Kearney and Kackman are editing a collection for Routledge with the same title, and with the aim of updating and expanding considerably upon Robert Allen’s famed Channels of Discourse books. Each chapter will take a different approach to the study of media, explaining its intellectual roots, and showing how to use it. My chapter, for instance, focuses on “Inter- and Para-textuality,” while others examine celebrities and stars, ideology, genre, sound, historiography, ethnography, and so forth. And so Kearney and Kackman hosted a conference, inviting each chapter’s author (or, rather, those who were able to attend) to discuss their topic, challenges they face in writing the chapter, concerns about parameters, key issues, and ideas for case studies and examples. Each participant got about 20 minutes to present, followed by an additional 20 minutes for questions and discussion from the room. In addition to the 25 or so presenters, some faculty, grad students, and undergrads from Notre Dame attended, and they contributed significantly to discussion.

I call it “back to front” and by that I mean that instead of making research, the presentation of new material, and the reporting of findings and conclusions the opening premise, it required that everyone’s opening premise be pedagogic and generative – “how do we teach our topic?” and “where do we start?” were key questions. As most readers know, conference attendance is regularly funded on the grounds that it contributes to faculty’s research profiles: indeed, many of us can only get reimbursement from our home institutions if we are presenting a research paper. Sometimes, poster sessions, workshops, and other activities don’t even count. Thus, if pedagogic gains are made at a conference, or if we stop to discuss how research begins, this must simply happen on the side, and the structure is per force all about the presentation of finished research or research being conducted. By contrast, the Craft of Criticism was structured around how to teach and how to start the exploratory process (and generously paid for all presenters’ attendance, thereby skirting the issue of institutional reimbursement).

This proved a transformational move. All of a sudden, the discussion could turn to the intricacies of how one communicates complex issues in the classroom … and once there, discussion could stay there. All chapters are meant to use one of the author’s published pieces as a case study, but instead of inviting us to rehash what we were doing with those pieces, the conference now asked us to discuss how to teach them and how to discuss their blindspots. As the conference progressed, therefore, I amassed great tips and best practices from the pros. As an audience member, I loved this and benefited from it immensely, and as a presenter, it was so very refreshing to be presenting on issues I’ve presented many times before, yet now looking though the lens of what to do with them in the classroom.

In many ways, this was an utter rarity, therefore: a teacher’s conference. And yet in many ways it energized my research agenda too. There’s this thing that can happen after tenure when one wonders why one is getting up in the morning. It should be easy to motivate oneself as a grad student and junior faculty member, as fear of not getting a job or fear of not getting tenure once one (hopefully) gets a job often provide all the energy (and angst) that one needs. After tenure, I finally had the luxury of sitting back and asking what I was doing and why it matters. And while I’m sure that some people find answers and energy at large, research-led conferences, I often find the sessions rather dull: I’d rather read a paper than hear it read, and still too many papers dive too deep into the specifics without allowing enough time to answer why any of it matters. When we talk about teaching, though, we should always be talking about why it matters. Indeed, if some of us anguish over failed classroom assignments or badly written student papers, and rejoice in the ones that get it right, that’s perhaps because we know that a lot of what we do as academics boils down to the concentrate of what we can communicate in the classroom, what we can motivate others to think about. A conference that was focused on those issues, ironically, led more naturally (for me) to thoughts about what I want to research next, what projects matter, how to engage in them, and so forth, than conferences focused around research. Which has me wondering whether we’re writing with the wrong hand at conferences, and whether there might be a better (or at least another) way to do it all, a way that Craft of Criticism alluringly offered.

Many thanks, therefore, to Mary and Michael, to Notre Dame, to all my fellow presenters (Cynthia Baron, Ron Becker, Mary Beltrán, Patrick Burkart, Cynthia Chris, Norma Coates, Eric Freedman, Mary Gray, Timothy Havens, Heather Hendershot, Matt Hills, Nina Huntemann, Victoria Johnson, Bill Kirkpatrick, Suzanne Leonard, Todd McGowan, Dan Marcus, Jason Mittell, Diane Negra, Matt Payne, Gregory Smith, and Jacob Smith), and to the attendees who asked such thoughtful questions.

Over two-and-a-half days, five problematics will be addressed that have been central to the development of “television studies” as an identifiable academic endeavor and that continue to drive television scholarship: Television’s Past, Present, and Future; Television and the Nation in an Era of Globalization; Television and Politics; Television, Text, and Identity; and finally, Digital Television.

