocide. Lara received her PhD from USC's Cinema and Media Studies program and wrote a dissertation on wellness culture across the digital media landscape.

Dr. Alice Daer, founder of Quick Brown Fox Consulting
Dr. Daer is a former university professor with 25 years' worth of experience teaching writing and argumentation to undergraduate and graduate students across the U.S. As a scholar, she helped pioneer the nascent field of video game studies and published several academic articles on video game design as a writing process. In 2015 she left academia to work in digital marketing as a content strategist and technical writer. Then, in 2018 she launched Quick Brown Fox, a small consultancy based in Phoenix that offers writing coaching services to academics and technologists across the globe. At Quick Brown Fox, Dr. Daer specializes in working with Silicon Valley companies by helping their teams become better written communicators. She remains an avid gamer: these days she plays a lot of Minecraft and Animal Crossing with her two kids, ages 7 and 9. She also makes a lot of sourdough bread.

Dr. Nina Huntemann, Vice President of Learning, edX
Nina Huntemann is Vice President of Learning at edX. In this role, Nina drives edX’s instructional and pedagogical strategy to maximize the capabilities of the edX platform to improve learner outcomes. Nina has over 15 years of college-level teaching, program administration, and faculty development experience. Prior to joining edX, she was an associate professor in the Department of Communication and Journalism at Suffolk University in Boston where she taught courses and published research in digital media studies. Nina received her Ph.D. in communication at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Outside of work, Nina enjoys cycling, baking, and hiking with her Welsh terrier, Penny.

American Life in the Midst of Crisis: How People are Using Technology as Their Lives Are Upended
3:30 -4:45 via Zoom: 910 2391 2219
Co-sponsored by Global Media Industry Speaker Series.

Lee Rainie, director of internet and technology research at the Pew Research Center, will speak about the latest Center public opinion surveys since mid-March related to COVID-19, racial justice protests and the endgame of the 2020 presidential election and how people are using the internet in the midst of multiple national crises.
After the talk concludes at 4:45, Lee will chat with interested grad students for an additional half hour about careers, research, professional development and more. He welcomes questions!

For currently enrolled MA & PhD students only.
*Note time: 1–5 pm CT*

Hosted by Global Media Industry Speaker Series.

Comparing US and China’s soft power in the EU and ASEAN
By Irene S. Wu, Ph.D.
Georgetown University and Federal Communications Commission

Soft power is a country’s ability to persuade others to its point of view and is usually related to its cultural influence. Hard power by contrast is a country’s ability to coerce others, usually with military and some kinds of economic action. The Soft Power Rubric is a framework to track changes in the volume and direction of interactions people have with foreigners. Three elements are direct people-to-people interactions -emigration, study abroad and traveling abroad; the fourth is a mediated interaction -watching foreign movies. The Soft Power Rubric emphasizes the audience's perspective, rather than the viewpoint of the country projecting power. To assess US and China’s soft power, then, this presentation will consider two regions: the European Union (EU) and the Association for Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). Data from 2000 to the present show how many people from EU and ASEAN emigrated to, enrolled in university in, and traveled to the US and China. While the US is a major destination in all categories for both the EU and ASEAN, people’s interest in China is growing, although more in ASEAN than in the EU.

Bio: Irene S. Wu is a lecturer in the Communications, Culture, and Technology program at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. She is also a senior economist at the US Federal Communications Commission. From 2017-2018 she was a fellow at the Wilson Center for International Scholars. Her publications include Forging trust communities: how technology changes politics (Johns Hopkins, 2015) and From iron fist to invisible hand: the uneven path of telecommunications reform in China (Stanford, 2009). Currently, she is constructing the Soft Power Rubric, a framework for measuring soft power in the international system. For more information see “Applying the Soft Power Rubric: how study abroad reveal international cultural relations” in Cultural values in political economy, J.P. Singh, ed. (Stanford, 2020). She holds degrees from Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and Harvard University.

