Confronting the Challenges of a Participatory Culture (Fifteen Plus Years Later) (Part Four)

In this final installment of our series, Henry Jenkins and Tessa Jolls offer some final reflections on Confronting the Challenge of a Participatory Culturein the current context.

 Tessa Jolls: How did you react when you re-read the report?

Henry Jenkins: There are certain things I wrote that when I reread I don't remember hardly anything. This whitepaper, I reread and remembered almost every word of it. There were things that surprised me, but the conversations of that era were still so vivid in my memory. I can remember the thinking that went behind this paragraph and that paragraph, as we went to that writing process. 

Tessa Jolls: Where do you see things going in terms of participatory culture? Certainly, we're at a moment right now, and you had mentioned earlier that some of the things that you had predicted, are all happening right now. It's interesting that it's taken that long to catch up, but nevertheless, it's happening. How do you see that? How do you see the moment today and where it’s going to?

Henry Jenkins: In the wake of COVID-19, we’ve seen the widespread embrace of networked technologies and particularly Zoom in response to the social isolation we're all feeling. Ironically, we were attacked as advocates of digital media for a long time because digital media was isolating us from going out into the world and engaging with the people around us.  Now, we're trapped in our apartments, have no way of going out or engaging with the world, we're isolated from the people around us. I haven't seen the guy in the apartment next to mine since this thing began but we're communicating via Zoom and email on an ongoing basis. Schools have had to revert overnight to online teaching. I'm teaching online exclusively right now. We're hearing stories of kindergarteners being asked to spend three or four hours blocks online, engaging with their teachers. This conversion was done without the support that the white paper was calling for.  The professional development never took place. The development of new content and techniques never took place.  People do traditional teaching on Zoom and largely receive technical advice rather than pedagogical advice. So the white paper still offers tools to rethink what's going on. Of course, there are innovative teachers across America doing that thinking now. We've heard from some of them through the Civic Imagination Project.  We're working regularly with some great teachers in the LA area and we do work with the National Writing Project. But teachers still need more guidance. 

As for participatory culture, we now see it in its best and in its worse, right.  We are seeing some of the challenges of networking and navigation and the verification of reliable information in a world of disinformation, misinformation, and sheer confusion. We've seen the breakdown of civility and the nastiness of cultural divides in the online world but also groups rallying to take social action in incredible ways. We've seen commercialization leaving young people particularly vulnerable to various mechanisms of data collection. Sonia Livingstone often talks about risks and benefits of children and families online and the challenge is to keep both in focus at once.

I still would remain  firm in the idea that literacy in a network era is a social skill and a cultural competency; that young people need to think through together, with mentorship from adults, how to respond to the social challenges they face in this online world and that the way out of our current crisis is to foster a generation that thinks more deeply than previous generations about the human beings they're interacting with and their accountability for the information they put in the circulation.  I would still like to see us raise a generation with a mouse in one hand and a book in the other.

Tessa Jolls: My take on it was that it represents the dawn of the social media era. It came out right at the beginning of Facebook. There was a reference to Myspace in it, Friendster. We've seen a lot of change in that particular environment and yet it was right on the cusp of this enormous explosion of social media. What's your take on that, Henry? 

Henry Jenkins: Convergence Culture -- which I wrote just before writing this report -- makes almost no reference to social media. That's always striking to me when I look back that it's still about discussion boards and not about social media. Convergence Culturealso does not reference Web 2.0 and Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culturepicks up on both of those. So it's somewhere in that transitional period when social media is first becoming visible to us and where the concept of Web 2.0 is starting to become popular. Certainly, I was well situated to know about social media as it was coming into being: dana boyd has been an early researcher on social media, a very important figure in that space. I remembered email correspondence with her where she started describing the work she was doing on Friendster and some of the earlier social media spaces. Some of the younger graduate students on the committee were more deeply immersed in social media at that point than I would have been.

I'm proud to have an early Facebook account because of the connections between MIT and Harvard, where Facebook was first created but we weren’t using it very heavily during that period of time. When I read the stuff about Web 2.0, I cringe a little because it's still written in this moment of celebration about what a transformation in business model and orientation Web 2.0 would represent.  It's not yet reflective of some of the critiques of Web 2.0 that would start to emerge in the years following that. I've become more and more clear trying to draw a distinction between participatory culture and Web 2.0 and the work we've done then.

The idealism of some of the Silicon Valley companies that I was interacting with during that period is very tangible.  When I spoke to them they weren't quite in the grasp of the venture capitalists. This is something danad boyd and Mimi Ito and I talked about in our book on Participatory Culture in a Networked Era,that shifts in the way we thought about Web 2.0. 

Tessa Jolls: Yes. That's why the word prescient is called for here, because the content of the report anticipated so many of the cultural aspects that would emerge with the increased use of Web 2.0 and social media.  Was that your impression as well? 

Henry Jenkins:Yes. I feel good about how it reads today. There's very little in it that I would change if I rewrote it now.  With any of the skills we identified,  you could drill as deeply as you wanted to. Many of these skills have been taken up by other specialists. Some of those skills reflect conversations that were taking place in the educational world at the time, like distributive cognition, which was something that the more education-trained members of our team brought to my attention. So, we were synthesizing what was in the air at the time. It is not that we invented collective intelligence; instead, we were consolidating it, and researchers that continue to do important work in each of those areas.

After it came out, we did some work to add one additional skill. visualization, because when we talked to science teachers and math teachers and so forth, it became abundantly clear that visualization is quite distinct from simulation. If we looked at it more closely, we might identify a couple of more skills that would need to be on that agenda. I don't think any of the skills that we identified seem wrong or out of date. They're all things that we need more urgently today than ever before. I think the balancing act we did in terms of acknowledging traditional research, traditional literacy, media literacy in relation to the new media literacy seems more as important, if not more so than ever before. This is an era of misinformation and disinformation. We need to have all of those skills to sort through what's going on day by day and the flow of information right now. 

Tessa Jolls:I thought the skills you cited are all relevant and more important than ever, as you said. If anything, it is disappointing to me that we haven't made more progress, from the standpoint of institutionalizing new media literacies. You called for a systemic approach to education regarding the new media literacies. In some ways, I think we're still stuck right where we were. What do you think? 

Henry Jenkins:The MacArthur Initiative, in general, identified large numbers of people who shared a common vision of what needed to be done and recruited a lot of individual teachers who were willing to take risks and experiment and do things in their classroom. At the end of the MacArthur-funded Digital Media and Learning Initiative, there is a much more, much stronger body of evidence in support of some of the hypotheses we put forth in that report. There were some nuances on how it needs to be taught and what it means to bring it into the classroom which are really significant. 

 What we didn't see was the institutionalization of it, the scalability of it. It's been hard to get even individual school districts on board. There's been good luck coming out of the Youth and Participatory Politics Initiative. Their Civic Tool Kit has been picked up in citywide or district-wide standards, but not on state or national standards so far. So in some ways, this experience taught me a lot about how hard it is to make institutional change in education. 

Change still comes on the backs of individual teachers who are willing to do the hard work, to bring new resources and approaches into their school and to fight their department chairs and their principals in order to do something that still seems risky. It shouldn't be risky, this many years later. I think getting wide adoption is really, really hard and MacArthur pushed against that, and still didn't inspire much momentum. We're still seeing the Connected Learning Network trying to fight that battle and again, they are running up against a lot of stone wall. 

Tessa Jolls:  In the report, you also called for the informal learning environment to be involved. Do you feel that there's been progress in that arena or do you feel like it's pretty much the same story as formal learning, in terms of scaling?

 Henry Jenkins: There have been some large scale initiatives, for example, the YouMedia project out of the Chicago Public Library. The MacArthur promoted this program and it led to many, many other libraries adopting that model. It may be the biggest success story coming out of Digital Media and Learning. The librarians have taken up the calling.  I spent time after the report was released talking to library organizations and I found them much more receptive than teacher organizations. If anything the role of the librarian as an information coach has now been firmly established in the way they conceptualize themselves. Many of them have been really open to the new media literacies in one way or another. So definitely we had much more freedom outside of school than inside school through libraries and even through school librarians. You have more freedom than the sort of standardized educational test-driven curriculum, but there is so much more that should be done to fully integrate those skills into the afterschool space.

Tessa Jolls: Regarding institutional barriers, and you mentioned in the report that there's the participation gap the transparency problem, and the ethics challenge. 

Henry Jenkins: Credibility issues seem more acute after 2016 and the misinformation campaigns and the debates about fake news and so forth. That's a huge problem that we're confronting today and we're realizing that our concerns are not just casual use of information but active massive misinformation campaigns that are undermining the idea of standards of truth. 

Similarly, we need to address the intractability of the participation gap. This is what led me some years after the report to shift talking about living in a more participatory culture because that phrase means every time I say it, I have to call attention to who's left out, what groups are not allowed to fully participate, and what the barriers the participation look like. 

Those barriers seem ever more real in the age of COVID. We wired the classrooms and promised people access to computers through libraries. Now we're hearing that as many as a quarter of students in LA don't have access to public education during the quarantine because they don't have home access. They can't go on Zoom calls with their teachers and participate with their classmates. They're locked-out.  Regarding the most basic level of technological access, we are as bad as we've ever been in serving the needs of the lowest-income students. We're hearing stories of students writing papers on their mobile phones because they don't have access to computers at home. We're also seeing young people who lack mentorship. They need to fully understand the world they're traveling through and to have someone who's watching their back and giving them insight about some of the choices they're making along the way. 

The ethics challenge increasingly came to focus on questions of mentorship because in the report we talked about some of the work that had been done on high school journalism as a space for mentoring future journalists.  We called out the degree to which at least some young people had greater access to the communication capacity than ever before, and less mentorship than ever before. The research I've seen more recently shows that this is still the case, that most young people don't have access to mentors who can help them confront the challenges they encounter as they move through the world online. 

Looking back, I don't think we understood the full complexities of the picture. I think the fact that since this systemic racism, for example, doesn't surface anywhere in the report.  We understood the participation gap almost entirely in terms of economic barriers to access. Today, it's clear that it's not just access to technology, it's access to knowledge and skills, but it's also access to certain kinds of privilege. It's access to people who are willing to listen and respond to what you have to say. If the message given is that what you say is unimportant because of the color of your skin, then that outweighs almost anything else we do in the space of new media literacy. That problem is more and more visible to us today than it was when we were writing that report, and I feel we were almost naive when I reread the report.  

Tessa Jolls:Interesting. Yes. We need to give hope to everyone and yet it has to be a real hope in terms of our culture, in our leadership, in our mentors, and being open to listening and exchanging ideas. 

Henry Jenkins: It doesn't do anything to ensure a voice for everyone if people aren’t making ethical commitments to listen to each other. Without that commitment, what I say about participatory culture as a learning environment is at best a set of ideals and not a description of reality. Students can develop a document to send government officials or a newspaper and even their own parents, but if they don’t get a response back, then is anyone listening?  That's a big problem for us as a society. So to have a participatory culture there has to be a reciprocity of communication. This is something that Nico Carpentier and I have been talking about a lot in recent years. How do you build that willingness to listen and willingness to hear? Otherwise, you've just got noise and to some degree, the divisiveness of Twitter grows out of that sense of growing frustration with lots of people talking and no one's hearing what it is they have to say. 

At the same time I'm seeing the updated numbers on young people producing media. I had a chance to observe it in an interesting way. When I traveled to India three years ago, an anthropologist took my wife and me into the center of one of the biggest slums in India, where they filmed Slumdog Millionaire.  We went into homes of people and talked to young people about their use of technology. Even under those conditions most of the young people we talked to had made some media. There was a really powerful story of a young man, who told me his best friend had died of tuberculosis. A friend of his had access to an office and smuggled the man at night so they could use the office computers to produce a video tribute to their friends from footage shot using cell phone cameras and put it out on YouTube. So that was a really powerful story to me of the young people fighting against every circumstance to create and share something with the world, but you see so many other young voices being unheard, despite all of that.

Tessa Jolls: In the report, there was a statement that we should look at the new media literacies as a social skill. In a sense, I think that's exactly what we're talking about here. There are social skills that are involved in speaking and listening and being respectful and having dialogue and using all kinds of different ways of communicating, whether it's transmedia or whether it's a particular form of media. So could you comment on that a bit? 

Henry Jenkins: If we look at traditional print-based literacy, it could be understood as an individual skill. I think that grew out of the fact that most people lack the capacity to communicate beyond an immediate circle of friends and family. So reading was understood as reading things that had been produced by someone else. Writing was understood as writing letters or maybe at most writing a letter to the editor of the local newspaper. There was almost an assumption that literacy didn't have large-scale social and cultural effects. In a networked society, we need to think of literacy as a collective experience, not just an individual experience.  So we look at a world where all the research shows young people get their news not by sitting down and reading the newspaper in the morning by grazing information throughout the day through social media. So, what they see of the world is what their friends pass along to them. A sense of social accountability/responsibility needs to go hand in hand with this expanded communication capacity. 

When we live in a world where hate speech has such an enormous, divisive effect on the culture then understanding the consequences of our own speech is really important. That has to be understood in the social context and not just an individual context. The problem is people see it as, "Oh, that is just my personal opinion or I was just expressing myself." They are not necessarily thinking of themselves is part of a larger information echo system that has a ripple effect across the world. 

Tessa Jolls: That too, is a very important point for today's society and the way that we use technology. It also builds on an idea that you introduced in the report, which was that we should be expanding literacies, not pushing aside literacies. So, in other words, with the new media literacies, we should be looking at enhancing people's ability to critically engage, to be able to understand that social context.  You put your finger on the pulse! Henry, where do you see the field going at this point? Having taken this look back, when you look forward, what do you see it? Do you feel that the report is a guide to that future?

Henry Jenkins: My own current work for the last how-many years has been in the area of civics, which picks up on a number of the themes from the report. When I re-read the report, I see my current thinking about the civic imagination as in some ways growing out of the discussion of play and out of the discussion of performance, but also, the act of imagining is something that is not in that report. I wasn't sure what skills I would add, but I find myself pondering whether something like imagination or world-building is not a skill that is more visible to us today than it was when we wrote that report. That skill set is one that in fact, I am spending much of my time working on, not just helping students or young people think about it. We certainly are still doing work with schools and libraries and after-school programs. We are also working with adult communities. We have done workshops with churches and mosques. We have done activities with governmental officials. We have done activities with labor unions. We have done projects all over the world on thinking about the civic imagination.

In some ways, this new work is an extension of the toolkit that we identify in that report. It is designed to specifically enhance the sense of possibility within the culture at large, and particularly the sense of civic connection. In that way, the sense of civics I am talking about in our new work probably connects with the social skills and cultural competency we are describing here. We are trying to figure out what the skills are that we need to live with each other, rather than continually grinding down at the core of our democracy with each election cycle and every battle in between, to the point that we are no longer speaking to each other. To me, that is the most urgent thing. In some ways, that is about extending our notion of new media literacy, to talk to adults as well as young people.  All of us in our society need networking skills, negotiation skills, judgment skills, as we process this new world we are living in. Now, we need to figure out how to inhabit a global society, and within the United States, to live in a much more diverse society than many of us grew up in.

Confronting the Challenges of a Participatory Culture (Some Fifteen Years Later) (Part Three)

In part three in our series about the production and impact of Confronting the Challenges of a Participatory Culture, we spend a little more time with Connie Yowell, who commissioned the report on behalf of the MacArthur Foundation; Alice Robison, who was one of the co-authors of the report; Mimi Ito, who was another key leader of the Digital Media and Learning Movement; and of course, Henry. We also check in with John Palfrey, who is now President of the MacArthur Foundation and was running an important center at Harvard focused around how “digital natives” learn at the time Jenkins was up the road at MIT.  Each of them addressed Tessa Jolls’ questions about the lasting legacy of the white paper and of the Digital Media and Learning Project more generally.

Connie Yowell: I thought the reaction was two fold. In general, it was like breathing fresh, new life into education and how people think about literacy and how they think about learning. There was a hunger, amongst teachers in particular, to really understand the report and understand what to do with it. Once they saw it, and read it, and understood it, they were really eager to figure out what to do with it. One of the core challenges for teachers is engaging students and finding ways to connect learning to the things that young people care about. Henry’s brilliance was sitting at the intersection of culture, media, literacy and education. It was a new intersection for educators and one that had the potential to pave the way to paradigmatic changes in how we think about learning, technology and learner empowerment. It’s where learner interest, engagement and action intersect. 

Later on, Henry’s work on the Harry Potter Alliance as an illustrative case of how these things come together was equally significant and enabled educators and learners to break out of their traditional learning as transmission of information box, giving us a whole new imagination on where learning can happen, how it can happen and how its supported and embedded in affinity groups.  That was the first step in creating a whole pathway into thinking about a different way of teaching literacy. 

 There was a broad uptake. There were fringes of people who were way more conservative, who really struggled with it, but we saw a massive uptake and interest.

if we had actually had even more uptake and more engagement, we would have had a way of helping our young people understand this shift in online tools that became more ad-based and more focused on capturing their attention rather than engaging them in participation. 

Henry was writing about the first wave of tools that came out, which were all around participation, and making and creating a more extraordinary youth culture--whether it was LiveJournal or some of the other tools he was looking at. Even MySpace was more maker and creator focused than Facebook.  But we took a serious turn with Twitter and Facebook and their use of media to capture and sell attention as opposed to creating onramps to participation and production.  The new media literacy took an invaluable approach to enabling youth to both be critical of and participatory in media. We needed more time to scale the approach, but its not too late.  Its time for another wave of the work.  

Connie Yowell is currently serving as Senior Vice Chancellor of Education Innovation at Northeastern University and was founder of LRNG.

John Palfrey:   It's great to be able to reflect on a previous time in a set of ideas and how they've then tracked through. It's kind of a cool intellectual history journey, which is fun to go on. I would say, clearly, your white paper was a catalytic piece in the context of the digital media and learning work that MacArthur committed many, many years and hundreds of millions of dollars to. You can take great pride in having set up a philosophical framework for a lot of that investment. Then, as Connie Yowell went on to take the LRNG spinoff out of the DML work, trying to focus on the new media literacies of young people outside of schools and in places from Chicago to Birmingham, Alabama, to New Hampshire, she's really taken the same set of ideas and implemented them in a variety of contexts. So it absolutely was one of several, very important blueprints from MacArthur's work and a huge amount of investment.

In some ways, it may be even unusual to say that scholars would have had such a huge impact on what such a program ended up doing. That's actually a hallmark of the Digital Media and Learning project. It took so many cues from the field and from leaders in the field, obviously, but it wasn't so much the brainchild necessarily just of one or two program officers. MacArthur was leaning into what the field thought was required for the next series of directions and then invested behind it. 

Henry Jenkins:  Well, thanks for that. So you were at Harvard at the time we were doing this and you were doing your work on digital natives?

John Palfrey:   We had a great interest in how kids were learning and engaging with information in different ways, and obviously, very focused on what are the ways that we could understand that and support it and then understand some of the ramifications of it. As you know, it was a fun time with danah boyd and, of course, your work and many others in the field kicking around Cambridge and to have interlocutors and people who are kind of writing in public together, both informally and formally. It was actually a pretty generative time, at least from my perspective in terms of thinking through how kids were learning, how that was changing, what was important about it, what was enduring. It kicked off a lot of work that followed.

Henry Jenkins:  The joke has always been that Harvard and MIT are two stops down the Red line and opposite ends of the planet at the same time. But, in those days, we were finding ourselves on somewhat similar trajectories and involved in some productive conversations.

John Palfrey:   I think it's a good example of not necessarily being in the same institution, but being focused on some similar questions and then being able to have a semi-public dialogue that actually could be quite constructive. I certainly am personally grateful for that.

Henry Jenkins:  Me too.   What do you think were the biggest insights that came out of that moment in time in terms in terms of understanding young people's relation to new media technologies?

John Palfrey:  The insights around agency are always ones I keep coming back to -- the things that kids can do relative to media.  It's not simply a passive experience. You and I both have had a great interest in the ways that young people can be involved in shaping, not just communities, but democracy itself. Those insights you included in the paper are important and enduring. The other piece of it, I would say, which is more of this moment, but it may well be enduring too, is that so many kids are learning outside of the classroom and outside of the formal structure of learning. An insight that came through your work, but then was amplified through the DML work broadly is how much learning is happening across a variety of things, whether it's cognitive or social-emotional.  It's harder to describe the kinds of learning kids do when they engage with media outside of school, independent of adult control, and removed from formal education. Right now, that's so important for all reasons - some fatigue; kids not having access to the technology, not being able to participate in the formal learning. It’s important to see that broader set of new media literacies come into play and understand why they matter. Where we can make that available for kids, there’s a huge benefit from an equity perspective. The work that one teacher is doing in that 30 minutes or 45 minutes or whatever it is on Zoom with kids who are not able to be physically proximate to each other actually isn't the end of the story. That may feel like it's sort of a pandemic answer to your question, but I think it could be an enduring answer too.

Henry Jenkins:  The pandemic obviously keeps cropping up in all of these conversations because suddenly, everyone's focused on schools, online education and what that looks like at the current moment. Notions like screen time just has blown up because everything is screen time and we need to be asking what kids are doing on those screens and not just whether there are screens involved.

John Palfrey:  What are you supposed to say? The data have not borne out the idea that screen time in aggregate is a bad thing for most kids. In fact, there's plenty of evidence to say that a bunch of screen time can be quite good for most kids. 

Henry Jenkins:   So, any further thoughts?

John Palfrey:   Just gratitude. I'm grateful for the ideas and the enduring connection and the fact that I get to talk with you for a few minutes across this divide. 

John Palfrey is the President of the MacArthur Foundation.

 Mimi Ito: Our report was empirical and descriptive unlike Henry's work, which was actually suggesting stuff that educators might do. We reissued the Hanging Out, Messing Around and Geeking Out book. We've issued a tenth anniversary version where we have a new foreword that looks back on the ten years and what we missed, or not necessarily what we missed, but how the ecosystem changed or what we were surprised about. I think the speed at which the grown-up world gobbled the internet was surprising, or maybe not surprising, but just how quickly it became this arena where grown-ups were doing their grown-up things and they got colonized by politics and commerce. 

When we were doing our research, it was much more of a youth and academic-centered space. It was very different. It was perceived as the space of freedom for young people. Now, it's not at all. Kids are retreating to private spaces and the open internet is not a happy place anymore.

It was a pleasant surprise how many educators embraced our work. I often take a critical view of educational institutions, and I’m not a big fan of teaching myself. I do research and mentor students but I don’t do classroom instruction. I actually enjoyed school myself, but I don’t look to the classroom as a place that is spearheading digital innovation. I wasn’t holding my breath about educator response to our work, but I was pleasantly surprised. Over the years I’ve learned to appreciate and collaborate with more educational institutions instead of just engaging with youth outside of school. It’s a good thing.

One of the big outcomes was the establishment of the YouMedia Learning Lab at the Chicago Public Library and the network of youth media labs that were based off of our research, at least in part. MacArthur incentivized those, but they also brought in a Federal funder, the Institute of Museum and Library Services. That was pretty exciting just to see actual programs being launched. It wasn't like it was an application of the research. It was because we were all in conversation with one another. Then a lot of our subsequent work around connected learning was really knitted around bringing insights from the empirical research, which my study was part of the design and agenda studying stuff, like Henry's report and then people who were actually building and rolling out tests and innovations and practice. Those things all fed together into the two research networks that Henry (Youth and Participatory Politics) and I (Connected Learning) were a part of to build frameworks that were evidenced-driven but were also setting the agenda for innovations and results. Because of MacArthur's funding of all of the subsequent work, there's this ongoing influence that this work has had and because they used the Hanging Out, Messing Around and Geeking Out framework for the youth media learning labs and they shortened it to an acronym, HOMAGO. Now, even the library spaces, they're routinely described as HOMAGO spaces.      

Mizuko “Mimi” Ito is a Professor in Residence at the Humanities Research Institute at the University of California, Irvine.

 
Tessa Jolls:  When you think back on it, do you feel like you were surprised by anything? Were there surprises that you just didn’t expect as a result of the reporting being published?

Alice Robinson:  I shouldn’t have been, but I was surprised that some media literacy educators were resentful that the report got so much attention. That was unfortunate; however, I don’t necessarily think they were wrong. We didn’t do enough to acknowledge the deep history of media literacy to begin with. However, I don’t think any of us wrote the paper with the intent of reaching an audience beyond media study folks. None of us was an expert in any way on media literacy and we should have brought in media literacy folks. We were a group of literacy scholars and media scholars, and it got taken up by the media literacy audience, but it was not written for the media literacy audience. We should have anticipated that, and we didn’t, and that was I think unfortunate. However, it was incredibly well received by literacy, especially digital literacy, scholars and educators, and that made me really happy because I really wanted them to look at literacy in different ways as not just sort of an acquisition problem and so I thought that that was really great. I was really thrilled that media folks found themselves thinking more about learning and literacy.

Tessa Jolls: Agreed. Media people, in general, were just in shock at that point in time and they were really scrambling to understand this new world that they were having [0:52:36 inaudible]and I think the report was just so awakening for a lot of them or they knew they needed to know something, and it gave them something to go to, and be able to understand the framework for it, and that articulation that you talked about was very important and [0:53:03 inaudible]for lots of people, so that… yeah, that’s a wonderful point to make.

AliceRobison, Ph.D.,is co-founder of Quick Brown Fox Consulting, LLC.

Mimi Ito:  I certainly don't think that our reports would have had the influence they did if there wasn't for the additional support MacArthur was giving to other organizations that were taking up the work. I'm guessing the same for Henry's report as well, but I don't have as much insight into that.   

Tessa Jolls: Yes, understandable. Do you think we're in one of those innovative moments now with COVID and all the homeschooling going on? I mean it's hard to tell, but at the same time it seems like things are really shaking up right now. That can be an opportunity, as well as certainly disruptive. 

Mimi Ito:  I think it's hard to know. I mean it's definitely going to change things. Whether it's an opportunity for the things we care about to survive --  that I think is less certain. It does feel to me similar to that moment in history that we were talking about earlier. COVID has really accelerated the next wave of mainstreaming of online learning. Before COVID, when people said online learning, they actually didn't think of the things that I study, like kids geeking out on videogames and things like that. They wouldn't have considered  the more expansive version of literacy that Henry talks about.  A lot of people would not associate that with digital learning because they think of online teaching as the delivery of standardized formal education for the most part. I think that has changed because people understand the importance of digital and social connection because of COVID. 

COVID has accelerated the recognition that kids can't learn academic subjects unless they feel connected and safe and/or well-fed. It seemed obvious but it's a big deal that is officially being recognized. Before COVID, homeschooling was growing slowly, but it was still a fringe set of groups that consider themselves homeschoolers and schools repeatedly ignored the home context and saw their mission as residing within the four walls of the school. 

We had been seeing a lot of growth in online learning in the Higher Ed because you have a lot of non-traditional learners there, but it had been really slow in the K12 sector.  Suddenly all doctors are doing telemedicine. It's like, "Okay. Now, we actually have to think about not only what  it means for kids to be able to access the school content from home, but also how do you design an online learning environment, which has never been a mainstream concern within education. 

The fact that Zoom has come to dominate online learning is unfortunate. Why aren’t virtual worlds where learners can interact socially and create things being used? I am running a nonprofit, Connected Camps, that is trying to do this more social and project-based kind of online learning, together with Katie Salen, also from the MacArthur network. Our focus has been offering live, social, online learning experiences in platforms like Minecraft and Roblox. These are some of the only learning platforms that some educators use, that allows for kids to engage in a social, hands-on way. Compare that to Zoom, which often translates to a second-rate version of lectures or classroom discussion. Minecraft is a digital environment that gives you new and different powers that you don’t have in the physical environment.

There were never resources or thoughts from educational community of putting imagination as a priority.  Imagine if we had invested in a metaverse that was actually good for kids where they could build things together and where a teacher could circulate among groups of kids instead of having this metaphor of face-to-face and breakout rooms, which is not how educators work.  If you want to do project-based stuff, You can't. It's very difficult to do anything that's inquiry-based in Zoom. Since March, we expanded our team from a group of 25 to 125 and we're still not able to meet the demand of summer. 

Tessa Jolls:   Wow! That's really something, Mimi. Congratulations. You kept into it, yet a good time and needed, so needed. 

Mimi Ito:  Yes, it almost killed us. We're still trying to keep things afloat, but there wasn't much out there. Families were just desperate for a step that was social and engaging and meaningful for their kids. 

Tessa Jolls:  Yes, I believe it. It's been so helpful to explore this with you because I think the timing is good with all of this change going on and yet I think it's also important to recognize how some of the work that was done early on has really blossomed. I think that the work that MacArthur undertook has really made a contribution and, in a way, we're probably going to see more from that contribution now even then we did in the past, especially when we look at the education space. Do you have any other thoughts you'd like to share on MacArthur and the impacts that it had? 

Mimi Ito: For a lot of people who are touched by it, it created a set of relationships in a community that has been very resilient.  Some of what I have tried to inherit and steward even after the official DML initiative ended a couple of years ago, I recruited eight faculty who were involved in the DML initiative to our campus at UC Irvine and started a new research institute, the Connected Learning Lab as a steward of some of the community and the resources that came out of that work.  We have a website, the Connected Learning Alliance, where we continue to blog and publish reports. My team at UC Irvine has been running the annual DML conference. Henry was our very first chair for the very first DML. We merged with Games, Learning, and Society and the Sandbox Summit, into a new event called the Connected Learning Summit, which we had to cancel this year.   This year would have been the third year in this new format. Yes, the community is still very robust. I have no idea if we're going to be able to continue it in the world post-COVID, but at least for the first two years, even after MacArthur ended its funding, it was sustainable as a community supported event. I think that the people like to see each other. They like to stay connected with each other. I think that's also a really nice outcome of that work. 