Each problematic will be discussed by a panel featuring an invited keynote speaker followed by two invited respondents and a third we aim to identify through this open call. We are particularly interested in having recent PhDs and advanced graduate students serve as respondents.

Conference Website: TV and Television Studies in the 21st Century [URL]

To Apply to the Open Call

Please review the topic statements from the keynote presenters and select the ONE that best fits your expertise. To review the preliminary statements, please click on the title of each topic here. By May 10, 2013, please submit via email (TV21Cconf@gmail.com) the following in a single document:

• A 250-word statement outlining the ideas of your 10-minute response. Please be specific; offer concrete examples and cases.
• A 3-item bibliography that suggests works key to your thinking in this area.
• A 100-word biographical statement.

The subject of your email should include the words “Open Call” and the topic to which you are responding.

We anticipate making notifications by May 30, 2013. If selected, you can expect to hear from us during the summer with further information.

Conference Organizers: Amanda Lotz and Aswin Punathambekar

One of this year’s key stories seems to be regarding how the industry deals with difference and inclusivity, both for developers and for the industry as a whole. The games industry has rightly been accused of failing to accommodate perspectives beyond those of the young men that have stereotypically been seen as the industry’s primary consumers. A potential watershed moment during this year’s conference was the #1ReasonToBe panel, featuring developers including Brenda Romero (Wizardry, Jagged Alliance), Robin Hunicke (Journey, Glitch, Funomena), Kim McCaullife (Microsoft Studios), Leigh Alexander (journalist for Gamasutra, Kotaku, and others), Elizabeth Sampat (Storm8), and Mattie Brice (independent game critic/journalist).

The panel cleverly pushed the devastasting #1ReasonWhy hashtag into new territory, incorporating both problems facing women in the games industry and “reasons for women to be” in the games industry. Presenters recounted horror stories of both casual and explicit sexism within the industry, while aspiring to start a larger conversation in the industry on issues of gender. The #1ReasonToBe hashtag on Twitter is still ongoing, albeit with less of the vigor that typified the #1ReasonWhy hashtag.

How much of this represents a real and significant shift in the culture of game design? For some, it seems clear that the industry is undergoing significant change on several fronts — The New York Times summarized GDC 2013 as the year the indies “grabbed the controls.” As quoted in the Times piece, game designer Eric Zimmerman has decided to end his annual, provocative Game Design Challenge (won this year by Jason Rohrer, for the second time in three years), explaining that “The idea of doing strange, bizarre, experimental games is no longer strange, bizarre or experimental.” Perhaps, in this context and in this particular moment, panels such as #1ReasonToBe may gain significant traction in the industry.

Unfortunately, even while there was a concerted effort by attendees and regular GDC organizers to reframe who the “games industry” is, some of the events surrounding GDC were still problematic. The International Game Developer’s Association came under widespread criticism for scantily-clad women dancers at their professional conference party. This drew the attention of the aforementioned Brenda Romero, who on the same day she was awarded a Women In Games lifetime achievement award very quickly resigned as co-chair of IGDA’s Women in Games special interest group (along with other IGDA resignations, including outgoing board member Darius Kazemi). On top of this, the creators of Minecraft, Mojang Specifications, threw a party that several developers alleged included women who were paid by the company to socialize with (predominantly male) game developers. Mojang has denied these accusations.

So, how do we come to some sense of where the industry is going? Was 2013 a breakthrough or just a case of an industry that’s moving to address its problematic gender culture while thousands of other attending developers were fine with business as usual? The discussion of gender and inclusivity at GDC2013 included very little from the Nintendos, Microsofts, Sonys, Capcoms, Activision Blizzards, Valves, and so on. In this regard, perhaps Zimmerman’s statement about the shift toward experimentation and change was correct; though the era of the AAA studio has not necessarily passed, AAA products and AAA studios were certainly not the story at this year’s conference. Rather than feature rollouts of new gaming consoles or prodcuts, the industry focused on deep discussions regarding its own culture and ways forward.

In-conference discussions of inclusivity and difference are just the tip of the iceberg, however, as the struggles with these very issues in the male-dominated, party-centric culture around the conference may indicate. How do we bridge this gap?

Note: lodging will be difficult to book that weekend because of an IU home football game so please plan accordingly. Some rooms have been reserved at the Brown County Inn in Brown County, Indiana (approximately 20 minute drive from campus).  Please call the Brown County Inn, 51 St. Rd. 46 E., Nashville, IN 47448  TOLL FREE: 1-800-772-5249.  Tell them that you are coming for the “Doty Memorial.” You must call no later than September 12.

