September 30, 2024

History of Media Studies Newsletter September 2024

History of Media Studies Newsletter September 2024

Welcome to the 42nd 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.

Lineup (with details and downloads available on the CHSTM site in the coming weeks):

• November: Anna Shechtman (Cornell University) - Wednesday, November 18, 14:00-15:00 UTC (10am-11am EST)
• January: Katharine Gerbner (University of Michigan) - Wednesday, January 15, 14:00-15:00 UTC (10am-11am EST)
• March: Florencia Soria (Universidad de la República) - Wednesday, March 19, 14:00-15:00 UTC (10am-11am EST)
• May: Aswin Punathambekar (University of Pennsylvania) - Wednesday, May 21, 14:00-15:00 UTC (10am-11am EDT)

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. The Making of the Humanities XI, Lund 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, Sweden between 9 and 11 October 2024. 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. * Conference dates: 9–11 October 2024 * More details
2. 2025 Cheiron Book Prize * Cheiron welcomes – and encourages – authors and publishers to submit entries for Cheiron’s upcoming Book Prize Competition. Eligible works include original book-length historical studies, written in English, and published after October 15, 2023. The deadline for submissions is November 1, 2024. Subject matter should focus on either specific or more general aspects of the social and behavioral sciences including, but not limited to, histories of psychology, psychiatry, anthropology, sociology, and social statistics, as well as historical biographies of scholars in these areas. * Deadline: 1 November 2024 * More details
3. ESHHS Early Career Award * The ESHHS is formally affiliated with the Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences (JHBS). Together with the JHBS, the ESHHS encourages early career researchers to submit their papers for the Early Career Award. The winning paper can be submitted to JHBS. If accepted after additional review, it will be published with a notice indicating that it is the winner of the ESHHS Early Career Award. The Publisher will then provide an honorarium of US $500 to the award recipient. * Deadline: 15 October 2024 * 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. Daros, Otávio. Writing Journalism History: The Press and Academia in Brazil. New York: Routledge, 2024. https://www.routledge.com/Writing-Journalism-History-The-Press-and-Academia-in-Brazil/Daros/p/book/9781032762487?srsltid=AfmBOorEfeqmcfHq-gKZnE6nMyO-gBDPTqSu0ZW3EURxHhOOMLjxGlAA.

   ABSTRACT: This book examines the trajectory of the historical knowledge about journalism produced by its scholars in Brazil, from the early accounts originating from the Brazilian Historical and Geographic Institute in the 19th century to the specialized academic field at the turn of the 21st century.The history of journalism historiography shows that during the Empire and the Old Republic, the press was idealized as a means of education and a form of mirror of events. After the New State, there was a tendency to view it as an instrument for manipulating public opinion and a suspicious documentary source in the eyes of historians. Finally, with the end of the Military Regime, and with the emergence of the area of communication studies, it came to be analyzed as an element of mediation of public debate and a space for sociability. Regarding this last phase, Daros argues that despite aspirations to subordinate journalism history to communication history, the field still lacks more significant historiographical undertakings beyond print media.This volume is aimed at scholars of journalism studies and media history, the historiography of the press and journalism, the history of historiography, and Brazilian historiography.

2. Brännström, Leila, Markus Gunneflo, Gregor Noll, and Amin Parsa. "Legal Imagination and the US Project of Globalising the Free Flow of Data." AI & Society 39, no. 5 (2024): 2259--66. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-023-01732-y.

   ABSTRACT: Today, the US pursues the global capture of data (understood as a significant engine of growth) by way of bi- and plurilateral trade agreements. However, the project of securing the global free flow of data has been pursued ever since the dawn of digital telecommunication in the 1960s and the US has made significant legal efforts to institutionalise it. These efforts have two phases: In the first 1970s and 80s "freedom of information" phase, the legal justification (and contestation) of the global free flow of data hinged on imagining data as information, and its exchange as a practice of liberty. The second phase began in the late 1990s and continues today. In this phase, the free flow of data is aligned with a free-trade agenda in the context of first e-commerce and, starting in the 2000s, through attempts at creating a global public domain of personal data for the platform economy. The global free flow of data is an intrinsic aspect of informational capitalism. Assuming a constitutive, but not commanding role for law in informational capitalism, we conclude that the US attempt at ensuring free flow for its informational corporations is neither an entirely contingent nor a necessary outcome. It is a product of legal imagination.

3. Daros, Otávio. "Prehistory of Journalism Studies: Discovering the Brazilian Tradition." Journalism 25, no. 10 (2024): 2044--60. https://doi.org/10.1177/14648849231200325.

