Media Studies

This work reflects on how the representation of the Arab world has evolved in three fictional works that have emerged in the second decade of the 21st century: Homeland (Showtime Networks, 2011-2020), Tyrant (FX Network-Fox, 2014-2016), and Jack Ryan (Amazon Prime Video, 2018-). The goal is to determine whether the main socio-political milestones that occurred during this period (the Arab Spring, Syrian Civil War, appearance of ISIS, etc.) have transformed the already classic theories of authors such as Edward Said, Jack Shaheen, or Evelyn Alsultany, among others. A viewing and analysis of the first season of each show demonstrates that the panorama has not improved in terms of discourse, topics, and stereotypes. It is clear, therefore, that the lens of 9/11 is still very present in the Hollywood mindset regarding Arabs, Muslims, and Islam.

Personal testimony by survivors of genocide or persecution has long constituted the gold standard for learning about human-inflicted tragedy. The physical presence of a survivor captivates audiences and lends immediacy to catastrophes that seem both unfathomable but also eminently repeatable. The Holocaust looms large as an example. The most aggressive efforts at preserving live testimony have centered on assembling archives of video testimonies. This transformation of live testimony into a different medium generates two key questions:
1. What value can personal testimony have when disembodied and presented in a medium more manipulable by the audience (via editing, selective viewing, etc.)?
2. How can mediated survivor testimonies serve as tools for preventing and counteracting prejudice?

As survivors of genocides pass away, their firsthand testimonies increasingly will be accessible primarily through video archives. The preservation of memory through video archives also exacts a price. Once a survivor’s testimony enters the archive, it risks becoming ossified as a static monument. The video preserves the definitive record not only of that survivor’s life, but it also endures as an instantiation of archetypal narrative templates that channel perceptions into familiar storylines. As these narrative patterns become embedded as expectations, they risk obscuring or marginalizing the complex panoply of ways the survivors dealt with their situations.

This project takes Holocaust survivor testimonies as its point of departure in assessing the pedagogical challenges and opportunities of video testimonies. Discussions focus on three types of mediated testimony: early non-fiction televised chronicles of Holocaust survivors (particularly the first appearance of a survivor, on the 1953 U.S. television series This Is Your Life); archival video testimonies; and “unsettled testimony” consisting of less structured, first-person testimonies that reveal the challenges of discursive representation. The final category includes testimonies of Holocaust survivors independently recorded by the author. Each type of testimony offers distinct advantages and limitations in reducing prejudice and increasing productive engagement with the global immigration crises that many politicians continue to foment into nativism and xenophobia.

Critical examination of each medium of testimony leads to recommendations regarding how to provide more thorough, nuanced understanding of refugees and immigrants in the present. Testimony from immigrants could put into practice several key lessons gleaned from Holocaust survivor testimony. At the micronarrative level, individual testimonies can provide counterexamples to categorical generalizations about immigrants. Attention at this level focuses on providing detailed context and background to demonstrate how immigrants do not necessarily align with how they are categorized by media and politicians. At the mesonarrative level, the diversity of narratives can activate themes and characterizations absent or suppressed in collective portrayals of immigrants. Metanarrative testimony reframes immigrants by offering new narratives that can reframe the role of immigrants in society, suggesting storylines that treat immigrants as contributors rather than invaders.

In contemporary medical discourse as well as in the field of Disability Studies, the problems concerning the Cochlear implant (CI) gave rise to a series of controversies. While medical discourses or viscourses imply a natural process of hearing, the counterargument is that “normal hearing” is a social and cultural construction, which depends on a corresponding “thought style”. However, such constructions of normality, disability, inclusion and exclusion are not only produced or criticized by scientific or journalistic mediatizations but also to a large degree by popular narrative media. Consequently, this paper analyzes the specific filmic-narrative appropriation, reworking and interpretation of discourses on the CI in popular media formations such as TV series, medical-technological viscourses in documentaries and Youtube videos. The thesis is that narrative media cannot be considered a mere reproduction of scientific or social discourses, but instead functions as productions of reality. Thus, narrative media is capable of (co)producing (in mutual exchange with social and medical discourses) interpretations, evaluations of normality and disability.

Given the on-going nature of this crisis, it’s too early for the full implications to be realized. However, it’s clear that the news industry which emerges on the other side will look very different from the one that went into it.

