Aca-Media

The sixth episode of our special series "Presenting the Past," a collaboration between The American Archive of Public Broadcasting and Aca-Media, features Bill Siemering, a radio innovator and advocate, who was inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame in October 2021. As a founding member of the NPR Board of Directors, Siemering wrote NPR's original mission and goals, and as NPR’s first director of pr...

What happens when communication scholars confront professional liars? The answer is weirder than you might think. In this episode, we talk with Drew Zolides, who organized a silent protest of right-wing propagandist Lara Logan when she spoke at his university and ended up getting pulled into her performance in unexpected ways.

The collaboration between Aca-Media and the American Archive of Public Broadcasting continues with episode 5 of our special series “Presenting the Past: Exploring the American Archive of Public Broadcasting.” This is Part 2 of our two-part episode on Latino Empowerment through Latino Broadcasting. The fifth episode of “Presenting the Past” explores the history of Spanish language public radio and...

The collaboration between Aca-Media and the American Archive of Public Broadcasting continues with episode 5 of our special series “Presenting the Past: Exploring the American Archive of Public Broadcasting.” This is Part 1 of our two-part episode on Latino Empowerment through Latino Broadcasting. The fifth episode of “Presenting the Past” explores the history of Spanish language public radio and...

We’re back with a great bleeping episode! First, we interview Dmitri Latsis, head of SCMS’s Scholarly Interest Group Coordinating Committee about the role of SIGs within the Society. Then we take on Rolling Stone’s list of “100 Best Sitcoms of All Time” with an all-star roundtable of comedy scholars that is even more entertaining than the sitcoms they are talking about. And Chris and Michael bante...

This episode of “Presenting the Past” features Newton Minow, Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) under President John F. Kennedy from 1961 until 1963. Minow would become a key figure in the establishment of public broadcasting in the U.S., and in this conversation, he reflects on his early vision for public service television. Highlighted in this program are clips from the AAPB...

Since May 2020, Aca-Media has been bringing you a special series, “Talking Television a Time of Crisis,” organized by Hunter Hargraves, Lynne Joyrich, and Brandy Monk-Payton and featuring dozens of prominent academics and practitioners. These sixteen episodes over two seasons have helped us understand the relationship of TV Studies to, first, the COVID-19 pandemic, and then, following the murder o...

In the third episode of "Presenting the Past," Shirley Sneve, Vice President of Broadcasting for Indian Country Today, reflects on her work with Indian Country Today, Vision Maker Media (VMM), and archiving with the AAPB. Sneve also comments on the history of Native American public broadcasting and presents excerpts from a few of the documentaries that VMM has supported that present a diversity of...

Our special series “Talking Television in a Time of Crisis” continues with episode 15: Academics. How have the twin pandemics of COVID-19 and racial injustice affected academia, and how might they force a reimagination of the role of television studies inside and outside the academy?

Our special series "Talking Television in a Time of Crisis" continues with Episode 14: Ethics. What ethical practices should television employ in depicting and framing the pandemic and struggles for racial justice? And moving forward, what are the ethical responsibilities of audiences? Host: Taylor Nygaard [Arizona State University] Participants: Heather Hendershot [Massachusetts Institute of Tech...

Aca-Media is back with a fascinating conversation about the great Faye Emerson, actress, talk-show host, proto-feminist, and bon vivant. She was once known as “The First Lady of Television” but is now all-too forgotten. Chris talks with media scholar Maureen Mauk and archivist Mary Huelsbeck about Emerson’s remarkable life and career, the Emerson collection at the Wisconsin Center for Film and Tel...

This is the second episode of our special series, “Presenting the Past,” a collaboration with the American Archive of Public Broadcasting. We talk with broadcast historian Allison Perlman about the AAPB special exhibit "On the Right: NET and Modern Conservatism" and the state of conservative movement in the 1960s. What challenges did conservatives face following World War II and the defeat of Barr...