   ABSTRACT: Aiming to broaden and diversify knowledge about the origins of journalism studies, this article proposes a longitudinal examination of research on the press and journalists produced in Brazil, from the 1840s to the 1940s. It is shown that the first intellectuals interested in investigating the subject were doctors, engineers, jurists and theologians, as well as self-taught. Instead of simply classifying the production of this dilettante group under the label of "Whig history," the study intends to understand the meaning and role that they, in common, attributed to journalism: the beacon of a young nation in progress. The analysis of the set of historical accounts identifies an approach that is at the same time liberal -- as it frames absolutist Portugal as the main obstacle to the introduction of the press in Colonial Brazil -- and nativist -- as it overestimates the development of Brazilian journalism during the period of the Empire, equating it with the British and French cases. Ultimately, these reactions to colonial powers could be seen as early impulses to current efforts to decolonize the field.

4. Ritland, Laura. "Reading against Feeling: The Structure of Feeling, Practical Criticism, and Stuart Hall's Migrant Study." Cultural Critique 125, no. 1 (2024): 34--65. https://doi.org/10.1353/cul.2024.a937469.

   ABSTRACT:

   Ritland identifies "feeling" and "study" as opposing concepts in the work of British-Jamaican cultural studies founder Stuart Hall. Where "feeling" for cultural theorists like Raymond Williams represented the incorporation of human agents' affective experiences into "culture," Hall found this social model dissatisfying for its elision of the difference between real-world determination and agents' subjective experiences of those worldly conditions. Hall thus forwarded a situated hermeneutics that Ritland calls "migrant study." By referring back to the literary pedagogical approach "practical criticism," Hall was able to insist on a distinction between determination and interpretation to open up opportunities for anticolonial resistance. This model of interpretation is grounded in a version of subaltern agency that views the "text" as an object available to critique through the colonial migrant's very condition of determination.

   .

5. Routhier, Dominique. With and against: The Situationist International in the Age of Automation. New York: Verso Books, 2023. https://www.versobooks.com/products/2954-with-and-against?srsltid=AfmBOopN2OLXRAwA6-6nNoeXvTUqt4dQsn9xmDjzwHyfsCeXdvn_VUdP.

   ABSTRACT: The little-known story of the Situationist International's struggle against the automation of everyday life. No other art movement has so profoundly influenced radical politics as the Situationist International. But beyond the clichés about its purported leader Guy Debord, the "society of the spectacle," détournement and dérive, lies a more complex story about key historical shifts in the composition of capital, work, labor, art, and revolutionary theory during the 1950s and 60s. With and Against reframes the history of the Situationist International as a struggle to come to terms with the then-emerging ideologies of cybernetics and automation. Through each of the book's four chapters, Dominique Routhier dissects Situationist pamphlets, documents, artworks, and objects that refract elements of a "cybernetic hypothesis": the theoretically hyperbolic belief that technological progress, computers and automation make class struggle and the idea of revolution obsolete.With equal attention to aesthetic detail and to the broader contours of political economy, this book serves as a critical intervention in art history as well a call to reconsider, more broadly, the contemporary lessons of the most political of all artistic avantgardes.

6. Sánchez-Camacho, Jesús. "The Rise of Catholic Thought on Social Communication in the Pontificate of Paul VI." International Journal of Public Theology 18, no. 2 (May 21, 2024): 207--28. https://doi.org/10.1163/15697320-20241573.

   ABSTRACT: In a period of mass media emergence and renewal of Catholicism after Vatican II, the church initiated into a profound approach to its Social Doctrine on the media. With a theology of communication as a cornerstone, numerous ecclesial documents published during the Papacy of Paul VI explored the implications of the media for society and the internal life of the church. This study aims to analyse the contents on the media addressed in official documents of the Catholic Church during the Pontificate of Paul VI. The conclusions of the research show to what extent communication is a significant issue for public theology and delve into the meaning of the right to information and public opinion, the place of the media in education, the training of communicators and recipients, the importance of the media for the church, and the involvement of Catholics in the media.

7. Stiernstedt, Fredrik. "Women's Struggle and Media Reform: The Swedish Women's Associations' Radio Committee, 1933--1940." Nordic Journal of Media Studies 6, no. 1 (August 1, 2024): 185--202. https://doi.org/10.2478/njms-2024-0009.

   ABSTRACT: This article contributes to a social history of Swedish broadcasting through an analysis of a movement for media reform: the Swedish Women's Associations' Radio Committee, formed in 1933 and operating until 1940. The committee was a joint effort by many established women's organisations in Sweden, formed with the goal of strengthening the role of women in the developing public service radio, and especially providing a platform for women to raise demands on influence in the decision-making around the development of this new media form. In this article, I analyse the Swedish Women's Associations' Radio Committee and their work in the 1930s and ask what they did, how they did it, and with what effects? In what ways can their work be understood as a movement for media reform? The analysis builds on archival material documenting the Swedish Women's Associations' Radio Committee, as well as secondary sources such as memoirs and newspaper materials.