April 30, 2025

History of Media Studies Newsletter April 2025

History of Media Studies Newsletter April 2025

Welcome to the 49th 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 21

Wednesday, May 21, 14:00-15:00 UTC (10am-11am EDT)

Reading for discussion:

• Pete Simonson, Draft preface to Mariano Zarowsky, From the Chilean Laboratory to World-Communication: Armand Mattelart’s Intellectual Journey

We are excited to host Simonson (one of the group’s organizers), for a discussion about his draft preface to Mariano Zarowsky’s From the Chilean Laboratory to World-Communication: Armand Mattelart’s Intellectual Journey/Del laboratorio chileno a la comunicación mundo: Un itinerario intelectual de Armand Mattelart. Simonson’s preface will be published in the English-language edition, to be published this year open access by mediastudies.press. English- and Spanish-language versions of the preface are included in the download, and the session will feature simultaneous interpretation in English and Spanish.

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. Call for Abstracts: Media Literacy, Mis/Disinformation Research, and the Institute for Propaganda Analysis

• In 1937, a small group of scholars and philanthropists founded the Institute for Propaganda Analysis at the Columbia Teachers College, to combat what they saw as the grave threat to American democracy posed by propaganda. From 1937 to 1942, the IPA mounted a campaign to educate the American public (and students) on dishonest techniques used in rhetoric and became involved in the movement to develop anti-racist curricula for use in schools. The IPA’s trajectory provides a unique opportunity to examine historical parallels to these present-day developments and debates. We are particularly interested in exploring the history and political economy of media literacy efforts in different countries, comparative media perspectives on anti-racist education efforts, other examples of backlash against scholars and educators in these areas, and historical understandings of truth and manipulation in media and journalism.
• Deadline: 1 May 2025
• More details

2. Call for Papers: Harold Lasswell and the Return of Propaganda: The Centenary of Propaganda Technique in the World War**

• Among the important events related to propaganda research whose tradition re-emerged in these first three decades of the 20th century, one stands out as a turning point: the first doctoral thesis on the subject, defended by political scientist Harold Lasswell in 1926 at the University of Chicago, which also celebrates its centenary. Published the following year, Propaganda Technique in the World War became the pioneering landmark in academic studies on war propaganda and transformed its author into the most important American expert on the subject for many years. This Esferas dossier celebrates not only the centenary of Harold Lasswell's thesis but also the approaching centenary of propaganda studies, founded on the need to understand this product of the media and which, despite its multiple facets, continues to present itself as an urgent problem to be interpreted in contemporary times.
• Deadline: 15 December 2025
• More details

3. Call for Abstracts: History of the Humanities Focus Area at 2025 History of Knowledge Conference (Lund)

• The History of the Humanities is one of six focus areas in the newly published Call for Papers for the second international History of Knowledge Conference on 8–10 October, 2025, to be held at Lund University, Sweden. The conference is hosted by the Lund Centre for the History of Knowledge (LUCK). The History of Knowledge Conference aims to gather scholars from different backgrounds to continue to develop the field of history of knowledge and inspire international collaboration. Confirmed keynote speakers are Robert Darnton (Harvard) and Susanne Schmidt (Berlin).
• Conference dates: 8–10 October 2025
• Deadline: 1 May 2025
• More details

4. Call for Papers: Society for U.S. Intellectual History

• The 2025 S-USIH Annual Conference will be held in Detroit, Michigan, on November 6-8, 2025. This year’s theme invites papers about creativity and renewal; the crossing of borders—of race, gender, class, nationality, religion, and culture—and the hybridized forms that result; the ways in which art, music, and dance become vehicles for intellectual debate and resistance; the nexus of capital, labor, and technology in the modern era; the dreams and failures of mid-twentieth century liberalism and urban policy; and the intersection of religion and social justice. We invite submissions that respond to the conference theme, but also welcome proposals that deal with any other aspect of U.S. intellectual history, broadly defined.
• Conference dates: 6–8 November, 2025
• Deadline: 16 May 2025
• More details

3. The Journal

History of Media Studies 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. Averbeck-Lietz, Stefanie, Lisa Bolz, and Otávio Daros. "Historical Trajectories of Entanglement and Ignorance: German, French, and Brazilian Communication Studies in Dialogue." In Cosmopolitan Communication Studies: Toward Deep Internationalization, edited by Carola Richter, Melanie Radue, Christine Horz-Ishak, Anna Litvinenko, Hanan Badr, and Anke Fiedler, 27--52. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2025. https://www.transcript-verlag.de/978-3-8376-7677-8/cosmopolitan-communication-studies/.