If you have photos that you would like to share with the planning committee, please email Mary L. Gray (mLg at indiana dot edu) or Brenda Weber (breweber at indiana dot edu).

Reality Gendervision:
Sexuality and Gender on Reality TV Conference
April 26-27, 2013
Indiana University
Bloomington, Indiana

Submission deadline:  January 7, 2013

The past decade has witnessed an explosion of programming and scholarship about reality television, yet very little of that scholarship actively deals with the politics of gender that are so insistent on Reality TV.  From Survivor to Jon and Kate Plus 8 to American Idol to Jersey Shore, Reality TV constitutes an enormous and ever-growing archive about our collective desires and anxieties, which often crystallize around gender. The gendered politics of Reality TV’s production and consumption further highlight the need for a discussion specifically on how gender is of critical concern to Reality TV.

This conference is third in a series of international events and is aligned with two previous symposia: Gender Politics & Reality TV (Dublin, Ireland) and Gender Cultures and Reality TV (Auckland, New Zealand).  The US conference marks the imminent publication of a new edited collection, Reality Gendervision: Decoding Sexuality and Gender on Transatlantic Reality TV, edited by Brenda R. Weber and forthcoming from Duke University Press.

Outstanding papers presented at the Reality Gendervision conference will be invited for publication in a leading peer-reviewed journal in 2014.

Confirmed keynote addresses:

Misha Kavka, Department of Film, TV, and Media Studies,
University of Auckland

Laurie Ouellette, Communication Studies, University of
Minnesota

With a pre-conference presentation on Thursday, April 25th by:

Herman Gray, Sociology, University of California at Santa Cruz

Deadline for submissions:  January 7, 2013 (announcement of acceptances will be made by February 1, 2013).  Submit 350-word abstracts and a brief bio to Brenda Weber: breweber@indiana.edu or to rgv@indiana.edu

For more information, consult the conference website.

The National Communication Association had such a tremendous number of interesting panels over the conferences five days that it would be impossible to truly capture anything like an accurate image of the event in a few hundred words. Instead, I want to provide a glimpse of one small segment of the conference, a sampling of feminist and girlhood panels. Several of the panels were organized by Sarah Projansky and brought some new faces to NCA for the first time. The first panel I attended from this grouping was entitled, Girls’ Voices in and Through Media and looked at particular feminist issues in girl studies. Sharon Ross presented a paper entitled “OMG, LOL: Urban Teen’s Thoughts on Media” that provided some fascinating early data about how different demographic groupings of teens, particularly divided by race and class, conceptualized and consumed media. Not only did Ross observe important differences in what these different groups of teens watched but she also found some key differences in the way these teens claimed to use or understand the media they watched. Jessalynn Keller presented her project “Talking Back to Seventeen: Girls’ Media Activism, Feminism, and the Blogosphere” exploring how a particular girl blogger entered into a complicated discourse with Seventeen magazine and its messages through “The Seventeen Magazine Project”  and what this case study may say about the potential for feminist girl activism on the web. UW-Madison’s very own Nora Seitz also presented on this panel, performing a fascinating analysis of the ABC Family program Huge and how the series’ representation of overweight teens deviated from the Alloy brand in core ways that reflected its specific authorship and industrial contexts. Sarah Projansky finished the panel with a particularly deep analysis of the media coverage of Venus Williams in her late teen years and the unspoken racism that emerged surrounding discussion of the beads that she kept in her hair and the differing approaches to this style taken by the news and tennis officials at different points in her career.

Later in the day, I attended a workshop titled “The Politics of Doing Feminist Girls’ Media Studies” featuring a variety of scholars in differing phases of their careers. Beretta Smith Shomade from Tulane University explored in depth the role of the teacher/activist/scholar in incorporating community activism and involvement in their scholarship and provided a particularly powerful example from her own work with students and media literacy education projects. More experienced scholars on the panel explored in depth the complex relationship between scholarship, activism and pleasure that often circulates around the media. Ruth Nicole Brown discussed an activist centered project on Soul Hot that explored how the Soul Hot phenomenon allowed the voices of black girlhood to be audible and to counter narratives that were “about us but never by us.” Angharad N. Valdivia, also an intersectional scholar, emphasized the ways in which we have to think about girls as not only consumers of media but as producers of media and culture. She explains the importance of being immersed in these kinds of media, of, as a parent, consuming media with kids. Valdivia argued that it is important to explore how, sometimes problematic, mainstream media may open up a space for certain kinds of subjectivities and recognition for young people. Younger scholars, like Lindsay H. Garrison and Jessalynn Keller discussed the challenges that they encountered with trying to find materials associated with girl’s media in traditional archives because of the ways in which girls work and girls media has historically been undervalued, as well as the challenges they encountered with reconciling feminist politics with the methodologies that they used in their interviews.