Mizuko “Mimi” Ito is a Professor in Residence at the Humanities Research Institute at the University of California, Irvine.

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Henry Jenkins: We wanted to make the report as concrete for teachers as we could. That was part of the writing process. So when the report came out, the first stories we were hearing were that groups of teachers were sitting down at the faculty lounge in schools across the country, reading the report, discussing it, trying to identify what they were already doing, trying to identify what next steps they wanted to take. I heard from so many teachers through the years, that they had department-wide or school-wide discussions over the report when it came out. That was really a surprise to me.

Then we started getting requests to translate it into foreign languages. We soon lost track of the number of different languages it got translated into. We are hearing reports, particularly in Scandinavia, was one pocket that really embraced it and was discussing it very far and wide. I was invited to Latin America after the report came out, to a Buenos Aires conference with delegates of all the school superintendents and educational policy-makers of the Latin American countries. So, we know it had an impact. We don't know how big an impact it was or where the impact was best felt because it was  beyond our control.  MacArthur put the report out in the public domain and people were translating themselves and studying it themselves. So, there is no way to estimate the scale of where it traveled.

The media literacy movement embraced the report  in a very serious and thoughtful way. There was some unfortunate divide. Some people didn't understand why we were not sticking with the traditional framework media literacy had developed through the years. We challenged them in some ways that we thought were productive. We saw the existing media literacy work as  part of a larger framework we were describing, and didn't feel the need to reinvent the wheel or to reproduce what was already out there, but instead, to  direct people to read that existing material. Some connected learning people probably did not appreciate fully the work that has already gone on in terms of the media literacy movement: the recruitment of teachers, the building up of the vocabulary, and so forth. I tried in my own work to bridge that divide and to be someone who had a toe in both of those camps and saw the potential of us working together to achieve a more literate culture in all senses of the word.

Tessa Jolls: You have really lived with those words, Henry. I know from my perspective, you cited the Center for Media Literacy’s framework called the attention to the fact that it was geared toward more of a passive kind of questioning in terms of media being developed by someone else. I think that your report had a huge impact. I know it did on our organization because we subsequently used your research and then developed a process of inquiry for producers of media so that it can be taken a questioning approach from an active standpoint. So, I think the research was very timely and very informative. 

Henry Jenkins: Yes, you  did an excellent job of revisiting that and responding to that critique in a very constructive and generative way. I appreciate it, that the critique got taken in the spirit in which it was meant. 

 The work that we did for the white paper led directly to the work we did with Ricardo Pitts Wiley, Wyn Kelly, Katie Clinton and others on the Moby-Dick project, which became the book, Reading in a Participatory Culture.  Erin Reilly took over the leadership of Project New Media Literacies from Margaret Weigel as we moved towards a fuller application of the ideas in the white paper, and we ended up, among other things, developing a professional development program for teachers associated with the Los Angeles Unified School District, helping them apply participatory learning practices into their classrooms. The conversations I was having with danah boyd and Mimi Ito were commemorated in the book, Participatory Culture in a Network Era, which is a book-long conversation about our intersecting research through the Digital Media and Learning initiative.

I continued to work with the MacArthur Foundation, moving gradually from work on new media literacies (with Erin Reilly) to work (with Sangita Shresthova) on civic media, civic engagement, the political lives of young people, first through the Youth in Participatory Politics Research Network.  Our work in that phase culminated with By Any Media Necessary: The New Youth Activists. More recently, our Civic Imagination Project is part of the civic media grant making that MacArthur is doing. So participatory culture has continued to drive a lot of the research that I've done.  It doesn't shape everything that I do. I've done work on comics and some other things that are largely unrelated to that strand, although you can always see the connections. But that strand on participatory culture runs from Textual Poachers atthe beginning of my career down to our current projects on Popular Culture and the Civic imagination and onward into the future. 

In the final section, Tessa Jolls and Henry Jenkins reflect back on the report today and what we know now that we did not know when the report was first written.

Confronting the Challenges of A Participatory Culture (Fifteen Plus Years Later) (Part Two)

In part two of this series on the writing and publication of Confronting the Challenges of a Participatory Culture, longtime media literacy advocate Tessa Jolls interviews two of my co-authors for the report: Alice Robison and Ravi Purushotma about their experience, what ideas from the report they think has survived the test of time, and how these ideas about education relate to their current professional and family lives. Margaret Weigel, the Research Director for the project, tragically passed away a few years ago. Katie Clinton was unable to participate.

Henry Jenkins:    Ravi Purushotma was one of the master’s students at the time. He came to us with a very strong commitment to thinking about new media in relation to learning and education. His particular fascination was language learning. He was doing really interesting things in his own life to try to learn languages using everything from video games to his iPod, to immerse himself into new language. He seemed absolutely the right person to do this work.

Margaret Weigel had just graduated from the program and was looking for work after her time with us.  We hired her as the research director of that project. The research directors play a really crucial role in my approach. As co-director of the program, I was pulled in so many different directions. I was on planes constantly, raising money, trying to manage a lot of different research initiatives. I would be distracted from one moment to the next, and I needed people for each project who would wake up every morning thinking about that project and would grab my attention when things needed to happen. Margaret played this role admirably through this phase of the research. 

Alice Robinson was hired as our postdoc to work on this project. She was a classmate of Katie Clinton who had just moved to Boston. Katie and Alice had been students of James Paul Gee at University of Wisconsin, Madison. I had met them during trips to visit Gee and Kurt Squire and they had made strong impressions on me. I'd liked both of them very much and felt that they would cross pollinate between the game centered research that Gee was doing and the more fan directed research that I had been doing. This was a good team, especially given MIT did not have its own education school for me to draw upon.

Tessa Jolls:It's interesting to look back on it and see what were the takeaways, and definitely, the participatory culture went worldwide. It was just incredible that it just kind of spread like wildfire.  So definitely, there was a need out there. There was a hunger out there for this new way of looking at the world. Were you expecting that kind of reaction, Henry? How did you feel at the time in terms of having done the work and released it?

Henry Jenkins:We had no idea what the response was going to be. MacArthur told me that they had very mixed reception on previous white papers that they had issued from research. So my expectations were relatively low.  We wrote it collaboratively using software that allowed us to share the text in process with each other, we were really trying to apply the technologies we were talking about. Ravi kept us state of the art in terms of the tools we were using to write the report. 

As we finished that first draft, Connie Yowell decided it made sense to bring in a developmental editor to increase the clarity and make it more widely accessible.  We worked with that editor closely. Yowell saw that there was real potential with us and our report became something that was really targeted at diverse stakeholders. 

Fairly late in the process, we realized that we needed not just to describe the skills and the research behind them, but also give concrete examples of how teachers could deploy them in their classes. That's where the postdocs particularly came into play. We had these brainstorming sessions where we brought that whole team together and just said, here's a skill, what do we know that's going on out there, where do we look for more examples. We reached out to media literacy organizations of all kinds to fill in those holes there. That's become an important part of the report, even though that may be the most dated part because it was describing prototypes, some of which took off, some of which didn't but it captures what was happening in the world as people saw this change coming. We were trying to get ready for it. 

But no, I didn't expect anywhere near the reception that that report got. I'm still floored by the number of discussions that I've heard about that took place as that report was released to the world. It's worth saying the two reports were released in parallel, meaning, Ito's report and my report were announced at this event at the Museum of Natural History and simultaneously a press event was held in Second Life. So that was MacArthur trying to use a new toolkit to release its reports to the world. 

Alice Robison:  I wanted to make sure that… Henry talked about Margaret because, as you know, she had breast cancer, and it was pretty severe, and she passed very quickly, and we all miss her. Margaret was just an incredibly, cool, Gen-X chick, and-- she was a true artist, and a radical and really representative of the Gen Xers. She played bass. She wore Doc Martens every day. She’s just a really cool chick and having her be a part of this paper, I miss her and I really think she would have loved to have talked to you about it. I I’m sure Margaret would be thrilled to know you were doing this.

In a true Margaret way, actually, she announced it on Facebook. She said, “Look guys, it’s not looking good, and I’ve got breast cancer, and I’m going to go in for one more round of treatment,” but it was very quick with her, like she did not catch it early. She said, “I’d appreciate it if you could just post something here,” and we did, and we all wrote to her and posted things, and her brother read them to her, and then it was I think a day or two later that he posted and said, “Thank you all. I read them all to her. She heard everything you said before…” and then she just died. It was, of course, shocking and awful, but at the same time, it was cool that she allowed us all to use that space to tell her how much we love her, and that she got to know that, and she used that tool in order to…

I do remember presenting the report at the National Media Literacy Conference in St. Louis, and I just remember how incredibly well received it was by a small minority of people who were excited about what we were talking about. It’s always true whenever you present radical ideas to educators. It’s always the minority who are most enthusiastic and most excited because they’re the closest to those changes that are happening. The further away you are, the more skeptical you are and that’s just true of anything. That minority of people were excited to know that they weren’t the only ones who were seeing the changes that we were seeing and they were so thrilled to get the validation that they had been seeking for a long time, and so for that, I’m still incredibly grateful.

There’s always going to be changes in platforms, right? There’s always going to be changes in applications and tools, but I think the principles that we described in the paper are still true. What we wrote in that paper is still very much true about distributed storytelling, and distributed cognition, and the ways that all of these media are specifically designed and created by teams of people in a very social way in a way that’s meant to be appreciated in social ways by people who love that content.

I have a nine-year-old and a seven-year-old. I was explaining to their teachers, not too long ago, that for them, YouTube stars are what rock stars were to us when we were young. My nine-year-old is begging me to have her own YouTube channel because she wants to be a media creator and create content for large groups of fans. She’s not thinking about, “Oh, this is going to appeal to a specific tailored-group.” She’s thinking, “I want everyone to love Minecraft as much as I do.” I think that was one thing that we probably could have been more articulate about.

We talked about, what was it, the transparency problem, the participation gap, and the ethics challenge.  The transparency problem is the one that most people are surprised by, meaning the persistence of the myths of the digital native will never die and I fought for years against this, and it still persists, engrained in millennial parents because a lot of these folks we were writing about then are now parents of their own children.

I’m part of an online summer camp for kids here, and we are spending hours talking about how to get all of our kids together on the same Minecraft server, and these other parents are just really resistant to think about how they might have something to offer their kids about how to be present in a collaborative online space and it’s so surprising to me that they would be so resistant to think, “Hey, maybe I should teach my kids a little bit about ‘password,’ or why you might want to think about muting yourself, or turning off your video, or think about what you say to others, or what does ‘griefing’ mean and why is it important not to grief someone, or why do we want to be careful about respecting what other people build in that space,” and they just assume  that their kids can just jump right onto this game and its online space with other people and know what to do. The transparency problem is still a huge concern of mine, and we don’t talk about it enough. 

We do talk a lot about the participation gap and the ethics challenge; but for example, rural internet is still very weak, still very limited, and it’s… we’re looking at things like how are we going to have distributed learning come August. Out here, we start school the very first week in August, some districts start at the end of July, and we still don’t have plans for how we’re going to do online learning for rural districts here in Arizona, how are we going to get them access, yeah, or what can be done on mobile devices. The Navajo Nation here in Arizona is one of the worst-hit COVID-19 population. I don’t imagine anyone that’s going to want to put those kids in classroom. What do we do if you don’t even have access to water? How are you going to have access to the internet? These things are really difficult, and I do believe that schools want the best for their students. I do strongly believe that there are limited numbers of things that can be covered in any given day, but the participation gap is still just as powerful as it was 16 years ago and the transparency issue is barely studied at all, so that’s something that frustrates me.

I don’t know if you know Katie Salen Tekinbas. She’s at UC Irvine. Katie Salen Tekinbas did the school project called “Quest to Learn” in New York City, that’s a school based on principles of gaming, Salen and Mimi Ito created something called “Connected Camps.” My  nine-year-old is participating… she’s done every single camp they’ve offered. It’s been wonderful to see how the principles that we wrote about are enacted in online digital curriculum and folks who are teaching these classes have no idea where this stuff comes from. They’re just thrilled to be teaching a class in Minecraft, but it’s fun for me to see my kid do the kinds of things that I wrote about 16 years ago.

Katie Clinton and I are very close, and we went to graduate school together, and we both went to work with Henry together. Katie’s son, same thing. It’s been so great to see and… I feel like all we did was really articulate what everyone who is immersed in digital media consumption at that time already knew. We just put it down on paper.

At the time Katie Clinton and I were finishing our dissertations and we were doing research on how video games were particularly good instantiations of what we already knew about learning science and how people learn, that’s different from saying, “Video games should be used to teach content areas,” okay? We were constantly trying to distinguish between video games as good instantiations of the research on learning versus folks who were in classroom being told to teach content with curriculum that was handed to them who wanted to use video games as a vehicle for that. Those are two different things, and so in the media literacy paper, we didn’t want to make that same mistake. We didn’t want to reduce what we were observing to a set of skills because we didn’t want that to be interpreted as, “Here’s the formula that you should be teaching in your class. Teach them how to blog, how to create YouTube channel.” Instead we were saying, “No, no, no. You need to teach them how to look at these phases in a different way. What you do with that is up to you,” but these phases are being created, and interpreted, and used in all kinds of fascinating new ways, what that ends up being translated to in the classroom is up to you because it’s your classroom, but we don’t want to reduce it down to a simple activity. 

Those little sections on what might be done, those are really tough to write. We understood the need. When we got feedback from readers, “Well, we want examples. We want examples,” and so we offered those examples, and I think they were good examples, but if you’ll notice, they’re not curriculum. Each of those sections, what might be done. Their ideas, their examples, they’re meant to be taken as such. They’re instantiations of the framework and examples of things that we had seen people do, and so we wanted to hold them up as good examples of the kinds of things we’re talking about without saying, “Here. Go teach X.”

Let’s say you’re teaching world history, that’s very, very different from teaching in a radio and TV lab. You can still use these principles in both content areas, but maybe one is going to be much more applied and the other one is going to be much more conceptual, but both can use these principles and use the framework in equally successful ways. There’s so many fantastic examples of how you could talk about distributed cognition in a whole class on the video game, Legends and use it  for example, in the Connected Camp. My daughter takes a weekly class in Minecraft, learning about ancient history of Rome, and they’re using all these principles, appropriation, distributed cognition, multitasking, all of the same things that we describe in the paper, they’re doing in that space and it’s because Katie Salen said, “Hey, Minecraft is a great place to explore what it was like to be a citizen in Ancient Rome,” but it’s not a class on ancient Roman history for a nine-year-old. …

 AliceRobison, Ph.D.,is co-founder of Quick Brown Fox Consulting, LLC.

 Ravi Purushotma: Henry was just always a brilliant mind and able to predict things quite well. It’s been a blast over the last couple decades to have had such insight into where things would be going. I mean, we really took it for granted just how aware of the direction things were changing we became by being around him.

If we were re-writing the report today, we might use some different language. There was a lot of talk about things like affinity spaces back in the time and maybe today we’d be using slightly different vocabulary. But, fundamentally, the underlying concepts of how we need to develop the skills to be able to take in information from society accurately, the skills to produce content and share information back with society in the best means possible -- that students need to find their voice. I think the underlying concepts still form the same fundamental conversation we’re having today.

Tessa Jolls:  Sure, yeah. But conceptually, you think, “Hey, yeah, we captured it,” and so that’s really gratifying to feel like it’s being used or could be used today. I think in that regard, the report really did make an impact at that time. What was your perspective about the impact that the report had?

Ravi Puralena:  I’m actually probably not super aware of the impact. I definitely got a sense it was getting good distribution. I would meet people randomly in social circles who would say, “Oh, my God. We just read your report in my grad seminar at Stanford!” So, events like that definitely gave me a sense that it seemed to have been an impactful report. But, for the most part, I had switched over to educational game design after graduating and I was a bit out of the media literacy discussion afterwards.

I guess I was trusting Henry a bit on where the report would land and where it would all go. Back at that age, I was much less attached to the process and just super excited to be a part of it all. I knew I wanted to make a difference in the Education and Media landscapes, but there was always, and there still is, a lot of uncertainty in my mind about where the best insertion point for making a change is. For change to happen, a lot of different efforts have to come together in parallel: some people need to take on arguing with the skeptics or traditionalists or policy-makers; some people need to be mentoring the open-minded but hesitant people looking to take their first steps; some people need to be trailblazing with the savvy early adopters and inventing the best possible solutions. In this field, there’s different media forms associated with each of those: the first one needs to be books and whitepapers like the one we wrote, the second might be things like YouTube guides and the latter might be things like programming mobile apps. Given my strong technical background, I always felt suited to the later. There also was simply more job opportunities being in the latter than the former. Also, I tend to get better energy being on the creative/trailblazing side of things rather than the arguing with the skeptics side. Though I’m super grateful for people like Henry who are able to do that role so well, after I graduate I somewhat left that role to them. Instead I was doing things like working with a Fortune 100 company to program an app to help kids in Latin America to create, tell and record stories.

I guess, even when starting the whole paper writing process, I didn’t fully understand what it was and where it could go. I think it’s really stunning for me to think back retrospectively about actually writing the paper. At the start, I don’t think I actually understood what the term “Media Literacy” meant or how to articulate it. I got “21st Century Skills.” But, even half-way through writing the paper, if you had told me “People think about ‘Literacy’ as the ability to read a book or write a paper. But, it’s really the skill of taking information in from society and producing information to contribute to society. You need to be able to take information in from more than just books and create more than just papers in order to really be ‘Literate’ today or have a voice.” I would have responded “Wooooah! I totally never thought of it that way!!!” But, piecing it all together while writing it -- it was a crazy journey to think about how that all came together.

I guess maybe to back up a bit. Originally, I don’t think even Henry knew that the paper was going to be such a big scope or the core focus it ended up being. I got the sense, originally, at the very beginning, that this was kind of my project personally and that maybe he would come in at the end, do a bit of fine touching and what not, but, fundamentally a simple paper I was to write about 21st Century Skills. I had written over a hundred pages of the original first draft before anybody had seen anything. Then, it started to evolve with more discussions from the Foundation and become clear that we were going to turn it into a much more involved paper. Henry was able to step in and pull together the huge gaps in my understanding of the field at the time and take my hundreds of pages, and really expand then edited it into just a much more polished and comprehensively articulated work. Originally, though, it started with a very different scope before evolving to what it became.

Looking back on it, one really unique thing about the paper for the time was the way it involved having multiple people writing it simultaneously. It's something we take for granted nowadays, having such easy access to Google Docs, but, I think the tools used for collaborating really impact the content of the writing. Perhaps one reason the paper was received so well is because of how unified the different voices of the authors felt compared to other papers at the time. And perhaps one reason for that was because it was one of the first papers of its scope to be written entirely in an online collaborative environment. At the time Google Docs didn’t exist. There was a small startup tool called “Writely” which I had identified and thought could be a good tool for this paper. It was still in beta at the time and incredibly buggy. I knew it was a big ask for all these academics to take a tool as fundamental to them as their word processor and ask them to replace it with the totally new way of doing things in the midst of a project with important deadlines. And the interface was totally unintuitive. I remember how frustrating it was for Henry: at one dinner someone made a comment about what a genius he was and he replied something like “I’m no genius, I can’t even figure out how to operate my word processor!” But, I really admired his willingness to give it a try, to show humility in always asking me for help learning to use a new technical tool and navigating through all its quirks and bugs. I think most people would have just said “Just send me a Word Docs with track changes turned on like I’ve been doing for 20 years. We’re in the middle of a big project. This isn’t the time for me to be learning this Writely thing that you’re fixated on [and is making me feel inept].” Perhaps it’s because they would have felt embarrassed to be the one to say that given the content of what we were writing about. But, for whatever reason, we persevered and I think the level of collaboration we had as a result really changed the tone and voicing of the paper for the better and was a first for its time. Writely was eventually acquired by Google and became Google Docs, so, nowadays it’s essentially the standard way of writing a collaborative paper. But, at the time of Writely Beta -- or ‘Writerly’ as Henry kept calling it -- it was unique.

After I graduated, I then moved from the media literacy side of Henry’s department to the educational video game side. I worked as a research manager in the Education Arcade lab, then for a spin-off, for many years focusing on educational video games design. I had a fellowship in Germany for almost two years teaching classes and meeting with various government officials for discussions about how technology can enhance language learning & education. Then, eventually, I moved to California and have been working largely in the tech industry here, gaining a lot more programming skills and more the technical side of media development. Some more work in educational games, but also just in general industry --  web programming, mobile app development, things like that. When I first got married, I needed to focus really on income and so I was working for an artificial intelligence company creating tools for doing financial audits. Now that my wife is further in her career, I have more flexibility to kind of go back into Educational design. I started making some content for Coursera. I’m hoping someday there’ll be more opportunities to utilize my tech background for more Media Literacy work. Perhaps once I’m a parent I’ll find a way of creating more creative activities and apps for parents and kids. But, currently Media Literacy is more just a hobby. Like, a week or two ago, I made a little video I posted on my facebook page discussing religious texts and what it means for someone from today's literate society to try and interpret something from an oral tradition 2,000 years ago and apply it to their life. I’ve been putting out little videos and things on those kinds of topics and constantly discussing it with people in my religious community, and work life. So, even though I’ve left academia, it’s still a discussion and a movement I love at heart and hope all my different backgrounds will intersect again someday.

Ravi Purushotma currently authors videos, games and apps for clients looking to use digital media to make learning & instruction more engaging.

Next time, We will consider the publication of the report and its subsequent impact on our understanding of media literacy.

Confronting the Challenges of a Participatory Culture (Fifteen Plus Years Later) (Part One)

The white paper, Confronting the Challenges of a Participatory Culture, was published by the MacArthur Foundation sixteen years ago. This document, prepared by Henry Jenkins and a team of researchers at MIT, offered an important reframing of media literacy which reflected the shifting realities of the digital era -- new affordances, new practices, and new opportunities were leading to new forms of informal learning that were playing an important role in the lives of many American youth. Educators were often slow to recognize the value of these new spaces as a site for developing new skills or the ways literacy changed in a world where young people were creating and sharing media with each other in record numbers. 

Across this series, we are going to provide an oral history of how that report came to be written and what its impact was at the time of publication. In this opening segment, we speak to Connie Yowell, who headed the Digital Media and Learning Initiative for the MacArthur Foundation; Mimi Ito, who was a second pillar of the initial research for the Digital Media and Learning Initiative; and Henry Jenkins, who was the primary author of the Participatory Culture White Paper. Long time media literacy advocate Tessa Jolls conducted the interviews.

Connie Yowell:  In 2004, we were coming out of a $30 million initiative and district reform that was focused on teacher professional development and evidence-based approaches to teacher professional development. It was state of the art. It was a really thoughtful, forward looking set of commitments we had made revolving around the notion that the teacher was going to be the core unit of change in transforming schools and that we needed to focus on professional development. We were in three districts doing district wide reform, and within three years, we cycled through 11 superintendents and made almost no progress. 

The MacArthur Board was paying attention. They said, there’s got to be something different we can do. We had John Seely Brown on our board, the former head of Xerox. John said we should be looking over the horizon and thinking about the impact of digital media, and these new tools that are coming out, and what they mean for learning. I was like, well, I don’t do that. I’m a hardcore educator. I don’t believe in technology making a difference.  I’m out of here. 

What we decided in the meantime was to split the difference, because MacArthur didn’t want me to leave, which I appreciated, and to do three exploratory pieces of work. Henry’s piece was one of the three. Another one was Mimi Ito’s research. We asked her, with her group of 25 researchers, to do an ethnographic study of how young people were using digital media outside of school. We had Nicole Pinker in Chicago, who’s a computer scientist, and we just said, “you’re in our backyard”. It allowed us, the staff, to be able to come and spend some time with teachers and kids to see how they were doing intervention with technology.

Great. But neither of those was the conceptual piece. Neither of those pieces were really grounded. In reading Henry’s stuff, I was really coming to understand the transformation in the culture. We needed somebody who really understood the relationship between culture and media and what it means for thinking and production and creativity and all the things that Henry focuses on. Then, the third piece was for Henry to really dive deep conceptually to help us and to help the field understand what was happening both from a theoretical and a more practical perspective. He was able to understand the media in a much different way and explain a new set of literacies. We were looking for Henry and his team to really conceptually, intellectually drive that work I mean, he’s got all those literacies. His team has all those literacies. He’s deep in it, but to have him start writing about it and really make explicit what the combination of these new digital tools plus culture was going to create. 

That was the genesis of the work. We had brought Henry with Mimi and Nicole to be our consultants to help make us be smarter. It really became clear that we needed him to be our intellectual center, and his team to really push that thinking to the world of education, because this new thinking wasn’t going to come out of the world of education. 

Tessa Jolls: I think that’s a really important point and something that I don’t know how we can shift education easily. I mean, it’s a real challenge, but I always felt that this work was really important in terms of holding up this mirror for where we were and trying to help educators see that we needed to move in a different direction. 

Connie Yowell:   Yes. In order to do that, educators, we all do, need a conceptual frame. We need to know the categories and the buckets that matter in this new world and why they matter. A big piece of the work that Henry was doing and his team was doing, from my perspective, was coming up with those key conceptual categories that are grounded in pop culture.  In our vision of innovation, we needed to go deep on the adjacencies to education. We weren’t funding directly within the education space; instead, we were funding all of the adjacent places where new ideas were coming to life then figuring out what they would mean for education and for learning. Henry’s work is clearly a core adjacency that needed to become infused inside education. 

Connie Yowell is currently serving as Senior Vice Chancellor of Education Innovation at Northeastern University and was founder of LRNG.

Henry Jenkins: This was my very first opportunity to work with the MacArthur Foundation. We've been working with them continuously for the last 15 years since the report was written.  I was midway through my time co-directing the Comparative Media Studies Program at MIT. We had launched the program with the goal of providing a new kind of master's program in media studies, one that was committed to preparing people to go out in the world and make a difference in industry, journalism, public policy and academia. It was a program that would have a very strong applied logic to it. We wanted students to take what they were studying in their classes and to apply that in an immediate way to pressing problems in conversation with real world stakeholders. Project New Media Literacies was one of our major research initiatives but one among others. We were also researching games-based education, games and innovation, global media policy, civic media, and the creative industries. Each of those projects allowed a mix of students to engage in an active research process based on their own career goals and commitments. 

 As we were reaching out to identify what those research opportunities were, I was in a dialogue with danah boyd, who took some classes under me when she was a master's student at the MIT Media Lab. She was advising Connie Yowell at MacArthur, about the launch of some new initiatives around digital media and learning. Through her intervention, I was invited out to San Francisco for a conference at the old Exploratorium, where we were to present some insights into the current media environment, with the idea of impressing the MacArthur leadership, and hopefully getting some grant funds out of it.   As I was doing that first presentation, something went wrong with the PowerPoint. It was basically shuffling the slides randomly throughout the entire presentation. So I had a rich deck of stuff prepared to share, but on the fly, I was having to adjust my talk to reflect the images on the screen, with no sense of what might pop up next. No one ever dared to say to me, was that a random presentation or did you plan it that way? But it must have been strong enough because that launched one of the most important relationships of my academic career.

Connie had situated me next to the President of the MacArthur Foundation on the bus trip back to the hotel, and asked me to explain to him why media literacy should be part of their initiative. I did so. I don't remember anything I said in that conversation. By the time we got off the bus, he was sold on the idea that media literacy should be part of MacArthur’s agenda. Everyone, all the staff at MacArthur seemed really thrilled that I somehow convinced him of this. I was asked to both write a white paper and to do some proof of concept demos.

I was already dabbling in media literacy. I'd written the column for Technology Reviewthat you and a number of other people had seen and responded to. I was starting to get invitations to speak at media literacy conferences in the New England area. We had begun to do a series of conferences called We’ve Wired the Classroom -- Now What? They were designed for local educators to think about the next steps towards online education -- what kinds of curricular materials and professional development were required, what new projects were emerging.

Right now, we’re suddenly relying on online education nationwide, but a lot of the work we were advocating then never took place. Many of the challenges we now confront were being discussed at these conferences decades ago. 

Many of us saw a need for advocacy for the digital realm, something like National Public Radio or National Public Television that was going to generate content, develop curricular materials, take advantage of the experiments that were going on, and bring the teachers along. As the conference title suggests, it's not enough to wire the classroom and just assume that everything else falls into place because it doesn't. The wires are the least of it. The Clinton administration at that time was pushing them to wire all the classrooms in America, saying this would close the digital divide, and we knew it wouldn't.

The main thinkers of that period were passing through MIT— like Howard Rheingold who was doing groundbreaking thinking about the virtual community, and regularly speaking at MIT. Sherry Turkle was a colleague at MIT who was raising important questions about online conversations, identity in a networked world, and the blurring of reality and the imaginary online.  We had great students like danah boyd passing through MIT. She was shaking up our thinking because she was so grounded in the youth culture and what they were doing online. 

Part of our mandate from MacArthur had been to look across the research that had been done on learning and fandom and gaming spaces. This helped us gain insight into learning in other online communities and bringing that back to schools. Throughout that report are signs of the conversations we were engaged with MIT on games-based learning. Alongside the work we were doing for MacArthur, we were doing Microsoft-funded research making the educational case for how games might serve educational purposes.  We called that initiative Games to Teach and as we expanded our funding, it became The Education Arcade.  Kurt Squire, the original Research Director for Games to Teach, left MIT and ended up at University of Wisconsin-Madison with James Paul Gee. It’s no accident that two of James Paul Gee's students are on the team that wrote the Macarthur white paper with me. So, there was a cross-pollination with one of the major centers for thinking about games-based education. I am still seeing the importance of that pioneering work even as I fear that this language of gamification has rigidified a lot of the creative experiments that were going on into the narrowest possible version of what games-based education could look like. I am very pleased to see this new book Locally Played by Benjamin Stokes who was, at the time, one of my foundation officers at MacArthur and later became my PhD student at USC. Ben’s new book stresses how games played in real world spaces can enhance community building. 

