Global Fandom: Şebnem Baran (Turkey)

Politics: Where the Global and the Local Meet in Fandoms of Turkey By Şebnem Baran

The summer of 2021 offers an interesting moment to look at the state of fans and fandoms in Turkey. Publicly discussed incidents involving  fans reveal clues about the increasing political and cultural divide while also demonstrating the influence of transnational media flows on the fan experience.  

Media flows originating from South Korea are at the center of the popular debates about transnational influence. This past August, Turkish media platforms became inundated with news articles about three young girls who went missing. The initial coverage alleged that the girls, who were K-Pop fans, had run away from home to go to Korea. After returning to their homes, the girls denied that was the case. However, their statements didn't attract the same level of attention. The debate had already shifted towards the effects of K-drama and K-pop on Turkey's youth—a topic that journalists and academics in Turkey have recurringly explored. Soon after the girls' return, it was reported1 that Turkey's Family and Social Services Ministry was launching an investigation about the Korean content's influence, including the allegations about "the genderless lifestyle" encouraged by K-pop.

Although there is a proliferation of master's theses on Hallyu—perhaps indicating generational trends for the aca-fans—academic literature on K-pop and K-drama fans in Turkey do not always follow the mainstream framework of fan studies. While some scholars focus on audience reception from a media studies perspective, some others are more interested in the cultural impact. The latter group’s sociological interest sometimes extends to the conservative families’ anxieties about Hallyu’s influence on their kids’ religiosity.

This panic is reminiscent of the earlier public discourses on the "corruptive" effects of transnational cultural flows on the youth. These concerns were intricately related to the stereotypical risks associated with unquestioned fan devotion and loyalty. One of the memorable examples among the many reiterations in the past was the murders and suicides attributed to heavy metal music consumption in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

The doubts about foreign influence still remain intact—especially among the conservative groups. Nevertheless, there is less stigma about being a fan. Since those days, Turkey has already gone through  the "mainstreaming" of fans, a process well explored by fan studies scholars in the Anglo- American world. Like in many other places, fans' increasing visibility on social media keeps underlining their role in the market as consumers in Turkey. Both content creators and critics do not hesitate to acknowledge fans' importance for the industry.

The success of Turkish drama exports in the 2000s was a turning point for this awareness. Fans had existed as devoted members of the audience along with the regular viewers before this turning point. However, in the 2000s, the devotion that was once attributed to the smaller groups gained a new meaning. First, the "Middle Eastern" fans [2] emerged as the"adoring other" while conjuring up the complex colonial tensions within the region. Then, new groups of fans from different regions, such as Latin America, entered the picture with the increasing volume of Turkish drama exports. Through transnational flows of television, global fans' visibility contributed to the solidification of the TV fandom as a publicly recognized cultural category. Again in the 2000s, the growth of the TV sector in Turkey facilitated more coverage about the domestic fandoms. Many news reports touched upon the devotion of TV fans. For example, Kurtlar Vadisi (Valley of the Wolves), a popular show of its time that later became a long-running franchise, was a frequent topic of these reports. Some fans had followed the real-life rituals of mourning after the death of one of the show's leading characters, which remained a frequently repeated example of Turkish TV fans' loyalty.

With the news coverage about the global fans as well as their Turkish counterparts' devotion, a new understanding of fandom was fully established. As a result, TV fans in Turkey gained more mainstream visibility similar to the celebrity, music and sports fans' statuses in public. This progression is comparable to the accounts discussed in the English language fan studies literature. Since gaining more mainstream visibility and acceptance, fans in Turkey sped up the entry of global fan practices and vocabulary into the public discourse by causing their favorite shows to trend on social media, warning "regular viewers" about sharing "spoilers" and publicly "shipping" characters as well as the actors portraying them.

Though the importance of transnational flows and globalization of fan practices via the Internet is undeniable, local circumstances had a big role in shaping the state of fans and fandoms in Turkey. During the ongoing political transformation of the country, fans became more visible through their activism. My own work focuses on two cases where this visibility became intertwined with political tension in the country. The fans of Behzat Ç. and Leyla ileMecnun—two TV shows with small but vocal fan followings—made a name for themselves through their activism to keep the shows on air. For example, Behzat Ç. fans immediately organized to prevent an impending cancellation when the show's slot was changed due to the low ratings. In addition to the fans' posts on online platforms, fans ofGençlerbirliği, the soccer team Behzat supports on the show, protested the show's broadcaster during a game. Leyla ile Mecnun fans similarly made it to the news by causing the show to trend on IMBD's list of highest-rated shows inresponse to a TV critic's article touching upon the low ratings.

As a detective show including storylines about political corruption, Behzat Ç. quickly claimed a more political tone embraced by the young people opposing the mainstream political divides. The politicization of the show paved the way for a lot of fines, which were usually justified by the show's depiction of alcohol use and profanity rather than commenting on the political critique. Despite the constant threat of cancellation, the show was able to survive until the end of its third season in 2013. Leyla ile Mecnun, an absurdist comedy that aired on the public broadcaster, had a more subtle engagement with politics until the cast and crew participated in the Gezi Protests in 2013. Initially starting with a group protesting the upcoming demolition of the Gezi Park in Taksim, these protests later became a movement criticizing the AKP government. Leyla ile Mecnun's cancellation after the cast and crew's participation in the protests caused a fan uproar and culminated in a political discussion in the parliament.

 During the same protests, sports fan groups like Çarşı became visible, creating new possibilities for research {3] on fan politicization. This specific moment of fan visibility during a political crisis reveals how political motives can unite media and sports fans. It is also important to mention the pre-existing overlap between sports and media fandoms. After all, Leyla ile Mecnun's lead character Mecnun is a devout fan of Beşiktaş, the same soccer team supported by the fan group Çarşı. This enables a synergistic connection also seen between Behzat Ç. and Gençlerbirliği fandoms.

 Although sports fandom research and my discussion of the sports fans have focused more on the soccer fans in Turkey so far, I believe Turkey's participation in the women's Olympic volleyball tournament in Tokyo has opened new possibilities for surveying the connection between local politics and fan practices. Despite the mainstream popularity of soccer, other sports like basketball and volleyball—with both men's and women's teams—had occasionally gained popular followings at the time of international tournaments. The recent politicization of the fan support for the women's volleyball team distinguished this case from the earlier examples.

In the summer of 2021, the women's volleyball team reached the quarterfinals during the Olympics. Their popularity continued as they moved to the European Championship Tournament. Two highly publicized incidents followed their initial success in the Olympics. First, a conservative figure, İhsan Şenocak, criticized4 the visibility of the players' bodies and the nickname given to them. According to Şenocak, the team's players did not deserve to be called "Filenin Sultanları" or "the Sultans of the Net," for they were not the rightful owners of the conservative imperial legacy embodied by the "Sultan" title. Şenocak's view about women's place in the public sphere was associated with the conservative agendas, hence causing strong reactions among the anti-conservative critics. As his tweet circulated, many users, including prominent political figures and celebrities, showed support for the volleyball team online.

Then, an Instagram post of Ebrar Karakurt, one of the most successful players, with her rumored girlfriend, instigated a new wave of anti-LGBTQ+ attacks. Like the previous incident, many fans and non-fans supported Ebrar Kararkurt and the team. Once again, the clash coincided with the political and cultural divides about religion's role in the public sphere. The discussions inevitably referred to the pre-existing crises regarding the conservative attacks on the LGBTQ+community. Taylan Antalyalı, a player from the soccer team Galatasaray, was similarly targeted for wearing a Pride T-shirt in June—the same month İstanbul Pride March was dispersed by the police with force. LGBTQ+ rights, like women's rights, were already elements of political polarization. Karakurt's post reignited the clash and earned more support for the team at the same time. Her successful performance following the online attacks further fueled the growing fandom's devotion both for her and for the team.

After the team qualified for the semifinals, another controversy followed. On social media, some users alleged that TRT, the public broadcaster, knowingly cut the team's chanting of İzmir Marşı, an anthem that has been embraced as a symbol of defiance against the conservative government. TRT General Manager Zahid Sobacı immediately responded on Twitter by saying TRT had no say over the live broadcast controlled by the broadcaster in Bulgaria. [5] All these controversies, along with Karakurt's viral social media posts combining humor and determination to win, contributed to the visibility of Turkey's women's national team. With popular support for the team becoming stronger, they ended the European Championship with a bronze medal.

 Like the cases of Behzat Ç. and Leyla ile Mecnun, the local political specificities affected how fan activism unfolded in Turkey's women's national team. While politicization followed the fan loyalties in these earlier examples, in the case of Turkey's women's national volleyball team, the pre-existing polarization and politicization intensified the fan activism and helped the fandom grow.

 This recipe for an authentic connection depends on a delicate configuration informed by the political context. For example, Behzat Ç., which returned to an online streaming platform with new episodes in 2019, failed to garner the same level of fan devotion it had six years ago. The blunt political criticism in the show was replaced with a more vagueversion avoiding direct targets. This choice cost the show its previous political relevance and the fan devotion it used togenerate. Therefore, the street art-like images of the lead character Behzat Ç. and his nemesis Ercüment, who now has his own spin-off, painted on the walls in İstanbul seem more like a marketing effort than real fan work to me. (Please see Figure-1)

Figure-1 : Behzat Ç. and Ercüment Çözer images. Photo by Şebnem Baran

Leyla ile Mecnun has similarly come back with new episodes in early September. It will be interesting to see if the show would be able to re-establish an authentic connection in a way Behzat Ç. could not in its second life.

While most of the examples I shared focus on fan activism vividly connected to the political divides in the country, it is important to acknowledge there are other fandoms, which are less preoccupied with the same political divides. I also would like to mention that North American and Western European content flows still inspire an important share of the fandoms in Turkey. A frequently Instagrammed proof is a mural in Karaköy, İstanbul depicting Tokyo, one of the main characters from Netflix's Casa de Papel/Money Heist. (Please see Figure-2).

Figure-2: A mural depicting Tokyo from Netflix's Casa de Papel/Money Heist. Photo by Şebnem Baran.

Nevertheless, I believe the global and the local are still going hand in hand in informing most Turkish fans' experiences.An image posted by a fan account on Instagram is a terrific example of this glocalization embedded. (Please see Figure-3). The caption under the image describes it as "Sailor Moon style Sultans of the Net," demonstrating the importance ofglobal images, practices, and vocabulary in shaping the responses to local specificities.

Figure-3: Screenshot of turkmillitakimleri1 account's post. Captured by Şebnem Baran. Although the original post didn't identify the artist, an attribution to Hong Kong-based illustrator Jasmine Tse's Instagram account @tsesaipei was added later.

Şebnem Baran is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Smith College's Film and Media Studies Department. She received her doctorate in Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Southern California in 2018. Baran's dissertation explores how Anglo-American quality programming standards are claiming more importance in the global television market. Her work on Behzat Ç. and Leyla ile Mecnun surveys the Turkish interpretation of quality TV and its intersection with fan activism. In addition to fan studies, her research interests include transnational television flows, quality TV, media industries, online streaming, and audience studies.  

[1] https://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/ministry-to-monitor-effects-of-k-pop-on-young-turks-167460

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCI-AahMapU

[3] For some examples:

https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/mono/10.4324/9780429285288/football-fandom-protest-democracy-dağhan-irak

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1012690217702944

[4] https://twitter.com/ihsansenocak/status/1419296320267997187?s=20

[5] https://twitter.com/zahidsobaci/status/1433040940038565895?s=20

Global Fandom Conversations (Round One): Bertha Chin, Lori Moromoto, Rukmini Pande (Part Two)

3.     To what degree do fandoms still reflect local cultural traditions and practices? 

RP: I think this is a very broad question that could have radically different responses. I’ll take this opportunity to reflect on a trend that I’ve noticed amongst transnational fandom conversations over the last few years. This encompasses parallel processes of othering and simplification that take place when discussing specific cultural issues reflected in non-anglophone media texts and their fandom communities. 

The process of othering is perhaps a familiar one to most scholars. It happens when certain practices specific to those fandoms - pertaining to fanart, fanfiction, etiquette around creator contact, etc - are seen as “problematic” by fans unfamiliar to those milieus. The resulting critique can also impose un-nuanced ideas around identity and representation. This is obviously a troubling phenomenon and is rightfully pushed back against by fans who see it as a misrepresentation of their own specific fan practices as shaped by local histories, cultures, and even pragmatic considerations around access and legal issues. 

However, perhaps inadvertently, this pushback can also result in what I term as simplification, whereby complex political, social and cultural issues informing those same specific fan practices are flattened out in order to be championed uncritically. In such cases, even fans speaking from positions of knowledge and experience within those fandoms are branded as “outsiders.” No media text or fandom is free from issues and hierarchies of power around representations of identity, relationships, and desire. Fans wanting to defend their localized practices against casual dismissal are extremely valid, but I find that this impulse also often undermines location-specific critiques which is an added layer of complexity.

BC: In my opening statement, I alluded to the 'cultural baggage' of conflict and reluctance, and at times, shame, when I looked at the way fandom is discussed in Malaysia. Commercially successful franchises and media such as the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Star Wars, Game of Thrones, and most recently, BTS and Squid Game are considered acceptable, often serving as fodder for national conversation. It is one thing to be able to understand the latest superhero references in popular press coverage, or to purchase a Funko Pop figure but fans are still cautioned against being too emotionally attached to a media text. My conversations with students certainly reveal this contradiction, where pop culture knowledge is considered "cool", but fandom is often "waste of time" and something one does as a child (and thus, grow out of). The hierarchy of taste is delineated along commercially successful texts, and acceptable fan practice is sanctioned by the industry through consumption of official merchandise. Any other fan practice that falls into a more transformative pursuit is othered, and often simplified, not only into “fluff”, but “fluff” that is a cause for concern. 