A more historical perspective on feminism could be seen in the panel: “Feminist Generations and Finding a Voice: Exploring Different Generations of Feminism’s Voices”. Cindy Koenig Richards began the panel by looking at the Washington Women’s Cookbook that was produced by Washington Women’s Suffrage Movement to expand its reach and its descendent Pots and Politics. She explained that while some dismissed these publications as too conservative and domestic that they also provided opportunities for women to be published for the first time and helped these women develop a public presence. Julia Wood provided a concise overview of the second wave and the departure that the third wave takes from it, in her view, surrounding issues of difference. She expressed concern about the need to assure that the third wave finds a way to engage more effectively in making their voices heard in key venues while addressing structural issue. Bonnie Dow brought up similar questions in her work, while discussing how postfeminism has to be reconceptualized in relationship to a particular life stage. She discussed her own experience with postfeminism through the prism of Sarah Palin, who is from the same generation. She argues that postfeminism has to be thought of as an authentic subject position in order to interrogate the new momism that she argues is having something of a backlash effect as part of this postfeminist position. Finally Natalie N Fixmer-Oraiz provided a fascinating case study of the third wave organization the Reproductive Justice Network which she argues eschews models of the wave that emphasized difference rather than those that emphasizes continuity. She explains how the Reproductive Justice Network privileges youth, intersectionality, and engages with young motherhood and queer and trans women.

The final panel that I attended along these lines was my own: The Girl and the Franchise. Morgan Blue began the panel with her paper “‘At least I know how to be a girl!’: Postfeminist ‘Girlification’ on Disney Channel” which explores how the a kind of sexualized young feminine girlfriend is privileged for both young girls and adult women. She argues that this dispersed cultural phenomenon is a “sensibility” and infantilizes women of all ages and illustrated this phenomenon with case studies from Hannah Montana and Wizards of Waverly Place. Derek Johnson explored the complexities of gender and fandom by looking at the case of a little girl Katie who was teased for being a fan of Star Wars in his paper “The Force is with you, Katie’: Media Franchising and the Confinement of Girls Through Multiplied Production”. He explained the activist response to the event and the media phenomenon that followed in support of Katie that attempted to frame Star Wars as “for girls” too. He explains the complex rhetoric of this response that both frames Star Wars as inclusive while also carving out individual iterations of the franchise that are clearly gendered  and funnel fans into ghettoized niches. The panel also included Taylor Nygaard’s paper “From Clothes to New Media: Alloy Inc. and the Colonization of Contemporary Girl Culture” which detailed the growing role the Alloy company has in various forms of teen media in particular television and forays into web series. She explored how the imperatives of Alloy, which run on particularly consumption oriented commercial lines,  inflect the massive amount of content that Alloy distributes for teens today. What about my paper? That is for another post.

As I hope the reader can see, a tremendous amount of different approaches to girlhood, feminism ad media are available in only a few brief panels. Yet the panels I detailed here represent only a small snapshot of the tremendous work done at the conference. What was your NCA experience? Let us know in the comments section so we can paint a bigger picture.

Below are our respective takeaways from our time in Seattle.

Ben Aslinger: Nancy Baym talked about her ongoing interview research with musicians on how musicians manage their social media presences (and absences). Baym emphasized that musicians must navigate why, how, and where to be present, given the proliferation of online music services and social networking sites. David Phillips profiled the emergence of a Quantified Self community and the potential implications of data being used not only in the hacker spirit of obtaining self-knowledge but also for repression and surveillance. Rosa Mikeal Martey presented ongoing collaborative research on gaming practices and identifications in Second Life, where she and her collaborators constructed a game in order to do virtual world ethnographic work. Tama Leaver posed a series of provocative questions about digital media presence, profiling the ethics and problems of parents creating social media traces (and thus digital identities) for their children (how much should parents share on online social networks, microblogging sites, and photo services?) and how digital identities are handled after death. Tom Boellstorff’s keynote featured a provocative discussion about how to treat the gap between the digital and the physical.  He drew interesting connections between his work on Second Life and his previous work on gay men and women in Indonesia. Alex Leavitt and Rosa Mikeal Martey’s presentations raised questions regarding how we balance our work as scholars with the work of archiving and preserving our objects of study. Is it our responsibility to save our objects of study? What new tools, software programs, and skills do we need to learn in order to preserve an object for study or keep our object of study around long enough for us to complete a research project? And through it all, there was the kissing booth, an experiment in presence, absence, viewership, and subjectivity designed by Theresa Senft.

