Scholars Program Events
FALL 2009
Making the University Matter investigates how academics situate themselves simultaneously in the university and the world, and how doing so affects the viability of the university setting. The university stands at the intersection of two sets of interests, needing to be at one with the world while aspiring to stand apart from it. In an era that promises intensified political instability, growing administrative pressures, dwindling economic returns and questions about economic viability, lower enrollments and shrinking programs, can the university continue to matter into the future? And if so, in which way? What will help it survive as an honest broker? What are the mechanisms for ensuring its independent voice? This two-day symposium considers a multiplicity of answers from across the curriculum on making the university matter, including critical scholarship, interdisciplinary, curricular blends of the humanities and social sciences, practical training and policy work.
Friday, December 4th
and
Saturday, December 5th
ASC Room 109
More information and a list of participants to follow...
FALL 2008
Real Worlds: Global Perspectives on the Politics of Reality Television, annual symposium took place on Friday, December 5th, 2008. Speakers included:
Mark Andrejevic, University of Iowa
Stephen Coleman, University of Leeds, UK
Nick Couldry, Goldsmiths University of London, UK
Fabienne Darling-Wolf, Temple University
Laura Grindstaff, University of California, Davis
Larry Gross, Annenberg School for Communication, University of Southern California
Sean Jacobs, University of Michigan
Francois Jost, Universite de la Sorbonne, Nouvelle, Paris III, France
Marwan Kraidy, Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania
Tania Lewis, La Trobe University, Australia
Toby Miller, University of Southern California, Riverside
Gareth Palmer, University of Salford, UK
Aswin Punathambekar, University of Michigan
Katherine Sender, Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania
Zala Volcic, University of Queensland, Australia
Helen Wood, DeMontfort University, UK
Barbie Zelizer, Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania
Néstor García Canclini, Distinguished Professor at Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana in Mexico and Emeritus Researcher at the National System of Researchers presented a public lecture "Information Society, Knowledge Society, and Recognition Society" on September 16th.Abstract: The division between an informational conception of society and a socio-cultural conception of society is no longer sustainable. In an age when knowledge construction is multicultural, the binary logic of modern/traditional, East/West, text/image, and entertainment/information no longer makes sense. This compels us to consider the advent of a society of recognition, to study gaps—between central and peripheral countries, informed and entertained countries, and between literary, audiovisual and digital cultures—and to develop communication strategies that will facilitate intelligibility and coexistence across cultures.
Néstor García Canclini speaks with Marwan Kraidy before presenting his lecture in Spanish on September 16th, 2008. Intepretation provided by Transperfect Translations (www.transperfect.com).
Nick Couldry, Professor of Media and Communication Studies at Goldsmiths University of London will be presenting a public lecture on November 18th, Do 'The Media' Have a Future?
Abstract: Media institutions’ authority has long depended on an underlying idea or construction that they are our principal point of access to the social world. This idea, which Couldry has called the ‘myth of the mediated centre,’ is captured in the phrase ‘the media’. But what if that idea is now less plausible given fragmenting audiences, the infinite proliferation of online materials, and media’s distribution across countless devices? The forces holding our idea of ‘the media’ in place may be more tenacious than often realized. Couldry considers what new strategies are emerging to sustain media institutions’ authority, with reference to ‘reality TV’, ‘convergence culture’ and how governments and populations appear to each other.
Mark Anthony Neal, Professor of Black Popular Culture in the Department of African and African-American Studies at Duke University will be presenting a public lecture on October 7th, R. Kelly's Closet: Shame, Desire and the Confessions of a (Post-Modern) Soul Man.
Abstract: R&B singer R. Kelly was recently acquitted of over a dozen charges of child pornography. The case centered on a widely circulated and bootlegged video which purported to show Kelly performing sexual acts with an underage female. Kelly's case elicted much discourse surrounding child pornography and rape within black communities, but also evoked a broader sense of shame around issues of sexuality, gender and deviance. In this conext I'd like to examine the music of R. Kelly, with particular attention to Trapped in the Closet, an episodic music video that examines black interpersonal relationships - with their attendant fixtures with shame, desire and betrayal - in the age of DL (downlow) sexuality.