It is difficult, at this juncture not to recall a friend's question, early on in my PhD, as to why I was researching fan cultures and not something "more serious", and that "Asian people don't do fandom". There is always a sense that fandom is a 'foreign practice' within Southeast -- and East -- Asian scholarship, which speaks to Lori's point about the devalued nature of Fan Studies within the academy. Except when one is of Asian descent, this scholarship is devalued twice over, within the academy and among fans themselves. But given Southeast Asia is itself a cosmopolitan hybrid of identities, it is difficult to determine what is local, and as such what would then be considered as ‘authentic’. 

LM: At the risk of continuing in a contradictory vein, “local cultural traditions and practices” is also something that I would problematize insofar as, to paraphrase Rukmini above, it can mean “radically different” things to different people. Historically, hegemonic fan studies has conceptualized ‘local’ fan traditions and practices in opposition to normative fandom practices; that is, as discrete and located outside those practices and traditions that characterize ill-defined (but seemingly universally understood) ‘fandom’ and ‘fan community’. There is little sense in lambasting foundational scholarship that originated and upheld such characterizations, particularly inasmuch as it was a product of its moment in both the history of media fan practices and the evolution of fan studies. But in our current media fandom/fan studies moment, I have a first-row seat to vitriolic English-language debates on social media about the in/validity of fujoshi (lit. “rotten women,” referring to women who consume and create Boy’s Love and yaoi media) that are entirely divorced from - and wilfully uninterested in - their original Japanese contexts. I’ve also gotten my feet wet in that Anglo-American iteration of Chinese drama fandom spawned by the increasing ubiquity of Mainland Chinese dramas on such mainstream streaming platforms like Netflix, YouTube, and Amazon Prime, where we struggle to grasp both the minutiae of Chinese* fan knowledges and practices (kadian, anyone?) and, in particular, the complex social and political circumstances that led to, among other things, English language fanfiction stalwart Archive of Our Own being banned by Mainland Chinese authorities. 

Within this context, what is “local” and against what are we defining it? For example, as I have argued elsewhere (Morimoto, 2019), Archive of Our Own has quite specific cultural traditions and practices that aren’t necessarily generalizable to English-language fanfiction reading and writing practices on FanFiction.net or Wattpad; can we then consider AO3’s norms ‘local’ (in opposition to those fans for whom AO3 embodies fanfiction culture, to the extent that it’s even recognized as a part, rather than the whole, of ‘fandom’)? Or is there perhaps a better way of conceptualizing both the vast array of fan practices and traditions enacted globally, as well as what happens when contact with other practices and traditions alter, challenge, or otherwise inflect them?

*see Bertha below to fully appreciate the complexity of such a superficially self-evident category as “Chinese fans”

4.     What are some of the key issues and challenges facing “global fandom” today?

RP: This conversation has perhaps sketched out some of the key challenges already but perhaps to recap, in my view, the key challenges for scholars of “global fandom” are building theoretical frameworks that can facilitate robust and nuanced examination of complex fan practices. I also think that it is vital to underline that building these frameworks are not abstract practices. They must engage with the increasingly skewed contemporary reality for many scholars - particularly those from the Global South but also those in the Global North with critical accessibility issues - who now face even greater barriers to participation in academic discourse than before. After all, no discipline can claim to be “global” without taking account of the exclusion of so many peers working in those very contexts. 

BC: Rukmini makes a really good point about needing more robust and nuanced theoretical frameworks to look at global fandom. Conversations like these are great starting points, and the fact that Henry is hosting them would mean that people would be aware that these conversations are happening, but as Lori pointed out, it's also dependent on the willingness of scholars to read and engage. And I'd like to take this further by saying that we need to ensure that this doesn't just become a cursory nod to acknowledge diversity and inclusivity, but to also pay attention to the gaps and silences, to who is being silenced, and the question of who is speaking for whom. Even -- and especially when -- it doesn't agree with our viewpoints or our understanding of the world. There is a lot of histories that are still being re-written; there are different approaches to, and understandings of postcoloniality, for instance that doesn't necessarily fit into a neat, little box we can place people into, and this informs and affects fans' understanding of their identities and their cultures. Acknowledging the constraints of where the fan scholar is working from, not just within an academic institution, but also the geopolitical location of the fan scholar would continue to be a key issue.

To build on the example that both Lori and Rukmini have already raised, I return to what's happening in China, and the different perspectives that have been offered up as explanations. The English language media in the West posits it as -- to borrow from Lori -- "[X authoritarian regime] cracks down on [Y subculture]", and a 'global event' like this will continue to be a challenge to the ways we conceptualise and understand what global fan cultures is. Even within the different factions of fandoms in China itself, responses and reactions to the crackdowns are varied; just as our reactions, as fan, celebrity and media scholars (and again, dependent on our educational, social and cultural capitals) are different. When I look at what's happening in China, for instance, it's more than just a crackdown on a specific subculture, but rather, it's also a very specific reading of how to perform Chinese-ness on a global scale, as dictated by a powerful country whose people have migrated to other parts of the world for centuries. And yet this performance is rooted in a sense of Confucian morality, and it is a cultural crackdown that can be alarming for other ethnic Chinese, long assimilated into hybrid identities or the culture of their migrated homes, who do not identify with a Confucian understanding of Chinese-ness. In short, it is never as simple or as neat as it seems. 

LM: To pick up where Bertha leaves off, I want to tell a quick story that happened over coffee with Rukmini and her friend Swati Moitra during a conference we were all at several years ago (a story I know Rukmini all too familiar with because I keep going on and on about it!). They had followed the conversation into a discussion about the upcoming Indian release of Disney’s live-action version of The Jungle Book (Jon Favreau, 2016), which Rukmini expressed some skepticism about until Swati mentioned a number of the actors involved and, in particular, a song being used in its promotion that updated the Hindi-language theme song of the Japanese anime series, The Jungle Book: Adventures of Mowgli ジャングルブック 少年モーグリ (Kurokawa Fumio, 1989-90). Rukmini ultimately wrote a touching and complex review of the film addressing how this corporate-strategized mashup of Kipling’s notoriously colonialist novel, Indian casting, and use of the widely beloved theme song to its Japanese adaptation effectively enabled a “reclamation” of the text, “expand[ing] into and imaginative space I didn’t quite know existed.” 

What grabbed my attention about this, and what I think is emblematic of the challenges facing fandoms and fan studies going forward, is its semiotic complexity. For Disney, a global corporation whose attempts at media localization include the insertion of painfully transparent scenes set in China in Iron Man 3 (Shane Black, 2013) intended to attract “Chinese” viewers (who, it should be noted, saw right through them), not to mention the Southeast Asian rollout of Disney+ Hotstar that Bertha discusses in her opening statement, this strategy seems uniquely attuned to the arguably counterintuitive popular cultural specificities of transmedia Jungle Book reception in India; something that, for being equally attuned to them, Rukmini’s nuanced analysis is able to discern and discuss. At the same time, her caveat that, “I'm not trying to argue here that the text is somehow free of Disney's globalisation agenda—it could be argued to have accomplished that agenda empathically, given that it made the company about Rs 180 cr (the most for any foreign film release in India by far),” equally demonstrates how, as she notes above, simplistic “ideas of resistance, subversion, or compliance” are often inadequate when it comes to grasping transnational and transcultural media fandoms and fan objects in their often-contradictory complexity.

In this sense, and particularly at a time when we must remind ourselves to think before we hit send on social media, when the number of ‘likes’ on our (often-unsolicited) opinions can engender significant social capital, when we jockey for authority in a world that thrusts us into ever-closer quarters with little understanding of how to navigate and negotiate that space, the need to acknowledge that, as Bertha writes, nothing is ever “as simple or neat as it seems” is at once absolutely imperative and a challenge that both fans and fan scholars face going forward. 

Global Fandom Conversations (Round One): Bertha Chin, Lori Moromoto, Rukmini Pande (Part One)

Rukmini Pande (RP) Intro: Like most other fandom scholars I’ve been invested in popular cultural texts and their fan communities from a pretty early age. As a young girl in India I was heavily engaged in everything from the dubbed version of a Jungle Book anime and the WWF (now WWE), to Bollywood, cricket and football. My exposure to online media fandom started with the delightfully weird anime Weiss Kreuz in the early 2000’s and I’ve been in both anglophone and non-anglophone spaces since then. In terms of my research focus, I’ve been interested in seeing how issues of race and racism interface with certain popular assumptions about fandom and fan studies, particularly ideas of shared pleasure, escapism, and progressive politics. I’m @RukminiPande on twitter. 

Lori Moromoto Intro: The little blurb I have on my personal website pretty much sums me up, so I’m copying it here in lieu of writing another one: I’m an academic, fan, and mom (she/her) who teaches in the Department of Media Studies at the University of Virginia and writes on transcultural media fandom. I became a fan of Hollywood movies in Hong Kong as a kid, a fan of Japanese anime in the US as a college student, and a fan of Hong Kong movies in Japan as an adult, and that has pretty much set the tone for my entire body of work. When I’m not teaching or writing, I’m arguing with my spouse about what to watch on TV, reading fanfiction, and trying to work my way through all 50 episodes of The Untamed [NOTE: I finished the series and then fell face-first into CQL/MDZS fandom. Turns out 50 episodes is just not enough]. You can find me on Twitter at @acafanmom

Bertha Chin Intro: My bio would (boringly) say that I’m a senior lecturer teaching Social Media & Communication at Swinburne University of Technology, Sarawak. And that the majority of my publications and research look at the intersections of fan and celebrity studies. It doesn’t say I’m a fan, and my first involvement with online fandom was via The X-Files(which was also incidentally where Lori and I met and bonded over our mutual love of Leslie Cheung and HK movies!). It also doesn’t say that in 2015, I moved back to Sarawak, in Malaysian Borneo where I was born and raised after spending more than half of my life in Australia and the UK, and a lot of the points -- and struggles -- I raised about hybrid identities and cultures stem from this personal experience. And this struggle with my own cultural identity continues to inform my work, which has also circled back to transcultural fandom (particularly in light of all the recent debates and Hollywood media content that highlighted Asian representation) as I fell head-over-heels into Never Have I Ever fandom [#TeamPaxton always]. I’m @bertha_c on Twitter.  

1.     Response to each other’s opening statements

RP: First of all, thank you both for your perceptive statements. I think there are a few threads that are speaking to common concerns we share, particularly when we discuss fandom in a “global” context with all the possibilities and complexities that that category holds. As Lori also points out, I think we’ve all underlined the need for fan scholars (and fans) to engage with local specificities and push past simplistic narratives that assume or impose a homogeneity on something as differentiated as transnational/transcultural fandom spaces. Bertha’s point about the implications of that cultural homogeneity imposed by a corporate behemoth like Disney+ is well taken. It would be interesting to have further research in how these homogeneities are also linked to the geopolitics of the states themselves and how fans align (or do not) with those interests. 

And also of course, a shared concern with how Fan Studies as a discipline with global interests interfaces with these issues and also builds scholarship that is suitably nuanced. Lori, I find myself returning to your point about the devaluation of Fan Studies as a discipline within the academy. As you rightly point out, its dismissal is certainly rooted in larger institutional biases. I think you also gesture to a possible way forward, which is for the discipline itself to go further in taking “fluff” seriously and crafting more robust critical frameworks. 

LM: Yes, thank you both for your insightful and provocative statements! As Rukmini says, we appear to share an equally impassioned insistence on the need for scholars, industries, and fans to grasp the cultural specificities that inflect not only transnational fandoms, but also transcultural fandoms where fans may have nation in common yet bring different (and differently positioned) cultural orientations to bear on their experiences and expectations. I particularly appreciate both Rukmini’s and Bertha’s attention to American media producers’ continued flattening of difference; something that historically has been reflected in fan studies and still characterizes interactions between normative (white, Global North, English-language) and non-normative fans in online fandom contact zones. To borrow from Bertha’s statement, Hollywood’s eminently questionable “diversity project” is predicated on the same kinds of simplistic identity politics that Rukmini observes in fandoms and fan studies alike, “which paper over the problems of media texts with ethnonationalist or other majoritarian themes with un-nuanced appeals to ‘diversity’ and ‘representation’.” 

Rukmini issues a much-needed call above for creating more robust critical frameworks in fan studies, and it’s here that I locate the critical importance of this series of conversations that Henry has been gracious enough to coordinate and host. Yet their potential impact on fan studies is predicated on scholars’ willingness to read and actively engage with them. This is as much a reminder for me, as both normative fan and fan scholar, as anyone reading; that the global reach of our contemporary media landscape means that, in a very real sense, what might appear through the lens of flattened difference to be irrelevant to a researcher in fact is indispensable to understanding the nuances of an always already transnational fanscape.

BC: Indeed, echoing what both of you have remarked on the common threads running through our opening statements! I find Rukmini’s point about not coming to broad conclusions about the politics of any space, even when the space is one with a majority of those from marginalised identities particularly resonant here. My recent and current work, certainly, have been trying to recognise gaps and silences when we talk about fans, but I think it is always important to remember what, or who is considered marginalised in one cultural context may not necessarily be so in another. To utilise K-pop fandom as an example here, Korean fans of K-pop may be a marginalised identity in the US, but Korean fans of K-pop isn’t necessarily a marginalised cultural and fan identity in Korea. So if we want to understand Korean K-pop fans’ relationship with blackness, we still need to return to the national and cultural context of Korea, and by extension, East Asia’s relationship to blackness. 

