Making Meaning of the Meanings We Make Online: An Interview with Robert Kozinets (Part One)

Imagine a time when the Earth (or at least the Web) was young, when academic research on things digital was almost nonexistent, and when I had just published my first book, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. A young Canadian researcher reached out to me about work he was doing on Star Trek fandom, we developed a friendship online, and ultimately I was flown in to serve as an advisor on his dissertation, probably the first dissertation I ever served on. Through his work, I discovered this whole parallel universe of folks who were applying techniques I associated with cultural studies to the understanding of consumer culture within the business school realm.

Robert Kozinets and I have maintained a friendship which now spans three decades. He has become an intellectual leader, modeling the methods and applications of what he calls “netnography,”" and we have ended up together at the University of Southern California where we co-taught a course in the spring focused on brand communities and fan communities. We were able to tap both of our networks to bring in a fascinating array of industry people who work with fans across diverse media sectors from sports to popular music, from action figures to religion.

I recently was interviewed by him for a podcast and so I asked him to return the favor. He had no idea what he was getting himself into Across this epic interview, Kozinets explains some of the methodological and ethical issues he negotiates as he applies netnographic approaches to understanding consumer culture.

Let’s start with a core definition. What do you mean by netnography? How do you situate it in the larger traditions of ethnography? What changes when we bring the Net into the equation?

The definition and the situation of netnography are both moving targets. They’ve been evolving since day one. Currently, there are four elements that distinguish netnography. First, it shares the cultural and contextualized focus of ethnography. Next, it uses social media data, which can mean data that come from, or are produced about, social media. Third, it requires an immersive engagement, an ethnographic reflective type of personal involvement in the social media phenomenon. Finally, I find it important to emphasize that netnography is a procedural approach to performing qualitative social media research. It encompasses a set of general instructions that relate specific ways to conduct qualitative social media research using a combination of different research practices, grouped into six overlapping movements. As you can tell from these four elements, the cultural and contextualized approach and the reflective type of immersion are both directly related to ethnographic traditions that stretch back to Malinowski and probably well before him. But the exact procedures change. Knowing the ethical practice of ethnography, for example, tells you very little about how to handle data ethics and GDPR regulations in netnography today. Knowing how to handle cultural entrée in an ethnography doesn’t help you much as you try to find good places where you can find relevant cultural data online. And, in the long run, it seems that some ethnographic notions for judging quality, such as duration and intensity, don’t apply or don’t apply the same way when you are sitting at home on your phone or computer to do cultural research, rather than being out in a physically embodied site meeting people eye-to-eye. So, when we bring the Net into the cultural research equation, a lot of things change: access to data becomes much simpler, amounts of data magnify like crazy, the type of data and the modes of transcript and analysis change, and many of the rules of embodied ethnography either need to be adapted or set aside for ones that make more sense. 

Early in the book, you spend some time discussing the ways that netnography engages with “online traces.” How does the concept of a “trace” differ from other words often used in this context, from “data” to “case studies” to “artifacts”? What does this suggest about the temporality of netnography? A traditional ethnographer might provide a thick description of a meaningful moment or talk about a culturally resonant narrative, but for the most part, they are discussing things they observed in real time as opposed to something they can recover after the fact.

I struggled with the meaning of data. I’d been using it somewhat unreflectively and I thought that it required a bit of philosophizing to really understand what it meant in the context of online research. The conclusion I came to was that it might be important to recognize that data happen when some sort of informational raw material come into contact with someone who is selecting and collecting them for a particular purpose, a particular project. So, when people do things like post messages or videos, like or reply to comments, those are traces, online traces. Those things don’t become data until someone collects them for a purpose, some objective or goal that someone has. Data implies purpose.

Online traces are a kind of digital artifact, in a socio-archaeological sense. But something like pressing a like button can leave a pretty low-commitment artifact, right? All of them are interesting. The footprints in an archaeological site probably tell you more about what happened to the everyday people there than what the scribes chose to carve in stone.

A case study I would think about as a very different and much more macro concept. It is related to the completeness of the entire site of investigation. But an online trace is something left behind that a researcher can scoop up, save, and study. Think about animal behaviorists out in the wild, taking casts of paw prints, samples of spoor, and photos of clawed trees and trying to reconstruct what animal was here, what they did, and where they went. The online traces are snapshots and, in that way, they are like artifacts left behind. They allow us to glimpse into the past, see the pathways of the masses who stopped to scoop or squat or whatever. That can be a very fresh past, as with comments and posts that were left today, or it can go back in time, sometimes years or decades. But tracing long-ago traces is certainly not the only tool the netnographer has. The researcher can also elicit data in live interaction with people, either online or off, synchronously or asynchronously, individually or in groups, as part of their study. In that way, the netnography can have those same meaningful moments, can relate those online conversations or exchanges that were observed in real time as well. And the immersion notes of the netnographer can capture those moments right after they occur, just as an ethnographer’s trusty fieldnotes would do. Downloading online traces is just one aspect of doing a netnography, although often it is viewed as the most emblematic one.  

You were there quite early on in terms of the applications of ethnographic methods for understanding online social interactions. What were some of the biggest challenges we faced early on? And to what degree does netnography provide a more fully developed set of protocols for addressing those challenges?

I like that you are asking me by saying “we faced”, since you were a trailblazer in whose footsteps I followed. I guess the biggest challenge early on was just the open space and blue sky. These worlds were opening up in front of us and there were very few maps or guides to what we should do in order to be rigorous. I found a few anthropologists who were considering that online work might be interesting, but there was very little methodological description or advice out there (Luciano Paccagnella’s Journal of Computer-Mediated Communicationarticle was a very helpful and notable exception).  I think we all fell into a bit of a trap in thinking that because an aspect of ethnography worked well and meant something in the in-person context, it would work well and mean the same thing in the online context. There are numerous aspects, but two big ones I’m thinking of are fieldsites and participation. What does it mean to participate in an ethnography when the cultural action is happening, partially or even wholly, online? What does it mean to engage with an ethnographic field when the field is behind your screen? As a field, this emerging sense of social media studies or Internet studies was grappling with what was going on in ways that, looking back, may not have been so productive. We were using the term community to refer to online discourse, and often that term wasn’t particularly reflexive or accurate. We were using terms like cyberspace, and other spatial and place-based metaphors that hung onto past conceptions and clouded the way we saw how these communications and systems were developing at the early points. Many of us were naïve about the commercialization and commodification potentials of these new communication forms as they developed. So, we were hobbled a bit by our own preconceptions, language use, and lack of guidance. And added to that, starting in the early 2000s as blogs started to develop and then social networking sites like Friendster began growing, there was this incredible explosion of user growth and diversity, and a lack of conceptual and methodological agreements about what to call things and how to study them. So, add this incredibly dynamism, which continues on steroids today, into the mix. 

Netnography is still reeling, still adapting, still evolving. It will never be “fully developed”. It will always be under development, like a piece of software that needs regular updating. And the short answer to your question about providing protocols to address these challenges is that people doing netnography publish and share their adaptations, and use each other’s work. The approach is open source and crowdsourced, as a scientific technique should always be. It has to be as dynamic and flexible as the rapidly changing phenomena it tries to understand, but it builds from a base of agree upon, proven, operations and steps. That base-setting task happens when researchers across many fields, including but absolutely not limited to me, write about the method and the way it has been used, looking back at what others have done, consolidating and trying to organize it, and provide specific foundations for others to breach and build upon again. That is the topic of my next book, Netnography Unlimited, which is a volume that Rossella Gambetti and I have edited. It features work by 32 different researchers and scholars, including several in industry, in 19 different chapters examining how they have adapted and altered netnography to the investigative task at hand.

 Robert V. Kozinets is the Jayne and Hans Hufschmid Chair of Strategic Public Relations at USC Annenberg, a position he shares with the USC Marshall School of Business. Previously, he has been a marketing professor at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Wisconsin School of Business, and York University’s Schulich School of Business.

His mission at USC is to build academic and popular understanding about the social and economic impacts of our new digital communications systems. In particular, his most recent research investigates the cultural effects of new technologies of personal and corporate branding. Rob is a globally recognized expert on social media, marketing, branding and innovation. In 1995, during his dissertation work on media fan communities, he invented the method of netnography, which adapts the anthropological approach of ethnography to work with the many types of social experience and interaction that emerge through networked digital communications. In the two decades since he first created and shared this new method, netnography has been adopted by academic researchers working in computer science, sociology, geography, library sciences, nursing, health sciences, psychology, addiction research, anthropology, marketing and consumer research. His research examines topics such as social branding, word-of-mouth marketing, themed retail spectacle, media consumption, technology ideologies, brand archetypes, utopian consumer culture, capitalist emancipation, and consumer activism through investigating sites such as Star Trek and Star Wars fandom, ESPN Zone, the American Girl brand, Wal-Mart, Volkswagen, mobile device use, digital social networks, and the Burning Man project.

The Stuff Through Which We Represent Our Lives: An Interview with Anna Poletti (Part Two)

Tell us about your intriguing concept,   “confessional entrepreneurs.” What does it suggest about the mechanisms which not only solicit but profit from our sharing of self in the network era?

I had become very interested in crowdsourced projects that invite the general public to contribute autobiographical fragments because these projects seemed to have such a strong transmedial element—utilizing online publishing (websites), book publishing, live events, podcasts and documentary. On the one hand, these projects seemed to create their own communities of dedicated contributors and followers online, while also appealing to a wider audience: how did they do that? And why was autobiographical content particularly amenable to this form of transmedial cultural production? It was clear to me that projects such as The Moth, PostSecret, Six Word Memoir were of a type—that all did a similar thing (collect autobiographical fragments and compile them into texts available in different media formats). My research began with a pretty basic question: how do these projects work and what makes them successful?

I developed the concept of ‘confessional entrepreneurship’ as a way to categorize the elements that these projects share, at the level of intention (what confessional entrepreneurs are trying to achieve), and how they go about achieving their aims (what specific uses of media, materiality and curation they have in common). I wanted to make a checklist of sorts, that would help identify whether or not a project could be considered as an example of confessional entrepreneurship, with the view that this can be updated as the strategies of these projects change. I also wanted to use the concept to help us think about the unique ways the logic of crowdsourcing is used to source analogue autobiographical texts (handmade postcards, childhood diaries or letters, live events, in person conversation) and that are repackaged into digital products (websites, podcasts, apps) and commercially successful mass market books. Researching these projects made the necessity of studying digital culture from a comparative media studies approach very clear to me—the power of these projects, their ability to claim and market the life narratives they collect as being authentic, is anchored in the materiality of analogue forms of media.

I use the term “entrepreneurship” to conceptualize the projects because even though the vast majority of them fall into a not-for-profit model, they are clearly attempts by individuals, or small groups of individuals who are “concerned with the discovery and exploitation of profitable opportunities” (Shane and Venkataraman, 217). The people behind this projects develop careers in the cultural industries by becoming experts in their particular brand of autobiographical storytelling—that is indeed branded and sold on to corporate and educational clients in some cases (such as The Moth, and StoryCorps). Shane and Venkataraman define entrepreneurship as consisting of two related properties: the presence of potentially lucrative opportunities, and the presence of “enterprising individuals” prepared to take action in response to the opportunities (218). In the case of confessional entrepreneurs, the opportunity occurs in the context of the three interconnected elements of the mid-2000s: the increased influence of memoir and personal storytelling (sometimes referred to as the ‘memoir boom’ which Julie Rak has written about the rise of intimacy and affect in the construction of US citizenship outlined by Lauren Berlant in her theory of intimate publics and the rise of communicative capitalism, theorized by Jodi Dean in her book Blog Theory. At its core—the entrepreneurs have seen that there is an increased expectation that people will engage in personal storytelling, and they have managed to convince millions of people that they need a template or a coach in order to do it well.

Confessional entrepreneurs exploit this cultural context by creating a textual template (secrets on postcards (PostSecret), short spoken work presentations such as those fostered by The Moth, the interview technique of StoryCorps) that they promote and which generates freely generated products that flow into the project via the logic of crowdsourcing. Terms of Service agreements are very important element here but they are not always easily visible: but each of these projects has them somewhere, and they grant the project ownership over the contributions they have crowdsourced and license the entrepreneurs to repackage the content into commercial products. I was interested in both the mechanisms of digital culture and the cultural logics that has led to people having no problem with someone like Frank Warren, or The Moth, claiming ownership of their life narrative. Indeed, the projects create such a convincing framing narrative about the community building and psychological importance of “sharing real life stories” that they convince many of us that contributing to the project is a means of confirms one’s humanity. Sending a card to Frank Warren, or writing a Six Word Memoir, is a way to confirm your membership of the human race (always conceptualized as a narrative race).

 In this sense, confessional entrepreneurship works with a participatory logic we see in zines and other subcultures where being a silent audience member is discouraged. However, unlike subcultures where participation is acknowledged as the making of the community, confessional entrepreneurs create projects that they claim meet an existing need for the sharing of personal stories. At the same time, these projects elevate the entrepreneurs (the people with the expertise in autobiographical storytelling) as individuals or small groups who must ‘help’ everyday people tell stories about their lives in engaging ways. 

The persona of the entrepreneur is vital to the organisation, coherence and commodification of the autobiographical fragments that are generated by the project—the entrepreneur articulates the logic of the project and names the affects the project seeks to foster (sense of community, relief at sharing a secret, a ‘mortified’  relationship with one’s teenage self). The confessional entrepreneur also articulates and polices quite narrow ideas about the form and content of the autobiographical material the project collects in order to establish, stablize and protect the coherence of the commodity the project produces.

You have very interesting things to say in the book about collage as an aesthetic form for articulating why and how queer lives matter in the context of a normative culture. Yet, collage has become such an everyday practice for many groups in our culture, especially if extended to include such forms of appropriation and quotation as scrapbooks or memes. I would argue that there are a range of different forms of collage practices out there, which express a range of different relations to the dominant culture. If so, what is particularly queer about collage in your eyes?

I agree that collage and appropriation is a wide spread technique that many different groups draw on for different reasons. At the core, what we do when collage is we take ownership of something, we take it apart, and we combine it with other things. We utilize and recombine existing meanings to make new meanings. 

Is this an inherently queer gesture? Maybe. If by queer we mean wanting to interrupt and mess around with existing structures of meaning and see what happens. To collage is to say: “well yes but maybe also… this.” It is additive, presumptive, potentially disruptive, and a bit disrespectful. 

We often collage with things we love, and when we do that we are loving the text in a specific way—our love for it overruns our respect for its integrity. We love it so much we want to cut it up. This form of loving may not be queer, but it is at least not an entirely respectable way to express one’s appreciation of something. It’s a little bit perverse to want to dismember the thing that brings you pleasure in order to increase your pleasure. 

When we collage out of ambivalence, or to demean something, we are also acknowledging the powerful reaction the thing has sparked in us. We may be unconsciously signalling our fetish. We are at least acknowledging the thing has moved us—it has meaning we want to grab on to and work with or on.

 I agree that there are a range of difference collaging practices out there, and that they all express different forms of relating to existing meanings in circulation in dominant culture. They may not all be queer, but maybe they enact queer relationships with culture, and produce queer readings of it. I don’t need to claim the aesthetic form itself for queerness, but I do think that it has been used by queer life writers in interesting and important ways, and these have overlooked in autobiography scholarship because of what collage does to authenticity (it destabilizes it).

In Stories of the Self, I am considering how queer life writers use collage to make a text that reflects on the work it takes to construct and believe in the possibility of a queer life. I am taking my lead from the work of Eve Sedgwick, and I approach the survival and flourishing of queer lives as an issue intrinsically linked to inventive, counterintuitive, and disobedient practices of reading and adaptation. In her influential essay “Queer and Now” under the heading “Promising, Smuggling, Reading, Overreading,” Sedgwick offers a theory of queer reading in the form of an autobiographical vignette:

I think that for many of us in childhood the ability to attach intently to a few cultural objects, objects of high or popular culture or both, objects whose meaning seemed mysterious, excessive, or oblique in relation to the codes most readily available to us, became a prime resource for survival. We needed for there to be sites where the meanings didn’t line up tidily with each other, and we learned to invest those sites with fascination and love. This can’t help coloring the adult relation to cultural text and objects; in fact, it’s almost hard for me to imagine another way of coming to care enough about literature to give a lifetime to it. The demands on both the text and the reader from so intent an attachment can be multiple, even paradoxical.

In the work of many scholars of queer culture, we see how aesthetic experiences—which are mediated and material—are resources for living. Indeed, the impact of Sedgwick’s influential theory of reparative reading—which offers queer practices of reading and writing as counter-examples to a certain kind of paranoid scholarly reading—enshrines the relationship between life and texts, living and reading, into the heart of a reconsideration of critical practice. 

My reading of collage expands this strand of Sedgwick’s work by focusing explicitly on how some queer autobiographers voice their experiences of reparative reading through a very material form of ventriloquism. The queer collages I explore narrate the importance of media texts in the lives of queer young people.  

In talking about the texts that helped them imagine a queer life by talking through those texts themselves, these queer life writers strike at a core tenet of what makes autobiography a distinct genre of social action—they speak a truth about their lived experience in the voice of others. So, when Jonathan Caouette, in his documentary Tarnation shows us his teenage self lip-synching to the song Frank Mills from the musical Hair, he is not telling us about his reparative reading. He is not narrating the reparative reading as being important to him or to how he came to understand his relationship with his mother, her mental illness, and his own queer identity. He is showing usthe reparative reading itself, in the form of home movie footage of him emoting to Shelley Plimpton’s rendition of the song. 

Existing frameworks for understanding what makes autobiography a distinctive struggle to account for this as a meaningful (and indeed complex and moving) instance of life writing, because the youthful Jonathan in the frame is not speaking (he is miming) and the content of his utterance is a popular song performed by a female singer. He violates two basic elements of autobiography as a social and artistic genre here: he does not speak in his own voice, and he does not speak in his own words. Yet the young Jonathon’s commitment to the performance, his use of the song and the video camera to express and give form to his emotions, is undeniably saying something about his lived experience. But what is it saying, and how we can learn to recognize the young person’s statement as being a statement about themselves when it is made in this collaged way? 

Caouette the filmmaker does not remediate his youthful reparative reading from the perspective of his adult self reflecting back on his childhood. He puts the lip-synching child in front of his audience and lets him speak for himself. Media materialities play a vital role here, the filmmaker can do this because he is working with digitized footage that allows him to collage many materials together including this material from his personal archive of home movie footage. Caouette bends the material affordances of digital film as far as he can to show us that when the child is trying to understand how to survive he doesn’t speak in his own voice, but in Plimpton’s—how do we listen to that voice coming from, but also clearly not belonging to, that body and hear what he is trying to say?

When it was released into cinemas Tarnationwas infamous for being made entirely in iMovie for a total of around $200 dollars (the soundtrack, on the other hand, was very expensive because of the cost of the rights). In the trailer, a bi-line for the film is: Your greatest creation is the life you lead—and this is a statement of queer flourishing. While largely reviewed as a documentary about Caouette’s relationship with his mother (which it is) the film is, I think, equally a story about how Caouette came to believe in the possibility of his own life, growing up poor and gay in Texas. Tarnation tries to celebrate and see clearly Caouette’s mother’s life, but it also tells the story of the life Caouette made for himself by using dominant culture (movies, television, popular music, musicals) as a resource and engaging in what Sedgwick would call “overreading.”

For a book about the autobiographical impulse in culture, you tell us very little about yourself. If you were to mediate your own life story, given what you learned in researching this book, what form of mediation would you use?

This is a great question! One of the reasons I am scholar of autobiography is that I have immense respect for—bordering on fear of—the nature of the challenge we face when we try to find the right form and media to tell others about our lived experience, who we are, and what matters to us. When I was researching zines as an autobiographical form as part of my doctorate, I become quite frustrated with scholars (and practitioners) who claimed that making a zine was “easy.” While it is true that there are low financial and material barriers to making a zine—a zine can be made out of a single sheet of paper using a pen —having and refining the ideas, working out how to tell the story you want to tell, discovering what your audience does and does not need to know about the context in which you live and the people who are important to you in order to understand what you are trying to tell them is anything but easy. I only came to really appreciate that by choosing the medium of the zine to communicate with zinemakers during my doctoral research—that was an autobiographical project, albeit a meta one: a zine about undertaking a PhD on zines (Poletti).

I think we see the ingenuity it takes to make a seemingly simple piece of life media in the work people put in to learning how to take good selfies (of various genres), to craft Facebook posts that both say what they want to say and compel others to write a comment or click a reaction. Even the most seemingly simple (and some would say banal and ephemeral) forms of self-life-writing actually have quite high and complex aesthetic and formal components that are fundamental to their capacity to create satisfying and meaningful encounters for the authors and their readers. 

As I tell my students when I teach life writing and ask them to undertake life writing themselves: the trick with autobiography is that while it is a genre, there is no colour by numbers way to write or produce a piece of autobiographical media. Autobiography always requires ingenuity on behalf of its creator—the material you are seeking to communicate (your identity, your lived experience, your values, your desires and fears) are unique to you, and the text you make to communicate them will have to be unique too.

All that said, I have never really consistently engaged in autobiography until this year when, in early March, I contracted covid-19 (before widespread testing was available in the Netherlands). I was in isolation at home for six weeks with a lung infection and serious fatigue caused by the virus. I was very sick and living alone in a country that did not quite feel like home (I have only lived here for four years). On top of that I become ill right at the beginning of the pandemic, and the medical profession was taking a triage approach to the virus—unless they thought you were in danger of being unable to breathe, they were not able to provide any care. (During this time the proofs came in for Stories of the Selfand I had to do both the index and the proofreading, which was a challenge physically but also a great way to stay anchored to the world while I was alone for so long. That said, I do feel like the index should come with a disclaimer: constructed while the author was suffering from novel coronavirus.)

During this time I was regularly updating my friends and family in Australia about my experience on Facebook, but I was also ‘documenting’ the experience of the virus because I thought people might be interested to know the kinds of impact it could have on a healthy person, and how little the health profession knows about the virus or how to treat it. It was, and still is, a kind of covid-19 chronicle. For many people I am friends with on Facebook, I was the only person they knew who had the virus, and so there was a lot of engagement and support coming through the site because they were curious, horrified, worried. Their responses eased my social isolation, but many of my friends on Facebook also told me that my posts helped them understand the virus and the pandemic better. It was the first time in my life that talking about my lived experience and myself seemed to be useful to my community. Recording the experience on Facebook was mutually beneficial for them and for me. (Although I am sure it may have also increased some peoples’ anxiety about the pandemic, and they may have had to block my posts.)

I am a ‘long haul’ covid-19 case, and I am still recovering, and once I was well enough to work again I wrote a short essay about the physical elements of my experience for the Guardian .This was the first time I had ‘gone public’ with a life writing text. I am still not sure how I feel about it, to be honest, although a number of people from America, Europe, and Australia have written to say they found it comforting to read a personal account that so closely mirrored their own experience with the virus and its ongoing effects during this time when there is little reliable medical knowledge about it. This sense of being useful to people helped me overcome my fear that no-one would care that much about one person’s experience with a ‘mild’ version of the virus—a feeling that plagued me when I was writing the essay. 

 So, I guess in answer to your question, when I decide to write about my lived experience I choose the media that I think will help me reach the audience I want to speak to.  

Works cited:

Berlant, Lauren. The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008.

Bodó, Balázs. “Mediated trust: A theoretical framework to address the trustworthiness of technological trust mediators.” New Media & Society. 2020.

Dean, Jodi. Dean, Jodi. Blog Theory: Feedback and Capture in the Circuits of Drive. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010.

Gitelman, Lisa. Always Already New: Media, History and the Data of Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008.

Hayles, N. K. Writing Machines. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002.

Jolly, Margaretta. In Love and Struggle: Letters in Contemporary Feminism. Columbia University Press, 2008.

Lejeune, Philippe. On Diary. University of Hawai'i Press, 2009. Project MUSE muse.jhu.edu/book/8351.

Marwick, Alice. “Instafame: Luxury Selfies in the Attention Economy.” Public Culture 27. 1. 2015. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-2798379

Miller, Carolyn R. “Genre as Social Action.” Quarterly Journal of Speech70 (1984): 151–167.

Poletti, Anna. “Putting Lives on the Record - The Book as Material and Symbol in Life Writing.” Biography, 40.3, 2017. https://dspace.library.uu.nl/handle/1874/359007

Poletti, Anna. Zines. In Ashley Barnwell & Kate Douglas (Eds.), Research methodologies for auto/biography studies. New York: Routledge, 2009: 26-33.

Rak, Julie. Boom! Manufacturing Memoir for the Popular Market. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier Press, 2013.

Shane, Scott, and S. Venkataraman. “The Promise of Entrepreneurship as a Field of Research.” Academy of Management Review25, no. 1 (2000): 217–226.

Stanley, Liz and Margaretta Jolly. “Epistolarity: life after death of the letter?” a/b: Auto/Biographical Studies 32. 2, 2017: 229-33. http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/id/eprint/61242/1/2017-5-23_Epistolari.pdf

 Tell us about your intriguing concept,   “confessional entrepreneurs.” What does it suggest about the mechanisms which not only solicit but profit from our sharing of self in the network era?

I had become very interested in crowdsourced projects that invite the general public to contribute autobiographical fragments because these projects seemed to have such a strong transmedial element—utilizing online publishing (websites), book publishing, live events, podcasts and documentary. On the one hand, these projects seemed to create their own communities of dedicated contributors and followers online, while also appealing to a wider audience: how did they do that? And why was autobiographical content particularly amenable to this form of transmedial cultural production? It was clear to me that projects such as The Moth, PostSecret, Six Word Memoir were of a type—that all did a similar thing (collect autobiographical fragments and compile them into texts available in different media formats). My research began with a pretty basic question: how do these projects work and what makes them successful?