Panel discussion, Co-sponsored with the Center for Sports Communication and Media.
Join via Zoom.

To discuss her new book, Sporting Blackness, Dr. Samantha N. Sheppard will be joined by Dr. Michael Butterworth (Director of the Center for Sports Communication and Media in Moody), Dr. Adrien Sebro (Assistant Professor in RTF), Dr. Jennifer McClearen (Assistant Professor in RTF), and Brett Siegel (PhD Candidate in RTF).

The book examines issues of race and representation in sports films, exploring what it means to embody, perform, play out, and contest blackness by representations of Black athletes on screen. By presenting new critical terms, Professor Sheppard analyzes not only “skin in the game,” or how racial representation shapes the genre’s imagery, but also “skin in the genre,” or the formal consequences of blackness on the sport film genre’s modes, codes, and conventions. Through a rich interdisciplinary approach, Sheppard argues that representations of Black sporting bodies contain “critical muscle memories”: embodied, kinesthetic, and cinematic histories that go beyond a film’s plot to index, circulate, and reproduce broader narratives about Black sporting and non-sporting experiences in American society.

Dr. Sheppard is the Mary Armstrong Meduski '80 Assistant Professor of Cinema and Media Studies in the Department of Performing and Media Arts at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY. A cinema and media studies scholar, professor, and writer, her research interests include Black cultural production and production cultures, African American representation in cinema, sports films, and feminist media studies.

*Note time: 5-7 p.m. CT*
Register to attend.

The Bad AI and Beyond Festival presents a conversation with Laeta Kalogridis (creator and showrunner of Altered Carbon and screenwriter of Alita: Battle Angel and Terminator Genisys). Radio-Television-Film Associate Professor Suzanne Scott will moderate the discussion.

BAD AI AND BEYOND FESTIVAL OF SCHOLARSHIP & CREATIVE WORK

Bringing together academics and industry experts in artificial intelligence, literature and media studies, and game design, the Bad AI and Beyond Festival invites dialogue on how media representations have shaped public perceptions of artificial intelligence, and how a new generation of creatives find innovative ways to represent AI and its impact on society.

The two-day program will introduce faculty research into how we understand AI, and showcase student fictional and non-fictional accounts—through video, prose, and even poetry—of the social impact of AI. Also premiering at the fest will be a student-built computer game, Buddi-Bot, that dramatizes the introduction of AI into everyday life.

Festival sponsored by Good Systems, a UT Grand Challenge.
Hosted by Samuel Baker, Associate Professor of English and Good Systems Executive Team Member;
Suzanne Scott, Associate Professor of Radio-Television-Film;

Hosted by Global Media Industry Speaker Series.

“On With the Dance”: The Convergence of Recording, Radio and Film Cultures, 1925-1935

Between the waning days of the jazz-age 1920s and the depression-era 1930s, U.S. recording companies’ corporate, technological, and cultural ties to the radio and film industries grew ever closer. In the span of roughly a decade, the biggest recording companies, Victor and Columbia, became RCA-Victor and CBS, subsidiaries of radio (and later, television) companies at the center of twentieth-century American media culture. Musical performers sought opportunities beyond sound recordings and the stage, as hosting radio shows and appearing in movies became commonplace celebrity strategies. Film and radio stars in turn sought out opportunities via sound recordings. Through a discursive analysis of the recording-industry trade press and an examination of emerging stars' careers, this presentation outlines the largely-unexamined intermedial ties between phonography, radio and film that led to the first major conglomeration of entertainment media in the twentieth century.
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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).

Presented by Latino Media Arts & Studies. Co-sponsored by Mexican American and Latina/o Studies, LGBTQ Studies, and the Department of Radio-Television-Film

Moderated by Iliana Sosa, Filmmaker and Assistant Professor of Radio-Television-Film
Register for Webinar.