In short, it is perhaps useful to constantly question whose lens are we understanding and viewing marginalised identities from. Which may also mean questioning how other, more established -- and accepted disciplines of research -- conceptualise ideas about the “global”, as if global is a homogenous whole rather than disparate, messy concoctions of geopolitical, national, cultural identities. In fact I think the more we move into discourses on global fandom, the more we should recognise the differences, which is why I think Lori’s work on fandom contact zones is so important here.

2.     To what degree is fandom part of a process of globalization? 

RP: I think fandom has always been a part of globalization, both in terms of processes of formal and informal circulation of texts and their popularity and sometimes contested interpretations by fans around the world. There are numerous aspects of this process relevant in a contemporary context, but I am currently most interested in how online media fan communities are interfacing with an ostensibly shared, but also extremely fractured, global mediascape. I am also interested in how these extremely heterogeneous and highly self-reflexive communities are intersecting with local and global geopolitical narratives that are often debated and disseminated within them. To briefly touch on an example that Lori also referenced in her opening statement, the recent regulations around fan culture and media content in China have been broadly reported as the “policing” of fan communities in English language media outlets. At the same time, there have also been numerous fan narratives offering alternate explanations and sometimes justifications of the need of such intervention. Fan communities globally then continue to have complex relationships with issues of identity and politics which cannot be mapped simply onto ideas of resistance, subversion, or compliance. This is true for even those sections of fandom that are seen to have somewhat non-normative interests in particular contexts. 

BC: I remember not really coming across the term ‘fan’ until I moved to Australia in my teens and being introduced to the concept through the discovery of The X-Files. But then thinking back to my childhood in Borneo, and recalling how it was always framed by trying to procure VHS tapes of a Disney animated film or a newly released Hollywood or Hong Kong film, or exchanging written stories with friends which featured a favourite character from a TV show we all loved, or the latest pop band we were all enamoured with made me realised I have been participating in various fan practices even before I understood the concept from a scholarly manner. And given this was all before the Internet, it stands to reason that fandom -- and media consumption in this case -- have always been a part of globalisation. 

What fascinates me, and continues to fascinate me within the context of transcultural fandom, is other fans like me, who accessed different media content but rather embracing the themes, mannerisms and identities that made sense to them, whether it's gender or sexual identity, self-reliance, self-confidence, or even language skills. It wasn't about disregarding a text's national context, but rather, looking beyond the trappings of cultural and national proximity. It's also a fascination with fans who have grown up within a hybrid context, be it via migration or just media consumption, who appropriated these media texts for their own, and who are not entirely visible in the fan studies discourse. Globalisation enabled transnational media flows, and as such, it enabled access to media content from elsewhere, but also access to fan communities online. 

LM: Both Rukmini and Bertha get at something I’m still working through myself; namely, the messiness of fandoms existing within what Rukmini describes as an “extremely fractured global mediascape,” and Bertha identifies as the sometimes “hybrid context[s]” of lived experience. Both characterizations capture our current media fandom moment in ways that don’t map neatly onto the more hierarchical, linear assumptions on which “globalization” rests. As mirrored in online fandom shifts from such platforms as LiveJournal, the affordances of which lent themselves to highly controllable and hierarchical fan spaces, to Tumblr and Twitter, whose far more rhizomatic points of entry afford nonlinear access to fan cultural contact zones characterized by “highly asymmetrical relations” (Pratt, 1991) of not only power, but also access in its myriad forms, “globalization” as a process predicated on ‘West to Rest’ conceptions of media and technology flows increasingly cannot adequately account for a multidirectional mediascape of cross-border access to technologies and media often outside the aegis of corporate and/or government strategizing. 

In this sense, I’d suggest that what we see today is less media fandom as a process of globalization, per se, than media fandom as both reflecting and enacting changing modes, patterns, and sites of transnational and transcultural media circulation and consumption that exceed the narrow parameters of “globalization” as it’s historically been conceptualized in scholarship.

Global Fandom: Rukmini Pande (India)

Bus advertisement for KPop group Red Velvet's Japan mini album

Credit: Photo by Hiu Yan Chelsia Choi on Unsplash

 I begin with an acknowledgement that I, as well as many scholars present (and absent) in this blog conversation series, continue to grapple with the deep inequities exposed and exacerbated by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The decisions of many conferences in the Global North to move back to “normal” formats with an emphasis on in-person attendance with its attendant networking and professional opportunities are far from value neutral. They signal a willingness (perhaps even an eagerness) to not just return to previous levels of academic inequity and inaccessibility, but further retrench them[1]. 

In this context, I welcome this conversation series being hosted by Henry Jenkins, as it goes some way in addressing those inequities. However, a single endeavour can only do so much. I hope that my colleagues located in other influential Global North institutions and organizations respond to the urgency of the present moment and establish similar forums and avenues of scholarly engagement, support, and publication. No discipline can claim global relevance and reach without working to dismantle mechanisms that alienate so many colleagues and institutions from participation and leadership roles. 

I use these observations to foreground their inextricability with all our current academic lives because they connect directly to many of the key questions faced by fan and audience scholars in a global context marked by precarity and inequity. I pose three as rhetorical jumping off points in the hope that they will connect with other pieces in this series to form a set of provocations for the field. 

1.     What does it mean to engage in fan studies at a time where our mediascape feels more networked, more globalized, and more fractured than ever before, both in terms of texts and the platforms that host and transmit them, as well fans themselves?

2.     To what extent are our current methods and theoretical models equipped to engage with the evolving and fractured dynamics of fan communities as related to broader cultural, political, and economic issues wherein individuals often hold extremely divergent views?

3.     And finally, how do we acknowledge and tackle the fact that all fan communities today are interfacing explicitly with deeply entrenched, globalized and networked social formations amplifying fascist politics (white supremacy, racism, gender-essentialism, xenophobia, religious fundamentalism, enthnonationalism, and neocolonialism amongst many others) without setting up binaries between “progressive” and “reactionary” fandoms? 

The animating focus of my research so far has been to make visible the role of race and racial identity in anglophone online media fandom as well as within the discipline of fan studies itself. I published Squee From The Margins[2] in 2018, and an edited collection, Fandom Now In Color[3] in 2020, as part of this broader project. I have also discussed the effects of institutional whiteness on fan studies methodologies and publication processes[4]. 

One of my primary arguments remains that issues of race/ism, particularly around Black characters, interrupt broadly held assumptions about media fandom spaces as uniformly politically progressive, offering a special refuge to fans from marginalized identities. These arguments remain relevant as we see an increasing polarization in fandom spaces around issues of racist fanwork, micro and macro-aggressions against vocal fans of color (especially Black fans) who identify problems in fandom spaces, and a concerted push to undermine any critiques of the same which seek to identify the workings of systemic racism, rather than individual issues by “bad” actors. This has also been pointed out by acafans such as Stitch in their detailed rundown here[5]. 

My work has also held up the hope for solidarity and coalition building around the category of “fan of color” in fandom spaces, pointing to a longer legacy of similar work lead by critical fans around events such as RaceFail ’09[6]. I continue to believe in the power and vital importance of such coalition building but want to reiterate that identifying and dismantling structural white supremacy is extremely difficult work and requires sustained effort. It does not begin or end with the personal identity of individuals. The power of whiteness operates in many ways including the co-option of marginalized voices and identities. Further, it is vital to understand the increasing role of majoritarian political ideologies (often rooted in ethno-nationalism) in the global mediascape. Fan communities, themselves more transnational and transcultural than ever before, have always been and continue to be profoundly influenced by these dynamics. 

Fandom spaces and communities have been demonstrably proven to be powerful arenas for civic participation ranging from pushing for changes in specific media properties, to broader socio-political mobilization. While initially optimistic about the progressive potential of such activity, recent scholarship has also taken into account the reactionary elements in these spaces. This is an extremely important step. 

Mel Stanfill lists a set of “jarring questions” in the introduction of a special issue on “Reactionary Fandom” which is a good summation of the concerns of this influential branch of scholarship. They ask, “What can we understand about reactionary politics by examining them through the lens of fandom? Should Gamergate be understood as the beginning of the alt-right? Do models of gift economies in fan fiction help us understand the production and circulation of conspiracy theories on YouTube? Can sexism be understood as fanon? Is white supremacy a fandom?”(Stanfill 2020, 2).

These are all extremely interesting provocations and the special issue’s scope includes a case study of fanfiction-based fandom by Anastasia Salter (2020). This also connects to Poe Johnson’s earlier perceptive questioning of fanworks’ troubled relationship with the Black body (Johnson 2019). However, taken together with other work on the same area, there continues to be noticeable skew towards either using the tools of fandom studies to examine explicitly white supremacist organizations like the MAGA movement or QAnon in the USA, or interrogating fandoms with observably reactionary elements in the majority such as Gamergate or sports fandoms (Miller 2020; Lobinger et al. 2020; Johnson 2020; Reinhard, Stanley, and Howell 2021). I am not trying to minimize the importance of this work but rather underline that it’s equally vital for scholars to understand more covert forms of white supremacy and other forms of majoritarianism operating in fandom spaces assumed to be resistant to such ideas. 

I would argue that while the question of white supremacy as a fandom is perhaps debatable, the presence of white supremacist structures in progressive media fandom is now well evidenced. Indeed, I would go further to state that the backlash against anti-racist efforts in these spaces, by branding them as censorship and policing of fannish pleasure, is actually gaining ground because it is couched in the language of social justice. These are admittedly complex issues but the need for scholars to be aware of these dynamics has never been more urgent. 

To expand on an example, many fandom scholars and commentators saw the mobilization of K-Pop fandoms around the 2020 BLM protests in the USA as a potentially politically transformative act. However, a more detailed analysis has shown those fandoms to be as marked by anti-Blackness as any others, as detailed here by Miranda Larsen[7]. To put it in another way, we cannot come to broad conclusions about the politics of any space, even one with a majority of individuals from marginalized identities, without sustained engagement and granular analysis.

This also extends to fandom spaces engaged in the consumption and creation of queer content, which has often functioned as a kind of shorthand for scholars, almost automatically designating those participants as having a larger progressive politics. However, in a world where queerwashing and homonationalism are extremely powerful forces, shaping everything from foreign policy, to media texts, to fan reactions, we need more robust and critical theoretical approach.

To give an example relevant to my current geo-political location, the fandom of USA television series Sense 8 (2015-18) (created and directed by the Wachowski siblings) had all the markers of a queer and racially diverse space which might have been expected to result in a politically progressive community. However, the series itself had some extremely disturbing narrative threads, including one centered on India which reinforced dominant Hindu nationalist beliefs. These same beliefs, now very much the mainstream, have pushed the country further and further into authoritarianism. Today, any effort to critique Hindu nationalism locally or internationally is framed (erroneously) as colonialist and racist. The storyline in the show itself did not generate much debate or protest within the fandom, precisely because it was framed within a queer utopic universalist frame which made locale-specific critique difficult to explain or sustain. Similar dynamics are also visible in many contemporary fandoms which paper over the problems of media texts with ethnonationalist or other majoritarian themes with un-nuanced appeals to “diversity” and “representation.” 

The point I wish to make through these examples is that while media fandom spaces continue function as spaces of connection and enjoyment for fans from marginalized backgrounds, scholars must push beyond single lens understandings of political and social affiliations. Fan studies must move beyond a shallow perception of intersectionality merely as a politics of citation or representation into the conditions it enables and the contexts it functions within; we cannot resist authoritarianism through the mere performative co-option of what sounds like resistance instead of the realities of what we are enabling in the world. 

Rukmini Pande is an Associate Professor in Literary Studies at O.P Jindal Global University,

India. She is currently part of the editorial board of the Journal of Fandom Studies and Mallorn:

The Journal of Tolkien Studies and has been published in multiple edited collections including

the Wiley Companion to Media Fandom and Fan Studies and The Routledge Handbook of

Popular Culture Tourism. She has also been published in peer reviewed journals such as

Transformative Works and Cultures and The Journal for Feminist Studies. Her monograph,

Squee From The Margins: Race in Fandom, was published in 2018 by the University of Iowa

Press. Her edited collection, Fandom, Now In Color: A Collection of Voices, bringing together

cutting-edge scholarship on race/ism in fandom, was published in December 2020. 

References:

Johnson, Poe. 2019. “Transformative Racism: The Black Body in Fan Works.” Transformative Works and Cultures 29 (March). https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2019.1669.

———. 2020. “Playing with Lynching: Fandom Violence and the Black Athletic Body.” Television & New Media 21 (2): 169–83.

Lobinger, Katharina, Benjamin Krämer, Rebecca Venema, and Eleonora Benecchi. 2020. “Pepe–Just a Funny Frog? A Visual Meme Caught Between Innocent Humor, Far-Right Ideology, and Fandom.” Perspectives on Populism and the Media: Avenues for Research 7: 333.

Miller, Lucy. 2020. “‘Wolfenstein II’and MAGA as Fandom.” Transformative Works and Cultures 32.

Pande, Rukmini. 2020. “How (Not) to Talk about Race: A Critique of Methodological Practices in Fan Studies.” Transformative Works and Cultures 33 (June). https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2020.1737.