   ABSTRACT: [first paragraph, in lieu of abstract] International research is one of the major buzzwords in career strategies and research projects, but this does not mean that communication studies have therefore become more "cosmopolitan" in a normative sense of openness for different or even unknown traditions. Various factors such as (mutual) ignorance and isolation can--in part--ex­plain dynamics that we observe today: when speaking about "international research," often only a certain type of international research is taken into consideration (i.e., com­parative project-based research relying on third-party funding). International career paths work well within the Western European and US-American spheres, but hardly beyond. We therefore suggest taking a close look at some of the results of international ignorance and isolation as well as at the lack of transnational academic crossings. This article is a first attempt to write the history of the field of communication studies from a cosmopolitan perspective, while the communities under analysis have been and remain more or less disconnected from each other.

2. Beringer, Guillaume. "L'industrie de la culture: La généalogie d'un concept et son contexte allemand (1831--1947)." PhD diss., Université de la Sorbonne nouvelle - Paris III, 2024. https://theses.hal.science/tel-04970086.

   ABSTRACT: Quand Theodor Adorno et Max Horkheimer, les premiers, utilisent le concept d'industrie de la culture (Kulturindustrie) en 1947 dans la Dialectique de la raison, ils soulignent l'écart entre les attentes enthousiastes suscitées par les Lumières et la désillusion qu'a fait naître le national-socialisme. Ce concept d'industrie de la culture n'est pas seulement le résultat d'observations méticuleuses d'événements contemporains, mais également d'un cheminement théorique que cette thèse propose de reconstituer. Après la mort de Goethe au début des années 1830, la culture est consommée par un public plus vaste (Heine). Elle sert alors des intérêts économiques dans la mesure où, sous forme de marchandise, elle intègre un marché (Marx). Ce phénomène est renforcé par la multiplication des transactions, conférant à l'argent le statut même de culture (Simmel), puisque cultivée pour sa seule propriété d'être valeur. Le marché ainsi rationalisé (Nietzsche, Weber), la production cherche à produire des objets qui composent une culture perçue comme source d'individualisation (Sombart, Simmel, Freud). Le cinéma sert de modèle idéalisé aux individus qui souhaitent s'émanciper par la culture (Balázs, Arnheim, Benjamin). Pourtant, nouvelle mythologie, cette culture aliène les individus (Lukács) et sert des intérêts non plus seulement économiques mais également politiques (Kracauer, Adorno, Horkheimer). Ainsi, nous analysons de quelle manière s'opère la transformation d'un public qui discutait la culture en un public qui la consomme. La culture rationalisée n'est plus objet de transcendance mais objet consommable et ainsi réifiée de manière à pouvoir être instrumentalisée à des fins politiques.

3. Briant, Emma L., and Marc Owen Jones. "A Century of Propaganda Studies: From Pen and Sword to Surveillant Smartphone." Critical Studies in Media Communication 42, no. 1 (2025): 64--68. https://doi.org/10.1080/15295036.2025.2464184.

   ABSTRACT: [first paragraph, in lieu of abstract] This forum in Critical Studies in Media Communication marks, what has been, arguably, a century since the birth of modern Propaganda Studies in the 1920s. The flurry of scholarship including Lippmann's Public Opinion (1922) and Edward Bernays' Propaganda (1928), was provoked by the rise of fascist and Stalinist propaganda in Europe when mass media was developing. It is sadly fitting that today's renewal of the discipline accompanies propaganda's service to resurgent authoritarianism. We thus envisioned this forum to consider what we have learned from this century of propaganda scholarshipand practice, and indeed what we still need to learn to challenge its authoritarian utility. Therefore we ask "whither Propaganda Studies?" as we hurtle into its digital future.

4. Comor, Edward A., ed. Harold Innis's Final Course. New York: Peter Lang, 2025. https://www.peterlang.com/document/1445448.

