How do you like it so far?

Robeson Taj Frazier is an associate professor of communication and director of IDEA (the Institute for Diversity and Empowerment at Annenberg), as well as the author of The East is Black: Cold War China in the Black Radical Imagination and KAOS Theory: The Afrokosmic Ark of Ben Caldwell , and producer of IT'S YOURS: A Story About Hip-Hop and the Internet and Hip-Hop and the Metaverse on PBS. Refle...

As a former volunteer and later employee of Fandom Forward (what was then called The Harry Potter Alliance) and a transgender man, Jackson Bird’s feelings about Harry Potter have certainly evolved, especially given the extremely divisive statements JK Rowling has made about the transgender community. He shares how what was once an important part of his identity has faded away and why, as well as h...

Our guest today is Maggie Hennefeld , McKnight Presidential Fellow and Associate Professor of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, who has co-curated a dvd set of the medium’s early female comedians titled Cinema’s First Nasty Women . Maggie talks us through the current resurgence in interest in silent cinema and the global landscape of festivals...

Listen to the original episode HERE . –––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– Share your thoughts via Twitter with Henry , Colin and the How Do You Like It So Far? account! You can also email us at howdoyoulikeitsofarpodcast@gmail.com . Music: “In Time” by Dylan Emmett and “Spaceship” by Lesion X. In Time (Instrumental) by Dylan Emmet  https://soundcloud.com/dylanemmet Spaceship by Lesion X https://so...

Bonus content not released as part of Episode 108 - hear the original episode here: https://www.howdoyoulikeitsofar.org/?p=1307   –––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– Share your thoughts via Twitter with Henry , Colin and the How Do You Like It So Far? account! You can also email us at howdoyoulikeitsofarpodcast@gmail.com . Music: “In Time” by Dylan Emmett and “Spaceship” by Lesion X. In Time (Instrumen...

We’re thrilled to be joined by Academy-Award winning Production Designer Rick Carter, who has four decades of experience working on Hollywood productions, including with his own personal “Mt. Rushmore” of blockbuster directors: Stephen Spielberg, Robert Zemeckis, James Cameron and J.J. Abrams. Carter walks us through how he tackled his latest Oscar-nominated project, The Fablemans , and recounts n...

We’re joined by Alexandria Arrieta , doctoral candidate at USC Annenberg and Christopher Cayari , associate professor of music education at Purdue University, about how music creators are using platforms like YouTube and TikTok to not just share performances but actually create content and hone their craft. By providing a distribution outlet for amateur artists, these platforms have spawned not ju...

We begin to talk about the story between MIT’s Open Doc Lab and our guests’ book Collective Wisdom with Kat’s experiences working for the National Film Board of Canada and how this provided a precious chance for her to dig into collective wisdom. William Uricchio brings in the Comparative Media Studies program at MIT and two major characteristics of its cross-media study: remarkable community and...

We start by digging into each of our guests’ definitions of “meme” (in contrast to Richard Dawkins), zeroing in on the agency of the meming process, how it connects with politics, and the need to be responsive to the way popular culture and the participating communities are using and defining these terms. Whitney offers “trolling” as an example to show how terms can be conflated and the consequenc...

Kevin discusses possible futures of the internet and online communities. Be sure to check out the original episode at https://www.howdoyoulikeitsofar.org/episode-101-kevin-driscoll/ –––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– Share your thoughts via Twitter with Henry , Colin and the How Do You Like It So Far? account! You can also email us at howdoyoulikeitsofarpodcast@gmail.com . Music: “In Time” by Dylan Em...

This week, we have Paul Mihailidis, Sangita Shresthova and Megan Fromm talking about their insights, stories, and theories in their book Transformative Media Pedagogies . We start with the three authors’ inspirations for their book, and then our guests share their definition of transformation, before discussing more detailed contexts for transformative media pedagogies and their mutual and crucial...

Kevin talks about what was happening in the 80s in France with Minitel –––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– Share your thoughts via Twitter with Henry , Colin and the How Do You Like It So Far? account! You can also email us at howdoyoulikeitsofarpodcast@gmail.com . Music: “In Time” by Dylan Emmett and “Spaceship” by Lesion X. In Time (Instrumental) by Dylan Emmet  https://soundcloud.com/dylanemmet...