Nonetheless, what this report shows is that we can start to identify the key characteristics inherent in those outlets who look best placed to navigate this situation.

Tl;DR think “audience first.”

“Businesses that focus on the audience first and advertising second will be better equipped to handle the consequences of the pandemic,” argues Curtis Huber, Senior Director of Circulation and Audience Revenue at the Seattle Times.

What does that mean in practice? Here’s a topline six-point playbook.

This study explores the factors that affect the perceptions of social networking site users of online social support. Specifically, we investigate the effect of online social ties and altruism on online social support. This study administers a survey questionnaire to 213 high school students applying for university admission after the release of the public examination results. The results show that online social ties (β = .284, p < .001) and altruism (β = .504, p < .001) are significantly related to online social support. Moreover, altruism is significantly related to online social ties (β = .674, p < .001). The variance explained by the model for online social ties and online social support with R 2 is .454 and .527, respectively. The effects of online social ties and altruism on online social support, and their implications are discussed.

RÉSUMÉ
Le présent article décrit une série de tentatives – toutes échouées – par la Société Radio-Canada (SRC) et la Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) de produire des émissions de nouvelles traduites. Sur un premier plan, il examine les raisons pour lesquelles la traduction journalistique paraît à des moments de crise comme un outil pour résoudre certaines questions identitaires au Canada, ainsi que les raisons pour lesquelles l’idée de produire des émissions de nouvelles traduites n’est pas réalisée. Sur un deuxième plan, il considère un dilemme méthodologique et épistémologique auquel les historiens doivent faire face : que faire quand les documents qu’ils cherchent ne sont pas conservés parce que les journalistes conçoivent la traduction d’une manière différente ? Cet article recommande que les historiens se tournent vers des « para-archives », ou des collections créées et conservées par des organismes non-journalistiques, qui contiennent des descriptions des documents qui n’existent plus. Ces para-archives peuvent fournir de quoi créer des récits plausibles au sujet des intérêts contradictoires qui militent contre la production d’émissions de nouvelles traduites. Elles peuvent aussi rendre plus claire la manière dont les historiens produisent les catégories qu’ils emploient pour définir leur objet d’étude.

ABSTRACT
This article describes a series of failed attempts by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and Société Radio Canada to present translated news. On one level, it is concerned with the impulse that prompts people during moments of crisis to suggest translated news as a solution to a problems related to Canadian identity and the reasons their suggestions to translate news programs are not acted upon. On a deeper level, it is concerned with a methodological and epistemological problem facing translation historians: what happens when the relevant documents are not preserved because journalists’ notions of translation differ from those of historians? It recommends that historians turn to “para-archives,” or collections created and preserved by non-news organizations, that contain descriptions of the documents journalists have not kept. These para-archives can provide evidence for the creation of plausible narratives about the competing interests shaping decisions not to produce translated news. They can also reveal how historians actively produce the categories they use to define their object of study.

This essay proposes a historically material theory of resonance in experience and literature. Working against contemporary techno-deterministic assessments of sound, I argue for a historical, rather than individual, modality of listening – a collective acoustical unconscious. Understood in its technical expression, Faulkner’s literary acoustics helps us to draw out some of Benjamin’s more elliptical points regarding an acoustical unconscious, a notion that Benjamin never directly articulated, but can be found scattered across the writings. Both Faulkner and Benjamin teach us that the acoustical unconscious far exceeds the boundaries of the individual life. In Absalom, Absalom!, Faulkner crafted a narrative space that is a sensitive recording apparatus, more sensitive than any mechanical device. But as history moves through narrative space and its radiophonic air, there are consequences for racial consciousness. In Faulkner’s narrative space, blackness and whiteness become, above all, sound-effects,  or what I call a “fact of resonance” rather than of essence or substance.

