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This week we welcome Ebony Elizabeth Thomas , author of the new book The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games . She counters the deficit-framed language describing an achievement gap among youth of color by asserting that there is a corresponding, long-standing imagination gap – that lack of representation in children’s literature and media has left them u...

Our guest this week is Jaroslav Švelch , author of Gaming the Iron Curtain: How Teenagers and Amateurs in Communist Czechoslovakia Claimed the Medium of Computer Games , which recounts the early history (and his own experience) of gaming and home computer use in Czechoslovakia in the 1980s. In discussing this creator/maker culture, we note how both local materials and state-sponsored infrastructur...

In this episode we talk to David Craig, Clinical Associate Professor at USC Annenberg’s School for Communication and Journalism and a Fellow at the Peabody Media Center, and Stuart Cunningham, Distinguished Professor of Media and Communication, Queensland University of Technology. They are the authors of Social Media Entertainment: The New Intersection of Hollywood and Silicon Valley , in which th...

In this episode we discuss lucha libre , the popular Mexican form of professional wrestling. We are joined by Peatonito, an activist for pedestrians in Mexico City, who uses the persona of a wrestler to create spectacle as activism on the streets, such as jumping in front of cars. We also speak with Heather Levi, an assistant professor of Anthropology at Temple university, who researches professio...

This week we talk about Korean science fiction, with Sang-Joon Park, publisher; Soyeon Jeong, a Science Fiction writer; Gord Sellar, also a writer, and Sunyoung Park, Associate Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures and Gender Studies at USC. Each are contributors to a new book, Readymade Bodhisattva: The Kaya anthology of South Korean Science Fiction, and this interview offers potential r...

In this episode we are joined by Kerri Hoffman, CEO of PRX (PRX, a distributor of public media content) and John Barth, Chief Content Editor of PRX. This is our fourth and last episode on the Power and Pleasure of Podcasting (with episodes 32, 33 and 34). We begin by discussing the history of podcasting and public radio, and how it has always been a venture of affecting lives and not money-making....

Amber J. Phillips (aka the High Priestess of Black Joy), podcaster and Participatory Civic Media Fellow at USC, takes the reins to interview Chenjerai Kumanyika, Assistant Professor ofJournalism and Media Studies at Rutgers University, and host of Uncivil Podcast. Following our podcasting event at USC (see episodes 32 and 33), they speak about some differences of black voices, performativity, and...

This is part 2 of our Power and Pleasure of Podcasting event at USC (episode 33), which included performances from our guests. In this episode, we have the Q&A session that followed, where we were able to delve into the process of making and starting to podcast. To reiterate, we had Chenjerai Kumanyika (Uncivil), Davia Nelson and Nikki Silva (The Kitchen Sisters), Melinna Bobadilla and Brenda...

We recently hosted an event on Power and Pleasure of Podcasting at USC, and we have the live recording to share with you . The lineup included performances by Chenjerai Kumanyika (Uncivil), Davia Nelson and Nikki Silva (The Kitchen Sisters), Melinna Bobadilla and Brenda Gonzalez (Tamarindo), and Taz Ahmed and Zahra Noorbakhsh (#GoodMuslimBadMuslim). We had the privilege of having each of these pod...

This week we experiment with format, but also with how we think about media, with our guest Shrikanth S. Narayanan, Engineering professor at a University of Southern California. Shri works in an interdisciplinary lab that looks at "data science before it was cool," showing the benefits of interdisciplinarity when studying media and storytelling. He thinks about "signals" from m...

This week we touch on gender in film history with Professor of Film at Columbia University School of the Arts, Jane Gaines. During the current #timesup moment, there is an implicit suggestion that women have been waiting a long time for a higher status in the entertainment industry but also often a suggestion that progress has been made but not fast enough. But a different picture emerges when we...

In this episode we discuss the Academy Awards with Raffi Sarkissian, Lecturer at Christopher Newport University, Virginia. Raffi has written about the long narrative created during the “award season” by creators, promotion strategists, the mainstream media etc. We discuss the emergence of the #oscarssowhite protest as a reflection of the industry's structural problems. However, since then, we have...

