Teresa Fund - News from Marian Meyers

It is with great pleasure, appreciation and humility that I announce that the Teresa Fund has been fully endowed at the level of $10,000 – all of it very generously contributed by our own Yoo Jae Song of Ewha University in Seoul. Yoo Jae decided to establish the fund in memory of her beloved mother, who passed away last year. Her mother’s whose Christian name was Teresa. It is Yoo Jae’s hope that the fund will enable, so that feminist scholars could to get the recognition and honor their they deserve. This incredibly wonderful gift is FSD’s first endowed fund, and the awards committee is working to establish criteria and guidelines for its operation. The awards committee this year consists of former FSD chair Carolyn Byerly, Yu Shi of Pennsylvania State-Harrisburg, and myself. Yoo Jae, who has been very active with the awards committee in previous years, will remain an honorary member of the Teresa Fund committee so as to stay informed.

With this $10,000 endowment from Yoo Jae, FSD can being begin the process of honoring our own deserving scholars. But it is up to us to make sure that the fund remains robust and grows so that we will be able to make significant awards to support feminist scholarship. Over the years, the Feminist Scholarship Division has put forward some of our best scholars for ICA awards, only to have the honors go to more traditional researchers. The problem that feminist scholars are facing is not simply within ICA – as we well know, feminist scholarship is still often overlooked, excluded and marginalized within our own and many other fields. The Teresa Fund Committee would like to use Yoo Jae’s donation as a starting point, to encourage others to contribute so that we can grant larger awards and so that more of those who are deserving of recognition get it. We ask that FSD members and others consider making donations to the Teresa Fund for its continued and sustained growth. It is worth noting that AEJMC’s MaryAnn Yodelis Smith Award, established in the early 1990s to support women’s research, has been the recipient of book royalties and other contributions from AEJMC members and others. We would like to see the Teresa Fund similarly be viewed as a deserving recipient of royalties from books and other types of donations. In supporting the Teresa Fund, we not only honor the spirit of its founding, but also ourselves and our own work, and the future of feminist scholarship.

News and Updates from Vicki Mayer

After an exciting meeting in San Francisco, I want to write you about the state of the Division as well as upcoming efforts.

First off, we are better off than we were just six months ago in terms of membership and our collective voices in ICA. The $3 campaign urging members to join our sister divisions (ERIC, LGBT, and Phil Comm) seems to have been working to our benefit, even though we charge a bit more than $3 for membership. As you remember, we were in danger at some point of dipping below the minimum numbers demanded for divisional status (200 that is), but with the assistance and support of fellow division leaders Isabel Molina, Lynn Comella, David Phillips, Kumi Silva, Katherine Sender, and Nick Couldry, we have all mutually become stronger. This is a really important thing because ICA board members vote on such important issues as what organizations ICA develops connections with and invests in, where we host conferences, and what indeed how we should define communication as a discipline in the future. If you have not yet registered for the sister divisions above, please consider doing so. The collective cost of joining all of the divisions for a year is about the price of a martini at the conference hotel in Montreal.

Speaking of Montreal, let’s support the Divisions by attending joint-sessions and preconferences. Preconferences are an excellent way to spend a day discussing and debating hot issues in communication today (not to mention a great venue for making new friends and contacts). FSD is co-sponsoring a preconference with Popular Communication entitled “Analysing Media Industries and Media Production: an Emerging Key Area for Communication Research.” While “feminism” is not in the title of the preconference, I think its very important to recognize the feminist contributions in an area of research that historically has been masculinist in the ways that gendered labor and cultural identities, as well as feminist theory and methods have been downplayed or completely overlooked. See the longer description in the newsletter for further details.

FSD has been a leader in promoting social change in ICA. Division member efforts have led to more recognition for feminist researchers and helped push for a new journal in the association. One of those efforts, the Media Associations Project (MAP), needs assistance right now.