To cite:
Wilkins, A. 2017. Rescaling the local: Multi-academy trusts, private monopoly and statecraft in England. Journal of Educational Administration and History, 49 (2), 171-185

For the past six years successive UK governments in England have introduced reforms intended to usher in less aggregated, top-down, bureaucratically overloaded models of service delivery as well as secure conditions for greater school autonomy.  Yet the ‘hollowing out’ of local government has not resulted in less bureaucracy on the ground or less regulation from above, nor has it diminished hierarchy as an organising principle of education governance.  In some cases, monopolies and monopolistic practices dominated by powerful bureaucracies and professional groups persist, albeit realised through the involvement of new actors and organisations from business and philanthropy.  In this paper I adopt a governmentality perspective to explore the political significance of large multi-academy trusts (MATs) – private sponsors contracted by central government to run publicly funded schools – to the generation of new scalar hierarchies and accountability infrastructures that assist in bringing the gaze of government to bear upon the actions of schools that are otherwise less visible under local government management.  On this account, it is argued, MATs are integral to statecraft and the invention and assemblage of particular apparatuses for intervening upon specific organisations, spaces and peoples.

Last year, at this conference, I discussed how distinctions between nature and culture, and humans and animals, can arise from the technical processes of food production (see "Food as an object of cultural technical study "). Drawing on the work of cultural techniques (e.g. Siegert 2015; Vismann 2013) and Levi-Strauss' The Raw and the Cooked (1970), I argued that the relationship between humans and food is primary to how the human understands itself and forms part of the ground of human ontological systems. I'd like to take this argument further today, to a system-level perspective of food production and beyond, to a posthuman future where food no longer resembles what we know it as today, and because of this, where the human as such arguably ceases to exist, as the ground upon which it has defined self and species is transcended. I'm responding both to fictional future food visions and aspirations towards technical solutions to our current food-related crises.

This article addresses the recent attempts to integrate evolutionary history in the US national narrative. Focusing on the cultural, legal, and scientific controversy over Kennewick Man, the ancient human remains discovered in Washington state in 1996, the article explores the narrative politics of American national belonging. Through a popular historical novel on Kennewick Man's life, the article further theorizes nostalgia as a narrative tool in imagining the evolutionary origins of the nation. The article argues that nostalgia produces a temporal dynamic that bridges the gap between national history and global prehistory, and that this dynamic is reinforced through cultural ideas of genetic knowledge. At the same time, prehistoric nostalgia renders problematic ideas of ethnic difference largely invisible.

When we—that is, Pavitra and Debashree—sat down to articulate our understanding of a decolonial and feminist media studies, we knew that we were entering a conversation that had long been underway. Anticolonial movements of the twentieth century ousted powerful and globe-spanning modern empires. Postcolonial and decolonial theories helped us understand the epistemic violence that made the material extraction of colonialism possible. They cautioned us that colonialism looked different in different parts of the world, used different weapons, and had different avatars in the present.
As many of the authors in this issue observe, the work of decolonization does not end at a definite historical milestone, and calls to decolonize become defanged when they are appropriated by the very institutions we seek to challenge. The struggle against the colonization of our minds and bodies and lands is ongoing. The task of the feminist media scholar, then, is to enter the struggle midstream and try to make sense of the different currents that make up the turbulence.

Strategic misinformation is an unavoidable term when addressing the relationship between politics, democracy and mass media in the 21st century. Deliberate propaganda has a long trajectory in our history, and it has existed as long as media has been essential for those in power to represent their interests to large audiences. This thesis analyzes the role of strategic misinformation in mediatized democracies of current times, considering cognitive bias as a crucial element that is highly exploited during the creation of systematic and targeted messages that are spread over the internet and social media. Also, the research investigates how strategic misinformation may be an incidental factor in certain population groups when they decide to be part of democratic processes. Religion and the diaspora in the U.S. are two important factors for Latino and Hispanic voting decisions and interaction with the news. In the theoretical framework, this thesis emphasizes post-truth and truth from a Foucauldian approach, cognitive bias and propaganda. The thesis implements an experiment with 15 participants (liberals and conservatives) and it is divided into three categories: a survey to measure their political inclination; exposure to strategic misinformation created to analyze different levels of trust in news that may go against their ideological preferences; and finally a questionnaire to analyze if a change in the levels of trust was possible. Religious affiliation of participants was a key factor that represented levels of confirmation bias related to the stories they read during the experiment, all of which were politically ideological.