In this episode we talked to Caty Borum Chatoo, Director of the Center for Media & Social Impact (CMSI) and Executive in Residence at the American University School of Communication in Washington, D.C. Before academia, she ranged from working with Norman Lear to producing documentaries. She collaborated with comedian Hasan Minhaj on the documentary, Standup Planet, identifying comedians in the...

In our third and final installment of the need for critics of color, Eric Deggans, NPR's first full-time TV critic and author of Race Baiter: How the Media Wields Dangerous Words to Divide a Nation, talks to Henry and Colin about his longtime trajectory in radio and print media. Our guest speaks about how his first encounter with white culture was through radio, and asserts that "podcasting i...

This week we continue with the second installment of our conversation about critics of color. Colin and Henry talk to Carolina Miranda, a writer and art critic at the LA Times, and Elizabeth Mendez Berry, Director of Voice, Creativity and Culture at the Nathan Cummings Foundation. Both critics came from a background of studying social movements and politics, but realized they could make a living a...

Today is our first of three episodes [exploring why we all need] critics of color. Colin talks to Jeff Yang, an American writer, journalist, and business/media consultant who has written for The Wall Street Journal and CNN, and, Mauricio Mota, a producer of East Los High, an award-winning [Hulu] drama series that has earned five Emmy nominations for its realistic portrayal of Latinx high school st...

To continue our thread on rumours and conspiracy theories, this week Colin discussed the 80th anniversary of the The War of the Worlds broadcast on CBS radio with media historian Nick Cull. Orson Welles' infamous radio drama showed the power of news media to convince populations about a fake event, but it also highlighted the rumours surrounding the broadcast: not everyone thought it was aliens in...

Why are younger people more likely to protest, and less likely to vote? This week, Henry talks with Naja Nielsen from Orb Media. They discuss how youth feels about their relationship with traditional politics, their tendency to focus on issues and not parties, and how they can often feel unwanted in current political systems. Nielsen also walks us through the shift - or need - to look at issues in...

This week we talked about conspiracy theories with Wu Ming, the collective, whose books inspired one the main conspiracy theorists on the internet, and Benjamen Walker, whose podcast often focuses on conspiracy theories. We cover: The art of blurring fact and fiction, and non-fiction, discrediting gatekeepers, can we ever really debunk, the role of satire, the hunger for complexity, pizzagate, the...

This week we explore the role of comedy in civic participation within the Indian context. Rohan Joshi is part of the sketch comedy group All India Backhod, which tackles political and social issues on their YouTube channel. A notable example was their viral video “It’s your fault” that dealt with the issue of rape, focusing on the irony of victim-blaming. Joshi recently spoke at the "The Past...

In this episode, we get the chance to talk to Anushka Shah, who works as a researcher at the Center for Civic Media, MIT Media Lab. More recently, she has started a project called Civic Entertainment that explores the intersection of civic engagement with television, radio, and digital entertainment and film. This project researches the media effects of fiction on thought and behavior change, and...

Henry is currently a visiting scholar at the Library of Congress in Washington DC, where he had the chance to speak about space with Margaret Weitekamp, curator of Space History department or the Smithsonian Air and Space museum. She curates the museum's social and cultural dimensions of spaceflight collection, which has more than 4,000 artifacts that include space memorabilia and space science fi...

This week Henry Jenkins talks to Diane Winston, professor of Communication and Journalism at USC, about religion and reality television. Are young people getting how to live their lives from reality TV? Contrary of reality TV as being a guilty pleasure, Winston's latest book talks about reality TV as the "the lived religion of late capitalism". Reality television tells stories that peopl...

Our podcast returns after its summer hiatus with an episode focused on science fiction as a way of understanding and re-imagining the world. We reassembled a panel of science fiction scholars fresh from the World Science Fiction Convention (in San Jose) and eager to dig deeper into the history of the genre, its social and political impact, and in particular, the forms of thought which were enabled...

Critic Maureen Ryan, showrunner Emily Andras and professor Louisa Stein discuss GLBT representation on TV and the tricky relationship between fans and showrunners. –––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– 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 “Spaceshi...