Sean Duncan: One of the most interesting gaming-related sessions was scheduled at the very end of the conference, featuring four papers on the topic of sexual identity in digital games (including one of the authors of this piece, Ben Aslinger of Bentley University, also featuring Todd Harper of the Singapore MIT GAMBIT Game Lab, Lee Sherlock of Michigan State University, and Kevin Rutherford of Miami University).  In it, issues of sexual identity and game studies were addressed from four quite complementary perspectives — Aslinger through an engagement with the question of what a queer game studies might look like, Harper through the development of A Closed World, a game project that he led at GAMBIT, Sherlock through fannish practices around World of Warcraft, and Rutherford through the analysis of game mechanics in Fallout: New Vegas that yield the gay male character option as the optimal one.  Through each of these talks, issues of sexual identity were addressed theoretically, through design, through investigation of fan practices, and through a look at the procedural rhetoric of a game.  As the beginnings of a queer game studies seems to be taking hold, it was heartening to see these scholars attempt to address not just how fans express sexual identity through their gameplay, but each tied these forms of engagement in some fashion to design, either the design of games to explicitly engage players with these perspectives (as in Aslinger’s discussion of Stonewall Brawl and Harper’s discussion of A Closed World) or the ways that game design and game mechanics are implicated in popular, commercial games (such as Sherlock’s discussion of World of Warcraft and Rutherford’s analysis of Fallout: New Vegas).  As the connections between internet studies and game studies deepens, it’s a positive step to see us moving beyond an inordinate focus on synchronous virtual worlds such as massively-multiplayer online games to a broader consideration of the variety of games, their designers’ intents, and the means by which they are engaged upon via the internet.

Liz Ellcessor: On Monday, before the official start of IR12, I attended the conference’s doctoral colloquium. With over 30 Ph.D. students from a variety of disciplines, the colloquium took the form of small group meetings, in which 3-5 students were matched with mentors on the basis of shared interests or methodologies. These senior internet scholars led dedicated discussions of each group member’s project, drew connections between projects, prompted reflection, and offered advice and support. Obviously, experiences within small groups varied, but in wrapping up the day, organizer Elizabeth Buchanan observed that the groups all engaged with challenges regarding interdisciplinary work, work-life balance, and the ethics of research in an era in which expectations of privacy may be shifting for both scholars and our research participants.

Some of these concerns regarding methods of Internet research were also addressed in Wednesday’s Theoretical Reassessments panel. Ron Rice and Ryan Fuller began the session with an analysis of the prevalence of various concepts and theoretical found in article titles and abstracts related to online media in the past several years. Some concepts declined in popularity, such as “Web 2.0,” while others grew, including research using uses and gratifications theories. In concluding, the authors suggested that the field could benefit from more theoretical work on credibility, participatory media, relationship management and cultural differences. Similar data analysis from Matthew Allen addressed the discourses of Web 2.0. Using Leximancer as a tool to analyze a vast corpus of data and locate the key terms and relationships, which centered on “share” and “use,” he theorized that these uses of language ultimately produced a preferred “user” subject position, analogous to preferred reading positions, from which to engage with Web 2.0 media and technologies. Alex Halavais conducted a “genealogy of badges,” describing the religious and military traditions from which badges emerged, and the blurring of their uses as signifiers of authority or identity and items of commerce. This “baggage of badges” carries over into their use in new media forms, whether in games, FourSquare, or the current MacArthur badges for learning competition. Finally, Annette Markham focused on the difficulty of protecting the privacy of human subjects when doing Internet research in the current, searchable, web environment. She argued in favor of fabrication, pointing out that research composites, fictional narratives, and fabricated conversations can be used ethically as a means of camouflaging particular online identities and communities while still drawing upon real themes and concerns identified through research.