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.

My own interest in writing this piece was sparked when I read Fred E. H. Schroeder’s 1973 essay “Video Aesthetics and Serial Art,” in the first edition of Horace Newcomb’s edited anthology Television: The Critical View (1976). The articles contemplating television aesthetics, such as Schroeder’s and Newcomb’s “Toward a Television Aesthetic,” disappear in later editions of this book. As Jonathan Gray and Amanda Lotz note in their book Television Studies, “the contents of the volume shifted considerably from journalists to academics over the first few editions” (18). Indeed, Gray and Lotz make a “gentle call” for a “more successful reintegration of aesthetics and critical analysis” as a “key frontier” for the future of television studies (53). This type of work exists, even if it does not explicitly call itself that: Julie D’Acci’s Defining Women: Television and the Case of Cagney & Lacey, Jeremy Butler’s Television Style, and a whole section of essays in Ethan Thompson and Jason Mittell’s How to Watch Television. But why hasn’t there been a bigger return to this analytical area?

I think there are a few factors that complicate this issue. For one, in the last decade there has been a clear shift in the public perception of television from the denigrated also-ran to a medium taken seriously by viewers as a prominent art form, a reputation that films and filmmakers have enjoyed for several decades. Likewise, aesthetics seems more clearly or naturally articulated in discussion of film than it does with television. Does this speak to a tension in television studies and television scholars, who may want to continue to distance themselves from film studies in regards to carving out its own disciplinary boundaries?

From another perspective, David Thorburn writes about this issue, rooting the problem less in the medium and more in terms of language. In his 1987 paper “Television as an Aesthetic Medium” he writes that “the adjective ‘aesthetic’ is problematic, I realize. But I know no other word to use for the qualities I wish to identify in our popular culture and specifically in our television system” (162). Despite the complicated nature of this term, he notes that he wants to employ it not as “a valuing of aesthetic objects” but rather for use as “a designation of their chief defining feature—their membership in a class of cultural experiences understood to be fictional or imaginary, understood to occur in a symbolic, culturally agreed upon imaginative space” (162).

In yet another way perhaps the early writing set the stage for a complicated relationship between television studies and aesthetics. Some articles from the 1960s and 1970s focus more on what television in this era couldn’t do rather than what it could do. Schroeder writes at length about the smallness of television image and television’s inability to transform “televised” arts within its at-the-time technological parameters. Evelina Tarroni’s article “The Aesthetics of Television” spends considerable time debating whether television is “art” or “merely a technical means of transmission which adds nothing to, and introduces no change, in the subject matter transmitted” (437). These aesthetic contemplations, while worthy of continued examination, are very much products of their time. Articles like this at their core were defensive arguments that had to first convince readers that television is art, and that television isn’t film. Since this line of thinking is less necessary for contemporary audiences, there is no longer a need to differentiate between the ideas that were at the center of these early television aesthetic discussions. These lines have been largely erased, between television actors and film actors, or between television texts and film texts.

From my perspective, what makes the conversation about aesthetics so productive, and instructive, is the reconnection of analyses that consider the form, content, and context of television programs, and relinking cultural studies and television aesthetics in a multitude of texts: old and new television programs; cult, popular, or unpopular programs; particular seasons or series as a whole; special episodes; mythology or monster-of-the week episodes; serial or episodic programs; groups of programs on networks or cable channels; “online” television, etc. In this regard, writers might also want to consider the ways in which different modes of distribution, reception, availability of texts, and their historical trajectories might inform aesthetic analysis.

From my own teaching perspective, I came to these questions and concerns from reading television studies research from the 1970s, but also from what felt like a classroom problem: why is it so easy for my students to talk about the form and content of films I show in class, when they have such difficulties connecting form and content in our analysis of television programs? Is it because television programs are devoid of form? Of course not, so let’s figure this out together.

This is the sixth post in Antenna’s series The Aesthetic Turn, which examines questions of cultural studies and media aesthetics. If you missed any of the earlier posts in the series, they can be read here.

