New announcements!

Check the call for papers and positions blog linked here on the right for new announcements as of June 25, 2007 on an open position and a call for submissions.

Women Challenging Barriers in Mass Comm Fields

submitted by Carolyn Byerly

As promised, I wanted to post some additional information about problems that feminists (and other leftists) have experienced in the academy in recent years. This follows up on the last FSD session at ICA, in which a number of our members shared some of the findings from their research with women in the mass communication field related to barriers to advancement – getting hired, tenured, promoted, etc. FSD has been tracking women’s advancement for six or seven years through the Media Associations Project, a broad effort that has sometimes involved those in our sister feminist groups in NCA, AEJMC, IAMCR, etc. The MAP has produced an annual session at ICA at which we report what has been learned through our inquiries of the previous year. Alongside our own work, a number of other feminist and critical theorists have been doing parallel work, giving our own efforts a bigger context by revealing similar problems throughout higher education for anyone who challenges status quo ideas, values and practices. I suggest the following as excellent related sources.

Aronowitz, S. (2000). The Knowledge Factory: Dismantling the Corporate University and Creating True Higher Education. Boston, MA: South End Press.
Notes: A readable, thoughtful analysis of how university administrations have systematically worked to eliminate intellectuals who critique or challenge neoliberalism or corporatism, or, in the case of feminists, patriarchal values.

Byerly, Carolyn M. (2004). Women and the Concentration of Media Ownership, pp. 245-262. In Rush, R.R., Oukrup, C. and Creedon, P. (Eds.), Women in Journalism and Mass Communication: A Thirty Year Update. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Notes: This is my own political-economic analysis of women’s problems in academic journalism programs, which I believe is related to larger trends associated with conglomeration in the media industries and the gradual corporate takeover of US culture.

Kolodny, A. (1998). Failing the Future: A Dean Looks at Higher Education in the Twenty-first Century. Durham, NC, USA and London, England: Duke University Press.
Notes: Annette Kolodny, a well-known feminist scholar, successfully sued her New England university a number of years ago for sex and religious discrimination. She used the settlement to establish a fund in National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA) for other women going the lawsuit route. This book is a sobering tale of her difficult journey to improve the problems she encountered, by entering administration, after her lawsuit.

Rush, R., Oukrup, C. and Creedon, P. (Eds.). (2004). Women in Journalism and Mass Communication: A Thirty Year Update. Mahwah: NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, Associates.
Notes: This edited volume contains varied essays and empirical pieces that scrutinize women’s persistent under-ranked status in mass communication fields within the United States. It is the definitive resource to date on why we encounter the problems we do.

2006 ICA FSD business mtg minutes

Greetings, folks. Below are the minutes from the 2006 Dresden ICA FSd business meeting. Please feel free to post comments with corrections, notes, or, well, comments!

Minutes

Feminist Scholarship Division business meeting
Dresden, June 2006

1 Announcements

a FSD Chair Marian Meyers thanked FSD officers and all those colleagues who had supported the planning of this year's conference, together with those who had given service in various capacities.

B ICA President Elect Select, Sonia Livingstone, addressed the meeting to discuss ICA 2007 in San Fransisco. She urged members to consider liaising with women's groups in SF and to think about involving some of those groups in the conference, especially to perhaps put on performances in the conference hotel which will be the Hilton. She strongly encouraged members to email her with their ideas for SF but also more generally, in terms of FSD's vision for future directions for ICA.

C Approval of minutes. These were approved.

D 2006 programme and discussion
78 submissions
posters given the same weight as formal panel presentations
pre-conference - Women and News - had been extremely successful, attracting 34 participants from 12 nations: conference organiser Carolyn Byerly was thanked.
To celebrate FSD's 20th anniversary, Joo Yae Song had agreed to organise the printing of T-shirts which were available for sale. She was thanked.
Members were informed that the proposal to create a new journal which would focus on qualitative research, including feminist research and methodologies, had been approved for development by the ICA Board. Marian Meyers was congratulated on a marvelous achievement.

ACTION POINT - Chair to request ICA Exec Board that FSD (as originator of proposal) be encouraged to suggest names for editor and members of editorial board.

ACTION POINT - Chair to request ICA Exec Board that FSD be encouraged to suggest names of new members of the Publications Board.

A key area of concern is the static membership, and Chair said this would be a significant piece of work to progress in the upcoming year. Suggestions from the floor about strategies for increasing membership included more co-sponsorship of sessions with other divisions, more explicit promotion of FSD to others; more explicitly inclusive stance taken to embracing multiple methodologies and promotion of same.

Vicki Mayer was duly voted in as Vice-Chair.

E Top student papers
The three award winners were all present to receive congratulations and their awards.


2 Officer reports

FSD Awards Committee report – the committee put forward nominations for ICA awards, but these nominees were not chosen by the ICA awards committee.

ACTION POINT: FSD Awards Committee to undertake an exploration of the mechanisms whereby individual get asked to serve on Awards Committee and report back. It was thought that as President Elect, Sonia Livingstone might be more receptive to an increase in transparency, so no immediate action was required of the Chair to seek clarification at this moment, hence the work to be undertaken by the Awards Committee.