The paper traces argumentations by the Deaf community in favor of deafness against the Cochlear implant and the impact of concepts like ethnicity, kinship, communities, and  the intimate living with a technical device - in german language - in: Karin Harrasser, Susanne Roeßiger (Hg.), Parahuman. Neue Perspektiven auf das Leben mit Technik [Schriften des Deutschen Hygiene-Museums Dresden, Bd. 12], Köln (Böhlau) 2016, 91-103

Joseph Turow’s The Daily You takes us behind-the-scenes of the advertising industry to get a better sense of not just how its capitalistic rationale is put into practice, but its potential impact on individuals in a consumer society. While readers are probably most familiar with his Breaking Up America (1997), this current book is a more natural development of its 2006 antecedent, Niche Envy. Indeed The Daily You contains familiar arguments Turow has made previously about marketing discrimination and profiling in a digital age, but this book delves further into the actual mechanics and end-goals of how advertising companies gather data, profile people, and try to follow ‘valuable’ individuals across as many possible geographic locations and devices as possible.

La Guerra Civil española es una cuestión sin agotar. Entre sus consecuencias se encuentra el impacto que ésta tuvo en la memoria de varias generaciones. Sin embargo, el estudio de la memoria social y de sus representaciones sobre la guerra y la dictadura franquista no ha recibido la atención necesaria por parte de la historiografía, la sociología, los estudios culturales y los de comunicación. No obstante, ochenta años después de la contienda española, son múltiples y variopintas las producciones culturales producidas bajo el paraguas de la posmemoria o memoria de segunda y tercera generación.

Los ensayos reunidos en este volumen se aproximan, desde un prisma interdisciplinar, a un corpus amplio y heterogéneo de producciones contemporáneas sobre la memoria en la España actual: trabajos literarios, visuales y audiovisuales que incluyen desde novelas a series de televisión, pasando por cómics, textos dramatúrgicos, programas radiofónicos, documentales, cortometrajes de ficción y producciones transmedia. Todos ellos proponen una mirada al pasado de España desde la distancia generacional, pero también subrayan la recuperación de lo traumático o lo nostálgico para nuestro presente.

Posmemoria de la Guerra Civil y el Franquismo aporta nuevas perspectivas acerca de la memoria colectiva, contribuyendo a repensar los modos en que ésta se construye y recrea, destacando el papel esencial que los medios de comunicación y la producción cultural juegan en la conformación de la memoria del pasado entre las generaciones.

During the 15 years of civil war (1975–90), political posters filled the streets and charged the walls of cities all over Lebanon. As the ongoing war formed an intrinsic aspect of everyday life in Lebanon, the graphic signs and political rhetoric of posters became a prevalent sight/reading that shaped the cityscape. The political parties strove to legitimize and sustain their political struggle while battling for power and territorial control. Their military engagement on the battlefronts was coupled with a relentless battle of signs and symbolic appropriation of territory through extensive poster production and distribution.

How to make sense of political posters’ nature of operation in the context of civil war? How does one poster, out of many on the same wall, hail to a specific person and at once be contested by another?
If we begin to rethink the concept of propaganda and question the models of communication on which its various definitions are built, perhaps we could move beyond the reductive notions of ‘mass persuasion’, ‘coercion’ and ‘deceit’. We could then undertake a more complex examination of the posters as inscribed in the socio-political institution of political communities during civil war time. In this chapter, I present the limits of the concept of propaganda and argue for alternative theoretical tools, which allow me to advance a conceptualization of political posters as symbolic sites of hegemonic struggle over meaning and political discourse.

As the number of Holocaust survivors declines, their live eyewitness testimony will be preserved and communicated via other media. This transformation prompts a key question. What value can personal testimony have when disembodied and presented in a medium more manipulable by the audience? The response addresses three types of mediated testimony: the first televised broadcast of a Holocaust survivor's story, on the 1953 U.S. television series This Is Your Life; archival video testimonies; and "unsettled testimony" consisting of less structured, first-person testimonies gathered by the author that reveal the challenges of discursive representation. Each type of testimony offers distinct advantages and limitations in reducing prejudice and fostering understanding.