I developed the concept of ‘confessional entrepreneurship’ as a way to categorize the elements that these projects share, at the level of intention (what confessional entrepreneurs are trying to achieve), and how they go about achieving their aims (what specific uses of media, materiality and curation they have in common). I wanted to make a checklist of sorts, that would help identify whether or not a project could be considered as an example of confessional entrepreneurship, with the view that this can be updated as the strategies of these projects change. I also wanted to use the concept to help us think about the unique ways the logic of crowdsourcing is used to source analogue autobiographical texts (handmade postcards, childhood diaries or letters, live events, in person conversation) and that are repackaged into digital products (websites, podcasts, apps) and commercially successful mass market books. Researching these projects made the necessity of studying digital culture from a comparative media studies approach very clear to me—the power of these projects, their ability to claim and market the life narratives they collect as being authentic, is anchored in the materiality of analogue forms of media.

I use the term “entrepreneurship” to conceptualize the projects because even though the vast majority of them fall into a not-for-profit model, they are clearly attempts by individuals, or small groups of individuals who are “concerned with the discovery and exploitation of profitable opportunities” (Shane and Venkataraman, 217). The people behind this projects develop careers in the cultural industries by becoming experts in their particular brand of autobiographical storytelling—that is indeed branded and sold on to corporate and educational clients in some cases (such as The Moth, and StoryCorps). Shane and Venkataraman define entrepreneurship as consisting of two related properties: the presence of potentially lucrative opportunities, and the presence of “enterprising individuals” prepared to take action in response to the opportunities (218). In the case of confessional entrepreneurs, the opportunity occurs in the context of the three interconnected elements of the mid-2000s: the increased influence of memoir and personal storytelling (sometimes referred to as the ‘memoir boom’ which Julie Rak has written about (https://www.wlupress.wlu.ca/Books/B/Boom2), rise of intimacy and affect in the construction of US citizenship outlined by Lauren Berlant in her theory of intimate publics (https://www.dukeupress.edu/the-female-complaint), and the rise of communicative capitalism, theorized by Jodi Dean in her book Blog Theory(https://jdeanicite.typepad.com/files/dean--blog-theory.pdf). At its core—the entrepreneurs have seen that there is an increased expectation that people will engage in personal storytelling, and they have managed to convince millions of people that they need a template or a coach in order to do it well.

Confessional entrepreneurs exploit this cultural context by creating a textual template (secrets on postcards (PostSecret), short spoken work presentations such as those fostered by The Moth, the interview technique of StoryCorps) that they promote and which generates freely generated products that flow into the project via the logic of crowdsourcing. Terms of Service agreements are very important element here but they are not always easily visible: but each of these projects has them somewhere, and they grant the project ownership over the contributions they have crowdsourced and license the entrepreneurs to repackage the content into commercial products. I was interested in both the mechanisms of digital culture and the cultural logics that has led to people having no problem with someone like Frank Warren, or The Moth, claiming ownership of their life narrative. Indeed, the projects create such a convincing framing narrative about the community building and psychological importance of “sharing real life stories” that they convince many of us that contributing to the project is a means of confirms one’s humanity. Sending a card to Frank Warren, or writing a Six Word Memoir, is a way to confirm your membership of the human race (always conceptualized as a narrative race).

 In this sense, confessional entrepreneurship works with a participatory logic we see in zines and other subcultures where being a silent audience member is discouraged. However, unlike subcultures where participation is acknowledged as the making of the community, confessional entrepreneurs create projects that they claim meet an existing need for the sharing of personal stories. At the same time, these projects elevate the entrepreneurs (the people with the expertise in autobiographical storytelling) as individuals or small groups who must ‘help’ everyday people tell stories about their lives in engaging ways. 

The persona of the entrepreneur is vital to the organisation, coherence and commodification of the autobiographical fragments that are generated by the project—the entrepreneur articulates the logic of the project and names the affects the project seeks to foster (sense of community, relief at sharing a secret, a ‘mortified’ (https://getmortified.com/) relationship with one’s teenage self). The confessional entrepreneur also articulates and polices quite narrow ideas about the form and content of the autobiographical material the project collects in order to establish, stablize and protect the coherence of the commodity the project produces.

You have very interesting things to say in the book about collage as an aesthetic form for articulating why and how queer lives matter in the context of a normative culture. Yet, collage has become such an everyday practice for many groups in our culture, especially if extended to include such forms of appropriation and quotation as scrapbooks or memes. I would argue that there are a range of different forms of collage practices out there, which express a range of different relations to the dominant culture. If so, what is particularly queer about collage in your eyes?

I agree that collage and appropriation is a wide spread technique that many different groups draw on for different reasons. At the core, what we do when collage is we take ownership of something, we take it apart, and we combine it with other things. We utilize and recombine existing meanings to make new meanings. 

Is this an inherently queer gesture? Maybe. If by queer we mean wanting to interrupt and mess around with existing structures of meaning and see what happens. To collage is to say: “well yes but maybe also… this.” It is additive, presumptive, potentially disruptive, and a bit disrespectful. 

We often collage with things we love, and when we do that we are loving the text in a specific way—our love for it overruns our respect for its integrity. We love it so much we want to cut it up. This form of loving may not be queer, but it is at least not an entirely respectable way to express one’s appreciation of something. It’s a little bit perverse to want to dismember the thing that brings you pleasure in order to increase your pleasure. 

When we collage out of ambivalence, or to demean something, we are also acknowledging the powerful reaction the thing has sparked in us. We may be unconsciously signalling our fetish. We are at least acknowledging the thing has moved us—it has meaning we want to grab on to and work with or on.

 I agree that there are a range of difference collaging practices out there, and that they all express different forms of relating to existing meanings in circulation in dominant culture. They may not all be queer, but maybe they enact queer relationships with culture, and produce queer readings of it. I don’t need to claim the aesthetic form itself for queerness, but I do think that it has been used by queer life writers in interesting and important ways, and these have overlooked in autobiography scholarship because of what collage does to authenticity (it destabilizes it).

In Stories of the Self, I am considering how queer life writers use collage to make a text that reflects on the work it takes to construct and believe in the possibility of a queer life. I am taking my lead from the work of Eve Sedgwick, and I approach the survival and flourishing of queer lives as an issue intrinsically linked to inventive, counterintuitive, and disobedient practices of reading and adaptation. In her influential essay “Queer and Now” (https://lgbt200readings.files.wordpress.com/2015/08/week-01_sedgwick_-queer-and-now.pdf)under the heading “Promising, Smuggling, Reading, Overreading,” Sedgwick offers a theory of queer reading in the form of an autobiographical vignette:

I think that for many of us in childhood the ability to attach intently to a few cultural objects, objects of high or popular culture or both, objects whose meaning seemed mysterious, excessive, or oblique in relation to the codes most readily available to us, became a prime resource for survival. We needed for there to be sites where the meanings didn’t line up tidily with each other, and we learned to invest those sites with fascination and love. This can’t help coloring the adult relation to cultural text and objects; in fact, it’s almost hard for me to imagine another way of coming to care enough about literature to give a lifetime to it. The demands on both the text and the reader from so intent an attachment can be multiple, even paradoxical.

In the work of many scholars of queer culture, we see how aesthetic experiences—which are mediated and material—are resources for living. Indeed, the impact of Sedgwick’s influential theory of reparative reading—which offers queer practices of reading and writing as counter-examples to a certain kind of paranoid scholarly reading—enshrines the relationship between life and texts, living and reading, into the heart of a reconsideration of critical practice. 

My reading of collage expands this strand of Sedgwick’s work by focusing explicitly on how some queer autobiographers voice their experiences of reparative reading through a very material form of ventriloquism. The queer collages I explore narrate the importance of media texts in the lives of queer young people. 

In talking about the texts that helped them imagine a queer life by talking through those texts themselves, these queer life writers strike at a core tenet of what makes autobiography a distinct genre of social action—they speak a truth about their lived experience in the voice of others. So, when Jonathan Caouette, in his documentary Tarnation(https://youtu.be/mLDQL23nutw) shows us his teenage self lip-synching to the song Frank Mills from the musical Hair, he is not telling us about his reparative reading. He is not narrating the reparative reading as being important to him or to how he came to understand his relationship with his mother, her mental illness, and his own queer identity. He is showing usthe reparative reading itself, in the form of home movie footage of him emoting to Shelley Plimpton’s rendition of the song. 

Existing frameworks for understanding what makes autobiography a distinctive struggle to account for this as a meaningful (and indeed complex and moving) instance of life writing, because the youthful Jonathan in the frame is not speaking (he is miming) and the content of his utterance is a popular song performed by a female singer. He violates two basic elements of autobiography as a social and artistic genre here: he does not speak in his own voice, and he does not speak in his own words. Yet the young Jonathon’s commitment to the performance, his use of the song and the video camera to express and give form to his emotions, is undeniably saying something about his lived experience. But what is it saying, and how we can learn to recognize the young person’s statement as being a statement about themselves when it is made in this collaged way? 

Caouette the filmmaker does not remediate his youthful reparative reading from the perspective of his adult self reflecting back on his childhood. He puts the lip-synching child in front of his audience and lets him speak for himself. Media materialities play a vital role here, the filmmaker can do this because he is working with digitized footage that allows him to collage many materials together including this material from his personal archive of home movie footage. Caouette bends the material affordances of digital film as far as he can to show us that when the child is trying to understand how to survive he doesn’t speak in his own voice, but in Plimpton’s—how do we listen to that voice coming from, but also clearly not belonging to, that body and hear what he is trying to say?

When it was released into cinemas Tarnationwas infamous for being made entirely in iMovie for a total of around $200 dollars (the soundtrack, on the other hand, was very expensive because of the cost of the rights). In the trailer, a bi-line for the film is: Your greatest creation is the life you lead—and this is a statement of queer flourishing. While largely reviewed as a documentary about Caouette’s relationship with his mother (which it is) the film is, I think, equally a story about how Caouette came to believe in the possibility of his own life, growing up poor and gay in Texas. Tarnationtries to celebrate and see clearly Caouette’s mother’s life, but it also tells the story of the life Caouette made for himself by using dominant culture (movies, television, popular music, musicals) as a resource and engaging in what Sedgwick would call “overreading.” 

For a book about the autobiographical impulse in culture, you tell us very little about yourself. If you were to mediate your own life story, given what you learned in researching this book, what form of mediation would you use?

This is a great question! One of the reasons I am scholar of autobiography is that I have immense respect for—bordering on fear of—the nature of the challenge we face when we try to find the right form and media to tell others about our lived experience, who we are, and what matters to us. When I was researching zines as an autobiographical form as part of my doctorate, I become quite frustrated with scholars (and practitioners) who claimed that making a zine was “easy.” While it is true that there are low financial and material barriers to making a zine—a zine can be made out of a single sheet of paper using a pen (https://youtu.be/3I7Uk24P-vI) —having and refining the ideas, working out how to tell the story you want to tell, discovering what your audience does and does not need to know about the context in which you live and the people who are important to you in order to understand what you are trying to tell them is anything but easy. I only came to really appreciate that by choosing the medium of the zine to communicate with zinemakers during my doctoral research—that was an autobiographical project, albeit a meta one: a zine about undertaking a PhD on zines (Poletti).

I think we see the ingenuity it takes to make a seemingly simple piece of life media in the work people put in to learning how to take good selfies (of various genres), to craft Facebook posts that both say what they want to say and compel others to write a comment or click a reaction. Even the most seemingly simple (and some would say banal and ephemeral) forms of self-life-writing actually have quite high and complex aesthetic and formal components that are fundamental to their capacity to create satisfying and meaningful encounters for the authors and their readers. 

As I tell my students when I teach life writing and ask them to undertake life writing themselves: the trick with autobiography is that while it is a genre, there is no colour by numbers way to write or produce a piece of autobiographical media. Autobiography always requires ingenuity on behalf of its creator—the material you are seeking to communicate (your identity, your lived experience, your values, your desires and fears) are unique to you, and the text you make to communicate them will have to be unique too.

All that said, I have never really consistently engaged in autobiography until this year when, in early March, I contracted covid-19 (before widespread testing was available in the Netherlands). I was in isolation at home for six weeks with a lung infection and serious fatigue caused by the virus. I was very sick and living alone in a country that did not quite feel like home (I have only lived here for four years). On top of that I become ill right at the beginning of the pandemic, and the medical profession was taking a triage approach to the virus—unless they thought you were in danger of being unable to breathe, they were not able to provide any care. (During this time the proofs came in for Stories of the Selfand I had to do both the index and the proofreading, which was a challenge physically but also a great way to stay anchored to the world while I was alone for so long. That said, I do feel like the index should come with a disclaimer: constructed while the author was suffering from novel coronavirus.)

During this time I was regularly updating my friends and family in Australia about my experience on Facebook, but I was also ‘documenting’ the experience of the virus because I thought people might be interested to know the kinds of impact it could have on a healthy person, and how little the health profession knows about the virus or how to treat it. It was, and still is, a kind of covid-19 chronicle. For many people I am friends with on Facebook, I was the only person they knew who had the virus, and so there was a lot of engagement and support coming through the site because they were curious, horrified, worried. Their responses eased my social isolation, but many of my friends on Facebook also told me that my posts helped them understand the virus and the pandemic better. It was the first time in my life that talking about my lived experience and myself seemed to be useful to my community. Recording the experience on Facebook was mutually beneficial for them and for me. (Although I am sure it may have also increased some peoples’ anxiety about the pandemic, and they may have had to block my posts.)

I am a ‘long haul’ covid-19 case, and I am still recovering, and once I was well enough to work again I wrote a short essay about the physical elements of my experience for the Guardian (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jul/20/i-was-regarded-as-having-a-mild-case-of-covid-19-i-had-burning-lungs-and-exhaustion-for-weeks).This was the first time I had ‘gone public’ with a life writing text. I am still not sure how I feel about it, to be honest, although a number of people from America, Europe, and Australia have written to say they found it comforting to read a personal account that so closely mirrored their own experience with the virus and its ongoing effects during this time when there is little reliable medical knowledge about it. This sense of being useful to people helped me overcome my fear that no-one would care that much about one person’s experience with a ‘mild’ version of the virus—a feeling that plagued me when I was writing the essay. 

So, I guess in answer to your question, when I decide to write about my lived experience I choose the media that I think will help me reach the audience I want to speak to. 

Works cited:

Berlant, Lauren. The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008.

Bodó, Balázs. “Mediated trust: A theoretical framework to address the trustworthiness of technological trust mediators.” New Media & Society. 2020.

Dean, Jodi. Dean, Jodi. Blog Theory: Feedback and Capture in the Circuits of Drive. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010.

Gitelman, Lisa. Always Already New: Media, History and the Data of Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008.

Hayles, N. K. Writing Machines. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002.

Jolly, Margaretta. In Love and Struggle: Letters in Contemporary Feminism. Columbia University Press, 2008.

Lejeune, Philippe. On Diary. University of Hawai'i Press, 2009. Project MUSE muse.jhu.edu/book/8351.

Marwick, Alice. “Instafame: Luxury Selfies in the Attention Economy.” Public Culture 27. 1. 2015. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-2798379

Miller, Carolyn R. “Genre as Social Action.” Quarterly Journal of Speech70 (1984): 151–167.

Poletti, Anna. “Putting Lives on the Record - The Book as Material and Symbol in Life Writing.” Biography, 40.3, 2017. https://dspace.library.uu.nl/handle/1874/359007

Poletti, Anna. Zines. In Ashley Barnwell & Kate Douglas (Eds.), Research methodologies for auto/biography studies. New York: Routledge, 2009: 26-33.

Rak, Julie. Boom! Manufacturing Memoir for the Popular Market. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier Press, 2013.

Shane, Scott, and S. Venkataraman. “The Promise of Entrepreneurship as a Field of Research.” Academy of Management Review25, no. 1 (2000): 217–226.

Stanley, Liz and Margaretta Jolly. “Epistolarity: life after death of the letter?” a/b: Auto/Biographical Studies 32. 2, 2017: 229-33. http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/id/eprint/61242/1/2017-5-23_Epistolari.pdf

 Anna Poletti is Associate Professor of English Literature and Culture at Utrecht University (the Netherlands). They are a researcher of contemporary life writing, and a co-editor of the journal Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly. They are the author of Life Narratives and Youth Culture: Representation, Agency and Participation (with Kate Douglas, 2016), and Intimate Ephemera: Reading Young Lives in Australian Zine Culture (2008). With Julie Rak, they co-edited Identity Technologies: Constructing the Self Online (2014).

The Stuff Through Which We Represent Our Lives: An Interview with Anna Poletti

Anna Poletti’s Stories of the Self: Life Writing After the Book is a remarkable new monograph that we were lucky enough to publish in the Post-Millenial Pop book series which Karen Tongson and I co-edit for New York University Press. One of the things we pay attention to as we consider books for the series is the corpus of works that are being discussed. We certainly have some books that drill deep into a particular medium but we have a bias for books that adopt a comparative approach – that encourage us to trace a theme or trend across multiple media platforms, that ask us to read one medium in relation to another. And that is one of the reasons I was drawn to this particular project. 

From the first, she was arguing that our understanding of the autobiographical or “stories of the self” or “life writing” had been shaped largely by the properties of print, even if we expand book culture to include newer forms such as the graphic novel. She wanted to expand beyond that canon to reflect upon how people (such as Andy Warhol) left an account of their life through many boxes of seemingly random stuff, how entrepreneurs crowd sourced shared cultural memories via digital platforms, how queer filmmakers constructed accounts of the ways they constructed their identity via collages of borrowed media materials, and how the role of the camera in certain documentary films allows us to reflect on what it means to become an observer of our own life experiences. The book is organized around a series of such case studies, each of which pose important questions at the intersection of life writing, media and cultural studies, and gender/sexuality studies. 

This interview will give a portrait – intellectual but also as you will see personal – of a remarkable and original author reflecting on a subject that literally touches each of us where we live. Thanks to Poletti for being willing to address my questions under what were difficult circumstances for her.

You write, “Autobiography matters—culturally, politically, historically, socially—because it puts individual lives ‘on the record,’ and in so doing creates a scene of apprehension: it is a cultural and social practice that makes lives available for engagement by others and responds to the fundamental need to make ourselves legible in the social field.” What might a comparative media studies approach, then, contribute to our understanding of the different ways that people make their lives visible and apprehensible to others? What are some of the examples of media practices you discuss in your book?

Autobiography is examined in a variety of disciplines such as social sciences, sociology, literary studies, psychology, philosophy, cultural and media studies, and history. But the understanding of what autobiography is, and what it can tell us about the world varies a lot across these fields. For sociologists and historians, autobiography is often data—collected through interviews, or sourced from pre-existing archives—that is used to inform a study into a particular phenomenon (historical or contemporary), and for psychologists and philosophers, autobiography is a cognitive, social, cultural and linguistic practice that forms part of the basic building blocks of personhood and social life (identity, sense of community, sense of personal and shared values etc). In cultural and media studies, autobiography is not really studied as autobiography but as identity work, or community building activity that takes place in specific communities or online spaces. Here, scholars rarely use the term ‘autobiography’ because it is associated with books. Therefore most of the insights into autobiographical practice that have been developed in life writing studies do not cross the disciplinary divide.

Stories of the Self is a book that tries to point out two things: to media studies scholars, it wants to demonstrate that the ways of reading, conceptualizing and talking about life writing developed in life writing studies can be useful for answering many of the key questions that media studies scholarship seeks to understand—from the question of how trust is being reshaped by technology (Bodó), to how social media has reshaped traditional media industries through its emphasis on personal identity (Marwick). However, a lot of the work undertaken in media studies that examines the rise of personal storytelling, or the shifting importance of autobiography to specific elements of the social and political world, focuses solely on digital technologies and their impact. I think a comparative media studies approach is vital if we are to really understand the nature of the changes digital technology is bringing about. Yes, most of us have an online life, and digital technology is integrated into our everyday forms of communication and living, but our lives are still lived in a material world—teeming with objects such as birthday presents with wrapping paper and cards, childhood toys, novelty coffee cups and family heirlooms. Many of the impacts of digital technology have local, material impacts on people’s living conditions. I don’t think we can fully grasp the impact of digital technology on the world if we analyse it in total isolation from the gritty material embodied world we inhabit. 

So my starting position is that we are both digital and analogue, if by analogue we mean being material, geographically and temporally located and bounded. (Lockdown in the pandemic has brutally reminded most of us just how local and material our lives are.) A comparative media studies approach as I use it involves a constant movement between digital and analogue forms, in order to see what insights into autobiography and its role in shaping the social field emerge when we take media affordances and materiality seriously as conditions for autobiographical statements and their reception. 

On the flip side of this, for my colleagues in life writing, I wanted to write a book that (ironically) pushes the field out beyond the world of the printed book—beyond memoir and comics and autobiography—and that tries to challenge the tendency in the field to make claims about the power of life writing (which you quoted) that are sometimes really claims about what the printed book is and does (Poletti). This is a continuation of work I began with my doctoral study, which looked at zines as a unique form of autobiography, and in my collaborations with Julie Rak on digital life writing (Poletti and Rak) and drag. 

In life writing studies, we do study digital forms of life writing, and there is a long tradition of studying other forms of life writing that are not published, such as diaries (Lejeune) and letters (Jolly; Stanley and Jolly)—so it is not as though we are as book-bound as our colleagues who study the novel. Stories of the Selfasks a pretty basic question: Is a life really “on the record”  if it appears as one of over hundreds of thousands of postcards contributed to PostSecret ? Or as a selfie on an Instagram feed? And does our commitment to understanding autobiography as a dynamic, flexible, rich, and grounding cultural practice that informs the social field mean that we exclude from our purview all the examples that don’t seem to fit the scholarly consensus of how and why autobiography matters because they are too large or too small or too weird to be easily assimilated into ‘the record’?

Figure: Postcard posted to PostSecret blog under the title “Classic Secrets”

I wondered what might happen to autobiography studies if it no longer relied so heavily on the book as its default object, but took a promiscuous approach to what counts as autobiography—what could we say about autobiography then? A comparative media studies approach provides a coherent way of tracking autobiography as a practice that occurs across media, without losing sight of the fact that it is a coherent genre of social action (Miller)—a reliable yet also flexible way for people to communicate and achieve all kinds of things together. We can all recognise autobiography, for example, when it appears as the opening of Greta Thunberg’s influential Ted Talk , or in documentary film’s such as Catfish. But each use of the genre is also a use of media, and I wanted to keep that at the centre of my thinking.

So, in the book I examine a mix of analogue and digital media forms including documentary films largely made with consumer grade technologies, crowdsourced autobiographical projects such as PostSecret and The Moth, and selfies. But I also wanted to include limit cases—that might not initially seem to fit the category of autobiography—in order to better account for materiality and its role in autobiography on the ‘analogue’ side. For this I turned to documentary television, and visual art—where issues of concern to media and autobiography studies could be thought differently. One chapter considers digital technology in relation to surveillance and the kind of shadow autobiography that is written when our data is collected by corporations and governments and subject to algorithmic reading. To think this issue I turn to two projects that remediate surveillance files from the mid-twentieth century: Steve McQueen’s End Credits and Australian Indigenous activist and scholar Gary Foley’s reading of the surveillance file kept on him by Australian security services. Together, they allowed me to explore the question of scale and autobiographical meaning from a comparative media studies angle—an issue central to many of the current debates about the intersection of digital technology, personal communication, and surveillance capitalism.

The only thing that is not in the book is a life writing text published as a book—although there is a short discussion of Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home. My comparative analysis moves across digital and analogue media forms outside of print culture and its products (books, magazines and so on)—to return to the quote in your question, I wanted to know what ‘on the record’ really means (and if it still has meaning) if we no longer assume that it refers to the ‘the printed record.’ The commonality across the media forms, though, is that they are all media of inscription—an idea I take from the work of Lisa Gitelman and N. Katherine Hayles—which refers to any media device that can “instantiate material changes that can be read as marks” (Hayles, 24). Returning to Thunberg’s TedTalk – the live performance is a separate form (tailored to engage the people in the room) that is ephemeral, while the video camera used to record it is a media of inscription.

Your book can be read as contributing to the broad cross-disciplinary project of new materialism or as I call it in my own recent writing, stuff studies. Daniel Miller talks about stories told through "the medium of stuff," which would seem to be literally true in your discussion of Andy Warhol's archive of boxed papers and other "stuff." so, talk a bit about how and why materiality enters your analysis.

Stuff studies seems to me to be a vital tool for understanding the intersection of the analogue and digital planes of our existence. Our digital lives are embedded in consumer capitalism through surveillance capitalism (we are surveilled so we can be sold stuff and the internet is a powerful portal for the buying and selling of stuff). The work of people like Miller and other anthropologists of material culture is vitally important, I think, for those of us in cultural and media studies who want to move beyond an observation that the internet is a commercial and commericializing space, to understanding the pre-existing currents in relation to stuff that online shopping spaces such as Amazon and Etsy have connected to. For me, this means continuing my interest in the power of handmade objects to function as powerful vehicles for autobiography (an approach I developed in response to trying to understand how zine makers used handmade zines), and continuing to try to find ways to account for the stuffness of autobiographical texts—to not just read them as narratives and treat the media and materiality they occur in them as secondary, as a physical package that does not signify, but to try to learn how to read autobiographical texts as both narrative and material and to give equal weight to materiality when accounting for autobiography as a process that creates a scene of apprehension between people.

So materiality enters my analysis through my insistence that any autobiography is also a choice of media form and a material object and we must learn how to read and account for both of these things if we are to feel confident that we are grasping what the text is doing. When I was planning the book I wanted to explore autobiography as a material practice, and so I turned my attention to the cardboard box—a ubiquitous and invisible material object that is, I argue, actually a media for autobiography. I am not an anthropologist, so I did not seek out people to interview about their relationship with cardboard boxes, instead I turned to culture—where was the cardboard box used? This is what led me to Warhol’s Time Capsules and then the challenge became, how do I bring my skills as an interpreter of texts to  612 cardboard boxes of stuff? Is it even possible to ‘read’ the Time Capsules as an autobiographical artwork?

I had two options when looking for examples of the cardboard box to analyse—Warhol, or Stanley Kubrick’s boxes. Kubrick actually designed his own cardboard box for manufacture (he was particular about how well the lids fit), and his archive is a great example of how cardboard boxes are not just containers for stuff, but a technology that facilitates certain relationships with and through stuff. This to me is what is stuff studies allows us to consider: the way stuff means and allows us to make meaning: when we have a strong and ongoing interaction with specific materials they become an important element of our lived experience (they become part of our lives) and they become a means for us to live in particular ways.

