April 30, 2024

# History of Media Studies Newsletter April 2024

Welcome to the 38th edition of the History of Media Studies Newsletter. The monthly email, assembled by Dave Park, Jeff Pooley, and Pete Simonson, maintains a loose affiliation with the new History of Media Studies journal and the Working Group on the History of Media Studies. Please contact us with any questions, suggestions, or items.

1. Working Group on the History of Media Studies

Join us for the next remote session devoted to discussing working papers with authors. Hosted by the Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine (CHSTM). Open to anyone interested in the history of the media studies fields. Instructions to join are here.

Wednesday, May 15, 2024

Wednesday, May 15, 2024, 14:00-15:00 UTC (10:00 am to 11:00 am EDT)

Reading for discussion:

• Angus Burgin, Title TBAe

For the Zoom link and the reading download, visit the Working Group page. Instructions for joining the group are here. Questions? Contact us

2. Conferences, Calls & Announcements

If you have a call or announcement relevant to the history of media studies, please contact us.

1. CFP: The Making of the Humanities XI, Lund

• In 2024, the eleventh conference in this series on the history of the humanities will be hosted by the Lund Center for the History of Knowledge (LUCK), Lund University. The MoH conferences are organized by the Society for the History of the Humanities and bring together scholars and historians interested in the history of a wide variety of fields, including archaeology, art history, historiography, linguistics, literary studies, media studies, musicology, and philology, tracing these fields from their earliest developments to the modern day. We welcome panels and papers on any period or region. We are especially interested in work that transcends the history of specific humanities disciplines by comparing scholarly practices across disciplines and civilisations.
• Conference dates: 9–11 October, 2024
• Deadline: 1 May 2024
• More details

2. CFP: Langer, Creativity, and American Thought: A Conference on the Work and Influence of Susanne Langer

• The Susanne Langer Circle announces an interdisciplinary conference covering all aspects of the thought of Susanne Langer. The conference will be hosted by the American Institute of Philosophical and Cultural Thought (AIPCT), Murphysboro, IL, and by Southern Illinois University Carbondale (SIUC), June 24-28, 2024. The conference is sponsored by the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy and the Foundation for the Philosophy of Creativity, along with AIPCT and SIUC. The conference will include keynote addresses, an artistic experience, a virtual reality demonstration and experience, and a conference dinner. Most speakers will be presenting in a series of plenary sessions.
• Conference dates: 24–28 June 2024
• Deadline: 31 March 2024
• More details

3. Call for Submissions: 20th Anniversary Issue of The Journal of Community Informatics

• On October 1, 2004, the first issue of The Journal of Community Informatics was published. It has since remained a free and open access, double-blind peer review journal featuring academic research and practitioner contributions at the intersection of CI research, practice, and policy. As a way to celebrate the past 20 years of the journal, and to open up new avenues for participation, we invite original submissions in these traditional formats, as well as new formats including artistic works such as poetry, audio/video recordings, and visual artwork, on topics including the past, present, and future of community informatics; reflections from journal article authors about the impact of their contributions; and personal/professional reflections on CI as a field of research and practice.
• Deadline: 1 May 2024
• More details

3. The Journal

HMS encourages submissions (en español) on the history of research, education, and reflective knowledge about media and communication—as expressed through academic institutions; through commercial, governmental, and non-governmental organizations; and through “alter-traditions” of thought and practice often excluded from the academic mainstream.

4. New Publications

Works listed here are newly published, or new to the bibliography.

The History of Communication Research Bibliography is a project of the Annenberg School for Communication Library Archives (ASCLA) at the University of Pennsylvania.

1. "Remembering Professor Emeritus David Bordwell." Department of Communication Arts, University of Wisconsin-Madison, March 1, 2024. https://commarts.wisc.edu/2024/03/remembering-professor-emeritus-david-bordwell/.

   ABSTRACT: The Communication Arts community has lost one of its truly stellar figures. David Bordwell, the Jacques Ledoux Professor Emeritus of Film Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, died on February 29, 2024 at the age ….