As one of the most influential musicians in Turkish history and the first modern pop star of Turkey, Zeki Müren gained huge popularity beginning in the 1950s across all different communities in Turkey, in spite of his groundbreaking behaviors like cross-dressing, and can be seen as an LGBTQ+ trailblazer. Even now, Zeki Müren continues to have a profound influence on Turkish society and on the Turk...

In this episode, Lynn Spigel , Chair of Screen Cultures in the Department of Radio/TV/Film at Northwestern University, and our hosts discuss her research and new book, TV Snapshots: An Archive of Everyday Life , on snapshot technology and TV history. While working on a research grant for smart houses, Lynn began researching the ways in which everyday people pose with computers and TV sets. From th...

A lot of parents nowadays are concerned about their children spending too much time on screens. We begin by discussing how screen time is inevitable in this post-pandemic era and that screen time itself might not be the problem. Lynn shares her own parenting experiences to state that parents also can use screen time and technology to build a good children-parent relationship and bond the family to...

Kevin Driscoll , author and associate professor of Media Studies at University of Virginia, discusses the history of BBSs, or bulletin board systems, and how they have been overlooked as part of the history of the internet. Developing out of his early experiences with local online communities, Kevin approaches the history of the internet from a grassroots perspective, offering up true stories and...

This week we are joined by archivist Jacqueline Stewart and historian Tyree Boyd-Pates to discuss the power of museum curation. The role of the museum curator is critical to the way that museums are experienced. We begin by discussing museums as “safe spaces for dangerous ideas” – in other words, how museums can be harbingers of racist and colonialist rhetoric when spaces are improperly curated. M...

Our guest this week is Diana Williams, who, after 30 years in the entertainment media industry working on premier content like the Star Wars Marvel Cinematic universes, has founded a new company, Kinetic Energy Entertainment , focused on partnering with creatives to build new intellectual property (IP) for today’s rapidly changing media landscape. Starting with a clear and holistic definition of I...

This week we are further diving into the recent banning of Art Spiegelman’s Maus by a school board in TN by speaking with comics scholar Hillary Chute , Distinguished Professor of English and Art + Design at Northeastern University and associate editor of MetaMaus . She discusses the history of the original publication of Maus and Spiegelman’s roots in the Underground Comics movement, which led to...

This week Henry and Colin are joined by writer and comics critic Jeet Heer and Jeff Trexler, Interim Director of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, to discuss the broader context for the censorship of graphic novels in schools. Jumping off from the recent censorship of Art Spiegelman’s Maus by a TN school board, we review the long history and reasoning of censorship, policing, gatekeeping of comic...

In this episode Stephanie Toliver, Assistant Professor of Literacy and and Secondary Humanities at University of Colorado Boulder and lifelong sci-fi nerd chats with Henry and Colin about her experience writing her hybrid PhD dissertation. As part of her PhD, Stephanie got the opportunity to work with the DEEP Center’s Block to Block Program teaching middle-school age black girls how to write scie...

This week Henry and Colin are joined by Cathy Cohen, a distinguished professor at the University of Chicago and Jen Humke, a senior program officer at the MacArthur Foundation to discuss Participatory Civic Media. Cohen discusses her work with The Black Youth Project and GenForward , projects that are focused on building independent institutions and influencing media institutions, respectively. Th...

Mónica Guzmán , author of I Never Thought of It That Way: How to Have Fearlessly Curious Conversations in Dangerously Divided Times , is the Director of Digital and Storytelling at Braver Angels which is a cross-partisan nonprofit organization dedicated to bridging America's widening political divide. Mónica’s background in journalism and her own life experiences brought her to Braver Angels as a...

For more with Josie Duffy Rice, listen to Episode 93 ! –––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– Share your thoughts via Twitter with Henry , Colin and the How Do You Like It So Far? account! You can also email us at howdoyoulikeitsofarpodcast@gmail.com . Music: “In Time” by Dylan Emmett and “Spaceship” by Lesion X. In Time (Instrumental) by Dylan Emmet  https://soundcloud.com/dylanemmet Spaceship by Le...

This week Henry and Colin catch up with AnnLab Civic Media Fellow Josie Duffy Rice to talk about the stories we hear and tell about our criminal justice system, and how we can reframe them to focus on people, not punishment. Josie recalls how her early experiences as a journalist covering public prosecutors quickly made her realize how opaque the system was and how she continues to work to humaniz...