 Anna Poletti is Associate Professor of English Literature and Culture at Utrecht University (the Netherlands). They are a researcher of contemporary life writing, and a co-editor of the journal Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly. They are the author of Life Narratives and Youth Culture: Representation, Agency and Participation (with Kate Douglas, 2016), and Intimate Ephemera: Reading Young Lives in Australian Zine Culture (2008). With Julie Rak, they co-edited Identity Technologies: Constructing the Self Online (2014).

"Screen Time" in the Age of Covid-19: Reports from the Home Front (Part 3)

Liana Gamber-Thompson: 

Before I write anything else, I want to second your endorsement of Joe Dillon’s work. I worked at the national office of the National Writing Project from 2015 to 2018, and I learned so much from him in that span, including a wonderfully inventive webinar protocol based on Peter Elbow’s Doubting/Believing game that I’ve been trying to find a chance to recreate for years. 

I’ve also filed away all your graphic novel recommendations! Another of Wesley’s birthday presents was a set of Dogman books, and the reception was chilly at best. I’m hoping they’ll grow on him. While we’re on the topic of graphic novels, I can’t recommend the March trilogy enough, which, like a lot of parents, we bought after John Lewis died back in July. You might have seen the widely circulated pictures of Lewis recreating his iconic march across the Edmund Pettus bridge at Comic-Con 2015. He was there promoting March, co-authored with Andrew Aydin and illustrated by Nate Powell, which chronicles the history of the Civil Rights Movement in beautiful and frank detail. We’ve been reading it with the kids nightly, and it’s been a great way for us and them to make connections to what’s happening now with Black Lives Matter. The only downside has been the need to slightly increase our already outsized grocery budget, as Helen, our three-year-old, has decided she needs to eat an apple during every reading (and who am I to argue!?).

I’ve been thinking a lot about your suggestion that perhaps what makes parents like us so nervous about games is simply a fear of the unknown and our general absence of familiarity with that world. It’s a super sharp observation and one that I think also applies to the lack of control parents (myself included) are feeling about not being able to fully monitor/engage with/participate in screen time of all sorts with their kids right now. Media scholars like Mimi Ito  have been saying for some time that the key to healthy screen time is not really about setting time limits on it but about building parents’ capacity to be good digital mentors. That is, screen time is better when it’s something parents can enjoy with their kids, talk to their kids about, or connect to other learning opportunities. 

But as parents try to do their own jobs and manage remote learning, sometimes tending to multiple children of varying ages, it’s very hard to be present and engaged with all screen time. The truth is, sometimes I need Daniel Tiger to babysit my kid while I take an important call, and I may or may not have a meaningful conversation about it at the dinner table later on. Of course, digital mentorship is still an important goal, but I also think it’s essential to be realistic about the fact that some of the scenarios in which we’re utilizing screen time are exclusively about triage. 

Your suggestion, Jessica, about peer mentorship, is a good one here. Working parents have minimal bandwidth, and I also see that it’s a struggle for Wesley’s teacher to captivate a group of between twenty and twenty-five first graders on Google Meet when the small group options are limited and there is pressure to get through as much instruction as possible during the synchronous teaching periods. Having kids serve as experts during in-class instruction seems like a great way to bridge learners’ own interests and affinities with the need to foster community during remote learning. There’s a lot of untapped potential there, and it wouldn’t necessarily have to come exclusively from the kids; I’m thinking particularly of a permanent aid, Mr. Andrew, who helps with learning and classwork for one of my son’s classmates. He was there before COVID-19, and he’s a fixture now on Zoom, and I know from talking to him that he has an encyclopedic knowledge of Pokémon! 

The idea of leveraging peer expertise also underscores something that’s easy to forget: we and our kids are not defined by this pandemic. I look forward to the day when we can all fully pursue our passions again and when my kids can play online and in-person with their friends. I feel this way especially when I think about Helen, our three-year-old, who loves making mud pies in the backyard and watercoloring and dancing. She happens to be plugged into the iPad on the floor right now, watching Avatar: The Last Airbender for the millionth time; but unlike my son, screen time is much less of a remedy for her in these tough times. While we’re doing our best by signing her up for Outschool circle times (shout out to Ms. Libby!) and downloading asynchronous preschool art curriculum, it’s no substitute for her friends and the playground and the Pinterest-worthy teacher activities to which she’s accustomed. For her, no amount of screen time can set things straight. 

What I hope the most is that, after all this is over, and we do go back to a world where close human interaction is part of our everyday lives again, we won’t lose what we’ve learned during this time. As a parent, I don’t want to forget how I’ve given myself permission to relax on my screen time rules and about all the cool things my kids have learned because of it. While it’s been a process, I also see the innovation by so many teachers out there, who have had to learn to adapt at lightning speed. I hope we remember what’s possible when it comes to learning online and that we hold our school and district leaders accountable when it comes to making sure these technological and pedagogical gains aren’t lost to the annals of history.  We can’t just go back to the way things were when everyone returns to the classroom, nor should we. Let’s always remember both the creativity and struggle of parenting, teaching, and learning during this time. If we do, I believe we’ll change education for the better. 

It’s been such a pleasure thinking and writing with you, Jessica! I hope we can do it again some time. Solidarity! 

Jessie Early: Liana, I love what you say above about the way we, as working parents, are, at times, using screen time for our kids as a form of triage. This is the truth.  I don’t know a single parent, working or otherwise, who isn’t performing some form of triage right now. As overly occupied parents, we put so much pressure on ourselves to do better than we are. I know I’m always battling an idealized vision of a no-screen childhood for my kids. However, part of being in the world today is learning to use, learn from, and regulate screens.  Wouldn't it be easier if we stopped fighting unrealistic visions of simplicity and gave ourselves  permission to do our best right now, whatever that may be (#goals)? Perhaps this time will bring about change in the way we all think about screen time and the many unfolding ways it can be used  as a rich and transformative endeavor when embedded carefully and observantly into teaching, learning, and living.

When I step back to reflect on this shared conversation between two working moms during this pandemic, what stands out most is the way our experiences highlight forms of privilege that so many are not experiencing. As we describe our kids playing on their Xboxes and Ipads, I know there are so many kids living without reliable or any internet access. Many teachers are spending most of their days teaching online struggling with basic internet connectivity issues for their students. A fourth-grade teacher-friend shared with me last week a typical day in her teaching life: She begins by giving her students a mini lesson and instructions, then half the students will start working and the other will drop off the screen after losing internet connectivity. The students who lost connectivity will slowly log on again, and then my friend will repeat the directions she started with and new students will drop off the screen again. This is her reality teaching right now. All day. Every day. 

As Liana and I exchange graphic novel suggestions for our children in this blog, I know many kids do not have access to books with public and school libraries closed. I also know many are choosing to leave their children at home alone to do online school so they may go to work to earn a living. Parents and caregivers are making choices no one should have to make right now.  We are all compromising or being compromised and we are all enacting forms of triage, but some are having to do so in ways that will be more lasting and scarring than others. If kids are cared for and loved and safe and spend too much time on their screens right now, they are more than lucky. 

My hope is this time highlights the ways our society has set children up again and again to succeed and others to fail, not because of ability, intelligence, willingness, or commitment, but because of zip code, skin color, and economic status. I hope this time will bring real change to the way our society values, support, and attends to children, teachers, schools, and families from all walks of life.  As you, Liana, so brilliantly write above, “We can’t just go back to the way things were when everyone returns to the classroom, nor should we.”

Jessica Early, Professor of English at Arizona State University, is a scholar of English education and secondary literacy. She is the director of English Education and the Central Arizona Writing Project, a local site of the National Writing Project, at ASU. She began her career in the field of education as a high school English language arts teacher.  

Jessica Early, Professor of English at Arizona State University, is a scholar of English education and secondary literacy. She is the director of English Education and the Central Arizona Writing Project, a local site of the National Writing Project, at ASU. She began her career in the field of education as a high school English language arts teacher.  

Liana Gamber-Thompson  is Digital Project and Operations Manager at EdSurge, an award-winning education news organization that reports on the people, ideas and technologies that shape the future of learning. EdSurge is now part of the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE). Previously, Liana was a researcher on youth and politics at USC, Community Manager at Connected Camps, and Program Associate at the National Writing Project. She is co-author of By Any Media Necessary: The New Youth Activism and holds a Ph.D. in Sociology.

John Lewis, Andrew Aydin, Nate Powell — March

"Screen Time" in the Age of Covid-19: Reports from the Home Front (Part Two)

Liana Gamber-Thompson: I loved reading your description of Lucca’s summer and how her love of gaming helped her navigate quarantine emotions and connect with friends. Your reflections were especially timely because over the weekend, we jumped off the precipice of a new gaming/literacy journey for my son; Wesley just celebrated his seventh birthday, and we got him a Nintendo Switch, a grand, quarantine-y gesture of unusual scale. He’s been exploring the forests of Pokémon: Let’s Go, Pikachu! all weekend, snapping up new Pokémon and battling trainers to his heart’s delight. On the parent front, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a little wary. It feels like we’ve entered a new dimension (of owning a gaming console) that we’ll never be able to come back from. I always said I’d wait until he was older. 

Yet, in keeping with the spirit of open mindedness I promised at the very end of my intro and building on your touching observations on how gaming can lead to confidence and collaboration, I’m suppressing the urge to panic. I’m already seeing some hopeful glimmers for how the Switch might be a good supplement to his other regular activities like reading physical books, daily swimming, and watching seemingly endless episodes of Wild Kratts on the iPad. 

First, best I can tell it seems like text-based adventure games (like the Pokémon game Wesley is playing) a la Legend of Zelda have won out in popularity over the arcade style games of my youth. While I have had to answer, “What does this say?” a bit more than my liking, I see Wesley making a concerted effort to sound out words and sentences on his own within the game. He’s at a point in his literacy development that he will spend hours flipping through encyclopedic reference books on animals and dinosaurs but isn’t quite confident enough to explore chapter books on his own, despite our having read every single Magic Treehouse book ever written together. I see that connecting his reading to the game play might just be the confidence boost he needs and might plant the seed for a love of narrative fiction that is largely overshadowed by his perfectly acceptable but singular love of nature anthologies. 

Secondly, like Lucca, he’s already delved into the collaborative side of gaming. The morning after he received the Switch, he had a playdate with his classmate, Sean, who is by comparison a seasoned gamer. On a FaceTime call, Sean patiently explained the ins and outs of the Pokémon game and played alongside him after helping him through the seemingly epic setup. It felt nice to see them engaging in a form of cooperation that is almost entirely absent from his remote learning experience. Because his teacher is prevented from facilitating breakout rooms for privacy reasons, he rarely gets 1:1 or small group interaction with his peers while learning from home. As such, the social aspect of gaming was a draw for us as we weighed the decision to purchase the Switch at what felt like a potentially premature age. 

You said something really powerful in your intro, Jessica, when you described Lucca’s gaming kicking into warp speed during quarantine. You said that, despite your decades of professional and scholarly training and your knowledge of “video gaming as [a] valuable, productive, and rich literacy space,” you still felt the weight of parental guilt. That feeling is so real. And it is so strong. 

The parental guilt comes from many directions. Part of eschewing screen time is about anticipating judgment from other parents; no one wants to seem like the negligent one among their parental peers. What’s more (and perhaps I’m just easily swayed), my social media echo chamber reinforces a particular path to parental piety via depictions of perfectly curated play spaces with nothing but neutral, wooden, educational toys. The toys are always wooden! Of course, that vision of what an idealistic childhood looks like is shaped largely by privilege and whiteness, and I think it’s important to keep coming back to that point across this conversation (especially one in which I’m describing the Sturm und Drang of buying my kid a 300 dollar Nintendo). 

The guilt is further codified by recommendations from medical experts. Until now, the American Academy of Pediatrics has recommended no screen time for children under two (except for video chats) and just one hour a day of “quality” programming for preschoolers. To say the least, those recommendations are purely aspirational if not downright impossible these days. Still, making a conscious break from conventional wisdom and medical advice about what’s good for kids can be agonizing, even if, like with Lucca and Wesley, we can see the good in it. I read a nice blog post by Laura Wheatman Hill over on JSTOR recently in which she reminds us that, in the 18th century, reading too many novels was considered dangerous, raising the potential for one to dissociate from reality. So, who knows. Maybe we’ll look back on this time period one day and wonder just why we were so worried about the dangers of Pokémon. 

Jessie Early: Reading your words about Wesley and his newly opened Pokeman and your internal, sometimes external, dialogue questioning this parenting choice, made me smile. I feel less alone in trying to navigate this time as a working parent. Your experience helps me realize how, on top of all the juggling and stress of what we are managing right now, so many parents are feeling extra pressure to somehow get this time “right”, even though none of us know what we are doing or have ever lived through a global pandemic. 

I, too, feel inundated with social media messages from parents who are backpacking with kids on weekends and making painted rocks to gift to trees and nooks and crannies throughout the neighborhood. I’ve read about “doom scrolling” , the act of endlessly scrolling social media looking for bad news. Instead, I scroll for articles and experts to reassure me that what I’m doing as a parent is ok. I jumped for joy after reading the  New York Times piece Just Give Them the Screens (for Now). As my husband often tells me, “You can search for anything to tell you what you want to hear.” We all need some reassurance right now.

I also think about Wesley with his Pokeman and Lucca with her Royal High and wonder if part of our uncertainty in allowing our kids to dive into these digital worlds is a lack of familiarity? These are not the same worlds we entered as children. Give me Donkey Kong and Pac Man and I would be good to go! However, as you point out, Pac Man is lacking the complexity and collaboration and storytelling of current games. Wesley and Lucca, in their digital endeavors, grant us a chance to try to silence our internal dialogue to step back and observe. I teach a class on research methods for pre service and inservice English language arts teachers, where I ask them to step back from their teaching practice and notice and document what is happening more closely to inform their practice. This act of observation more often than not, leads teachers to slow down, reflect, and revise their teaching for the better. As teachers and as parents, the act of decentering our expertise, or admitting we are lacking any, is vulnerable and scary.  

I have been sitting next to my twin 9-year-old sons as they navigate online school from home and one of the things that strikes me is how their classmates are using the chat space and time before and after the office Google Meet with their teachers to set up digital video gaming playdates. I heard one kid shout out from his little box on the screen this morning, “Who wants to meet up in Roblox after PE today?” I wonder how teachers and parents can take up these digital spaces our students and kids are diving into right now and blend them into the formal curriculum or or honor them in family conversation?  

What if students could spend time designing avatars for their online school spaces and creating instructional videos to share their expertise (either digital or non) with one another? What if they got to draw and write and create new chapters or characters or worlds for the games they are playing in their free time during their class time? For kids who do not play these games, they could design and create ones that fit their interests and play, either digital or real time. There are teachers out there, many in the National Writing Project, doing this work like Joe Dillon from NWP sharing his work teaching high school students to write code for video games with Scalable Game Design and NWP Blog Radio’s blog radio show Addressing Skepticism Around Using Video Games for Learning



I also recognize the reading transition you describe Wesley facing in moving from picture books to chapter books. My twin boys experienced this as well and  I didn’t know what to do until we discovered graphic novels! I brought home books like Dave Pilkey’s DogMan series and Aaron Blabey’s The Bad Guys series and Abby Hanlon’s Dory Fantasmagory and Nate Evan’s Tyrannosaurus Ralph and they started reading again. The mix of the visual and the textual on each page helped bridge the gap between the genres they had been experiencing (picture books) and the ones they were moving toward (chapter). I also see, from what you share about Wesley’s gaming, how video games do this too. These digital spaces allow kids to enact, build, and follow stories with characters and drama and story all with a sense of ownership and control.

Jessica Early, Professor of English at Arizona State University, is a scholar of English education and secondary literacy. She is the director of English Education and the Central Arizona Writing Project, a local site of the National Writing Project, at ASU. She began her career in the field of education as a high school English language arts teacher.  

Liana Gamber-Thompson  is Digital Project and Operations Manager at EdSurge, an award-winning education news organization that reports on the people, ideas and technologies that shape the future of learning. EdSurge is now part of the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE). Previously, Liana was a researcher on youth and politics at USC, Community Manager at Connected Camps, and Program Associate at the National Writing Project. She is co-author of By Any Media Necessary: The New Youth Activism and holds a Ph.D. in Sociology.

"Screen Time" in the Age of Covid-19: Reports from the Front Lines (Part One)

Liana Gamber-Thompson: I’ve tried to write this no fewer than ten times. With a three-year-old who has been largely free-ranging since her preschool closed for the year and a six-year-old remote learning his way through first grade, a good chunk of my brain space is generally occupied by trying to get someone back on a Google Meet, cutting crusts off PBJs, and discovering new household surfaces that have been graffitied. The remainder of my attention goes to trying to perform my full-time job to fidelity, which consists of fielding client calls and hosting live webinars for hundreds of viewers from my bedroom, all while trying to appear professional from the shoulders up. Along the way, I catch snippets of my partner, a 9th grade English teacher, translating James Baldwin’s GoTell It on the Mountain into Spanish on the fly and eking out virtual class discussions from our kids’ treehouse, which might be the quietest spot in the vicinity. 

To put it mildly, it’s a lot, and grabbing any significant chunk of time to write is a Sisyphean task. Still, my family and I are among the lucky ones. Henry asked Jessica and me to reflect, not only on our experiences as parents, but also on the impact of COVID-19 on school and learning, especially as it relates to what I think most people recognize as an across-the-board re-orientation toward screen time. Like many parents, we are absolutely fumbling our way through remote learning. But when I really reflect on my personal experiences of trying to keep learning going, I also realize there is a lot I take for granted. With our relative flexibility to work from home, an at-home stash of newer iPads and laptops, access to stable wifi, and enough books in the house to fill twenty Little Free Libraries, our kids will be fine. But the harsh reality is that many families aren’t fine when it comes to both access and a safe and productive space to learn. 

In my days as a media scholar, I focused on young people’s political and performative use of media, often looking to the explosion of mobile access in the late aughts as proof enough of the democratizing effects of technology. The Digital Divide was real, but it was decreasing; and safe in that knowledge, I focused almost solely on the creative output of young people. But working and learning in the COVID-19 world has underscored the essential nature of a reliable internet connection and access to devices, and despite large scale efforts by private telecom companies and state governments to provide hot spots to all students, many gaps remain. Just last week, photos of two Salinas, CA students sitting outside a Taco Bell with their laptops were circulated widely online. They were reportedly using the restaurant’s wifi in order to participate in remote learning, and the inequities exposed by the snapshot received widespread condemnation from educators and tech leaders alike. 

Photo Credit: Luis Alejo/Twitter via CNN

Successful learning outcomes during COVID-19 are about more than putting laptops or hot spots in the hands of students and their parents, though. The issue of access is multidimensional and sometimes surprising. For example, my colleague Tony Wan, Managing Editor at EdSurge, recently reported that a major factor hindering students’ learning is actually their inability to find a quiet place to work (relatable!). Other pain points of remote learning include lack of tech support for students and generally poor communication between schools and parents about learning schedules and plans. 

We’ve certainly been privy to these struggles in our own home. Our first day of distance learning was nothing short of disastrous when we tried to use the school-issued Chromebook to access my first grade son’s Google Meet. In an effort to ensure all students had access to technology, his school, a racially and economically diverse Title 1 school in suburban Los Angeles, issued devices of varying make and quality to all students before the first day of instruction. Unfortunately, while the devices might have been suitable for casual web browsing, they were not equipped to support a video call of 25 students. The result was a lot of angry and frustrated parents and six-year-olds who couldn’t access their class. Because it’s 2020 and adding insult to injury is now the norm, a neighborhood wildfire coincided with the first day of school. Amidst the tech stress of the first day, a fellow mom texted me jokingly supposing the overworked fans of the first grade laptops, which we later learned were 7 years old, were somehow responsible for the fire. 

But in all seriousness, our response to this problem was to provide our son with a newish Mac I had inherited from a former job. The wildfire mom drove straight to Best Buy that day to purchase her daughter a new Chromebook. But what about the parents who can’t afford to buy a new laptop? Or parents whose first language is not English who might be trying to troubleshoot with school IT staff? Or for those who are working on the front lines, unable to spend an hour of their day setting up a district email for their student, which, I kid you not, required parents to input a child’s first name, middle initial, student permanent ID, and lunch number, just to access live instruction. These are the sticky situations parents and educators, who are also working with limited resources, keep finding themselves in, and all these little inconveniences add up to one giant headache. 

Before this introduction devolves into one long diatribe about the personal hellscape that is keeping two kids alive and schooled during a global pandemic, I want to zoom out a bit to make two key points that I hope to expand on in my conversation with Jessica. First, I want to make it clear that the huge headache I describe is 100% a structural failure. My academic training is in Sociology, and if there is one thing it taught me, it’s that we are so often blind to the effects decades or centuries-old institutions and policies have on our everyday lives. In the case of COVID-19, remote learning has further exposed the impact of long term underfunding of schools and the often devastating marriage between property taxes and K-12 funding.

In America especially, our tendency is to personalize structural inadequacies into individual, moral failures, and I see that playing out in the series of difficult decisions being made by parents and educators during COVID-19. Families and school districts with access and resources might be experiencing daily chaos, but they again come out on top as they develop creative solutions to ensure their students succeed (I hesitate to bring up the exhausted topic of “pandemic pods,” but they are a good example of how those with generational wealth and white privilege continue to use the system for their advantage). 

Secondly, if there was ever a time when grace was called for, it’s now. Part of the storyline of parents leveraging their privilege to help their own kids come out on top is the normalization of micromanaging teachers’ instructional choices. We’re in the third week of school, and already I’ve been on the receiving end of concerns from fellow parents that our kids’ teachers aren’t employing differentiation, “flipped classroom” strategies, or inventive multimedia nearly enough. While some teachers are taking to virtual teaching with ease, learning multiple new platforms while trying to meet the needs of diverse learners is a real challenge. As parents, we need to be sensitive to the epic task in front of teachers right now. Not only are they being forced to reimagine teaching as they know it, but being married to a teacher has shown me how they are simultaneously facing myriad behind-the-scenes pressures around testing and assessment, attendance, mandated synchronous instruction, and so forth. We cannot place our 2019 expectations on 2020 learning. 

When it comes to using media for learning, politics, and expression, I’ve always been an optimist. In almost everything I’ve ever written or published, I look to the creative and liberatory uses of media, and I still do. Strangely, in my life as a parent, I’ve taken a much more cautionary approach to screen time, limiting it only to weekends in pre-quarantine times. Now, of course, those limitations have gone out the window, and I’ve been trying to reflect more on why I was so hesitant to allow screen time in the first place. Part of that re-assessment has been seeing firsthand that effective classroom instruction can take place with the wide range of tools at our fingertips, even if figuring it out is messy. Because of it, my geeky school-age learner is largely thriving. My greatest hope, though, is that as many learners as possible have those same experiences and opportunities, even if the path to equity is a tumultuous one; if anything, I hope this situation proves that something beautiful can still grow from rocky, rocky soil. 

Jessica Early: 

I have been quarantining with my husband, 11-year-old daughter, 9-year-old twin boys, and our two guinea pigs since March 6th. We live in Arizona, where the Covid numbers were late to expand, but by mid June had exploded, to land us with the horrid distinction of a world hotspot. As a family, we have taken a cautious and privileged approach to this time. My husband is a self-employed, professional artist and I am a professor at Arizona State University, but have been granted accommodation to work from home to help care for my kids. We remain at home almost exclusively, except for a once-a-week grocery run and frequent bike rides. 

In between dish washing and meal making, I spent the summer in my role as director of English Education and the Central Arizona Writing Project, a local site of the National Writing Project, working to support teachers in an unprecedented and traumatic time and to prepare myself and others to transition to teaching writing and reading in virtual or hybrid teaching spaces. Needless to say, with three kids, two full-time jobs, record breaking summer heat in the desert (52 days over 110 degrees so far - and no rain), and a global pandemic, we have a lot on our plate. Like working parents everywhere, my husband and I have spent our days trying to support the well-being of our kids and ourselves while also trying to get our work done and maintain a 24/7 occupied household.

When I was invited to contribute to Henry’s blog to reflect with Liana on our experiences as parents during Covid-19 and on school and learning and how it relates to screen time, the one thing that came to mind was my eleven year old daughter. Nothing has informed my teaching, thinking, learning, and parenting more than Lucca, and her nonstop video gaming throughout our quarantine. I first have to confess that a huge part of me feels uncomfortable and vulnerable admitting that my daughter has been glued to her iPad all summer. Even though I have spent the last 20 years researching and teaching literacy practices in school, after school, and community settings and know video gaming as valuable, productive, and rich literacy space, I was certain that Lucca’s intense devotion to gaming represented some failure on my part as a parent. Regardless of my insecurity around screen time and parenting, this pandemic summer has afforded me the chance to step back, notice, and learn first-hand from my daughter’s literacy endeavors. I have seen how her screen has become a space to form a supportive and valuable peer community, to learn and practice sophisticated and transferable literacy skills, to make sense of broader social issues like the pandemic and Black Lives Matter, and to process uncertainty and fear.

When the pandemic hit here in March and schools in Arizona went online, Lucca went from being an outgoing 5th grade soccer player, “A” student, and avid reader to  completely shutting down in almost every way. She struggled with anxiety, couldn’t sleep alone, rarely talked, and seemed generally depressed. She put on her headphones, turned on her iPad, and started playing a Roblox game called Princess High. This game, from what I can tell, is about the creation of Avatar identities through themed fashion outfits and trading and earning diamonds to purchase fancier and more desirable attire, including magical halos and wands and oversized digital stuffed animals. I found the game choice surprising because Lucca had never been interested in fashion or looks in her daily life. My husband and I worried about her screen time and withdrawal from our family, but we also knew that anything normal was upended and we weren’t sure what to do. So, we observed closely, checked in often, and let her be.

Over the summer months, Lucca played hours and hours of Roblox. Jake and I frequently asked her about the game and she shared the ins and outs of her play. She created her own Avatar, a wide-eyed pink lipped brown haired beauty who constantly changed and traded outfits and wings and halos. As weeks passed, she started playing with a friend of a friend, Penny, from her soccer team and the two became gaming buddies. They Facetime and game simultaneously so they can talk and play together for hours and they have become close friends even living apart and never spending time together in person.