 I don't think that report could have come out of any place other than MIT. Being at MIT left us ahead of the curve in the midst of ongoing conversations about the social and cultural impact of emerging platforms and practices. I was housemaster in an MIT dormitory, and I could walk up and down the halls, and just see what students were doing online. That was part of my night job, so it wasn't even necessarily formalized research. But there were lots of insights that made their way into that report that grew out of just living in an MIT environment with those students.

Tessa Jolls:  Yes, and I think that's fascinating how all of that came together at this special time. How then was that connection made in terms of, hey, we need a report, we need this theoretical framework outlined?

Henry Jenkins:  As Connie Yowell describes in her interview, she was working with Nicole Pinker. She was working with Mimi Ito. She was working with me. There were conversations amongst us about how we were progressing. I certainly was following Mimi Ito’s research. She invited me to participate in discussions with her research groups at multiple points along the way, and vice versa. I think it was very clear that we needed a shared vocabulary to talk about learning in this environment. I also felt that we needed to make the case to educators for why the kinds of informal learning that were taking place in young people's lives outside of school were in fact pertinent to what teachers did in their classrooms. 

Mimi's work was really documenting youth digital practices out in the world. She ended up using youth vernacular to frame her theories. She talks about “hanging out, messing around, geeking out”. Those are terms that emerged organically from the young people she interviewed. My task was the opposite: to take what we knew from research on informal learning, fan communities, gaming communities, and write it up in a way that would speak to teachers, to principals, the school board members, the state policymakers, grant funders. So I was giving academic terms to practices that probably would have been described rather differently by the young people themselves. 

As we got into it, it was also clear that young people were being taught to devalue their own experiences, to devalue the ways they were learning and what they were learning in these informal spaces. I've come to recognize the importance of helping young people think about why it's important to take seriously those opportunities, as alongside helping teachers think about how to incorporate those skills and practices into the schools. 

Tessa Jolls: Yes, absolutely. You really were at this confluence of all of these ideas swirling around. Fortunately, it seems, like, I know and talking with Connie and with Mimi, they saw a need to really articulate more of the theoretical foundations and then turn to you. It was just incredible timing, well, not really coincidence, but definitely you were the man of the time and that really made all the difference.

Henry Jenkins is currently Provost's Professor of Communication, Journalism, Cinematic Arts, and Education at the University of Southern California and is the Principal Investigator for the Civic Imagination Project (funded by MacArthur).

Mimi Ito: Henry was focused on writing a more conceptual summative piece and then around the same, we had started fieldwork on what young people were doing in the digital landscape. We were looking at kids who were on Myspace and instant messenger primarily and had not really made the leap to text messaging, which is hard to believe.  The US was very late to text messaging compared to the rest of the post-industrial world. The US was an outlier, so kids were still using a lot of instant messengers around then. This is pre-iPhone. Sometimes I get my chronology wrong ... yes, it was definitely pre-iPhone. MacArthur deciding to look at the online world as an arena for understanding learning was ahead of the time. John Seely Brown had just joined the board and it was a bold move at that time. 

Tessa Jolls: Yes, it certainly was. It was interesting, too, because the emphasis was certainly on the education, but not education in schools. It was really centered around the technology and, of course, that was rapidly developing. We didn't even have a clue about what was coming, but I guess that isn't quite fair. We did have some clues, but nevertheless, when we really didn't have, as you said, the adoption of the social media and so on, but what did you feel then was your major challenge in terms of the research you were doing? 

Mimi Ito: I was in that post-doctoral phase when all of this started. I had been studying how kids learn with video games and socializing and other things.  I was an educational researcher as well as a cultural anthropologist by training.  I wrote the first dissertation about digital culture in our anthropology department, but a lot of the perspective came from youth culture studies and so on. 

I was very familiar with Henry's work because there weren't really many people doing work in the States. Henry had written an early paper on videogames and had been one of the few senior media study scholars who would look at video games at all. At that time, I don't think Henry was that deep into learning and education.  I was delighted that he was brought into the MacArthur initiative and was writing the paper around literacy, which is obviously a great bridge to the education side. I was always the black sheep of educational research because I looked at what kids did for fun, like play videogames. I had just finished the study of Yu-Gi-Oh!, which is a post-Pokémontrading card game and I described what kids learn from playing those kinds of complex games.  Early networks, multiplayer games, text-based games were really the only environment at the time that I could see kids connecting socially via digital media because none of this other stuff had taken off yet. I had done research on mobile phones and texting in Japan, but the MacArthur Initiative kicked off right at that time when those things were starting to converge.

Henry was writing his book on convergence culture and suddenly you were at the beginning of seeing rich digital media in a social environment and games turned into real-time multiplayer network for the first time. ... there was a five-year period when all of that was converging, which was also that period that this paper that Henry was working on was pulled together and our digital youth study started. 

For me, it was very much an extension of work I had already been doing theoretically and conceptually, but suddenly, it became a big thing in the world… I had just spent two years in Japan studying the birth of camera phones and the mobile Internet and these weird videogames that were very social and then suddenly the rest of the world got interested.   That was when MacArthur stepped in, yes. I was starting to write about this stuff, suddenly the whole world was interested. I had already seen how youth culture was an incubator of trends around the digital. By 2004, people were paying attention to the mobile internet. It wasn't just high school girls in Tokyo. 

I was pretty confident in the topics I was choosing that they were going to become global phenomena that transcended ages. If you were an observer of the digital environment, you knew this was going to explode. That part was not surprising. I think the question of whether educators would pay attention, that was not preordained. MacArthur had important influence supporting a counter-narrative. Henry's paper was really instrumental in that. 

Tessa Jolls: Interesting, yes. Again, the impact on the different audience, splinters, educators versus the technology people and so on is really interesting because traditionally the education segment has always lagged and not necessarily been there. It was really important to have some impact on that particular audience and I think these reports did. That was something very different. 

Mimi Ito:  MacArthur’s choices of scholars were not in the educational mainstream. Bringing people like Henry into the conversation around education was an interesting move because Henry has credibility within the media and gaming space. That helped knit those worlds together, I think, in an important way. 

Mizuko “Mimi” Ito is a Professor in Residence at the Humanities Research Institute at the University of California, Irvine.

Next time, we will check in with Henry’s co-authors on the project to see how they are living with those insights in their professional and personal lives today.

Race. Identity and Memory in Lovecraft Country: A Conversation (Part Two)

Kyu Hyun Kim: Among the strengths of Lovecraft Country as Shawn discusses I was particularly taken by depiction of the series's black characters as organic intellectuals per Gramsci. This observation led me to think about how Asian Americans have been presented in the US mainstream genre works. While there are plenty of occasions for associating Asian Americans with "book-smart" qualities and with technological expertise or academic knowledge, I doubt that these stereotypes really function the way you recognize as organic intellectuals. More often than not, the "book-smart" qualities are merely there to highlight social akwardness or bodily weaknesses. It gets even more complicated when the weight of the US-centered historical perspective (left-anti-imperialist or right-American-Exceptionalist) is added to a character: Hiro from Heroes, for instance.

Shawn's piece also returns me to one of my initial questions, which is how do we make use out of a profoundly racist or otherwise deeply problematic classic source that nonetheless has become greatly influential and remain alluring for the creatives? Would you say that Lovecraft Country basically evades this issue by merely appropriating cultural capital of the author's name? The series was not convincing to me as a critique of the racism underlying the Lovecraftian mythos, provided that it was ever intended as such. The fury of Christine who got excluded from the Order of Adam because of her gender seems to have received a greater attention, and then that angle also seems to become curiously defused as the series reaches its resolution. Where is the equivalent of Nyarlatothep or Fungi from Yuggoth, rethought and transformed in the manner African-American characters were in this series? Maybe we don't need them at all, but then again, this somehow leaves me vaguely cheated: was the series's end somehow meant to suggest the critical inversion of Lovecraft's racism? If so, I still remain unconvinced.

Sorry this is really so incoherent and all over the place. But in any case thank you Shawn for your great thought piece!

Shawn Taylor: Something that Kyu Hyun’s brilliant excavating of Love Country sparked in me is the many ways Asians and Pacific Islanders exist as the every and no-things of (I’ll generically call) the genres of the fantastic. But we’ll get to that. 

I agree with Kyu Hyun that there was little Lovecraft in Lovecraft Country. It makes me wonder if the disconnect was in the LC novel—a book written by a white man, attempting to tell a horror story centering on a Black family; or the adaptation by Black creatives from the source material—in either case, the lack of real Lovecraftian cosmic horror felt like a distorted minor key. It was instantly recognizable, but this false note engendered questions instead of dismissal of the work. At least for me. To see the twin horror of racism and monsters, in the same work, was a revelation—despite some of the plot holes, lip service to every genre, and the blatant omission of a resolution of the most fascinating relationship in the entire series, that of Ruby and Christina.

Their relationship and its Cronenbergian body-horror dynamics could have been an entire series, unto itself. This relationship also brings to the fore questions that always arise when considering shapeshifters: what is racial phenotype and sex to one who can change those qualities? There were a lot of intriguing questions left on the table. Alas. I’ll stick a pin in this, for now. 

 Before the episode, “Meet Me in Daegu”, I had only a passing familiarity with Korea, it’s politics, or its mythology. In the West, in my experience, especially in the States, there is a mashing together of Asian cultures. Not in a useful, transcultural way that highlights exchange, mutual influence, and the very real specter of colonization—but of laziness. No other word for it. Asian, instead of taking the time to explore what this means, becomes a catchall, something to affix as a label without having to do any more exploration.

So, when the Kumiho was introduced, I became angry (through my ignorance) because I thought they’d injected the Japanese Kitsune into the narrative. I couldn’t tell my fox spirits apart. This is a major problem with Asian culture and the Asian diaspora, as understood in the West; unless you’re a scholar, all of the cultures become Asian. No Japanese, no Chinese, no Korean, not Taiwanese, just Asian. Granted, it’s up to us to investigate and gain clarity, but the with the all and nothingness of Asian culture, as it is presented in media, it makes it difficult. 

I first thought about this with Star Trek. As a lifelong fan, I have to fully agree with Kyu Hyun’s assessment that Trek has tokenized not only Asian people (despite George Takei’s Sulu being a revolutionary character, for his time) but Asian cultures as well. The Vulcans and the Romulans seemed to occupy Asian allegorical space, seen through the lens of ill-informed exoticism. Years later, Joss Whedon’s Firefly was not only more glaring and grating than Trek, but more blatantly offensive. The entire show mythology was that there are two cultural cores: One Western and one “Pan-Asian.” The show is peppered with a kind of Chinese-language pidgin, bland and generic Asian characters, symbols, modes of dress—but the show is essentially Space Confederates cosplaying Asian (no particular Asian, ostensibly Chinese, but never firmly verified) but with no Asians of note in the series’ thirteen episode run.

This is the everything and no-thingness I mentioned. The idea and cultural trappings of an Asian society is all around, but Asian people are thoroughly erased. This is why I felt “Meet me in Daegu” was so powerful. 

Outside of M.A.S.H. and the Phillip Rhee starring martial arts film franchise, Best of the Best, I never encountered too much of anything that related to Korea. I had a Korean friend in high school, Myung, but we could only be friends at school because I was Black (American) and his parents would not allow me in his home. After seeing what Korean’s went through during the Fatherland Liberation War/Six-Two-Five depicted in LC, seeing Atticus casually murder and instill fear—and then pine after Ji-Ah—I could understand (not justify) their not wanting me for company. I had two Black Korean war veterans I knew watch this episode and asked them to tell me what they thought about Atticus’ scenes. One refused to tell me anything and the other, through what I interpreted as tears on the telephone, told me that those scenes were mild. It gave my more insight into Myung’s family’s experience. 

Lovecraft Country humanized the Koreans living under occupation and illustrated the ‘just doing my job’ cruelty space American soldiers occupied—something most people in the U.S. are wholly unfamiliar with. We’ve been told North Korea is an oppressive state with wacky leaders and South Korea is a hub of technology and boy/girl band factory. That’s it. But being introduced to a more accurate portrayal of Korean life under wartime conditions, and getting a glimpse of Korean folk/mythic life forces us to see just how much heavy-lifting “Meet Me in Daegu” tried to do and how much further the image industry has to go.] 

Kye Hyun Kim: Thank you so much, Shawn, for a wonderful, super-stimulating and deeply moving response to what I have written. The passage about your conversations with the old African-American veterans of the Cold War was so powerful that I had to literally get up from my seat and pace around the room for some minutes before I could sit down again. So many things went through my mind, including the very real specter of Korean racism-- a people as fiercely nationalistic and ethnocentric as any in the world-- toward the people of color, specifically against the mixed-blood children fathered during the Korean War. Your comments gave me a renewed appreciation of just how far the creators of Lovecraft Country did push the envelope in terms of destabilizing the accepted imageries of Asians and Koreans in the American media.

Kyu Hyun Kim, Associate Professor History at University of California-Davis, was born in Seoul, Korea. He received his Ph.D. in history and East Asian languages in 1997 from Harvard University. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Edwin O. Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies at Harvard University (1996-1997), served a Japan Society for Promotion of Science Fellowship, and was nominated and sponsored in the United States by the Japan Advisory Board, Social Science Research Council in 2000. He is the author of the forthcoming book, Treasonous Patriots: Collaboration and the Colonial Modernity in Modern Korean History and Culture.

Shawn Taylor is one of the founders of Nerds of Color and a founding organizer of the Black Comix Arts Festival, a festival that highlights and promotes artists on the margins of the mainstream comic book industry. Shawn recently published a white paper, We The Fans: How Our Powers Can Change the World, as a Senior Fellow for the Pop Culture Collaborative.

Race, Identity and Memory in Lovecraft Country: A Conversation (Part One)

Over the next two installments, I will continue my focus on some of the most discussed television dramas of 2020 with a conversation between Kyu Hyun Kim (a historian of South Korean politics and culture) and Shawn Taylor (one of the founders of Nerds of Color), about Lovecraft Country. These two writers explore the ways this remarkable series broke with earlier representations of Koreans and African-Americans in the horror and fantasy genre. My own sense was that the series took swing for the fences risks that sometimes paid off and sometimes didn’t, but that it was crammed full of provocative ideas that will shape my thinking for sometime to come. In some ways, it was more successful at the level of individual episodes, which made provocative interventions in a range of horror subgenres, rather than at the level of the serial, which was a bit incoherent up till the end and opened much that it failed to resolve. But we don’t need to see a series as perfect to find it sparks conversation as this and the next blog post illustrate.

Kyu Hyun Kim: Some parts of HBO’s Lovecraft Country has left me breathlessly excited and well-nigh speechless due to its sheer political audacity as well as pleasures derived from its crazy blending of different subgenres and styles— Afro-futurism, Gothic horror conventions, film noir— even when the cake mix sometimes does not quite rise as expected. Other parts of the series— thankfully minor in proportion— turned out ultimately disappointing for various reasons: the rather listless denouement rehabilitating that hoary cliché of a Christian patriarch sacrificing himself for the community, a non-resolution of the relationship between Ruby and Christina, for my money the most intriguing couple in the whole series, the curiously lackadaisical depictions of Lovecraftian monsters (is that multi-ocular, many-toothed thing supposed to be… Shoggoth?) and so on. In the end, though, I have little problem praising historical awareness, innovative approach and genre-savvy chutzpah of the showrunner Misha Green, who wrote the majority of episodes as well. 

For me, a South Korean genre enthusiast as well as a teacher of Korean culture and history, the big “uh-oh” moment arrived when the series segued into Episode Six, “Meet Me in Daegu,” devoted to the unspooling of the backstory between the protagonist Atticus (Jonathan Majors) and the Korean nurse Ji-ah (Jaimie Chung), during the Korean War. The images of idiotically grinning Asian men clad in loose pants and cotton jackets from M. A. S. H. and other too-awful-to-mention “representations of Koreans in American TV” passed through my head, but only for a moment. I told myself, OK, this is 2020. A South Korean film won the Best Picture Oscar only a few months ago, for God’s sake. I probably will not see a degrading Korean character speaking in pidgin English (unless such a speech pattern was integral to that character). I also probably will not see a generic Oriental landscape and 19th century Chinese houses standing in for Daegu, one of the major cities in South Korea and its very name fraught with historical and cultural implications, as “Chicago” or “New Orleans” would be for Americans. I also admit that I was intrigued to find out how Ji-ah as a Korean woman, living in ‘50s during the height of Cold War no less, would be portrayed. Would she disappointingly turn out to be just another token Asian presence, in the way multiple iterations of (with apologies to some Trekker friends I admire and respect) Star Trek have always treated “real” Asians (rather than Vulcans and Romulans “standing in” for Asians)? 

The verdict: it was significantly better than I expected. Not that the show got all period, historical and cultural details right: of course not. But overall, the episode was ambitious in the right ways and obviously trying to break new grounds, some of them in relation to depictions of East Asian cultures in the American TV, others in terms of recognizing with clear eyes the presence of US imperialism and horrible treatment of women by the hyper-masculine state (war regimes) in both Korea and the US. This adventurous attitude was in all honesty far better than being timidly "safe" by the contemporary standards of identity politics. 

And I was right: approximately sixty percent or so of the dialogue was in Korean. Of course, it would have been really great, and instantly impressed many Korean viewers, had Green and others paid a bit more attention to the Korean language and got Ji-ah and her mother to speak in Daegu dialect. Moreover, the episode in my opinion also displayed some evidence of the production crew or writers having studied the Korean horror and dark fantasy of the past two decades. The kumiho (nine-tailed fox) myth is probably one of the most frequently exploited subject matter for Korean horror/dark fantasy genre, and the Lovecraft Country team manages to mine its subtext of gender politics, an approach very much in tune with the evolution of the myth in New Korean Cinema as well as South Korean TV dramas. A bit head-scratching part was depicting the “nine tails” of Ji-ah the werefox as disgusting tentacular organs snaking out of various orifices of her body: a smart student of mine opined that this was perhaps influenced by the “tentacular” obsessions of some adult-oriented Japanese anime, which has little to do with the Korean myth. 

More importantly, the episode was critically reflective about American Cold War imperialism in the way that I have seldom seen in stateside productions. For some American viewers, hopefully it would have been jarring to see the hero Atticus presented as a cold-blooded torturer and executioner "just doing his job," then turn all gooey-romantic to trying to woo Ji-ah. In the similar vein, I was most impressed by the character of Young-ja, a Communist-sympathetic nurse (an excellent performance by Prisca Kim). Her character, morally sensitive and empathetic but also endowed with certain levels of urban sophistication, is very much the kind we would see in recent, notable works of New Korean Cinema dealing with the Korean War or North Korea (such as The Frontline [2011], Swing Kids [2018], The Spy Gone North [2018]) that have managed to humanize North Korean “enemies.” 

The production design was lavish and gorgeous, which is not to say there were no moments that reminded me of a ‘50s black-and-white Samuel Fuller war flick set in the Korean peninsula. Some of the flubs are probably difficult to notice unless you have actually lived in the country proximate to the era depicted. For instance, the Korean subtitles for American movies playing in movie theaters, used to appear vertically, not horizontally, as shown in the episode and today’s Korea. The costumes and sets sometimes have that slightly off-kilter, prefab vibes that might well have been an intended effect. By the way, I did not mind making Ji-ah a fan of Hollywood musicals, especially of Judy Garland. Some Korean viewers might object. It is, I would argue, clearly not a shallow infatuation with a slick American consumerist culture on her part. For this particular point, I hope that South Koreans of today try to recognize the unimaginable allure that old Hollywood could claim for their parents and grandparents.

Ironically, one of the most obvious cliches in the episode was the Korean-American character, Atticus’s buddy, who gives a neat position speech about how he is caught between two (racist) nations and rejected by both sides: these characters often function as an alibi for racial sensitivity on the part of the producers. If Green and others were serious about anti-Asian racism, they should have included the more overt racist treatment of “gooks” by American soldiers. 

Nitpickings aside, I enjoyed the episode (and the whole series) despite its flaws and disappointments. Things have improved much by 2020 but also much remains the same: witness the debacle of Disney sinking hundreds of millions of dollars into making the nauseatingly culturally-and-politically obtuse Mulan, the very raison d’etre of which is egregious pandering to the PRC market and state. I definitely appreciate Green et al.’s boundary-busting gutsiness in Lovecraft Country, which I believe is the greatest strength of the whole episode and the series.

Shawn Taylor: Based on the 2016 novel by Matt Ruff, Lovecraft Country is a television milestone in so many ways. It’s the first horror tv show starring an almost all Black cast that is focused on multiple Black characters, each of the characters have some agency, some stake in the story and all of it wrapped in a prestige television format. This alone should be enough to put it in the running for GOAT status.

But why Lovecraft? How could a virulent racist’s work be used to tell the story of Black folks in the height of the 1950s Jim Crow era United States? While I’m fully on board with the program, there isn’t too much “Lovecraftian Horror” in Lovecraft Country. To be Black in the US, especially before the Civil Rights Movement was in full swing, was to be afraid most of the time. You go to the wrong town, the wrong restaurant, the wrong store and you could be assaulted, assaulted and jailed, or killed. No help would be available. You were completely and utterly on your own. The universe didn’t give one shit about you. I guess the whole ‘uncaring, disinterested universe’ is a Lovecraftian trope. I’ll concede this point. 

The cosmic horror of the Lovecraftian Mythos cannot even hold a candle to the cloak of fear Black folks wore, say, driving from down south up to Chicago, or from Chicago to New England. The quintessentially American activity of the cross-country road trip, something white folks enjoyed as a matter of course, is the starting point of one long episode of hypervigilance, terror, and anxiety for Black folks. So, then, why did Atticus, Letitia, and Uncle George make so many of those trips? Their motivation is why I absolutely fell in love with this show, despite its flaws and glaring plot-holes. 

Running parallel with the horror and magic and swashbuckling adventure that our protagonists were enveloped in were two things rarely afforded Black folks in television and film, especially in the more fantastic genres: intelligence and curiosity. Of course, there have been intelligent Black characters on big and small screen science fiction/horror/fantasy, but rarely are they complete beings. They usually get reduced to being nothing more than exposition drops that spur the main characters to action, or their intelligence is played for comic relief. Lovecraft Country gives us an entirely no presentation of the smart Black character.

I was privy to a preview screening of the first five episodes. After the fifth episode, those in my viewing pod immediately entered into a text conversation about how each and every Black character was smart. Like, really smart. It only got better with the remainder of the series. And it wasn’t like so many other shows where intelligence, especially for Black people, is coded as some kind of disability or impediment (awkward, dispassionate, distant)—or linked to same (See Geordi La Forge from Star Trek: The Next Generation or Dr. Miles Hawkins from M.A.N.T.I.S.). In Lovecraft Country, every Black character, man or woman; gay or straight; old or young; male or female possessed both a keen intelligence and a restless curiosity. And the thing that struck all of us was that there was no explanation for it. 

Unlike Charles Gunn who underwent a procedure to enhance his knowledge of the law and improve how he spoke (aka make him more appealing to white people) in Joss Whedon’s, Angel, the Black venturers of Lovecraft Country were organic intellectuals—we see you Gramsci and Friere. There was no talk of schools or schooling, only literature as an entry point for Atticus, his Uncle George, and his father Montrose; science for Uncle George’s wife, Hippolyta and science and art for their daughter, Diana (not so coincidently the names of Wonder Woman and her mother), and art for Letitia and her sister, Ruby. That they all were able to draw from their respective intellectual bases and curiosities to confront the creeping horror, while engaging in transdisciplinary problem solving, elevated Lovecraft Country above the schlock horror it could have devolved into. 

As a lifelong fan of the fantastic (we see you, Todorov) and the speculative, I have been routinely disappointed by how Black people and Blackness has been portrayed in the genres that fall under these. Blackness is either coded or blatantly offered as evil, or less than, or something that needs to be banished or abolished. What Lovecraft Country does, the reparative work it did, was to give the Black venturers agency in a genre that excludes or dispatches Black people on a regular basis. Not only do the Black protagonists have agency, Black culture, Black folks life is presented not as something other than the norm, but as something loving and mainstream, despite the forces allied against it. 

Lovecraft Country provided us with a Black culture that was tender, affectionate, and a source of strength for the characters. It was a culture that was able to produce intellectuals, curiosity seekers who, through their willingness to engage and utilize knowledge, without bias, were able to save their world and give us ten or so hours of damn fine television. 

Kyu Hyun Kim, Associate Professor History at University of California-Davis, was born in Seoul, Korea. He received his Ph.D. in history and East Asian languages in 1997 from Harvard University. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Edwin O. Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies at Harvard University (1996-1997), served a Japan Society for Promotion of Science Fellowship, and was nominated and sponsored in the United States by the Japan Advisory Board, Social Science Research Council in 2000. He is the author of the forthcoming book, Treasonous Patriots: Collaboration and the Colonial Modernity in Modern Korean History and Culture.

Shawn Taylor is one of the founders of Nerds of Color and a founding organizer of the Black Comix Arts Festival, a festival that highlights and promotes artists on the margins of the mainstream comic book industry. Shawn recently published a white paper, We The Fans: How Our Powers Can Change the World, as a Senior Fellow for the Pop Culture Collaborative.

Back to School: Living Newspapers, Transmedia Operas, and Other Hybrid Media

Yesterday, I shared the syllabus for my PhD seminar, Science Fiction AS Media Theory. Today, I am sharing the syllabus for a class I am co-teaching with a longtime friend and a colleague from the Specialized Journalism Program, Sasha Anawalt. This is going to be Sasha’s last class, since she is retiring, and so we wanted it to be a blow-out, one which stretched both of us (and our students) to think about arts and culture in new ways, especially in the context of the Pandemic, social distancing, Zoom teaching, etc. So, we tapped our respective networks to host a series of conversations with artists, critics, scholars, activists, who are exploring new relations between high and low, between media and everyday life. Our assignments tap the past — living newspapers, Cornell boxes — and the future — speculative journalism. Students are challenged to process the material in conversation with each other through dialogic writing. And there’s a recurring focus on speculative fiction as a set of tools that will allow us to think differently about our current conditions and future possibilities. The students will be early and mid career arts and culture journalisms who are returning for a masters to retool and deepen their thinking. i should note that my syllabi normally list the readings under the topic of the day where-as here, we are listing the readings first and the topic

JOUR 593: Arts Criticism and Commentary

3 units

Spring 2021 – Wednesdays – 2-4:30 p.m.

Instructors: Sasha Anawalt; Henry Jenki

Course Description

Living Newspapers, Transmedia Operas, and Other Hybrid Media Forms

This course looks to the future, asking how we might imagine the world of arts and culture journalism post-COVID-19 pandemic. New forms of expression have emerged during lockdown. Cinema has dimmed its bright lights so that fainter forms of participatory media, such as Twitch or podcasts, have gained greater visibility. Television has lowered technical standards so that international media producers can compete more fully in their marketplace. And fans are restaging their favorite amusement park rides for each other via YouTube as a response to the shutting down of Disneyland for the better part of a year. Virtual choirs of a hundred people sing across the continents from their separate living rooms to your screen. Museums and galleries open “pop-up” shows for fistfuls of viewers at a time. Opera takes place in parking lots with the audience in their cars. Nothing is the same. The relationship between audience and artist is forever changed. The current moment is characterized by the blurring of boundaries between high and low, between different media forms, between different cultural practices. It is further informed by BLM, #MeToo, and the presidential election. 

How might journalists expand their repertoire to incorporate new modes of criticism and reporting which themselves reflect a broader range of media affordances? And how might we understand this cultural churn in relation to earlier moments in the history of arts and entertainment? We will grapple with these questions through conversations with leading creators and thinkers from across the art and entertainment worlds. Guests will range from Disney Imagineers, comic book artists, fan activists, virtual reality producers, and science fiction writers to photographers, assemblage artists, architects, and opera producers, not to mention distinguished arts and culture journalists, who will weigh in and help us explore alternatives such as living newspapers, transmedia opera, and other hybrid forms. Through assignments that include dialogic writing, live performances, and hands-on creative projects, students with work together to produce new journalism possibilities that ideally rise to meet the current cultural moment and move it forward.

 Student Learning Outcomes

·       Learning about influential thinkers and critics in the humanist tradition through classic and contemporary texts, podcasts, and videos – as well as from in-person lectures;

·       Questioning conventional ideas of effective communication and media through DIY collaborative and individual journalism projects;

·       Producing one “living newspaper” team project that exercises and tests the relations between politics and culture;

·       Discovering how connected everything is, and making this manifest through an immersive Joseph Cornell box;

·       Writing on a weekly basis to reinforce the writing habit in a dialogic Blackboard journal;

·       Publishing on Ampersand or other media outlets;

·       Solidifying ideas about your future and the confluence of high and low art, hybrid media, and the ways your journalism can be realized and possibly affect change.

Course Notes

This class will be a combination of lecture/discussion and production workshopping, leaning toward the former with a roster of guests from many arts-related disciplines.We will be talking a lot across the term about fan engagement and participation, and that will require you to talk about what is meaningful to you and be active in most conversations. Come prepared, having done the readings, and open to mentoring one another. You will each introduce at least one speaker.

This course takes place online through Zoom with multimedia and technology-enhanced elements as a likely accompaniment to many of the lectures. The materials will be made available on Blackboard, as will all the reading assignments in a PDF format or via links to e-books and articles.You are responsible for paying attention to the emails we send, and responding in a timely fashion. Likewise, we will respond to yours certainly within 48 hours. If you do not hear from either of us, by all means give us a tap. 

