January 31, 2025

History of Media Studies Newsletter January 2025

History of Media Studies Newsletter January 2025

Welcome to the 46th 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, March 19

Wednesday, March 19, 14:00-15:00 UTC (10am-11am EDT)

Reading for discussion:

• Florencia Soria, TBA

with simultaneous English/Spanish interpretation

For the Zoom link and the reading download (when available), 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: Society for the History of Recent Social Science (HISRESS)

• This two-day conference of the Society for the History of Recent Social Science (HISRESS), at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands, will bring together researchers working on the history of post-World War II social science. It will provide a forum for the latest research on the cross-disciplinary history of the post-war social sciences, including but not limited to anthropology, economics, psychology, political science, and sociology as well as related fields like area studies, communication studies, design, history, international relations, law, linguistics, and urban studies. The conference, hosted by the Department of European Studies at the University of Amsterdam, aims to build upon the recent emergence of work and conversation on cross-disciplinary themes in the postwar history of the social sciences.
• Conference dates: 6-7 June 2025
• Deadline: 3 February 2025
• More details

2. History of the Human Sciences Early Career Prize 2024–25

• History of the Human Sciences – the international journal of peer-reviewed research, which provides the leading forum for work in the social sciences, humanities, human psychology and biology that reflexively examines its own historical origins and interdisciplinary influences – is delighted to announce details of its annual prize for early career scholars. The intention of the annual award is to recognise a researcher whose work best represents the journal’s aim to critically examine traditional assumptions and preoccupations about human beings, their societies and their histories in light of developments that cut across disciplinary boundaries. In the pursuit of these goals, History of the Human Sciences publishes traditional humanistic studies as well work in the social sciences, including the fields of sociology, psychology, political science, the history and philosophy of science, anthropology, classical studies, and literary theory. Scholars working in any of these fields are encouraged to apply.
• Deadline: 28 March 2025
• More details

3. Call for Abstracts: European Communication Research: What, Whence, and Whither?

• In its 50th year, Communications: The European Journal of Communication Research invites to reconsider what European communication research is – and what it can be. From its start in 1975, the journal’s mission has been to serve as a forum for scholarship and academic debate in the field of communication science and research from a European perspective. But what is in fact a European perspective? The jubilee conference invites us to rethink what constitutes European communication research. The conference offers a moment to rethink what a European perspective could mean for scholarship and what kind of Europe is in fact evoked here. The conference is open to theoretical and empirical approaches. It invites emerging and junior scholars as well as senior faculty to contemplate the peculiar character of European communication research.
• Conference dates: 29–30 September 2025
• Deadline: 15 April 2025
• More details

4. 2025 Three Societies Meeting

• ESHHS (the European Society for the History of the Human Sciences), CHEIRON (the International Society for the History of the Social and Behavioral Sciences) & SHP (the Society for the History of Psychology) invite submissions for papers, posters and symposia for their first “Three Societies Meeting” to take place in Paris, France from July 1st–July 5th, 2025, hosted by the American University of Paris. This year’s featured theme will be Environments, Milieux and Places in the History of the Human, Behavioral and Social Sciences and we particularly encourage submissions related to any particular aspect of this theme.
• Conference dates: 1 July to 5 July 2025
• Deadline: 25 February 2025
• 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. Anderson, Christopher W. "Between the Center and the Margins: Todd Gitlin and the Politics of Communication." Sociologica 18, no. 3 (2024): 57--69. https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.1971-8853/20699.

   ABSTRACT: What role does the media play in shaping public life, in guiding the practices of democracy, and in maintaining or disrupting the capitalist economic system? How does the media interact with both social movements (groups of people dedicated to changing one or all of these macrosystems) and public intellectuals (people dedicated to thinking about these systems)? How do all three groups relate to each other? And when one group changes -- when there are alterations in the structures and practices of the media, intellectuals, or social movements -- how do the others change alongside them? These questions and others like them preoccupied American sociologist and communications theorist Todd Gitlin, and through an examination of both Gitlin's career and his intellectual trajectory we can see some of the answers he provided: both the ways he rose to the challenge of understanding the sociology of late 20th century media, and the ways in which he fell short.

