Department: Entertainment and Media Studies

Abstract: In the 1970s, almost fifty years before the “Time’s Up” movement, women in Hollywood unions organized “women’s committees” to counter institutional sexism and address rampant underemployment. While the unions supported the general motive behind these committees’ efforts, women activists struggled to gather information about hiring practices and enact policy changes. To understand gender inequity […]

Vincent, Theodore*, and Jay Hamilton. (Forthcoming.) “Narrativizing Climate Change Through Popular Culture.”  The Peace Review. Abstract: This article attempts to explain lack of action taken to address climate change. It locates part of the problem in the difficulty of concretely grasping something as amorphous, complex and expansive as climate change. It argues that how climate […]

Andy Kavoori has been selected for a Fulbright award. He will serve as the Garcia-Robles-Fulbright Distinguished Chair in U.S. Studies at the Universidad Veracruzana, Xalapa, Veracruz, Mexico for the Spring 2020 academic term.  He will teach courses on American Media, Culture and Politics, plus conduct ethnographic research on Son Jarocho, a regional and diasporic entertainment […]

Abstract: In scholarly and industry analyses of television’s expansion into online distribution, few have accounted for the specific negotiations required when old television content streams on new media. This article considers the economic consequences, viewer utility, and cultural position of television reruns as they expand from the pushed flows of legacy television to the pull […]

Abstract: When we discuss games, as a culture, the games under discussion are often presumed almost always a “core” (or “hardcore”) games. However, video games are change rapidly. The market has been shifting for years with increased revenue and game play occurring in casual and mobile gaming. Revenue streams have are now flowing from digital […]

Abstract: This panel will provide a discussion on benefits and challenges of teaching journalism innovation and will offer tips on how to include technology innovation in journalism classes. It will offer perspectives from both academia and industry, including the experience of one professor who has adopted digital and hackathon culture to produce award-winning, innovative journalism […]

As video games become an increasingly mass medium — not intended for niche audiences but deployed with different genres, styles, and platforms — it is an apt time to rethink the role of feminism in gaming. Feminism, as it is deployed in this paper, considers feminism as discursive, exceeding “women” as its subject, per Judith […]

Stardew Valley, on its surface, appears to be yet another invest-express farming game; players grow crops, tend to animals, mine, fish, and do other idyllic tasks that make it almost feel mundane at first. Yet, as time passes in the game, the player has opportunities to engage in relationships with non-player characters that reveal dark […]

Abstract: This paper investigates boundaries between professional from the amateur by investigating amateur journalism of the late 19th-Century United States. Amateur journalists wrote, typeset and printed journals of essays, commentary, word puzzles and stories, which were circulated primarily among themselves in subcultural networks of reciprocity. A broad cultural analysis characterizes how debates about social changes […]

Abstract: This chapter offers a “diffractive” consideration (Barad 2003) of posthumanist and cyberfeminist theory, masculinity studies, and research on gender and gaming, that views digital play between straight white men as a form of homosexual contact via cyborg bodies, one that is mediated by the material and semiotic apparatuses of gaming, but no less real […]