Required Readings and Supplementary Materials

You are required to have the graphic novel adaptation, by Damian Duffy and John Jennings, of Octavia E. Butler’s “Parable of the Sower” (2020), Abrams ComicArts, New York, (ISBN 978-1-4197-3133-4), (265 pages). $25.

We recommend you have:

·      bell hooks, Art on My Mind: Visual Politics, (The New Press, New York, 1995)

·      Henry Jenkins, Comics and Stuff(New York; New York University Press, 2020)

These can be purchased through the USC Bookstore, Amazon, or Bookshop.org.In addition, the USC Library may be able to lend you a copy of Art on My Mindor Comics and Stuff.

All of our other reading materials will be made available to you in PDF form or as links. These will be posted on Blackboard and incorporated in the weekly assignment sheets “handed out” in class via email. Most are in this syllabus under Course Schedule.

Description and Assessment of Assignments 

There are two main projects that you will simultaneously develop and execute over the course of the semester. one of them – which we’re calling “the Joseph Cornell Box” – culminates as a presentation during finals week, in place of a final exam. It is a solo assignment that effectively looks inward. The other, which we will refer to as the Living Newspaper Project, is a group project that looks outward. Both projects are described here in brief, and you can expect fuller details and explanations in class. Both will be graded with a rubric providing a numerical grade that is translated into a letter grade. 

In addition, you will engage in a weekly Dialogic Writing journal exercise on Blackboard, where you and a partner will discuss the class and readings and whatever comes to mind throughout the week (not just in one push right before class). These will be graded at the end of the course. For each missing journal entry, deduct half a letter grade (A becomes A-, etc.) for this specific element of your graded coursework.

CORNELL BOX– The Indo-European root of the word “art” is “to arrange” or “to fit together” (join). This assignment is additive. It begins the first day of class, when you bring in a memory object or what the museum curator and author Nina Simon calls a “social object.”  It’s an object that has a narrative. Its meaning is known to you, and part of this semester-long assignment’s objective is for you to make it have meaning to others. To set it within the context of other objects that you will gather and by “joining” and “arranging” them inside of a box, you will create a world that provokes the viewer to find connections between these objects and create meaning. Worth 20 percent of your final grade.

LIVING NEWSPAPER – This assignment is for a collaborative project, probably in trios or pairs. The objective is to develop a Living Newspaper, which means figuring out a topic or theme that is relevant and of mutual interest. (This could involve improvisation.) It looks to the future. And it must be based on well-reported facts, data, and history. Early on, you will pitch two ideas in 250 words or less. Expect to present one in class. Your theme or topic must relate to the arts or culture, high or low, hybrid or popular, and be about the implications of such social issues as #BLM, anti-racism, #MeToo, diversity and equity in the newsroom, the COVID-19 pandemic, immigration, education, natural resources, the environment, and/or climate change. Your aim is to bring about changes in social behavior and attitudes that could possibly affect the media as a real business and discipline. You will determine the form your Living Newspaper takes. It can be a play, video, dance, stand-up comedy act, comic strip, a 3-D sculpture, or a piece of visual art – it could be on the intersections of food and architecture and an opera chorus. In other words, you are to experiment with form and content, encouraging people to think about the news, using active technologies and materials. Ultimately, you will present this work with your team to the class, in conjunction with a 1,250-word essay authored by you. The essay should provide a critical analysis and understanding of your Living Newspaper. Explain your choices and the background of the work you did as a team. What was your premise? Your thesis? Your objective? Your research? Your process? Finally, why do you think your project will move the needle on social policy and behavior? On the art and artists? On American media? Worth 30 percent of your final grade.

DIALOGIC WRITING– Culture, both high and low, seeks to provoke conversation with a public, but cultural journalism is too often framed as a monologue. This semester, we want students to experiment with collaborative or dialogic forms of writing. You will be assigned a partner at the start of the term (someone who will bring a significantly different background and perspective from your own). Across the term, you will write a weekly series of conversational pieces where the two of you dig into issues which have been raised for you by the course materials, conversations, and experiences, but which will also draw on your own observations about forms of cultural expression in the world around you. These are not crossfire posts; your goal is to explore your differences but also to search for common ground. Each installment should be roughly 1,500 words (i.e. 750-1k words per contributor) and should include more than one round of back and forth exchanges. One of the exchanges must be the speculative journalism project described below which will count for 5 percent of the total for the dialogic writing grade.

SPECULATIVE JOURNALISMmay mean many things, including journalists writing science fiction as a way of exploring what they have learned about how alternative futures might play out. Here, we are using the term to build on the work of the Civic Imagination Project.You will be asked to participate in a world-making workshop conducted by the Civic Imagination team as participants brainstorm their ideal future society of 2060. You are then going to take some of the ideas generated by the workshop and trace down what's happening now which might pave the way for such a future society. This approach combines speculative journalism with citizen-led reporting. We ask that you write a 1,000-word piece on your Dialogic Writing journals, which shares the result of this experiment. Your focus should be on the future of arts and entertainment in world this community imagined. Worth 20 percent of your final grade.

In addition, students will also participate through:

1.    Introducing speaker(s)

2.    One 1:1 meeting with your professor(s)

COURSE SCHEDULE: A WEEKLY BREAKDOWN

Assignment Before the First Day ofClass

Read (in this order, and available in PDF): 

·      Raymond Williams, “Culture is Ordinary,” Resources of Hope: Culture, Democracy and Socialism(1958)

·      Henry Jenkins, “Henry Jenkins on John Fiske,” Exploring the Roots of Digital and Media Literacy through Personal Narrative (2016)

·      Sasha Anawalt, “Introduction,” The Joffrey Ballet: Robert Joffrey and the Making of an American Dance Company(1996)

·      Henry Jenkins and Angela Ndalianis, “On Multisensory and Transmedia Stories,” Journal of Media Literacy(forthcoming)

In addition, choose a memory object to share in the first class.  

Important note to students: Be advised that this syllabus is subject to change - and probably will change - based on the progress of the class, news events, and/or guest speaker availability. 

WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 20TH  

Week 1: Introduction

Assignment:In addition to Joe Rohde’s suggestions (TK), 

Read: 

·      This syllabus and sign it

·      Theodore Gioia, “The Great Reformatting,” The American Scholar(2020)

·      "Hero’s Journey,” Wikipedia

·      Excerpts from Mary Ann Caws (ed.), Joseph Cornell’s Theater of the Mind:Selected Diaries, Letters and Files(2000) 

Watch:

·      Art Spiegelman and Pilobolus Ballet, Hapless Hooligan In Still Moving

·      Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers on Star Wars

Write:

·      Dialogic Collaborative Journal, 1000 words 

WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 27TH

Week 2: Creativity, Collaboration, Innovation, and Hybridity

Speaker:

·       Joe Rohde

Assignment: 

Read:

·       Brief excerpts from Cory Doctorow’s  “Unauthorized Bread” from Radicalized(2019)

·       Brief excerpts from Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl (2010)

·       Three excerpts from Daniel Miller’s The Comfort of Things (2009)

·       Excerpt from Henry Jenkins’ Comics and Stuff (2020)

·       Alexander B. Joy, “Candyland Was Invented for Polio Wards,” The Atlantic.

·       "Mr. Rohde's Wild Ride" https://www.oxy.edu/magazine/summer-2017/mr-rohdes-wild-ride

·       A World-Maker Retires https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/story/2021-01-07/joe-rohde-the-exit-interview

Explore:

·       The Atlantic’s “Object Lessons” 

·       Dominique Moody’s website

·       LA Library, 21 Collections -- Every Object Has a Story

Listen:

·       Kitchen Sisters,“21 Collections -- Every Object Has a Story” 

Write:

·       Dialogic Collaborative Journal, 1,000 words

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 3RD

Week 3: Workshop and Material Culture: Things and...Stuff

Speakers: 

·       Dominique Moody and Cory Doctorow 

Assignments: In addition to suggestions from Yuval Sharon (TK),

Read:

·       Sharon Quinn, “Cradle Will Rock,” TheFurious Improvisation: How the WPA and a Cast of Thousands Made High Art Out of Desperate Times (2008)

·        “Orson Welles’ Voodoo Macbeth: A Forgotten Diversity Landmark,” BBC4 Front Row(2018)

·       P. J. Grisar, “Before the Trump-Inspired Julius Caesar, There was Orson Welles’s Anti-Fascist Staging,” Hyperallergic(2017)

Watch: 

·       Trailer of The Industry’s “Sweetland”(Yuval Sharon)

·       “The Cradle Will Rock” (full film, so we can point to specific passages)

“What the Constitution Means to Me” (On Amazon Prime) (Anyone who does not have Amazon Prime is exempt from watching this.)

·        

·       “Twilight Los Angeles” 

·       “Nixon in China” (Excerpt)

·       “Nixon in China” (Trailer)

·       “Rodney King” (Trailer) 

·       “Between the World and Me” (Trailer)

·       John Outterbridge https://youtu.be/QY9cV_-tnAE

Write:

·      Dialogic Collaborative Journal, 1,000 words 

Prepare:

·      Show ‘n’ tell your Cornell box

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 10TH

Week 4: Living Newspapers and Transmedia Opera 

Speakers:

·       Yuval Sharon and TBD

Assignments: 

Read:

·       Alice Kimm, “Public Space in the Age of Covid-19” (2019)

·       Jason Hartman, “Homes of the Future:Now You Can Talk to Your Home From a Distance, with Alice Kim of JFAK,” Authority(2020)

·       bell hooks, “Black Vernacular: Architecture as Cultural Practice,” Art on My Mind(1995)

·       Carolina A. Miranda, “The Last (Porn) Picture Shows: Once Dotted with Dozens of Adult Cinemas, LA Now Has Two,” LA Times (2017)

·       Caroline A. Miranda, “Parler’s Vibe is MAGA-Red and Unreal,”LA Times (2020)

·       Caroline A. Miranda, “Essential Arts: It’s Time to Redesign the Electoral Map,” LA Times(2020)

·       Caroline A. Miranda, “Say Goodbye, Guy on Horse,” LA Times(2020)

·      Susan Sontag, Intro, Chapters 1 and 9, Illness as Metaphor (2001)

·      David Craig, “Pandemic and Its Metaphors: Sontag Revisited in the Covid-19 Era,” European Journal of Cultural Studies(2020) 

Listen:

·       Nicola Twilley and Geoff Manaugh, “The Architecture of Quarantine,” Architect

Watch: 

·      MC Lars, “The Hip Hop of Shakespeare,” TEDx USC

Write:

·      Dialogic Collaborative Journal, 1,000 words

·      Two pitches of 250 words each for your Living Newspaper

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 17TH

Week 5: COVID-19, Quarantine Culture, and The Future Spaces of Los Angeles

Speakers:

·       Alice Kimm, John Friedman, Carolina A. Miranda and Nicola Twilley 

Assignments: 

Read: 

·      Sangita Shresthova, “Introduction,” Practicing Futures: A Civic Imagination Handbook(2020)

·      Eryn Carlson, “Speculative Journalism Can Prepare Us for What Comes. Can It Also Promote Misinformation?,” Nieman Reports(2020) 

·      Buckminster Fuller, Introduction by Jaime Snyder and Chapter 1, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1969)

·      Aja Romano, “Hopepunk, the Latest Storytelling Trend, Is All About Weaponizing Optimism,”Vox(2018)

·      Aja Romano, “Janelle Monae’s Body of Work Is a Masterpiece of Modern Science Fiction,”Vox (2018)

·      Annalee Newitz, “The Elites Were Living High, Then Came the Fall,”The New York Times

·      Annalee Newitz, “What Unearthing Ancient Cities Teaches Us About Expoloring Outer Space,”Popular Science

·      Annalee Newitz, “Inside Meow Wolf, The Amusement Park For People Who Want a Weirder Disneyland,”Ars Technica

·      Annalee Newitz, “How to Write a Novel Set More than 125 Years in the Future,”Slate 

·      Annalee Newitz, “Robots Need Civil Rights, Too,”Boston Globe

·      Start readingJohn Jennings and Damian Duffy, The Parable of the Sower: A Graphic Novel Adaptation (2020)

Explore/Read:

·      Doug McLennan’s Diacriticalblog 

Watch:

·       The Infiltrators(trailer)

·       Alex Rivera on his film, The Infiltrators

·       Sleep Merchants(trailer) 

Listen:

·       Imaginary Worlds: “Solarpunk The Future”

Write:

·      Dialogic Collaborative Journal, 1,000 words

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 24TH

Week 6: Speculative Journalism

Speakers:

Sangita Shresthova, Doug McLennan and Annilee Newitz

Assignments:

Read:

·      bell hooks, “Beauty Laid Bare: Aesthetics in the Ordinary,” Art on My Mind(1995)

·      continue reading John Jennings and Damian Duffy, The Parable of the Sower: A Graphic Novel Adaptation (2020)

Attend:

·       The Civic Imagination Workshop on March 2, 12:30-2 (Zoom) 

Write:

·      Dialogic Collaborative Journal, 1,000 words 

Prepare:

·      Show ‘n’ tell your Cornell box and your Living Newspaper project

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 3RD

Week 7: Workshop: Cornell Box, Living Newspaper, Improvisation, and Review 

Assignments:

Read: 

·       Finish readingJohn Jennings and Damian Duffy, The Parable of the Sower: A Graphic Novel Adaptation(2020)

·        Lynell George, Chapters 2, 6, 8, A Handful of Earth, a Handful of Sky: The World of Octavia Butler (2020)

·       Octavia E. Butler, “Speech Sounds”(1983) 

Explore:

·       Ayana Jaimeson’s website for OEB Legacy Network

Watch: 

·       Parable of the Soweropera trailer

·       Tyree Boyd-Pates and Shamell Bell, “Dance Activism and Black Lives Matter,” Movement/Matters

Write:

·       Dialogic Collaborative Journal, 1000 words (This one must be about the Civic Imagination Workshop.)

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 10TH

Week 8 Octavia E. Butler

Speakers:

·       John Jennings and Damian Duffy 

·       Lynell George, Dr. Shamell Bell, and Ayana Jaimeson 

Assignments: 

Read: 

·       Rebecca Onion, “Reclaiming the Machine: An Introductory Look at Steampunk in Everyday Practice,” Journal of Neo-Victorian Studies(2008)

·       James Ring Adam, “Native Authors Invade Sci-Fi: Indigenous Writers Are Reshaping Speculative Fiction,” American Indian(2019)

·       Layla Leiman, “Afrofuturism Artists to Watch Out For,” Between 10 and 5(2019) 

·       Bruce Sterling, “Preface,”Mirrorshades: A Cyberpunk Anthology(1986).

Listen:

·       N. K. Jemisin on The Ezra Klein Show

Watch:

·       Cyberpunk 2077game trailer

·       Jingle Jangletrailer

Write:

·      Dialogic Collaborative Journal, 1,000 words 

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 17TH

Week 9: The Worlds of Speculative Fiction: Solarpunk, Steampunk, Cyberpunk, Afrofuturism, Native Futurism, Chicano Futurism

Speakers:

·       Shawn Taylor, Grace Dillan, and Curtis Marez 

·       Living Newspapers and Cornell Boxes workshop 

Assignments: 

Read:

·       Ann Pendleton-Jillian and John Seely Brown, ‘Worldbuilding”, Design Unbound: Designing for Emergence in a White Water World, Volume 2: Ecologies of Change (2018)

·       Lisa Pon, “Raphael 2020,” Norton Simon Museum(Start at 17:00)

·       “How Nonny de La Pena, The ‘Godmother of VR’, Is Changing the Mediascape,” Wall Street Journal(2018) 

Watch: 

·      Game of Thrones transmedia campaign

Write:

·       Dialogic Collaborative Journal, 1,000 words

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 24TH

Week 10: Hybrid Media, Immersive Entertainment

Speakers:

·       Ann Pendleton-Julian, Lisa Pon, and Nonny de la Pena  

Assignments: 

Read: 

·      Abigail De Kosnik, “Relationship Nations: Phillipines/US Fan Art and Fan Fiction,” Transformative Works and Cultures(2019)

·      Paromita Gupta, “A Conversation with Terry Marshall (Intelligent Mischief/Wakanda Dream Lab)” Confessions of an Aca-Fan(2019)

·      Henry Jenkins, Mimi Ito, and danah boyd, “Gaps and Genres of Participation” Participatory Culture in a Networked Era (2015)

Write:

·      Dialogic Collaborative Journal, 1,000 words

Prepare:

·      Show ‘n’ tell your Cornell box and Living Newspaper

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 31ST

Week 11: Workshop: Fandom, and Participatory Culture 

Speakers:

·       Abigail De Kosnik and Terry Marshall 

·       Living Newspapers and Cornell Boxes Workshop 

Assignments:

Read:

·       Caty Borum Chattoo, “‘It’s Like Taking Your Vodka with a Chaser’: Creativity and Comedy for Social Justice in the Participatory Media Age,” “‘Maybe They Think Beauty Can’t Come from Here’: Resilience and Power in the Climate Crisis,” The Revolution Will Be Hilarious: Creativity, Comedy and Civic Power (forthcoming)

·       An Xiao Mina, chapter 1, 5.1, From Memes to Movements: How the World’s Most Viral Media is Changing Social Protest and Power (2019) 

Write:

·       Dialogic Collaborative Journal, 1,000 words

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 7TH

Week 12: NO CLASS (wellness day)

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 14TH

Week 13: Activism in the Age of Participatory Culture; Workshop

Speakers:

·       An Xiao Mina and Caty Baroom Chattou 

Assignments:

·       Work on your Living Newspaper Project (half the class presents next week, with former guest speakers returning, and half the week after that, with more invited guests).

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 21ST

Week 14: Presentation and Evaluations

Assignments:

·       Work on your Living Newspaper Project 

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 28TH

Week 15: Presentations 

MONDAY, MAY 10TH, 2-4 p.m.

Final Exam: Presentation of Joseph Cornell Box

ABOUT YOUR INSTRUCTORS

Sasha Anawalt

I had my first newspaper when I was ten years old with my best friend. It was calledThe Chocolate Newsand, mostly, we wrote about Mean Mr. Vanilla. In college, I started the first arts news weekly magazine for the McGill Dailyin Montreal, which is still published to this day. Turns out, I like starting things. When I moved to Los Angeles, I became the first chief dance critic at the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner. I wrote a book about the Joffrey Ballet. A best-seller, it was turned into a documentary feature film that aired on PBS American Mastersin 2013. Between these gigs, I had three children and helmed the weekly radio spot on KCRW for dance criticism, called “Dance Notes.” I was also the first dance critic for the L.A. Weekly. I served on the Pulitzer Prize committee jury for criticism for two years, and, one of those years, Jonathan Gold won for his restaurant criticism. Determined to help put L.A. on the so-called cultural map, I was by good fortune given the chance to create and lead the USC Annenberg/Getty Arts Journalism Fellowship Program for 13 years and the NEA Institute for Theater and Musical Theater for USC Annenberg for seven. These snowballed into being asked to help build the first Master’s degree program in Specialized Journalism (the Arts) at USC Annenberg. Now, I am a full professor of professional practice and am working on launching a new Master’s program for the school in 2021 that is all about Food Culture Journalism. I was born in New York City.

Henry Jenkins

Henry Jenkins is the Provost's Professor of Communication, Journalism, Cinematic Arts and Education at the University of Southern California and the founder and former co-director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program. He is the author or editor of 20 books on various aspects of media and popular culture, including Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, Spreadable Media: Creating Meaning and Value in a Networked Culture (with Sam Ford and Joshua Green), and By Any Media Necessary: The New Youth Activism (with Sangita Shresthova and others). He has two more books that just came out this spring -- Popular Culture and the Civic Imagination: Case Studies of Creative Social Change and Comics and Stuff. He is the co-host of the How Do You Like It So Far? podcast, which explores popular culture in a changing world and has run the Confessions of an Aca-Fan blog for more than 15 years.

Back to School: Science Fiction as Media Theory

This term, I am spending much of my time focused on speculative fiction. In part, this is because the work I have been doing on the Civic Imagination has left me working through core concepts from the realm of speculative fiction — especially the ways world-building has taken on a bigger role in social change movements but also because as we start to imagine life after the pandemic, a focus on alternative futures seems more urgent than ever. I have returned to a course I have only taught once before — Science Fiction as Media Theory — which encourages students to think creatively about the work theory does, who does theory, and how it operates in different contexts. While there are other versions of the class out there, I have updated it so much since 2011 when I taught it last that I thought it was worth sharing again. For those of you who are interested in the thinking behind the class, I recently published a piece demonstrating its underlying assumptions through an analysis of The Space Merchants, a classic SF novel dealing with the future of advertising Otherwise, without much more fanfare, here’s the syllabus.

              COMM 620: Science Fiction as Media Theory 

4 units

Fall 2020 – Tuesdays – 12:30-3:20 p.m.

Section:20900D

Location: https://blackboard.usc.edu/

Instructor: Henry Jenkins

Office:ASC-101C

Office Hours: Virtual office hours by appointment. Contact assistant. (Info below.)

Contact Info: hjenkins@usc.edu

Assistant: Amanda Ford

Contact Info: amandafo@usc.edu 

          Course Description

This class explores the ways that science fiction—sometimes known as speculative fiction—has historically functioned as a form of vernacular theory about media technologies, practices, and institutions. As recent writings about "design fictions" illustrate, these speculations have, in turn, inspired the developers of new technologies, as well as those who create content for such platforms, helping to frame our expectations about the nature of media change. And, increasingly, media theorists—raised in a culture where science fiction has been a pervasive influence—are drawing on its metaphors as they speculate about virtual worlds, cyborg feminism, post-humanism, and afro-futurism, among a range of other topics.

This seminar will explore the multiple intersections between science fiction and media theory, reading literary and filmic fictions as theoretical speculations and classic and contemporary theory as forms of science fiction. The scope of the course ranges from technological Utopian writers from the early 20th century to contemporary imaginings of digital futures and steampunk pasts. Not simply a course on science fiction as a genre, this seminar will invite us to explore what kinds of cultural work science fiction performs and how it has contributed to larger debates about communication and culture.

          Student Learning Outcomes 

By the end of the course, students will be able to:

·      describe the historic relationship between speculative fiction and media theory. 

·      explain key movements in science fiction (such as technological utopianism, cyberpunk, steampunk) and discuss their relationship to larger theories of media change.

·      trace the roots of contemporary media theories of cyborg feminism, afrofuturism, and trans/post-humanism back through science fiction films and literature.

·      develop their own critical account of how ideas about media and technology have been shaped by the discourses associated with science fiction.

       Required Readings and Supplementary Materials

·      Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

·      Frederik Pohl and Cyril M. Kornbluth, The Space Merchants

·      Pat Cadigan, Mindplayers

·       Paolo Bacigalupi, The Windup Girl 

·       One of the following: 

o  Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, original novel, Audible audiobook, or Damian Duffy and John Jennings, Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower: A Graphic NovelAdaptation

o  Walidah Imarisha, adrienne maree brown, et al. Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements

o  Charlie Jane Anders, Lesley Nneka Arimah, et al., The People’ s Future of the United States

o  Cory Doctorow, Radicalized. Available for $3 as ebook at https://craphound.com/category/radicalized-full/

All else is on Blackboard.

  Description and Assessment of Assignments & Assignment Submission Policy 

All assignments (except for Blackboard posts) should be submitted via email to the instructor by 5 p.m. on the due date.

1.    Blackboard Posts: Each week, students will post a reaction to the readings via the class Blackboard site. The reaction might be a comment, a question, or a provocation, and often will be a complex mixture of all of the above. It can be informal and need not be more than a few paragraphs, but it should show the student's thinking process in response to the topics and materials being encountered that week. This is the primary mechanism by which I will be monitoring your mastery of the core concepts of the class. You need not respond to every reading each week, but there should be signs of close reading and critical engagement. (30%)

2.     Media Analysis Paper: Applying the concepts of science fiction as a "design platform" that we will encounter in the first class session, students will choose a film, television series, or game which they feel offers a particularly vivid embodiment of a science fiction concept and provide an analysis which considers the thinking behind this representation of future media or technology, the ways this concept gets deployed through the story and the values which become associated with it, and how this concept may be deployed as a springboard for creative thinking about the development of future media tools, platforms, or processes. Along the way, students might consider the differences between embodying these concepts in an audio-visual media as opposed to the ways they might be dealt with in a literary text. The result should be a short but impactful essay (roughly 5-7 pages). (20%)

3.     Theory Analysis Paper:A key theme in our discussions is the idea that science fiction functions much like theory, to speculate about the implications of current social, economic, political, cultural, or technological practices and to envision potential outcomes of current trends. In this paper, students will reverse their lens and examine theory as a form of speculative fiction. Students will select a work of media theory and discuss what they see as its vision for the future (whether implicit or explicit). What does it have to say about the nature of media change? Does it see people as moving towards a utopian or dystopian future? What, if any, explicit use does it make of metaphors drawn from science fiction as it constructs its vision for the future? What kinds of response does it seek from its readers to the problems or potentials that it has identified? Students shall produce a short, impactful essay (5-7 pages) which demonstrates close reading of the theoretical text and an ability to push analysis beyond what's explicitly on the page. (20%)

4.     Final Paper: Students, in consultation with the professor, will develop a distinctive project which emerges from the intersection between their research interests and the course content. The result can either be a creative project or a paper, though either should show the ability to construct an argument and mobilize evidence in support of their core claims and should show a grasp of the basic conceptual framework of the course. Students will be asked to give a short class presentation, sharing their project and its implications with their classmates, as part of the process of developing and refining their ideas. (30%)

5.     Participation: Students are expected to come to class prepared and ready to participate in discussions around these materials. On most days, we have one or more guest speaker, so it is especially important to bring questions to gain maximum benefit from their experiences and expertise.

Each activity here builds on the previous ones, so it is important to meet deadlines in the class.  

Unless specified otherwise, I expect to fill the designated class period with a mix of discussions, activities, and guest visitors, so students should plan, under normal circumstances, to stay for the class period.

      Breakdown of Grade

·      Blackboard Posts (30%)

·      Media Analysis Paper (20%)

·      Theory Analysis Paper (20%)

·      Final Paper (30%)

     Course Schedule: A Weekly Breakdown

Important note to students:Be advised that this syllabus is subject to change—and probably will change—based on the progress of the class, events, and/or guest speaker availability, where relevant.  Students should consult the Registration Calendar for dates regarding add/drop deadlines, fees, grading options, etc.

TUESDAY, JANUARY19TH

Week 1: Science Fiction as Design Fiction

·      Students will watch Minority Reportprior to the first class session.

·      Brian David Johnson, excerpt from Science Fiction Prototyping: Designing the Future with Science Fiction (Morgan and Claypool, 2011), pp.9-32.

·      Philip K. Dick, "The Minority Report," Selected Stories of Philip K. Dick (New York: Random House, 2002), pp. 227-264.

·      Bruce Sterling, "Design Fiction," Interactions 16(3), May-June 2009, pp. 20-24.

·      Ann Pendleton-Julian and John Seeley Brown, excerpt from Design Unbound(Cambridge: MIT Press, 2018).

·      The Ezra Klein Show, “I Build a World with Fantasy Master N. K. Jemison.” 

TUESDAY, JANUARY 26TH

Week Two: Technological Utopianism

·      Howard P. Segal, "The Vocabulary of Technological Utopianism" and "American Visions of Technological Utopia," Technological Utopianism in American Culture(Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2005), pp. 10-44.

·      Edward Bellamy, excerpt from Looking Backward, Chapter 1-12, pp. 3-72.

·      Katharine Burdekin, excerpt from Proud Man13-62.

·      W. E. B. Dubois, “The Comet”  (1920). 

·      José Vasconcelos, “The Cosmic Race” (1925). 

·      (Reccomended) Alexis Lothian, “Dystopian Impulses, Feminist Negativity, and The Fascism of the Baby’s Face,” Old Futures: Speculative Fiction and Queer Possibility(New York: New York University Press, 2018), pp. 57-87

·        

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 2ND

Week Three: The Origins of Science Fiction

·      Andrew Ross, "Getting Out of the Gernsbeck Continuum," Strange Weather: Culture, Science and Technology in the Age of Limits(London: Verso, 1991), pp. 100-135

·      John W. Campbell, "Twilight" (pp. 40-63); Lester del Rey, "Helen O'Loy" (pp. 62-73); Theodore Sturgeon, "Microscopic God" (pp. 115-142); and Clifford Simak, “Huddling Place” (pp. 261-280) in Robert Silverberg (ed.), Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Vol. 1, (New York, NY: Orb Books, 2005).

·      Vannevar Bush, "As We May Think" (pp. 35-48); Alan Turing, "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" (pp. 49-64); Nobert Wiener, and "Men, Machines, and the World About" (pp. 65-72), in Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort (ed.), The New Media Reader(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003).

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 9TH

Week Four: Postwar Dystopias

·      George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language." 

·      George Orwell, 1984, Chapter One.

·      Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, pp. 1-44, 117-131.

·      Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451.

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 16TH

Week Five: The Space Merchants and American Advertising

·      Vance Packard, excerpt from The Hidden Persuaders(New York: Ig, 2007), pp. 31-64.

·      Jules Henry, "Advertising as a Philosophical System," Culture Against Man(New York: Vintage, 1965), pp. 45-99.

·      Frederik Pohl and Cyril M. Kornbluth, The Space Merchants(New York: St. Martins, 1958).

·      Frederik Pohl, "Tunnel Under the World" (pp. 1-34) and "Happy Birthday, Baby Jesus" (pp. 62-85), The Best of Frederik Pohl(New York: Sidgewick and Johnson, 1977).

