Creating Critical Media Workers: Labor and Pedagogy

Session Submission Type: Roundtable Proposal

Abstract

In communication and media studies programs, our students are communication and media workers too. That is, despite the long scholarly literature that has developed around media and communications labor, few have made the connections reflexively back to what we ask our students do in their classes and in preparation for their careers. Even as critical scholars have questioned the value of free labor internships (Perlin 2011; Banks & Oakley 2015), self commodification (Hearn 2008; Banet-Wiser 2011), and the reification of corporate brands in education (Schiller 1999; Losh 2014), we need to question our own practice, knowing that abstention or dismissal are not viable solutions.

Participants in this roundtable represent both lecturers and senior scholars who teach media and communication in higher education institutions in the U.S. and the U.K. We take as our starting point inequalities in cultural production, and how higher education can best equip students – our future media workers – to negotiate and challenge the obstacles that such inequalities bring. From there, we offer case studies from our own classroom practices and experiences. We want to present our pedagogic strategies and critical conundrums to our audience in order to help us reimagine the ways we teach a critical communication curriculum with an eye to the future. This includes exploring the dynamics of class, gender and race in relation to cultural work and media labor markets. Questions to address include: How does our teaching of creative labour enable students to not just pursue or even critically reflect upon their careers in the media, but indeed, transform the industries where they will eventually work? How can we empower students to reduce aesthetic or structural boundaries through their activism/organisation or their individual creative practices? Finally, what are the issues of social justice and equality that must be integrated into our media work in the classroom and beyond through community-engaged research or training processes?

Sub Unit

• Popular Communication

Cosponsors

• Ethnicity and Race in Communication

• Feminist Scholarship

Chairs

• Anamik Saha

• Vicki Mayer, Tulane University

Individual Presentations

• What’s Wrong With Inequality? Confronting Meritocracy - Kate Oakley, U of Leeds

• The Good Will Out? Discourses of Talent in Cultural and Media Education - Mark Banks

• From the Politics of Representation to the Politics of Production; Teaching Race and the Cultural Industries - Anamik Saha

• Digital Humanities as Cradles of Democratic Representation: Collaborative Methods in Making Media - Vicki Mayer, Tulane University

• Teaching Students to Use New Tools and Platforms to Enhance Rather Than Restrict Media Freedom and Diversity - Adrienne Russell, U of Denver

• Taking Community Engagement Into Journalism Education - Lynn Schofield Clark, U of Denver