2. Alkathiri, Essa Saleh, and Musaab Faleh Alharbi. "A Scoping Review of Arab Public Relations Scholarship." Public Relations Review 50, no. 2 (June 1, 2024): 102435. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pubrev.2024.102435.

   ABSTRACT: Arab public relations research (APRR) has reached many milestones since its inception; however, no study has investigated extant literature to map the trends and patterns within the subject area. As a result, this study aims to aggregate the landscape of APRR from 1979 to date. To achieve this, this current study adopts a multi-method approach of content analysis and text mining of 106 peer-reviewed APRR articles. Findings show an inconsistent trend of APRR. Findings also illustrate the status of APRR methods, analytical methods, media genres, media platforms, organizations, industries, most used words and dominant perspectives within the subject area. This study concludes that despite the irregularities in the progression, APRR is an emergent sub-area with the potential to gain prominence concerning interest and output.

3. Berry, David M., and James Stockman. "Schumacher in the Age of Generative AI: Towards a New Critique of Technology." European Journal of Social Theory, 2024, 13684310241234028. https://doi.org/10.1177/13684310241234028.

   ABSTRACT: This article sets out to bring E. F. Schumacher's social theory of technology into dialogue with recent advances in the field of generative artificial intelligence (AI). By generative AI, we are here referring to a new constellation of machine learning technologies that aim to simulate and, subsequently, automate human creativity, with a particular focus on OpenAI's GPT-3 family (ChatGPT and DALL-E). Often overlooked in contemporary debates on machine learning and AI, we argue that Schumacher's 1973 book, Small is Beautiful, offers a series of insights and concepts that are increasingly relevant for the development of a humanist politics under conditions of computation. With a particular focus on Schumacher's account of 'intermediate technology', we suggest that his emphasis on the social role of human creativity and identification of scale as a crucial concept to deploy in critiquing technology together provide a unique framework within which to (a) address the rise of what we call 'pathologies of meaning' and (b) offer a powerful way to consider alternatives to the gigantisms of the FAANG (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Google) and Silicon Valley-style ideologies of digital transformation.

4. Breen, Benjamin. "Tripping on LSD at the Dolphin Research Lab." Chronicle of Higher Education, February 27, 2024. https://www.chronicle.com/article/tripping-on-lsd-at-the-dolphin-research-lab.

   ABSTRACT: How a 1960s interspecies-communication experiment went haywire.

5. Couldry, Nick. "Hermeneutics for an Anti-Hermeneutic Age: What the Legacy of Jesús Martín-Barbero Means Today." Media, Culture & Society 46, no. 3 (2024): 659--67. https://doi.org/10.1177/01634437231217176.

   ABSTRACT: This article, after discussing the obstacles to the initial reception of Martín-Barbero's work on mediation in Europe, analyses its importance to contemporary media research in terms of three factors: mediation, inequality and complexity. Far from being less relevant today, those insights, and Martín-Barbero's overall insistence on a hermeneutic approach to understanding culture are of huge relevant today in an age when the automation of cultural production and data extraction is characterized by an anti-hermeneutic drive.

6. Huebner, Daniel R. "Language as Social Action: Gertrude Buck, the 'Michigan School' of Rhetoric, and Pragmatist Philosophy." Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 60, no. 2 (2024): e22307. https://doi.org/10.1002/jhbs.22307.

   ABSTRACT: In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Gertrude Buck and collaborators developed a sociologically and pragmatist-informed approach to language that has been neglected in later scholarship. Buck approached the study of language from the standpoint of pragmatist functional psychology, which is indebted to John Dewey's pragmatism at the University of Michigan, and which views language as a normal, dynamic action of human organisms engaged in necessary cooperative relations with one another. Her approach overcomes the small-minded pragmatism that would criticize figurative or poetic language as impractical, and instead shows how figuration is essential to the particular ways in which language is action that conveys meaning to others and serves broader social functions. Buck's forgotten work helps overcome criticisms of the application of pragmatic action theory to language and literature, sketching how language structure may be explained on the basis of language as a natural social-communicative act, how figurative language is inherent in the normal act of communicating situated bodily experiences to others, and how rhetorical speech and writing contributes to participation in democratic social processes. This paper also indicates how Buck's work has been partially rediscovered in Composition Studies, as well as prefigures later reader-response esthetics and feminist analyses of language.

