Media Studies Colloquium

The Texas Entertainment and Media Industries Symposium will showcase the breadth of film, TV, music, gaming, and digital media opportunities available in Texas. This all-day event will take place on Friday, September 20, at the Moody College of Communication on the UT Austin campus. We welcome students, industry leaders, and members of the Texas film community to celebrate and investigate the media ecosystem of the Lone Star State.

Professor, Queensland University of Technology

"Screen Stories and Media Microcultures: Navigating Industrial and Critical Challenges"

Amanda’s talk draws from her forthcoming book After Mass Media: Storytelling for Microaudiences in the Twenty-first Century (NYU Press, April 2025) that explores how the dominant and “normal” operation of commercial screen storytelling becomes a business of attracting microaudiences, what that means for the stories that can be told, and the implications for the cultural roles of screen storytelling. The project connects two decades of research about television industry change to shifts and expansion in the universe of commercially viable stories. The project aims to trouble conventional understandings tied to norms now past and pave a way to investigating and theorizing the cultural roles of screen stories beyond those of mass consumption.

Bio:
Amanda D. Lotz is a Professor in the Digital Media Research Centre and School of Communication at Queensland University of Technology, where she leads the Transforming Media Industries and Cultures research program. She is the author, coauthor, or editor of fourteen books that explore television and media industries – which includes the forthcoming Media Industries in the Digital Age with Timothy Havens (Nov 2024) and After Mass Media: Storytelling for Microaudiences in the Twenty-first Century (April 2025).

Her most recent books explore 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. Her books have been translated into Mandarin, Korean, Russian, Italian, and Polish. She is frequently interviewed by press around the globe and has consulted for a range of government and industry clients for more than a decade. She is a Fellow of the International Communication Association.

Assistant Professor, University of Alabama

Can’t Get Enough of Myself: The Feminization of Collaborative Music Merchandise

Despite the hypervisibility of a constellation of female pop stars, the music business is structured around gender inequality. As a result, women in the music industry often seize on self-branding opportunities in fashion, cosmetics, food, and technology for the purposes of professional longevity. Extending Play examines the ubiquity of brand partnerships in the contemporary music industry through the lens of feminized labor, to demonstrate how female artists use them as a resource for artistic expression and to articulate forms of popular feminism through self-commodification. In this book, author Alyxandra Vesey examines this type of promotional work and examines its proliferation in the early 21st century.

Though brand partnerships exist across all media industries, they are a distinct phenomenon for the music business because of their associations with fan club merchandise, concert merchandise, and lifestyle branding, often foregrounding women’s participation in shaping these economies through fan labor and image management. Through textual and discourse analysis of artists’ songs, music videos, interviews, social media usage, promotional campaigns, marketing strategies, and business decisions, Extending Play investigates how female musicians co-create branded feminine-coded products like perfume, clothes, makeup, and cookbooks and masculine-coded products like music equipment as resources to work through their own ideas about gender and femininity as workers in industries that often use sexism and ageism to diminish women’s creative authority and diminish the value of the recording in order to incentivize musicians to internalize the demands of industrial convergence.

By merging star studies, popular music studies, and media industry studies, this book proposes an integrated methodology for approaching contemporary cultural history that demonstrates how female-identified musicians have operated as both a hub for industrial convergence and as music industry professionals who use their extramusical skills to reassert their creative acumen.

Senior Acquisitions Editor, University of Texas Press
"The Ins & Outs of Academic Publishing"

Jim Burr is a Senior Acquisitions Editor at the University of Texas Press, who acquires books in Film and Media Studies, Classics, and Middle Eastern Studies. He did his undergraduate work at Michigan State University and graduate work at the University of Texas at Austin in Classics. He’s been at the Press since 1996.

PhD Candidate Practice Job Talk
"Beyond the Red Ink: Independent Production & Cultures of Finance in U.S.
Television"

Film and television financing often serves as the table setting or the political
economic “background” for media industry analyses on other topics. Meanwhile, media
economists present finance as a positivist science that can be understood via its inherent
economic attributes and industry structure. However, what if media financing is approached not
only as background or a purely economic phenomenon but also as a political, cultural, and
historically contingent practice? In other words, what does a cultural history of financing look like
for media industries? This dissertation project addresses this tension by tracing the historical
development of financing practices in the United States television industry from the early
network era in the 1940s to the advent of streaming in the 2010s.

To ground this project, I examine the practices of independent television producers (i.e., those
unaffiliated with a major studio or network) and ask how the hegemony of the major Hollywood
conglomerates and later Big Tech companies was not an “inevitable” economic outcome but a
product of human agency, management cultures, government intervention, and the broader
structuring tendencies of capitalism. This project integrates historical methods like archival
research and oral history with contemporary interviews with TV producers, investors,
executives, and strategists from studios, streamers, and independent firms. Ultimately, I find that
financing, particularly the common practice of “deficit financing,” became not only a material
practice but also a discursive tool used to advance the industrial lore and self-mythologizations
of particular stakeholders. Further, I argue that postwar antitrust sentiment, financial regulation,
and the business cultures of finance and media industries led television producers to act more
like investors overseeing a portfolio of assets and maximizing growth, rather than producers of
culture or even executives maximizing profitability. In this talk, I will discuss one case study and
one body chapter from my dissertation.

PhD Candidate Practice Job Talk