October 31, 2024

History of Media Studies Newsletter October 2024

History of Media Studies Newsletter October 2024

Welcome to the 43rd 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, November 20

Wednesday, November 20, 15:00-16:00 UTC (10am-11am EST)

Reading for discussion:

• Anna Shechtman, “From Text to Media” (draft chapter)

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: “A Century of Propaganda Studies: From Pen and Sword to Surveillant Smartphone” Forum

• This Critical Studies in Media Communication Forum marks what has been, arguably, a century since the birth of modern Propaganda Studies: the flurry of scholarship that followed as a reaction to the rise of fascist and Stalinist propaganda use in Europe at a time of developing mass media. Propaganda Studies has evolved from a field dominated by white, Anglo-American and male scholars of security producing its dominant perspectives, toward one that is growing increasingly diverse in its scholars, ideas, and focus – and in terms of region, positionality and epistemology. We thus envisioned this CSMC Forum to consider what we have learned from this century of propaganda’s scholarship and practice, and indeed what we still need to learn. This Forum therefore asks ‘whither Propaganda Studies?’ as we hurtle toward its future.
• Deadline: 13 December 2024
• More details

2. CFP: Histories, Presents and Futures of Media and Communication

• In 1975 the first undergraduate Media degree in the UK was launched at the Polytechnic of Central London, now the University of Westminster. To celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of this foundational moment, Westminster’s Communication and Media Research Institute (CAMRI) invites proposals for presentations at a two-day conference in central London on 22 and 23 May 2025. We invite papers and panels that reflect upon aspects of the histories, presents, or futures of the field of Media and Communication. What lessons can we learn from the emergence, shaping and development of this field? Where are we now and how do we matter? And how can we respond as a field to those future challenges—political, social, cultural, environmental, technological—that we can anticipate?
• Conference dates: 29 November 2024
• Deadline: 22-23 May 2025
• More details

3. 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

4. Four-session oral history of Oscar Gandy posted (video and transcripts)

• The Annenberg School for Communication Library Archives (ASCLA) has posted a four-session oral history of Oscar H. Gandy, Jr. (1944–), an influential political economist of communication. Gandy has made significant contributions to the study of privacy, data brokerage, public relations, framing, and the representation of risk. He is the author of four books, including The Panoptic Sort: A Political Economy of Personal Information (1993), a widely celebrated work that—among other things—anticipated Silicon Valley’s business model of surveillance capitalism. The oral history sessions include video recordings synced to transcripts, in addition to PDF transcript downloads.
• More details

3. The Journal

History of Media Studies

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. Corduwener, Pepijn. "A Historical Turn in the Study of Media Governance: A Research Agenda for Europe in Times of Democratic Crisis." Media, Culture & Society 46, no. 7 (2024): 1515--26. https://doi.org/10.1177/01634437241254737.

   ABSTRACT: The liberalization of the media stands very much at the forefront in public, policy and academic concerns on how our current model of media governance affects democracy. But the discussion on the effects of media liberalization has obscured the vital question why liberalization was able to become the dominant media governance paradigm in the first place. This research note makes the case for a historical turn to answer this question. It argues that it is essential to contextualize media liberalization in the history of contemporary democracy in Europe rather than see it primarily through the perspective of technological innovation or top-down promotion of neo-liberal policies. It explores how three insights in historiography might form the core of a research agenda for media governance that takes history seriously. These include (a) the study of actors from below that pushed for reform outside the realm of government; (b) the influence of ideas on shaping institutional reform and (c) reading history forward rather than project today's assumptions and outcomes into the past. Jointly, this historical turn will not only provide an enhanced understanding of how past reforms shaped the present, but also enlighten prospects for future changes of media governance paradigms.

2. Lawer, Maryann Erigha. "Black Girlhood Media Studies: Bridging Multidisciplinary Approaches from Old to New Media." Critical Studies in Media Communication 41, no. 3 (2024): 179--93. https://doi.org/10.1080/15295036.2024.2387117.

   ABSTRACT: Black girlhood media studies provides a space to connect multidisciplinary research across the fields of African American and African Diaspora studies, media studies, gender studies, and communications. With a focus on film, television, and digital media, this essay highlights common themes and approaches of existing scholarship on Black girlhood in media to further understand and contemplate Black girlhood as a media genre. Key themes in prior literature include: adultification and lack of innocence, stereotypes, racial politics, digital media artifacts, and audience perceptions. The essay concludes with suggestions for ways scholars, producers, and consumers can further engage collective cultural representations and varied contexts to build a robust field of Black girlhood media studies.