2. Ayres, John D. "The C. A. Lejeune Archive: Film Criticism for The Observer, The Sketch and Britain To-Day." Journal of British Cinema and Television 22, no. 1 (2025): 76--97. https://doi.org/10.3366/jbctv.2025.0752.

   ABSTRACT: This article considers the means and styles with which film critic Caroline A. Lejeune (1897--1973) wrote for a multiplicity of journalistic outlets. Via reference to a newly acquired collection of her papers at the John Rylands Research Institute and Library, it examines how Lejeune reviewed selected films for The Observer newspaper, the illustrated society magazine The Sketch and the British Council propaganda periodical Britain To-day. Responding to the content of this archival holding, the article will pay specific attention to a series of reviews written for films such as Moulin Rouge, The Story of Gilbert and Sullivan and The Titfield Thunderbolt, and well as considering the academic and socio-political implications of examining and writing about content drawn from a 'woman's archive'.

3. Barrowman, Kyle. "Contesting Feminism: Pedagogical Problems in Classical Hollywood Cinema, Feminist Theory, and Media Studies." Feminist Media Studies 25, no. 1 (2025): 201--15. https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2023.2268305.

   ABSTRACT: In this essay, I explore the pasts and futures of teaching and researching classical Hollywood cinema in feminist media studies. After outlining some of the problems associated with Laura Mulvey's influential work on the male gaze, I consider subsequent feminist responses to Mulvey's work. In particular, I focus on the attempts by post-Mulvey feminist film scholars to reject in their critical practice Mulvey's conclusion that classical Hollywood cinema is anathema to feminist progress vis-à-vis media representations of women while accepting the theoretical premise that classical Hollywood cinema is inherently misogynistic and patriarchally corrupt at its core. On this point, I discuss the controversial clashes between male and female scholars over this disjunction between theory and criticism. With reference to the films of Otto Preminger, I demonstrate the probative value of an inclusive feminist media studies praxis in which, on the one hand, theory informs rather than distorts criticism, and, on the other hand, male and female scholars are able to assess the contributions--past, present, and future--of men to the project of feminism.

4. Hatfield, Haley R, Hongtao Hao, Matthew Klein, Jing Zhang, Yijie Fu, Jaemin Kim, Jongmin Lee, and Sun Joo (Grace) Ahn. "Addressing Whiteness in Communication Scholar Composition and Collaboration across Seven Decades of ICA Journals (1951--2022)." Journal of Communication 74, no. 6 (2024): 451--65. https://doi.org/10.1093/joc/jqae019.

   ABSTRACT: The persisting legacies of colonialism have called for scholars to be more active in their efforts to dismantle and decenter the normative foundations of Whiteness in scholarly practices. This article examines the intersectional structures of authorship and collaboration patterns among scholarly teams within five flagship Communication journals. We used a bibliometric analysis to examine the race, gender, institution, and institution type of 11,292 authors from five International Communication Association journals between 1951 and 2022. We found that the dominating representation of white, male, and U.S.-based scholars is decreasing, but stark disparities within the composition of and collaborations among Communication scholars still remain. We offer insights into how these patterns reproduce structural inequities and propose future directions for scholars to support and participate in the ongoing work to dismantle and decenter Whiteness in academia. All data, code, and analyses are available at https://osf.io/8bszj/.

5. Herrero, Esperanza. "The Women Who Proposed Two-Step Flow: A Gendered Revisit to the Intellectual History of a Mass Communication Theory." International Journal of Communication 19 (January 6, 2025): 20. https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/23134.

   ABSTRACT: Women were a key component of the research teams that worked on the first proposal of the two-step flow theory in the Bureau of Applied Social Research (Columbia University) in the 1940s and 1950s. However, in a perfect stance of historiographical epistemic injustice, they disappeared from the history of the field. Through archival analysis and critical-hermeneutic approaches, we recover the contributions of female researchers to the Erie County and Decatur projects, published as The People's Choice and Personal Influence, respectively. These are the 2 projects that first proposed the two-step flow theory. In particular, we recover female contributions to both the fieldwork and theoretical debates. Ultimately, we analyze their work from a gender-informed perspective. To conclude, we argue that reinscribing women into the foundational narratives of communication research is a step toward a fairer, more pluralistic, and less individualistic comprehension of the historiography of the field.