·      Henry Kuttner, “All Mimsy Were the Borogroves,” "The Twonky," The Best of Henry Kutner(New York: Ballantine, 1975), pp. 167-189.

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 23TH

Week Six: Cordwainer Smith and Psychological Warfare

·      Paul M.A. Linebarger, excerpt from Psychological Warfare(New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1948), pp. 43-92.

·      Cordwainer Smith, "Scanners Live in Vain" (pp. 65-95); "The Dead Lady of Clown Town" (pp. 223-286); "The Ballad of Lost C'Mell" (pp. 401-417); "A Planet Named Shayol" (pp. 419-448, The Rediscovery of Man: The Complete Short Science Fiction of Cordwainer Smith(Boston: Boston Science Fiction Association, 1993).

TUESDAY, MARCH 2ND

Week Seven: Altered States

·      Alvin Toffler, "Diversity," Future Shock(New York: Bantam, 1984), pp. 283-322.

·      Betty Friedan, "The Problem That Has No Name" (pp. 57-78) and "The Crisis in Women's Identity," The Feminine Mystique(New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2001), pp.123-136.

·      James Tiptree Jr., "The Women Men Don't See," in Brian Atteby and Ursula K. Le Guin (eds.), The Norton Book of Science Fiction(New York: W.W. Norton, 1997), pp. 255-279.

·      Pamela Zoline, "Heat Death of the Universe," in Pamela Sargent (ed.), The New Women of Wonder(New York: Vintage, 1978), pp. 100-119.

·      Kate Wilhelm, "Baby, You Were Great," in Pamela Sargent (ed.), Women of Wonder (New York: Vintage, 1974), pp. 139-158.

·      Imaginary Worlds: The Mysterious James Tiptree. 

TUESDAY, MARCH 9TH

Week Eight: Cyberpunk 

·      Bruce Sterling, "Preface" (pp. XX); James Patrick Kelly, "Solstice;" (pp. 66-104); Bruce Sterling and Lewis Shiner, "Mozart in Mirrorshades" (pp. 223-239); and John Shirley, "Freezone;" (pp. 139- 177), in Bruce Sterling (ed.), Mirrorshades: A Cyberpunk Anthology(Berkeley, CA: Ace Books, 1988).

·      William Gibson, "Johnny Mnemonic," Burning Chrome(New York: Ace, 1986), pp.1-22.

·      Samuel R. Delaney, "Some Real Mothers: An Interview with Samuel R. Delaney," in Silent Interviews(Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1994), pp. 164-185.

TUESDAY, MARCH 16TH

Week Nine: Cyborg Feminism

·      Anne Balsamo, "Signal to Noise: On the Meaning of Cyberpunk Subculture," in Frank Biocca and Mark R. Levy (eds.),Communication in the Age of Virtual Reality(New York, NY: Routledge, 1995), pp. 347-368.

·      N. Katherine Hayles, "Towards Embodied Virtuality," in How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics(Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999), pp. 1-24.

·      Ray Kurzweil, "The Six Epochs" (pp.7-34) and "Eich bin ein Singularitarian" (pp. 369-390), The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, (London, England: Penguin, 2006), pp. 7-34.

·      C.L. Moore, "No Woman Born," in Mary Flanagan and Austin Booth (eds.), Reload: Rethinking Women and Cyberculture(Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002), pp. 261-300.

·      Pat Cadigan, Mindplayers(Orion, 2000).

·      Aja Romano, “Janelle Monae’s Body of Work Is A Masterpiece of Modern Science Fiction,” Vox, May 16 2018. 

·      Donna Harroway, "Cyborgs at Large," in Constance Penley and Andrew Ross (eds.), Technoculture(Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), pp. 1-20.

TUESDAY, MARCH 23RD 

Week Ten: Wellness Day

TUESDAY, MARCH 30TH 

Week Eleven: Steampunk and Ecofuturism

·      Rebecca Onion, "Reclaiming the Machine: An Introductory Look at Steampunk in Everyday Practice," Neo-Victorian Studies1(1), Autumn 2008, pp. 138-163.

·       Naomi Klein, excerpt from No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need (Boston: Haymarket, 2017[MOU1] ).

·       “A Message from the Future With Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez,” The Intercept, April 17, 2019.

·      “The Solarpunk Manifesto.” 

·      Imaginary Worlds, “Solarpunk The Future.” 

·       Paolo Bacigalupi, The Windup Girl (Night Shade Books, 2009).

Guest Speaker:Ed Finn, Director, Center for Science and the Imagination, Arizona State University

TUESDAY, APRIL 6TH

Week Twelve: Octavia Butler and Her Legacy 

·      Alex Zamalin, “Octavia Butler and the Politics of Utopian Transcendence,” Black Utopia: The History of an Idea from Black Nationalism to Afrofuturism(New York: Columbia University Press, 2019), 123-136. 

·      Engage with Parable of the Sowerthrough one of the following:

o   Octavia Butler’s original novel

o   Audible audiobook

o   Damian Duffy and John Jennings, Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower: A Graphic NovelAdaptation (Seattle: Abrams, 2019). 

·      Octavia Butler, “The Evening and The Morning and the Night.”

·      Sami Schalk, “Interpreting Disability Metaphor and Race in Octavia Butler’s ‘The Evening and the Morning and the Night’,” African American Review50(2), 2017, pp. 139-151. (Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/afa.2017.0018)

TUESDAY, APRIL 13TH

Week Thirteen: Afrofuturism and Global Science Fiction 

·      Alondra Nelson, “’Making the Impossible Possible’: An Interview with Nalo Hopkinson,” Social Text20(2), 2002, pp. 97-113.

·      Elizabeth C. Hamilton, “Afrofuturism and the Technologies of Survival,” African Arts50(4), Winter 2017, pp. 18-23.

·      Suzanne Newman Fricke, “Indigenous Futurisms in the Hyperpresent Now,” World Art 9(2), 2019, pp. 107-121.

·     Alexis Pauline Gumba, “Evidence” (pp. 33-42)[MOU2] ; Walidah Imarisha, “Black Angel” (pp. 43-56); Morgann Philips, “The Long Memory” (pp. 57-78); Mia Mingel, “Hollow” (pp.109-122) Autumn Brown, Small and Bright” (pp. pp.79-880; Gabriel Teodros, “Lalibela” (pp. 123-134), and Adrienne Marie Brown, “Outro,” (pp. 279-282 in Adriene Marie Brown and Walidah Imarisha (eds.), Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements(New York: AK Press, 2015).

TUESDAY, APRIL 20TH

Week Fourteen: Science Fiction and Social Change

·      A. Merc Rustad, “Our Aim Is Not To Die” (pp. 27-47); Malka Older, “Disruption and Continuity” (pp. 84-92) Ashok K.  Baker, “By His Boostraps” (pp. 133-144); N. K. Jemison, “Give Me Cornbread or Give Me Death” (pp. 298-306); Charles Yu, “Good News, Bad News” (pp. 307-320), in Victor Lavalle and John Joseph Adams (eds.), A People’s Future of the United States (New York: One World, 2019).

·      Cory Doctorow, “Model Minority,” Radicalized: Four Tales for Our Present(New York: Tor, 2020), pp. 111-180. 

·      Mariabe Kambe, “Justice,” in Alexandria Brodsky and Rachel Kauder Nalebuff (eds.) The Feminist Utopia Project: Fifty-Seven Versions of a Wildly Better World(New York: The Feminist Press at CUNY, 2015), pp. X

·     Curtis Marez, “Farm Worker Futurism Today,” Farm Worker Futurism: Speculative Technologies of Resistance(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), pp. 155-182.

TUESDAY, APRIL 27TH

Week Fifteen: Student Presentations

How Do You Like It So Far?: Here's What You Missed This Season

When we started our podcast, How Do You Like It So Far?, the title was something of an inside joke. We were trying something neither of us had done before. We wanted your feedback so we could get better. We didn’t get much feedback, to be honest, because we didn’t have many listeners but we did get better — practice makes perfect. And our title became about something more — encouraging us to reflect each week on popular culture in a changing world. This has been a rough year and it has pushed us to reflect more deeply. And as a result, we finished what my cohost Colin Maclay and I think has been our strongest season yet. We had great conversations with great quests and I wanted to share them with you as a package having recently wrapped that season, Here’s what you missed:

Episode 67 Pandemic, Pedagogy and Politics — This was an end of summer reflection about the world around us that ranged from reflections on how the Covid-19 lockdown was impacting various media and how it shaped the Republican and Democratic national conventions to thoughts about the Black Lives Matter protests, the census, and home schooling.

Episode 68 The Business of Fandom — Susan Kresnicka is one of the leading fandom researchers consulting with the media industry as they seek to understand their fans; Suzanne Scott wrote Fake Geek Girls; Fandom, Gender, and the Convergence Culture Industry and has been a sharp critic of how the media industry interacts with its fans. They had never met before and we thought something interesting might emerge if we brought them together for the show. They took over the show and we could barely get a word in edge-wise during this stereotype-shattering conversation about fandom and the media industry.

Episode 69 The Power of Fan Activism — Here, we brought together Janae Phillips from the Harry Potter Alliance and Shawn Taylor from Nerds of Color, for a far-ranging discussion of fan activism as a model for social change. They had much to say about how merging fan and activist identities increased the sustainability of social movements by bringing more joy and pleasure to the effort.

Episode 70 How the Babysitters Club Changed Asian-American Culture — We are joined by Sue Ding, whose film, The Claudia Kishi Club, launched on Netflix alongside their recent Babysitters Club series and interviews a range of contemporary Asian-American artists and writers about their childhood fascinating with Claudia Kishi. We use this topic as a starting point for considering representational politics and amplifying the voices of Asian-American producers, ending with some cool reflections on the importance of the Fast and Furious franchise.

Episode 71 The Undocumented Document Themselves — Set Hernandez Longkilyo is an undocumented queer filmmaker who documents the lives and political struggles of other undocumented peoples. His films also considers the everyday practices by which these people document their own lives and find the voice to tell their own stories. Here, he sounds off about the struggles for self-representation the community faces and their efforts to organize to tell their own stories in their own terms.

Episode 72 Religion, Sports and Popular Culture Are the Same/Seeking Sanctuary During the Apocalypse: USC’s Dean of Religious Life, Varun Soni is a remarkable guy who has a unique perspective on popular culture. Here, we range from his work counseling students during the pandemic to discussions of sports and ritual and Bob Marley as a religious prophet.

Episode 73 Increasing Visibility Is Essential for Native Communities — We check in with Crystal Echohawk, founder and CEO of IllumiNative, a research-driven initiative created and led by Natives that is challenging negative narratives and supporting accurate and authentic portrayals of Native communities in pop culture. She shares what’s been happening for Natives during 2020, from land rights struggles to coping with Covid-19 to achieving some real breakthroughs in terms of representation in popular culture.

Episode 74 Horror, Social Change, and Experimentation — In this discussion of the horror genre as a site of protest and experimentation across media. we talk to Campfire’s Michael Monello about his Shutter podcast Video Palace and Qiana Whitted who wrote a Eisner-Award Winning book about EC Comics. Between us, we cover horror in film, literature, radio/podcast, comics, and television, not to mention in the context of our everyday lives. I am a longtime monster buff while Colin is horror-curious but mostly new to the genre. A good time was had by all.

Episode 75 Play as a Precursor to Participation — Benjamin Stokes wrote a book about games as tools for enhancing civic engagement and Reanne Estrada is an artist and advocate in Los Angeles. They think we should take to the streets, when it’s safe to do so, not only to protest but also to celebrate, create, perform, and play as a means of rebuilding our connections with each other.

Episode 76 Skateboarding Subcultures Surprises — Neftalie Williams is a lifelong skateboarder and skateboarding advocate, while Zoe Corwin is a newbie who is grounded in educational research. They have been working together to study the educational and social benefits of skateboarding culture especially for youth of color around the world. Much of what they have found will surprise you — it certainly surprised us — but like the last episode, it gives us hope in terms of what’s going to happen next for American cities.

Episode 77 From Hip Hop to TikTok — Dexter Thomas is a Vice reporter who shares reflections about subjectivity and American journalism, his doctoral research on the Hip Hop scene in Japan, and explores how he thinks TikTok is changing American culture and politics. This is like our interview with Varun Soni an expansive discussion, one that hits one high note after the next, and the perfect way to end our season.

There’s something here which should grab your attention — otherwise, I don’t understand why you are reading this block. Check us out. Look at our notes which allow you to drill deeper into everything being discussed. And then try some of the other episodes, because we are mapping contemporary popular culture and its connections with social change; there’s a method to our madness and we see the topics being discussed as connected, as part of a larger culture shift changing our world. How do you like it so far?

Youth Power in Precarious Times: Interview with Melissa Brough (Part Two)

Why did you choose Medellin, Colombia, as the focus for your project? What makes this city a particularly rich site for understanding "youth power in precious times"?

I first visited Medellín in 2009 to attend the Our Media/Nuestros Medios conference on community/participatory media. I was struck by the ways in which Medellín was rebranding itself as a participatory city, with taglines like, “Medellín gobernable y participativa” (“Medellín, governable and participatory”). The Mayor’s Office had pasted its insignia and phrases like this throughout the city. On the very same streets, I noticed graffiti messages about non-violence and participation, or witnessed hip hop concerts in which young people were talking about making their voices heard and engaging in community development. It seemed like everywhere I turned people were invoking the idea of participation as a way to stabilize and rebuild a city that had been devastated by narcotrafficking and urban warfare. 

Until the early 2000s, Medellín had been famous on the world stage as the murder capital of the world and the home of the notorious drug trafficker Pablo Escobar. In 2004 the Compromiso Ciudadano party (which can be translated as “Civic Engagement” or “Citizens’ Commitment” ) came into power -- the first independent party to hold the Mayor’s office -- built on a unique coalition that included leaders of grassroots organizers as well as business leaders and others.  The administration oversaw the development of dramatic changes to the urban landscape, like park libraries, situated in some of the poorest parts of the city. These served as striking physical symbols of their various efforts to integrate poorer neighborhoods and make the city more stable and governable. 

During this period Medellín enjoyed an era of relative peace and became internationally recognized for its urban revitalization projects -- so much so that some even referred to it (hyperbolically, I would argue) as “the miracle of Medellín.” In 2013, for example, Citigroup, the Wall Street Journal, and the Urban Land Institute named Medellin, Colombia, the “Innovative City of the Year,” describing Medellín’s transformation thus: 

“Few cities have transformed the way that Medellín, Colombia’s second largest city, has in the past 20 years. Medellín’s homicide rate has plunged, nearly 80% from 1991 to 2010. The city built public libraries, parks, and schools in poor hillside neighborhoods and constructed a series of transportation links from there to its commercial and industrial centers. . . . The local government, along with businesses, community organizations, and universities worked together to fight violence and to modernize Medellín. . . . In addition, Medellín is one of the largest cities to successfully implement participatory budgeting, which allows citizens to define priorities and allocate a portion of the municipal budget. Community organizations, health centers, and youth groups have formed, empowering citizens to declare ownership of their neighborhoods.”

 During this period the city also fashioned itself as an emerging digital hub of Latin America, drawing tech companies like Hewlett Packard to open regional offices there, and launching a number of digital portals with the stated aim of cultivating more “digital citizens”. These initiatives had varying degrees of success, but nonetheless added to the ethos of citizen participation that the Compromiso Ciudadano party was advocating.  

So the first reason I felt Medellín was an important site of study was because of the strategic use of discourses of participation at multiple levels of society, from the grassroots to the business sector to government officials. The second reason was that young people had been both the primary protagonists and victims of the violence that had decimated the city’s social fabric. This was largely due to an economic downturn and political disenfranchisement suffered by the city’s low-income youth, who often felt they had no better choice than to join a gang. Young people were recruited by multiple armed actors, from street gangs to guerrilla groups to paramilitaries to carry out their violent biddings in what some described as a “death market.” At the same time, young people also became central actors in the non-violent social movements that were struggling to shift the dynamics of violence.   

One of my first interviews with youth in Medellín was with two hip hop artists/activists who lived in Comuna 13, one of the poorest and most notoriously violent parts of the city. At the end of our interview they offered to give me the cell phone numbers of some officials in the mayor’s office. In Colombia, large municipal governments have a relatively high degree of autonomy and power, and operate somewhat like city-states in which mayors enjoy fairly high-profile visibility and influence. What’s more, the city’s political elite had traditionally been just that -- elite, quite distanced from the lower-income communities in the city. So I was rather surprised that youth from one of the most marginalized communities in the city had a direct line to the city’s center of power. As I investigated this dynamic I realized that it was a sign of the ways in which the people of Medellín, under the two Compromiso Ciudadano administrations (Mayor Sergio Fajardo, 2004-2007, and Mayor Alonso Salazar, 2008-2011) were cultivating an ecology of participation unlike any I personally had ever seen before. As I describe in the book, it was a civic polyculture, in which the participation of youth from low-income neighborhoods was, at its best, valued as much as that of civil society organizations or political institutions. This polycultural ecosystem of participation was a key dynamic in helping to transform the city -- and harnessing youth power toward that end. For all of these reasons, it offered an important case study for understanding the powerful role young people can play in challenging and changing systems of inequality, violence, economic precarity, and injustice. 

As I describe in the final chapter of my book, the case of Medellín offers several insights that are relevant around the globe today pertaining to: the disconnection between youth and traditional civic and political institutions; democracy-building and peace-building; participatory budgeting, which is growing in popularity in several countries including the U.S. and Canada; and fostering meaningful digital participation, citizenship and activism, among others. I also describe the limitations of discourses and practices of participation while still offering a hopeful way forward. 

All of that said, the way forward is not to reify youth power, placing all hope in future generations as a way for those currently in power to turn a blind eye or remain complicit while public institutions around the world are floundering and human societies seem to be careening toward global ecological disaster. Youth Power in Precarious Times advocates listening to, empowering, and engaging youth voices -- but not as a way to abdicate older generations’ (including my own) immediate responsibility and accountability for the impact of our actions on the future. It is not their job to save us.

Works Cited

Cooke, Bill, and Uma Kothari, eds. Participation: The New Tyranny? London: Zed Books, 2001.

Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Translated by Myra Bergman Ramos. 30th anniversary edition. New York: Continuum, 2003.

Garcés Montoya, Ángela. Nos-otros los Jóvenes: Polisemias de las Culturas y los Territorios Musicales en Medellín. Medellín, Colombia: Universidad de Medellín, 2005.

Gumucio Dagron, Alfonso, and Thomas Tufte, eds. Communication for Social Change Anthology: Historical and Contemporary Readings. South Orange, NJ: cfsc Consortium, 2016.

Participatory Budgeting Project, https://www.participatorybudgeting.org/case-studies/

Reguillo, Rossana. Culturas Juveniles: Formas Políticas del Desencanto. Buenos Aires, Argentina: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 2013.

Riaño, Pilar. Women in Grassroots Communication: Furthering Social Change. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1994.

Rodríguez, Clemencia. Citizens’ Media against Armed Conflict: Disrupting Violence in Colombia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001.

 Melissa Brough is Assistant Professor of Communication & Technology in the Department of Communication Studies at California State University Northridge. Her research focuses on the relationships between digital communication, civic/political engagement and social change. Much of her work considers the role of communication technology in the social, cultural, and political lives of youth from historically disenfranchised groups. Her research has been published in Social Media + Society, Mobile Media and Communication, the International Journal of Communication, and the Johns Hopkins Guide to Digital Media, among others. Her first book, Youth Participation in Precarious Times: The Power of Polycultural Civics (2020), is now available from Duke University Press.

For more information, and to order the book directly from Duke University Press at a 30% discount please visit Youth Power in Precarious Times: Reimagining Civic Participation and enter the coupon code E20BROGH at checkout.

Youth Power in Precarious Times: Interview with Melissa Brough (Part One)

When I first came to USC more than 11 years ago, one of the first students I met was Melissa Brough, who challenged me to rethink some core assumptions about participatory culture by calling my attention to critical writings from Latin America. Through the years since, she has continued to hold my feet to the fire. She wrote a brilliant dissertation growing out of the field work she had done with various youth initiatives in Medellín, Colombia. She managed to deftly thread the needle with a committee which included myself, Manuel Castells, Sarah Banet-Weiser and others. She wrote a really provocative overview of various forms of fan activism with Sangita Shresthova for Transformative Works and Cultures.

And now she has published her first book coming out of this research, Youth Power in Precarious Times: Rethinking Civic Participation. This work merges a deep theoretical engagement with multiple traditions of writing about participation with some substantive observations from the field considering why these theories matter in terms of their application to the problems confronting the Global South. Any of us writing about participatory culture, learning, and politics need to engage seriously with this book. This interview will give you a preview of what you will find there.

From the start, you have described your project in terms of an effort to bridge between debates concerning participation as it has been framed in the “global north” and the “global north.” What can you tell us about the historic debates around participation, particularly youth participation, in Latin America?

In 2000 I spent a summer working with the Chiapas Media Project (CMP), a video project in Southern Mexico that helped train indigenous communities to produce their own videos, often in association with the Zapatista movement. The CMP was just shifting from linear to non-linear digital editing at that time, and I had the great privilege of teaching their indigenous filmmakers how to edit in Final Cut Pro. In the process, they taught me about a totally different style of video production than what I’d been taught in school; one that prioritized the needs of the community through a collectivist, collaborative process of video making. I ended up writing my undergraduate thesis about this project, and in so doing was introduced to decades of literature and case studies in participatory communication. So my first exposure to the idea of participatory media was not Web 2.0; it was participatory media as it had been practiced for decades across Latin America.  

 (Photo thanks to Chiapas Media Project)

Latin American theorists, practitioners and researchers of community participation have really been at the forefront of this topic for decades, at least as far back as the Bolivian miners’ network of radio stations founded in 1949, which were initiated, owned, and operated by and for local community members to share information. Since then, many cases of participatory media, theater, etc. have been documented across Latin America and beyond; see, for example, Making Waves: Stories of Participatory Communication for Social Change. The field of Development Studies has done a better job to date of incorporating this body of knowledge and practice than have Media or Communication Studies. This is in part because Development Studies is primarily focused (for better or worse) on the so-called global South, whereas these other fields of study are typically very Western and Northern-centric. One of my motivations for doing this study was to try to push back against the dominant flow of information and scholarship from the global North to the global South and draw attention to these rich histories of participatory media, culture, and communication that most of the scholars in the U.S. were not aware of or acknowledging at the time.

Colombia in particular has been a nexus of participatory communication and other participatory projects for decades. I discuss this in Chapter 2 and elsewhere in my book, but Clemencia Rodriguez’s book Citizens’ Media Against Armed Conflict: Disrupting Violence in Colombia is another fascinating study of the rich fabric of citizens’ media and their wide range participatory practices in Colombia. (Note that both Rodriguez and I use the term “citizen” broadly, not confined to the legal status conferred by nation-states.) Pilar Riaño’s edited volume Women in Grassroots Communication: Furthering Social Change was also influential for me, along with the work of Paulo Freire, Robert Huesca, Alfonso Gumucio Dagron, Orlando Fals Borda, and many others. (For interested readers, several relevant texts are gathered in the Communication for Social Change Anthology compiled by Alfonso Gumucio Dagron and Thomas Tufte.) Freire, a Brazilian educator and philosopher most well known for his book Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970), is widely considered one of the most important theorists of participation of the 20th century. He described participation as being “an exercise in voice, in having voice, in involvement, in decision making at certain levels of power... a right of citizenship.” His work continues to influence participatory projects in Latin America and beyond. 

In terms of youth participation in particular, two of my favorite Latin American scholars are Rossana Reguillo (especially Culturas Juveniles) and Ángela Garcés Montoya (especially Nos-otros los Jóvenes). They both take the cultural and political work of young people seriously, and illuminate how power is struggled over and wielded through symbolic, cultural forms. But I learned the most by observing and collaborating with youth activists and artists in Medellín. It was their work, and their thinking, that led me to the insights offered in my book. 

As you note, “While some scholars suggest that participation has been rendered a nearly useless concept with its widespread proliferation and should perhaps be abandoned, this book contends that it is crucial to recuperate its analytical and practical utility in order to work towards more equitable, just societies.” Explain. Why do you see participation as an especially valuable concept in this context? What work needs to be done to reclaim and redefine it?

In many ways, participation in public life seems more critical but also more complicated than ever. Traditional civic and political institutions have been largely discredited, particularly among younger generations who do not see their identities and needs reflected in these institutions, and who enact their political will in non-traditional ways (much of which you and your team has been documenting for some time now). This disconnection between young people and traditional institutions has been well documented in many parts of the globe, including in Latin America. The dynamic of disconnection has been further exacerbated by a fragmented mediascape and the variously construed phenomenon of “fake news”.

With the rise of Web 2.0 discourses of participation in the global North went from being relatively fringe and often counter-hegemonic to being fully mainstreamed and commercialized. There are so many examples of this; one I find particularly relevant and darkly amusing is Flock Associates’ description of Mountain Dew’s “Dewmocracy” participatory marketing campaign. (Here’s a taste: “We proposed that the brand give the people their due [Dew?]—it was to be the ultimate Dewmocracy... with the ultimate goal of creating an elixir that will restore choice to the people. [Online game] players worked together to design the color, flavor, and feel of their elixir that will ultimately become the next Mountain Dew product... The people’s voices were heard... [bringing] forth on this continent a new Dew, conceived in liberty.”) It’s no wonder that the commercialization of the rhetoric of participation left a bitter taste in the mouths of those who had been advocating for more participatory democracy for decades; if the rhetoric of participation can be so easily and completely co-opted to sell soda, how useful is the concept anymore? And yet the de-popularization and delegitimization of traditional government and civic institutions -- and, crucially, the press -- is clearly benefiting only a very small number of traditional power holders. 

Participation never has been and never will be perfect. Participation is messy. Practitioners and researchers in international development have perhaps best documented both the promises and perils of participatory practices for community building, development, and empowerment. They’ve shown inefficiencies, inequalities, and corruption in processes of participation that were meant to promote democratic practices (see, for example, Cooke & Kothari’s collection, Participation: The New Tyranny?); I found instances of all of these in Medellín. You obviously cannot have a democracy without participation; but participation does not a democracy make. One of the arguments of my book is that it’s time to reclaim and redefine participation so that it can be demanded, enacted, grappled with, and improved. In this book I focus specifically on participation in civic and political life and define participatory public culture as one with “significant opportunities for horizontal decision making, based in practices of dialogic communication with low barriers to participation, through which issues of public consequence are negotiated. A participatory public culture is one in which the voices, interests, and participation of non-hegemonic groups are valued.” This definition articulates some of the key characteristics of a public culture that offers meaningful opportunities for participation. While I believe this definition is more specific and therefore more useful than the vague and sweeping ways in which participation is often talked about in the current moment, I also believe that participation is a concept that must continuously be interrogated, refined, and redefined to better account for how relations of power are enacted in and through it, and to take contextual and historical factors into account. 

One of the biggest lessons I learned from the case of Medellín is that if we think about and support participation ecologically, from grassroots youth activists to civil society organizations to local and state government and beyond -- and, crucially, the relationships between these -- we have a better chance of nurturing a functional, vibrant, and democratic public life. This is why I make the case for polycultural civics. Borrowing the concept from agriculture, polyculture (vs. monoculture) refers to the practice of cultivating different crops in the same space in a way that is mutually beneficial and enhances the overall ecosystem. I adapt it here to think about participation as a resource that can be cultivated in different ways at multiple levels, from the grassroots to institutions -- and to emphasize that the relationships between these are crucial. 

What happened in Medellín from 2004-2011 is that many actors in the “ecosystem” of Medellín’s public life began working together in mutually beneficial relationships, even if sometimes their agendas were in conflict or competition. For example, the municipal government created a participatory budgeting process that enabled citizens age 14 and above to participate in the allocation of 5% of the city’s annual budget. The process was not perfect, and went through several iterations. People and organizations competed for the resources. Yet, at the time of my research, the outcomes of the participatory budgeting process for communities throughout the city were largely positive -- particularly so for youth (as young as age 14), who were quite active in the process. 

That is not to say the participatory budgeting process wasn’t flawed and susceptible to manipulation by corrupt actors -- it certainly was. And it only accounted for a small percentage of the city’s overall budget. But the predominant impact of this ecosystem of participation was to increase the opportunities for citizens (especially youth, women, and other groups who were traditionally marginalized from city politics) to participate meaningfully in public life. In the process, citizens learned how to engage actively and effectively in the development and governance of their communities. It was an especially powerful civic and political education for youth, who were learning by doing. At the same time, the local government gained greater legitimacy locally and internationally. This was a polycultural relationship. And within it, the concept of participation was defined, contested, debated, and refined in the process. This is an example of how participation is contextually and historically contingent; it is shaped within particular contexts, practices, relationships, and histories.   

 So one of our key tasks is to be historically and contextually specific when we talk about participation -- with special attention to who gets to participate, how, who is defining the terms of participation, who benefits from the participation, who wields power within (and after) the process of participation, and what is the labor involved in participating. I’m writing this just weeks away from the U.S. presidential election, the day after the New York Times released information about Donald Trump’s tax returns. I am reminded to add the question, who doesn’t participate?, and what are the costs of that to an ostensibly democratic society? 

 Melissa Brough is Assistant Professor of Communication & Technology in the Department of Communication Studies at California State University Northridge. Her research focuses on the relationships between digital communication, civic/political engagement and social change. Much of her work considers the role of communication technology in the social, cultural, and political lives of youth from historically disenfranchised groups. Her research has been published in Social Media + Society, Mobile Media and Communication, the International Journal of Communication, and the Johns Hopkins Guide to Digital Media, among others. Her first book, Youth Participation in Precarious Times: The Power of Polycultural Civics (2020), is now available from Duke University Press.