Reinhard, CarrieLynn D., David Stanley, and Linda Howell. 2021. “Fans of Q: The Stakes of QAnon’s Functioning as Political Fandom.” American Behavioral Scientist, September, 00027642211042294. https://doi.org/10.1177/00027642211042294.

Salter, Anastasia. 2020. “#RelationshipGoals? Suicide Squad and Fandom’s Love of ‘Problematic’ Men.” Television & New Media 21 (2): 135–50. https://doi.org/10.1177/1527476419879916.

Stanfill, M. 2020. “Special Issue: Reactionary Fandom.” Television & New Media 21 (2): 123–217.

[1] I am referring specifically to the relationship of “global” media and audience studies scholarship whose power centers of publication and privilege continue to be located in the academic structures of the Global North. I do not mean to dismiss the many nuanced locale-specific conversations (such as in India) around higher education where access to the internet and associated digital technologies are a contested terrain.

[2] https://www.uipress.uiowa.edu/books/9781609386184/squee-from-the-margins

[3] https://www.uipress.uiowa.edu/books/9781609387280/fandom-now-in-color

[4] https://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/view/1737

[5] https://stitchmediamix.com/2021/09/08/where-are-we-now-ao3-anti-racism/

[6] While “fan of color” is used quite broadly in fandom spaces it can also be linked to the history of the term “women of color.” The latter was initially conceptualized as a category of active organization and coalition building rather than of fixed and static identity by Black feminist activists at the National Conference for Women in 1977 in Washington DC. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=82vl34mi4Iw

[7] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLUWN1l2ZMU

Global Fandom: Lori Morimoto (American/Adult Third Culture Kid)

This Star Wars poster is familiar in the west as a somewhat exoticized image on t-shirts sold at Disney parks, but it also happens to be the actual poster used in the Hong Kong run of Star Wars, with the theater I saw it at circled in red. Something that’s since become somewhat ironically commodified that has a lived past,

I can trace my interest in the ways texts move and transform across borders to coming across, sometime in the sixth grade at the Lutheran Hong Kong International School, illustrations representing Jesus as Chinese. It obviously made enough of an impression that I remember it some 40 years later; in particular, I recall how it gently challenged my theretofore unexamined mental image of “Jesus” as dirty blond, bearded, and unequivocally white (think Ted Neely in Jesus Christ Superstar [1973]).

 It was also in Hong Kong that I became a fan of American movies like Star Wars (1977), Superman (1978), and Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), and this too was inflected by Hong Kong’s transnational milieu. Where fans of such films in the US were buying up special edition magazines and interviews with their stars in publications like People Magazine, I had accidentally discovered in local Japanese department stores movie magazines like Screen and Roadshow that were replete with stills from the films and photos from stars’ Tokyo junkets. I couldn’t read them (although they were very much the genesis of my subsquent study of Japanese language), but I cut the images out and pasted them into embroidered Chinese photo albums, which I pored (and squee’d) over with friends for many enjoyable hours.

Author’s Scrapbook, including Carrie Fischer eating with chopsticks on lower right,

In short, as I’ve written elsewhere (Chin & Morimoto, 2013), I’ve always been a fan of the wrong thing in the wrong place – American movies in Hong Kong, Japanese anime in the US, and Hong Kong films in Japan – and it was these formative experiences that laid the foundations of my research. Indeed, the scholarly significance of those movie magazines I used to ‘read’ in Hong Kong was driven home to me when, many years later, I stumbled across images on Tumblr of Benedict Cumberbatch’s Japan junkets taken from Screen magazine, punctuated by hundreds of reblogs, likes, and the occasional “thank you” to Screen for publishing heretofore unseen images of the star. Seeing them in an entirely different communication context drove home for me both a relative constant of media fandom – the largely borderless pursuit of more and new content now afforded by the Internet – and the critical role played by access in fostering fannish attachments across geographic and cultural divides. 

 Historically, global fan studies has focused on why people become fans of media from outside their own cultural/language/national aegis, focusing on the attractions of their differences to more familiar media texts. Such media, or the places from which they come, historically have been understood as intrinsically exotic, obscure enough to generate cultural capital for its aficionados, and – if lucky – engrossing enough to precipitate further delving into its culture of origin. Certainly all of these are possible, but it’s important to keep in mind that fans of something seldom, if ever, seek out their fannish texts. As they say in English language transformative fan culture, we don’t find fandom, it finds us. While the national aegis of a text can have a strong affective pull, it’s just as (if not more) likely that cross-border fandom begins when we happen to stumble across something in a space we regularly frequent that just catches our attention and keeps it until we’re hooked.

 In this sense, the important question becomes less one of why someone becomes a border-crossing fan – although I absolutely love a good origin story! – than of what happens next. What happens when a white Australian becomes a fan of black American hip-hop? What happens when mainland Chinese women become fans of Sherlock? What happens when American women become fans of Chinese dramas that flirt with (originally Japanese) boy’s love narratives? When black American women participate in global online K-pop fandom? What do we, as fans hailing from our own cultural habitus (fan, but also national, racial, sexual, gender, and so on) bring to bear on not only how we interpret texts from outside that habitus, but also on our interactions with other fans in the spatiotemporally convergent contact zones of online fan culture?

 For me, research on global fandoms begins in the deceptively simple observation that people become fans, ultimately, because we love something, and as we know, love is seldom logical, nor does it always overcome problems of systemic inequality and discrimination. It can move us to do wonderful things – raise funds for people in crisis, support fellow fans in times of need, participate in politically congruent activism – but that same passion that motivates such acts is equally susceptible to motivating more harmful behaviors in the name of what we love. Too, fannish love is itself vulnerable to manipulation by corporate interests in ways that may not actually benefit fans themselves, particularly in an age of algorithms and the (attempted) datafication of affect. Within this context, my research focuses on the critically important question of what happens when we love a thing – when, to borrow from Lawrence Grossberg, it matters to us in ways that exceed everyday mattering – particularly in a global contact zone we have yet to learn to effectively (and safely!) navigate.

 In my entirely volunteer role as inveterate fan studies proselytizer I often foreground the importance of understanding affect and fannish investments in relation to politics. I do this as a way of appealing to those who might otherwise dismiss fan studies as preoccupied with ‘fluff’; while I am personally all about the fluff (particularly insofar as the fluff is critical to understanding the love, which is critical to understanding how fandom intersects with a host of concerns), fan studies can be a hard sell in academic environments that prioritize quantitative over qualitative research and teaching (as well as qualitative fields whose own legitimacy in academia has been hard-won). As I write, arguably the most salient example of what fan studies brings to the understanding of global politics is Chinese government disciplining of womens’ fan circlesin August, 2021 and the subsequent banning of those “effeminate men” on television and in the music industry who have been the focus of intense fan interest in both China and abroad for several years. This action followed on, among other things, a fandom conflagration that resulted in Archive of Our Own being banned in China, and it reflects ongoing concerns over the effects of globally ubiquitous media (in this case, K-pop and Korean dramas) on domestic media industries and markets. While broadly legible at the level of a somewhat pat discourse of “[X authoritarian regime] cracks down on [Y subculture],” any meaningful understanding of the broader history and implications of such actions requires intimate knowledge of not only its Chinese governmental and popular cultural contexts, but also its embeddedness in non-Chinese fan cultures and objects. That is, it requires the kind of transcultural lens that researchers of global fandoms bring to the scholarly table.

 It’s this kind of more meaningful understanding that my own research and teaching advances, taking seriously the ways that fan cultures both reflect and effect both global media fandoms and their cultural milieu in all their messy complexity.  

Lori Morimoto is an Assistant Professor, General Faculty in the Department of Media Studies at the University of Virginia. She researches transnational/transcultural fandoms and transnational media co-production and distribution. Her work has been published in East Asian Journal of Popular Culture, Transformative Works and Cultures, Participations, Asian Cinema, and Mechademia: Second Arc. She has also contributed to Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World (NYU Press, 2017), The Routledge Companion to Media Fandom (Routledge, 2018), A Companion to Media Fandom and Fan Studies (Wiley-Blackwell, 2018), and Fan Studies Primer: Method, Research, Ethics (Iowa, 2021). She also teaches courses in media fandom, East Asian film and media, and videographic criticism.

Global Fandom: Bertha Chin (Malaysia)

Today begins the first week of my Global Fandom Jamboree which will feature early career scholars in fandom studies from more than 40 countries and run through April. This week, I am featuring three distinguished and established scholars — Bertha Chin, Lori Hitchcock Morimoto, and Rukmini Pande. Each has helped to reshape our understanding of transcultural fandom.

Disney+ was launched in Malaysia in May 2021, after much speculation and fanfare. However, instead of the Disney+ premium brand (with same day access to new films released straight to streaming as a result of the pandemic) that many Malaysians have come to expect, the streaming platform was branded as Disney+ Hotstar about 3 months before its Malaysian launch. The inclusion of Hotstar to the branding aligns it with Disney’s other South and Southeast Asian markets of Indonesia, Thailand and India, instead of the premium version launched in neighbouring Singapore (which was more aligned with the rest of the Western world). Disney+ Hotstar would offer more local content and the option of watching top titles from Marvel, Star Warsand Pixar dubbed in the “local language” (in this case, Malay, Malaysia’s official language). However, Malaysia’s 32 million population is multi-ethnic, multicultural, and multi-lingual. Its urban population is also highly mobile, and prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, Malaysians frequently move between Singapore, Australia, New Zealand and the UK for study, work and because of family ties. As such, Disney’s claims of a singular ‘local language’ can be politically controversial, when the concept of ‘local language’ can change from Malay to English, Cantonese, or Tamil depending on the community, the age and class of the audience, and geographical location within the country itself.  

A pop-up store and exhibition for Batman v Superman in a shopping mall in Kuala Lumpur

While Malaysia did not have a strong film and TV production industry, it was – and remains – a country with a wealth of access to regional and international media content. Netflix, launched in 2016, remains a popular streaming platform, combining regional and top international titles like Never Have I Ever, Dark, The Untamed, Sex Education, Crash Landing on You, and the like. Malaysia's satellite broadcaster, Astro, offers access to HBO Go (a combination of HBO and HBO Max) and simulcasts top content from South Korea, Hong Kong and China – all in their original language. This is a familiar state of being a media consumer, and by extension, a media fan, in Southeast Asia. Growing up in Sarawak, a Malaysian state on the island of Borneo in the 1980s meant access to media content from Hollywood, Hong Kong, Bollywood, Japan and other production powerhouses. With the exception of Japanese anime and Mexican telenovelas, which were usually dubbed into Malay or Cantonese, films and TV shows were available in their original language with subtitles in three languages (Malay, English, and Mandarin). 

Much like a lot of other people in the 1980s, I grew up, not only surrounded by DC and Marvel comic books, Star Wars, Doctor Who, and Disney animated cartoons, but also Hong Kong TV adaptations of classic Chinese folk tales and wuxia literature; essentially building the foundations of a hybrid cultural identity. My work with Lori Morimoto on transcultural fandom was a reflection of growing up under these transnational media consumption patterns. Fandom was an affinity to a character, a fictional universe, a text rather than an affinity to a specific national identity or claims of cultural proximity. 

I start with Disney in this piece because of what Disney represents: a global media conglomerate that now owns mega franchises that is familiar the world over, and where franchises like Star Wars and the Marvel Cinematic Universe attract huge fan interest in Malaysia. However, there is often a ‘cultural baggage’ of conflict and reluctance – and sometimes, shame – in identifying as a fan in Malaysia. Fandom is acceptable when its practice is structured around material fandom (exhibitions of props and replicas in shopping malls, usually leading up to release dates) and consumption (of the media text, merchandise like a Funko Pop figurine or official T-shirts), and there is a sense that this is a childhood past-time that one grows out of. And if one isn’t a child, then it has to be a practice sanctioned by the media industry (e.g. exhibitions and consumption of merchandise). 

A Funko Pop section in the local departmental store in the children's department in my hometown of Kuching, Sarawak (this is a permanent section)

What this creates is layers of hierarchies of taste. Much like the way Disney have created a hierarchy of content that is available on Disney+ based on their conception of the Asian market, there is a hierarchy of what is acceptable and unacceptable fannish texts. Commercially successful texts like the MCU, Star Wars, Game of Thrones and BTS are acceptable because they are globally renowned, supported by global media conglomerates, while identifying as a fan of anime and cult media are less acceptable. Fannishness over less commercially successful texts are considered as a waste of time, as they are often seen to be more involved in the practice of transformative fandom and thus, more ‘foreign’ and crazier than merely purchasing a Funko Pop figurine or official T-shirt. Consumption, then, is ‘good fandom’, sanctioned by the media industry. Transformative fandom presents a more emotional engagement with the texts, and is considered improper and unbecoming within a Malaysian – and Asian – cultural context. 

A pop-up store and exhibition on Star Wars in a shopping mall in Kuala Lumpur

Perhaps this suggests that transformative fandom space is a white space, but this may be too simplistic a reasoning without taking into account internal biases and criticism fans receive from a cultural context. And perhaps Disney+ Hotstar’s promotion of local content and making dubbed versions of its popular titles can be read as a politically correct move towards diversity and inclusion of varied international markets, but I would like to propose a cautionary approach to what I would call Hollywood’s “diversity project”. While the recent inclusion of more diverse characters (especially with regards to Asian representation) in major films and TV shows is a much-needed positive step forward, it may also create assumptions about a particular culture that is foreign. 