I’ll be honest: I watched the Oscars live on Sunday, and though I found MacFarlane spectacularly unfunny, didn’t find a whole lot to be offended over.  So imagine my surprise upon waking up to a Facebook news feed full of proclamations that the host was not only unfunny, but misogynist and racist, to boot (In my defense, I appear to have missed several of the most egregious displays of sexism and racism while chatting with fellow partygoers and/or noshing).  There’s a lot of excellent reporting and analysis out there, so I won’t spend my space here recapping it (Two of my favorite pieces include this one from The New Yorker, and this from The Atlantic).  Throughout the day, I not only learned about the moments I’d missed, but entered into online discussions with folks far and wide about the controversy, and by mid-afternoon, came across several instances of backlash in which people defended MacFarlane’s right to make the jokes he wants to make, and accusations that those upset by the ordeal were overreacting.

For my money, Margaret Lyons’ Vulture piece offers the best response to this particular counter-critique:

Jeez, the song was a joke! Can’t you take a joke? Yes, I can take a joke. I can take a bunch! A thousand, 10,000, maybe even more! But after 30 or so years, this stuff doesn’t feel like joking. It’s dehumanizing and humiliating, and as if every single one of those jokes is an ostensibly gentler way of saying, “I don’t think you belong here.” All those little instances add up, grain of sand by grain of sand until I’m stranded in a desert of every “tits or GTFO” joke I’ve ever tried to ignore.

Lyons’ argument offers the jumping-off point for this post.  I’m not here to make any grand claims about whether MacFarlane was funny or within his rights as a comedian.  I’m not even here to argue that his jokes were sexist or racist, appropriate or inappropriate (Though I welcome thoughtful arguments on all sides in the comments, or as another Antenna post entirely!).  I’m here to make a plea that before we each go to our separate corners, carefully guarding and maintaining our own position on the controversy, we open ourselves up to the opportunity to interrogate what happened and consider what it reveals about comedy, about Hollywood, about society.  I would argue that MacFarlane is not so much the problem as a symptom. There’s a lot that’s problematic about Hollywood’s treatment of women, and it neither begins nor ends with MacFarlane OR the Oscars.  But if we stop identifying the symptoms, we stop thinking about the problem.  So let’s seize the moment and have conversations about these issues.  They’re incredibly complex, but absolutely worth taking seriously and unpacking.

Hegemony is pernicious because it relies on invisibility.  The system can only be maintained by convincing everyone that the way things are is the way they should be–that our beliefs, our existing social structures structures, our interactions are normal, and thus not worth interrogating.  Even for those of us personally and professionally committed to challenging ideological structures, normalization proves a difficult force to escape.  I confess that at the party I attended, a colleague said, “Man!  Does he think that by telling all the women how nice they look, he can get away with murder?” and I failed to see the brilliant critique that comment articulated.  Most of the time, most of us walk around without seeing the ideologies which guide our lives as constructed.

And that’s why moments when the machinations of hegemony are laid bare are so powerful.  For a few days after MacFarlane’s hosting gig, discourse has opened up around questions of patriarchy and the media’s role in perpetuating misogyny.  These moments when some of us are thinking, “Wait a minute…there’s something wrong here” and some are saying, “Oh come on.  It’s fine.  It’s normal” provide us with an opportunity to have conversations about the things we take for granted.  Take to Facebook, to Twitter, to the classroom, to coffee klatsches and have the conversation.

I admit that I didn’t necessarily expect this semester’s opportunity to unpack the relationship between media and ideology to come in the form of an awards show.  But I am spectacularly grateful that it did, and for the chance to open essential dialogue about these issues with my students, colleagues, friends, and family.  (And you!  Feel free to continue the conversation in the comments!)

One recommendation: re-imagine the function of TV texts in the cultural studies project and in doing so revise our role as scholars/teachers and the foundation of our expertise. Approaches to the politics of TV representation (a central lynch pin in cultural studies models) have remained relatively stagnant. In many ways, they still reflect the ideological approaches central to the field at its birth in the 1970s. Despite evolving interest in contexts of production and the conceptualization of reception as a process of negotiation, a key function of the teacher/scholar has remained the same: to open readers’/students’ eyes to the unnoticed ideological assumptions in texts by offering sophisticated readings that marshal representational theories, close textual analysis, and historical perspective.  Because such work is usually invested in a political project (e.g., feminism, critical race theory, Marxism, queer theory), the process of understanding the ideological implications of representations are a matter of opening students’ eyes to the politically problematic nature of those representations.