As the weeks passed, Lucca and Penny began gaming with new friends from Sweden and Australia and Canada who they grew to know through shared Avatar conversations. Through their gaming, they discussed their experiences with the pandemic from their different countries and with the Black Lives Matters movement and protests. Many of her gaming friends dressed their Avatars in Black Lives Matter T-shirts. Lucca talked about how in Sweden the Covid cases were growing and her friend was worried and in Canada her other gaming friend was having playdates and life seemed normal. She also learned about new shampoo she wanted to try and how to dye her hair with lemon juice.

Lucca and Penny started a YouTube channel about the game using their Avatars as the hosts. Within weeks, they taught themselves how to make and edit sophisticated videos with voice overs with credits and music. They started collecting followers, including grandparents, parents, and other gamers around the country and the world. Lucca wanted to celebrate when she reached 200 followers. I made brownies and got her hot cheetos. She started asking Jake to help her design digital “merchandise” for Avatars that she could sell for digital coins within the game and a logo to use for her YouTube channel. At one point during the summer, I asked Lucca if I could play the game with her. I spent  an hour beside her trying to figure it out while she rolled with laughter watching me try to navigate this unfamiliar space, which was her expert territory. 

As the summer went on, Lucca started coming out of her shell. She went on bike rides and started baking cookies and swimming. She asked more and more questions about Covid and wanted help understanding the possibility of a vaccine and how science around vaccines works. Many of her questions were sparked by conversations she was having in her game. She also started expressing her fear about transitioning to middle school and how she wished she could go back to 5th grade. 

We spent the last weeks of summer rearranging rooms, building desks, and creating spaces for each of us to work and learn comfortably. My husband ordered each of us wireless headphones and blue light blocking glasses. We picked up each of the kid’s laptops from their schools, I brought my office desk chair from work home, and we ordered pencils and highlighters and glue sticks and Post-It notes. Even with preparation and support, the transition and practice of daily online schooling has been a rocky and tiresome adventure. With glitches in internet connectivity (on our end and the school’s), new learning platforms to navigate, classmates constantly “spam chatting” in the Google Classroom chat spaces, and meeting and working with new teachers and schedules and classmates, the first weeks of school have been unlike any other. 

Lucca is making the transition from elementary to middle school with grace and courage and confidence. She sets her alarm each morning to wake up on time, takes a shower, brushes her hair and logs on to class. She follows her schedule and takes notes and does her work. She comes out of her room to ask for help and food. During lunch she logs on to Roblox and plays or texts Penny to check in about her day or goes for a swim in the pool. She still has meltdowns and longs to play on her soccer team again and have sleepovers with friends, but she’s ok. She’s really ok. 

I don’t want to portray screen time as a cure-all for Covid blues. I know some families who are struggling to care for children suffering from serious mental health challenges at this time and, in no way do I want to communicate that gaming is the route to curing mental health challenges, which  need professional attention and care. There are a lot of ways Lucca received support over the summer from us beyond allowing her to stay glued to her game. She began learning Italian with my husband through a language app. We made her exercise daily. I read to her at night because she didn’t want to read on her own, and we joked around with her and constantly engaged her in conversations about her interests. I recognize the privilege that goes with all of this, with her iPad and internet access and comfort and safety of our home and food to eat and the attention of two parents at home all day every day. However, even with all of that, the world, for Lucca and kids all over this country and globe, has felt scary and out of control during the pandemic. While the world outside was spinning, the online spaces Lucca navigated over the summer were her own. 

In the following conversation with Liana, I wonder about the ways we can think about the value of letting go or, as she writes, “throwing out the window” our preconceived notions of what is ok when it comes to screen time, but still provide the support, gentle oversight, and observation to understand what our kids are doing and gaining or needing in these digital spaces? I also wonder, as a teacher educator and writing scholar, how the various kinds of digital play our kids take part in may be tapped into during formal school literacy learning as a way to draw from and honor their expertise and lived experiences while living in a pandemic?

Jessica Early, Professor of English at Arizona State University, is a scholar of English education and secondary literacy. She is the director of English Education and the Central Arizona Writing Project, a local site of the National Writing Project, at ASU. She began her career in the field of education as a high school English language arts teacher.  

Liana Gamber-Thompson  is Digital Project and Operations Manager at EdSurge, an award-winning education news organization that reports on the people, ideas and technologies that shape the future of learning. EdSurge is now part of the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE). Previously, Liana was a researcher on youth and politics at USC, Community Manager at Connected Camps, and Program Associate at the National Writing Project. She is co-author of By Any Media Necessary: The New Youth Activism and holds a Ph.D. in Sociology.

Unequal Struggles and Impossible Digital Choices for Parents During Covid-19 (Part Three)

C, M. Hoffman, cc

S. Craig Watkins: Meryl, thanks for these great examples of how we look toward a more inclusive post-COVID future.  I agree that we need to develop ways to empower parents and other caregivers who are on the frontlines of social change.  Community-based organizations will always be critical in the struggle for social and economic justice.  As I think about social justice the implications for parents are significant. Parents are a vital resource in their children’s lives and to the extent that systemic forms of inequality, namely racial and gender, undermine adults they also undermine the families and children that they care for.  I vividly remember meeting the parents in our research for the Digital Edge and thinking how resourceful they were in the struggle to keep their families afloat. Our field work began just as the Great Recession was coming from its peak.  As economic data would later reveal the recovery for those in poverty was slow in coming, at best.  Whether it was immigrant parents or a working poor African American parent, they spent every day fighting for their children and their families.  The occupations they held, usually low-status and low-income, seldom offered them dignity or opportunity.  And yet, they worked in those jobs, relocated to neighborhoods, and did other things to try and improve the life chances of their children. These parents understood the value of education more than anyone, even though many of them never reached high levels of educational attainment.  When I think about the challenges parents face today, especially those heading resource-constrained households, I often think about the parents we met and how little support they received.  

If we learn anything through this current and unprecedented crisis it is the need to make sure that families, especially the most vulnerable, are stable. Without familial stability, children are at greater risk for poverty, immobility, and health problems in their adult lives.  One area of change that is desperately needed is the creation of a policy apparatus that is truly family-centered.  So much of the financial mitigation policy efforts that we see happening in the U.S. in response to COVID (and the Great Recession) is about saving corporations that are so-called, “too big to fail.”  But there is no greater institution in the modern world than our families.  The lack of family friendly policies-- paid sick leave, childcare, health care, guaranteed income--continues to undermine the lives of working poor adults and the young people they care for.     

A future challenge is cultivating a policy discourse that is sensitive to the needs of vulnerable families.  Many of our elected officials and policy makers simply don’t get what it's like to try and keep a family together when you are paid poverty wages, do not have access to healthcare, and send your children to schools that are ill-equipped to prepare your children for the world of tomorrow. Thus, policy mechanisms that are designed to support parents and their desire to ensure that their children have access to social, educational, and economic opportunity is a critical feature of any social justice future.  

Sonia Livingstone: I find it fascinating that we all research families’ lives in a digital world but, although the media themselves love to point to their own importance in shaping children’s experiences and life chances, we find over and again that the fundamentals of structural inequality matter hugely, and so for the most part, socio-economic divides shape digital divides. As Craig says, it is crucial that educators, social workers, policy makers and community workers keep this in mind when working with families instead, as so often happens, of somehow becoming overly focused on popular expectations of “silver bullet” technological solutions, or distracted by families’ particular, and supposedly problematic, uses of technologies.

Nonetheless, digital technologies make a difference, entering into families’ possibilities, and becoming the focus of parents’ hopes and fears for their children in ways that often compound but sometimes alleviate experiences linked to poverty, marginalization, mental ill-health, racism, or disability. Just reviewing our discussion across these three posts, we have noted that digital technologies enter as actors into families’ lives by introducing a series of specific safety, informational, and privacy risks. More positively, we have also suggested that, if parents and others (policy makers, educators…) could throw off misleading discourses relating to screen time, digital natives and the rest, they could embrace and support parents’ investments, energies and expertise regarding digital technologies in ways that are, thus far, undervalued and underexploited, and thereby further children’s interests for the better. As Meryl eloquently argued, this should be done not (or not only) parent by parent, as individuals, but by recognizing parents as a collectivity, and parenting as a phenomenon that society as a whole should invest in – and everyone could benefit.

Without exaggerating the role of digital technologies, we end our book on Parenting for a Digital Future with six recommendations for how society can better support parents – 1. Make room for parents’ voices in policymaking, including in relation to provision of digital resources; 2. Ensure that public and media discourses offer parents a realistic (rather than a contradictory, or simplistic) vision of their role; 3. Recognize the already-significant contribution of parents to their children’s learning, digital and otherwise, rather than endlessly rehearsing deficit accounts of parents; 4. Takes steps so that professionals who support parents are well-informed regarding the latest research and guidance on digital technologies; 5. Build in attention to parents and parenting when designing and governing the digital environment; 6. Resource research on diverse families and take the findings into account when formulating policy for families and education.

Meryl Alper: Thank you Craig and Sonia for summarizing and synthesizing our discussion as we find ourselves looking for ways to “build back better” (to echo a popular phrase among various political leaders at the moment) with respect to the recovery and reconstruction of social institutions and digital infrastructures that support children and families in the wake of the pandemic. 

Rebuilding for youth and their communities will require nothing short of a radical reexamination of supposedly-democratic schooling. To this end, I wish more people knew the story of Reggio Emilia, an Italian city destroyed by fascist forces that after World War II completely reoriented itself to center early childhood education as its highest public priority. Out of literal wreckage and destroyed buildings, the citizens of the town (led by the Italian Women’s Union) rebuilt the working-class village around the site of a school they physically constructed together. The new school and others built in the area were driven by parent cooperatives who insisted that their children be raised with high expectations of citizen responsibility and participation. Children not only needed to be listened to by adults and their peers, but they had a right to. Further cultivated by educator Loris Malaguzzi, Reggio Emilia has become a global educational philosophythat emphasizes the responsibilities that adults have to actively respond to children as they co-construct their ideas and knowledge.

In contrast, instead of centering children, families, and public schools in the U.S. pandemic response, our leadership prioritized business interests (and unequally for that matter), as Craig notes. Going forward, we will need digital tools and environments that are explicitly designed not to surveil and monetize children’s participation, but to put children in charge of their own learning in an open-ended manner. And lastly, we deserve leadership at the very top of our government system that does not stand to financially benefit from the privatization of education, and even better, has actual classroom experience (even if for right now, that means teaching over Zoom).

Bios

Meryl Alper is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Northeastern University, where she researches the social and cultural implications of communication technologies, with a focus on disability and digital media, children and families’ technology use, and mobile communication. She is the author of Digital Youth with Disabilities(MIT Press, 2014) and Giving Voice: Mobile Communication, Disability, and Inequality(MIT Press, 2017), which was awarded a 2018 PROSE Award Honorable Mention from the Association of American Publishers and the 2018 Outstanding Publication in the Sociology of Disability Award from the American Sociological Association. In her research and teaching, Dr. Alper also draws on over 15 years of professional experience in educational children’s media as a researcher, strategist, and consultant with Sesame Workshop, PBS KIDS, Nickelodeon, and Disney.

Sonia Livingstone is a professor in the Department of Media and Communicationsat the London School of Economics and Political Science. Taking a comparative, critical and contextualised approach, her research examines how the changing conditions of mediation are reshaping everyday practices and possibilities for action. She has published 20 books on media audiences, especially children and young people’s risks and opportunities, media literacy and rights in the digital environment. Her new book is “Parenting for a Digital Future: How hopes and fears about technology shape children’s lives” (Oxford University Press, with Alicia Blum-Ross). Sonia currently directs the Digital Futures Commission(with the 5Rights Foundation) and the “Global Kids Online”project (with UNICEF), among other projects. She blogs at www.parenting.digital.

S. Craig Watkins is the Ernest A. Sharpe Centennial Professor at the University of Texas at Austin.  He is the author of six books including The Digital Edgeand Don’t Knock the Hustle.  Craig is also the founding Director of the Institute for Media Innovation, a boutique hub for research and design. Among other things, the Institute is currently working on projects that address technology and mental health, bias in the deployment of artificial intelligence, and the social, racial, and economic aspects of a post-COVID world.

Unequal Struggles and Impossible Digital Choices For Parents During Covid-19 (Part Two)

G. White, CC By SA 2.0

Sonia Livingstone: Craig’s question - how do we design ways for parents and guardians who manage resource-constrained households to access vital social and informational networks – is a crucial one. In some ways, access to digital resources create new workarounds that can empower families. But as we have all three argued, in many ways they intensify the inequalities that many families face and, therefore, the urgency of finding new educational and policy solutions.

Our lives during the pandemic have already gone through several significant stages. At first, confusion and disbelief, relieved only by the misconception that the pandemic would be quickly over. Then an overwhelming concern for our personal circumstances, accompanied by anger and frustration with politicians and those with the power to address the problem, as recognition of the likely duration of the pandemic began to sink in. Then, a (perhaps belated) analysis of the societal costs and their unfolding geopolitical consequences. I remember in the early months of 2020 noting how little attention was paid to children and young people. Indeed, in some quarters, they were blamed for their (supposed) bad behavior in spreading the virus to others while (supposedly) avoiding it themselves. Only those of us specifically attuned to research and advocacy for young people observed the growing evidence of the adverse mental health consequences of isolation and anxiety, the increased risk of being victims of family breakdown or abuse, and the catastrophic and deeply unequal costs of school closures – for children’s education most obviously, but also for their friendships, community belonging and participation in the wider world, and their future life chances.

Even when the losses suffered by children during the pandemic are noticed, they are too often treated as a homogenous group (“children”). And the assumption is easily made that everything could be put right if only society could return to life as it was before. But as Craig has argued, inequality and injustice differentiates children’s experiences, with some much harder hit than others. Like Craig’s Digital Edge project, we too found that, in the case of the ethnic minority families, most of whom lived on a very low income, digital technologies seemed to offer a workaround to the structural disadvantages they face, and to map some practical steps they could take to benefit their children (often involving an investment in technology that is disproportionate to their income).

I also appreciate Meryl’s point that life before COVID-19 was already highly problematic for many families, and so it hardly provides an occasion for nostalgia or a vision of the life we hope to return to “when this is all over.” In part inspired byMeryl’s research, Alicia Blum-Ross and I, in our “Parenting for a Digital Future” project, also interviewed some families with children on the autism spectrum. And informed by Craig’s work on the Digital Edge project (as we both participated in Mizuko Ito’sConnected Learning Research Network), we also interviewed a good many families from, as we say in the UK, diverse ethnicities and cultural origins.

Although I strongly agree with Meryl’s critique that it is unsustainable – indeed, unconscionable - to leave these families during COVID-19 with no alternative than an ICT-mediated reality, in interviewing both groups of families in our London-based research, we were struck by the strength of parents hopes for a digital future for their children. In relation to the families of children with special educational needs and disabilities, we analyzed this in terms of parents’ talk of aspecial affinitybetween their child’s capabilities, as they see them, and the distinct affordances of digital technologies. For example, parents told us how they valued the visual natureof digital media learning, or how their children preferred the asynchronous communicationof some messaging services, by comparison with the intensity of face-to-face communication. This special affinity is reflected directly, for instance, in promised routes to a digital future, such as theMicrosoft Autism Hiringprogram, and indirectly through cultural representations of ‘on the spectrum’ geeky software engineers (think of Big Bang Theory or Silicon Valley), leading parents to hope that, for their child too, “geeks will inherit the earth.” 

But, of course, the future is inherently unknowable, and so these parental strategies, whilst borne of need and, often, of the lack of any viable alternative, are nonetheless risky and uncertain. We’ll need to revisit this discussion in a few years or even decades to see whether– bear fruit. Or, will they turn out to illustrate what Lauren Berlant has called “cruel optimism,” meaning that parents would have done better to place their hopes and investments in something other than digital technology, for this may not only disappoint but may even impede children’s life changes. More urgently, we need to build strong alternative pathways for these children and their parents, to reduce the allure of such a risky “digital future.”

S. Craig Watkins: Meryl and Sonia raise some interesting questions about parenting in the context of COVID and the degree to which systemic forms of racism and inequality underscore the extraordinary challenges that many families face.  Meryl, you are right: the brutal nature of capitalism leaves families on the margins with only bad choices.  For example, work in “essential jobs” that heighten your risk of virus exposure or struggle to provide shelter and food for your children.  Meryl and Sonia, I think we would agree that the challenges that we and others have alluded to such as unequal learning opportunities or increasing household stress in the context of COVID could have been predicted by our research.  Did it really take a global pandemic and the murders of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Eric Garner and others to recognize the unprecedented forms of inequality that shape our lives today?

Sonia has made a few references to mental health, something that I have been thinking about a lot in my current research.  Over the last year my team and I have been speaking with young people and mental health professionals about the state of mental health.  We were experiencing a mental health crisis before COVID and we know what the pandemic has done for mental health.  We have done parents a great disservice by blaming the mental health challenges their children face on smartphones and social media. If only the problem was that simple. Let me be clear: these technologies have certainly been designed to absorb our attention and keep us scrolling. But the mental health crisis among young people--pre and post-COVID--is a result of factors far more complicated than smartphones.  The conditions that underlie the mental health conditions of children and teens--a lack of support, strained personal relationships, poverty, discrimination, and a sense of hopelessness--are rooted in the sharp realities of structural inequality.  To the extent that we blame the youth mental health crisis on technology alone, we undermine the development of solutions that help families and societies respond in more effective ways. 

We can only hope that out of the ashes of COVID and a public reckoning with systemic racism that we can build and sustain the momentum for substantive change. This is an opportunity to realize a new vision for society, one that takes the challenge of building a more equitable future head on.  Sonia and Meryl:  As we look toward a post-COVID society, what kind of solutions for families would you like to see gain more traction? 

Meryl Alper: We cannot wait for this indefinite pandemic to end to make, as U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren champions,“big, structural change.”Online and offline, we need to enable resource-constrained households to more fully tap into networks of connections, resources, and information that make it possible for them to advocate collectively on behalf of their children. I strongly agree with Craig that any such initiatives have to be culturally specific and lead from within. I am thinking of an autism services resource fair for parents that I attended last year in a predominantly Latinx immigrant community in Boston, one that is currently one of the main epicenters of COVID-19 in the state of Massachusetts. While these sorts of fairs happen with great regularity in mostly white, suburban neighborhoods, until the neighborhood group organizing it received a grant from a national foundation, there had never been one locally that was fully bilingual in Spanish and English, that fed families food donated from neighborhood Colombian and Dominican restaurants, and that featured autism advocates with shared experiences of racial discrimination in education and healthcare. In this vein, I really admire the work ofRicarose Roque, whose Family Creative Learningworkshopsleverage the strengths that minoritized parents with little background in technology can bring to support their child’s digital learning.

Individual solutions alone though will never solve systemic problems. Hands-on, in-person workshops that provide opportunities for technological tinkering are a non-starter during the pandemic, which has removed the possibilities of parentsbuilding supportive networks through everyday interactions at sites like child care centers. Taking up Craig’s question, about how to build a more equitable future moving forward, any investment in reconstructing a better post-COVID-19 society must center the needs of those most severely affected. Personally, I would like to see greater public investment in high-quality broadband internet access—whichVikki Katzhas beenchampioningfor years now—so that all children have the potential to do their homework at home without having to work from theparking lot of a Taco Bellto access wi-fi. I would love for there to be guaranteed paid family leave in the U.S. that allows more than just the most privileged mothers and fathers to build the kind of relationships with their children that pay dividends later on. In the U.S., there are also decades of housing segregation to reckon with and correct so that all children get to socially, emotionally, and cognitively benefit from racially integrated neighborhoods and schools. There should also be greater regulatory pressure across all branches of government placed on big tech companies like Facebook and Alphabet, who have enabled informational ecosystems that regularly expose minors to misinformation, disinformation, andadult content masquerading as child-friendly.

Speaking to Sonia’s most recent book, spanning both families of children with disabilities and ethnic minority families, I have to see those categories in my work as overlapping and through anintersectional lens. The dream of someday joining a program like Microsoft’s Autism Hiring Program (which has truly changed the lives of some autistic people and their loved ones) or becoming a “geeky” software engineer is one that is inherently raced, classed, and gendered. Yes, technology can provide immense sensory pleasure for these young people and open up new possibilities for socializing remotely with friends through online gaming and video chat. But it was only the parents of Black and Latinx autistic boys and girls that I talked to in my research who were afraid of police officers seeing their child as a mortal threat and treating them as such, like 15-year-oldStephon Watts. I am energized by BIPOC disabled people and parents of disabled children like artist, scholar, and activist Jen White Johnsonutilizing and developing resources through social media platforms like Twitter and Instagram; for example, coalescing around hashtags like#BlackDisabledLivesMatterto engage in advocacy. And touching upon the themes that both Sonia and Craig raise about mental health, teenagers, and technology, this is another conversation within which disability communities should be centered and consulted.

Bios

Meryl Alper is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Northeastern University, where she researches the social and cultural implications of communication technologies, with a focus on disability and digital media, children and families’ technology use, and mobile communication. She is the author of Digital Youth with Disabilities(MIT Press, 2014) and Giving Voice: Mobile Communication, Disability, and Inequality(MIT Press, 2017), which was awarded a 2018 PROSE Award Honorable Mention from the Association of American Publishers and the 2018 Outstanding Publication in the Sociology of Disability Award from the American Sociological Association. In her research and teaching, Dr. Alper also draws on over 15 years of professional experience in educational children’s media as a researcher, strategist, and consultant with Sesame Workshop, PBS KIDS, Nickelodeon, and Disney.

Sonia Livingstone is a professor in the Department of Media and Communicationsat the London School of Economics and Political Science. Taking a comparative, critical and contextualised approach, her research examines how the changing conditions of mediation are reshaping everyday practices and possibilities for action. She has published 20 books on media audiences, especially children and young people’s risks and opportunities, media literacy and rights in the digital environment. Her new book is “Parenting for a Digital Future: How hopes and fears about technology shape children’s lives” (Oxford University Press, with Alicia Blum-Ross). Sonia currently directs the Digital Futures Commission(with the 5Rights Foundation) and the “Global Kids Online”project (with UNICEF), among other projects. She blogs at www.parenting.digital.

S. Craig Watkins is the Ernest A. Sharpe Centennial Professor at the University of Texas at Austin.  He is the author of six books including The Digital Edgeand Don’t Knock the Hustle.  Craig is also the founding Director of the Institute for Media Innovation, a boutique hub for research and design. Among other things, the Institute is currently working on projects that address technology and mental health, bias in the deployment of artificial intelligence, and the social, racial, and economic aspects of a post-COVID world.

Unequal Struggles and Impossible Digital Choices for Parents During COVID19 (Part 1)

Sonia Livingstone: This is an extraordinary time for parents trying to ensure their children learn and gain a good education, while also working, and worrying about the family’s income, health and a host of everyday practicalities during COVID-19. Among the problems they need to tackle are how tomaximize the opportunities and minimize the risksof the digital technologies they are able to access. Of course, achieving such a balance has long been a concern of parents, but this is hugely exacerbated at a time when, it seems, so much of our daily lives has gone online. This includes, for many, their children’s education, contact with friends and relatives, access to information, and much of their entertainment, all of which are fast becomingdigital by default. Also to be contended with is that many commercial and institutional services, including most forms of welfare and support, are now functioning only online, and that isolation is difficult for many, resulting in adverse consequences for mental health.

I’m especially interested in the ways that life online brings its own problems.Digital inequalitiesare heightened, and lack ofmeaningful accessor digital skills matters more than ever. Reports suggest that online risks of harm of all kinds have increased – from scams and cybercrime to bullying and sexual abuse. Less obvious perhaps but also of growing concern is the fact that life online means ever more of our daily activities and interactions aredigitally tracked, with our personal data being collected and aggregated by others and possibly hacked or exploited. COVID-19 is far from the only “digital” problem of the recent period: the challenge ofmisinformation or false informationremains largely unmet, with many parents and children struggling to locate or evaluate reliable information regarding news, learning, health, finances, or other significant matters. All this contributes to a climate of confusion, mistrust, and tension.

On a more positive note, I suggest that this unprecedented turn to the digital has laid to rest some myths that have undermined parents in recent years. Three myths have been of particular concern to me in my own research on “Parenting for a Digital Future.”

The first myth is that “screen time” matters. In fact, thedemise of screen timehad already been announced by a series of high-level expert pronouncements, including from the American Academy of Pediatrics who originally invented and promoted the notion of screen time 30 years ago. Reviews of the available evidence have been increasingly critical of the quality of that evidence as well as the conclusions popularly drawn from it, that namely that what matters is the amount of time children spend with one screen or another rather than the quality of the content that they engage with, the context in which they watch, or the social connections that mediated engagement makes possible. Still, as we found our in-depth qualitative research with parents, even though the academics and other experts were voicing doubts, for parents, screen time has been a rod for their backs, asource of conflictin its own right, and a source of guilt and shame regarding their parenting practices and their seeming laxity in “controlling” or, worse, “policing” their children’s activities. But since COVID-19, the mass media and public opinion has radically shifted, and it is at last acknowledged that technology, perhaps like books or bicycles, can be good or bad for children, depending on how they are used and by whom.

The second myth that my research contradicts, and that I believe we now should lay to rest, is that parents know nothing about the digital world and the children know everything. The idea ofdigital natives and digital immigrants. This idea has been extraordinarily successful, and it has had the advantage of recognizing that, perhaps for the first time in history, children genuinely have knowledge of value in the wider society, well beyond the small private sphere in which they are often sequestered. But it also had two adverse consequences. First, it hasallowed policymakersto rhetorically celebrate children’s digital expertise with the effect of undermining the case, or perceived need, for educational support or, indeed, regulation of the digital realm. Second, and receiving less attention still, it has led many to undervalue the contribution that parents could make to the children’s development and digital literacy. As I saw clearly in our “parenting for a digital future” research,parental interests and expertiseregarding digital technologies, while of course heavily stratified by class and other forms of inequality, is nonethelessroutinely underestimatedby schools and other societal institutions, as well as by themselves. With appropriate encouragement and guidance, parents could harness their digital knowledge gained through our personal interest to benefit their children. Indeed, many are trying to do exactly this, with some success.