Disney+ assumes and imposes a singular culture unto Malaysia upon its launch; that the Malay language unites Malaysia when it has been the subject of fierce debate and division in a region with a complex postcolonial history. Likewise, the global domination of BTS, the Asian representation we currently see on our screens in the MCU’s Shang Chi, Netflix’s Never Have I Ever and The Chair, and the CW’s Kung Fu, among others represent a particular cultural moment in American popular culture which may not necessarily translate internationally. 

Dr Bertha Chin is senior lecturer of Social Media and Communication at Swinburne University of Technology (Sarawak). She has published extensively on transcultural fandom, fan labour, subcultural celebrity, anti-fandom and fan-producer relationships. She is a board member of the UK-based Fan Studies Network, and co-editor of Crowdfunding the Future: Media Industries, Ethics and Digital Society (2015, Peter Lang) and Eating Fandom (2020, Routledge), on the intersections of food culture and fan studies. 

Coming Soon: Global Fandom Jamboree

This year, I am putting this blog, Confessions of an Aca-Fan, into the service of an ambitious project. I have sought to map fandom and fandom studies across as many different countries as I can. I spent time this summer tapping my various networks seeking to identify early career scholars — advanced PhD candidates, junior faculty, independent scholars — who were doing work on fandom broadly defined to include cult media, comics, sports, and music — and who were willing to engage in conversations with other scholars doing similar work somewhere else on the planet. To date, the series has participants from almost 40 countries. The terminology here is challenging — global, transnational, transcultural will all crop up in our discussion here. I am thrilled by the scope and diversity of participation but also painfully aware of absences here.

Each week, we will present opening statements from 2-3 scholars doing loosely related work, whether organized around shared objects or themes, followed by several posts worth of back and forth conversations among them about whatever these statements inspired. The series is currently scheduled to run from Mid-October through late April, representing all together 25 pairings of participants. I am still open to further participants, but only if they come from countries which are not currently represented. The included countries so far are:

Argentina

Australia

Brazil

Bulgaria

Cameroon

Canada

Chile

China

Colombia

Cyprus

Czechia

Denmark

Ecuador

Finland

France

Great Britain

Greece

India

Indonesia

Ireland

Israel

Italy

Japan

Korea

Lebanon

Malaysia

Mexico

The Netherlands

Nigeria

Norway

Pakistan

Philippines

Poland

Portugal

Russia

Singapore

South Africa

Spain

Syria

Thailand

Turkey

United States

Vietnam

I am especially interested in filling holes from the Global South . So if you would like to participate and represent those countries, reach out to me at hjenkins@usc.edu and I will do my best to get you paired off.

There’s much to look forward to in this epic conversation series. Based on the materials produced so far, there’s much we can learn about geographies of distribution, about the spaces of fandom in different countries, about issues of translation, about how smaller countries get absorbed into global fan cultures or exist as crossroads for multiple national fandoms, about process of localization, about the particularity of fandom as it operates in the islamic world, in post-socialist and socialist economies, and so much more. We will be talking about soccer, Turkish drama, K-Pop, Bollywood, Anime, games, Game of Throne, Hollywood, Netflix, comics, pop music, and so much more.

Keep an eye on this space. I am going to be taking a little downtime over the next few days but we will be back soon with the debut of the series and it won’t slow down much from there.

Free Human Kindness: How ASMR Is Helping us Survive the Pandemic, Clinical Depression and America's Culture Wars (Part Three

You have referenced raising money for charity here but of course, many of the ASMR artists and community leaders also support themselves by performing these services. There’s been a big debate among fans and fan scholars around which aspects of the producer-fan relationship are exploitative and how to reconcile community building and profit-making in this regard. Given what you have said here about the strong affective bonds between performers and followers, I wonder how these issues have been dealt with in regard to ASMR. Are some practices here read as exploitative or as damaging to the kinds of social relationships you describe? We pay therapists, after all, and yet also see them as looking after the emotional needs of their patients/clients. 

It’s delicate. Right? People enjoy content as much as most things in their lives. They’d part with a lot before they gave it up, and yet they often steal it, even when they’d never walk into a store and put something in their backpack. Seemingly, it comes in part from the belief that content creation jobs are a pleasure to do, and people should be paid based on the amount of torment and boredom they endure. As an independent artist myself I generally stand one hundred percent on the side of others like me who are just trying to pay their rent and put food on their table. I don’t particularly want to hear Amazon Studios cry poor when they don’t even pay their taxes, but we’re individuals, working full time, who do pay our fair share. I have, however, felt momentarily taken aback when therapists asked me for money that I couldn’t comfortably afford. You come to them because you’re in pain. They express concern for you, but at the end they remind you that you have a transactional relationship. Sometimes a thought can pass through your mind. “If you actually cared, you wouldn’t leave me in a financially stressful situation.” And then I remind myself that they deserve to be paid. I just deserve functional insurance.

Both of these emotional dynamics can come up in ASMR.  I discovered the genre on YouTube, which is ad-supported. Sometimes a video would begin with the performer delivering a plug for a sponsor like Blue Apron or Casper Mattresses, but I was used to that from podcasts so it didn’t phase me. When I started watching Twitch, which is tip-supported, it took some getting used to because I was reminded incessantly about the money trading hands as announcements popped up on the screen. “Thanks, Aster, for the thousand bitties.” Even without doing any mental math it was hard to miss the fact that some of these artists were making multiple times as much money for a day’s work as I’d ever earned. You mustn’t compare like that. The goal is for all of us to win. Besides, streamers tend to repeat over and over, “You don’t need to give me anything. Please don’t feel like you have to. It’s not necessary. I love all of you equally.”  They rarely offer anything extra for sale, only their thanks and sometimes the opportunity to request a song or something. But people still pelt them with larger and larger amounts of money in a game of one-upmanship to be seen as their #1 fan. 

I once watched someone donate fifteen thousand dollars to a Twitch streamer (not an ASMRtist) over the course of a few weeks. I was like, “Who is this guy, a Saudi prince or something?” Even though the streamer was married, I felt safe in assuming he was in love with her and that no matter what happened it couldn’t end well. Plot twist: It ended very badly, but for a different reason than I expected. He convinced her to start a business with him. She put more than fifteen thousand dollars into it. Then he tried to vanish and actually left her in the red. It came out that he’d done this to other people as well. She hired an attorney and got her money back. Please, no one do that again.  The story I’m describing is the limit case. Even most of the artists who are making videos full time now worked in low-paying service industry jobs until very recently, and it scares them to think about ASMR falling out of vogue, or those artists getting #Cancelled and not having a normal career to fall back on.

YouTube regularly, routinely cheats artists out of their money by ‘demonetizing’ them. The artist allows ads to run at the beginning of their videos in exchange for payment, and then YouTube refuses to pay out by claiming that the videos have violated their standards and practices. Ninety percent of the time there’s absolutely nothing in the videos which would be considered inappropriate outside of, say, China, where YouTube does a lot of their business. YouTube won’t tell you how exactly a given video has violated the agreement, so one is left to conclude that it’s because the artist is large-chested or because the whole idea of whispering to the camera struck someone as sexual.  

Gibi, the most-subscribed-to English language ASMRtist on YouTube, ran into a different sand trap when she attempted to start a subscription service app called Zees. Essentially, artists would repost their YouTube videos on the app and she would ensure they got paid more fairly than they had elsewhere. She stressed over and over that the same videos would still be free on ad-supported YouTube, just as they always had been. We’d simply be giving our favorite artists an added layer of financial protection from the censorship whims and financial double dealings, and we’d be getting our usual content in a nicer format. Despite those promises fans got scared that yes, today her intentions sounded honorable, but if they supported her then soon all of this previously ‘free’ content would in fact end up behind a paywall. ASMR would end up like so many other post-capitalist institutions, out of reach for most people. I genuinely don’t think that’s what was going on, but the business was quietly discontinued.

I am especially interested in the phenomenon of gifting -- the exchange of meaningful, tangible objects between performers and fans, exchanges which might make the virtual online relationships seem more concrete and “real.” What role(s) do such gifts play in the ASMR community? 

Most artists are very selective in what personal information they share online, first and foremost their physical address, so it’s not always easy to send them physical gifts. But some have PO Boxes, either in their own town or near a family member, who will relay them things. Some of them also appear at conventions like TwitchCon and VidCon, where there may be an opportunity to hand them something. 

I have had two experiences with giving gifts and both were really satisfying. A Twitch streamer mentioned that they were spending Christmas alone and had no plans. I came across an ad on Facebook for a company that would send someone a cute stuffed animal and a card. I knew chickens were her favorite animal, so I sent one to her PO Box. It was the only present she got for Christmas last year. When she opened the box on stream and had a big reaction I felt really good. They’ve had that chicken next to them in every stream they’ve done since. Whenever I check in on her channel and she’s still got it close at hand I feel so glad I spent the money.

Another ASMRtist I follow, who is a big Legend of Zelda fan, developed a serious medical problem. For a few months they were in mind-bending pain, almost all day, every day. I ran across a luminescent Zelda health potion on eBay. I wanted it to sit on her shelf like a talisman. She had no way of receiving gifts, but I wanted her to own it, so I arranged to Venmo her the cash and have her buy the item for herself. Her condition has significantly improved. She says that when she was really in trouble it wasn’t the people she knew in real life who were there for her, it was her online community.

As we wrap this up, I want to return to where you started. Your first sentence was “ASMR is an art movement, an aesthetic, an online culture and even a philosophy.” So speak a bit more about the first part of the sentence. What does it mean to think of it as an art movement? How might you describe that aesthetic? And how does the aesthetic operate in the service of the philosophy and community aspects you have been discussing so systematically here? You’ve already told us a number of things in this regard, but I wanted to give you a chance to sum that up now that we as readers are better informed about what’s going on here.

In terms of formal aesthetics, ASMR films are usually recorded in absolute silence, making each sound deliberate and purposeful. They use soft volumes, which force us to stop moving around and really listen. There may be a single actor or a small few, and the actors get very intimate with the camera. The films are typically made on a low budget, by a relative amateur. The settings are usually domestic or pastoral, and instead of a house where everyone is rushing to get out the door in the morning, you’re likely to see a lot of bedrooms at 3am. The plots are often loosely-structured and more concerned with the journey than the destination. And the visuals often include a lot of close-up shots of props, costumes and other details. ASMR videos are obsessed with aesthetics like clean simplicity, color matching, beautiful tailoring and craftsmanship, and yes, potentially a person’s physical appearance – not just their genes but their clothes, their grooming. It’s all of a piece. Tonally, the films might be comedic, or contemplative, or romantic, but the mood is almost always light. And the function is to relax and uplift you, making you feel better about the world and each other.

However, neither A Quiet Place nor The Lion King is an ASMR movie. A Quiet Place possesses all of the formal aesthetics I just described, but the exact opposite tone and function. It tries to make you nervous. The Lion King possesses the tone and function I described, but virtually none of the aesthetics. ASMR, as a genre, is the meeting of a form and a function.   

Some of the most utilitarian ASMR videos are the simplest, providing white noise, rain sounds, LoFi music and other relaxing aural soundscapes which you can listen to while you write or study. My favorite mixes together rain, soft jazz and the quiet background sounds of a cafe, allowing you to trick your brain into thinking you’re writing in a public restaurant without spending money or defying COVID restrictions. Such minimalist ASMR videos might not set the world on fire with their originality and production values, but they get a lot of repeat views for obvious reasons and serve a useful purpose.  

These are just a few of the forms ASMR can take and the purposes it can serve. I hope people give it a listen.

To read the first parts of this interview, see Part One and Part Two.

Charlie Jenkins is a novelist and transmedia consultant. His upcoming debut novel, American Wrestling 1989, is a melodrama which explore cultural conflicts in the world of 1980s professional wrestling and the ways that broken and discarded people can either heal or hurt one another as they endure their own personal tragedies. He was previously the Creative Director of Chaotic Good Studios and Research Director for The Alchemists Transmedia Storytelling Company, serving clients like NBC, The CW, Blizzard Entertainment and BaseFX.

Free Human Kindness: How ASMR Is Helping Us Survive the Pandemic, Clinical Depression and America's Culture Wars(Part Two)

To read the rest, see part one and part three.

You’ve already said several times here that a majority of the community leaders are women. This has to do with notions of attractiveness and sexiness to be sure, but we’ve also talked about the strong maternal roles these women play in the life of their followers. That they are traditionally attractive gets men to look once. It may even offer some thrill given these women are getting close to the camera, whispering, and otherwise creating a dynamic we associate with more intimate relations, but the maternal nurturing would seem to be what sustains these relationships.  

Since these are complex and personal subjects I just want to say up front: Most of my thoughts on this are based on my close observations and experiences as a viewer. You’re interviewing me as a fan, but an artist might well describe their own work differently.   

 When I was little my mother used to rub my back, ruffle my hair, cuddle me and speak to me in soft voices. Those experiences filled me with a deep sense of well-being. I felt very safe and protected. I did less of that with you, dad – probably because society tries very hard to make men feel self-conscious being affectionate with one another – so I associate those feelings specifically with feminine nurturing. We, as adults, possess “inner children” - versions of ourselves which haven’t really aged that much since our early years, but which we’re usually forced to hide away from the adult world for protection. It can be very healing when we’re able to trust someone enough to let them care for our inner children or play with our inner children. 

 I’ll never forget a video Frivolous Fox made where she sang “You Are My Sunshine”. I started sobbing, because my mother used to sing that song to me when she was about that same age, and I felt like Frivvi had captured that moment in a bottle for me, allowing me to have it back.  