Scholars Symposium 2008, an all-day event titled Real Worlds: Global Perspectives on the Politics of Reality Telvision will take place on December 5th. This year's symposium will bring together an international group of distinguished scholars to consider the meanings and impacts of the burgeoning industry of reality television across the globe. Topics for discussion will include discourses of nationalism; gender, race and class identities; technologies of survelliance; changing production contexts and transnational adaptations of shows; audience reception; and shifting meanings of politics and citizenship in popular contexts, among others. More details including speakers coming soon!
SUMMER 2008
SummerCulture, a two week emersion course in culture, communication and politics, will take place in Tampere, Finland, from July 27th to August 8th 2008. Seven Annenberg graduate students, selected on the basis of research proposal submissions, will be visiting the University of Tampere in Finland as well as Helsinki and St. Petersburg, Russia. Barbie Zelizer, Director of the Scholars Program, co-organized the program with Risto Kunelius and Kaarle Nordesntreng from the University of Tampere.
SPRING 2008
Don Mitchell, Distinguished Professor Geography and Chair of the Geography Department in the Maxwell School at Syracuse University, and Visiting Scholar, Annenberg School for Communication gave a public lecture on February 12th. The lecture,"The Watched City: Surveillance, Security, and the Geography of Survival," focuses on both the greater securitization of urban space, and the infiltration and surveillance of particular grass-roots political groups, this talk makes the point that securitization threatens survival, and as such threaten the very possibility for a democratic public sphere.
View Professor Mitchell's lecture: http://media.asc.upenn.edu/media/don_mitchell/don_mitchell.html
John Erni, Professor of Cultural Studies, Lingnan University, Hong Kong, and Visiting Scholar, Annenberg School for Communication gave a public lecture March 18th. In his lecture, "Legal Cultural Studies and the Politics of New Sovereignties: Remapping the Human Rights Imaginary," Professor Erni attempts to bridge cultural studies with human rights legal discourse, and in doing so, illuminate why rights as international recognition politics for the subaltern is inadvertantly complicit with the reproduction of rights constitutive of empire.
View Professor Erni's lecture: http://media.asc.upenn.edu/media/john_erni/john_erni.html
Victoria de Grazia is Professor of History at Columbia University and was our Spring guest lecturer.Professor de Grazia presented a lecture titled "A Short Critical History of 'Soft Power' on April 15th. Professor de Grazia spoke on 'soft power' which is the term commonly used to characterize the capacity of states to use cultural as opposed to 'hard' military means or economic incentives to influence other political bodies.
View Professor de Grazia's lecture: http://media.asc.upenn.edu/media/victoria_de_grazia/victoria_de_grazia.html
FALL 2007
Dominic Boyer, Associate Professor, Dept of Anthropology, Cornell University gave a public lecture November 27th titled "Making News in the Era of Digital Information." Abstract: Drawing upon ten years of ethnographic research with German news journalists, this lecture explores journalists' ability to "make news" in an era of shifting technical, organizational, and finaical regimes in mass media. For more information please contact scholars@asc.upenn.edu
Elizabeth Bird, Professor and Chair of Anthropology, University of South Florida, and Fall 2007 Visiting Scholar at the Annenberg School gave a public lecture on October 23rd. Dr. Bird presented a talk on the controversial musuem exhibits of "plastinated" human bodies, "Museums as Popular Culture: The Body of Evidence in Controversial Science."
Peter Dahlgren, Professor of Media and Communication Studies, Lund University, and Fall 2007 Visiting Scholar at the Annenberg School gave a public lecture on September 25th. Dr. Dahlgren addressed the use of the internet by young political activists in a lecture titled, "New Media, Young Citizens, and Civic Cultures: Participation, Practices and Identities."