7. Marroquín Parducci, Amparo. "The Possibilities Jesús Martín-Barbero Left for Us to Understand Latin America." Media, Culture & Society 46, no. 3 (2024): 641--47. https://doi.org/10.1177/01634437231217161.

   ABSTRACT: This essay analyzes the Ph.D dissertation of Jesús Martín-Barbero, written in 1972 in Louvain, Belgium. Equipped with Paul Ricoeur's explorations on how a text is constructed and Paulo Freire's insistence on the emancipatory nature of the communicative action, Martín-Barbero centered his scholarship on the urgency to study and understand Latin American popular cultures. Martín-Barbero's dissertation centers the great problem of academic analysis on language as the subject that acts in the world. To explore the connection of language and action, Martín-Barbero proposes three historically situated language devices that allow individuals to position themselves and move toward praxis: myth, prophecy, and poetry.

8. Morris III, Charles E. "Anniversary Memories, a Lost Critic, and Queer Future Multitudes of Critical/Cultural Studies." Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 21, no. 1 (2024): 29--35. https://doi.org/10.1080/14791420.2024.2304260.

   ABSTRACT: This essay remembers Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies' (CC/CS's) queer engagement with the discipline. Its anniversary also conjures memories of queer critical/cultural scholar Daniel Brouwer, tragically lost in 2021. These intersecting memories amplify the archive of LGBTQ critical/cultural studies as resource for queer multitudes in the field to come, where traces of past and future imaginings might mobilize across and between generations of queer critics.

9. Nakayama, Thomas K. "Articulating Whiteness." Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 21, no. 1 (2024): 67--71. https://doi.org/10.1080/14791420.2024.2304263.

   ABSTRACT: In almost three decades of work on whiteness in communication studies, it has developed in a number of different directions. In contemporary cultural politics, whiteness has transformed into an even more powerful discursive force in society. This piece reflects on the history of the journal, Communication and Critical Cultural Studies, and argues that one of its legacies, articulation theory, offers a particularly productive approach for the further development of whiteness studies.

10. Ojala, Markus, and Leena Ripatti-Torniainen. "Where Is the Public of 'Networked Publics'? A Critical Analysis of the Theoretical Limitations of Online Publics Research." European Journal of Communication 39, no. 2 (2024): 145--60. https://doi.org/10.1177/02673231231210207.

    ABSTRACT: The study of online media use has been elemental in shaping the research on publics within communication and media studies in the last few decades. This article takes a critical view of this research by asking to what extent it has been informed by the long history of theoretical work on the concept of the public. Reviewing the literature on 'networked publics' as an illustrative example, we demonstrate how the lack of public-theoretical engagement creates both conceptual and empirical limitations to the study of online publics. We also indicate how the sociological, political theory and cultural studies traditions on the concept of the public can contribute to widening the perspectives of online publics research within communication and media studies.

11. Oliver, Mary Beth, Homero Gil de Zúñiga, and Tamara D Afifi. "Reflecting on 50 Years of Theory in Human Communication Research: Where Do We Go from Here." Human Communication Research 50, no. 2 (2024): 143--45. https://doi.org/10.1093/hcr/hqae003.

    ABSTRACT: This essay is an introduction to the special issue on "Rethinking and Expanding Communication Theories on HCR's 50th Anniversary." We begin by arguing that communication research has expanded substantially since Human Communication Research's inaugural issue. However, in light of changes in communication technologies, political discourse, means of engaging in interpersonal communication, and awareness of the importance of diversity and inclusion, this special issue takes note of our current theorizing and ways to build as we look toward the future. The essays in this special issue, reviewed in this article, will undoubtedly prompt us to re-think, re-envision, and renew our commitment to the importance of communication theory, both in terms of where we have been and in terms of where we can progress.