 On her Twitch channel, Cutscene Cutie often hums vintage Disney songs and it always makes my heart soar, because she has such a beautiful voice, and because I watched those animated films when I was little. Scottish Murmurs loves to play the ‘Dot Dot, Line Line’ game with viewers, because it was something her mom always did with her when she was a child. Gibi has a wonderful series where she plays with children’s books and puzzles. Several artists I like have made videos where they play school nurses who check you for lice, grade school teachers who help you make arts and crafts for your parents, or moms who tuck you into bed. The White Rabbit roleplays as an Italian grandmother named Nonna and knits you a scarf. 

 At the same time, different people need other kinds of therapeutic experiences. Some artists offer snuggling videos where they pretend to be your girlfriend and to lie next to you while you go to sleep. Or they pretend to be your wife and they comfort you after you had a bad day at work. I think someone could definitely watch a movie like Blade Runner 2049 or Her which deals with the romance between a man and artificial intelligence and they could view this as a disturbing trend. If you can just get your needs met without confronting the complexities of real human relationships then not only will you be alone, but someone else will be alone who you could have had a relationship with. Switzerland’s Gina Carla has a video where she just repeats, “I love you, I love you, I love you” for several minutes, and by the end of it she’s crying because she’s thinking about the people out there who need to hear that. I just feel that many people have been so damaged by friends and partners who recklessly hurt their feelings that they need to see healthy relationships modeled, and get a sense of what they feel like, before they’ll be prepared to risk looking for them again.

As we look at these women, they often express ideals we might associate with feminism -- from self-empowerment to notions of consent, from queer positivity to a rejection of body and slut shaming. So, tell us more about how the genre facilitates those messages. 

 My favorite ASMR video of all time, because of its potential to transcend entertainment and help people, is Goodnight Moon’s “Can I Touch Your Face?” She demonstrates that asking for consent doesn’t have to be uncomfortable. If you bring a different energy to it, it can be playful, intimate and inviting. Instead of just opening you up for rejection it can be an empowering affirmation of what you want. By making it about something that’s very personal but not sexual she keeps it from coming across as dirty. I wish that sex education students would watch it because if they learned from her they’d probably develop some healthy practices and outlooks. 

I’d hope many of the artists feel empowered by their work. But, one of the most powerful and deeply personal stories I’ve heard comes from FrivolousFox (Lauren). This one is difficult for me to write about, and I can’t imagine how difficult it was for her to tell. It’s the very rare ASMR video that isn’t relaxing, but if anything speaks to the heart of what the art movement is about, it’s this. 

In high school Lauren was a deeply insecure tomboy from a small-town religious upbringing. She fell in love with a girl, which caused her to feel ashamed, and caused her family to stop supporting her. She pursued the relationship in secret for several years, even after the other girl’s mom sent her to a school in another state. In college Lauren got a car so that she could see her girlfriend whenever she wanted. They went on a road trip. They were clowning around and Lauren got into a car wreck. The car somersaulted and landed on the other side of the highway. Her girlfriend was in a coma for 33 days and when she woke up she was mute and had to relearn everything from scratch. She’s still very limited in what she can do. Lauren wasn’t allowed to see her for five years and had to find a way to process the unbearable regret that she felt. She has dealt with severe emotional problems ever since, but ASMR has given her a way to try to comfort other people who are in pain. She’s probably the most outspoken ASMRtist I know about mental health issues and she’s one of several LGBTQ+ artists who have made videos with queer positive themes, such as roleplays around gay crushes, or ones which offer you words of acceptance.  

I think originally ASMR was, overall, a relatively white group, albeit one which had a lot of diversity in life experience. At the same time, YouTube has such a low barrier for entry that you don’t need to be in Hollywood to make it. You don’t need to be recognized by an agent or a producer. All kinds of people from around the world have been able to add their authentic voices to the culture. There have long been a few icons heavily visible within the space, such as MattyTingles, who was born in South Korea, BoHime Chella, who is of Portugese descent, ASMR Glow, who’s of Israeli and Moroccan descent, and Angelica, RaffyTaphy and The ASMR Ryan, who are Latinx. There have also been Caucasians from countries around the world such as Scottish Undertones, Tinglesmith and WhispersRed, who are British, Gentle Whispers and Palagea, who are Russian, Gina Carla, who is Swiss, and MassageASMR, who is Australian. Over the past few years I have become aware of an ever-wider range of Black voices entering the space, including the aforementioned BoHime Chella, Batala, April’s ASMR, Annura’s ASMR and JayYoung. In many cases my awareness is honestly the operative phrase, because they had been around. In other cases, it’s because our circle of friends has grown exponentially.  

 There are also a whole world of artists like Latte, ASMR PPOMO, SAS-ASMR, Devya Gurjar, KittyKlaw and Petit Sucre Blau who largely or exclusively speak languages other than English. PPOMO and SAS have two of the five largest channels in the world. Honestly, I really enjoy the languages and accents. But apart from just representation, each of these people brings elements of their cultures to their videos. If I’ve misdescribed anyone’s identity, please let me know and I’ll be happy to edit it. Since singling any one culture out with a video example goes against the spirit of what I’m saying I’ll use a playlist again. 

Honestly, it’s easy to get comfortable with a group of favorite artists and never become as familiar with others, even though they’re just as good. There are so many creators out there that it can be easy for busy people to just feel overwhelmed. But when you do take the time to sample artists it can be really rewarding. I’d love to read a similar personal essay written by someone who primarily watches an entirely different group of creators.

I think you have now given us enough of a core understanding of this community, its values, and its leadership structure that we can start to make sense of the role ASMR was playing for people during the Pandemic. So, share a bit more about the ways that these videos focused on self-care and community well-being helped people -- especially those struggling with depression and anxiety -- make it through this incredibly difficult time. How did these performers -- of all races and nationalities, as you note -- embrace new responsibilities for their community? And what did this mean for their followers?

To be honest, the first time I saw a COVID mask in an ASMR video I felt uneasy. I liked it even less when one artist called out another for failing to use her platform to promote Black Lives Matter, and the criticized person received a flood of hateful Twitter DMs, including threats to her children’s safety. She was left visibly frightened and crying. “I make relaxation videos to help people sleep,” she said. As 2020 went by some artists had to step away because their own mental health had collapsed. My clinical depression and anxiety had reached an all-time high and I was mainlining hours of relaxation videos every day, trying to stay fucking calm. Seeing the ASMR community become more like the rest of the world was not helping my confidence that everything was going to turn out alright. 

 A number of ASMR Twitch streamers held 24 hour telethons for a variety of charitable causes. I expected their donors to dry up after the first few hours. A lot of ASMR viewers are young, with very little economic opportunity, especially during a pandemic and record layoffs. But I’d wake up at 4am and check back in and the gifts would still be rolling in. Frivolous Fox regularly used her Twitch channel to go on hours-long, life affirming rambles about topics like empathy and forgiveness. She’d probably be embarrassed by this description, but it was almost like watching a 27 year old pastor deliver sermons for secular Millennial audiences. 

Here is a video where “Doctor” Darling tests you for COVID, debunking misinformation in the process, which captures both the insomnia-producing anxieties and the desire to help during this moment,

We got through it. By the Fall of 2020 I had developed curiosity about what COVID masks my favorite artists were wearing and seen a very welcome increase in the amount of content they were putting out each week. By the Spring of 2021 I had lost interest in their masks and I felt glad for those who were able to go on well-deserved vacations or visit with each other in person. The in-fighting had calmed down to a whisper. The videos were largely indistinguishable from those which had come before the pandemic, except that there were more artists. It wouldn’t surprise me if some of the ranks thin out, both on the supply and demand sides, as people place a renewed value on face-to-face relationships. My consumption has decreased a little, because I’ve been busy and my mental health has been pretty good.  

 I’ll remember, though, that throughout it all, despite and because of their humanity, most of the steadfast helpers stayed on the ship, seemingly ready to go down with it if necessary. I know their work was sometimes exhausting to them, but it gave them a way to help people from the safety of their homes, without spreading the disease. I love them for who they are. 

Charlie Jenkins is a novelist and transmedia consultant. His upcoming debut novel, American Wrestling 1989, is a melodrama which explore cultural conflicts in the world of 1980s professional wrestling and the ways that broken and discarded people can either heal or hurt one another as they endure their own personal tragedies. He was previously the Creative Director of Chaotic Good Studios and Research Director for The Alchemists Transmedia Storytelling Company, serving clients like NBC, The CW, Blizzard Entertainment and BaseFX.

Free Human Kindness: How ASMR Is Helping Us Survive the Pandemic, Clinical Depression and America's Culture Wars(Part One)

Throughout 2020 my adult son Charlie and I were locked down together in our Los Angeles apartment, so we necessarily got absorbed much more deeply into each other’s lives than we had in a long time. Perhaps what interested me the most was his engagement with the ASMR community. I learned about the social and emotional support work that YouTube creators and Twitch streamers were leading in their communities during the pandemic. These self-care and community support practices were built into the ASMR ethos. The subculture itself is somewhat guarded against press, because the media has portrayed its videos as strange and inexplicable. I’ve tried to get some leading ASMR influencers to appear on my podcast without luck (The invitation still stands if you are reading this). So, I wanted to get my son to share some of his own reflections as a participant-observer. 

Because this community is little known to outsiders, I wanted to have you start with a basic explanation which we can deepen over time. What is ASMR? How might you characterize the ASMR subculture? What kinds of content does it produce and why?

ASMR is an art movement, an aesthetic, a culture and even a philosophy. Streamers and YouTubers produce videos which are often designed to convey a sense of relaxation, kindness, fellowship and a greater appreciation for life's small pleasures. The videos can also be quite whimsical, and often they revel in absolutely trivial subjects. Welcoming people from all walks of life is a foundational principle, but that's usually accompanied by an underlying sense of unity and togetherness. ASMR is, in short, the anti-Twitter. There's so much important, hard work that needs to be done in our society, so many difficult subjects we need to talk about, and service to others is an important part of a balanced life. But if you become so damaged by the toxicity of our world that you develop serious mental health problems, you're not going to be in an effective place to help anyone. You're going to need other people to invest a lot of their energy in helping you. In times like those you look for the helpers, and ASMRtists are there with an endless supply of wholesomeness and love. 

Nothing beats real world, face-to-face companionship, but as the pandemic has shown us that isn’t always an option. When I discovered ASMR I was living in a small Louisiana town where I didn’t know even one person who I could call up to go for a beer. I tried and tried to make “real” friends but felt rejected. I’ve spent long parts of my adulthood without much money to socialize, and without much social status or confidence, partly as a result of clinical depression. I’m not alone in those regards. 

You can consume platforms like YouTube as a series of disjointed clickbait. You can also flip through the TV dial, watching things at random. Alternatively, you can choose a favorite serial drama and watch it for ten seasons. YouTubers and streamers may never become your real life friends, but when you watch them and talk to them regularly they also stop being strangers. They offer steadfast daily companionship to those who are love-poor. You can listen to them ramble about their days and it will make a trip to the laundromat go by faster. Often ASMR videos are the last thing I watch before I fall asleep, because they clear my mind of worries. If porn imperfectly meets your sexual needs, they imperfectly meet your social needs. In an ideal world, all of us would have so much healthy human contact we wouldn’t need to look for it online, but humanity has never been that way. Isolated farmers and social outcasts of previous generations simply sat alone in the dark. I think this is better. I’ve even found that some of the positive social skills modeled in ASMR can be learned. Consuming enough free digital kindness can offer you the courage to look for someone who wants to hear you prattle on about your day.

Many people believe that ASMR videos just involve people blowing on wind chimes or licking microphones. Those popular media images of ASMR reduce the genre to a postage stamp sized simplification, which is not entirely inaccurate, but far from complete. If there's one formal convention shared by all ASMR content it is calming sounds. If there’s a second, it’s how slow videos often are, forcing you to stop rushing around, flitting from one thing to the next, and be calm. It's yoga without the exercise. Words are spoken in soft tones or whispers.  

Often Bob Ross’ The Joy of Painting is cited as the inspiration point for ASMR because of the host’s calm, soft-spoken demeaner and eternal optimism. But, I think Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood is an equally significant predecessor. Most of the ASMRtists are of an age where they developed as children listening to his messages of love and peace. The way he directly addresses the audience throughout each episode and shares his hobbies and interests with them feels very much like ASMR.

If I could get people to watch one video which captures ASMR’s aesthetic it would be one of Goodnight Moon’s travelogues. When I’ve recorded vacation footage the sound has been choppy and the camera work has been disorienting. She creates these contemplative little wanders full of slow, smooth shots, curated atmospheric sounds and whispered narration. 

(Goodnight Moon is one of my absolute favorites, so I’m going to reference her a lot)

ASMR is a broad category. Any video where the filmmaker speaks softly or makes soothing with the intention of relaxing you is an ASMR video. Generally speaking the highest rated ASMR in America and Western Europe are whisper rambles, where the artist chats with the camera about subjects which interest them. For example, BlueWhispers sometimes flips through the new seed catalogues, telling you about the plants she likes to plant in her garden; Russian-born Gentle Whispering often teaches us professional insights about what fashions and accessories will flatter you; former rapper MattyTingles loves shoes and makes a lot of videos where he and his friends share their favorite pairs.