I apologize for falling into the pitfall of making sweeping, unsupported characterizations.  However, I do so in order to identify the most taken-for-granted ways we operate as teacher/scholars and to historicize the utility of certain kinds of expertise.  We work hard to know more about how texts operate than students and assume that our job is to impart more sophisticated ways of understanding texts, power, and politics. That approach made sense at a time when television constructed a mythic mainstream through images and narratives shared by large percentages of the population.  But I don’t believe it is as productive for intervening in a society as profoundly marked by the fragmentation of cultural consumption as ours.  Texts are still ideologically complex and politically invested, of course, but they don’t function the way they used to sociologically which should lead us to change how we use them pedagogically. TV texts don’t seem to be well suited any more for the kind of cultural studies interventions we have traditionally used them for (i.e., to make students understand culture as a site where systems of power get reproduced and contested with the ultimate goal of producing a more just social world) because both TV and society have changed.

In response to such changes, I would like to suggest that we shift our role and the basis of our expertise.  What could cultural studies work on TV look like if we saw our function as facilitating conversations among our students (and ourselves) about social identity, privilege, and power centered on their and our differing engagements with and feelings about television programming? To many of us, that may sound like we already do, but I believe we can do that differently—more explicitly and wholeheartedly. Executing such an approach fully would require different skills (and different modes of scholarship) than the ones we are socialized in during graduate school; our expertise would not be based (at least solely) on providing the smart, theoretically sophisticated reading of a text, but rather on helping students talk to each other about their experiences with media. It might require us to be sociologists, mediators, or even therapists as much as or more than cultural theorists and textual and industry analysts.  Such an approach might offer benefits better suited to our current context in which cultural segregation and political polarization seem to be as much of a problem for social progress as the homogenizing dynamics of network television were in the 1970s.

The approach we’ve followed up to now develops students’ capacity for critical thinking; it is predicated upon the assumption that demystifying how media texts operate or how the media industries are structured are practical ways to give students the skills needed to become responsible, liberally educated citizens. Giving students more information about the dynamics of cultural production and developing their ability to think critically is vital. But I also believe that there are limits to the benefits of that approach; just because people know more, doesn’t mean they will do better (to paraphrase and challenge Maya Angelou).  The new approach I suggest here could develop students’ capacity for empathy.  As various academic traditions have long pointed out, empathy is a socio-political competency needed to translate knowing better into doing better. TV studies could serve as a tremendously valuable arena where students can develop those abilities; in doing so, Television Studies could once again become a valuable part of the cultural studies project.

“I believe in criticism and I believe in humbly analyzing one’s faults,” she writes.  This rings true for me, as I wholeheartedly—truly!—welcome students’ critiques and suggestions for improvements of both my own teaching and my syllabi.  Teaching, after all, requires constant evolution.  I’m confident in my own teaching style, but I’m new enough that there’s certainly room for improvement.  When a student urged me to play devil’s advocate more often by challenging students in class discussion, I saw it as constructive criticism.  And one student this semester gave me several excellent ideas for in-class activities I’m considering using in the fall.  I encourage students to give me useful feedback on their evaluations, and tell them that their input is important to me.  The result has been generally supportive and constructive criticism.

And yet, as Jenkins explains, “…as I read these negative reviews I sometimes don’t understand what restaurants these people are eating at.”  Haven’t we all had this experience with evaluations?  Sometimes I’m left wondering what class a student was attending, or what they were expecting to get from my class.  Of course, there are always the “No exams!” and “Less reading!” comments that are not really useful (or feasible).  But there are also bewildering comments that reveal confusion about the nature and content of the course, including one suggestion that I use less media in my teaching of a media studies course.

In separating the wheat from the chaff, Jenkins encapsulates what I view as the best advice regarding evaluations: “I want to read my criticism and take it on the chin, use it to better see what we are doing wrong and improve… but have to put more faith in what I see in front of me.”  Anyone who’s been teaching for any length of time will say this is the key to reading student evaluations: approach with an open mind, and a willingness to embrace practical suggestions, but compare the feedback to your own experience in the class, and if it just doesn’t fit (with your experience, or indeed, with evals from other students!), let it go.  This is the only route to turning evaluations into a productive exercise while maintaining your sanity.

I’d love you to chime in below with your own experiences with evaluations.  What’s the best advice you have for administering evaluations and/or dealing with the resulting feedback?  What’s the best (funniest, most rewarding, etc.) feedback you’ve gotten from a student?  The worst?