Third, it has been often said in recent years that young people prefer the online world to the offline world, that they would rather talk to their friends online than engage with a person in front of them, and there is no natural limit on their desire to go digital. Life during COVID-19 has clearly proved the falsity of such a myth. For young people as for the rest of us, the task of balancing online and offline remains critical and difficult, and the value of seeing friends face-to-face, of going out into the world, into the community, and engaging there freely with others, is as vital to them as for everyone. The “COVID generation,” so-called, is becoming angry, let down by the generations in power on this as in other matters. We may expect them to take increasingly to the streets, and to digital public spaces, as the actuality and perception ofgenerational injusticegrows.

Meryl Alper: These are indeed isolating times for so many families; a stretch of months (though it feels so much longer) during which technology has been a lifeline for connecting with friends, extended family, community, and the broader public. This dependency on social media and digital platforms, as Sonia notes, has also created new possibilities for those who seek to further surveil, sow conflict among, and physically and emotionally harm young people, particularly those from poor and minoritized communities. I additionally appreciate Sonia’s work to illustrate that various myths about children, youth, and media were false long before COVID-19 and should not be perpetuated going forward: beliefs in the utility of “screen time” as a concept, the idea that children can fend for themselves online and well intentioned adults have nothing to contribute, and the notion that adolescents and teens choose media over people when most are just finding ways to bond and thrive through whatever form of sociality is available and useful to them.

Particularly within the U.S. context, I have been thinking a lot about how the “choices” parents are being offered right now for managing their household’s health and well-being (and sometimes that of their own older parents), their family’s media use, and their children’s education (i.e., “Zoom school” and “learning pods”) are not really choices at all under the conditions of capitalism, neoliberalism, and “rugged individualism.” As they stand, the institutions and infrastructures are not built for marginalized parents to make mistakes just like any other parents because the systems are not designed for interdependency and collective care across families and within communities. Moreover, the illusory nature of choice is only now being discovered by some (primarily white)families when other parents (especially Black and brown caregivers) have not been under any such illusion.

Distance learning in the pandemic has enabled some students with disabilities to thrive while it has set others back significantly.In my work, I am especially interested in how children with disabilities and their families—across race, ethnicity, and social class—have been making the most of sometimes fairly awful (and illegal) learning conditions for their child, and to what extent digital media and technology have helped or hurt them in their efforts to thrive. Over the past seven years, I have been conducting ethnographic research in the homes of over 60 children ages 3 to 13 on the autism spectrum in Boston and Los Angeles (remotely starting in April 2020) by interviewing parents, observing kids engaged in their media habits and rituals, and asking them to explain the appeal and challenges of technology to me. What I have found so far is that for many families of disabled children in the COVID era, being cut off from various forms of institutional support and caregivers turning to technology to provide some form of relief is not an unfamiliar experience.

Take Sofia Acosta (pseudonym), a five-year-old non-speaking Latina girl on the autism spectrum with a deep love of the classic storybook character Clifford the Big Red Dog. When I visited her Boston apartment in July 2019, her mom April explained that Sofia was stuck at home and not attending summer camp, that her days at home lacked structure, and that she was usually up all night for those reasons, combined with the fact that she had a naturally dysregulated sleeping pattern. Watching media, and especially Clifford videos on YouTube, was the only thing that helped keep Sofia calm and maintain control of her body. While staying home, having no summer camp options, and passing time on structureless days was new for many families in July 2020, my visit with Sofia was a year earlier. She was not attending camp because local programs for autistic kids were too expensive. She was not leaving the apartment much because her home was in a predominantly Black and Latinx neighborhood with very little green space and Sofia’s senses got easily overwhelmed on mass transit. And she was spending so much time using media as a coping mechanism because she was on a never-ending wait list for speech and behavioral therapy services that might have given her important communicative and expressive tools.

Many people have made excruciatingly hard choices and major sacrifices to incorporate social distancing and self-isolation into their vocabularies and lifestyles post-COVID-19. Interlocking forms of structural inequality have meant, though, that Sofia and the Acosta family were already intimately familiar with being socially distanced and heavily technologically mediated. Disabled adults, youth, and their loved oneshave been telling us for a long timehow unsustainable it is to leave families with no other options but to turn to media and technology to offset undue caregiving responsibilities that are actually failed societal and moral obligations.

S. Craig Watkins: In the work that we did for the Digital Edgethe core focus was on addressing the inventive ways Black and Latinx youth navigate social, educational, and digital inequality.  The Digital 'Edge' is a recognition of the tension that shapes how people of color engage technology.  On the one hand, "edge" represents the cutting edge or the ways in which Black and Latinx youth have been leaders, innovators, and early adopters, especially when it comes to social and mobile media. Black youth were the first among their generational counterparts to adopt Twitter at scale, leading to the rise of the highly influential Black Twitter.  But "edge" in this context also points to marginalization and inequality.  Thus, even as Black and Latinx youth have asserted a strong presence in the digital world, they do so under social, educational, and economic constraints not of their own making.

As we did the research for the Digital Edge we also explored the home life of students and this gave us an opportunity to learn more about their parents. The educational levels among many of the parents were quite low, thus severely restricting their employment prospects.  Most of the parents in our sample worked in low-skill, low-wage occupations.  Still, the parents that we met were extraordinarily savvy and had a sharp understanding of society.  

Many of these parents made enormous sacrifices to ensure their children had access to computers, the internet, and mobile devices.  And although consistent and robust access to these technologies were often marred by economic precarity, parents felt it was important that their children had internet connectivity even though it was difficult to afford. Over the years research has shown that the presence of a child in the home is a strong predictor of whether technology will be in the home.  

I've always been struck by the "technology dilemma" that parents grapple with.  Even as they may have some concerns about screen time  or more specifically the kind of content their children are exposed to, most parents tell us that they believe they must make computers, internet, and mobile devices available to their kids.  They understand in some opaque way that mastery of these technologies is now required to find opportunity in the economy of tomorrow. When it comes to providing their children access to technology, parents feel as if they are damned if they do and damned if they do not.

We learned that parents in low-wage occupations have the same concerns as parents in high-wage occupations.  All parents want their kids to be safe, happy, and able to access good schools and meaningful opportunities to pursue the aspirations.  But not all parents have the full stack of resources--money, good schools, extra-curricular activities, robust social supports, or a stay-at-home parent-- to bolster their children's life chances.  Likewise, not all parents have access to the social and informational capital that deepens their knowledge, parental efficacy, and ability to support how their children navigate the digital world.  Meryl, I really appreciate your assertion that parents who care for kids with learning disabilities struggle to find the adequate social and technological supports to engage their children’s potential for learning and development.  I also like how you draw similarities between the challenges they face, “being socially distanced and heavily technologically mediated,” and the challenges millions of families with kids restricted to their homes for learning and recreation now face.

We must figure out more effective ways to support parents and their efforts to support their children.  This includes finding culturally relevant ways to introduce parents to ideas and potential strategies they can employ in their efforts to equip their children with the resources to participate in the connected world.  Now more than ever, young children must learn how to protect their privacy and data rights while also increasing their accumulation of social, civic, and educational capital via digital technologies. As Sonia and Meryl note, one of the outcomes of COVID is the increased reliance on social and digital platforms. Among other things, this means that we are all subjected to more surveillance, scams, and disinformation campaigns as Sonia explains.  

Sonia’s point that we should forever do away with the “young people as digital natives” and “old people as digital immigrants” perspective is well taken.  The framework overlooks the fact that parents have a lot to offer young people including experience, wisdom, and the importance of empathy in the connected world.  Most parents are looking for answers instead of fear mongering and misinformation.  More affluent parents have access to the social and informational networks that enhance their capacity to support how their children navigate the digital world.  But many parents do not have access to these resources, hence their ability to support their children's digital activities face severe challenges.  

I'll end with this question: how do we design ways for parents and guardians who manage resource-constrained households to access the social and informational networks that empower their desire to support their children's participation in the connected world and secure pathways to opportunity? 

Bios

Meryl Alper is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Northeastern University, where she researches the social and cultural implications of communication technologies, with a focus on disability and digital media, children and families’ technology use, and mobile communication. She is the author of Digital Youth with Disabilities(MIT Press, 2014) and Giving Voice: Mobile Communication, Disability, and Inequality(MIT Press, 2017), which was awarded a 2018 PROSE Award Honorable Mention from the Association of American Publishers and the 2018 Outstanding Publication in the Sociology of Disability Award from the American Sociological Association. In her research and teaching, Dr. Alper also draws on over 15 years of professional experience in educational children’s media as a researcher, strategist, and consultant with Sesame Workshop, PBS KIDS, Nickelodeon, and Disney.

Sonia Livingstone is a professor in the Department of Media and Communicationsat the London School of Economics and Political Science. Taking a comparative, critical and contextualised approach, her research examines how the changing conditions of mediation are reshaping everyday practices and possibilities for action. She has published 20 books on media audiences, especially children and young people’s risks and opportunities, media literacy and rights in the digital environment. Her new book is “Parenting for a Digital Future: How hopes and fears about technology shape children’s lives” (Oxford University Press, with Alicia Blum-Ross). Sonia currently directs the Digital Futures Commission(with the 5Rights Foundation) and the “Global Kids Online”project (with UNICEF), among other projects. She blogs at www.parenting.digital.

S. Craig Watkins is the Ernest A. Sharpe Centennial Professor at the University of Texas at Austin.  He is the author of six books including The Digital Edgeand Don’t Knock the Hustle.  Craig is also the founding Director of the Institute for Media Innovation, a boutique hub for research and design. Among other things, the Institute is currently working on projects that address technology and mental health, bias in the deployment of artificial intelligence, and the social, racial, and economic aspects of a post-COVID world.

Launching our Popular Culture and Civic Imagination Toolkit

Welcome to our Popular Culture and Civic Imagination Toolkit! Here we tap the stories, TV shows, games, movies and folk stories we love (and love to hate) to activate our imaginations as we work through the social challenges our communities face. Our playful easy to do activities engage popular culture, imagination and issues of collective concern, tackling questions like: How do we want to live with one another? How do we resolve conflicts in our community? How do we know what’s fair for us and for others? How do we work together to solve big problems? 

​The toolkit is intended for a broad age group - parents and children (5+), peer-groups, those working in educational settings and really anyone interested in watching, remixing, creating, and having fun with popular culture!

 Our number one goal here is to help adults and children (and others) to have fun around shared media experiences, moving us beyond the negative focus on “screen time” to a more generative mode of co-creating our culture. These activities are shaped by concepts such as perspective taking and emotional intelligence, but more broadly, designed to help young people to think about how they live in communities and physical spaces with other people, how they work together to achieve a social order that is fair to all, how they might learn to appreciate each other’s different perspectives and experiences, and how they might look at their physical surroundings, both places and things, in new, even magical, ways. We also see these activities as an childhood entry into media literacy (understood not as a school subject but as part of our everyday lives as media consumers and fans.) 

​Each activity in the toolkit can be completed as a stand-alone unit. Unless otherwise noted, these activities here emerged from brainstorming sessions with the members of the Civic Paths research group.

 This is a work in progress and we welcome feedback and new activity suggestions! Do you have activities that you would like to submit to the Toolkit? Please, reach out to us via this form.

​You can also download the printer friendly version of this toolkit here.

Rethinking "Screen Time" In the Age of Covid-19 (Part Three)

Sangita Shresthova: Yes, screentime is an incredibly blunt, and largely ineffective tool for navigating children engagement with media. As Susan pointed out “screens” are just a piece of hardware. I would add that “time” measures duration and tells us nothing about what is actually taking place. Clearly. we need more nuanced approaches that take into account everything that has been brought up in our exchange.  And, we need them now more than ever.

This summer, I got quite excited about the possibilities of online interest-based learning for young children when my son took several classes though Outschool (outschool.com).

The classes (taught over zoom) were generally small (ranging from 4-6 kids) and short (15-30 minutes, over several days or weeks). The offerings were staggeringly diverse, with classes on almost any topic imaginable (from butterflies to photography, from drawing superheroes to Bollywood dance).  While somewhat uneven because some instructors were more experienced than others, the classes all helped my son connect learning to a subject area that interested him. He learned a lot and enjoyed it. 

Perhaps it was this positive experience that made the first days of distance-learning kindergarten such a shock over the past week. Responding to critiques of how distance learning happened in public schools this spring, California has passed legislation mandating duration of instruction for every grade level. For kindergarten it is 180 minutes. To meet this mandate, my son’s school leaned into “screentime” and implemented a three hour zoom call, which the teacher now has to fill with programming. It is early days yet, so I am working hard to keep an open mind about how this may play out. And yet, seeing my son stare vacantly at the screen as he moved into hour two on day two, I can’t help but think that there are better ways to do this.

I know that many educators and parents are in the thick of it right now. We are all navigating uncharted territory and the desire to hold on to the “old” normal as a measuring stick is overwhelmingly tempting. It is also dangerous as it obscures the fact that we are living through, what might be, a once in a life-time opportunity to re-evaluate our assumptions about media in our children’s lives.

Henry Jenkins: In Susan’s story, her son’s comment, “you should watch it,” was an invitation into his world, sharing his new favorite program with her and thus opening up a channel of communication. My experience has been that those invitations are most apt to occur when the family has created a history of such open conversations through the years and developed a shared understanding of media content as a resource around which the family might come together and work through its differences. This is very different from advice that parents should surveil their children, looking at their internet history behind their backs, say, or otherwise go where they have not been invited. The first is about building trust and respecting your children’s growing agency to make meaningful choices. The second represents a lack of trust and respect and is apt to further unravel communication within the family over time. 

Our children need adults who will watch their backs, not snoop over their shoulders. They need mentorship as they confront some of the challenges of the digital world and as they construct their own identities in relation to the culture around them. But they are only going to accept our advice when they actively seek it out rather than having it imposed upon them. Child development literature suggests that children adventure a bit further from their parents’ orbit each year they grow older but that this stepping out is inconsistent, that they also seek out their parents’ hands when they feel uncomfortable. A wise parent looks for those openings to provide the support they need. They let go of some control over their kids and instead empower them to stand on their own feet. The indirectness of conversations around television make it an effective middle ground for both letting go and providing support.

Sangita’s story shows something else. Restricting or imposing a specific quantity of “screen time” for children is misguided. Our relations to media should be understood in qualitative rather than quantitative terms. Research on fandom shows that the average fan consumes less television than the general population, not more. Fans actively choose what to watch; they pay close attention as they watch; and watching springboards them towards other social and creative experiences. There are times in the life of a fan when their relationship to the medium is more intensive than others: they are absorbing a new program; they are working through some emotional crisis; they are feeling bored or lonely, so a regular time table does not serve us well if the goal is to ensure a more valuable engagement with the media in our lives. So if the changed circumstances surrounding COVID-19 and Zoom-based learning are forcing us to relax our quantitative control, we should be having the kind of conversation amongst parents and educators we are modeling here regarding what we think a valuable relationship to media might look like.

The Civic Imagination Project has been exploring how adults might learn a more playful way of thinking through the future together. Instead of becoming bogged down in frustrations over our current problems we need to stop and ask each other what kind of world we would want to share together if anything were possible. Then we can think from a fresh perspective about how to achieve that.  Adults need permission to play together.  Children are already playing with the contents of their culture, including media content. Play is how children learn. They don’t need to reclaim a sense of imaginative possibilities as adults do, because they haven’t lost them. They need to learn how to direct their imaginations towards fairness and caring in the world around them. They need to learn how to connect what they see on the screen to what they observe about their surroundings. This playful engagement with media content should be as much a part of media literacy as developing a skeptical understanding of who makes media and what interests are served by its production and distribution. 

In a few days, we will be sharing on this blog some new resources that parents can use to foster civic imagination through playful engagement with the media content that their children already care about. We see these exercises as offering parents some concrete models for how they might introduce these kinds of constructive relationships to popular culture into the context of their own family life, respecting each family’s values, but also respecting each family member’s emotional and social needs. And then we will have some more perspectives to share through two more conversations. So don’t touch that dial!

Susan Kresnicka: You are absolutely correct, Henry. My family has a history of tapping entertainment as an expanded vocabulary, and it's proving more helpful than ever in this uncertain and stressful moment. We need every recourse we can find to raise, express, and process the sprawling range of thoughts and feelings this era is provoking.

I agree, Sangita, that when kindergarteners are being asked to participate in 180 minutes of Zoom instruction each day, indeed, there must be a better way. And tired, trivializing, derogatory assumptions about media – and the judgment they can provoke – seem likely only to obscure it. I look forward to learning more about the Civic Imagination toolkit and how it can help parents forge a new, healthier path.

 BIOS

Henry Jenkins is the Provost’s Professor of Communication, Journalism, CInematic Arts and Education at the University of Southern California and the founder and former co-director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program. He has been a dedicated advocate for media literacy education, recently receiving the Jesse McKanse award for his life-time contribution to this field, including the publication of Confronting the Challenges of a Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century which helped to launch the MacArthur Foundation’s Digital Media and Learning Initiative. Subsequent work here included Reading in a Participatory Culture and Participatory Culture in a Networked Society. His other work on children and media includes The Children’s Culture Reader and From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games. He is currently writing a book which examines children’s media of the 1950s and 1960s in light of shifting understandings of childhood in Post-War American culture. His most recent books include Participatory Culture: Interviews, Popular Culture and the Civic Imagination: Case Studies of Creative Social Change and Comics and Stuff.

Sangita Shresthova is the Director of Research of the Civic Paths Group based at the University of Southern California. Her work focuses on intersections among online learning, popular culture, performance, new media, politics, and globalization. She is also one of the authors of Popular Culture and the Civic Imagination: Case Studies of Creative Change (2020) and of  By Any Media Necessary: The New Activism of Youth (2016), both published by NYU Press. Her earlier book on Bollywood (Is It All About Hips?) was published in 2011 by Sage. She is one of the creators of the Digital Civics Toolkit (digitalcivicstoolkit.org), a collection of resources for educators, teachers and community leaders to support youth learning. Her own artistic work has been presented in academic and creative venues around the world including the Schaubuehne (Berlin), the Other Festival (Chennai), the EBS International Documentary Festival (Seoul), and the American Dance Festival (Durham, NC). She enjoys engaging with diverse communities through her workshops, lectures and projects. sangitashresthova.com

Susan Kresnicka

Founder and president of research firm KR&I, Susan is a cultural anthropologist with over 18 years of experience in the commercial sector. Specializing in foundational research to establish core human drivers for consumer behavior, Susan has led large-scale, multi-modal research projects for a range of industries. A student of fandom for more than a decade, Susan has conducted fan research for a variety of iconic entertainment IP brands, sports teams, and brands built around passionate hobbyists. Whether she is studying fandom or another topic, Susan specializes in tying consumer behavior to core human needs, allowing clients to establish more enduring and meaningful bonds with the people upon whom their commercial success relies. Susan holds an M.A. in social anthropology from The University of Texas at Austin, sits on the professional advisory board for UCLA’s Master of Social Science program, and regularly speaks publicly on fandom, gender, morality, identity, and the value of anthropology in business. Her work has been covered in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Forbes, Variety, and more. kresnickaresearch.com 

Rethinking "Screen Time" in the Age of Covid-19 (Part Two)

Sangita Shrestova:  I was struck by Henry’s observation that parenting through media calls for a different set of parenting skills.  In reading what has been said so far, I am starting to see some of the contours of what such skills might need to be. Clearly, there is a lot to be said for a mindset that appreciates, rather than denigrates, the important role that popular culture plays in children's lives. We also need to be able to recognize the opportunities for discussion that TV shows, and other media content provide. And, we need to have the tools to encourage the imagination at opportune moments. For me, this all begins with a need for open-minded listening, which was so poignantly captured in Susan’s recounting of the conversation she had with her friend’s daughter about Disney princesses. As Jackson Bird, a trans-activist and former staff member of the Harry Potter Alliance, once said in an interview, “We need to learn to listen, to really listen.” On some level, this may seem to be an almost banal observation, and, yet, I see again and again, that we (adults) often do not really tune into what children are saying, and just as importantly, what they are not saying (but are communicating in other ways) about their relationship with popular culture. 

I am particularly tuned into the non-verbal aspects of “listening” because of my own background in dance and performance. I also spent years working with Bollywood dance fans, whose imagination is activated when they re-choreograph the dances contained in Hindi films. For these dancer fans, choreography becomes the space where the imagination is activated. This is where they engage, critique, re-interpret popular culture content.  I realize that this may be too far afield, but I actually have been thinking a lot about the performative and embodied possibilities for parenting through media, particularly at this moment when our physicality is limited in such profound ways and where I see so much desire for imagined and actual co-presence. Henry described action figures as “authoring tools” for re-imagined stories. I am really interested in encouraging improvised and staged performances inspired by popular culture as moments that allow us to embody and share our imagination.

Henry Jenkins: Amidst the many great questions that Susan posed for us, the one that struck me the most was the question, “When do we feel pride about our relationships to popular culture?” As a culture, we are programmed to feel shame and guilt, but rarely pride. Watching television, one of my mentors used to say, was like masturbation. We all do it sometimes, but we don’t like to talk about it, and never in front of the neighbors. I used to wear a button that said simply “I Love TV” and people would struggle so much to figure out what TV stood for, because it couldn’t possibly mean television. Why would you wear a button proclaiming your love for television?  

I think this is part of the hidden curriculum of the concept of “screen time.” We start from a logic which says this is something we should minimize because it has no intrinsic value and in many cases, is associated with some social harm, if nothing else because it takes time away from other, more valuable activities we should be engaging with, and “Aren’t you ashamed to let your children watch television instead of reading books or socializing with their friends or playing outside?” Well, Covid-19 is shifting our priorities on some of those other things, leading many people around the world to the conclusion that maybe it is better -- for now at least -- for children to socialize with friends (or go to school) through a screen. 

“Screen time” talk starts from a series of normalized assumptions about what it means to consume media. The first of those assumptions is that what happens on screens is completely separate from the other activities in our lives. So, in Sangita’s example above, television is assumed to be a mental activity (of a relative low order) which has little or nothing to do with our physical bodies (or more accurately, it involves bodies at rest rather than in movement.) I wonder if the people who make this mind-body distinction have ever seen children watching (or perhaps playing with) television. They are rarely sitting still, they are only sometimes giving it their full attention, it IS integrated into a range of other activities, and they are often physically moving around in one way or another while they are “watching” the show. One reason they watch the same programs over and over is that they catch different bits each time, though the other reason is that the ritualized nature of certain moments are comforting and familiar. We know that children learn stories through their bodies and their voices, and contrary to our high-low culture assumptions, this is as true for television as it is for children’s books.

“Screen Time” talk assumes that television is socially isolating, ignoring all of the signs that television content becomes a social currency that enables conversations with others and that cutting kids off from shows that are part of the shared mythology of their peer group is going to be far more socially isolating than allowing them the time to watch the show itself. And of course, much of what kids do with screens already involves real time or asynchronous social interaction with others with whom they are chatting or playing games or just hanging out on Zoom.

“Screen Time” talk assumes that watching television is less apt to spark the imagination than reading a book. The logic goes that we have to construct in our mind’s eye the physical world where the story takes place and television’s visuals give us that information too easily. Fair enough, but books often tell us what the characters are thinking and feeling, where-as television requires us to interpret implicit social cues and thus fosters emotional intelligence through perspective taking. 

“Screen Time” talk assumes that television is a site of pure consumption (often understood in passive terms) whereas the research suggests it is often a site of active cognitive interpretation and the starting point for a range of other creative and expressive activities for our children (go back to what I said about action figures as authoring tools.) 

“Screen Time” talk assumes too often that everything kids do with screens is more or less the same, rather than focusing on the range of activities in children’s lives, and what aspects of those activities get conducted on screens under what circumstances, and how those aspects are connected integrally to things that children are doing when they are not focused on screens. 

What I am calling for is that we move beyond the fragmentation and border policing that regulating “screen time” requires and begin to think about our children’s lives in a more holistic manner.

Susan Kresnicka: Funny, as I was reading through the deconstructions of 'screen time' we've been listing in this dialogue, I noticed for the first time how tellingly shallow the term itself is. (I suspect I'm way late to this realization!). We don't call it 'content time' or 'story time' – we've named it after the most superficial and non-dynamic attribute we could identify: the cold, hard, physical screen. Speaks volumes...

I've been incredibly grateful for this conversation over the last few days. It's been a difficult week for my family, with the start of this weird, virtual school year. My son, entering his sophomore year in college, is deeply resentful that we haven't agreed to let him move halfway across the country to live in an off-campus apartment while the school grapples with the intersection of a pandemic, an impulse-driven quasi-adult population, and its own financial realities. My daughter, starting her senior year in high school, has a heightened sense of anxiety surrounding this significant year. At varying moments, this week brought tears, cold silence, door slamming, and awkward dinners. Do you know where we found relief this week? TV. And not because we curled up in front of our respective devices and watched our own things to zone out. Content offered relief during this fraught week because, at moments when we felt disconnected from one another, it created an opportunity to reconnect. After a particularly tense few days, our son began to shift (slowly) into acceptance about the college decision. The very first signal that this shift was underway was when he told me how much he was enjoying watching The Boys. "What do you like about it?," I asked. "Well, it's about this guy whose girlfriend gets killed by a superhero and how he changes as a result. You should watch it." It was the first uncharged conversation we'd had in days, and it served as an invitation: "I'm moving past my anger," he implied, "and I want you to understand the ideas that are speaking to me in this difficult moment." I learned long ago that if my children tell me I should watch something, I should. I'm now on S1E5 of The Boys, and my son and I have a new point of connection to draw upon as we work through this. With my daughter, content has been our relationship salve for years. At the end of a truly wrenching tear-filled night this week, as we tried to patch ourselves (and each other) up, she asked if I would stay in her room and watch TV with her. We crawled under the covers, held hands, and watched Hugh Laurie demonstrate the tension between exceptionalism and human connection in an episode of House ("Sometimes, you just have to watch an episode of House," she told me.)