Deborah S. Esquenazi is an award-winning film director, screenwriter, and investigative journalist, based in Austin, Texas. Her interest in upending the oftentimes sensationalist True Crime genre informs the neorealist approach she takes to her work and her films foreground issues of identity within queer, Latino, and other marginalized communities in the United States.​ Her latest documentary, El Vacío, which is part of the New York Times’s Op-Doc Series, is nominated for a 2020 Emmy award. Esquenazi’s first feature, Southwest of Salem: The Story of the San Antonio Four, was also nominated for an Emmy and earned a variety of other distinctions, including the Peabody Award (2016). Southwest of Salem played a key role in the exoneration of four Latina lesbians who spent over a decade in prison for a crime they did not commit. The film is currently being adapted for television.

Please email any questions you have for our special guest and moderator to latinx_media@utexas.edu, in advance of the event.

Before the talk, we encourage you to watch the following two films:

1. Southwest of Salem: The Story of the San Antonio Four
– Available to current UT students here.
– Available on demand for the general public: Amazon, Hulu, Apple, Kanopy

2. El Vacío
– Available via NYT Op-Docs.

Hosted by Global Media Industry Speaker Series.

*Note time: 9:00- 10:00 am CT

Investigative journalism and digital communication technologies in China
Join via Zoom.
This talk, based on Tong’s recent publications, will discuss how digital communication technologies are contributing to limiting the space for practicing investigative journalism in China. In the current political and economic environments, the empowering potential of digital communication technologies is outperformed by the capitalisation of digital platforms. A hostile political climate and the pursuit of profit have radically diminished the necessary conditions for sustaining investigative journalism. After the talk concludes at 10:00, Jingrong will chat with interested grad students for an additional half hour about careers, research, professional development and more. She welcomes questions!

Hosted by Global Media Industry Speaker Series.

Digital Media and Human Capital in Rural America: Differentiating the role of Access, Skills, and Excessive Media Use for Educational Performance and Aspirations
Join via Zoom.

Compared with their urban and suburban peers, rural students are less likely to complete higher education. If access and use of digital technologies are supportive of students’ human capital, deficits in Internet access may further concentrate the inequalities of rural youth. However, there is mixed evidence that Internet use plays a supportive role in the formation of young peoples’ human capital. This presentation discusses implications for rural students’ access to human capital, and how the unequal relationship between digital skills and performance in the classroom and the SAT may perpetuate rural inequalities. After the talk concludes at 4:45, Keith will chat with interested grad students for an additional half hour about careers, research, professional development and more. He welcomes questions!

Bio: Keith N. Hampton is a professor in the Department of Media and Information, in the College of Communication Arts and Sciences at Michigan State University, where he is also Associate Director for Academic Research at the Quello Center for Media and Information Policy, and Affiliate Faculty in the Department of Sociology.Before joining the faculty at MSU, he held the position of Endowed Professor in Communication and Public Policy and Co-Chair of the Social Media & Society Cluster in the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers University; Assistant Professor at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania; and Assistant Professor of Technology, Urban and Community Sociology & Class of '43 Chair in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He received his Ph.D. and M.A. in sociology from the University ofToronto, and a B.A. (Hons) in sociology from the University of Calgary.

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 network newsfilm libraries to the development of US television news practices. 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. Approaching media libraries and archives first and foremost as dynamic organizational instruments embedded within the supply chain of audiovisual media production, this talk chronicles how commercially-motivated organizational schemas, workflows, and labor practices within network film libraries merged with evolving professional journalistic ethics in early television news departments.

This roundtable conversation series will feature media studies scholars working in an array of professions outside of the academy. In addition to offering advice on how to best translate the skills you are developing in grad school to potential employers, the panelists will discuss both the benefits and challenges of moving into new professions and how they navigated or broadened their own sense of their identity as "academics" in the process. We encourage all grad students to attend these panels and bring questions about pursuing alt-ac career paths, even if you ultimately plan to pursue careers in the academy.