Scholars Symposium 2007, an all-day event titled The Changing Faces of Journalism: Tradition, Tabloidization, Technology and Truthiness took place on November 30th. This event consisted of panel discussions by a roster of distinguished scholars in the field of Journalism, including Elizabeth Bird, Peter Dahlgren (both of whom were Fall 2007 Visiting Scholars), and Pablo Boczkowski (Northwestern University), Mark Deuze (Indiana University), James Ettema (Northwestern University), Herbert Gans (Columbia University), Jeffrey Jones (Old Dominion University), Carolyn Kitch (Temple University), Julianne Newton (University of Oregon), Carlin Romano (Critic, Philadelphia Inquirer and The Chronicle of Higher Education), Michael Schudson (University of California, San Diego and Columbia University), and Barbie Zelizer (Raymond Williams Professor of Communication, and Director of the Scholars Program, Annenberg School for Communication). For more information see the symposium website.
SUMMER 2007
SummerCulture, a two week emersion course in culture, communication and politics, took place in Lisbon, Portugal, from July 9-20, 2007. Five Annenberg graduate students, selected on the basis of research proposal submissions, joined 10 Portuguese doctoral students at the host institution, Universidade Catolica Portuguesa, for a course of study organized around issues politcal visibility and invisibility in Portugal's present and past. Barbie Zelizer, Director of the Scholars Program, co-organized the program with Dr. Isabel Capeloa Gil, professor at Universidade Catolica Portuguesa.
SPRING 2007
Robin Wagner-Pacifici, Professor of Sociology at Swarthmore College offered a course this semester titled "Discourse and the Nation," which explored how "speaking and writing the nation creates the nation." Official speeches and documents speak in the name of the nation - but they actually perform the double work of referring to and contituting this entity at the same time. The course material will include scholarly analyses of historic and contemporary speeches, as well as primary documents, including the 9/11 Commission Report and the National Security Strategies of 2002 and 2006. Professor Wagner-Pacifici's public lecture, presented on February 20, was titled, "The Defense of the Nation: Reading the 9/11 Commission Report."
Marwan Kraidy Assistant Professor in International Communication at American University, Washington D.C. taught a course called "Culture and Modernity in the 'Arab Media Revolution'", which will focus on the 'revolution' in Arab-language media output since September 11th, 2001. The outgrowth of hundreds of satellite TV channels feature rpograms like reality televison, music videos and social talk-shows that have fuelled wide-raning controversies about Arab-Western relations, cultural authenticity, gender, and the convergence of politics and public culture. This course uses interpretive and critical approaches to analyze these controversies as exemplars of the role of the media in shaping notions of modernity, authenticity, and otehrness in the non-Western world. Professor Kraidy will also give a public lecture, scheduled for April 10, titled, "Idioms of Contention: Reality TV and Arab Politics."
Lawrence Grossberg, Morris Davis Distinguished Professor of Communication and Cultural Studies, Adjunct Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and the Director of the University Program in Cultural Studies, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill gave a lecture on the topic "Where Have All the Moderns Gone? When Will We Ever Learn?"
FALL 2006
Anna McCarthy, Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies, Department of Cinema Studies, Tisch School of the Arts, New York University, will teach a semester-long graduate seminar titled, "Media, Culture and Citizenship: Histories, Debates, Paradigms." Anna McCarthy, "Reality TV and the Neoliberal Theater of Suffering," Tues, September 26, 2006, 6:15 pm
James P. Curran, Professor of Communications, Department of Media and Communications, Goldsmiths College, University of London, will teach a semester-long graduate-level seminar titled, "Journalism, Entertainment and Society." James Curran, "Journalism, Entertainment & Democracy." Tues, October 31, 2006, 6:15 pm
Scholars Symposium 2006, an all-day event titled"Back to the Future: Explorations in Communication and History" took place on December 1st. Presented by the Scholars Program in collaboration with the Graduate Working Group in Communication and History, guest panelists included: Richard Butsch (Rider University), James Curran (Goldsmiths College, Visiting Scholar), Susan Douglas (University of Michigan), Anna McCarthy (New York University, Visiting Scholar), Robert A. McChesney (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign), John Nerone (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign), David Paul Nord (Indiana University), John Durham Peters (University of Iowa), Barbara Savage (University of Penn - History), Michael Schudson (University Cal-San Diego & Columbia University), Peter Stallybrass (University of Penn-English), Paul Starr (Princeton University).
SPRING 2006
FALL 2005
Fall 2005 Scholars-in-Residence