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.

A Note from Claire Wardle - Newsletter Editor

Firstly, apologies for the late arrival of the Spring newsletter. A number of different factors have conspired against us, including Google changing this blogging software, which has forced us to move the blog and update it as we went. We are in the process of moving over the old material as we speak. Thanks again to web-mistress Rosa Mikeal Martey for all of her help.

I would also like to encourage people to submit material for the newsletter. I didn't receive anything in reply to my call for information, and for that reason, this newsletter is only really a space for messages from the chair and vice-chair, information about the conference panels and some useful travel information about San Francisco, including restaurant and bookshop tips (a personal favourite when travelling!) We had really hoped this blog format would open up the newsletter, but without suggestions and comments, it's not really working at the moment.

Please take note of some of the great sessions happening in San Francisco and the business meeting, which is on Friday 25 May at 3pm (Franciscan Room C). I look forward to seeing many of you at the conference, and for those of you who aren't able to make it this year, please do get in touch if you have any comments or suggestions for improving the newsletter.

A Note from Marian Meyers - Chair

The ICA annual conference is almost upon us, and I am very excited about the program FSD vice chair Vicki Mayer has put together for us. Vicki has done a tremendous job, and I am confident it will be one of the best we have ever had (please see her article for some of the highlights). I look forward to more of her creativity and vision when she assumes the position of chair of the division after the San Francisco conference. At that point, I will become immediate past chair, and Diana Rios will take over as vice chair. As I contemplate the future of FSD, I know the division will thrive under the leadership of Vicki and Diana.

And so, as I contemplate the end of my tenure as FSD chair, I want to express my thanks and gratitude to all those who helped make my two years as chair – as well as my two years as vice chair prior to that – so truly memorable and gratifying. I could not have done it without the help of so many of you. With this article, my last as chair, I would like to express my appreciation to all of you – because I could not have done my job nor would the Feminist Scholarship Division exist without you. So, first and foremost, the FSD membership deserves my deepest appreciation. It has been such a pleasure to get to know and work with so many of you!

In addition, so many of you deserve singling out for special mention. Cynthia Carter was a tremendous help in guiding me through my first few years as vice chair and then providing on-going support and feedback in my years as chair – in addition to heading the awards committee. When Karen Riggs had to step down as vice chair in the midst of organizing the 2007 conference in Dresden – which also happened to be FSD’s 20th anniversary -- I put out an urgent call for help, and I received a tremendous response. As a result, the Dresden conference and anniversary celebration were a smashing success – thanks to the collaborative efforts of a number of division members – including – but certainly not limited to -- the efforts of Yoo Jae Song, who not only came to the conference from Korea with boxes of T-shirts commemorating the division’s 20th birthday, but also set up shop selling them. It was an honor to sell them alongside her. During my years as chair, Claire Wardle, FSD’s newsletter editor, and Rosa Mikeal Martey completely revamped the division newsletter, Feminist Con/Text, to make it interactive and more responsive and informative to membership. Rosa, our webmistress extraordinaire, also revised FSD’s website. Both the website and the newsletter have set new standards and have been pointed to as models within ICA.

FSD members also supported me in urging ICA to establish a new journal that would welcome critical, primarily qualitative research of the type conducted by feminist communication scholars (and other critical scholars). The result is that Communication, Culture & Critique, to be edited by FSD member Karen Ross, will be launched in spring 2008. Carolyn Byerly was particularly helpful in this process, appearing with me before ICA’s publications board at the New York City meeting in 2005, and providing support and encouragement in so many other ways on so many other issues over the many years I have known her. Of course, the names mentioned here can’t begin to include the many wonderful FSD members who have contributed in innumerable ways to the division’s successes – from serving as translator and arranging for a wonderful meal for FSD members at a traditional German restaurant in Dresden (that would be graduate student Martina Myers) to serving as the division’s student liaison (Rebecca Hains) to filling the role of FSD secretary/historian (Bernadette Barker-Plummer) to volunteering to take minutes and write them up (Karen Ross) to… You get the idea. If I have been successful at all as vice chair or chair, it is only because I have had an army of women behind me. And for that I am extremely grateful.

A Note from Vicki Mayer - Vice Chair

I was so happy to be the programming coordinator for San Francisco’s conference and hope you’ll have a great time there! It was so much fun thinking with the other divisions and interest groups of the ways FSD could be involved with a city that has such an amazing history of progressive feminist, multicultural, and LGBT movements.

One thing we came up with was a plenary re-thinking the impact of the Barnard Convention 25 Years Later, called “Representing Sexuality, Mediating Power.” This was a milestone in articulating a pro-women/pro-sex standpoint for academics and activists alike. It’s an all-star panel, scheduled for Friday, May 25th from 4:30 p.m. to 5:45 p.m. in the huge Franciscan Room C. Check out the participants:
Carol Queen: Part Owner of Good Vibrations, Founder of the Center for Sex and Culture, and Performance Artist, http://www.carolqueen.com/pages/queen.htm
Susan Stryker: Gay Historian, Filmmaker, and Executive Director of Gay and Lesbian Historical Society of Northern California, http://geography.berkeley.edu/ProjectsResources/CaliforniaThinkers/profiles/stryker.html
Carla Freccero: Professor and Chair of Literature, University of CA, Santa Cruz, http://humwww.ucsc.edu/PEMS/faculty/freccero.html
Respondent: Lisa Henderson, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, http://www.umass.edu/communication/faculty_and_staff/faculty/lisa_henderson.shtml
Chair: Lynn Comella, Indiana University, http://www.indiana.edu/~gender/html/visiting_lecturers_and_instruc.html
It’s SO IMPORTANT that you make time for this panel, which is co-sponsored by FSD, LGBT, Phil Comm, and Pop Comm.

This fab group is scheduled right after the FSD Business Meeting, where we will strategize for the future health of the division and award some excellent student papers by Hongmei Chen (University of Maryland), Melissa Fritz (University of Toronto), and Karen Sichler (University of Georgia). Afterwards, we are having a joint reception with LGBT, Phil Comm, Pop Comm, and ERIC, our new and rapidly growing ICA interest group. So folks, I’m sorry, your Friday is booked. Bring yer friends.

Some other notes of interest: We had over 100 submissions for about 52 slots. The quality of the papers and works in progress were really high. There’s a range of panels focusing on everything from girls’ media uses to women’s health, from women’s activism to women and technology. I want to THANK the reviewers for FSD; I could not do this without you!

So I hope to see everyone in San Francisco. If you have a chance, be sure to see some of the great feminist centers, performances, bookstores, and shops in the city.

-- Vicki Mayer

Top 3 Student Papers

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Melissa Fritz, University of Toronto
“Revisiting the Gender Gap: Further Data Analysis of the Gendered Digital Divide in Canada”

Sunday, 27 May, 12pm, Hilton Hotel/Grand Ballroom

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Hongmei Shen, University of Maryland
“All-China Women’s Federation: A Party Representative or Feminist Organization?”

Saturday, 26 May, 3pm, Hilton Hotel/Franciscan Room C

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Karen Sichler, University of Georgia
“Hyperreal Gendering: The End of the Quest for Origins”

Sunday, 27 May, 9am, Hilton Hotel/Franciscan Room C