12. Quandt, Thorsten. "Euphoria, Disillusionment and Fear: Twenty-Five Years of Digital Journalism (Research)." Journalism 25, no. 5 (2024): 1186--1203. https://doi.org/10.1177/14648849231192789.

    ABSTRACT: Digital journalism and its research have evolved significantly over the last twenty-five years. When the first online media were installed on an experimental basis in the mid-1990s, neither media companies nor scientific observers expected them to transform the way journalism operates. However, very soon after these humble beginnings, a seemingly infectious euphoria spread among journalism scholars who hoped to rejuvenate journalism and democracy with the help of user participation and a resulting "dialogue with the audience." Still, many of these promises remained unfulfilled, and this led to considerable disenchantment of academics with online media and user participation during the second decade of the 2000s. Indeed, current journalism scholars exhibit a preoccupation with fears of disinformation and forms of "dark" participation. This essay analyzes the process of co-evolution in digital journalism and academia from the personal perspective of a European scholar. Four broad empirical phases are discussed: (1) niche, (2) euphoria, (3) disillusionment, and (4) doom and gloom. Using this typology, a fifth phase will be suggested to extend the current state of the field.

13. Rincón, Omar. "Martín-Barbero's Style." Media, Culture & Society 46, no. 3 (2024): 632--40. https://doi.org/10.1177/01634437231217167.

    ABSTRACT: In Latin America, Jesús Martín-Barbero is a pop star and a beloved scholar with thousands of followers captured by his original way of thinking, imagining, and researching the relations between communication, culture, and politics. This essay explains five characteristics of Martín-Barbero's style: (i) his reflections about expressions of popular and mass culture such as music, telenovelas, fairs, and celebrations; (ii) his gaze at and from local territories, identities; (iii) his innovative way of thinking from the Global South while in conversation with Western philosophy; (iv) his proposal for a theory of mediations as a way to understand cultural interactions and the production of social meaning; and (v) an intellectual passion that led him to engage daringly in political issues in society. As one of his students and colleagues, the essay ends with my own notions of what a communication researcher should do/be.

14. Rodríguez, Clemencia, and Patrick Murphy. "Roots and Trajectories: Essays on the Legacy of Jesús Martín-Barbero in Global Communication Studies." Media, Culture & Society 46, no. 3 (2024): 624--31. https://doi.org/10.1177/01634437231215700.

    ABSTRACT: "Roots and Trajectories: Essays on the Legacy of Jesús Martín-Barbero in Global Communication Studies" is an introduction to this special collection for Media, Culture & Society's Crosscurrents. Our introduction serves to contextualize and frame the role of Martín-Barbero's theoretical roots and epistemological gaze in the essays authored by Omar Rincón (Colombia), Amparo Marroquín Parducci (El Salvador), Marwan Kraidy (Lebanon) and Nick Couldry (United Kingdom). This introduction positions Martín-Barbero's work as strong evidence of Latin America's own epistemological and theoretical formation, as we remind our colleagues in the Global North of the need to dialogue with the South in an effort to de-Westernizing communication theory.

15. Shome, Raka. "Whither Cultural Studies in (US) Communication Studies? The Problem of Parochialism." Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 21, no. 1 (2024): 59--66. https://doi.org/10.1080/14791420.2024.2315426.

    ABSTRACT: This article critiques the US/UK centrism in cultural studies work in our field and the larger US academy. It addresses the limits of concepts in Cultural Studies that are popular in the Communication discipline when they are taken to the Global South and the Postcolonial Non-West. The article is an invitation to scholars to actively de-parochialize their research and teaching in light of dispossessions in the Global South.

16. Shue, Carolyn Karmon, Laura L S O'Hara, and Glen Stamp. "Fifty-Years of Theory-Driven Research in HCR: Prominence, Progress, and Opportunities." Human Communication Research 50, no. 2 (2024): 146--53. https://doi.org/10.1093/hcr/hqad045.