In my research and in my own life, I see time and again how shared content experiences – whether synchronous or not – help us forge, maintain, deepen, and repair social bonds, including those with the people we love most. When we dismiss and demonize entertainment media, we conveniently ignore this crucial function. An incredibly insightful friend once told me, "You can't understand something if you are judging it." I believe that this chronic cultural judgment of entertainment media, hypocritically embraced and lauded as a measure of responsible parenthood, cuts us off from a full understanding of how entertainment operates in our lives, including its potential for strengthening our relationships with our children

Rethinking "Screen Time" In the Age of Covid 19 (Part One)

This is the first of a series of exchanges where parents, teachers, and researchers share their insights about children and media in the era of Covid-19. How does the concept of “screen time” break down as we are all forced to conduct schooling, work, social relations, and every other aspect of our lives on line? Why is there a residual guilt that many parents are feeling about leaving their children alone with screens under these circumstances? How are people coping with the challenges of working, parenting, and home-schooling within the same limited real estate and same limited time frame? And how might we take advantage of this moment of profound disruption and discomfort in order to construct a new and perhaps better relationship with media in the context of our family life?·  

Sangita Shresthova: As I started to think about media, parenting, and imagination in this moment, I was drawn to a seemingly common-place conversation I had recently with a friend, who is also a parent. We were chatting about current events, supporting each other through our concerns about our own parents, and commiserating on the challenges of having our children be at home all the time, when she suddenly exclaimed almost breathlessly that she felt she was doing one thing right in the midst of all this - she had pretty much eliminated all "screentime" for her kids. As a media scholar with an enduring commitment to the participatory and creative possibilities of media, I felt my body tense up immediately. She went on to explain that she had pretty much banned all shows, all media, all facetime, from her kids day.  “Media is bad for them”, she argued. She then asked me how I was approaching this problem.

“Well”, I responded, “I find measuring screen time useless”. To me, the question isn't whether my five year old son is using a "screen". Rather I am interested in how he, my partner, and I are able to engage with media. My friend was clearly taken aback and shifted topics abruptly, leaving our conversation awkwardly unresolved. I never got to say all that I wanted to say on this topic.

So, I am going to use this blog conversation as an excuse to connect my personal experiences with parenting and media to my work on participatory culture and the civic imagination. 

As a media scholar and practitioner whose work focuses on participatory cultures (think Bollywood dance fandoms), connected learning (think Lego clubs) and participatory politics (think Facebook supported DIY facemask making), I have a deep appreciation for how media can be helpful to communities, educators and others. Of course, I also realize that the challenges that surround our current media landscape and popular culture narratives are very real. In fact, our current work on the civic imagination explores how we may tap, complicate, and remix such narratives to ignite creativity to imagine how we may be able to tackle these, and other, issues.

The work and research I do has helped me take a more nuanced approach to thinking through media in my son’s life. This has been even more true over the past few months when my son’s life outside the home pretty much ceased to exist. Though handling all this is, by no means, easy, making sense of the ways that we can use media to connect, imagine, and learn has helped me and my family stay afloat.

For me and my family, the first days of California's shut down in March triggered a profound sense of isolation and disconnect. Like everyone, we had been abruptly severed from our daily routines. We also felt so, so far away from my family in the Czech Republic, which under normal circumstances was "just a few hours of flight time" away. In fact, we had suddenly woken up to the diasporic person's worst nightmare as the many miles that separate us from our loved ones had become an insurmountable distance overnight. 

I was struggling. My son was struggling. My partner was struggling. Emotions were high. And, then, unexpectedly, Czech public broadcast television (Czech TV) came to our rescue. 

Within days of the lockdown being implemented in the Czech Republic, Czech TV launched a Učí Telka, daily classroom based program for kids in grades 1-5. Pulled together overnight, the program was a valiant effort to provide continuity to children in the country who had, like my son, suddenly had to transition to being at home and not going to school. The build-it-on-the-fly ethos of the program was openly acknowledged by the moderators, teachers and students who were all learning how to do this while on air.  As my son and I tuned in asynchronously everyday, we saw children like my son trying to keep their masks on. We also saw the teachers muddling through how to teach for a TV audience. We saw this confusion transform into resolve as the weeks went on. We too soon found our rhythm.

We learned how to complete the daily lessons. We enjoyed the TV show recesses.  By the time the program ended in mid June, we felt connected to the imagined community that had formed around it.

Czech TV school is only one example of the many ways in which media has helped my family connect over the past months. There are the daily Facetime/Whatsapp storytelling calls that allow my son to spend time with his grandparents. There are also many shows that have sparked his imagination by connecting him to new ideas and information. The Smurfs, a cartoon centered on the village life of small blue creatures, taught him about appreciating every member of the community and inspired him to create imaginary scenes that push past the stories themselves. Wild Kratts, an animated  television series that follows the wild life focused adventures of two brothers, inspired “what if” conversations about the animals, the brothers, and, most importantly, the antagonist Donita. I could go on.

In thinking my experiences, over the past weeks, I am really excited about this exchange. For me, parenting with and through media in the midst of a pandemic is about identifying opportunities for creative exchange, as well as, inspiring a sense of connection and community at this otherwise profoundly isolating time. Media has helped my family feel connected. It has encouraged dialogue, and has inspired our imaginations at a time when we  desperately need to find ways to feel even a little hopeful.

Henry Jenkins:    Sangita's phrase here, "parenting through media," captures something essential about the relationship to "screen time" we want to foster. Most of the time, people who mumble about reducing their children's "screen time" imagine parenting by media: that is, the media functions as an electronic babysitter, they imagine shifting their attention elsewhere and leaving their children to be a feral child of YouTube. This is something all parents do from time to time and they should not feel guilty for doing so if the alternative is to become overwhelmed and lash out emotionally at the children who, under the current circumstances, are constantly under foot.

But parenting through media requires a different set of parenting skills. First, the ideal may be some form of co-viewing where the parent and child are watching a program which provides each of them some degree of pleasure. The parent has the remote in their hand and is willing to stop, rewind, focus on specific details, and ask their children questions designed to prompt their own mental processing of the narrative. Children acquire skills by making sense of complex narratives, taking the perspectives of nuanced characters or distinguishing fiction from fact. They are best able to develop these skills if parents learn to "read" television the way they might read a picture book, even getting playful in asking questions that might take you well beyond what is on the screen. Such exchanges may form the basis for the development of media literacy skills within the home.

But, as Shelby Anne Wolf and Shirley Brice Heath discuss in their study of children's relationship with fictional characters, The Braid of Literacy, children's creative engagement with imaginary worlds ideally does not stop when the parent turns the television off. Again, writing specifically about printed books (and drawing sharp lines away from media and popular culture), Wolf writes about her daughter, "To Lindsey, reading was action and each part must be played. The words of the story were meant not to lie on the page but to leap off and rock back and forth in life." My experience as a parent was more or less the same except what excited my son was content he absorbed from television and films on VHS tapes. 

Listen closely and you will hear phrases from the show enter their everyday speech. You will see them embody the character's personality using whatever props they have at hand. If they have action figures or other toys, they may expand the saga through introducing their favorite characters to characters from other series. I see action figures as authoring tools which empower users to reimagine and retell the stories that matter to them.  When this happens, its clear that something has caught the child's imagination, that the program is providing them with resources to work through some of the emotional conflicts or social challenges they are facing at that moment of their development.

When my son was five or so, we developed the practice of trading stories. Some nights we would read him children's books or we would make up our own stories that incorporated his circumstances into the narrative. On other nights, we would ask him to make up stories. He would dictate and we would record on the computer every word he said. The challenge was to let the story remain his -- to let him work through whatever residue he had from the day and tap whatever resources he might draw from the culture around him. His stories were full of Pee-Wee Herman and He-Man, seemingly contrasting figures of masculinity which he drew upon to make sense of his own identity. 

Those first stories are shapeless blobs which suck in details from all directions and are mostly descriptive or list-like. But in this process, you were hear how the child is making sense of the media they are consuming and how it relates to other life events. We would print out the stories, he would draw pictures or create collages of images cut from magazines and catalogues, and we would send them to his grandparents for their birthdays or holidays. He would have that chance to feel like an author of the culture around him. He would claim for himself the right to push beyond the ending or ret-con the core events in the character's life. It certainly mattered where his stories started so choose wisely what you introduce into your children's life, but know that when the child gets his hands on the story material, he will reshape it like Play-Doh to make it into the kind of story the child needs in their life at that moment. 

As he grew older, we found that the characters on television allowed him to work through, in an indirect way, the issues he faced in his own life. As a family, we have remained committed to Survivor, which gave us a shared set of reference points for talking though social interactions with others at a time when he struggled with social anxiety and had trouble reading how other people related to him. We could talk through what kinds of social interactions produced positive and negative results, understanding the risks of different strategies and recognizing the choices that leaders made in relation to their communities. In his early 20s years, being able to talk about issues in the context of television provided a helpful buffer that would have been harder if we were talking about real people in his life. Perspective taking is a core aspect of emotional intelligence and so being able to step back, lower the risks, and explore different ways of working through problems in social interaction proved extremely valuable for him and for us. Sometimes, we realized he was talking about characters on the screen as a way to talk indirectly about his relationship with us and this made the social distance television provided crucial for avoiding more intense conflicts.

Coming back to where I started, I see these examples as suggestive of what happens when we parent through media, when we use it as a resource in our interaction with children, when we bring it under our control and engage with it on our own terms. Right now, the closure of most real world spaces forces us to work and socialize through technology, so prohibitionist responses make no sense, if they ever did. How do you restrict "screen time" when Mom and Dad spend their entire day working via Zoom Calls and when schooling online remains the safest way to protect your child from the pandemic? No, the goal is not to restrict "screen time" but to use “screen time” in a way which makes sense in the context of your own family life.

Susan Kresnicka: At a family dinner a few years ago, I asked my daughter’s best friend about her Disney fandom. I had known about her love for all things Disney (especially the Princess movies) for quite some time, and, as I was in the middle of conducting a year-long study of fans and fandom, I just couldn’t pass up the opportunity. About 12 years old at the time, she described expansively the themes she saw in the movies, considering what they suggested about gender, family bonds, and individuality. She spoke about the close friendships she had made with other fans she had met online and the way her experience as a fan was helping her reflect on her own potential. I was fascinated and overjoyed by the conversation. Towards the end, my daughter’s friend uttered, what seemed to me, a surprising statement: “No one has ever asked me about any of this before.” When I inquired as to whether she ever discussed her fandoms with her parents, she told me, “No, they just call it ‘all that teeny bopper stuff’.”

That discussion has stuck with me. Time and again, my work affirms how deeply we value the entertainment we love, how much meaning it brings to our lives, and how fulfilling it can be to share our entertainment fandoms with our loved ones. Additionally, as a parent, I couldn’t imagine not sharing with my children something so important to them. My daughter’s friend’s parents had missed out on the enriching experience I had with their daughter because they considered her Disney fandom ‘frivolous.’

Frivolous. Waste of time. Mindless. Boob tube. Rotting your brain. As we know, the criticisms typically leveled against entertainment run the gamut from being dismissive of the real value it offers to fearful of the perceived damage it can cause – especially among children. And while boundary-setting around media and entertainment plays an important role in parenting, exclusively focusing on control obscures the bigger picture. Not only will our tech-savvy kids eventually find work-arounds, but such strict policing may be implicitly teaching our children that media consumption can be inherently shameful, something to hide. And, if children feel they need to conceal their entertainment and media consumption from their parents, how likely is it that they’ll seek us out when their favorite content inevitably provokes questions and concerns?

When we don’t appreciate the role of media and entertainment in our own lives, we are less likely to appreciate the role it plays in our kids’ lives – and we are more likely to miss out on invaluable opportunities to connect with them. To talk openly and meaningfully, to learn what they care about, to understand their everyday experiences, and, importantly, to help them process their encounters with media.

So, what would a more open and mindful approach to parenting around media and entertainment look like? How can we help our kids reflect and think purposefully about the content they encounter? First of all, ‘media literacy’ may sound like a topic for the school classroom, but I believe that’s a misconception. The best opportunities for this kind of ‘coaching’ happen outside of school, at home, where kids consume content in everyday life. Furthermore, the last thing we want to do is turn this kind of critical thinking and learning into a homework exercise. If kids see ‘understanding media’ as a threat to their enjoyment of it, they’ll be less likely to embrace it. Finally, like so many things, our kids learn how to relate to media and entertainment by watching us. If we don’t model a mindful approach at home, will our kids really believe it matters?

With that in mind, we can begin by asking ourselves how entertainment and media operate in our own lives:

• When and why do we engage with it?

• How do our media choices relate to our feelings? Our social relationships? Our understanding of who we are?

• How might these answers shift depending upon the type of media or entertainment genre we’re considering?

• About which types of media experiences do we feel the most pride? Judgment? Guilt? Ambivalence? Connection to others? Isolation? 

Beyond reflecting upon the role of media in our own lives, I’ve always found one question incredibly powerful in helping develop a more mindful approach to media: why does this content exist? When we stop for a moment and ask ourselves – and teach our children to ask – this question, we immediately create distance from the content. We frame it as an object of inquiry and curiosity rather than something we mindlessly absorb. Likewise, when we pose this question to our kids about their favorite entertainment, we open up a dialogue and opportunities for connection.

With the door open, we can also create more moments of connection over specific content. We can share shows and movies that convey the values and ideas we most want our children to embrace and, perhaps, even share with their children one day. In my research on family fandoms – fandom that is shared by children and parents (and sometimes even grandparents and extended family) – a shared love for specific content creates an array of benefits for all involved: the transmission of important values, a focal point for shared ideas and experiences, a way to make memories together, and opportunities for ritual and symbolic representation of that which bonds us together. 

My work has taught me that media and entertainment consumption helps us meet core human needs for self-care, social connection, and identity. In many instances, our children are already receiving these benefits from their favorite content. Demonstrating to our kids that we care about how entertainment makes them feel, how it helps them belong, and how it helps them understand and express who they are is a great privilege. And it’s an undertaking that can strengthen family bonds and empower our kids to develop critical thinking skills that will serve them throughout their lives. Rather than operate narrowly as a site of anxiety, media and entertainment can become a springboard for powerful connection and expansive thinking.

BIOS

Henry Jenkins is the Provost’s Professor of Communication, Journalism, CInematic Arts and Education at the University of Southern California and the founder and former co-director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program. He has been a dedicated advocate for media literacy education, recently receiving the Jesse McKanse award for his life-time contribution to this field, including the publication of Confronting the Challenges of a Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century which helped to launch the MacArthur Foundation’s Digital Media and Learning Initiative. Subsequent work here included Reading in a Participatory Culture and Participatory Culture in a Networked Society. His other work on children and media includes The Children’s Culture Reader and From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games. He is currently writing a book which examines children’s media of the 1950s and 1960s in light of shifting understandings of childhood in Post-War American culture. His most recent books include Participatory Culture: Interviews, Popular Culture and the Civic Imagination: Case Studies of Creative Social Change and Comics and Stuff.

Sangita Shresthova is the Director of Research of the Civic Paths Group based at the University of Southern California. Her work focuses on intersections among online learning, popular culture, performance, new media, politics, and globalization. She is also one of the authors of Popular Culture and the Civic Imagination: Case Studies of Creative Change (2020) and of  By Any Media Necessary: The New Activism of Youth (2016), both published by NYU Press. Her earlier book on Bollywood (Is It All About Hips?) was published in 2011 by Sage. She is one of the creators of the Digital Civics Toolkit (digitalcivicstoolkit.org), a collection of resources for educators, teachers and community leaders to support youth learning. Her own artistic work has been presented in academic and creative venues around the world including the Schaubuehne (Berlin), the Other Festival (Chennai), the EBS International Documentary Festival (Seoul), and the American Dance Festival (Durham, NC). She enjoys engaging with diverse communities through her workshops, lectures and projects. sangitashresthova.com

Founder and president of research firm KR&I, Susan Kresnicka is a cultural anthropologist with over 18 years of experience in the commercial sector. Specializing in foundational research to establish core human drivers for consumer behavior, Susan has led large-scale, multi-modal research projects for a range of industries. A student of fandom for more than a decade, Susan has conducted fan research for a variety of iconic entertainment IP brands, sports teams, and brands built around passionate hobbyists. Whether she is studying fandom or another topic, Susan specializes in tying consumer behavior to core human needs, allowing clients to establish more enduring and meaningful bonds with the people upon whom their commercial success relies. Susan holds an M.A. in social anthropology from The University of Texas at Austin, sits on the professional advisory board for UCLA’s Master of Social Science program, and regularly speaks publicly on fandom, gender, morality, identity, and the value of anthropology in business. Her work has been covered in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Forbes, Variety, and more. kresnickaresearch.com 

A Personal Statement: How Good Intentions Can Produce Harmful Effects

Over the past weekend, I have been trying to address a bruising controversy brought about by choices I made regarding this blog. In the process, I have caused emotional and reputational harm to several female BIPOC scholars.  What started with the best of intentions has had negative impacts on multiple fronts. More care should have been taken at every stage of the process.

Here’s what happened:

Billy Proctor and I had been discussing plans for the blog this fall. When I did a series of Zoom book clubs over the summer, many had expressed interest in learning more about Black comics. I had been hearing about a wave of new titles released over the past year. Due to the lockdown and some current transportation issues, I had not been able to go to my local comic shop since March and I wanted to know, myself, what I should make sure to read from this new and emerging work. As always, I wanted to use this blog to amplify emerging voices in the field -- in this case, especially Black comic scholars. So, we decided to try to pull together a series. I only briefly discussed the mechanisms for doing so, figuring we would dig into those questions more fully later. But from the first, I had vaguely signaled that we would need a diverse group of editors to make this project viable.

After our initial discussion, my attention was drawn elsewhere leaving Proctor to act on these plans. He was only vaguely reporting what was happening and I was distractedly waving him forward, trying, as always, to do too many things at once. I own my failure to oversee this properly. But I also want to make clear the disconnects in the process. Proctor drafted a call for papers which he posted on several comic studies listservs. I did not review or even know about the CFP before it was posted and not being a subscriber to these lists, I was not aware of what was happening until there was significant pushback against these plans. I also did not read or even know about the reframing of the project, though I had been consulted about expanding the remit to allow other BIPOC participants. When I learned of the criticisms on Friday afternoon, I was sympathetic with many of the critiques of what had happened. The initial approach was deeply flawed and the hasty response to the criticism had only made things worse.

I started working behind the scenes to find a way to substantively address the concerns. Specifically, there was a call for Black scholars to be the curators for such a project, which I acknowledge should have been the case from the start. As I heard of the pushback, I reached out to try to identify some early career Black scholars who might want to take ownership over this project, offering them complete control over the content and contributors and asking them to totally reframe the series to reflect their own perspectives. For technical reasons, I would need to facilitate the actual posting. Otherwise, I was ceding my platform to them. When Billy had told me he had heard from other BIPOC scholars who wondered if the blog might also provide space for them to write about comics by, for and about their communities,. I wanted to also facilitate their participation, but again, I was only vaguely following how he was going to do so. After some false steps, Billy identified someone who volunteered to take ownership over this second series.  As of now, my plan has been to run two series, first one under Black editorship on Black comics, and a second under BIPOC leadership dealing with “multicultural” comics.

In the midst of coming up with these plans, Billy Proctor accidentally posted one email from a back and forth exchange around these topics onto a Comic Studies list-serve. Proctor inappropriately characterized Samira Nadkarni who had been a leading critic (among others) of the original plans and further evoked Rukmini Pande, who has been a key figure critiquing racism in fandom studies. There has been an outpouring of outrage over what Billy said and the fact that he felt comfortable using such a negative characterization in my presence. I am deeply sorry for my role in this exchange. I have publicly apologized on the comic studies list where the email was posted and I also personally apologized to the women involved.  Billy Proctor has since stepped down as Associate Editor of this blog and will have no involvement with any future series we may launch, behind the scenes or otherwise. 

Let me be clear where I stand. I admire Rukmini Pande's contributions to the field enormously. She has transformed fan studies (and to a degree, fandom) by her willingness to challenge orthodoxies, to question our historic silence about race, to model what transformative scholarship might look like, and to call out normalized practices that reflect white supremacist logics that have gone unexamined and unquestioned for two long. I am just getting to know Samira Nadkarni through this exchange but I also deeply appreciate her critical voice in raising questions around the initial framing of this project.  I appreciate her willingness to call me out, even though her critiques have not always been easy to hear. Both women have suffered previous harm as a consequence of other public discussions over racism in fandom studies, and I am sorry that my poor choices may have contributed to further wounding them.

There is very little I can say -- the email in its tone and in its substance was inappropriate. I am horrified that this email was distributed on a public list -- not because it is embarrassing to me but because it did public damage to the women referenced in the exchange. I try to promote the work of younger scholars in my field and even where this is not possible, to above all, do no harm. And in this exchange, I failed at that basic expectation. 

I have read various assumptions being made on Twitter about what I did or did not say to Billy Proctor in response to that email. One of the ways whiteness reasserts itself is through what gets said amongst white people in private conversation. Our mutual support for each other shores up the existing conditions of systemic and structural racism and misogyny. When things get said in our presence and we remain silent or we offer words of encouragement, we become complicit in those attitudes. We say things in private we would NEVER say in public and doing so makes them impossible to combat or challenge the casual racism and sexism that run through everyday conversations even among well-meaning people who are otherwise working for social justice.  I have seen people read Billy’s email as suggesting we were circling the wagons against the BIPOC women. For my part, I was seeking out advice from senior BIPOC women so I could get insights on the best way to de-escalate this situation and figure out how to shift the editorship around this project to empower younger BIPOC scholars. Aware of some of the history, I was trying to find ways to avoid harm to the people involved.

As I was working to quickly address the core concerns that had been raised, I also allowed a sense of defensiveness to enter our exchange without fully realizing it myself. I work hard to hear, respect, and act on criticism, but I do have some feelings to work through when I am publicly called out. I should have slowed down to process those feelings. Instead, a certain degree of distrust entered my language and it enabled Proctor to write what he did. Systemic racism runs deep, it can reassert itself in unexpected ways, it transmits itself through unexamined assumptions and we need to correct each other when racist modes of thought enter our conversations.  We need to guard against our raw emotional responses which often surface unprocessed assumptions. I let everyone down by not making the right choices in the moment as I was trying to resolve a complex and tangled set of concerns. For this, I am really and truly sorry. I will do better.

Structural racism enters the conversation in other ways also. Because of structural racism,  Billy Proctor was already in my social circle and Samira Nadkarni was not. Because we knew each other, Proctor volunteered to help me with the grunt work on the blog, when others — for a multitude of reasons — would not have felt comfortable doing so. Because we were both white men, I felt comfortable in my interactions with him. Because I knew him, I did not want to harm him even as it was clear that his mistakes were making it impossible to continue to stand behind what he had done.  The social patterns created by structural racism also mean that I was more likely to respond defensively to Samira Nadkarni criticizing our project because I did not already know her. I recognize that such an impulse is wrong, because it contributes to those lacking access and power not being taken seriously when they risk speaking out. As a personal blog rather than a publication with an organization behind it, I have been personally trying to identify younger scholars to promote. But this means that, again, those people already inside or adjacent to my circles have structural advantages in getting asked to contribute. One reason I wanted us to have a call for papers was because I recognize this issue and wanted to expand access and identify new contributors not already in my network. As a consequence, I feel even worse that these efforts to reach out were so badly handled.   Again, I want to do better.

I owe this apology not simply to the women who were unfairly evoked in this specific incident but more broadly to young women, especially women of color, in the academic world, who so often are struggling to find their own voice as scholars, who are so often mischaracterized and dismissed when they pose important critiques of institutional, systemic and structural racism and misogyny. I admire these women’s courage in calling out senior scholars and entrenched assumptions in their fields. I would hate if anything I have done here has the effect of discouraging them from full throated participation in the core debates of their chosen fields. We need your contributions, even if it can be sometimes hard for older white male scholars, myself among them, to hear and process your critiques.  We all need to do better.

Where does this leave the two series? I honestly do not know. I am still working with some younger scholars who wanted to participate in overseeing them and still hoping to develop a framework under which they might move forward. I still believe something positive can come from this, but I want to go slow and find the most constructive way that this blog might address these topics. Whatever happens, I will be as open as possible in soliciting participation so that involvement goes beyond my pre-existing networks. I welcome any and all constructive feedback on the best way to proceed.

Identity, Power, and Soiled Storytelling: Examining the Contemporary Politics of Authorship through American Dirt (3 of 3)

Identity, Power, and Soiled Storytelling: Examining the Contemporary Politics of Authorship through American Dirt (3 of 3)

Olivia González

For Whom is Embodying a Cultural Bridge a Mechanism of Oppression and Liberation? 

Cummins’ reported motivations for authoring American Dirt further highlight the privileged position from which her novel was written and read. In explaining her decision to write American Dirt, Cummins has repeatedly claimed that she aimed to act as a “bridge,” presumably between Mexican migrants and an Anglo-American readership. For example, in the author’s note of American Dirt, Cummins claimed that she was “worried that, as a non-migrant and non-Mexican, I had no business writing a book set almost entirely in Mexico, set entirely among migrants”; however, she ultimately chose to write the book because “I thought, ‘If you’re a person who has the capacity to be a bridge, why not be a bridge?’” (p. 382). Additionally, in interviews addressing the controversy around American Dirt, Cummins has rearticulated this rhetoric, sharing that she wrote the novel with the hope that it “would be a bridge” (cited in Boyagoda, 2020). While Cummins’ efforts to serve as a cultural bridge have been commended by some of her supporters, putting her rhetoric in conversation with Moraga & Anzaldúa’s (1981; 1983) Bridge highlights the damaging effects and distance from which Cummins wrote about and aimed to “bridge” her subjects and readers.  