Poter accedere a qualsiasi immagine, in qualsiasi momento, in qualsiasi luogo. I nuovi media prospettano straordinarie vie di fruizione. Ma come orientarsi in questo scenario? La nostra cultura visuale è capace di tenere il passo della tecnologia? Questo libro racconta come il cinema, ben prima dell'avvento della tecnologia digitale, abbia saputo accogliere immagini provenienti da archivi pubblici e privati: dai rapporti con la pittura al foundfootage, dalla pratica del remake all'intermedialità. Molte volte assegnato al compito di produrre un calco del "reale", il film costituisce piuttosto uno spazio del pensiero nel quale si rielaborano le immagini del passato e si rigenerano i materiali "usurati" della cultura. Se i nuovi media invitano lo spettatore a manipolare le immagini e non semplicemente a osservarle, è dunque a partire dalle lezioni di montaggio offerte da maestri come Godard e Herzog, Sokurov e Van Sant, Pasolini e Moretti, che diventa possibile assumere un ruolo attivo e consapevole nell'orizzonte estetico e mediatico contemporaneo.

Book (in French) published in 2003 at the occasion of the first exhibition staging exclusively biomedia art works at the national art center Le Lieu Unique in Nantes/France. Hauser Jens (ed.): L'Art Biotech. Nantes/Trézélan, 2003.

The publication has not been available anymore since 2008; this PDF is made accessible with the agreement and the kind support of the Filigranes publishing house, until an augmented new edition will be be available. Great thanks to Filigranes and Patrick Le Bescont! https://www.filigranes.com

Die Auswirkungen struktureller Diskriminierung in Form von Audismus werden gegenwärtig gesellschaftlich und politisch unterschätzt. Privile-gien, die sich für Menschen durch die Fähigkeit, zu hören, ergeben, bleiben tauben Menschen verwehrt. Es wird deshalb in der vorliegenden Arbeit an-genommen, dass die Lebensrealität hörender Menschen zu Nachteilen für taube Menschen führt. Die Diskriminierungen, die taube Menschen tagtäg-lich in vielen wichtigen Lebensbereichen innerhalb der hörenden Gesell-schaft erfahren, bleiben jedoch im Diskurs unsichtbar (Tuccoli 2008, 23 f.). Beispielhaft für die daraus anzunehmenden Spannungen zwischen der tau-ben sprachlich-kulturellen Minderheit und der hörenden Mehrheit soll im Folgenden das Phänomen der "kulturellen Aneignung" von Gebärdenspra-che und der diesbezügliche Diskurs-ausgelöst durch den Eurovision Song-contest (ESC) 2017-stehen und untersucht werden. Ziel der Arbeit ist es, eine wissenschaftliche Grundlage anzubieten, um auf deren Basis den Diskurs über "kulturelle Aneignung", Audismus und hearing privileges breiter und fundierter führen zu können. Sie greift das im Postkolonialismus geprägte Konzept der "kulturellen Aneignung" auf und beleuchtet dabei mithilfe der Kritischen Diskursanalyse nach Jäger (2015) die Reproduktion struktureller Diskriminierung. Die Analyse des Diskur-ses wirft Schlaglichter auf seine Aspekte und Argumente und versucht, die-se zu entschlüsseln. Dabei werden verschiedene Subjektpositionen sowie Diskursverschränkungen,-brüche und-verschiebungen sichtbar gemacht.

Published by Cognella Academic Publishing (San Diego), ISBN 978-1-7935-2153-8. Previous editions have been adopted at 10 universities and colleges.

"Media Environments: Using Movies and Texts to Critique Media and Society" uses popular film as a gateway to critical readings, encouraging students to think creatively and critically about media, society, technology, and popular culture.

The text anthology explores media in their totality and provides models and theories for interrogating many universal themes that span media, technology, and planetary civilization. Using popular films about media as lead-ins, students are introduced to the works of well-known thinkers and writers such as Marshall McLuhan, Charlton D. McIlwain, Shoshanna Zuboff, Julia Hildebrand, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Devon Powers, Antonio Lopez, and many others. Chapters span interconnected topics:

Memes (original meaning),
Networks (McLuhan),
Spectacle (Debord),
Hyperreality (Baudrillard).

Capitalism and Consumerism,
Freedom and Protest,
Social-Mobile Media,
Ecology and the Anthropocene,
Science and Our Place in the Universe,
Pseudoscience and Conspiracy,
Celebrity and Superheroes,
New Concepts of "Hot" and "Cool" Media,
Land Art, Dark Skies, and Technological Civilization.

