Representing Stuart Hall
Back into the archives this week, this time for a guest lecture I did for a large undergraduate class here at the University of Minnesota in 2012. At least that’s what my notes tell me. I was asked to come in and say some useful words about Stuart Hall and his importance to media studies […]
Unfixing the race
Twenty years or so ago, I tried to write a book about multiracial identity and media called Mixed Messages. For a variety of reasons, the book never happened. But one piece of the project did wind up in print as a journal article on Eminem . . . and there was a lecture that went […]
Being critical
Dipping back into the archives once again, but this time I’m pulling from the teaching wing, rather than the conference paper wing. This is the most recent (spring 2021) version of my opening lecture to the department’s big undergraduate intro course in media studies. As the syllabus notes, this course is a basic introduction to […]
Asking better questions
Recently, I found myself responding to one of those semi-regular “campus climate” surveys that universities (sometimes) like to do in order to take the proverbial temperature of the community with respect to diversity, equity, and inclusion. It’s a task that I routinely approach with a jumbled sense of necessity and cynicism. The necessity, of course, […]
The problem with happy endings
Lots of broken patterns this time. This week’s post comes “early”: I’ve fallen into a Saturday posting rhythm, but it’s only Thursday, and I’m back at it. And the content isn’t some dusty old conference paper unearthed from back in the day, but a (Zoom) talk I gave just yesterday (so the digital ink is […]
Inside/outside
In 2008, some graduate students at the University of Minnesota organized a small conference on campus called, “Rethinking the University: Labor, Knowledge, Value.” Part of that conference was a roundtable on “The University and the Public Intellectual,” and somehow I got invited to be a part of the group on the podium for that session. […]
Open access
In 2013, Kembrew McLeod asked me to pinch-hit for him on a roundtable panel — “Open Access Publishing and the Future of Scholarship: A Conversation Between Stakeholders” — at the annual meeting of the National Communication Association. On the downside, this was because Kembrew wasn’t able to attend the conference, and so I didn’t get […]
. . . of Surveillance of the University of Surveillance of the . . .
Dipping back into the archive once more, this time to the “Media in Transition 8” conference held at MIT in 2013. I began this talk with a “joke” intro that (shamelessly) I have used more than once. Partly, because it almost always gets a good laugh. But mostly because, in this case, it was definitely […]
Video(s) of the week
Anyone who’s used the internet in the past decade or so knows Christopher Walken can dance rings around pretty much anything, if only because they’ve seen this gem of a video: Less virally shared, though, is this stunning scene from 1981’s Pennies From Heaven, where Walken’s character, with some help from Cole Porter, tries to […]
Back in the saddle
The “spring” semester starts up for us again on Tuesday, though spring itself is still a long way away. And, if recent years are any indication, the weather won’t feel like proper spring until somewhere close to finals week. Maybe not even then. Still. It’s a new semester. There are updated syllabi (“Freedom of Speech” […]