As the anthology’s title signals, Bridge (1981; 1983) interrogates and reimagines the bridges that have historically been built along the backs of women of color by those with varying levels of privilege and power (including, but not limited to, white men and women) in their attempts to explore and understand those situated as “Other.” Presented in the opening of the anthology, “The Bridge Poem”—penned by acclaimed Black poet Kate Rushin—highlights the burdens that embodying a bridge imposes on Black women as they are expected to connect, educate, and translate across difference.Through this work, Rushin expresses her fatigue and frustrations as a bridge, declaring: “I've had enough / I'm sick of seeing and touching / Both sides of things / Sick of being the damn bridge for everybody / …I'm sick of filling in your gaps / Sick of being your insurance against / The isolation of your self-imposed limitations” (Moraga & Anzaldúa, 1983, p. xxi). Bridge (1981; 1983) explores interventions in the building of these bridges, highlighting the liberatory power deployed when women of color develop their own bridges to one another: “bridges of consciousness” connecting them in solidarity (Moraga, 2015, p. xvi). As Moraga (2015) shares in the preface to the fourth edition of Bridge, the first edition (1981) of this anthology was the product of “women of color, who had been historically denied a shared political voice, endeavor[ing] to create bridges of consciousness through the exploration, in print, of their diverse classes, cultures and sexualities” (p. xvi). Thus, as Moraga & Anzaldúa (1983) claim, constructing these bridges of solidarity emerges through women of color “naming our selves and by telling our stories in our own words” (p. 23). 

I argue that in authoring American Dirt—a work that is not rooted in her personal experiences with oppression or liberation, and a work not designed to connect herself to women of color in solidarity—Cummins, and her rhetoric around “bridging,” are ultimately, like the book itself, hollow and harmful. In authoring an apolitical and impersonal work, Cummins not only fails to construct the bridge of consciousness envisioned in Bridge, but reproduces the toxic notion that bridges between those with oppressive power and women of color must be constructed in order for the former to learn and comprehend the humanity of the latter. Further, Cummins appears unaware of where the burdens of her attempts to be or build a bridge fall. As Cummins (2020) reveals in American Dirt’s afterword, her novel was made possible by migrants and deportation victims who “patiently” taught her about things “I never would’ve understood without their insight” (p. 385). Therefore, while Cummins’ attempts to be a bridge may reflect a “social justice” ethos (Markowicz, 2020), she failed to build a bridge along her own back; instead, (re)constructing them on the backs of those who “patiently” taught, and translated for, her.

For Whom are Borderlands Stories Profitable? 

Lastly, as many American Dirt critics have highlighted, Cummins’ success in selling American Dirt represents the inequities embedded within mainstream cultural production structures in the U.S. For example, responding to Cummins’ lamenting that “I wished someone slightly browner than me would write it,” other writers have reminded her that authors who are “browner” than her have written stories about their experiences (Grady, 2020a).However, many of those stories have not received the same visibility or capital; “authentic stories by Mexicanas and Chicanas are either passed over or published to significantly less fanfare (and for much less money)” than American Dirt (Bowles, 2020). Thus, as her critics suggest, Cummins’ early acclaim epitomizes the lack of equitable opportunities for Mexicanas and Chicanas to tell and sell their own stories within present publishing structures in the U.S.

Indeed, as many writers of color have discussed, the U.S. publishing industry has sustained a “historic and systemic whiteness” (Ho, 2016), with industry gatekeeping positions dominated by cis-het, able-bodied white women. As a survey by Lee & Low Books (2020) revealed, as of 2019, 76% of literary agents and publishing and review journal employees working in the U.S. were white, while only 6% identified as “Hispanic/Latino/Mexican.” Further, the majority of Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) folks represented in publishing houses hold positions with little to no gatekeeping power, constituting nearly half of interns (49%), while remaining chiefly excluded from executive (22%), editorial (15%), and marketing and publicity (26%) positions (Lee & Low Books, 2020). 

These substantial inequities in publishing power consistently produce a lack of opportunities for authors of color to publish and sell their work. As established publishing industry professionals have asserted, addressing inequities within the industry requires addressing representation in all gatekeeping positions, not simply seeking out “diverse” authors (Ho, 2016). For example, according to accomplished editor Sulay Hernandez, “the majority of books that are published in the US are not by people of color. The majority of high-profile authors are not people of color,” but changes need to be made to not only ensure that “more voices of color [are] being published” but that “more voices of color [are] being published well. And, very importantly, selling well” (cited in Masad, 2016). Thus, disrupting publishing industry inequities requires addressing the dearth of employees of color in all gatekeeping positions, with a particular focus on marketing and publicity, as these divisions substantially determine authors’ ability to sell their work (Ho, 2016).

Thus, with Latinxs and Mexicans occupying only 5% of marketing and publicity positions in the U.S. (Lee & Low Books, 2020), Mexican, Latinx, and Chicanx writers must fight to market themselves, and get stores to sell, and readers to buy, stories that may be considered marginal or “niche.” As Marcela Landres claims, the lack of Latinxs in “key” publishing positions is a primary contributor to the “paucity of published books written by Latinos” (cited in Cubias, 2015). And as Bowles (2020) shares, he has “seen my Chicana and Mexicana colleagues struggle to get their stories told, to get their manuscripts into the hands of agents and past the publishing industry’s gatekeepers;” thus, they remain “horribly underpaid” and “suffer marginalization in the US market.” 

Meanwhile, Cummins received a million-dollar advance from Flatiron Books for the rights to American Dirt, a film production deal with Imperative Entertainment, and enjoyed substantially effective pre-release publicity and marketing. Despite the widespread backlash that the novel received after its publication, American Dirt’s sales continued to grow to over 362,000 copies by July of 2020 (Milliot, 2020), and maintained a place on the New York Timesbest-sellers list for twenty-six weeks straight. I argue that this success further demonstrates the privileges that Cummins was afforded in telling and selling this story. Unlike so many women of color striving to publish their own stories, Cummins was not rejected or silenced by dominant publishing structures, was not “horribly underpaid,” and did not struggle to have the story she told marketed and sold well. 

Conclusion

Ultimately, I posit that critiques of American Dirt must be guided by a politics of authorship that recognizes the inequities represented by, and reproduced through, Cummins’success in telling and selling this story. Engaging with work fromMoraga (1983; 2015), Anzaldúa (1983; 1987), Moraga & Anzaldúa (1983), and Hurtado (2020), and examining the broader sociocultural and political economic contexts in which American Dirt was produced and published, reminds us that women writers of color contend with mechanisms that silence and delegitimize their storytelling, have historically been tasked with serving as cultural bridges, and are consistently denied opportunities to tell and sell their own stories in the U.S. publishing industry. Thus, while Cummins has now publicly claimed her identity as a Latina, I argue that as the author of American Dirt, she was ultimately read and afforded the same privileges as a white writer. 

But American Dirt as a phenomenon speaks beyond one particular story and storyteller; it reflects, and has helped reify, a publishing system that privileges and perpetuates whiteness. This is particularly evinced by the success with which Cummins was able to tell and sell a story filled with harmful, stereotypical portrayals of Mexicans and migrants, whichwere unquestioned by publishers but quickly recognized and critiqued by Mexican and Chicanx writers and readers. Further, as reflected in Cummins’ representations of, and rhetoric around, “brownness,” Black and Afro-Latinx writers and immigrants are erased from Cummins’ conceptions of authorship and immigration respectively—contributing to the continued exclusion of Black immigrants from narratives about the United States’ southern border and the atrocities afflicted by its Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Thus, Cummins not only benefits from the whiteness of the U.S. publishing industry, but simultaneously reinforces the anti-black racism and nativism pervading narratives about immigration in the United States writ large. 

So what does this mean for other authors and scholars writing in the U.S. publishing industries or academia? To address (note: not answer) this question requires that I interrogate my own power and privilege. While I am highly critical of Cummins, hearing her trepidations about authoring American Dirt—“I don’t know if I’m the right person to tell this story” (Alter, 2020)—sunk like a rock in my own chest; I know these fears, they flood my mind with every research project that I pursue. Like Moraga (1983) in her piece “La Güera,” I find myself asking: as a white Chicana, “what is my responsibility to my roots—both white and brown, Spanish-speaking and English?” (p. 34), and what does it mean for me to claim the label of woman of color? Like Moraga, I recognize that I have to “look critically at my claim to color” and “must acknowledge the fact that, physically, I have had a choice about making that claim, in contrast to women who have not had such a choice, and have been abused for their color” (p. 33–34). Thus, I offer the following considerations:

To writers who are looking to tell stories with or about communities of color, but have—like myself—benefited from whiteness: Interrogate your power and privileges, and situate this in your own work; rejecthetero-masculinist tendencies to feign objectivity through distance.Seek out silenced storytellers—versus stories—and give them your ears, your heart, and your platform. Listen to, celebrate, and honor them. And ask not just “who am I to tell these stories?” but “who am I to hear them?” We are not entitled to their knowledge, their stories, their perspectives; they are not yours, nor mine to hold in my güera hands or heart.

And so I write this for the mujeres de color

escribiendo sobre su esperanza y su enojo, su alegría y su dolor

Proclaiming with tongue and heart, key and pen

voces que otras no quieren oír, realidades que no ven.

Olivia González is a doctoral student at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism and a former Ronald E. McNair scholar. Working at the intersections of critical media industry studies and education studies, Olivia’s research examines the politics of race and gender within contemporary structures of media education and production. Her current work and dissertation center on the storytelling practices and professional socialization of aspiring film and television creators of color.

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Identity, Power, and Soiled Storytelling: Examining the Contemporary Politics of Authorship through American Dirt (2 of 3)

Identity, Power, and Soiled Storytelling: Examining the Contemporary Politics of Authorship through American Dirt (2 of 3)

Olivia González

Silencing, Censorship, and Identity “Policing”?: Interrogating Cummins’ Concerns

Like several of her supporters, Cummins has suggested that identity politics, silencing, and censorship are responsible for the backlash that American Dirt has received. For example, Cummins has maligned critiques of American Dirt that are centered upon her identity, claiming that while she is a privileged, white, U.S. citizen, “I am also Puerto Rican” and “that fact has been attacked and sidelined by people who, frankly, are attempting to police my identity” (Martin, 2020). Additionally, Cummins has expressed concerns over cultural appropriation conversations that go “too far toward silencing people” (Alter, 2020, para. 17–18), and suggested that“telling people what stories they are allowed to write” is a “dangerous sort of slippery fascist slope” (Conroy, 2020).However, through engaging with Chicana feminist scholarship, I argue that these claims are not only unfounded but also—communicated from Cummins’ now substantial platform—mislead the public about which writers are prevented from telling their own stories. As work by Cherríe Moraga, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Aída Hurtado reveals—contrary to claims about contemporary “cancel culture”—efforts to silence and censor storytelling are not new phenomena, and it is women of color whose stories and storytelling have consistently been silenced and censored, and for whom writing is a powerful tool in the pursuit of liberation.

While first created in considerably different social and political contexts, Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa’s (1981) widely acclaimed anthology, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (hereafter referred to as Bridge) embodies a powerful work through which the controversy surrounding American Dirt can be productively read. As discussed and demonstrated in Bridge, writing can play a powerful role in mujeres of color’s development and expression of a feminist politic that is shaped by their embodied experiences. Specifically, as Moraga (2015) suggests, Bridge presents U.S. women of color’s “theory in the flesh”—a politic formed through exploring, recording, and honoring their complex, even contradictory, lived experiences as women at the “crossroads” of multiple, intersecting identities (p. xxii). And according to Moraga (2015), it is through writing about these experiences—“telling our stories in our own words” (p. 19)—that women of color can “bring into consciousness what only the body knows to be true” and pursue the liberatory potential of their “theory incarnate” (p. xxiv). Thus, as Moraga & Anzaldúa (1983) discuss in the anthology’s second edition, Bridge—comprised of art, essays, poems, and other writings by women of color—contains “non-rhetorical, highly personal chronicles that present a political analysis in everyday terms" (p.xxiv). 

Similarly, in her text Intersectional Chicana Feminisms, Aída Hurtado (2020) asserts that Chicanas “use writing as the most powerful weapon at their disposal to voice their feminisms, to fight injustice” (p. 93). And as discussed and demonstrated in Bridge, Hurtado (2020) affirms that this writing can take many forms, voices, and tongues. According to Hurtado (2020), Chicana feminist writers insist that “we use everything,” from poetry to social science, “whatever it takes to voice a reality that has never been properly addressed” (p. 59). Additionally, Hurtado (2020) cites Chicana poet Elba Sánchez, who claims that her tongue is “‘a gift, my power,’” through which she “‘names injustices I witness, a veces en voz de poeta, a veces en mi native lengua pocha, from my pocha perspective’” (p. 93). 

Moreover, in her work “Speaking in Tongues: A Letter to Third World Women Writers,” Anzaldúa (1983) claims that writing is a mechanism through which mujeres de color “reclaim” their voices and tongues, and negotiate their survival and selfhood. In particular, according to both Moraga & Anzaldúa (1983), Third World women—a term used by U.S. women of color to “align ourselves with countries bearing colonial histories and still suffering their effects” (Moraga, 2015, p. xxv)—"wield a pen as a tool, a weapon, a means of survival, a magic wand that will attract power, that will draw self-love into our bodies” (p. 163). Thus, Anzaldúa (1983) shares that she herself writes to “record what others erase when I speak, to rewrite the stories others have miswritten about me, about you…To discover myself, to preserve myself, to achieve autonomy” (p. 169). 

However, Anzaldúa (1983) also emphasizes that mujeres of color must contend with mechanisms that silence them and delegitimize their voices and tongues, revealing that the difficulties and “dangers we face as women writers of color are not the same as those of white women” (p. 165). For example, through her work Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, Anzaldúa (1987) decries the “tradition of silence” that suppresses her many voices as a queer Chicana: “my voice: Indian, Spanish, white” and “my woman's voice, my sexual voice, my poet's voice” (p. 59). Additionally, Anzaldúa (1987) describes the burdens of translation that she endures when speaking in her “‘home’ tongues,” such as “Standard Mexican Spanish” and “Spanglish” (p. 56)—a process that renders her multilingual tongue “illegitimate” (p. 59). 

Drawing from these works, and examining the sociocultural and political contexts in which American Dirtwas authored and acclaimed, I argue that identity “policing” and “cancel culture” are not the driving forces behind the novel’s negative reception. Instead, I posit that American Dirt must be critiqued through a politics of authorship that is guided by three critical questions: For whom are stories about the U.S.-Mexico borderlands political and personal? For whom is embodying a cultural bridge a mechanism of oppression and liberation? And for whom are borderlands stories profitable?

 For whom are stories about the U.S.-Mexico borderlands political and personal?

Despite its engagement with topics bearing highly politicized tenor in current U.S. discourses—including the “norteño president” and his rhetoric about “bad hombres” (Cummins, 2020, p. 235)—many reviewers have characterized American Dirt as apolitical. Some have criticized American Dirt for being “determinedly apolitical,” decrying Cummins’ failure to address the political factors fueling the “forced migrations ” she depicts (Sehgal, 2020, para. 15), and her attempts to separate “‘policy issues’” from “‘moral and humanitarian concerns’” (Arce, 2020). However, other reviewers, such as John Grisham (n.d.), have praised American Dirt for being apolitical, applauding that “its message is important and timely, but not political.” Similarly, some positive reviews of American Dirt have alluded to the novel’s political implications while refraining from labeling it a political piece. For example, Sarah Blake (n.d.) claimed the book is “urgent and unforgettable, [it] leaps the borders of the page and demands attention, especially now,” while Stephen King (n.d.) deemed American Dirt “an important voice in the discussion about immigration and los migrantes… put[ing] the lie to the idea that we are being besieged by ‘bad hombres.’” 

I argue that reviews praising American Dirt as an apolitical work highlight the privileged position from which Cummins wrote—and was read and reviewed—compared to mujeres of color writing about and from the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. Specifically, through juxtaposing responses to American Dirt with responses to recent writing by Chicana and Mexicana authors, and drawing from Moraga (1983; 2015), Anzaldúa (1983; 1987),Moraga & Anzaldúa (1983),  and Hurtado’s (2020) claims about both the power and difficulties that women writers of color navigate, I highlight the distance from which Cummins authored American Dirt, and the dangers posed by the novel’s positive reception as an “apolitical” piece. 

For example, like American Dirt, Mexican immigrant writer Valeria Luiselli’s (2019) Lost Children Archive—a novel tracing a woman’s journey as she embarks on a road trip from New York to Arizona with her family and documents the child refugee crisis along the southern U.S border—explores issues tied to the U.S.-Mexico borderlands through a fictional narrative. However, unlike American Dirt, Lost Children Archive was substantially shaped by Luiselli’s personal experiences, including Luiselli’s own road trip from New York to Arizona with her family, and her work as an interpreter for child migrants in federal immigration court (Wood, 2019). And in further contrast with American Dirt, Luiselli’s work has been repeatedly deemed “political.” In particular, reviewers have called Lost Children Archive a work that “drifts almost dreamlike between the personal and political” (Greenblatt, n.d.), is “both personal and global, familial and political” (McGinty, n.d.), and is “political without being propagandistic” (Malone, n.d.).

While Lost Children Archive does address the political forces fueling the injustices it depicts, these reviews highlight that even as a work of fiction, Lost Children Archive is a powerful reminder that for women writers of color, “the political is profoundly personal” (Moraga, 2015, p. xxi). Juxtaposing these reviews with those celebrating American Dirt for being “apolitical” thus illustrates the privileged distance from which Cummins wrote her work, including her limited personal stakes in the discourses and policies shaping the lives of the migrants she aimed to portray. Thus, I argue that praising American Dirt as “apolitical” does more than address Cummins’ lack of engagement with policies or partisan politics; this label reveals—and rewards—Cummins’ distance from the subjects of her story. 

Further, like Lost Children Archive, Myriam Gurba’s critique of American Dirt was intimately shaped by her personal experiences, and received responses that deviated substantially from American Dirt. Throughout her review, Gurba grounds her critiques of the novelin her personal experiences and affective responses as a Chicana “living en el Norte.”Forexample, Gurba compares Cummins to a college roommate who wore Gurba’s clothes as an “ill-fitting Mexican costume,” and describes her visceral reactions to Cummins’ reported efforts to give a face to the “‘faceless brown mass’” at the southern border, which “pissed me off so bad my blood became carbonated.” While Gurba has been praised by many readers for her incisive and personal writing, others have criticized the personal nature, as well as the language and tone, of her critique.

For example, as Gurba shares in the opening of her work, she originally wrote her review of American Dirt at the request of Ms., a feminist magazine.However, Ms. later denied Gurba (2019) the opportunity to publish her finished critique, as its editors suggested that she “lacked the fame to pen something so ‘negative.’” Gurba subsequently published her review online via the academic blog Tropics of Meta, where several readers similarly critiqued Gurba’s tone, as well as her use of language and personal stories. For example, readers suggested that Gurba was 

“negative,” “mean,” “vulgar,” and “whin[y].” As one reader stated, Gurba is “mean y harsh,” and her writing is “an over-worked exercise in meanness,” and “pierde fuerza in being so vehemente, y sobre todo in being so vulgar” (Moreno, 2019).

Some readers also criticized Gurba’s use of Spanglish in her review, asserting that it was unimpressive, “poorly-used” (Pablo, 2020), and that “Spanglish es solo un inglés malo y un castellano peor…” (Leftbanker, 2020), Further, according to several readers, through grounding her review in her personal experiences, Gurba diminished the credibility of her arguments. As one reader claimed, the “worst” parts of Gurba’s review are “about Gurba,” and not truly “about the book” (Tyrer, 2020). And others “challenge[d]” Gurba to write a new, positive and impersonal critique: “to take yourself out of the picture…and find something, anything positive about this book from another person’s perspective” (Julia, 2020). 

These responses to Gurba’s work thus illustrate the silencing, delegitimizing mechanisms and dangers with which contemporary women writers of color penning personal, multi-lingual works (Anzaldúa, 1983; 1987) must still contend. Using what some of her critics seem to suggest is her “lengua pocha” and “pocha perspective,” Gurba wields her writing as a “weapon” to fight the injustices she sees reflected in, and reproduced by, American Dirt (Hurtado, 2020, p. 93); to “rewrite the stories others have miswritten about me, about you” (Anzaldúa, 1983, p. 169). However, in doing so, Gurba and her voice and tongue were deemed illegitimate by many readers, as well as threatened by others—Gurba received death threats in response to her piece (Grady, 2020b).

Thus, I argue that juxtaposing responses to Gurba’s review, as well as to Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive, with those celebrating American Dirt for being “apolitical” suggests that, while Cummins has now publicly claimed her identity as a Latina, she was read and reviewed as—and held the privileges of—a white woman writer. Cummins was not only able to tell and sell a story about highly polarizing, politicized topics without being considered political in the process, but was rewarded for doing so in a system that continues to discourage mujeres of color from telling their own stories and speaking in their many voices and tongues.And I posit that reviews celebrating American Dirt for being “apolitical” help sustain this system, as they suggest that stories about immigration and the U.S.-Mexico borderlands can, and should be, told from a “neutral,” impersonal perspective; a dangerous precedent that heightens women of color writers’ risk of being deemed “mean,” “negative,” “whiny,” or “propagandistic” in drawing from their personal experiences and writing “our stories in our own words” (Moraga & Anzaldúa, 1983, p. 23).

Olivia González is a doctoral student at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism and a former Ronald E. McNair scholar. Working at the intersections of critical media industry studies and education studies, Olivia’s research examines the politics of race and gender within contemporary structures of media education and production. Her current work and dissertation center on the storytelling practices and professional socialization of aspiring film and television creators of color.

Identity, Power, and Soiled Storytelling: Examining the Contemporary Politics of Authorship through American Dirt (1 of 3)

Identity, Power, and Soiled Storytelling: Examining the Contemporary Politics of Authorship through American Dirt (1 of 3)

Olivia González

Who am I to tell their stories, if I cannot tell my own?

Of uncertainty, ambiguity—what are you? Where do you call home? 

I straddle the line between neighboring worlds, un pie plantado en cada lado. 

Soy Mexicana like my papá. And like my mama, I am Anglo. 

But blurring the borders of these worlds is unacceptable. I am pushed out and in. 

Painted with the labels of others, I am “Gringa.” “Pocha.” “Exotic.” “Foreign.”

My tongue twists to speak their languages, but theirs only twist to spit:

“You’re a Hispanic, aren’t you? You don’t look white.”

“No eres una Mexicana auténtica. Eres gringa. You’re not a real Mexican. You’re a white chick.”

But in these discursive borderlands, my güera hands hold privilege and power. 

And through my access to higher education, my own voice can be made even louder. 

So I take up this platform and pass it to las mujeres: Chicana, Latina, y Mexicana.

To amplify the stories of those seeking la liberación, justicia, y esperanza.

—"¿quíen soy yo?”, Olivia González

Introduction

As I leaf through the pages of Jeanine Cummins’ American Dirt, I oscillate between feeling engrossed and repelled; navigating a simultaneous sense of intimate closeness with, yet distance from, the characters. Published in January 2020, American Dirt traces the fictional journey of Lydia, a Mexican bookstore owner, and her young son, Luca, as they flee cartel-bred and led violence in their hometown of Acapulco, Mexico, and attempt to emigrate to the United States. In a multitude of jarring moments, I find myself rubbing my eyes and cheeks to remove the saline stains that have appeared there—tears that fell as Luca’s formed atop a dusty northbound train passing a town near Jalisco.

I am shocked and angered by every moment of my own sorrow. These feel like the tears of a traitor, of a woman transfixed by a spectacle of suffering about those in Mexico and the borderlands—about those like her own familia. I feel a deep part of me ache, struggling to process the haphazard similarities: of the journey that my own papá made around the same age as Luca’s character, traveling from a town in Jalisco across the border into an unfamiliar and unwelcoming land. But as I swallow the lingering sting of sorrow in the back of my throat, I recall that this isn’t my papá’s story. Nor is it my own. In fact, according to myriad critics, it isn’t anyone’s story. As critics have suggested, Luca and Lydia’s narrative is a “hollow, harmful” fiction (Bermudez, 2020a), soiled by its non-Mexican and non-migrant author’s telling and selling of a story that—not rooted in her own experiences, and inaccurately depicting the experiences of her subjects—does not belong to anyone.  

Since its publication, American Dirt has garnered considerable attention and controversy, landing squarely in the center of debates about authorship and appropriation. American Dirt initially received substantial pre-release acclaim from various critics and creatives, such as authors Stephen King and Sandra Cisneros, and actresses Salma Hayek and Yalitza Aparicio. However, criticisms of the noveland of Cummins have since surged and widely circulated, with audiences and authors alike decrying American Dirt as an exemplar of cultural appropriation, and a formidable reminder of extant inequities in the U.S. publishing industries. Some early supporters of the book have thus rescinded their praises, while others have sustained their support—joining Cummins in defending her work, and critiquing the role that “cancel culture” and identity politics have purportedly played in fueling the backlash the book has received. 

As many of those caught in, or reporting on, this controversy have acknowledged, these diverging responses to American Dirt revolve around an increasingly contested question in contemporary discourses: who gets to tell and sell what stories? As a doctoral student researching the storytelling practices of minoritized filmmakers, this question permeates my own writing and reckonings with my power and positionality. Thus, I find myself tangled in complicated ties to Cummins. While I agree with the aforementioned criticisms of American Dirt, I see some of my own anxieties about identity, power, and authorship reflected in a key question that Cummins has repeatedly raised: who am I to tell their stories?

Simultaneously, as a white Chicana born to an Anglo-American mother and a Mexican immigrant father, I have also struggled to make sense of my authority as a critic of Cummins’ work. My childhood was filled with my papá’s stories of his own childhood in Mexico where his family made do with little means, of his journey to the U.S., his experiences teaching himself English to survive an Anglo-American school system, and his forced internalization of the “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” narrative. These stories are not my own; I was born in the U.S. and raised in a California suburb, I had the luxury of learning English at a very young age, and I have spent the past seven years in higher-education classrooms where my time has been spent critiquing ideologies like the “bootstraps” narrative, rather than living them for hope and survival. However, as celebrated Chicana feminist scholar Cherríe Moraga (1983) describes in reference to her Chicana mother, my papá’s stories “crept under my ‘güera’ skin” and his life “into my heart” (p. 28), shaping who I am and how I engage with other stories about immigrants and the U.S.-Mexico border. And yet, contending with the norms of the academic spaces that I inhabit—in which the autobiographical may be considered illegitimate for straying from norms of “neutrality” or objectivity—I find myself questioning what role my güera heart, skin, and voice can and should play in my analyses ofAmerican Dirt. I question: who, and how, am I to critique this story?