3. Newsinger, Jack, Helen Kennedy, and Rowan Aust. "Is Television Reformable? The 'Reformist Tendency' in Inequality Research in the Cultural and Creative Industries." Media, Culture & Society 46, no. 7 (2024): 1503--14. https://doi.org/10.1177/01634437241254331.

   ABSTRACT: This article engages with research on UK Television (UKTV) and the wider cultural and creative industries by interrogating the role of academic research in industrial and social change. We argue that a 'reformist tendency' implicitly structures much creative industries research. This reformist tendency takes a critical approach to the problem of inequality, identifying it and making it visible, and at times developing strategies which attempt to enhance and promote greater equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI). Academic research seeking to reform the media and creative industries increasingly works in collaboration with -- often relatively powerful -- social actors within these industries. However, the creative industries in general and UKTV in particular, have shown a remarkable resistance to reform and remain characterised by persistent inequalities in terms of class, race, gender and disability. This article explores this problem aiming to provoke debate into the role of academic-industry collaboration in the failure of creative industries EDI. It argues that academics should adopt a more reflexive and selective approach to collaboration.

4. Salvador-Mata, Bertran, Sergi Cortinas-Rovira, and Víctor Herrero-Solana. "Research into Journalism in Spain: Sizeable, but Neither International nor Impactful." Journalism 25, no. 11 (2024): 2362--82. https://doi.org/10.1177/14648849231207674.

   ABSTRACT: Until 2021, studies of scientific disciplines took as their object of study papers published in journals from certain subject categories. This paper is one of the firsts to analyse research into journalism in Spain using the Clarivate InCites analytics platform algorithm that groups papers together according to their citation relations (Citation Topics, CT) rather than by the category of the journals themselves. A unique universe was obtained made up of 63,694 items on the Web of Science, this being the global output of the CT 'Journalism' (1980--2022, both included). Spain is the world's third producer by number of items (4635), but only seventh in citations (and has the lowest proportion of citations per paper, 7.151). Most of the papers (34.01%) are published in Q3 (unlike the rest of the countries analysed, which publish more in Q1 and Q2) and in national journals (61%, even more than the US or the UK, 52% and 47%, respectively), edited by small, non-commercial publishers. Only 40.6% of the items are in the WoS Flagship citation index databases (SCIE, SSCI and AHCI). Most Spanish journals publish national research in proportions around 80%. Spanish research tends to collaborate internationally to a lesser extent (16.5%) than the other European countries analysed, and no significant change has been apparent over the last years. Spanish research into journalism is very productive but has little international presence, obtains few citations per paper, and shows no clear signs of progress towards greater international collaboration.

5. Skinner, Carolyn. "Theorizing Reception: Antoinette Brown Blackwell's Response to Evolutionary Theory." Rhetoric Review 43, no. 4 (2024): 303--18. https://doi.org/10.1080/07350198.2024.2398374.

   ABSTRACT: Because nineteenth-century women were generally excluded from evolutionary research, they had limited options for resisting its claims that women were inferior to men. Antoinette Brown Blackwell presented one means of intervening in the influential discourse of evolutionary science in The Sexes Throughout Nature (1875), where she theorized reception as a rhetorical approach particularly suited to women. Although reliance on reception risks reinforcing stereotypes of feminine passivity, Blackwell's theorization of reception suggests relationships between audience and rhetor that are not well accounted for by the masculine rhetorical tradition and foregrounds reception as an often overlooked but important counterpart to rhetorical production.

6. Theine, Hendrik, and Sebastian Sevignani. "Media Property: Mapping the Field and Future Trajectories in the Digital Age." European Journal of Communication 39, no. 5 (2024): 412--25. https://doi.org/10.1177/02673231241268159.

   ABSTRACT: Ownership has been a core research theme in parts of media and communication science since its establishment as a distinct research field. In particular, scholars in the field of political economy of the media, media sociology and media industry studies typically pay close attention to the role ownership has on various media and communication processes. In this article, we argue, however, that media ownership has been treated largely as a black box ignoring the inner workings and dynamics of it. Filling this void, we reach out to research on ownership from the field of political economy, sociology as well as social and legal philosophy to discuss two options to conceptually grasp the 'inner workings of property'. To showcase the importance of this conceptual redefinition, the article discusses the implications of unpacking property in the realm of digital capitalism.