For more information, and to order the book directly from Duke University Press at a 30% discount please visit Youth Power in Precarious Times: Reimagining Civic Participation and enter the coupon code E20BROGH at checkout.

What Science Fiction Media Gets Wrong About Facial Recognition

This is the final in a series of blog posts created by students in my PhD seminar on Public Intellectuals. I hope you have enjoyed the range of new voices and perspectives this series brought to this space.

What Science Fiction Media Gets Wrong About Facial Recognition

by Mehitabel Glenhaber

If you’re a theater-goer in the 21st century, you know how the AI surveillance dystopia story goes. The government has robotic eyes everywhere, tracking your every move with security cameras, and drones. Nothing escapes the watchful gaze of an computer system, which monitors your identity with face recognition and retina scans. Shady government agents sit in control rooms full of shiny blue screens, vigilantly watching thousands of video feeds. Tom Cruise, probably, is a fugitive on the run, but all the odds are against him. 

Every day, it seems that our world gets a little closer to this dystopia that we see so often on the screen. Police departments all around the US have deals with clearview.ai, a startup that sells face recognition software trained on personal photos posted to social media. HireVue hucksters face-recognition algorithms to help companies decide who to hire, based on whose face a computer thinks looks trustworthy. Software companies and computer science labs try to convince us that computer systems can determine someone’s health, emotional status, or even sexual orientation, just from one picture of them. 

In fact, in the past couple years, we’ve seen an explosion of articles comparing the current state of tech to famous sci-fi dystopias: 1984, Minority Report, Blade Runner, Terminator, and Robocop. This makes sense, because sci-fi can be a useful tool for making sense of the role of technology in our society and understanding the risks and stakes of AI based surveillance systems. Sci-fi can predict, or even influence the development of real-world tech. For instance, when face recognition technology showed up in the James Bond film A View To Kill in 1985, Robert Wallace, the then Director of Technical Services Staff at the CIA, claims to have gotten a phone call from the higher-ups asking “do you have one of those?” and then “How long will it take you to make it?” An acquaintance of mine who works at a tech startup in San Francisco once told me a story about their office screening the dystopian film Hyper-Reality. The next day, they got a message from their boss which read “I wonder if we can turn this nightmarish vision into a fun reality! :)” When real-world tech developers are treating dystopias as inspiration boards, maybe it’s not crazy to try and use these films to understand where the world is headed. 

Keiichi Matsuda’s nightmarish vision in Hyper-Reality, which I hope doesn’t become any kind of reality

But dystopian sci-fi can also mislead us about the future, or put our fears in the wrong places. Sci-fi narratives produced by Hollywood often give us a narrow picture: they show us only one set of dystopian tropes, and explore how members of only particular groups might be affected. In my own research, I look at depictions of facial recognition in science fiction film. There’s a lot of things that these films got right about the reality we live in now: Facial recognition everywhere is a huge violation of privacy. AI systems are scary because they’re inhumanly rigid, and they don’t care about you personally. Facial recognition is becoming a frightening tool for oppressive governments. But there’s also a few big things that these films get wrong – ways the tropes in these films don’t capture the whole picture. So let’s go into a few of them!

Yes! Even the Pixar film Coco has face recognition in it!

#1 – Who owns facial recognition?

When facial recognition in sci-fi films is used by humans, and not autonomous robots, it’s almost always used by a totalitarian, oppressive government that and uses it to surveill its citizens. Whether it’s John Anderton in Minority Reporttrying to hide from the precognitive police without his retina print giving him away, or Robocop using his cyborg memory to identify mugshots of a suspect, it’s usually government law enforcement using the technology in these films. 

Government control of face recognition is very real concern in the world today! A lot of the people we see adopting facial recognition are official law enforcement officials: it’s now used by the TSA in airports, in local police departments, and by ICE to hunt down and deport undocumented immigrants. But a lot of what makes facial recognition so frightening in the real world, that these films often leave out, is that facial recognition software is produced by privately owned companies. These companies are getting rich off of government surveillance – in the article I linked above, for instance, ICE payed clearview.ai $224,000 dollars for their services. Being privately owned also means that, even when these companies sell their services to the government, their software is proprietary – it’s often a secret black box that even government agencies can’t take a peek inside. While sci-fi films prepared us well to imagine a world where facial recognition is used by a restrictive government to oppress the population, we also have to be prepared for the opposite possibility: that corporations are playing fast and loose with this technology, with a dangerous lack of regulation. 

To it’s credit, Robocop does actually get into some of what is so scary about private contractors selling tech to law enforcement – that it lets private corporations decide who laws get enforced on, and who they don’t. 

#2 – What is facial recognition being used for? 

In Hollywood films, facial recognition is almost always being used to identify individuals, for security purposes. Sometimes the technology is part of a high-tech, retina-scan activated lock, like we’ve seen in Star Trek: Wrath of Khanor The Avengers franchise. Or sometimes it’s part of a sinister omnipresent surveillance network. In all these cases though, the point of facial recognition is to use an image of one person’s face to confirm that person’s identity. You’ve gotta admit, a camera zooming in and sketching a red box around a character’s face or eyeball, and their name rolling in monospace ticker tape on the screen is a great visual. But this one particular use-case doesn’t cover all the ways that facial recognition is being used today. We don’t see uses of facial recognition that happen on the secret back-end of websites, or in research labs. 

Captain Kirk accessing top-secret information with a retina scan in The Wrath Of Khan (1982) was a genre establishing scene which wowed many fans in the 1980s and established the trope of facial recognition being used on high-tech safes. 

Most patents for facial recognition these days aren’t actually about identifying individuals or creating security systems, they’re about using facial recognition to classify people: letting AI use faces to decide who’s a good hire and who isn’t, who’s a criminal and who isn’t. A group of computer scientists in 2017 even created a facial recognition algorithm which can supposedly identify if someone is gay or not – just based on their face. Facial recognition systems are also used to classify and judge behavior. Recently, there’s been a lot of controversy around remote proctoring softwares like Proctorio and ProctorU, which schools have been requiring students to subject themselves to in order to take remote tests during the covid-19 pandemic. And the Tokyo metro even uses a facial recognition system to grade employees smiles.

Facial recognition is also integrated into a variety of other places: when Twitter crops the previews of photos your post, when snapchat filters put bunny ears on your face, when deepfakes algorithms replace a face in a video with another face. If we only focus on the narrow view of facial recognition used a system to identify individuals, we risk missing the full breadth of ways this technology is used, and the possible benefits or dangers associated with each of those uses. While films might give us the sense that facial recognition is easy to define and ban, the reality is that the boundaries of this technology are not clear, and it’s a more complicated question. 

#3  - How accurate is facial recognition?

On the silver screen, the scary thing about facial recognition technology, and AI in general, is that they are inescapably accurate. The Terminator, in Judgment Day (2009), is terrifying because he’s coming to get you, there’s no way to fool him – his robot eyes can identify you from half a mile away. In films about facial recognition, we never see the AI mess up – or, when it does, it’s only because characters went to extreme lengths to avoid it. In Minority Report, the only way that John Anderton can avoid being identified by a futuristic retina-scanning system is to literally remove his own eyeballs.

You can run, but you can’t hide.  

However, when I read what technology studies scholars are writing about facial recognition, the thing that really scares me about it is that it messes up all the time. As Joy Buolamwini’s work shows, face recognition systems are actually terrible at telling black people apart. Some facial recognition systems don’t even recognize black faces as faces. Os Keyeshas also written about how facial recognition systems have no idea how to deal with queer and trans people, and constantly misgender them. Facial recognition systems are only as good as the data they’re trained on – and if mostly cis white male programmers use their own faces to test these systems, we end up with systems which are awful at identifying everyone else. 

Like all AI systems, facial recognition systems can encode the biases of their creators. We already know that AI systems for filtering through candidate’s resumes discriminate against female candidates and people of color. And we already know that predictive policing algorithms perpetuate bias against black and latinx folks. So we shouldn’t expect facial recognition systems to be any better. The remote proctoring softwares I mentioned above have already created problems for neuroatypical students with autism or ADHD, or even women with long hair, since it interprets these student’s natural tics as cheating behaviors. Films about facial recognition are certainly right that AI systems are frighteningly inflexible – there’s no way to reason with them, and they can’t be sympathetic to your personal situation. But instead of worrying about our lives being governed by deadly accurate machines, maybe we should be more worried about the alternative dystopia where these systems are wrong all the time, but we continue to put faith in them. 

#4 – Who is the target of facial recognition? 

Seriously? This movie’s supposed to be set in Washington DC?? A city that is currently 45.5% black??

In Hollywood surveillance dystopia films, the lone rebel protagonist on the run from an oppressive government is almost always a straight white man. This is not particularly unusual or unexpected – most Hollywood studio executives are straight white men, and they tend to make movies about straight white men. But in addition to just being bad representation, films which only tell this kind of story perpetuate an unfortunate trend in surveillance studies of straight white men only caring about surveillance when they can see themselves as the victims of it. 

Surveillance studies has, historically, not talked about race – which is pretty inexcusable, given that race is such a big factor in who gets surveilled. Influential writers in surveillance studies have often been white men, and have often regarded surveillance dystopias such as “the panopticon” or 1984 as a hypothetical scary future which might affect them. But something that they’ve ignored is that the kind of constant scrutiny, judgment, and oppression which are 1984 or Minority Report to white men are just current lived realities for people of color. People of color are already watched in stores, and have credit score checks run on them all the time. They are hassled by the police constantly, and are murdered by cops at a much higher rate than white people. Queer folks, also, especially queer and trans people of color, constantly have their gender presentation scrutinized, and judged, and are also often the subjects of police violence. As Brian Merchant writes, dystopian literature can “allo[w] white viewers to cosplay as the oppressed, without actually interrogating in any meaningful way what oppression might actually entail or who gets oppressed and why.”

Given everything I’ve said in the last section about how algorithms in general discriminate against black people, women, and queer folks, how facial recognition systems already fail when it comes to these groups, we should be very worried about what wider adoption of facial recognition technologies is going to mean for these groups in particular. But we don’t see them being subject to facial recognition technology in movies. I can’t think of any films where an algorithm falsely identifies a black person as a criminal or denies a trans character access to healthcare. But in the real world, if we’re headed towards a surveillance dystopia, straight white men probably won’t be the main victims of it. 

A comment I get a lot from my (often relatively privileged) friends when I try to warn them about the dangers of face recognition and surveillance is “sure, it sounds bad, but I guess I just don’t care that much about my own data, it doesn’t personally creep me out to know the government’s spying on me.” This individualistic view of data privacy makes a lot of sense in a world where movies tell you that the main thing that’d be scary about surveillance is if you personally had to go on the run from a surveillance state. But if you’re reading this, especially if you’re a straight white man, I want to say to you: don’t be scared of facial recognition collecting data on you because of what it’s going to do to you. Be scared of it collecting data on you because of how that data’s going to be used against your queer, black, or latinx neighbors.

As I said before, sci-fi can be a useful tool for envisioning and understanding how new technologies might affect our society. These films are completely correct that face recognition systems can be worryingly cold and inflexible, and can be employed by governments as tools of oppression. But images from these films might also blind us to another possible dystopia we could be headed towards:  one where we put extreme faith in corporations which make huge amounts of money employing faulty and biased algorithms which discriminate against people of color, women, and trans people in all sectors of society. I don’t know exactly what a film which captured all these complexities of the problem would look like – though I’m still holding out for the 21st century north-by-northwest-esque thriller about a person who has to go on the run after they’re mis-classified as a Most Wanted criminal by a facial recognition algorithm. But until films like this exist, we need to think about how these existing films might create blind spots for us, even as they warn us about dystopia. 

Transgressive Queer Space-Making in London

This is another in a series of blog posts by the students in my PhD seminar on public intellectuals.

Transgressive queer space-making in London

by Jody Liu

Prior to my time abroad in London, UK, I had spent my formative years attending parties of some of the greatest techno legends: Jeff Mills, Juan Atkins, Kevin Saunderson. Through these shows, I forged connections with music producers and djs, radio show hosts and music label owners, and event organizers both in Detroit and internationally. As a result, I came into a familiar network in London as I was settling into an unfamiliar city.

As I immersed myself in the underground electronic music scene, I connected with several queer people of color who hosted cultural events in music, dance, and the arts. Almost every weekend, I made the trek from my small rear-garden flat to various parts of the city: Elephant & Castle, Hackney Wick, Peckham, Tottenham Hale. Somehow, I had the energy to stay out until 5 or 6 in the morning. I would get home just as the birds were starting to chirp and people were heading to early shifts. The nights out nourished me, in some ways; there was something about striking up conversations with strangers in the smoking area, smiling across the dancefloor at each other, everyone moving in rhythm. Slowly, I began to recognize people as we found each other in different spaces week after week. This ritual of coming together and dispersing, of connecting--however momentarily--before returning to our everyday lives, made these places all the more special. For many queer individuals, these places provided respite in an otherwise hostile world. 

This personal connection to London’s music subculture led to my interest in how and why these spaces of community were disappearing. As an urban planning student, I wanted to understand how the profession could engage more critically with queer issues. But more importantly, how could urban planning support these rapidly-disappearing spaces that were so vital to marginalized queer communities?

Through our conversations, I began to understand how queer organizers and friends were navigating the disappearance of queer spaces across London, and more generally, the decline of LGBTQ+ neighborhoods. For a while now, they had found peers outside of established gay neighborhoods. They felt excluded from the image-conscious, consumption-focused venues for various reasons. Instead, they have relied on ephemeral, decentralized, and virtual spaces to sustain themselves. Through their actions, these individuals and organizations were both resisting and staking claim on a heteronormative and patriarchal envrionment.

In this blog post, I illustrate how changes in planning priorities have intensified the closure of queer venues across the world, using London as a case study. Furthermore, I describe how my interviewees have been mobilizing in different ways to assert their right to the city. The post concludes with a discussion on the need to continue fighting for lgbtq+ justice alongside the struggle for racial, labor, and gender equity. 

Declining venues, declined gayborhoods 

Researchers at the University College London found that between 2006 to 2017, the number of LGBTQ+ venues in London had decreased from 125 to 53. This loss in venues is situated within an overall decline in the nightlife scene, with a 44% closure in UK nightclubs (2005-2015), 35% in grassroots London venues (2007-2016), and 25% in UK pubs (2001-2016). The loss of both LGBTQ+ and non-LGBTQ+ specific venues can be attributed to shifts in urban redevelopment under the Margaret Thatcher administration. The neoliberalization of urban planning in that era, which shifted towards more market-led regeneration, continues to have reverberting effects in London’s property market and development.

This approach is evidenced in the growth-first logic that the Greater London Authority (GLA) has pushed for in regeneration schemes. (The Greater London Authority is the governance body that oversees administration across London’s 33 boroughs, including strategic planning.) Most recently, the banking crisis in 2008 and the ensuing period of economic instability further cemented the age of austerity. To bring in revenue for the city, the GLA loosened planning regulations to capture “flows of global investment” (Imrie et al., 2009) through increasing permitted developments. The focus on economic growth pushed requirements for social sustainability to the wayside, thus exacerbating the issue of community venue loss. 

As a result, queer spaces have evolved as a reaction to, and recovery from, such neoliberal regeneration practices. Mayor Sadiq Khan, who intends to improve cultural sustainability under his leadership, has been supporting these efforts. For example, the government has established the LGBTQ+ Venues Charter and a Culture at Risk office to safeguard the loss of these venues.  However, it remains to be seen whether these initiatives will reflect the diverse needs of the queer community. 

Alternative making of queer space

My interviewees reflected the aforementioned ambivalence towards government initiatives through our conversations. One respondent explained, “This is a good first step towards protecting these venues. But I am worried most of their efforts will focus on Soho… which, to be honest, I haven’t frequented much at all since first coming out”. Other interviewees shared similar sentiments, expanding on how different aspects of their identities affected their experiences within Soho. 

Soho is perhaps the most recognizable gay neighborhood, or “gayborhood”, in the UK. It’s a neighborhood of with rich LGBTQ+ history, having hosted clandestine queer social clubs in the 1920s (when homosexuality was still criminalized in the UK). In 2005, it was the heart of a campaign against the Westminster City Council. LGBTQ+ businesses challenged and won the right to continue displaying the Pride flag on their premises, which the council had ordered them to remove as a violation of planning regulations. 

Despite this history of LGBTQ+ struggles, many of the interviewees actually expressed a disconnect with Soho. While Soho venues were the backdrop to some of their first “coming out” memories, they no longer found it relevant to their everyday lives. As one interviewee shared, the commercialization of the neighborhood made the venues feel unapproachable. He explained how, as a queer person from an immigrant and working-class background, he felt uncomfortable in spaces that catered largely to wealthy, white gay males. He shared, “I have both been fetishized as an ‘object’ of desire, and looked down upon”. The cognitive dissonance contributed towards the interviewees’ ambivalence regarding the venue charter. They believed the charter will mostly support the spaces that already have more resources and political support. 

Their experiences trouble the gay neighborhood-as-liberation model, which was first termed by sociologist Manuel Castells’ seminal work on the Castro district in San Francisco. In describing the Castro, Castells argued the transformation of the marginalized gay ghetto into a deliberatedly constructed neighborhood was a trajectory through which gay and lesbians could attain legitimation in the city. Geographer Jack Gieseking, however, argues this “liberation” model buys into a neoliberal approach--one which depends on gentrification and displacement of other marginalized communities to secure a better life for gays and lesbians. The model seeks assimilation into the American Dream of homeownership, rather than drawing a critical connection between the struggles of queer people to other marginalized groups in the United States. In other words, the gay neighborhood-as-liberation model aspires to problematic heteronormative and capitalist ideals. As a result, the interviewees have found different ways of sustaining themselves and resisting their erasure from the city through alternative spatial practices.

Emerging queer space: the Queer Picnic and Femmes of Color Open Brunch

In contrast to the static nature of Soho, interviewees often had to stake claim on heteronormative or homonormative spaces to construct a place for themselves. As a result, these spaces are often ephemeral, fragmented, and virtual. Through seemingly mundane acts of socializing, mingling, and eating together, queer people of color actively challenge the public gaze and perceptions of what being queer means.

In June 2017, I attended the Queer Picnic in southeast London, which attracted over 300+ people from across the city. People of diverse gender identities, ethnicities, abilities, and generations gathered and proudly affirmed their existence in a large public park. On its Facebook, the event page asked: “Are you tired of the stress of navigating London as a queer person of color or even as a queer white person? Do you love being with other queers but feel that Pride [Parade] is just a bit too corporate/assimilationist/white/expensive/policed or triggering?”. This statement unearthed a broader discontent within the (minority) queer community with wider LGBTQ+ culture. Interviewees felt mainstream LGBTQ+ culture has become depoliticized and corporatized as particular queer identities (i.e. white, cis-gendered, gay men) have become more accepted. Similarly, the Femmes of Color Open Brunch also described itself as an alternative to Pride. By positioning themselves in this way, it reflects the problem that Hannah Dee argues, “London Pride – once a militant demonstration in commemoration of the Stonewall riots – has become a corporate-sponsored event far removed from any challenge to the ongoing injustices that we face”. 

An attendee described feeling a sense of ease at the picnic; the organizers had been very intentional in creating an inclusive space. Unlike the Soho bars and clubs, which necessitated purchasing drinks or paying an entry fee, these do-it-yourself events were free or had a sliding payscale. The organizers also paid attention to people’s abilities, making sure the space was in an accessible section of the park. Another attendee mentioned how, due to social anxiety, crowded clubs or intimate bars were out of the question for him. He preferred the relaxed atmosphere of the park, which allowed for conversations to take place. In contrast, clubs often blasted loud music that made conversation difficult -- unless you wanted to shout at each other repeatedly. Additionally, the organizers had put together a taxi fund beforehand. While this may seem like a small detail, it made a world of difference. This fund ensured that people who felt uncomfortable using public transit could still attend the picnic without worrying about cost. These actions of care and community prefigures a future of more inclusive spatial practices, where queer people of all identities could feel safe and accepted. 

A new LGBTQ+ community center

This desire for more inclusive space outside of nightlife has galvanized a crowd-funding campaign for a new LGBTQ+ community center in London.

Back in 1985, the Labour-run Greater London Council had established the London Lesbian and Gay Centre. As Christobel Hastings at VICE explores, the Centre provided a respite during a time when queer people faced workplace discrimination, harassment, and arrests; it also provided office space for various queer organizations. The center was short-lived, however. Just after 5 years, the centre closed due to political infighting, financial losses, and the withdrawal of grant funding by the incoming Conservative government. 

While the center was set up as a workers’ cooperative, and purportedly ran on a decentralized structure, the Centre nevertheless ran into issues. In a Vice article, former visitors and volunteers recounted issues with representation (with most of the workforce being white and college educated) and conflicts between queer identities (and certain groups being “policed”). Despite these shortcomings, however, the Lesbian and Gay Centre nevertheless presented a model for what an anti-capitalist, community-driven space could be. 

Since then, London has been without a dedicated LGBTQ+ community center. Plans were made in 2007 for a community center in Soho, but a narrow vision for the center (i.e. white and gay male-focused) created a rift within the City of Westminster Council; ultimately, the plans were not realized.  In late 2017, as I was wrapping up my research project, a new initiative was underway in East London. A group of volunteers held open meetings, consultations, conversations, and workshops to envision a new LGBTQ+ centre. Collectively, the center will be a nonprofit multi-purpose, multi-generational space offering clinic and therapy spaces for service providers; a garden; an informational hub; and a workspace for individuals and campaigning groups. As of June 2018, they have raised about £102,000 and are working to secure a physical space. 

The future of queer spaces

The interviews revealed the paradoxical ways in which a queer space can be a site of inclusion for some, and one of exclusion and anxiety for others. In particular, more established neighborhood of Soho felt particularly alienating for the queer people of color I interviewed. Instead, they preferred and produced more decentralized spaces across the city. Such a diffused network of spaces disappear as quickly as they come into being. Queer spaces are made both by queer bodies and through queer practices; that is, spaces become queer through the presence of queer bodies, as well as through deliberate queer actions. The local library becomes a queer space as a gay, Black man learns about what it means to hold his Blackness and gayness from James Baldwin. The local beauty store becomes a queer space as an Iraqi of nonbinary identity buys make-up they’ll later use in a photoshoot centering trans and queer of color identities. Burgess Park became a queer space when the organizers planned the picnic, then people of all non-normative gender identities and sexual orientations gathered there. Thus, queer space can come into being through everyday actions and through deliberative planning. 

However, this does not mean queer minorities are against establishing more permanent and welcoming spaces. Some of the organizers expressed how having to constantly look for new venues to host events can be tiresome. What it does mean, however, is that queer spaces should not be understood as fixed and static; nor should the existense of a gayborhood be understood to mean queer rights have been fully realized. Rather, the fleeting and precarious nature of queer minority-led spaces signifies the political, economic, racial, and gender injustices they continue to face. It serves as a reminder that queer liberation is a continuous fight, one that necessitates us to act outside the confines of capitalism. ⧫

Jody Liu is a doctoral student in urban planning and policy at the Price School of Public Policy, University of Southern California. Her work explores how queer communities center healing and mutual care to contest racial capitalism and carceral feminism across digital and physical geographies.

Jamming the Olympic Rings: Anti-Olympics Art Across Space and Time

This is another in a series of blog posts written by the PhD students in my Public Intellectuals Seminar.

Jamming the Olympic Rings: Anti-Olympics Art Across Space and Time

by Cerianne Robertson

I can still recite so many of their names. The names of the gymnasts from Romania, Russia, China, and the United States who tumbled their way into my heart in 2000, the year of the Sydney Olympics. I was nine years old. The perfect age to be enchanted by a sport. The way I saw it, those young women defied gravity and embodied power, all under the majestic icon of the interlocked Olympic rings. I was hooked. At my own gymnastics practice that week I imagined dismounting my bar routine onto a mat emblazoned with the five rings, saluting the adoring crowd. Those rings meant dreams. Those rings meant excellence. 

This is just what the International Olympic Committee (IOC) wants, of course. In 2019 the organization published an article claiming that people around the world associate the five rings with concepts like "global," "diversity," "heritage and tradition," "inspirational," "optimistic," "inclusive," "excellence," and "friendship.” The IOC touted its logo as “one of the world’s most widely recognized symbols.” 

Nine-year-old me was a sucker for that branding.

Twenty years later, the rings mean something very different for me. I first encountered anti-Olympics graphics while reporting in Rio de Janeiro for RioOnWatch, a platform that monitored urban transformations as the Brazilian city prepared to host the 2016 Olympics. As the city evicted an estimated 77,000 people and as police violence against the low-income, predominantly Black residents of favelas spiked, I encountered comics like the one drawn by Brazilian artist Carlos Latuff below. The red Olympic ring turns into blood gushing from a man’s body as a police helicopter flies overhead, a reminder that police killings in the state of Rio de Janeiro doubled in the three months before the 2016 Olympics compared to the same period in the previous year. 

“The gold, silver, and bronze are over but the lead continues!” Image by Carlos Latuff (Rio 2016).

From mass demonstrations across Brazil to grassroots campaigns in Boston, an increasingly critical global public discourse has linked sports mega-events to public debt, evictions, real estate speculation and gentrification, spikes in police brutality and surveillance, environmental destruction, and corruption. Over the course of the past decade an unprecedented number of cities have dropped their bids to host the Olympics Games.  

As part of my PhD research on contested narratives about Olympics host cities, I’ve been collecting, archiving, and analyzing art and graphics produced by anti-Olympics activists or Olympics watchdog groups. I’ve compiled many of these images in an informal archive on Flickr. (And I’ve stored many more on my computer as I find excuse after excuse to procrastinate on uploading them.) It turns out Carlos Latuff is only one of many artists — spanning across continents and over the course of decades — who have transformed the Olympics rings in order to critique the Games. Images from Vancouver, for instance, paired the Olympic rings with Indigenous iconography, accompanied by text reminding viewers that the 2010 Games were taking place on unceded Indigenous land. Another poster embedded the five rings into the tires of a tractor clearing a tree, a reference to deforestation to make way for ski runs in Vancouver. 

Left: Image from antiolympicartscouncil.tumblr.com/ (Vancouver 2010). Right: Image by Zig Zag (Vancouver 2010).

The employment of the rings in these images suggests that the IOC is right that the Olympic rings are globally recognizable, but that the question of what values are associated with that symbol is highly contested.

As I started to see more and more hijackings of the Olympics rings by anti-Olympics activists, I started to wonder what patterns we might find in the way the rings are appropriated. I also wondered what role these visual subversions could play in challenging the powerful global network of elites that make up or support the IOC. 

Policing and the rings

Policing, surveillance, and incarceration collectively constitute the most common theme captured in the visual subversions of the Olympic rings that I’ve collected thus far. In several of the images I’ve encountered, the rings are reimagined as handcuffs, like in these examples from Vancouver 2010 and Beijing 2008.

Left: Image from no2010.com (Vancouver 2010). Right: Image from the Center for the Study of Political Graphics (Beijing 2008).

The rings have also often been redrawn as barbed wire fencing, as in these examples from LA 1984 and Rio 2016.

 Left: Image from the Center for the Study of Political Graphics (LA 1984). Right: Image from the Rio de Janeiro Popular Committee of the World Cup and Olympics (Rio 2016).

This art also reflects a concern with surveillance, with the rings turned into lenses through which state (or corporate) power might watch and monitor. 

Left: Image by Zig Zag (Vancouver 2010). Right: Image from Random Blowe blog’s Anti Olympic Poster Competition (London 2012).

These themes may seem surprising to some Olympics fans, but probably won’t surprise anyone who has actually lived near Olympics infrastructure, where security is usually designed to be spectacularly visible. These themes will be even less surprising to folks from racialized and/or marginalized communities who are often targeted in police ‘crackdowns’ ahead of the Games to make the area more ‘secure’ for visitors (and more desirable for global corporate sponsors). Ahead of the Olympics, host cities typically expand their police forces (both in terms of personnel and weapons) and call on armed forces, multinational private security firms, and global intelligence networks to support operations during the Games. Meanwhile protests and activism that might be tolerated under normal circumstances are restricted and criminalized throughout the ‘state of exception’ of the Olympic Games. 

 It is no wonder then that counter-Olympics artists opt to subvert the positive values the IOC wants to associate with the rings and associate them instead with more nefarious imagery, including symbols of oppression and state violence.

Challenging sacred and supreme authority

If you check out how the IOC talks about the rings, it’s easy to see why they make such a juicy target for activists and critics. It’s not just their malleable shape that lends itself to transformation. It’s also about the symbolic weight the IOC itself has bestowed on these five linked circles.  

One page of the IOC’s website is dedicated entirely to the rings, describing them as “the visual ambassador of Olympism for billions of people.” That’s quite a weighty role. Another IOC webpage explains: 

The Olympic Movement is the concerted, organised, universal and permanent action, carried out under the supreme authority of the IOC, of all individuals and entities who are inspired by the values of Olympism…. Its symbol is five interlaced rings. The goal of the Olympic Movement is to contribute to building a peaceful and better world by educating youth through sport …

 Here, the IOC declares itself the “supreme authority” over its “movement.” Someone unfamiliar with the IOC might imagine that this is a bizarre but ultimately harmless exaggeration. But the IOC’s claim to “supreme authority” reflects the iron-fisted control with which it has protected its trademarks (including the rings), enforced its corporate sponsors’ exclusive marketing rights, and even insisted that host countries adjust their laws in order to restrict protests related to the sports event. 

