The latest news from Media Studies faculty and graduate students.
In addition to his administrative role as the CMCI’s Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Programs, Andrew Calabrese currently is at work producing a documentary film called Grain Changers, which depicts the contemporary movement to develop local and regional infrastructures to support the cultivation, processing and consumption of older varieties of wheat and other grains. The film examines the environmental, health and culinary reasons behind this movement. Along with his recent research on media and food politics, he just completed (with media studies PhD student Christopher Barnes) a contribution to the forthcoming second edition of The Blackwell Companion for Television, titled “The Trade in Television News, Revisited,” which accounts for the massive transformations in televised news production and distribution through digital innovations since the publication of the first edition in 2009. He will teach a seven-day, intensive graduate seminar on Communication, Media & Society at the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia in May 2019. He currently is teaching a graduate seminar on Media, Culture & Food Politics.
Alexis de Coning passed her comps exams. In April, she presented her paper, “Interviewing Men’s Rights Activists Online: Ethical and Methodological Challenges and Affordances” at the What is Technology? conference in Portland, Oregon. In May, she will present her paper “Crossing the Boundaries between Feminism and the Men’s Rights Movement” at ICA in Washington, D.C. She also recently competed in her first Brazilian jiujitsu tournament and won her first fight.
Nabil Echchaibi co-organized an international seminar on decoloniality and social imaginaries at the University of the Free State in Bloemfontein, South Africa. He presented his paper “The Transparent Muslim: Muslims Between the Blackmail of Visibility and The Right to Opacity” at the Internet, Authority and Religious Contact Symposium at Bochum University in Germany. His essay, “What Are we Fighting For? Academia or the Humility of Knowledge,” is forthcoming in a book volume with Cambridge University Press.
Kevan Feshami presented a paper at the First Lisbon Winter School for the Study of Communication at the Catholic University of Portugal. This month, he is attending the Milton Wolf Seminar on Media and Diplomacy in Vienna, Austria.
Katy Fetters successfully organized the first CPSTRONG event, CP Social, in March. More than 40 people attended the first community-led event, which allowed people to share stories and experiences, and hold powerful discussions about entering adulthood with cerebral palsy. Many attendees said they came because they’d never had the opportunity to meet others with CP before. The experience was empowering and brought a lot of joy.
Steven Frost presented a weaving workshop and artist's talk as part of the exhibition Over, Under, Forward, Back at the Arlington Arts Center in Arlington, Virginia. In March, he was appointed to a 5-year term on the Boulder City Library Commission. He has worked as a volunteer and instructor in the main branch's maker space since 2016 and will join the commission as the city begins construction of the North Boulder Library expansion, which will house the city's largest publicly available meeting space, an industrial kitchen/maker space, and a variety of NOBO specific services.
In April, he hosted a Sassy Sash Workshop at Denver's Redline Contemporary Art Center, which also featured one of his original designs in its Ghille Suite Fashion Show as part of Redline's annual Gala Fundraiser.
Greg Gondwe’s article “News Believability & Trustworthiness on African online Networks: An Experimental Design” was published in the International Communication Research Journal (AEJMC). He also had his book review of The Palgrave Handbook of Media and Communication Research in Africa published in the International Communication Journal (USC Annenberg Press, University of Southern California).
Stewart Hoover attended a conference on decoloniality and borderlands at the University of the Free State in South Africa, where he gave concluding remarks. He delivered a paper on his current work on religion, media and populism at a workshop at Ruhr University in Bochum, Germany, and lectured on religion, media and technoscience at a seminar at the University of California, San Diego. He also published an article in the Journal of Media, Religion and Digital Culture.
Rachel van der Merwe is organizing an IAMCR preconference on "Reimagining the University" in collaboration with the IAMCR Emerging Scholars Network in Madrid this summer. The preconference will take place on July 7, and will provide an interactive space for both emerging and veteran scholars to develop and present strategies for positively transforming and decolonizing the modern university. CMCI faculty and students should keep an eye out for the CFP, and all are encouraged to apply and/or attend!
Sandra Ristovska co-edited the book Visual Imagery and Human Rights Practice (Palgrave, 2018) for which the Cardozo Law School in New York City hosted the book launch on February 12. She also published a book chapter, “Imagination and Emotion at the Crossroad Between Art and the Law,” in The Agency for Legal Imagination (Goethe Institute, 2018). She was an invited speaker at the Screening Scholarship Media Festival at the University of Pennsylvania in March, and a recipient of the deCastro Research Award for her forthcoming book, Seeing Human Rights: Video Activism as a Proxy Profession (MIT Press). She was elected a secretary of the Philosophy, Theory & Critique Division at ICA, and was selected a member of the IAMCR History Commission.
Nathan Schneider published a new article, "Decentralization: An Incomplete Ambition," which will be out soon from the Journal of Cultural Economy, and multiple popular press articles have come out in The Nation, America and Hacker Noon. Nathan’s work has been discussed by others in Harper's, Nonprofit Quarterly and Fast Company. With MAPE student Katy Fetters, Nathan launched the new Media Enterprise Design Lab.
Katie Schwind will be presenting a paper on June 4 and 5 in New York City at the International Conference on Film and Media Studies titled “President Obama’s Approval Ratings: A Discourse Analysis of Broadcast News’ Use of Approval Ratings.”
Autumn Tyler held a photo exhibition on March 30 at Cabal Gallery to display her thesis project, Roots. Self. Gaze.: An Exploration of Identity and Representation. Having traveled to Texas, Georgia and Massachusetts during the fall semester, Autumn’s photo exhibition focused on the visibility of queer and transgender black artists and their artistic interventions to reclaim space, both metaphorically and physically.