 The western world also loves roleplay videos, where the artist portrays a fictional role and monologues for the camera. Sometimes that means portraying a particular profession. In one video the Chris Hemsworth-esque FredsVoice, who has a fantastic British accent, portrays a professional photographer and pretends to have you pose for a modeling shoot; in another video, WhispersRed replicates the familiar sounds and small talk of an English barber shop. Other times artists cosplay as their favorite media characters and act out original scenes. Glow is a Star Wars nerd, so she dressed up as Darth Maul and pretended to hold you as her prisoner. A group of European artists collaborated on a richly-ornamented interpretation of A Christmas Carol for the holidays one year. Still other times artists create original characters. Goodnight Moon has an entire Medieval fantasy world called Babblebrook where she plays all of the different people in town and plays out storylines between them. Gibi, currently the most-followed English language ASMRtist, is the queen of all kinds of roleplays. My favorite of her creations is Tatyana, your Eastern European personal assistant, who measures you for wax figures and helps you to buy private islands. If you look at Japanese and Korean ASMR, or ACMP (Russian ASMR), or ASMR porn, those are different worlds. There are different trends in each. 

 Note that in most whisper ramble and roleplay videos the artist directly addresses you, the audience, and pretends as though you’re actually in the room with them, even asking you questions and pausing for you to answer. (You can answer in your head, or not at all, if you feel silly playing along at home.) Their goal is to make you feel like someone is paying attention to you in a friendly way and treating you the way you deserve to be treated. But occasionally artists turn the dynamic on its head, clownishly portraying rude and disruptive characters in order to make you laugh. 

Here is a playlist with all of the aforementioned examples. Once someone figures out what types of videos they most enjoy it’s easy to find variations on a theme. 

ASMR is named after a cool scientific phenomenon which I first noticed in childhood, long before I had any idea what it was called. Every once in a while I'd hear a sound like the howling of wind through the trees or the crunching of autumn leaves that gave me a pleasant little shiver. Sometimes when people would touch the back of my neck I’d shiver even more. Both of those are ASMR (autonomous sensory meridian response), also referred to as "the tingles." I experience that occasionally while listening to ASMR videos, and it's pleasant, but personally I always find it overstated in media coverage. 

If you want to talk about neuroscience, here's a way of looking at it which speaks much more to my experience. When I hear forks scratching against ceramic dishes in the sink it gives me a shudder of revulsion. If I'm dining with someone who chews with their mouth open it disturbs me so much I need to leave the room. Those are examples of a really common psychological phenomenon called misophonia. I also deal with sensory integration disorder, a related problem. If I'm trying to have a conversation with someone and they're loudly crunching nuts or there's a fussy toddler having a tantrum nearby I can barely string two sentences together. Your brain is supposed to focus on relevant information and fade out irrelevant background noise without your needing to consciously think about it, but mine is bad at that. I suspect many - if not most - people have had experiences like those, it's just a question of how frequently it detracts from your quality of life. I'm not a neuroscience researcher, but those issues seem to be really common among ASMR fans. I would speculate that the more unsettled someone is by painful sound frequencies or disruptive noises, the more soothing they find pleasant other frequencies or harmonious sounds (and thus ASMR videos.) They might also get the tingles, but they might simply feel like their fur or feathers are being smoothed down in the right direction rather than being rubbed against the grain. I'd also say it's an especially good place for people with depression, anxiety and related disorders to heal and maintain good mental health.

I like the way you discuss the aesthetic and philosophical dimensions of ASMR practice as well as its neurological roots. And with your suggestion that it is the “anti-twitter” you start to get at the social and political dimensions too.  In what ways does ASMR illustrate a different model of how online communities might operate than the social dynamics many find frustrating and even frightening on Twitter in the Age of Trump? How do the content producers and consumers, if those are even the right words, relate to each other? The word ‘community’ has been so overused in the Web 2.0 era that many of us have become skeptical about it; the promises of “virtual community” seem a quaint reminder of another time and place, like haircuts in high school yearbooks. Yet, when I watch your interactions with ASMR folks, it does seem to have some elements of a gift economy, even if some of the artists find ways to make money off of what they produce. I don’t mean to romanticize this. But I would like to get your sense of what you see yourself as participating in here.

Generally speaking, I believe social media is one of the most corrosive things to ever happen to American politics and society, making it harder to solve every other problem we face. I guess it's a little ironic I feel that way, since you’re the author of Spreadable Media. But overall, for me, ASMR has the healthiest online fan community I've encountered since before the advent of Facebook. 

YouTube comments, Twitter, Instagram and TikTok offer additional places for artists to express themselves and share brief interactions with supporters. But, generally I think of ASMR communities in terms of two platforms, Twitch and Discord. Twitch is essentially a one-way Zoom conversation. The creator sits in front of their webcam and performs live. You can then comment in a chatroom and they can read what you say and reply verbally. Discord provides private message boards. The artist gives you permission to join and they can kick you out. But as long as you act appropriately you can hang out with them and their other core supporters. The one I'm active in has threads about far flung topics like video games, sports, animal pictures, trivia, poetry and self-care. Every week we vote as a group on a movie to watch together, and often stay up until all hours watching sitcoms and cartoons afterward. Sometimes we play networked video games and all converse over voice chat while we compete. The artist is certainly doted on, but all of us are homies. Several of the people in the community have Twitch streams and we drop by to support all of them if we can.

 There are several reasons why, I suspect, ASMR fares somewhat better than most online communities. One is the subject matter. Generally relaxation videos appeal to empaths and sensitive types. The lower the volume of comments a community receives, the easier it is to police. Generally, in ASMR communities trolls are escorted off the premises very quickly. Personal animosities are mediated or split up ASAP. Artists typically designate some of the supporters they know best to moderate their communities and because the moderators are invested in the brand they loyally defend it from malicious assailants.

 With all of that said, there is unfortunately a darker side to everything. Sadly, a lot of the most toxic elements of the community are reserved for the artist as an individual rather than the group as a whole. Many ASMRtists have sensitive personalities. They might be a nurse who wants to ease people’s pain; or a mom who wants to nurture; or a drug store cashier who wants to feel a greater sense of purpose. They encounter people who want to bluntly critique their work. From the outside those comments may seem fair and harmless enough, but if they catch someone at the wrong moment they can really sting. Because it's a visual medium performers constantly have people evaluating their appearance. One moment they might hear, “Your chest looks nice in that dress” and the next they might hear “You look pale and sickly. Are you taking care of yourself?” Performers have shared Twitter DMs they received where people called them slurs or made threats against their family. I suspect virtually all ASMRtists have dealt with amateur sleuths curious about their personal information, and I know of at least one who had a stalker show up at their home. In short, they deal with all of the negative aspects of celebrity culture, but without making millions of dollars. But they deal with some of the negatives that therapists do when they try to help people who are mentally ill or miserable. Someone says, “I’m thinking about killing myself and you’re the only person who’s keeping me from doing it. I need you to pay constant attention to me.” I don't want to overstate all of that. We’re talking about a tiny fraction of the audience. But I'm painting such an otherwise - and deservedly - rosy picture that I do want to acknowledge some of the negatives.

To read the rest, see Part Two and Part Three.

Charlie Jenkins is a novelist and transmedia consultant. His upcoming debut novel, American Wrestling 1989, is a melodrama which explore cultural conflicts in the world of 1980s professional wrestling and the ways that broken and discarded people can either heal or hurt one another as they endure their own personal tragedies. He was previously the Creative Director of Chaotic Good Studios and Research Director for The Alchemists Transmedia Storytelling Company, serving clients like NBC, The CW, Blizzard Entertainment and BaseFX.

Agents of Influence: An Educational Video Game to Fight Misinformation

Over the past few years, I have been offering advice to Anahita Dalma and a team of USC students (among others) who have been working on a game, Agents of Influence, intended to address current issues around misinformation and disinformation circulation on social networking platforms. The group is launching a Kickstarter campaign as of today to help raise money to push the project to the next level. Having been impressed by their original insights into games-based learning and media literacy, not to mention their professionalism, I want to give them a chance to share some of their work here.

Agents of Influence: An Educational Video Game to Fight Misinformation

Written by: Michael Warker


Over the last year, we all have had to live much of our lives on the internet, whether it be through work, play, or reading the latest updates on these tumultuous times. With the convenience of the internet comes risks, however, as misinformation can easily masquerade as verified fact, and this threat inspired us at Alterea Inc. to think of a way to help. 

The solution we came up with is Agents of Influence: a spy-themed, educational video game that uses active inoculation theory to prepare students to recognize and combat digital misinformation. This theory is much like an inoculation for a virus, as it posits that exposing students to manipulative argumentation strategies makes them more resistant to subsequent manipulation attempts. Through Agents of Influence, we are aiming to equip a generation of “digital natives” in middle school with the tools and knowledge they need to combat digital misinformation.

Agents of Influence was created around the belief that video games have the capacity to be extremely useful learning tools. We constantly abided by teaching best practices to make sure our game was fulfilling the goals we wanted. Video games are a fantastic tool, as demonstrated by the idea of mastery orientations, which states that true knowledge comes from a desire for learning and understanding, not from a letter grade. Through the fun of video games, students actually want to learn. Studies have also shown that feedback is most helpful when it is “specific” and “immediate”, which is easy to accomplish through the video game format. 

As we researched our game and made connections with teachers, librarians, government officials, and more, we realized that misinformation may be one of the greatest threats facing our generation. During the 2016 election, it was found that the top “fake news” stories outperformed the top real ones on Facebook. Even more troubling, an Ipsos poll showed that 75% of Americans who see fake news view it as “somewhat” or “very” accurate. Since the 2016 election, the world has faced many huge issues that require credible information to combat them, including an ongoing global pandemic. We need tools to fight back against the growing threat of misinformation.

The “truth decay” caused by misinformation has taken hold of the world during the digital age, eroding civil discourse, causing political paralysis, and leading to public uncertainty and disengagement. With so much noise, people are taking the easy route of simply reaffirming their own biases with the information that they consume. The most recent and prevalent of these issues lies in COVID-19 vaccine trust, with many people on both sides of the issue finding information that simply reaffirms their own beliefs, as opposed to engaging in civil conversation with each other. 

These are all immense issues, but the solution lies in every individual’s ability and, more importantly, their willingness, to investigate the information that they consume. To encourage our target audience of middle schoolers to become more engaged and critical of what they see online, we knew that we had to make it fun for them. This reason is why we decided to make a video game to teach them about misinformation. 

Before thinking about the fun, however, we had to determine what we were trying to teach our middle schoolers. We spoke to multiple experts on media literacy, and we investigated how other organizations such as MediaWise, News Literacy Project, and more are educating people about misinformation. From all of this research, we derived three core learning objectives that have guided our game. 

Agents of Influence will teach students how to: 

1) Question the trustworthiness of information.

2) Investigate the trustworthiness of information.

3) Use this investigation to inform their decisions and build better information consumption habits.

If students walk away from this game questioning information they consume, and they have the ability and drive to research to verify their information, then we will qualify Agents of Influence as a success. For added benefit, however, we have also included much more educational content. 

We’ve designed our game around many educational standards, including Common Core, CASEL SEL, NAMLE, ISTE, Learning for Justice Digital Literacy Framework, Media Smarts, California Model School Library Standards, and NCSS C3 Framework. A process which is common to many of these standards is the IRAC, or the Inquiry, Research, Analysis, and Conclusion model. The IRAC model was formative to both our story structure and our game structure during the creation of Agents of Influence. Once we finished our initial education prep, we tackled the hard part: making it entertaining for middle schoolers. 

We discovered that the IRAC model forms well into a mystery story structure, so we decided to make our spy-themed game center around an investigation that students will have to lead. Every one of our three core modules will involve a plot from an evil spy group led by the nefarious Harbinger, and the player will have to work together with their spy team, the Agents of Influence, to stop them before it’s too late. These three modules are centered around cyber danger, political disinformation, and pseudoscience, respectively, so even the theming of each story is tied into our core learning objectives.

Creating a compelling narrative was an essential step in the development of this game, as it has been shown that emotional resonance helps students better retain information. We’re creating an experience that will teach students to question information, which is a new skill, not just information to be regurgitated on a test, so having a narrative that helps them remember the significance of their actions both online and in the real world is essential to a successful game In addition to our compelling narrative,we developed four mini-games centered around our other learning objectives. 

Conversation: Disguised in the narrative context of an interrogation, students must use good conversation practices to talk to a suspect. Every turn, students choose between different dialogue options, putting them in control of how they talk and act. If they’re not careful, however, they could trigger a negative “state,” such as making their suspect defensive or suspicious of them. These negative states are triggered when a student says something aggressive, critical, contemptuous, or alienating to their suspect. In addition, this game also teaches students how to recognize logical fallacies that may arise in arguments so they can better combat these fallacies in their daily lives. 

Research: This game takes place in the all too familiar landscape of a social media feed. Setting the game on social media allows for high transferability of skills, as this is where students would most likely encounter misinformation in their own lives. In our research game, students must flag posts as “accurate” or “misleading” by researching the post’s content in a simulated search engine. They’re also taught lateral reading techniques, along with learning about different misinformation types such as satire, false context, imposter content, and fact versus opinion. 

Analysis: Your artificial intelligence friend, A.M.I.E. is malfunctioning, and you have to prove to her that you’re a master of misinformation by answering her questions. Visually, we have a maze representation of A.M.I.E.’s circuitry, which students can navigate if they correctly answer analytical questions about an article they read. Students answer true and false questions about the purpose of the article, the bias of the author, logical and data fallacies the article employs, and many other relevant skills useful to critical reading. 

Finale: This last game is the emotional and intellectual climax of every module of Agents of Influence. Players must save a fellow student who has had their memories corrupted by misinformation. Through research and critical thinking, the player must remind their classmate who they truly are and save them from the clutches of misinformation. 