6. Jaggi, Ruchi Kher. "Critical Reflections on Children and Media Research in India." Journal of Children and Media 19, no. 1 (2025): 32--38. https://doi.org/10.1080/17482798.2024.2435005.

   ABSTRACT: [first paragraph, in lieu of abstract] It was more than a decade ago that I presented one of my earlier research studies on media and children at a conference in India. I recall some comments from a fellow colleague to reorient my research journey to a more serious topic. It is important to note that this comment was made at an academic congregation in a country with the highest number of children between 0 and 14 years of age in the world. While some progress has been made, children and media (CAM) researchers focused on India continue to seek greater attention from the academic community, institutions, and policymakers alike.

7. Katz, Vikki, Fashina Aladé, and Bradley J. Bond. "Journal of Children and Media Comes of Age: An Introduction to the Special Section." Journal of Children and Media 19, no. 1 (2025): 1--5. https://doi.org/10.1080/17482798.2024.2439666.

   ABSTRACT: [first paragraph, in lieu of abstract] Milestone birthdays are a time for reflection. They offer a chance to look back and take stock of how far one has come. They also offer the opportunity to look forward to what the future might bring. Reaching the age of majority -- the age at which one is no longer defined as a child -- is an especially important milestone from developmental, symbolic, and legal perspectives. As the Journal of Children and Media (JOCAM) turns 18, which is the legal age of majority in most of the world, we decided to celebrate as a community by collectively examining what it means to reach this special age. When Dafna Lemish founded JOCAM, children, adolescents, and media (CAM) research was in its early stages of development as a distinctive field of study. Dafna's vision was to give CAM scholarship a "shared space," as she phrased it in that very first issue (Lemish, Citation2007, p. 2). The establishment of JOCAM in 2007 and the Children, Adolescents, and Media Division of the International Communication Association in 2011 gave CAM scholars that much-needed, self-defined space to grow and thrive. Over the last 18 years, CAM researchers have developed a shared identity, theoretical and methodological independence from other subfields of communication and media studies, and rich intellectual conversations that are all our own within the pages of this journal.

8. Lemish, Dafna. "Evolution or Revolution? Reflecting on What JOCAM at 18 Reveals about Our Field." Journal of Children and Media 19, no. 1 (2025): 102--6. https://doi.org/10.1080/17482798.2024.2438669.

   ABSTRACT: [first paragraph, in lieu of abstract] In the tradition of Jewish numerology (i.e., gematria, assigning numbers to letters), 18 means "alive" ("Chai"). At 18, JOCAM is, indeed, very much alive and well. As is typical on such special milestones, I went back to reflect on the inception of the idea that brought us to this day, and to assess the aims and ideas stated in my editorial in the first issue of JOCAM, published in 2007. Now, in 2024, I am struck by how so much of the vision I laid out 18 years ago remains relevant and timely.

9. Mosco, Vincent. Critical Communication: A Memoir. London: University of Westminster Press, 2025. https://doi.org/10.16997/book76.

   ABSTRACT: This memoir, completed just before Vincent Mosco's sudden death in February 2024, chronicles the last half century of research, activism and teaching in critical communication, technology and society from the perspective of one of its pioneering figures. It concentrates on the making of a radical activist scholar, the creation of a critical communication research field, the growth of a critical political economy of media and the concomitant expansion of critical approaches to media and computer technology, to communication labour and to public policy and media activism. This beautifully written and deeply personal book is an informative and fascinating read that will be of interest to anyone interested in Critical Media and Communication Studies and the Political Economy of Communication.

10. Niranjana, Tejaswini. "Engaging with Culture and Modernity: Cultural Studies in India." Critical Studies in Media Communication 41, no. 5 (2024): 510--18. https://doi.org/10.1080/15295036.2024.2422999.