The combination of the IOC’s insistence on authority and its simple narrative of building a peaceful world call for a consideration of Nick Mirzoeff’s concept of visuality. Visuality is “that narrative that concentrates on the formation of a coherent and intelligible picture of modernity that allowed for centralized and/or autocratic leadership,” Mirzoeff writes in The Right to Look(p. 23). He adds that visuality is “that authority to tell us to move on” (p. 2), the way a police officer might tell us “there’s nothing to see here” (p. 1). The Olympic media event is a struggle over where to look: the producers and corporate sponsors of the event insist that everyone should watch the official content they generate. 

Anti-Olympic art refuses those instructions. It subverts the rings and associates them with evictions, policing, marginalization, and corporate greed, among other manifestations of power and inequality, insisting on what Mirzoeff calls the “right to look.” Rather than focusing on the subjects included in the TV version of the Olympics — often wealthier, whiter people who can afford tickets — anti-Olympic art puts on a spotlight on those who are excluded from the sports event and caught up in larger processes of exclusion related to the Olympics, including Black, brown, and unhoused targets of police sweeps in LA, Indigenous communities in Vancouver, and favela residents in Rio, among others. 

By linking the rings and the Olympics to other institutions like real estate developers, police, corporations, and autocratic governments that are more visibly political than the IOC, anti-Olympic art disputes the IOC’s claims that it just “place[s] sport at the service of humanity” from a position of political neutrality. It not only critiques the “supreme authority” (the IOC), but by appropriating the IOC’s primary symbol it enacts a challenge to that authority, producing a reality in which the IOC does not reign “supreme” over its claimed property. 

Anti-Olympic art makes visible the struggle and contradiction that exists around the Olympics. Each visual subversion of the rings chips away at their supposed sanctity. 

The power of ‘no’

All of these examples can be considered culture jamming, which Mark Dery defines as to “appropriate, rework, and disseminate cultural symbols in order to contest meaning and challenge dominant forms of power.” Culture jamming often targets corporations and consumer culture. Some recent writings on culture jamming have criticized this form (see below) of hijacking corporate or institutional imagery, arguing that it offers a negative critique but doesn’t offer solutions, alternatives, or ways for people to engage.

Artist: Klaus Staek. Image from the Center for the Study of Political Graphics.

What’s interesting from the images I’ve been able to collect is that, yes, they’re incredibly negative. They are part of campaigns that say “no” to the Olympics. Literally. The rings are appropriated into the letter “o” of “no” or “fuck off” (“foda-se,” in Portuguese), or transformed into prohibition signs.

Embracing negation extends beyond the rings imagery, too. The recent campaign against the 2024 Olympics bid in Hamburg, Germany is a particularly great example. The official logo for the Olympic bid was this “Fire and Flame” symbol below:

Image from Hamburg 2024 committee (Hamburg 2024 bid).

And since the official image of the pro-Olympics campaign was fire, guess what the anti-Olympics group adopted as their logo?

Image from NOlympia Hamburg (Hamburg 2024 bid).

A fire extinguisher. (And occasionally a watering can.) They fully embraced the idea of being the “anti” campaign. And this campaign was successful! Hamburg withdrew its Olympic bid after 52% percent of residents voted against hosting in a referendum in 2015, proving that a campaign based on saying no to something can be a winning strategy with concrete results in a struggle against a coalition of powerful global elites. Part of why saying ‘no’ to the Olympics can be generative — even if it doesn’t appear proactive or offer clear proposals — is that it is often asserted in the context of a ‘right to the city’ framework. Anti-Olympic campaigns have insisted that cities’ residents should have power over the decisions that affect their lives and urban environment. They’ve argued that preparing to host an Olympics opens the way for multinational actors to exploit the city for profit and for local elites to build a more exclusive space — the opposite of ‘right to the city’ demands. 

In cases where cities have actually held referenda to vote on hosting the Olympics, this argument has been pretty successful. Since 2013, at least five cities have held referenda in which a majority voted against the bid (versus one referendum in which residents of Oslo initially voted in favor of hosting, before the city ultimately dropped its bid anyway after public opinion soured on the idea). Another six cities have dropped their bids due to a lack of support. 

In voting against an Olympic bid, a city’s residents are saying “no” to a club of powerful actors including multinational corporations, local business and government leaders, media conglomerates, international security consultants, sports federations, and that highly profitable non-profit headquartered in a château in Switzerland: the IOC. This rejection thus imagines and enacts new possibilities in which a city’s residents are more empowered and global networks of capital have to respect local residents’ wishes. 

Final thoughts

From this study of anti-Olympic art, I believe these subversive graphics play two main roles in contesting the power of the Olympic Movement. They disrupt the IOC’s simple narratives and threaten its (fragile) claims to authority, insisting instead on the “right to look” elsewhere. By rejecting top-down visuality, the graphics also imagine and enact new alternative possibilities in which a city’s residents have more local power relative to global networks of capital.

Now when I see the five rings looming over sports events, I see them as a frame ready for millions of global viewers to attach their interpretations. I’m sure there are still many nine-year-olds for whom those rings provoke excitement and awe. I’m sure there are folks of all ages who feel that way. But there’s a growing and increasingly vocal group of people around the world who associate the rings with oppression and an abuse of power, including nine-year-olds who have been displaced from their homes in the name of the Olympics. There’s a growing group of people who are eager to disrupt the five rings’ claims to peace and humanity. For all it can legally declare its ownership rights over those five circles, the IOC does not — and cannot — own those rings. 

Academic references 

Dery, M. (2017). Culture jamming: Hacking, slashing, and sniping in the empire of signs. In M. Delaure, & M. Fink (eds.), Culture jamming: Activism and the art of cultural resistance. New York, NY: New York University Press.

Mirzoeff, N. (2011). The right to look: A counterhistory of visuality. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Cerianne Robertson is a PhD student at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. She researches the news media narratives, discourses, and practices that sustain power relations, as well as the opportunities available to disrupt and change them. Her research often focuses on the stories we tell about cities and sports mega-events. Cerianne previously worked as the Editor and Media Monitoring Coordinator for RioOnWatch.org, a Rio de Janeiro-based media platform that aimed to amplify favela resident perspectives and monitor urban transformations in the build-up to the 2016 Olympics. She is currently a participant in NOlympics LA.

Thinking Through Voice: Sound, Identity and Race

This is another in a series of blog posts written by PhD students in my Public Intellectuals class.

“Thinking through voice: Sound, identity, and race”

Edward B. Kang 

If you’re like me, the pandemic-induced migration of social life to Zoom (the face-to-face parts at least) has really shed light on how jarring it is to hear random disruptions (silences) in speech. To be fair, my Internet connection sucks, but the effects of it were tolerable until now. It’s truly frustrating when I have to text my colleagues to ask what was just said, or to avoid being annoying, just listen through a patchy conversation in which my Internet sporadically glitches at just the right moments to make the discussion just the right level of incomprehensible. But beyond the frustrating disconnects that interrupt my ability to listen to others, I’m also made hyper cognizant about how my voicemight sound when I’m speaking on Zoom. I mean it probably goes both ways, right? Perhaps somewhat resonant with, but of course not nearly as enduring as, the way one is socially conditioned to feel self-conscious if s/he has a heavy accent or a distinct vocal timbre, my unstable Internet connection oddly manifests as a kind of temporary but still relevant and embodied ailment that mediates my voice in Zoom space.   

I want to take some time here to thinkabout voice and all of the different things it stands for. As a budding scholar broadly interested in technological mediations of the voice and their manifestations in various sociocultural contexts from Voice ID, voice biometrics/analytics, interactive virtual assistants etc., I often force myself (and also pressured by the structure of academia itself) to locate specific sites in which my “intersection” of “voice/sound, identity, and technology” materialize, so I can analyze them for the purposes of producing a CV-worthy paper or a chapter for my doctoral dissertation. As rigorous and enlightening as this institutionalized method of critical and structured thinking can be, it can also take away from the practice of just thinking for thinking’s sake. Without having to “delineate my disciplinary boundaries,” “carefully lay out the limitations of my thinking,” “detail the methodological advantages of my objects of analyses,” “make interventions in current scholarly debates,” or write with the unavoidable factor of pleasing journal reviewers in mind, I want to take some time here to just thinkabout voice. Not “examine the ways, in which” or “drawing from the frameworks of.” Just think. 

Voice is messy. And it can mean a lot of different things to different people in different contexts. We talk about “fighting for a voice,” by which we mean something along the lines of staking a claim to our political identities. A right to express our personhood. We “read other voices” as cues to interiority or as registers of well-being: “she said this, but I think she actually meant this.” “I can hear it in her voice.” We all have “inner” voices to think. Some of us have “outer” voices to speak. Someone might be the “voice of a community,” as an individual representing a collective. We also treat voice, in its most physical sense, as a kind of “sound object”, if you will. Something to be liked, circulated, compared, and bought, even. For vocalists, voice is something that can be trained, refined and, to some, maybe even perfected. It’s also the means by which they make a living. Think about the ways some talents are evaluated on the hit television show, The Voice. As William Cheng, Associate Professor of Musicology at Dartmouth University, observes in his book, Loving Music Till It Hurts, the contestants’ impressive singing voices become technologies of super-humanization or as romanticized correctives for those with disabilities. Voices deemed impressive can be deifying. But those deemed not can be crippling. 



“The Blind Auditions: Dylan Marguccio sings ‘I Want You Back’ | The Voice Australia 2020”

As an ethnic and racial minority in America, I’m often told I don’t sound Asian. Without immediately denigrating these comments as ignorant, I’m inclined to say that the prevalence of these kinds of encounters for ethnic minorities acrossNorth America (actually probably across the world) really does speak to a larger cultural imagination (one that we are all responsible for) that affixes voice to identity. We talk about voices that are appropriatefor radio or opera. We often understand dialects as ways of categorization and identification. But also, in terms of ownership and authenticity. What do we make of Awkwafina’s “blaccent?” 



“Crazy Rich Asians: Rachel Chu and Peik Lin Goh scenes” 

Voice, as we know it, is raced, gendered, spatialized, and classed. It’s possible to have a voice in one sense but be completely devoid of it in another. It’s possible to have a voice that doesn’t “fit” you. It’s possible to useyour voice. It’s possible to have it taken away. Voice is not singular, but multiple. 

Thinking about voice is complicated precisely because of this multiplicity. When a bank asks me to set up a Voice ID as part of a more secure two-factor authentication method, which part of my voice is it using as the ID? I don’t think it’s measuring my ability to express my personhood. I’m pretty sure those “without” much of a voice in this sense, can still technically set up a Voice ID at Charles Schwab. In fact, it’s been reported that prisons across the United States are coercing inmates to enroll into their voice biometric identification systems in order to maintain phone access. Let’s add “voice as object of control or surveillance” to the list as well. 

It’s also probably not trying to identify hidden meanings that might be gleaned through the wayI say something. If anything, a reliable Voice ID should be able to match me with my voice regardless of whether I’m feeling down or excited, sick or well, right? That gets a little trickier because the actual tonality and the timbral qualities of our voices do change based on our emotions and health. And vocal timbre isactually one of the aspects of voice that gets factored into constructing a Voice ID. But the question is, how does it account for that inevitable variability inherent to vocal expression? Without getting into too much detail of how voiceprint technologies operate, I’ll just say that as a doctoral student researcher who’s been looking at patents of these kinds of technologies, they technically can’t, which is (1) why they are almost always used as supplementsand not alternatives to passphrases and (2) why there are numerous cases of expert impersonators deceiving these Voice ID systems. 

“Dialect Coach Guesses Who Is Faking An American Accent” 

Expert impersonators, voice actors, accent coaches, and even singers share a relationship to voice that really foregrounds that link we make between voice and identity. For one, they simultaneously riff on the singularity of voice as well as its collectivity. The fascination that follows a good vocal impersonation is based on the idea that we understand individual voices as just that – individual. And yet the perceptual similarity of the impersonation also questions that individuality. We’re confronted with a performance that questions the intimate relationship we have with our voices. If my voice is unique, why does that person sound exactly like me? Where do we locate the uniqueness of voice? 

Accent coaches operate in a similar way. Without going into too much detail about the different ways that accents and dialects are positioned as sociocultural markers (Basil Bernstein or William Labov can tell you more about that elsewhere), we generally understand that they are often used to gauge other kinds of information about speakers. They are often linked to identity in ways that position the speakers as part of larger collectives (a Brooklyn accent, an Indian accent, an Oxford accent etc.) through which we try to gather additional sociocultural information. 

And yet, the idea that we are able to gather such information by listening to accent or dialect is confounded by individuals who have learned to code switch effortlessly. I, for one, did not have the slightest clue that Alfred Enoch, who played Wes Gibbins on the American television series, How to Get Away with Murder, was a British actor until I watched this interview (and then I remembered he was Dean Thomas in theHarry Potterfilms). 



“Alfred Enoch Shows Off His British and American Accents” 

I find Enoch’s effortless switch from a British accent to an American one impressive, and based on the clip, I’d say the audience and the hosts seem to agree. But we need to remember that discussions around accent, dialect, and code switching inevitably also necessitate conversations around authenticity, ownership, and power. Where does one draw the line between code switching and cultural appropriation? At their most fundamental levels, both practices involve the adoption of different dialects or ways of speaking/voicing that presumably deviate from the way individuals might “originally” talk. Why do discussions around Eminem or Awkwafina’s cultural appropriation of the “blaccent” seem appropriate? And yet why does it seem odd to accuse Key & Peele of culturally appropriating White Americanness in this clip below? 

“Key & Peele – White-Sounding Black Guys” 

As Keegan Michael-Key and Jordan Peele “dial down their blackness” and speak in a way that “sounds whiter than Mitt Romney in a snowstorm,” they say they’re doing so with the hopes of not intimidating anybody, thus hinging their joke on a politics of respectability that tells Black Americans to police their own “intimidating” voices. More generally, this concept of respectability politics refers to a moralistic discourse that polices individuals from marginalized or minority groups to adhere to constructed standards of hegemonic “respectability.” In the context of language, this means that specific vernaculars are suppressed and replaced with what is generally understood to be a more “standard” – i.e. white – dialect. W.E.B Dubois in The Souls of Black Folkreferred to this “double consciousness” among Black Americans as the position in which one is forced to look and evaluate at one’s self through the eyes of others. This performance in the clip below by Keegan Michael-Key and Barack Obama also riffs on this same idea. Here Michael-Key is not only Obama’s anger translator, but also his vernacular code switcher. 



“President Obama’s Anger Translator at White House Correspondent’s Dinner” 

If we understand that Black Americans code switch in this way, as part of a larger system of oppression that necessitates a politics of respectability as a method of survival, how does this play into its separation from the flip side of that discourse in cultural appropriation? Perhaps we can try to unpack that difference by attending to the ways that Black Americans negotiate social pressures to conform to a standardized English at the moment in which they code-switch back. Ida Harris, writer and assistant editor for Blavity, talks about the shame she feels when she finds herself abandoning her “native tongue – African American Vernacular English,” in order to assimilate into the role of an instructor in a classroom. As a means of dealing with that shame, she references Derrick Harriel, Associate Professor of English and African American Studies at the University of Mississippi, suggesting that “the ability to code switch back into our Black selves is another way we subsist, feel whole and in some regard redeemed.” 

Individuals who need to code-switch intowhat is standard American English (as opposed to those who just speak it) can, in this way, be seen to have an intimate relationship with the dialect that they switch backto. There is a sense of inwardness or affinity that only those who are burdened with the social pressure to code-switch share at the moment they return to their native dialect. At least, I know that that’s the case for me. It feels awkward (even strangely elitist or at least pretentious) to speak to other Korean people in English. It’s a space only available to us. Let’s cherish it. So, in addition to the exploitation, fetishization of culture as “exotica,” and the overall alienation that characterizes cultural appropriation, maybe on a more personal level, there’s also a sense of infringement on that intimate space of momentary redemption. When Jordan Peele says, “you never want to be the whitest sounding Black guy in a room,” it makes sense to me too.

But I also want to ask, without negating the above-mentioned dispossessions that follow cultural appropriation, what does policing the boundaries of those spaces of intimacy under the righteous duty to undo cultural appropriation, necessarily achieve? In simpler words, what does the negativity associated with cultural appropriation miss about the fundamental multiplicity of culture, and thus also the voices associated with them? Marxist intellectual and past Professor of International Studies at Trinity College, Vijay Prashad, in Everybody was Kung-Fu Fighting: Afro-Asian Connections and the Myth of Cultural Puritymakes the provocative suggestion that although as a defense tactic, laying claim to certain cultures and lineages may protect minority groups from the cruelties of racism, as a strategy for freedom, it only reifies culture as a separate and distinct artifact, thus taking away from the grander project of collective liberty which requires that we see all cultures as fundamentally interlinked. As Robin Kelley, Professor of American History at UCLA, asserted in 1999 for ColorLines Magazine, “All of us, and I mean ALL of us, are the inheritors of European, African, Native American, and even Asian pasts, even if we can’t exactly trace our blood lines to all of these continents.” 

I’ve tried to trace this multiplicity of voice/identity/culture by sifting through the different ways it is sounded, taken, claimed, and replicated. And yet, I must admit it still weirdly makes sense to think of voice as something intimate and unique. And despite the inherent variability that arises even within an individual’s voice through emotion, age, culture, physical environment, and health, the idea of a voiceprint or Voice ID, which positions our voice as an invariant biometric identifier, is strangely seductive. Voice, like culture, oddly feels like something I can own as part of my identity.

Thinking about the voice is, in this way, an incessantly undulating and polymorphic process. It requires acknowledging the enormously variegated channels, abstract and concrete, through which it takes form and occupies our political, social, and cultural lives. It requires us to negotiate those irresistibly tempting understandings of voice as unique markers of identity with the equally accurate and critical perspectives that tells us voice, identity, and culture are never fixed but always rearranging according to the specific relations from which they emerge. This unruliness is precisely what makes voice such a difficult object/phenomenon/concept – thing– to study. But understood differently, this conceptual intractability is also what allows me to use it as the malleable mouthpiece through which I explore and comment on the multiplicity of culture, society, and politics writ large. It’s what allows me to link Schwab’s Voice ID to Key & Peele. Barack Obama to The Voice. And respectability politics to glitchy Zoom calls. 

As Nina Sun Eidsheim, Professor of Musicology at UCLA, reminds us, we must resist the temptation to knowsound, and instead find ways to engage with it as a complex system of knowledge in and of itself. 

Edward B. Kang is a PhD student at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism and Assistant Editor for the International Journal of Communication. His research concerns the social and cultural dimensions of digital technologies with a specific focus on the relationship between surveillance, race, and identity. Currently, he is interested in exploring the broader cultural imaginations around voice embedded into the operational logics of voiceprint technologies (voice biometrics, voice analytics). Apart from his own research, he has served as a committee member for Annenberg's annual Communication and Cultural Studies graduate student conference Critical Mediations, as well as led Music Production workshops for Annenberg's Critical Media Project with California Humanities.

Love-Letters and Thing-Bads: Video Essays and 'Intellectual' Self-Presentation

This is another in a series of blog posts written by PhD students in my Public Intellectuals seminar.

Love Letters and Thing-Bad’s: Video Essays and “Intellectual” Self-Presentation 

Steven Proudfoot

"Maybe there's even a lesson to be learned in this awful, awful way. What else am I going to do? This is my brand, I think? So, let's give talking dog movies the true rigor of academic analysis they've long been sorely in need of."

 – Jack Saint, The Political Implications of Talking Dog Movies

Let’s talk about tone. I am an academic (grad student), writing on a blog platform created by a Big Name Scholar, writing about YouTubers doing various kinds of analysis. Naturally,I will talk a lot differently here than if I was trying to write an article for a publication. The medium and intended audience could make the same argument look completely different, argued in different ways. For example, I can say “fuck” outside of a relevant quote here, just for fun. Take that, Ivory Tower.

Using this space and freedom of tone, I want to talk about academia and video essays. More pointedly, I want to talk about some YouTubers’ sometimes mixed relationship to academia and how many benefit from defining themselves in contrast to it. The few I highlight here don’t take an anti-intellectual stance, but present as post-academic dropouts or debt-burdened graduates who are qualified to talk the talk but will tell it to you straight without lecturing you like an academic. By reflecting on how we present ourselves as academics and subsequently considering some things they do to maintain an “authentic” self-presentation that we can’t. Particularly, I’ll highlight how they take advantage of this post-academic positioning with patterns like using alcohol as a visual tone-setter and simply using humor in place of academic distance to make passionate visual love letters to their favorite things or arguments of why something is bad where it could have been good (often called the “thing bad” format).

While it is important to foreground these techniques in an academic context, I’ll be focusing on the work happening on YouTube. Even though YouTube is sometimes a long way from the ivory tower, there’s a lot we can learn from it about subtle and intentional techniques of self-presentation.

As a quick disclaimer: for this post, I’ll mostly be discussing the work of four video essayists on YouTube: Lindsay Ellis, Jack Saint, KaptainKristian, and ContraPoints. Notably, not all of these fit within the same niche. Some of these channels do deep dives into seemingly innocuous topics while others are very up front with the fact that their work is activism. Some of them switch between those attitudes. The first three channels are mostly about media analysis while ContraPoints works more on general societal issues. Each of these creators have videos that have excellent arguments and analysis, and they also all have videos or arguments that aren’t so great and fall into some holes. Sometimes they have bad takes. Sometimes they present things in ways that are worrying, but ultimately aren’t in bad faith. I don’t think that the accuracy or consistency of their claims are important for the conversation I’m trying to have here. I’m not going to go into any of these YouTuber’s arguments or talk about why they’re wrong or right, but more look at how they talk about things and the surrounding context that drives it.

Negotiating with the Ivory Tower

            Now that I’ve specified that I’m going to talk about YouTubers specifically, I’m going to talk about academia instead. Oops. Before talking about the weirder informal stuff that YouTube video essayists tend to do, it’s important to emphasize that these don’t only exist on YouTube.

            While more formal, video essays do exist in academia. Relatively speaking, they’re rare, but there’s a movement within media studies to make a space for this format within a serious academic sphere. There are now journals like [in]Transitionentirely for videographic essays. These journals are home to some well-crafted and compelling work ranging from editing film into montagesthat make a statement to essays that use visual evidence to short documentaries.



            As is natural for publishing in an academic space like this, the tone of these videos then to be more serious than those on YouTube. The simple fact that there is academic space to publish work like this is worth taking a moment to call out. This work of making a serious space for this sort of work in academia where “alternate” formats have been not commonly accepted is being done by a number of academics like Drew Morton and Jason Mittell and this movement is growing. While there has been acceptance of academic video essays as far back as the early 2000’s, it’s important to emphasize that this wasn’t always widely accepted. 

            In general, academia is slow to change from what it has always been doing. While we are on a path towards academia at large acknowledging serious video essays occupying the same space as written work, it will be a slow process of getting there. Any academic who has tried to use a different medium than articles or has tried interdisciplinary work is likely familiar with the phrase “when you only have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” The line quickly makes a point that lies at the heart of many people’s pushes to do any number of new or not-yet-normal things within academia: sometimes it’s best to do things outside of the box because it fits the problem better. Because sometimes it’s a screw and just whapping that thing with a hammer will probably end up clumsy and worse off than it could have been.

            Except, sometimes it’s really hard to see that a screw isn’t a nail. Sometimes, it’s even harder to pick up the screwdriver when you do see it. Even if you do use a hammer and a screwdriver both to make some really cool shit, sometimes it doesn’t matter because the publications build their reputation and livelihood on talking really, really well about hitting nails with hammers. The Journal of Hammer Studies might think that’s great work, really cool, really cutting edge. But it’s not what they do, they don’t want to publish it themselves. Doing different-than-normal things in academia is always a question of finding and negotiating space. So, when something like [in]Transition comes along and makes a space for this for a different tool, that is radical and important work.

            Talking in metaphor like this makes it seem light and like if you just stop and think, it’s actually quite logical and, after all, why don’t we all just do it. While I believe in these ideas, it’s worth mentioning that it’s not simple to just do things like that. People often have good reasons for working the way they do and making space for new modalities, methods, and interdisciplinary work is hard. Even if you do find space to do this kind of work, it can also be a question of if a hiring committee is even able to properly consider, assess and “count” less traditional types of work if they don’t have an expert among them already. Even though my own identity as a scholar is built around trying to mix psychology and humanistic work on games and fandom, I’ve only ever written from one or the other field without actually using both. It’s a problem I spend most of my time thinking about, yet I’ve done very little to actually do anything about it.

            Simply engaging with all of this broad umbrella of work is an active process of negotiating your own existence within an ivory tower stuck in its ways. While these spaces exist now, they’re not always well known yet and a budding video essayist might miss the chance to give their work a real platform inside the academy. 

            So what happens when those negotiations fail and someone falls through yet-to-be-filled gaps? What of those who, instead of taking up the fight for a space inside the academy, said “fuck this” and went to talk to a different audience? 

Post-Academic Intellectuals

            Youtubers. Sometimes, YouTubers happen. YouTubers with academic training doing analysis on a similar level to what you could see in any number of fields in a different way with a different set of rules. They’re using different tools in different ways to approach similar topics as many academics, and they’re doing it well. And that idea that they learned how to talk the talk and then left because they’re not going to deal with the system and debt is a big part of how some YouTubers present themselves. 

Admittedly, I am, in part, focusing on these four creators because of how they position themselves in relation to academia. Lindsay Ellis has an MFA in Film from USC, Jack Saint has an MA in English Lit, kaptainkristian dropped out of undergraduate film school, and Natalie Wynn (creator of ContraPoints) dropped out of a PhD in Philosophy at Northwestern University. This sample of four channels isn’t necessarily representative of all of FilmTube or the wider “BreadTube.” There are great series in these spaces like FilmJoy’s Movies with Mikeyor hbomberguy’s “Measured Response” by people who don’t have a fancy piece of paper declaring some kind of expert training.

While none of them are openly hostile to academia and don’t yell for people to stop going to school, they pretty universally present their academic credentials as something that they wouldn’t recommend or are helping others avoid. Lindsay Ellis’ merchandise page on DFTBAintroduces herself as a video essayist with degrees from NYU and USC, noting that “She conveys the knowledge she gained at these great institutions so her viewers won’t be burdened with student debt like she is.” Kaptainkristian dropped out of film school when he “realized everything they were teaching was available online” (Liptak, 2016).

Are they right? 

Well, yes and no. You can’t get everything online, but , a course is more than the articles you’re assigned to read, but sometimes it isn’t worth it to go into academia to get it. If I were to list everything wrong with academia, this would be a book not a blog post, so I’ll be brief here. In short, sometimes it’s not a great idea to be in academia. The academic job market is depressingly sparse, and it’s gotten worse since the global pandemic. Sometimes it isn’t worth going into debt to do this. It can work for those who find their passion here, but it’s not universally good. Often, dropping out isn’t the bad choice or failure of someone who wasn’t good enough to finish. Often, it can just be a good decision for your career and mental health.

So, academia…. Bad?

Sometimes, yeah. But more importantly, these YouTubers present themselves as aware of this state of academia-bad and it frames nearly all of what they do. By establishing credentials and then subsequently distancing themselves from it, they show expertise without being a lame professor who would lecture you about something. They can take a shot straight from a bottle of vodka and tell you some shitabout everything wrong with Jon Snow’s characterization in Game of Thrones.

Watch from starting timestamp (20:29) to 21:10 for a brief example of this tone.

And that works. I often find myself procrastinating reading theory by listening to these people talk about different theories in entertaining ways. Put simply, reading most theory is a lot less fun than watching a ContraPoints video about why Autogynephilia (a transphobic theory on why trans people are trans) is blatantly wrong as she provides her own experience, perspective, and analysis of the relevant texts.

Watch from starting timestamp (10:58) to 13:21 for snippet of this. 

Instead of existing within the highly regulated, toxic environment of academia and writing articles, they now exist within the moderately regulated, toxic environment of YouTube and make video essays with similar content. Here, you can say “fuck” and call people cucks. Take that, Ivory tower.

To be serious though, while these video essays have certain freedoms of expression that you don’t have in an academic context, like swearing and drinking on camera, there’s still informal rules and citational practices. As an example, if you want to make a case about what the ideology of the apocalypse is in Mad Max, you’re expected to bring your citations instead of just talking about what you thought. See this clip of Jack Saint’s video for an example of providing an argument, citation, joke, then video clips of the text to back it up (timestamp 28:22 to 29:46). 



While you can of course talk in these spaces without citing Hegel, there is clear expectation of having done your homework instead of simply showing up excited to talk about the idea. Even when no academic sources are used, like in the above Game of Thrones video, creator commentary, pieces of a show or movie, or other similar sources are presented to back up what they’re saying. 

Whether its about a thing they like or why thing-bad, these argumentative video essays are compelling, in part, because you tell that they genuinely care about the content. Because someone frustrated with how good Jon Snow couldhave been developed better and yet wasn’t is a lot more compelling than an article explaining how character development works or a professor lecturing about the concept. Someone who finds the use of color pallet in the Watchmencomics compelling and their use in the 2009 movie is more interesting when they lean in to show you the panels and the shots in question instead of describing them in text. 



In this example (from 1:53 to 2:12), his argument is essentially: Lookat how cool this is and how flat the film’s reproduction was. And, yeah, he’s right, those comics looked really damn cool. This video captures a feeling that runs throughout kaptainkristian’s work. Looking at his YouTube channel description, you’ll find only three words: visual love letters. He’s clearly a nerd who is excited to show you some really cool shit. Whether he’s talking about the color in Watchmen, the animation in Who Framed Roger Rabbit, or rhyming for two straight minutes to talk about Dr. Seuss, these videos are clear projects of passion. And that passion is infectious.