    ABSTRACT: We reviewed Human Communication Research (HCR) articles that included named theories in the: (a) abstract, (b) keywords, or (c) section headers to determine theory trends, identifying 592 instances of named theories in 447 articles. We conducted a follow-up analysis of 76 articles to illustrate how HCR researchers have contributed to theory development. Our review demonstrated systematic growth in theory use; the number of named theories in our sample doubled from the first 10 years to the last. There remains the propensity for theory shopping in the discipline with over 50% of theories in each decade cited only once. We also analyzed theory development strategies. There was evidence of theorizing that: (a) extended the range of theories and (b) explored effects. There was less theory synthesis that might provide frameworks for organizing related but distinct theories. We concluded by offering recommendations for how researchers can contribute to future theoretical development.

17. Walter, Dror, and Yotam Ophir. "Meta-Theorizing Framing in Communication Research (1992--2022): Toward Academic Silos or Professionalized Specialization?" Journal of Communication 74, no. 2 (2024): 101--16. https://doi.org/10.1093/joc/jqad043.

    ABSTRACT: Framing, a prominent communication theory, is often lamented as a fractured paradigm, leading some to offer radical changes to its conceptualization, operationalization, and application. Using a meta-theoretical and computational approach, we analyze three decades of framing research to examine academic silos, specializations, the canon's formation, gender inequalities, authors' origins, countries studied, and methods used in framing research. Instead of silos, our analysis of 5,291 papers and over 170,000 citations identified specializations formed around a core of canonic texts. While framing research has become more diverse over the years, males affiliated with U.S. institutions still predominately author canonical works. Results reject the isolated-silos hypothesis in favor of a view of framing as a bridging networked paradigm, coalescing around core assumptions, definitions, and approaches. These findings contrast with the common fractured-paradigm narrative and challenge calls for radical solutions.

18. Williams, Andrew. "Herbert Schiller: Media Scholar and Critic of American Empire." Unique at Penn, December 20, 2023. https://uniqueatpenn.wordpress.com/2023/12/20/herbert-schiller-critic-of-communication-and-american-empire/.

    ABSTRACT: [first paragraph, in lieu of abstract] Herbert Schiller (1919-2000) was an American media critic and political economist who studied the systematic connections between mass media, technology, U.S. information policy, and corporate interests. His work placed communication at the center of understanding the expansion of American political, economic, and cultural influence across the globe, and he examined the ways in which the government and corporations use media messages and technology to protect and expand their positions of power. While he eschewed ideological labels like "Marxism" and "materialism," fellow communication scholar, George Gerbner, argued that Schiller "believed that the cultural 'superstructure' is as least as important in a media-dominated society as the 'material' structure of class and production roles." Schiller was also a political activist and public intellectual. He worked pseudonymously as a radical journalist during the McCarthy era and continued to write for political journals throughout his career. He often collaborated with activist groups, such as the non-profit video collective Paper Tiger Television, and participated in conferences and talks around the world to teach about the pervasiveness of the information industry in daily life. Schiller's writing style and lectures were happily accessible, and his work was often published internationally in translation. In a globalized world where media and commercial interests continue to permeate through all areas of modern life, Schiller's work remains presciently relevant and a font of inspiration to today's communication scholars and students.

19. Yambor, Marjorie, Paul Blankenmeister, Cynthia M. King, James W. Brown, and Lawrence Mullen ). "Remembering Paul Martin Lester, Ph.D. (1953--2023)." Visual Communication Quarterly 31, no. 1 (2024): 3--12. https://doi.org/10.1080/15551393.2024.2303304.

    ABSTRACT: [first paragraph, in lieu of abstract] This remembrance of Paul Martin Lester is a compilation of five personal stories from Marjorie Yambor, associate professor at Dalton State College; Paul Blankenmeister, photographer and business executive, retired; Cynthia King, professor at Cal State, Fullerton; James W. Brown, professor emeritus, Indiana University; and me (Larry Mullen). Each of us knew Paul at different times and in different ways. The thing that is common among us is that we all knew Paul, and we all spent four days with him and his family in a rented house in McKinney, Texas, just outside Dallas. Marjorie, Cynthia, and I stayed at the house, which is on the National Register of Historic Places--definitely a funky-cool kind of place, indicative of Paul's style. Paul B. and Jim came by daily.