Our special series “Talking Television in a Time of Crisis” continues with episode 13: Publics. What new viewing publics have been created over the past year? How have such TV publics both connected and disconnected us, particularly in these times of media bubbles, and with what effects? Hear the conversation with: Hannah Hamad [Cardiff University] Charlotte Howell [Boston University] Rahul Muhker...

In the first episode of “Presenting the Past,” a new special series from the American Archive of Public Broadcasting and Aca-Media , film scholar Michelle Kelley highlights a collection of 127 unedited interviews conducted for the landmark PBS documentary series Eyes on the Prize: America's Civil Rights Years, 1954–1965, first broadcast in January 1987. Kelley provides context for the making of th...

Our special series “Talking Television in a Time of Crisis” continues with Ep. 12: Aesthetics. Questions include: How is television transforming aesthetically, and what new developments in TV form and style have emerged in this time of crisis? How have new forms of television changed our relationship to the TV image? Featuring: Josie Torres Barth [North Carolina State University] Elana Levine [Uni...

This episode features a Fan Studies Roundtable: what can Fan Studies tell us about our current political and cultural moment, and what is the state of Fan Studies within the discipline today? Then we bring you interviews with two more SCMS 2020 award winners, Rachel Webb Jekanowski (Best Dissertation) and Pansy Duncan (the Katherine Singer Kovács Essay Award). Finally, Chris and Michael banter abo...

Episode 11 of our special series “Talking Television in a Time of Crisis” is here: Optics. How does television seek to manage social and political crises around the world? How does television manage its own internal crises (of representation and of legitimation) in such a precarious cultural moment and climate of unrest? This conversation is hosted by Mimi White (Northwestern University) and featu...

Episode 10 of our special series “Talking Television in a Time of Crisis” is here: Economics. How has the business of television, from streaming to legacy media, changed in 2020? How can we rethink notions of value in the industry that might contest capitalist modes of production and consumption? Hosting is Miranda Banks (Loyola Marymount University), and our guest scholars for this episode are Sa...

Our special series “Talking Television” is back for a second season, now as “Talking Television in a Time of Crisis”! In this second episode, we discuss tactics: How can we best analyze and address the power of television, particularly in times of crisis and controversy? How might we define a televisual activism—or is that a contradiction in terms? Guest Scholars: Jonathan Gray (University of Wisc...

Aca-Media is back with a series of fascinating conversations. First, we talk with Cara Dickason about her work on surveillance and teen girl media, the Graduate Student Organization and the Precarious Labor Organization, SCMS+, and more. Then we talk with two 2020 SCMS Award winners: Jinsook Kim, who won the Student Writing Award, and Allison Whitney, who won the Distinguished Pedagogy Award.

Our special series “Talking Television in a Pandemic” is back for a second season! In this episode we discuss how television manages, amplifies, and contains our collective anxieties about the election and about other political issues, and we ask: How can we best use television to promote democratic aims? Guest Scholars:  Matt Delmont [Dartmouth College], Sarah Kessler [University of Southern...

As we head into this weird and dangerous fall, we bring you one of the most important episodes of Aca-Media ever: a panel on organizing the academic workplace. How do we collectively organize within and outside of unions for improvements in labor conditions, compensation, and faculty governance? What tactics should we pursuing, and what difficulties should we expect? With Yulia Gilich, Rebecca Gor...

The organizers of the ”Talking Television in a Pandemic" series reflect on the previous six episodes, summarize key take-aways from these conversations, and look ahead to the coming months. With Hunter Hargraves, Lynne Joyrich, and Brandy Monk-Payton.

Our special series “Talking Television in a Pandemic” continues with a bonus sixth episode! What can non-North American perspectives teach us about television’s negotiation between the local and the global, both during the global pandemic and amidst global protest movements for liberation and racial justice? Guest scholars: Chris Becker, Liz Giuffre, Misha Kavka, Jinying Li, Jeff Scheible, and Fra...

How do we teach TV today? What issues are emerging at this moment in the classroom? How has the social context and the virtualization of everyday life shifted the ways in which we reflect on and teach media? What can we do to support the mental and physical health of our students and colleagues, and how might that tie to media themselves? What can we do to ensure that our discipline is supported b...