Started from informal discussions at the 2000 FSD business meeting about gender discrimination in media and communication departments, MAP launched through the hard work and efforts of past-chairs Cynthia Carter from the Cardiff School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies, Carolyn Byerly of Howard University, and Marian Meyers of the University of Georgia. The first MAP project coordinator Sheida Shirvani (Ohio University at Zanesville) oversaw an online survey, followed by Karin Wahl-Jorgensen’s (Cardiff School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies) efforts to recruit focus group leaders to follow up on quantitative measure. In all, Wahl-Jorgensen, Tara Emmers-Sommers (University of Nevada- Las Vegas), and others have conducted several focus groups using a bi-national sample of professors, graduate students, and faculty chairs.

As they analyze this data and prepare a report on their findings, it is important to find a new coordinator for MAP. Although FSD was the lunch pad for this initiative, we would like to extend the opportunity to our sister associations (NCA and AEJMC) to lead this project through the next stages. Anecdotal evidence points to the enduring discrimination in university departments, despite the perception of equality in the popular imaginary, but we need this empirical research to corroborate our stories. Please contact me if you can help with this project!

Special thanks to Diana, Claire, Rosa, and Marian. Their collective efforts continue to keep us growing.

FSD and Popular Communication Pre-Conference Information

Analysing Media Industries and Media Production: an Emerging Key Area for Communication Research

Organised by the Popular Communication and Feminist Scholarship Divisions

Date: 22 May 2008
Venue: tbc
Costs: $tba will include lunch and regular coffee/tea breaks

Description and Rationale:

This pre-conference brings together established and up and coming scholars who are examining the fundamental question of how popular communication artefacts come to take the form they do. This question involves re-examining questions of cultural production, the status of cultural industries, and their organization in light of new approaches drawn from cultural studies, feminist and critical race studies, and global studies. This is a vibrant and interdisciplinary area, drawing on sociology, cultural studies, organisational and management studies, political economy, economics, social history, cultural geography and social theory, to name just a few. Which theories and methods are most likely to consolidate the recent success of this field of analysis? What tensions exist between the various disciplines contributing to the field and how might they best be addressed?

The pre-conference addresses these questions in four panels, consisting of leading speakers that represent disciplinary and geographic diversity. Each group of presentations will be followed by open round-table discussion from all participants. The preconference is meant as an inclusive dialogue, a chance to search for points of agreement as well as clarify differences. Position papers will be posted to all participants before the conference and we will establish a blog for participants to post questions and challenges that we may address during the course of the day. Following the preconference, we expect to look to participants for next steps in considering production or industrial studies as part of the communication discipline.

Pre-conference convenors:
David Hesmondhalgh, University of Leeds
Amanda Lotz, University of Michigan
Vicki Mayer, Tulane University

Panel 1: Traditions of Theory and Research, 8:30-10 a.m.
This panel brings together three traditions with their own theoretical orientations. John Caldwell (Professor and Chair of Critical Studies at UCLA) addresses the contribution of film and television studies to a long history of mass communication research. Graham Murdock (Reader in the Sociology of Culture at Loughborough University) has been a key theorist of the political economy of culture. Joseph Turow (Robert Lewis Shayon Professor of Communication at Penn's Annenberg School for Communication) has been a longtime proponent of organizational approaches in the study of media industries.
Moderator: Amanda Lotz, University of Michigan

John Caldwell, UCLA
Graham Murdock, University of Loughborough
Joseph Turow, University of Pennsylvania


Panel 2: Methods, 10:30-noon
This panel brings us to our diverse groundings, that is, the actual methods we use in building our theories about production and industries. Widely influenced by feminist theories and ethnographic approaches, these panels present complementary, yet distinct approaches to the study of challenging spaces and their human subjects. Georgina Born (Fellow and Director of Studies in Social and Political Sciences, at Emmanuel College, Cambridge) brings an anthropological perspective based in her esteemed work on musicians and BBC employees. Laura Grindstaff (Associate Professor of Sociology at University of California, Davis) adds the perspective of the participant-observer in a sociological tradition. Lisa McLaughlin (Associate Professor of Mass Communication and Women’s Studies) adds a third voice straight from the field, with a discussion of feminist methods in the context of global electronics industries.
Moderator: Vicki Mayer, Tulane University

Georgina Born, University of Cambridge
Laura Grindstaff, UC-Davis
Lisa McLaughlin, Miami University

Lunch 12:30 – 2 p.m.