The fourth edition features 19 new readings that explore Afrofuturism in Black Panther, Avatar and global media ecosystems, Hollywood and climate change, Blade Runner 2049 and future earth scenarios, Avengers and environmental advocacy, #BlackLivesMatter and Black movements in digital culture, and the International Dark Sky movement as a radical media-tech philosophy. Intellectually rigorous and thematically diverse, Media Environments is ideal for courses and programs in media and/or communication studies.

İletişim olgusu, toplumsal bir varlık olan insan için her dönem önemli bir konuma sahip olmuştur. Tarihin ilk dönemlerinden itibaren doğa ile iç içe yaşayan insan beslenme, barınma ve korunma gibi temel ihtiyaçlarını giderirken iletişim kurmaya çabalamıştır. İletişim her dönem insanların hayatlarını biçimlendirmiş, yaşayışlarına yön vermiştir. Toplumsal dönüşümü hızlandıran ve sosyalleşmeyi biçimlendiren iletişim olgusu, medyanın etkisiyle birlikte daha zengin bir yapıya kavuşmuştur. Geleneksel medyadan yeni medyaya dönüşüm sürecinde iletişim teknolojileri etkisini derinden hissettirmiş ve içinde yaşadığımız dönem “medya çağı” olarak ifade edilmeye başlamıştır. İletişim bugün gerek sokakta, gerek evde izlediğimiz televizyonlarda, gerek sanal ortamda ve gerekse de reel hayatımızda vazgeçemediğimiz olgular arasında yer almaktadır. 23 farklı çalışmadan oluşan bu kitap, altı farklı kategoride bulunan bilimsel çalışmaları kapsamaktadır. Bu kategoriler sırasıyla; “Halkla İlişkiler ve Medya”, “Bilişim ve Medya”, “Sinema ve Medya”, “Sanat ve Medya”, “Kültür ve Medya”, “Siyasal İletişim ve Medya”dır.

In 2007, the Dera Sacha Sauda (DSS) guru Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh Insan wore an attire similar to calendar image of tenth Sikh guru, Guru Gobind Singh, and performed a ritual baptism, which became controversial. This article will show how this controversy opens up two significant issues: first, questioning the egalitarian ethos of caste equality upheld by the Sikh religion, and second, with regard to authenticity of religious practice – of what is deemed Sikh and non/un-Sikh practices. The controversy became the fulcrum for questions of visuality and material practices around imageries of Sikh gurus in the domain of popular religiosity and visual culture. This historically relates to the much-debated status of images around gurus in contemporary Punjab. The image and ritual become a crucial site of conflict with regard to questions of Sikh identity, religion and caste. Questions of iconoclasm, authenticity and representation have emerged around the images—largely audio-visual in nature--of the Sikh gurus. In this article I will analyse music video/s that engages with the genre of Sikhi (Sikh principles or faith) highlighting crisis in Sikh identity through lyrical and visual references, for instance to the institutions of popular religion, such as Deras. I then mainly argue that the DSS event cannot be grasped without understanding the modes of engagement and ritual practices around images of Sikh gurus. Such an analysis will not only underline contestations around the ‘vexed’ status of images comprising both Sikh and Dera gurus but will also critique the normative understanding of Sikh identity and religion.

Questo intervento intende esplorare e problematizzare la rappresentazione delle donne in quanto icone, muse o soggetti passivi, e come esse diventino ricettacolo di proiezioni sociali. Quali strumenti estetici e politici le donne hanno impiegato per riappropriarsi della propria soggettività e autonomia in una cultura visuale patriarcale ed eteronormativa? Attraverso un’analisi critica queer-femminista – e percorrendo le definizioni di sesso, genere e sessualità – questa lectio prende come punto di partenza esempi tratti dai media mainstream per poi allargarsi verso problematiche che riguardano la rappresentazione dei corpi in ambito artistico.

[EN]
'Body, Femininity and Objectification: Queer-Feminist Perspectives'
This presentation explores and problematises how women are usually portrayed as either icons, muses or passive subjects, either way becoming receptacles of social projections. What aesthetic and political tools have women employed to re-frame their own subjectivity and autonomy within a heteronormative and patriarchal visual culture? Through a feminist and queer critical analysis, this lecture will take as its starting point examples drawn from mainstream media, to move towards issues that relate to the representation of bodies in the arts.

-- text available only in Italian --