That impression is no mistake, nor probably unrelated to his success. In a way similar to how academics are compelled to present as emotionally distanced, cooly rational, and calmly argumentative, YouTubers of various genres have been rewarded for presenting a sense of authenticity. Lindsay Ellis, has an insightful essay on “Manufactured Authenticity” in which she uses How to Cake It with Yolanda Gamppand some others as case studies in how presenting as informal and authentic tends to go hand in hand with audience growth as well as talking to her friend and fellow YouTuber Hank Green about how they perceive these ideas impacting their own channels. Critically, I don’t think that this drive to seem authentic is presented as condemnation, but as an impact of the medium they are on. No one is really immune to it. 

There’s quite a lot that these creators do that very intentionally presents themselves as genuine, authentic, or passionate and shapes the way they present their points. While kap might show this by rhyming for two minutes, there’s more subtle ways this shows up. One way that a number of YouTubers do this, including both Lindsay Ellis herself and Natalie Wynn (creator of contrapoints), is using alcohol as a visual tool. 

In a lot of videos, Lindsay will either take a shot straight from a bottle of liquor before getting into something she presents as particularly eye-roll-worthy or will drink a glass of wine after saying something bad that a movie or director did. For example, in same the video as linked above, she drinks various kinds of beers and liquors throughout “The Last of the Game of Thrones Hot Takes.”The copious amounts of empty beer bottles and cans in the background that progressively grows almost every time it cuts back to her in is likely not an accident. Natalie, when talking about getting “cancelled” on twitter, is persistently drinking in a bathtub. 

(First minute)

They both seem to use this as a way to signal that they’re tired of or exasperated with the topic and that they will need to drink to really get through talking about it. Drinking here is signposting that they’re going to tell you like it is without having to say that outright. In reality, they aren’t saying this in a moment of probably-a-bit-buzzed rambling: they’ve taken months to prepare scripts and carefully controlled every element of the presentation, including that impression.

Humor itself can do essentially the same thing. Saying something funny instead of “in this essay I will…” is a great way to set the tone for a video that does a longform argument anyways. The ContraPoints video on The West is a great example of this.

(From starting timestamp 1:29 to 2:00) 

She ends her intro here with saying what one should do to talk about this topic, then instead dismisses it with the 16-corndogs/dicks joke right before doing what she just dismissed anyways. Which is a lot more engaging than ending your thesis paragraph in an educational essay with “in this essay I will operationalize The West.” Similarly, Jack Saint opens his talking dogs movies video by pointing out how absurd it would be to do a video about it and plays on the humor of applying serious “rigorous analysis” to a topic that sounds extremely not-serious immediately before he does it anyways. All of these four channels do things like this because sarcasm and humor works. It helps make their arguments actually seem genuine and entertaining instead of feeling like a lecture. 

Pointing out how these creators intentionally use these strategies to present themselves as more authentic isn’t to say that it’s all artifice. While there is a lot going on to help build that impression, it’s clear that these people genuinely care about the things they’re talking about. Instead, I want to use this to draw attention to this format and how it’s not only been shaped by the influences of YouTube, but by presenting as an intellectual without seeming like they’re lecturing. By doing things like this that academic pointedly can’t, they can lean on academic authority without falling into its patterns. The details of how they present themselves are carefully crafted to maintain this image. 

So what? Why should I care?

Thinking about how we, as academics and “public intellectuals,” do something similar in articles but in the opposite emotional direction can be instructive in thinking about what spaces we create with our work and the personas we develop simply by inhabiting that space. By shaping to the norms of our medium, we’re letting it shape who we present ourselves as. In most journals, that means presenting as emotionally distant and expositing knowledge.

Naturally, there is also passion in academia. There is writing that comes off as personal and authentic, but sometimes it’s quite hard for that to survive the peer review process. Similarly, academics like bell hooks have talked about how passion is an essential element of teaching (hooks, 1993). Personally, a lot of my favorite classes have been ones where the professor is passionate about the topic. Yet, the norms of this system typically push towards not presenting that passion.

They’re approaching a similar nail as we are, then they’re hitting it with a different tool in a different way and doing so with passion. They’re being intentional about presenting themselves as emotionally present and in conversation. They’re writing love letters (and thing-bads) to be shared instead of lectures and articles to be published. 

We too could just try to be more authentic and be intentional about how we present that authenticity. Underneath the layers of authority and “academic rigor,” many academics are simply passionate about what they study and will endlessly ramble lovingly about the topic they’re fascinated with if prompted. All my friends certainly know that I wouldn’t shut up about video essays for weeks before I wrote this.

I don’t think you have to drop out and start a YouTube channel, but I do implore you to consider maybe folding something you’re working on into a love letter instead of hammering it into an article. 

 Referenced videos and links to these aforementioned creators’ platforms:

[in]Transition

    http://mediacommons.org/intransition/

Watching the Pain of Others by Chloé Galibert-Laîné
     http://mediacommons.org/intransition/watching-pain-others

Who Ever Heard…? By Matthew Thomas Payne

      http://mediacommons.org/intransition/who-ever-heard%E2%80%A6

ContraPoints 

    https://www.youtube.com/c/ContraPoints/videos

    https://twitter.com/ContraPoints

Autogynephilia | ContraPoints 

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6czRFLs5JQo

The West | ContraPoints 

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hyaftqCORT4

Canceling | ContraPoints

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjMPJVmXxV8

Cringe | ContraPoints

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vRBsaJPkt2Q

Lindsay Ellis 

    https://www.youtube.com/c/LindsayEllisVids/videos 

    https://twitter.com/thelindsayellis

    Her book, Axiom’s End: https://read.macmillan.com/lp/axioms-end/

    Aforementioned merch page: https://store.dftba.com/collections/lindsay-ellis

YouTube: Manufacturing Authenticity (For Fun and Profit!) - Lindsay Ellis

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FJEtCvb2Kw

RENT - Look Pretty and Do As Little as Possible: A Video Essay

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0qfFbtIj5w&t=2369s

The Last of the Game of Thrones Hot Takes

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGr0NRx3TKU
Is Titanic Good, Actually?

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hW4U_lfgPac

kaptainkristian

    https://www.youtube.com/c/kaptainkristian/videos

    https://twitter.com/kaptainkristian

    An article about him that I pulled a quote from: https://www.theverge.com/2016/8/1/12318900/kaptain-kristian-video-blogger-interview

Watchmen - Adapting The Unadaptable

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5oltd-Jsi2I

Jack Saint

    https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCdQKvqmHKe_8fv4Rwe7ag9Q

    https://twitter.com/LackingSaint

The Political Implications Of Talking Dog Movies | Jack Saint

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fq8AYICXVUs

FilmJoy, home of Movies with Mikey 

https://www.youtube.com/c/filmjoy/videos

hbomberguy
    https://www.youtube.com/c/hbomberguy/videos

Steven Proudfoot is a Ph.D student at USC’s Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism. He studies video games and fandom, especially where they intersect in fields of psychology and cultural studies.

The Ghost on the Phone

This is the fourth in a series of blog posts created by the PhD students in my Public Intellectuals seminar.

The Ghost in the Phone

By Simogne Hudson

October 2, 2020

I got my first cell phone when I was twelve: a Nokia 3310 (pictured here). After begging for a cell phone for years, my parents finally got me one a few years after their divorce (I remember, in my tween mind, feeling conflicted over my excitement at the phone and the knowledge of why I had it -- so my parents wouldn’t need to communicate directly with each other). As was usual at that time, the affordances of the phone were pretty limited. I don’t even think I had texting; it was for emergencies only. Nevertheless, the glee of a first cell phone in one’s hands will surely be relatable to anyone reading this.

            Years later, I upgraded to my first flip phone, which was (if my memory serves me correctly) a Samsung Gusto (also pictured). Many phones followed, including QWERTY slider phones, Blackberries, and iPhones. One thing that’s remained consistent, however, is my phone number. I have had the same phone number for almost fifteen years now, which gives me an odd sense of satisfaction given the never-ending flux that defines the technology industry. At the risk of coming off cyborg-like, I feel like the phone number is a part of me. However, phone numbers are not actually so individual:they get recycled,maybe even more so than the physical cell phones they’re attached to, which most often end up at the dump.

My phone number was inherited from somebody else, a man by the name of Bradley Holsclaw.

            For most people, the question of their new number’s previous owner would never come up. But in the first few weeks of calling this phone number my own, I started receiving calls of a particular sort that persist to this day. For years, I simply looked at the calls as a minor annoyance, ignoring them and writing off any voicemails as spam. A few years ago, when I started thinking more critically about technology (an interest that then blossomed into my PhD research), I got increasingly more curious about where these calls were coming from and who they were for. So I started listening. 

            My first step was to figure out who these calls were intended for, which was more difficult than one might imagine. Those who were technologically active prior to the iPhone era will likely be able to distinguish the difference in audio quality between then and now. However, after some sustained and attentive listening, I was able to catch the intended recipient’s name: Bradley Holsclaw.

The calls came from debt collectors, an industry I was unfamiliar with until I began this detective work. The short of it: debt becomes “delinquent,” debt collection agencies can hire debt collectors, or sell the debt to debt buyers,both of which result in these types of calls. 

Over the last few years I’ve begun archiving the voicemails -- you can listen to them here.

            At this point in my investigation, two things were clear to me: someone named Bradley used to have my phone number, and Bradley owes somebody a lot of money. So, I looked Bradley up on Google. What I found in that search has stayed with me ever since:

SE Portland man dies a day after devastating house fire

Posted Jan. 28, 2008

A man died today, a day after inhaling smoke and suffering burns in a fire that gutted a home in Southeast Portland.

Firefighters arrived at the home in the 4400 block of Southeast 65th Avenue just after 7:45 a.m. Sunday as smoke poured out of the eaves.

Two men in the home at the time were not harmed, said Kim Kosmas, a Portland Fire Bureau spokeswoman. But the third roommate, identified as 28-year-old Bradley Holsclaw, died of his injuries the next morning.

The home, valued at $330,000, was a total loss, Kosmas said. And the fire's cause may remain unknown because of the extent of the damage.

(The Oregonian)

Bradley, the former owner of my phone number, died in a house fire only a few weeks before I received my cell phone.

Put differently, I have a haunted phone number.

(East PDX News)

In technology discourse, we often talk about death as it relates to the objects themselves. Concepts like planned obsolescence, hyper-consumerism, and innovation dominate, and user vitality takes a backseat to its technological counterpart. A phone without a charged battery is “dead,” they are released in “generations,” and earlier models are referred to, with a sense of owners’ misfortune, as “old.”

I don’t claim to exist outside of this construct; as I stated earlier on in this post I have personally participated in the rapid consumption of cell phones. Seeing these photos, though, and reading these articles, brought my thinking back into the human-embodied elements of life and death that technology exists alongside. Instead of huffing about the annoyance that is automated debt collection calls, I am now shaken each time I get a call and remember the traces -- the ghost -- that lives inside of my phone.

            The intersection of technology and ghosts is one that, while I think undertheorized on an academic level, comes up consistently in popular media. Take for example the South Korean film Phone (2002):

Soon after Ji-won gets a new cell phone, her friend’s young daughter, Yeong-ju, puts it to her ear and immediately begins screaming in terror. When other strange things start happening in connection with the phone, Ji-Won does some investigating and discovers that of the people before her who had the same number, almost all of them died suddenly under unusual circumstances. As Yeong-ju’s behavior becomes increasingly alarming, Ji-won digs deeper into the circumstances surrounding the disappearance of the number’s first owner, a high school girl named Jin-hie. (Horror News Net)

Media like this depart from utopian ideas about technology and what it can do for us. Instead, they point out the fears that surround technology, specifically in how, in its operational opacity, can take on a life of its own. How can we read the “life cycle” of a technological object (whether via material form of a cell phone or immaterial form of a number) to look for themes of the uncanny or the haunted?

In thinking about how the traces of Bradley manifest in my phone number, I also have to ask about the significance of the signs. Given that his ghost is coming through not in direct communication, but refracted through the communication of debt collectors, I would argue that what is exposed is another particular (and troubling) aspect of technology and haunting: he only exists in my life because of his debts. In other words, Bradley’s existence in the technological plane of reality is informed, and catalyzed, by harmful capitalist practices of the debt chase: when somebody dies, their debt does not go away. Instead of being exposed by Ghost Hunters (a la the A&E program Ghost Hunters), or, in a more expected fashion, eulogized and memorialized by his family, he is instead kept alive through debt.

I suppose in some odd way I’m honored to have inherited Bradley’s phone number. In all of my detective work I’ve never been able to track down family members or anything more detailed than the two news articles referenced in this post. In his 1919 writing on the uncanny, Sigmund Freud articulates that terror comes from the idea of the “double.” Might the double here be the phone-body connection? In that case, it would certainly seem like the possession I feel is at least in part because I’ve replaced the latter half of that connection, and I’m now faced with a reflection that is not my own.

Many phones and one number after Bradley’s death, I feel a certain amount of responsibility to continue his legacy, even if only by keeping this phone number for as long as I possibly can. What if the next owner didn’t realize the significance of (what I’ve now termed) the Bradley calls? The East PDX News article includes a photo of a “rain-soaked makeshift shrine” for Bradley.

            My only hope is that my shrine, which is really just my phone’s voicemail folder, might do something to carry on his memory (no matter how insignificant). 

The Problem with the "Main Character" Meme

This is the third in a series of blog posts written by students in my Public Intellectuals: Theory and Practice seminar.

Alexandria Arrieta

The Problem with the “Main Character” Meme

On May 26, a TikTok user named Ashley Ward posted a video of herself lying on a towel at the beach with this voiceover:

You have to start romanticizing your life. You have to start thinking of yourself as the main character because if you don’t, life will continue to pass you by and all the little things that make it so beautiful will continue to go unnoticed. So take a second, and look around, and realize that it is a blessing to be here right now.

Main character video by Ashley Ward posted on May 26

It is a pretty simple, even trite idea, but being the “main character” in life is something that feels particularly resonant right now for teenagers and young adults who are missing out on some of the basic milestones of growing up, such as prom, graduation, and fooling around with friends. They may feel as though their agency and their youth have been taken away as they are forced to awkwardly navigate many of those experiences through Zoom or worse, alongside their parents. As a result, users like Ward started to create content about what it means to be the “main character” in May. Many latched onto Ward’s audio and used it to soundtrack TikTok videos of themselves and their friends going on camping trips, running on beaches during sunset, driving late at night and (of course) editing them with retro film filters. Beyond that, a whole “main character” discourse emerged over the summer on TikTok through various types of memes and comments, and it actually reveals a lot about the ways in which teens are modeled what it means to “come of age” through media, and specifically, through whiteness. 

Over the past decade, both major studio films like The Fault in Our Stars (2014) and Love, Simon (2018) and critically acclaimed indie pieces like Lady Bird (2018), Boyhood (2014), Booksmart (2019), and Call Me By Your Name (2017) have presented coming of age narratives focused on white protagonists navigating identity, sexuality and purpose in the transition from adolescence into adulthood.

Amanda Mary Anna in her YouTube video "dressing like the main character in a coming of age movie" posted on July 16

These films, especially those made by indie production companies like A24, provided key references as the main character meme spread on TikTok, YouTube and Spotify over the summer.

Emma Topp in her YouTube video "HOW TO ROMANTICIZE YOUR LIFE || main character energy" posted on August 18

In her YouTube video entitled “becoming the main character of your life,” Claire Bergen explains, “You basically just need to essentially live your life as if you are a character in a movie or a tv show or a book because everyone’s always jealous of the lives of these characters but you can literally have that life if you wish to and I believe that to my core. It’s important to do things for yourself, do things that feed your soul, do what you want to when you want to.” She then proceeds to reference the show Outer Banksas a model of adventurous risk-taking. Many of these main character videos on YouTube begin with a general explanation of the concept and proceed to model “main character energy” through a makeup and outfit tutorial, drawing from the costume design of specific coming of age films as references. It is in these moments where the meme seems to intersect the most with activities of tv and film fandom through casual cosplay. But other than that, much of the discourse involves a general pop cultural engagement with narrative studies and understanding of character.

TikTok video posted by @arijelkins on July 6

Perhaps the most important reference that teens have drawn from these coming of age films is the particular sonic landscapes they present through soundtracks full of artists from indie and alt rock genres. Early in the development of this main character meme on TikTok, users started to make videos about the songs that make them feel like main characters, and many of them used bands that often appear in these films, such as M83 and Grouplove. There is even a growing number of playlists on Spotify and YouTube called “main character” that are dominated by white artists and bands, such as Lorde, Wallows, COIN, and Dayglow—acts that have situated many of their music videos in suburban streets and neighborhoods. These playlists often have thousands of followers, and one of them “main. character.” by David Welch (which I found out about on TikTok) has almost 100,000 followers. There are a few artists of color that I’ve noticed on these playlists, such as Labrinth (who made the soundtrack for Euphoria) and Frank Ocean, but it’s important to note that genres like hip-hop are largely absent from these playlists and are not part of this particular sonic landscape for coming of age.

Spotify curators created a popular main character playlist that has over 100,000 followers featuring primarily indie and alt rock music bands and artists

As a researcher who studies the relationship between Internet memes and popular music, I was initially interested in this particular meme because instead of merely propelling individual songs into virality (as TikTok often does), the main character meme has resulted in imaginative worldbuilding through playlist curation. As I was sifting through playlists, I also remembered that about a year ago my friend Brandon, a nineteen year old that I know through volunteering, suggested that I follow his Spotify playlist “Life’s an Indie Film, Vol. I,” which featured a lot of the same songs that were highlighted this year through the main character meme. When I asked him why he made his playlist, he said, “It’s just songs I loved that matched me and who I was in those moments when I was going through something or doing something like sneaking out late at night with friends [...] almost like a time capsule.” He also explained that he became annoyed when this type of playlisting became part of the main character meme because it felt like it had lost its meaning.

Wallows is an alt rock band that often appears on main character playlists

But it seems that a key difference between the way in which Brandon and others engaged in playlisting indie film music in 2018 and 2019 and how it played out this year is that while Brandon was working to capture memories from his teen years, many TikTokers were attempting to create memories that they never got to experience due to COVID-19. The main character idea was not simply focused on nostalgic reflection mediated through film references, but instead, became a call to reassert agency over a year of lost experiences. As platforms like TikTok increasingly center content creation around a matching process between video and audio, young users are becoming particularly fluent in soundtracking. At times, it feels as if the Internet has raised the next generation of skilled music supervisors, and at other moments, it seems as if they are simply reiterating past creative choices and tropes from popular films—even as these films reify racial stereotypes and lack of representation.

As TikTokers started to create videos about the qualifications for being the main character, such as childhood trauma and having parents that are divorced, user @nabazillion created a video that highlighted that whiteness seems to be a central characteristic.

TikTok video posted by @nabazillion on May 25

Though some users in the comments celebrated the fact that they were not eliminated from qualifying as main characters, others recognized that @nabazillion’s video was actually a commentary about lack of representation in the coming of age genre. It’s a severe issue—only 34.3 percent of speaking roles in the top 100 films of 2019 were given to people of color (Smith et al, 2020, p. 2)—and it’s also something that prior generations of people of color have had to navigate in different ways. In their editorial piece that calls readers to rethink the politics of representation by “looking away” from whiteness, J. Reid Miller, Richard T. Rodríguez, Celine Parreñas Shimizu (2018) write, “Thinking about the 1980s movies of our American teenhood, we recognize how we were forced to be white in our spectatorships and fantasies—you have to be white to be in this!” (p. 240). 

In her YouTube video, Amanda Mary Anna, a NYU film student, says, “When I think about the main character what comes to mind is the quirky, skinny, white ingénue in a low budget coming of age film set in suburbia, not McMansions and strip malls suburbia but like cute, quaint houses and like sunflower fields suburbia, you know what I’m talking about.” After declaring that she is “here to be the black Lady Bird,” she provides a tutorial on how to dress and model the adventurous and free-spirited behavior of the character. Both Amanda Mary Anna and users in the comments expressed the desire for more coming of age films featuring black protagonists that are not set in inner-city contexts or focused on racial trauma:

The first comment is interesting not simply because it’s an expression of a desire for black coming of age stories set in suburban spaces, but also because a suburban setting feels like a particular prerequisite for entry into this genre. It is also important to note that films like The Hate U Give (2018), which features a black adolescent protagonist dealing with racial violence and police brutality, were not commonly referenced in this meme because they did not function as compelling sites of escapism. It’s not that coming of age films about people of color don’t exist—they are beginning to become more common, especially with newer Netflix originals like Never Have I Ever (2020) or To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before (2018)— but the meme tended to circulate a particular, narrow vision of adolescence modeled by films in which white protagonists don’t need to worry about the daily reality of systemic racism but are able to explore other aspects of identity formation.

This year, as police brutality against black lives has reached a critical boiling point and COVID-19 has revealed entrenched socioeconomic inequality along racial lines as Latinx and black communities have been disproportionately impacted by the virus, it is important to consider how this genre of film has too often reinforced “coming of age” as a privilege of whiteness. And by this I’m not simply referring to growing up, but rather, the privilege of having the space to engage in exploration, rebellion and play in the process with little ramifications. Related to this is the way in which suburban spaces have been imagined and invoked within political discourse this year. On one hand, President Donald Trump has made incessant appeals to his white voter base by stoking fear that the suburbs are at risk due to the encroachment of low-income housing and Obama-era policies bent on breaking down suburban racial segregation. On the other, when Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was asked in July what cities would look like if the police were to be defunded, her response was that they would look like a suburb. The way that we conceptualize cities and invoke the imagery of the suburb, beyond existing as a bastion of white flight and racial segregation, has a significant impact on civic imagination and spatial figurations of community. 

The “main character” meme has grown and developed in some interesting ways within the last month or so. Many TikTok users have taken to the comment sections of comedic videos to identify “main character energy” when someone in a video behaves with freedom and an extreme lack of self-consciousness about what others think and have applied the term much more liberally to individuals from different generations. Others made fun of the trite nature of Olivia Ward’s audio by using it in videos of animals defecating.

TikTok video posted by @eshelton3 on August 14

The song “Heather” by Conan Gray became a sleeper hit as it captured the particular despair of being a side character. In the song, Gray writes about how the person he is in love with is in love with Heather, a seemingly perfect girl that everyone is jealous of. The song has inspired the creation of over a million videos, and in many of them, teens identify the “heathers” of their families and their schools or post vintage photos of their moms who they believe were the “heathers” of their time.

Much of the research I have done in the past has focused on how music memes can work to dismantle racialized genre borders in the music industry, but this is an example of the opposite. Memes, as digital items that can be rapidly spread or imitated, have the potential to quickly reinforce these borders as well, especially when they are not created in a comedic mode or for the purposes of trolling. As teens grappled with and mourned the experiences that they missed out on this year, they largely perpetuated narrow representations in pop culture of what those moments should entail through the main character meme. In the process, they often worked to reify “coming of age” as a process that is intertwined with systems of race and privilege.

References:

Reid Miller, J., Rodríguez, R. T., & Shimizu, C. P. (2018). The Unwatchability of Whiteness: A New Imperative of Representation. Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas, 4(3), 235–243. https://doi.org/10.1163/23523085-00403001

Smith, D. S. L., & Pieper, D. K. (2020). Inequality in 1,300 Popular Films: xamining Portrayals of Gender, Race/Ethnicity, LGBTQ & Disability from 2007 to 2019. USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, 42.

Alexandria Arrieta is a doctoral student in Communication at the University of Southern California. She researches the relationship between popular music and Internet memes and also focuses on issues related to gender and race in the music industry. Arrieta is an independent music artist and producer who has toured across the west coast.

Stop Stressing Graduate Students About Tenure

This is the second in a series of blog posts developed by students in my PhD seminar, Public Intellectuals: Theory and Practice.

Stop Stressing Graduate Students about Tenure 

By: Jordan Harper 

Faculty are responsible for and take pride in many things: teaching, research, service, and stressing graduate students out about tenure. The realities of the academy actually make the latter unnecessary. 

The academy is changing and has been for a while. Data from the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) show that three-quarters of all faculty positions exist off the tenure-track. That is, non-tenure-track faculty (i.e., part-time, full-time contingent and adjunct faculty). Pressuring graduate students to think about tenure in just about everything they do is a carceral logic that impacts their intellectual curiosity and overall experience in graduate education. It is unhelpful to burden graduate students with the thought of tenure when the reality of the academy is that very few, if any at this point in time, will even land a tenure-track job, or, even have a desire to go into the academy at all. Conversations about tenure are distracting and burdensome. 

Before we go any further, let us first observe how tenure is talked about before graduate students even become fully aware of what it actually means to ‘get’ tenure. I present to you, tenure, as discussed on Big Bang Theory. 

In the clip, tenure is discussed as a flashy, highly sought after reward that will not impact “output,” gives you job security and freedom, and may even make your mother proud, that is if she can even comprehend what tenure truly is. One of the guys, Sheldon, even goes as far as to allude that, even after achieving tenure, he will still have to live with a roommate. This slight comment illustrates that the Ph.D. and tenure is not a ticket to financial freedom and ease, but instead serves as more of a personal achievement and a recognition that your work in theacademyis promising and worthwhile. Another guy in the clip, Leonard, informs Penny that he, in fact, does not have to schmooze up to anyone to be awarded tenure. This is not true. In fact, your career leading up to tenure is all about schmoozing.

Graduate students, especially, exist in marginal and vulnerable positions. They feel all the pressure to conform and fold into what the academy desires of them (i.e., publications, conference presentations, research) and even adjust their research interests to what will get them published and land them a job. As gatekeepers of the academy, faculty often call attention to tenure every chance they get and some feel that it is their responsibility to do so. The tenure conversation deeply impacts vulnerable graduate students by lowering them into a rabbit hole of reevaluation: reevaluating their relationships with the academy, with their personal research interests, with social media, with television, with themselves. Graduate students then internalize the position of a tenure-track professor by falling into the idea that they must publish or perish, reach for only the top journals that exist behind a paywall, and put their mental health on the line and work, work, work. 

Tenure talk also stirs graduate students away from engaging with public audiences. It is no secret that research published in top-tier journals is the golden ticket to tenure, especially at a Research I institution. So, graduate students will often feel the pressure to shift all of their energy to the top journals in their respective fields, even if it takes over a year for the article to get published. Graduate students only talk to other academics when publishing in these journals and miss vital opportunities to share that research and information with broader audiences. Partly because of the ongoing tenure conversations, graduate students do not even think about ways to translate their research to public audiences by way of op-eds, blog posts, or resource guides. Here, key opportunities are missed to broaden a graduate students’ network and reach. And, if a tenure-track position is out of their reach or becomes a distant desire, all they have on their CV’s is an article citation that shows their allegiance to academia and to no one else. 

Another tale as old as time is that graduate students are in no position to conduct ‘cutting edge,’ ‘radical,’ or ‘critical’ research. Graduate students are frequently reminded of tenure when they do so and are often encouraged to wait until they receive the job security that comes with tenure to produce such research. What happened to the purpose of graduate education? To advance and construct new knowledge? Unfortunately, the purpose of graduate education gets lost in the conversation of tenure. When students are indoctrinated with the thought and concept of tenure, they tend to police their actions and the product(s) they consume, locking themselves into a carceral state that stifles their creativity and agency.  

I, for one, am not solely looking at academic jobs or tenure-track jobs. In fact, I am aware of the current job outlook for tenure-track faculty and am fully aware of the fact that tenure is diminishing before our eyes. Therefore, in all the work I do, I am reminded of two things: why I’m doing a Ph.D. and the fact that I do not necessarily need to enter academia after completing my program. I’m doing a Ph.D. because I’m genuinely curious about a multitude of things regarding higher education—leadership, non-tenure-track faculty, graduate admissions/education, hiring. And I know that my curiosity about all things higher education will lead me wherever I am meant to be. I am also aware of my commitment to public work and public scholarship and how that may later come in tension with a tenure-track faculty position. My commitment to public work is something I hold close and allows me to drown out conflicting messages about publishing or perishing and the need to publish in top-tier journals. In fact, I am more interested in publishing in open-access journals and more public forums so my work can land in the hands of those who need it most. I want my work to start conversations. If my work is only published in top-tier journals and journals behind paywalls, then that means only other academics with institutional access to these journals can start conversations. And even then, it’s probably only to cite me in the introduction of a paper or at most, a literature review. These commitments I hold cause me to think beyond tenure. In fact, I very seldom think about tenure. I think about the vital need for the work I produce, where it can go for others to read widely, and how to have subsequent conversations with the people who read and engage with my work. Tenure is truly the last thing on my mind. And I acknowledge that this is a privilege and a luxury, but I think it is a mindset for other graduate students to adopt and actively think about to push against the carceral state graduate students’ are put in when they are bogged down with the reminder of tenure and what you have to lose or give up in order to achieve it. 

So many graduate students lose their soul well before landing a tenure-track job. And that is, in part, due to the conversations they have with other faculty regarding what they should or should not be doing during their time as graduate students. Instead of pressuring graduate students to think about tenure and how their work will affect their ability to be awarded tenure, the message should be more about authenticity; to thine own self be true. Graduate students should be able to pursue any line of inquiry they want without the pressure of tenure looming over their heads. They should be able to honor their personal commitments in an academic space. Also, graduate students do not need a reminder of tenure in every academic space; it’s stressful, unnecessary, and lowkey traumatic. The message for faculty is clear: stop stressing graduate students about tenure. And the message for graduate students is even more straightforward: express yourself and do work that you’re passionate about during your time as a graduate student. We’ll cross that [tenure] bridge if and when we get there. 

Jordan Harper is a research assistant at the Pullias Center for Higher Education and a PhD student in the Urban Education Policy program at USC Rossier School of Education. His research interests are focused on higher education leadership, non-tenure-track faculty, graduate admissions, and graduate education.

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