    ABSTRACT: This paper discusses two examples of how Cultural Studies in India has assembled research domains around the terms culture and modernity, which have grown out of the debates in colonial society between colonizer and colonized. In my first example, "Indian culture" traveled overseas, to the Caribbean, through indentured laborers who created a form of subaltern diasporic modernity; however, that notion of culture was used to eliminate subaltern women from the normative frames of an Indian modernity taking shape in India. In my second example, "Indian culture" was involved in the creation of a national-modern subject. The creation happened through a process in which modernity was disavowed in the name of "our" distinctive culture even as that culture was propagated through modern institutions. These two examples, taken together, indicate the centrality of "culture" and "modernity" to the conceptual-political field of Cultural Studies in India.

11. Paterson, Richard. "The BFI, Cultural Diversity and Its Faltering Response to Social and Epistemic Injustice." Journal of British Cinema and Television 22, no. 1 (2025): 98--117. https://doi.org/10.3366/jbctv.2025.0753.

    ABSTRACT: Over its history the BFI since its foundation in 1933 has regularly had to contend with changes in culture and in relation to issues of diversity, from the language used in cataloguing films in its archive to the funding of films which reflect Britain's evolving population and demography. This article traces that history through the lens of institutional thinking and describes repeated initiatives to address perceived epistemic injustices in Britain, how these factors influenced and influence the treatment of issues relating to ethnicity, sexuality and disability, and how these have been affected by the organisation's changing leadership and governance.

12. Shome, Raka, and Lawrence Grossberg. "Between Parochialism and Planetary in Cultural Studies: An Interview with Lawrence Grossberg." Critical Studies in Media Communication 41, no. 5 (2024): 519--36. https://doi.org/10.1080/15295036.2024.2418921.

    ABSTRACT: This interview with one of the leading scholars of cultural studies, Lawrence Grossberg, conducted by Raka Shome addresses, once again, what cultural studies is (given that it continues to be misunderstood), its methods of working, the parochialism of cultural studies in the US academy, the challenges that confront it, and planetarity.

13. Shome, Raka. "Cultural Studies, What Is It (and Is Not): Once More with Feeling." Critical Studies in Media Communication 41, no. 5 (2024): 490--99. https://doi.org/10.1080/15295036.2024.2417985.

    ABSTRACT: This essay emerges from a recognition that Cultural Studies in the field of Communication (and beyond) continues to be misrecognized and mis-used. This essay thus re-engages the question of what exactly is cultural studies and why it is important not to misrecognize it and dilute it of its critical potential. Addressing Cultural Studies' parochialism, its circulation in non western parts of the world and its specific commitments, this essay hopes to invite the readers to re-cognize what cultural studies is, so that it is not used loosely for any form of cultural criticism.

14. Sullivan, Daniel. "Kracauer and Tarkovsky's Cinema of Redemptive Estrangement." Film-Philosophy 29, no. 1 (2025): 46--71. https://doi.org/10.3366/film.2025.0292.

    ABSTRACT: Despite striking parallels between their philosophies and artistic work, there have been no prior dedicated studies of the reinforcing ideas of Siegfried Kracauer and Andrei Tarkovsky. I contend wi...

15. Xu, Shan, Kulsawasd Jitkajornwanich, Prabu David, Hye-jung Park, Yani Zhao, Jeffery Adu, and Thanathip Chumthong. "A Longitudinal Examination of Collaboration Diversity among Communication Scholars: 1990--2023." Journal of Communication 74, no. 6 (2024): 466--80. https://doi.org/10.1093/joc/jqae037.

    ABSTRACT: This study examines racial diversity in co-authorship in articles published in communication journals and its association with citations accrued over time. We analyzed 76,217 publications from 73 communication journals, spanning from 1990 to 2023, with a focus on racial diversity in authorship as an indicator of collaboration diversity. Our results reveal that diversity is positively associated with the number of citations received, with this positive effect increasing over time. In addition, non-White lead authors collaborated more diversely, whereas White authors exhibited a faster increase in collaboration diversity over the years. Furthermore, the positive association between collaboration diversity and citations was more pronounced when the lead author was non-White than when White. Additional analyses show a concerning disparity: While non-White first authors are equally likely as their White counterparts to publish in top journals, they receive significantly fewer citations.