Panel 3: Transnational Industries and Production, 2-3:30 pm
Theories surrounding the globalization of media industries and their ancillary products frequently overlook the local dimensions to production, distribution, and exhibition circuits. This panel seeks to overcome these dichotomies with a discussion of the global dimensions of their located research. Michael Curtin (Professor of Media and Cultural Studies and Director of Global Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison), Jyotsna Kapur (Associate Professor of Cinema at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale), and Serra Tinic (Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Alberta) are each working on geographies (respectively, China, India, and Canada) that are crucially important to our understanding of global production, from the roles of states and transnational industries, to the perspectives of workers and laborers in those fields.
Moderator: David Hesmondhalgh, University of Leeds

Michael Curtin, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Jyotsna Kapur, SIU-Carbondale
Serra Tinic, U. of Alberta

Panel 4: Directions, 4-5:30 p.m.
This final panel raises future directions for a study of cultural industries and production by capturing some issues that have frequently fall outside of the purviews of our respective disciplines. Jonathan Burston (Assistant Professor of Information Studies at the University of Western Ontario) investigates the role of the military in media production. David Hesmondalgh (Professor of Media and Music Industries at the University of Leeds) raises the role of affect in symbolic production sites. Vicki Mayer (Associate Professor and Chair of Communication at Tulane University) works with invisible labor communities in the new television economy. Timothy Havens (Associate Professor of Communication at the University of Iowa) pushes us to look at cultural negotiations in standard business practices.
Moderator: Amanda Lotz, University of Michigan

Jonathan Burston, University of Western Ontario
David Hesmondhalgh, University of Leeds
Vicki Mayer, Tulane University
Tim Havens, University of Iowa

New ICA journal - Communication, Culture and Critique

After many FSD business meetings ending up in a disappointed discussion about the lack of an ICA journal which would publish the critical, qualitative work so favoured of our division members, our very own Karen Ross is the Editor of the new ICA journal: Communication, Culture and Critique. Let’s hope we see some of the best gender scholarship making its way to a wider ICA audience.

Communication, Culture & Critique provides an international forum for research and commentary which examines the role of mediated communication in today's world. We welcome high quality research and analyses from diverse theoretical and methodological approaches, from all fields of communication, media, film and cultural studies, which is critically informed, methodologically imaginative and careful in its exposition and argument. Foci for enquiry can include all kinds of text- and print-based media, as well as broadcast, still and moving images and electronic modes of communication including the internet, games and mobile telephony. We publish research-informed and theory-focused articles, commentaries on evolving and topical issues, research notes and reviews (books, films, DVDs, etc.). Any and all approaches, analyses and perspectives are welcome, but especially those with a qualitative and/or interpretive inflection. Issue 1, vol.1 will be published in March 2008 and subsequent issues in the volume published in June, September and December 2008. We look forward to receiving your contributions to this exciting new journal which we hope will quickly become an important voice in our field, offering lively and innovative perspectives and critiques.
Contributions to CCC are via the online submission system provided by Manuscript Central. To submit your article/note/review, please go to:
http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/cccr
and follow the online instructions.

Women and Language

Women and Language is seeking an editor, term beginning January 2010. The Executive Committee of the Organization for the Study of Communication, Language and Gender (OSCLG) selects the editor. Editorial terms are for four years, renewable.

Women and Language, an international, interdisciplinary research periodical has the mission of providing a feminist forum for those interested in communication, language and gender. W&L publishes peer-reviewed research and theoretical articles from all disciplines with interests in women and language. Also included are essays; personal narratives; poetry; news about scholarly publications, work in progress, bibliographical material, conferences, relevant magazine and newspaper articles; and correspondence from around the world.

Women and Language is affiliated with the Organization for the Study of Communication, Language and Gender with which it shares many aims.

Process for Selection

Applications for editorial appointment are sought beginning immediately and must be received by August 1, 2008, with interviews scheduled at the OSCLG annual meeting in October 2008, which will be held in Nashville, Tennessee. During 2009 transition arrangements will be made and the new editor will begin accepting manuscripts in preparation for her/his first issue of Spring 2007.

Interested persons may raise questions with current editor, Anita Taylor, at ataylor"at"gmu.edu; or with Laura Ellingson at lellingson"at"scu.edu.