   ABSTRACT: In 1952, a terminally ill Harold Innis asked his closest intellectual confidant, Tom Easterbrook, to teach his signature course on communications on his behalf. With Innis's premature death, the course turned out to be both Innis's final course and the first course on Innis. Alongside Edward Comor's detailed Introduction, Easterbrook's previously unknown lectures clarify aspects of Innisian scholarship that have been obscured, neglected, or forgotten. These include Easterbrook's understanding that Innis applied his concept of bias more broadly than most realize, that through references to media Innis strategically sought to promote certain values, and that Innis had become increasingly interested in the role played by institutions such as language, law, and the nation. Given Easterbrook's intimate understanding of Innis's methodology and research trajectories, this book is a rich resource for anyone interested in Innis and the foundations of media ecology.

5. Edwards, Dustin, Zane Griffin Talley Cooper, and Mél Hogan. "The Making of Critical Data Center Studies." Convergence 31, no. 2 (2025): 429--46. https://doi.org/10.1177/13548565231224157.

   ABSTRACT: In this article, the authors demonstrate how the data center has become a key site, object, and metaphor for interdisciplinary scholarship of the internet. While the data center is a fabrication of engineering, computer science, and cognate fields, it has been the critical gaze of scholars outside of those industries. Together, this scholarship has established the field of Critical Data Center Studies. Critiques of the data center -- often thought of more generally as 'internet infrastructure', and more evocatively as 'the cloud' -- have emerged from the social sciences, humanities, journalism, and the arts. The authors do this by answering questions about the current social, cultural, political, and environmental landscapes of the data center. Scrutiny of the foundational imaginaries of the internet, real estate deals by Big Tech, the industry's enabling policies, their connections to energy and other public infrastructure -- among many other factors -- serves, at the very least, to situate the data center as a media object, as more than simply a material infrastructure, as more than data warehouse, and as more than 'the cloud'. Further to this, the authors reflect on how the data center has been and continues to be studied, and why critical interventions have been so fruitful within a vast array of disciplines -- from history and anthropology, to media studies, information studies, and science & technology studies -- for shifting the focus from questions of infrastructural visibility to questions that weave together concerns of efficiency, policy, popular culture, and planetary devastation.

6. McCarthy, Ella, and Will J Grant. "What Are We Talking about When We Are Talking about the Audience? Exploring the Concept of Audience in Science Communication Research and Education." Public Understanding of Science 34, no. 4 (2025): 408--23. https://doi.org/10.1177/09636625241280349.

   ABSTRACT: The concept of 'audience' is central to research and practice in science communication. When asked by a scientist for help communicating their work, who among us has not responded with the time honoured question 'who is your audience?' Yet what we mean when we talk about audience is not always clear: implied and ambiguous, rather than explicit and precise. This article explores this ambiguity, drawing on a systematic review of 1360 science communication research articles and a survey of 45 science communication educators. We report 10 different conceptualisations, in three groups. Being conceptualisations include 'Demographic', 'Knowledge', 'Values' and 'Embodied'; Doing conceptualisations include 'Interaction' and 'Dynamic'. In Qualifiers, we found 'Diverse', 'Potential', 'Plural' and 'General' conceptualisations. These data allow tracking of how we have conceptualised audience over time, an understanding of the groups systematically under-serviced, and a pathway to a richer discussion of this key concept for our field.

7. Nah, Seungahn, Jun Luo, Gülşah Akçakır, Xinlei Wu, Gwiwon Nam, and Seungbae Kim. "Revisiting Citizen Journalism Scholarship in the Web Era (1994-2023): Past, Present, and Prospect." Journalism 26, no. 5 (2025): 944--69. https://doi.org/10.1177/14648849241247972.

   ABSTRACT: The study revisits citizen journalism scholarship spanning 30 years of journal articles published in the fields of journalism, communication, media, technology studies, and beyond. Previous studies in this domain have endeavored to evaluate the landscape of citizen journalism research since the inception of the Internet and its associated web technologies in 1994. Nonetheless, it remains fully unexplored concerning the topology and knowledge network structure of citizen journalism scholarship. The study assesses the landscape of citizen journalism scholarship over the past 30 years by employing a variety of mixed methods, including topic modeling, bibliometric analysis, and manual content analysis. This study provides an exploratory examination of the realm of citizen journalism within the context of journalism and democracy and further discusses the past, present, and prospects for future directions of this field. The study aims to advance citizen journalism scholarship in terms of theory, research, practice, and policy implications with a focus on English language articles. While the study contributes to the existing body of knowledge on citizen journalism scholarship, it serves as a catalyst for continuous intellectual inquiry in an international and interdisciplinary environment.