s-nelson

media history blog

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The Media Bubble Is Real — And Worse Than You Think

Wondering how reporters missed the Trump wave? We crunched the data on where they work and how fast it’s changing. The results should worry the country.

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CMAP & Me

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Here’s a little running list of professional organizations I’ve come across that are relevant to historical studies of media and communications. Peruse at your own interest!

http://iamhist.org/about-us/

https://iamcr.org/welcome-to-iamcr

http://oncommunicationmedia.com/about

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Nontenured faculty should not be assessed by student evaluations in this politically charged era (essay)

One way of countering a campus culture in which everyone is afraid to speak is to stop relying on student evaluations to assess nontenured faculty, argues Robert Samuels.

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My partner and I have spent the last four days doing end-of-semester work while all six extended editions of The Hobbit/Lord of the Rings films play in the background. In honor of this experience, here is an allegory for the final weeks of the semester in Lord of the Rings .gifs.

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Graphic from 1938, representing the reach of the United States’ second-largest news agency, the United Press (second to the Associated Press). Image reproduced from Robert W. Desmond, The Press and World Affairs (New York: D. Appleton-Century Company), 1940.

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Was the Art of 'S-Town' Worth the Pain?

How a decades-old literary argument adds insight to the debate over the popular nonfiction podcast

*spoiler alert*

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This is the document that forms the basis of the research paper I’ve been working on this semester. It’s the Final Act of the United Nations Geneva Conference on Freedom of Information, and it articulates a vision of an internationalist, cooperative system of media regulation. Link is here, if you’re interested in checking it out! 

Spoiler alert: because of the Cold War, the vagaries of the UN bureaucracy, and delegates’ failure to agree upon a politically actionable conception of “freedom of information,” the whole thing essentially failed. The one lasting component was Convention #2, the French suggestion on an International Right of Correction. It was not compulsory for any nation to comply with, and only 16 nations ultimately signed on, France being the only major global power among them.

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'The Great Shame of Our Profession'

How the humanities survive on exploitation.

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Neither philosophy in general, nor deconstruction in particular, should be thought of as a pioneering, path-breaking, tool for feminist politics. Recent philoso...

Per our conversation on Ronnell (and, honestly, per many of the conversations we’ve had in the CMAP program so far), I’ve been compelled to think about notions of empowerment and whether a poststructuralist/Derridean framework actually carries the potential for an alleviation of the conceptual ills it points up. Is there a viable politics to be built of deconstruction? How does/can academic deconstructionism speak to contemporary political reform or revolution? Rorty’s 1993 essay on the possibilities of deconstruction and/or pragmatism to collaborate with feminism probes this issue.

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Pussy Don’t Fail Me Now: The Place of Vaginas in Black Feminist Theory & Organizing

#1 – I was on a plane heading to give a talk about the Movement for Black Lives when I felt menstrual blood beginning to leak through the seat of my jeans. Everyone who …

Re: the extent to which "Pussy Hats"/ uterus-vagina-centric rhetoric and images from the Women's March constitute problematic trans exclusionism.

This is the essay I was looking for. This is a deeply thoughtful and multivalent piece-- a careful consideration of a complex issue.

From Brittany Cooper: "Having a vagina has always made us more rather than less susceptible to violence. Feminism taught me this. As long as that remains true, vaginas have to remain central to our organizing and our thinking." [...] “...because we won’t dig in and do this work and think through categories, and histories, and identities out loud in public, for fear of being called transphobic, then when we see white girls reveling in their pink pussy hats, we don’t know how to say that actually – centering white girl’s pussies might not be the move, but Black pussies matter, and the many women and GNC folks who have them still matters structurally and politically to a great degree.”