Media Studies Colloquium

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.

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).