Through this work, I take up these questions, and embrace my angry, aching güera heart and pocha tongue to examine American Dirt and what it tells us about the contemporary politics of authorship. Specifically, I examine discourses around American Dirt—including arguments posed by Cummins and her critics and supporters, and my own reactions to the novel and the controversy surrounding it. I inquire: What do the debates about American Dirt tell us about identity, power, and literary production and reception in the United States? What do these debates reveal about the current politics of authorship in the U.S.? And what implications do the creation, reception, and critiques of American Dirt have for audiences and authors, and for students and scholars, such as myself?

 “Timely” Page-Turner or “Trauma Porn?”: Debating American Dirt

Before its official release, American Dirt garnered substantial acclaim and anticipation. With waves of positive pre-release reviews and reports of a “bidding war” ending in a million-dollar publishing deal, critics deemed American Dirt one of, if not the, “most anticipated release of 2020” (Varela, 2020, para. 2). In the months leading up to the book’s publication, handfuls of writers produced glowing advance reviews, calling American Dirt “extraordinary”(Stephen King, n.d.), “important and timely…rich in authenticity” (John Grisham, n.d.), and“relevant, powerful, extraordinary” (Kristin Hannah, n.d.). Additionally, renowned media executive Oprah Winfrey selected American Dirt to join Oprah’s Book Club—a “coveted and exclusive fraternity” known for bolstering attention and sales for the books inducted as its members (Nielsen, 2011, para. 1). Transmitting the decision via Twitter, Winfrey described American Dirt as “a heart-wrenching page-turner” (oprahsbookclub, 2020) that “changed the way I see what it means to be a migrant in a whole new way” (Winfrey, 2020).  

However, following American Dirt’s release and its selection for Oprah’s Book Club, both Cummins and Winfrey were quickly met with backlash and a widespread call to boycott the book. Twitter users, many of whom identified as Mexicans and immigrants, critiqued the novel’s inaccurate and stereotypical portrayal of its subjects—calling American Dirt, and Winfrey’s decision to promote it, “disappointing” (von Essen, 2020). Others claimed that through this book, Cummins—who had primarily publicly identified herself as white and her family as “mostly” white “in every practical way” (Cummins, 2015) prior to publishing American Dirt—was engaging in cultural appropriation and “brown-face” (Rodriguez, 2020, para. 2). And many Twitter users critiqued the book and the praise it was receiving in relation to the realities of a publishing industry dominated by white authors and critics—an industry that is “so out of touch—that so rarely supports immigrants to tell our own stories—eager to make money off of our suffering with a cheap, stereotypical thrill” (Bermudez, 2020b). 

Additionally, Mexican, Latinx, and Chicanx writers’ critiques of American Dirt—many of which had been published before the novel’s release, but were buried beneath a mountain of positive pre-release publicity—began widely circulating among this ever-expanding chorus of critiques on Twitter. For example, Chicana writer Myriam Gurba’s review of American Dirt, which was originally published in December of 2019, came to the fore of the debates. In a piece titled “Pendeja, You Ain’t Steinbeck: My Bronca with Fake-Ass Social Justice Literature,” Gurba (2019) describes American Dirt as a “trauma porn that wears a social justice fig leaf,” and critiques Cummins’ decision to write it—highlighting that while Cummins herself acknowledged that she “lacked the qualifications to write Dirt…she did it anyways. For a seven-figure sum.” And as Gurba claims, Cummins’ lack of qualifications is evident in the book, which reads like it was written by someone who is neither Mexican nor an immigrant. According to Gurba (2019), this is particularly evinced by the novel’s protagonist, Lydia, in whom readers see Mexico “through the eyes of a pearl-clutching American tourist.” 

Similarly, Mexican American author David Bowles (2020) penned a lengthy critique of American Dirt, calling ita “harmful, appropriating, inaccurate, trauma-porn melodrama.” Like Gurba, Bowles published his piece online before American Dirt’s official release, and highlighted the various ways in which Cummins’ perspective as a non-Mexican and non-migrant author lead to inaccurate and stereotypical portrayals of Mexico. Additionally, as Gurba and Bowles’ critiques circulated in the months following American Dirt’s release, they collaborated with immigration journalist and writer Robert Lovato to create a movement named #DignidadLiteraria. Announced on January 26thvia Twitter, #DignidadLiteraria called on the U.S. publishing industry to interrogate and bolster its support for Latinx stories and storytellers. The movement also penned a letter, signed by 142 writers, to Oprah Winfrey, imploring her to remove American Dirt from her book club (Pineda, 2020b). 

However, Winfrey and other early supporters, such as Sandra Cisneros, have “doubled down” on their support for American Dirt (Pineda, 2020a, para. 3), questioning or critiquing the backlash the book has received. For example, Cisneros has reaffirmed her belief that American Dirt is “the great novel of las Americas,” and called critics of the work “exagerados” (cited in Reichard, 2020). Additionally, Winfrey has denied #DignidadLiteraria’s request to remove American Dirt from her book club, claiming that doing so would suggest that “anybody is subject to being rescinded, silenced, erased” (cited in Associated Press, 2020, para. 6). 

Some conservative columnists have also defended Cummins, deeming her avictim of “cancel culture.” For example, in an article titled “American Dirt: ‘Cancel culture’ embraces book burning in the digital age,” Christian Toto (2020) claims that “identity politics” helped fuel the “fury” toward Cummins and American Dirt, and critiques the notion that “only Latino artists can tell stories from their community from a pre-set narrative.” Similarly, New York Post columnist Karol Markowicz (2020) has attributed what she described as “frothing-at-the-mouth criticism” of American Dirt to issues of “political correctness” and “cancel culture.”  Markowicz (2020) suggests that critiques related to Cummins’ identity as a white woman who “wrote about something other than her own lived experience” represents “something strange and ugly,” and asserts that efforts to “cancel” Cummins are fueled by a “trial-by-mob culture.”

Olivia González is a doctoral student at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism and a former Ronald E. McNair scholar. Working at the intersections of critical media industry studies and education studies, Olivia’s research examines the politics of race and gender within contemporary structures of media education and production. Her current work and dissertation center on the storytelling practices and professional socialization of aspiring film and television creators of color.



Desert Island Comics (Issue 2) Andrew Edwards

It would be easy to choose five comics written by Alan Moore to fill this list. After all, I decided to do my PhD on his work, but it feels a lot like cheating to just rattle of what I think are his five best works (From Hell, Watchmen, The League of Extraordinary Gentleman, Miracleman and Swamp Thing, if you’re interested). So I thought it would a bit fairer, and more interesting, to choose my top five single issue comics instead (mostly), and focus on some obscure choices to throw into the mix too. 

Sandman #14

My first experience of reading Sandmanwas buying #1 and #2 when they were first published. I bought them on a school trip to London, along with Black Orchid#1-3 and the trade paperback of Frank Miller’s Dark Knight Returns. I religiously bought Sandmanas a monthly comics throughout its entire run, but it’s some of the early issues that stay in my memory the most clearly, and none more so than #14’s ‘Collectors’. I was disturbed by the concept – a serial killer convention – and various moments that have imprinted themselves on my memory ever since. It’s the contextualisation of the serial killer within the quotidian convention that disturbed me then, and still does now. It feel like an uncomfortable possibility. I re-read it a few days ago, for the first time lord-knows-how-many years, and it’s power remains undimmed. I’d place it in Gaiman’s top 10 works easily.

Ghosts #107

Sticking with horror, this issue is one from childhood that I randomly bought from a newsagents in, I think, Bala in North Wales, sometime in the early 80s. Trips to places were my opportunity to call in to random newsagents who often had piles of older American comics cluttering up their shelves, although I distinctly remember this comic being on a spinner rack, probably the first one I ever saw.

I was a reader of British humour comics The Dandy and The Beano, alongside the occasional American comic that I could find on trips (DC dominated my finds). Ghosts#107 was the first non-humour, non-superhero comic I’d ever read and, boy, did it make its mark on me. It was a three part tale of a medieval crown that made its way through history causing tragedy for those who wore it. The stories were scripted by Robert Kanigher, with art by Howard Bender, Rodin Rodriguez and Adrian Gonzales. For a kid used to the slapstick comedy of humour comics, and superhero battles, this comic introduced me to the way that the sweep of history, and historical artefacts, can profoundly influence and change lives. It’s worth checking out the back issue bins for.

Watchmen #4

OK, so an Alan Moore-scripted comic has made it on to my list despite my self-imposed restrictions, but I’ve limited myself to a single issue. And what an issue it was! I first read Watchmenin single issue form, in one sitting, in the late eighties, and #4 really brought home to me just how different this series was going to be. I would have been around 13 or 14 when I read it, and it was the first time that I became consciously aware of how narrative and structure can be used for effect. I showed me that narratives didn’t have to start at point A and move chronologically through B, C, D etc. You could skip, repeat, move backwards and forwards, and experience the use of time in comics in new and exciting ways. All these years later, it is still my favourite issue of the series.

Marvel Superheroes Secret Wars #2 (UK Edition)

Ok, ok – I can almost hear some of you sniggering at the back… For its time, and for an 11 year old boy like I was, this was incredible. My only previous exposure to superhero comics was the odd DC I randomly found on trips from home. I’m not referring to the US version either, but the Marvel UK version. Here I discovered the X-Men, Avengers, Dr Doom, Magneto and more. I loved the bizarre portraits of Marvel heroes created by the Secret Artist, and enjoyed the reprints of John Byrne’s Alpha Flighttoo; both first appeared in #2, which is why I’ve chosen this particular issue. This was the gateway to American super heroes, and American comics, and for that I’ll always be grateful.

Brief Interlude

It’s clear that nostalgia is currently dominating my thinking. Perhaps it’s because I’m getting older, and perhaps its heightened by the new changes we are all experiencing in real life. I do also love modern comics, but it’s the comfort that memories of childhood and comics that have influenced my choices. Even then, another day may have seen me choose something by Harvey Pekar, or Art Spiegelman’s Maus, or even the Giffen - Dematteis Justice League. It was hard to narrow this list down to five, let me tell you. However, in breaking all previous conventions in this list, here’s my final choice.

Black Hammer

I’ve only recently read (binged) all of these comics by Jeff Lemire and artist Dean Ormston, and while I haven’t processed my thoughts on them in any intellectual or critical way, I can say that I loved them on the level of my gut reaction. I found them captivating because it tickles the parts of me that love superhero comic history, alternative worlds in science fiction, Twin Peaks level weirdness, and older and disillusioned heroes struggling to make meaning for their lives and their world. It’s a stone cold contemporary classic that you are compelled to keep reading to find out what happens next.

Dr Andrew Edwards is a writer and scholar. His research interests include comics and graphic novels, science fiction, horror, intertextuality, and representations of gender. He is currently working on a number of writing projects. He is also an Academic Skills Tutor at Wrexham Glyndwr University. He can be followed on Twitter: @AndrewEdwards88  

Desert Island Comics (Issue 1) Joan Ormrod

Image designed by Rutherford.

Like many comics readers, I love hearing recommendations from other scholars and fans. It’s never healthy for the bank balance, but as Henry once said to me, “it’s expensive if you do it right.” (He was referring to superhero comics, but the sentiment is true for the medium in general, I’d say). Over the past two weeks, I’ve been involved in the virtual book-club on Henry’s new monograph, Comics and Stuff, and let me tell you: it’s a dangerous place to be! With so many references and recommendations flying around, I found myself heading frantically to online shops afterwards. (I know, I know, a first-world ‘problem’ to be sure.) One thing is abundantly clear: we’re gonna need a bigger house!

To RSVP for the final panel on Tuesday June 30th at 10 a.m (Pacific ST)/ 18:00 (British ST), head here to register for the Zoom link. We would be honored if you would join us.

When Julia Round and I ran a series on British Comics late in 2019 on this website, I began asking contributors to discuss some of their favorite comics, comic strips, and/ or graphic novels. In today’s first installment, we have Dr Joan Ormod sharing some of her favorites (and it’s great to see Bryan Talbot’s Alice in Sunderland in there, which is one of Henry’s case studies in Comics and Stuff).

—William Proctor, Associate Editor.

Joan Ormod

It’s tough deciding on the top five comics and so I tried to have a reasonable spread of comics that have inspired or awed me. The choices are in no particular order but can be viewed in linear time. So, some of the first comics I read to the latest. One thing I noticed is the necessity of the words and images working together and the first of these choices illustrates this really well.

1.     ‘Sandra of the Secret Ballet’ – art by Paddy Brennan, story unknown

Sandra Wilson appeared in Judy from issue #1 (16/01/1060) and for most of the 1960s to the 1980s, the latter in reprints of the earlier stories when Judy merged with Emma. She was a great role model for girls in that era as she was brilliant dancer, created ballets and had adventures (not for her a husband two children and domestic bliss).  

Her first adventure was to be kidnapped by Nina Sierra, a famous ballerina, who spirited orphans away from their abusive homes and trained them to become ballet dancers.  Ok so in the post Jimmy Savile era there would be all sorts of social services and police investigations going on but this was the innocent 1950s.  The stories and the images worked organically – Paddy Brennan was, in my opinion, the best artist at representing ballet. Ron Smith who drew the much more famous Moira Kent, just couldn’t get the feet and the positions right.  It is such a shame that the writer was unknown, but they obviously knew what would appeal to young girls – a secret castle on a secluded island, loads of orphan girls who were fabulous dancers and a heroine who toured the world, saved her ballet teacher from ritual sacrifice in Spain and foiled numerous evil plots.  

There was also a cast of visitors to the castle from Boris Rambine (modelled on Boris Karloff) who hypnotised the girls, a princess in hiding and a Billy Butlin clone who wanted to turn the castle into a holiday park.  Somehow the series lost its magic when Sandra graduated and became a star.

I have included a few pages of Sandra stories. From #30 (06/08/1960), pages 2 and 3 – this is the story that introduces Alicia, queen of an Eastern European country, who happens to be a brilliant dance in hiding in the castle.  

Brennan is a master of the black and white on the comics page and his drawings of the secret passages make you believe this is a real place.

The second story is the culmination of Sandra’s journey to Spain to save her dancing teacher, Nina Sierra from being forced to dance to death in the Ritual of the Flaming Sun.  Gypsies in this story come from a long line of gypsies in British children’s literature.  They were an exotic and ancient people with strange and sometimes cruel customs. Sandra, of course, saves Nina Sierra by taking her place and dancing through the night.  Spain at this time was also an exotic destination as package holidays were only just becoming possible for mass tourists.  Brennan’s use of tonal line work gives this story its atmosphere.  Somehow, when his work was colored, for reprints in the 1980s, it lost some of its magic.

What I said earlier about the organic nature of stories and art can be seen in some of the Sandra stories with artwork by a different artist.  They just weren’t the same.

2.     Lois Lane – art Kurt Schaffenberger, stories diverse

I included Lois Lane because of the art by Kurt Schaffenberger which fit the sappy stories so well.  His style was clean and uncluttered and he seemed to take some of the idiotic stories seriously.  Schaffenberger was one of the writers and artists who transferred to DC after Fawcett was closed when they lost a court battle against DC for copyright to Captain Marvel (now called Shazam).  Some of the Lois Lane stories were written by Otto Binder, also from Fawcett and that innocent vibe from Captain Marvel comes through in a lot of these stories.

Superman and Lois Lane’s relationship was quite toxic. She was always being tested by Superman and punished for the most slight of reasons.  It was similar to the sex comedies of Rock Hudson and Doris Day (without the sex, of course) in a battle of the sexes.  Lois loved Superman but not Clark, Clark loved Lois but wouldn’t reveal he was Superman until she showed him she preferred him. The colour was startling on the news rack and much more glamourous than the UK comics which were often in black and white inside.

The editor of this series, Mort Weisinger, always had the most alluring premises.  This cover from Lois Lane #44, October 1963 shows Lois and Lana Lang, her rival, tricking Superman into taking a lie detector.  When I saw this cover in a newsagent window, I had to have the comic to find out whom he preferred.  In 1964 comics were sold by the yard and you took pot luck which ones were available in any shop.  Unfortunately, by the time I saved enough money to buy it, it had been sold and I never saw it again, until a few years ago when I managed to get a copy. You got your money’s worth too.  There were three stories in each issue.  Here’s the first page with Schaffenberger’s signature telephone panel.  He was also allowed to sign his name – a practice that few artists were allowed to do until Marvel opened up the way for artists and writers to get credits.

3.     Wonder Woman – art and stories George Pérez

I spent several years writing a book on Wonder Woman, a character who fascinated me as she was different from every other female character I’d encountered.  I had a sneaky liking for the early 1960s stories on Paradise Island when she was written by Robert Kanigher and drawn by Mike Esposito and Ross Andru.  But she never really came to life until the title was taken over by George Pérez in the 1987 post Crisis reboot under Karen Berger’s brilliant Vertigo line.  For the first time the Wonder Woman I imagined became real. She was a naïve, kind and empathic person who was often bewildered by the cruelty and suffering she encountered in man’s world. 

The stories by Pérez were sensitive and beautifully drawn but the characters came to life when he worked with Mindy Newall. The best of these was ‘Chalk Drawings’ (#46 September 1990) in which there is little superheroic action.  In it, Vanessa, Wonder Woman’s young friend, attends the funeral of her best friend, Lucy Spears, a girl who has it all but who commits suicide.  The story explores some of the toxic themes surrounding fame, fandom, beauty and consumerism.  Lucy’s parent don’t understand why she committed suicide but the subtext tells it all, when someone has it all and its just never enough.  Jill Thompson’s sensitive artwork was just right for this story.

4.     Here – Richard McGuire

Richard McGuire’s ‘Here’ first appeared in Art Spiegelman’s Raw v.2, n.1, 1989.   At first glance ‘Here’ (1989) appears an unremarkable (and rather confusing) account of the history of a space, rendered in a clean line style, each page consisting of 6 panels.  However, the aim of Raw was to produce commix that pushed the boundaries of the medium and challenged the reader.  ‘Here’ is certainly a challenging read for there is no clear cause and effect to direct the narrative and no protagonist to incite action.  Rather, McGuire uses 36 panels to show the formation of the world, to reflect on evolution, vast time spans encompass the rise and decline of human cultures down to the lifespan of a human being.  This comic is as much about time as ‘here’. It is impossible to describe a specific story from the comic but I love it because it show the potential for the form to express more than simple stories.

McGuire claimed he conceived the idea when he saw all the screens open on an Apple computer – a few pages show how this is reflected in the construction of the panels.  He spent several years developing his original six pages into a book. The book does expand the ideas but, in my opinion, its nowhere as powerful as the comic.  You can get the full six pages here 

There is also a film produced by art students attempting to adapt the comic into a film:

An article by Chris Ware on the book Here; and a film of the book. 

5.     Alice in Sunderland, Bryan Talbot

Every Desert Island castaway needs a book that will keep them engrossed for many years (and doesn’t it feel like we’re in that situation at the moment when we are in lockdown?  The one that I would still keep coming back to is Alice in Sunderland by Bryan Talbot.  Like ‘Here’, Alice in Sunderland is more than just an exploration of Alice in Wonderland.  It is about telling stories and is described by Talbot as ‘an entertainment’. He starts off in the Sunderland Empire introducing the reader to his stories.  They span the history of the North East (which naturally draws me in since that’s where I come from), folk tales and legends such as the Lampton Worm (a precursor of Jabberwocky), the history of comics all wrapped into the story of the genesis of Alice. His art styles are gloriously diverse and experimental. His tales something like the Borges ‘Garden of Forking Paths’ with infinite possibilities and often ventures into cul-de-sacs and alternate storylines.  

I enjoyed this so much that after reading it I tried to find some of the places in Sunderland.  I have one disagreement with Bryan and that is in his affirmation that Bede lived in Sunderland.  He lived for most of his life in Jarrow St. Paul’s monastery.  Nevertheless, this book would keep me occupied for many years just in awe of its rich imagery and stories. 

This page shows the complexity of the images as it collages photos, drawings and paintings on the page and shows the plasticity of the comics form.

This page is a mixture of different Bryans as audience member, as actor, as artist.  It captures the fantastic nature of Alice in Wonderland’s dream world.

Returning to my original statement, it was only when I began to compile these comics that I realised how much I enjoy a comic where the art and story work well together.  They are also inspirational.  The list is unadventurous – Alice in Sunderland would likely feature in several top ten lists of any comics reader.  But I make no apologies.  The first two are comics I grew up with and inspired me to think beyond what was expected of me as a girl.  Wonder Woman was meant to inspire women to become empowered.  The last two are inspirational because they prompt me to think and wonder.

Dr Joan Ormrod is a senior lecturer in the Department of Media at Manchester Metropolitan University.  She specializes in teaching subcultures, comics, fantasy and girlhood.  She has published widely on these topics and she has edited books on time travel, superheroes and adventure sports. Her latest monograph, Wonder Woman, the Female Body and Popular Culture was published in February 2020 and is available now.  Joan is the editor of Routledge’s Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics and she is on the organizing committee of the annual conference of Graphic Novels and Comics.  She is currently researching girlhood and teenage comics in the UK 1955-1975.

Thematic, a Music Marketplace for Influencers and Producers: Digital Labor and the Creative Class (3 of 3)

Thematic, a Music Marketplace for Influencers and Producers: Digital Labor and the Creative Class (3 of 3)

Edward B. Kang

User Interfaces: Interactive Library vs. Isolated Metrics 

In this brief section before the conclusion, I navigate the user interfaces of Thematic afforded to both Music Artists and Content Creators to simply exhibit how this inequality between the two groups is embedded into the platform itself. Returning to Terranova’s idea of the translucent commodity, the labor that shines through the platform is truly spectacular for the Content Creator. The main page shows “Recent Pickups” to display songs that were recently used in influencer videos, “Selected for [Content Creator]” and “Top Projects for [Content Creator]” to direct the Content Creator to other songs and playlists based on their previous downloads, “Staff Picks” to let the Content Creator know what the Thematic team is currently backing, and “New Music”, which speaks for itself. Upon clicking the “Browse Music” tab, there is a seemingly endless list of songs, each with their own beautiful album cover provided by Music Artists, which can then be filtered according to genre, community, vocal, tempo, and mood. The “Projects” tab allows the Content Creator to create personal playlists, and the “Downloads” tab lists recent downloads. For the Content Creator, Thematic serves as an easy-to-use, beautiful, and interactive library and personal storage of free songs. 

Music catalogue for Content Creators (hellothematic.com)

Filters for searching music (hellothematic.com)

The interface for the Music Artist is in comparison quite dry. Once logged in as Music Artist, the user no longer has access to any parts of the vast library of music, which even the general unregistered visitor can browse, and only has access to two pages: the submission portal through which the Music Artist submits music to be reviewed by Thematic’s A&R team, and the statistics page, which shows the specific metrics of the number of times their songs were used and the number of views of the videos their songs are featured on. In contrast to the democratic rhetoric of community that Thematic employs in its promotion, Music Artists have no real access to the broader community that their music and Content Creators operate in. They are closed off behind walls of numbers that don’t necessarily directly translate into other forms of valuable quantification like revenue or social media following. The labor that shines through here is anything but spectacular, with most of the services offered being relegated to algorithms. This is not to say that the maintenance and development of algorithms is not labor-intensive, but it pales in comparison to the coupling of both the human-intensive labor of curation, quality control, and organization with algorithmically derived personal picks for Content Creators. With these additional absences of avenues for engagement with the broader community shown through the design of the actual user interface, the uneven terms of participation between the Music Artist and Content Creator as well as the contradictions between promotion and actual user experience become ever more apparent. 

Tracking page for Music Producers

Conclusion

“From the very beginning, I’ve always wanted to empower and give back to creators,” Michelle Phan told us. “Since uploading my first video 12 years ago, I’ve experienced lawsuits and seen first-hand what happens when big music labels come in and make copyright infringement claims.” 

“I understand intimately the challenges facing creators today. Through Thematic, I hope to protect creators and artists and provide a platform where they can connect, safely and free.” (Resnikoff, 2019) 

While I don’t intend this paper to be a direct challenge against Michelle Phan’s motives, I do think that in her efforts to empower Content Creators, such as herself, she overlooks some of the pressing ramifications that those efforts can entail for Music Artists. As I showed through my examination of the forward-facing promotional materials, to the underlying contractual agreements, and finally to the separate user interfaces themselves, the terms of participation on Thematic are not always communal and democratic nor are they mutually beneficial for both Music Artists and Content Creators. Although the broader social conditions in which the cultural industries operate that Terranova, Hesmondhalgh, and McRobbie, among others, have outlined, may have normalized such precarious work to a certain extent, as an influential figurehead of a rapidly growing platform like Thematic that stands to advocate for the democratic production of culture on digital platforms, Michelle Phan has the power to at least begin to veer us in a direction that resists or circumvents those oppressive social conditions. 

Finally, even though I take in this present paper a critical stance towards Thematic, I acknowledge that at the time of writing, the platform is still in public beta testing, and there is thus ample opportunity for improvements to be made. Especially as the platform garners more serious investors, for which the recruitment process has just ended, and the platform inevitably moves from a free one to a paid, most likely subscription-based one, it will be imperative for the Thematic team led by Michelle Phan, CEO Marc Schrobilgen and COO Aubrey Marshall, to be adamant in their support for the increased protection of Music Artists on the platform. This may take the form of technical interventions I suggested earlier to more safely deliver the music content uploaded, a broader application of the approval feature that allows Music Artists to also have a say in which videos their music can be featured, easier access for Music Artists to engage with the broader community, and an overall re-evaluation of the separate Artist and Creator Agreements that more thoroughly hold Thematic responsible in protecting and crediting Music Artists. It may also take the form of introducing new services altogether such as the feature for Content Creators to also provide their video-making services to Music Artists who want content released under their name – i.e. lyric videos or music videos. There are indeed many practical ways for the Thematic team to truly better democratize the platform. To this end, I want to conclude on a more hopeful note and write that, moving forward, I trust Phan and her team will take these many possibilities into consideration, and truly use Thematic to build, in their own words, “a community for the community” (Thematic). 

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