Of course, we did not know whether our game would be fun for a middle schooler until we sat down over Zoom with a few of them and heard what they had to say. After playing our research game, a small pool of middle schoolers we tested all said that they would research more. This was after only one version of the game in an early paper prototype. Stacking this exposure along with our other games and our narrative could have a huge potential impact on students. Plus, to top it all off, our testers all had fun and were engaged with the material. One of them even asked if we could make the game for his Nintendo DS so that he could take it on the go.

In addition to these small tests with middle schoolers, we brought in teachers and other experts to playtest our games so that we could learn more from industry professionals about how to enhance Agents of Influence. We also sent out multiple surveys to teachers around the world to learn how to make our game seamlessly accomplish their various classroom needs. Through this research, we learned that designing with ample flexibility was essential, which is why we decided to separate the game into smaller, thirty minute sections that are individually playable. This structure allows for teachers to focus on skills that are most applicable to their classrooms. This feedback, along with the copious other guidance from experts we consulted, has been essential in forming the structure and content of our game.

While our initial tests were small, they have allowed us to prepare our framework for feedback, which will be instrumental in our expanded testing period in the near future. Some of our core questions include asking if players have the motivation to look for multiple perspectives when researching after playing our games. We also want to know if they feel better empowered to fight misinformation online after playing Agents of Influence. So far, our takeaways are solid, but expanded testing will be necessary to verify our information. 

To truly see if our game is effective in preparing students for the looming threat of misinformation, we need additional funding. Going forward, we hope to fund our first module, Agents of Influence: Cyber Danger, and we want thousands of students to play it for our in-depth beta period. We have worked hard to ensure this large-scale test will show similarly enthusiastic results as our initial tests. 

Agents of Influence was created wholly to fit the needs of our educational objectives. Story, character, and gamified elements all arose from the core need to teach students how to better combat misinformation, and we are very excited to get Agents of Influence in front of even more students and teachers in the future. This game has a long road ahead of it, and if you would like to follow that journey, try our prototype, or learn more about the game, please visit our kickstarter or our website for more information.

Michael Warker is a recent graduate of the University of Southern California where he studied Theatre and Screenwriting. He is writing on behalf of Alterea, Inc., which is a story-telling company focused on immersive story-living that lets participants grow and change through the stories they experience. This article was written in association with Anahita Dalmia and Jasper McEvoy. Visit our website here: https://www.altereainc.com/ 

Watching Teen TV: An Interview with Stefania Marghitu (Part Three)

To what degree is teen television an aspirational category targeting those on the threshold of adolescence rather than speaking to those actually undergoing such shifts in their age and social status?

There’s no denying any commercial for profit endeavor is exactly that. But I also do find the solution parents often find is censorship, those that are sheltered from media don’t have the literacy to understand it later on in life. I think it’s why I’m so keen to move on to one of my next hopeful projects on the idea of the digital masquerade in social media. The carefully fabricated authenticity behind the ideal beauty standard on platforms like Instagram is leading young people into a dangerous path. Going back to issues of gender and girl making, and added on to complexities of race, colorist, ethnicity, body image, gender identity, Im seeing a lot more organizations outside of the US invest in taking on these issues. Tracing back to the feminine masquerade to the post-feminist masquerade, and to Safiy Noble’s Algorithims of Opression, this is not a new issue, but a newly presented one.

At some point the media literacy and development does kick in with fictional media as fabricated and aspirational. Every single character in a teen show also breaks down some kind of vulnerability at some point, even if it’s solved within a “very special episode” or given more depth through a serialized plot line. I think there’s a reckoning with body images and a wave of amazing resistance geared towards breaking down the ideal beauty standard online right now too, but far too often the potential psychological or physical damage can already be done. And this is why the pain and suffering from childhood and adolescence carries on into adulthood, as it was never resolved or sometimes not even acknowledged.

Again we’re seeing some paradigm shifts, but those most in need of help in this country are also the least likely to receive any form of support. I dedicated the book to a dear childhood friend of mine who struggled with issues of identity, belonging, and self-worth. When we first met we bonded over the music and film and television that we loved. Going back to our town after the vaccine I see a lot of good for teens today, but it makes me realize how much can still be improved and how things have not changed as much as I wish. Finishing the book during the pandemic really reinforced this drive in me to dedicate my pedagogy and research to marginalized communities. 

A recurring critique of teen television is that the actors playing high school students are a decade or so older and often “too old” to convincingly play the part. Why do networks feel the need to cast actors in their 20s in such role and what are the consequences of this choice for the evolution of the genre?

This is a double edged sword. Age appropriate casting like Schulyer’s choice in Degrassi is geared towards public service authenticity and connection. But because it’s so common, audiences are also all the more aware of it. Gabrielle Cartiers just spoke about lying about her age for her part in 90210 because of ageism. Most audiences can look up or roughly know the twenty something playing a teen and be cognizant. Part of the reason behind the casting is industrial, and also  financial. As Holzman described, there are limitations to hiring a child actor. But it also grants authenticity and can also allow for more storylines. But again at this point it’s been satirized and accepted that it almost helps in acknowledge the false standards of what an ideal teen should look like. It’s poked fun of at the beginning of Never Have I Ever.  That kind of self reflexivity helps show behind the curtain and is also helpful for the young viewers. It can also take the pressure of child actors who have historically struggled in their own lives due to the pressures associated with their stardom.

Teen television has proven unusually successful at generating stars -- from Sally Field to John Travolta, from  Clare Danes  to Zendaya. What mechanisms are used to create teen idols? How does this impact the production of the shows? What are some of the challenges of escaping this teen idol status?

There are mechanisms - marketing, promotion, etc. - to try to make stars and there are also sometimes happenstance. Danes’ series was canceled but My So Called Life and her acting allowed her to be a film star. Field’s career shows how quickly one can go from teen to love interest to mother, highlighting ageism in the industry. Both Field and Danes returned to television later in their careers, which shows the opportunities it can give in contrast to film. Travolta and the Saturday Night Fever sensation is a whole phenomenon, and the story behind The Bee Gees soundtrack as told through their recent documentary merits its own academic study. I think it’s telling a lot of the men who started on TV and became film stars - from Tom Hanks to George Clooney to Leonardo DiCaprio, stayed strong in film. Of course the pipeline of movie stars is already so limited.

Zendaya is definitely a unicorn in the world of former child stars. She tried a bit of film acting, singing, yet still found her way back to television where she thrived.  She choose her projects wisely, has an enviable public image, and is now the youngest lead actress in a drama Emmy award winner. 

As I am writing these questions, I just finished watching the final series of Atypical, which deals with a teen who is on the autism spectrum. It raises questions for me about the notion of “normality” as a key theme in these series? It’s built into the title of  Freaks and Geeks, both groups who feel themselves to be outcasts in their school but for different reasons. My So-Called Life’s Winnie Holzman talks about “people who ‘fit in’ and don’t fit in.”  How has this push to deal with “outcasts” taken different forms across the history of the genre and how might a character like the protagonist of Atypical relate to this dynamic/  Or for that matter, the number of queer characters in recent series?

Atypical was another show I was really delighted to see my students engage with. Historical research has traditionally told us escapist media is where audiences turn to after national and global trauma. Some folks don’t want Covid in their fictional media at all. Some seek that for normalcy and catharsis. I’m really not sure how this might play out in relation to diversity and inclusion given those cyclical histories of shutting out, erasing, or scapegoating marginalized communities. But the positive responses for series like Atypical and Never Have I Ever, as well as docu series and interests in understanding how media history works is also encouraging. 

The recent decision in Tennessee to ban all state outreach with Covid-19 information to adolescents reflects ongoing struggles of adults to exert greater control over teen’s lives, at least among more conservative parts of the culture. Does this make teen television a particularly intense battleground in struggles over cultural politics?

I was actually just talking with a friend who is a teacher in a neighboring state about the upcoming school year right after discussing the new season of Never Have I Ever.  Public school teachers are being told they can’t express their vaccination status or opinions on it. There was a recent episode of Good Fight in which parents sued a private Zoom teacher tutor for “teaching socialism” and that students started critiquing their parents after seeing Parasite through a class lens. It’s all a battleground right now.

The politicization of the vaccine makes “sense” based on the rhetoric, but not on the logics of what vaccines have done for humanity for eradicating diseases. Especially as 12 is the starting age of vaccine eligibility now, but that it depends on their parents’ decisions. Also, of course, as with many of us, teens and pre teens have spent more time at home and potentially with television.  And some folks wanted escapism, but even family dramas like This Is Us showed the difficulties of both being away from family and loved ones, but also the tensions of multi-generational “bubbles” or “pods” and how young people especially were missing out on milestones and social lives.

I know there was a lot of criticism towards young people who “didn’t care” about Covid because it didn’t impact them, but I found that my students were cautious and considerate, though they were also forthcoming of the frustration behind spending a year in college off campus and back home. 

I’m all for criticizing Big Pharma and the inequalities of the health care system, but this is a free vaccine, that is also adding new incentives for folks to get vaccinated in states with low statistics. Meanwhile other countries don’t have the access to the vaccine and citizens which they could have the same protection.

Again I’m seeing both advancements and regressions in these areas. I do think access is key here. Horace Newcomb once said in an interview that he didn’t have access to cinemas growing in the non-urban South, so TV was his entry point into a lot of new worlds. I think about the books and media that was banned and censored while my parents were growing up in Communist Romania. And for teens especially, this is a time when they are gaining independence and forming their own views and perspectives while coming of age. There’s a lot of pressure and to some extent blame being put on educators for pushing agendas and having students turn against their parents. In the new HBO series White Lotus, a great critique of class and privilege, Connie Britton’s character tells her teenage daughter played by Sydney Sweeney that their generation’s legacy is “biting the hand that feeds them, ” not caring about their families who actually know and love them, while caring about oppressed groups who they don’t even know. I think being newly critical and questioning the world around you, including your own privilege, is part of the gears turning towards critical thinking and media literacy.

As college professors, there’s less pressure than teachers in K-12, I am not envious of the constant battles they face in just teaching objective facts in courses like science and history and how that is being challenged, or censorship over the type of literature being taught in English classes. But one interesting aspect of teaching this past year, more students were more in touch with their hometowns as adults, and more self-reflexive about childhood and upbringing. There’s a tendency for some to get out of their hometowns as soon as possible and start anew, which can be liberating of course. And some students stay nearby for various reasons, so this kind of united folks from high school who would have previously not kept in touch. Living in their childhood homes and sleeping in their rooms, being more involved in their local communities, they had a lot of interesting perspectives they previously wouldn’t have.

I had some students in conservative cities or states and they were realizing the changes they can make or impact was greater than in a political bubble or the echo chamber idea. And that’s why we’re seeing folks return to their hometowns or the south to contribute to change. That’s where the good fight is really being fought in those battlegrounds. And I think teen TV has allowed for a lot of relatability and catharsis for college students dealing with their high school past through nee series like Normal People , which also shows the transition to college, Cruel Summer, Never Have I Ever, End of fhe F***ng World, and Sex Education, but also revisiting or exploring past teen TV like Freaks and Geeks, Moesha, Skins, The OC, MSCL and so on. 

From the afterschool specials to East Los High, we can see tensions playing out between the desire to education teens about particular issues or concerns and the entertainment value of these series. What are some of the strategies producers use to negotiate these tensions?

This is where I think the influence of Canadian and British- and of course other non-US- public service television is making both a direct and indirect influence.

Some students don’t realize British shows like Skins and Misfits they loved when younger are on a public service platform- and even if it caused moral panic around the drugs, drinking and sex- and as scholars like Susan Berridge have asserted reassert some of the same stereotypes and narratives of marginalized folks - it was new ground for teen audiences at the time. And when we discuss the failed Skins US remake, it can be traced to adapting the surface level or shock value without a thoughtful or culturally specific eye

As both the folks behind East Los High and Degrassi told me, and for really many teen series that connected to its audiences, talking down is never the answer. Teens are critical when the writing is forced, whether it’s too commercial and like an algorithm of teen speak, or too much of a cautionary tale based on moral panic. Many grow up watching those sometimes terrifying and trite health class videos, or programs like Abstinence Only and D.A.R.E. It’s interesting because a lot of English television scholars have written on how US teen TV influenced the Channel 4 youth series and the American-ness of the teenage experience. And of course we know it’s more common for US to make their own versions of UK shows. But seeing audiences love not only other Anglophone teen series, but from continental Europe and K-dramas, really defies a lot of assumptions about US audience.

And shows like Norway’s Skam, which has been remade in various countries multiple times over, is still revered for its original and the way fans translated for subtitles  and distributed it via Tumblr. And that came from a very savvy Norwegian public service model. I don’t think we’ll see US public service programming beyond childhood series, though Sesame Street and other programs are revered. I see students really want more oversight and checks and balances of the Disney and Nickelodeon programming they grew up on. Children’s programming is not my area of expertise but again I’m seeing more self reflexivity towards that exposure. And the “representation matters” discourse and seeing someone like them on screen matters so much, but again I want to stress to them the cultural and industrial contexts beyond that. And that’s a main goal of the book, and my dissertation, and I think a lot of my work : to trace how socially conscious programming is developed, brought in, distributed and received, and when and why.

Stefania Marghitu holds her PhD from the University of Southern California’s Division of Cinema and Media Studies, with a minor from The Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism. Her book, Teen Television (Routledge Genre Guidebook series), was released in May 2021. You can also find her work published in journals such as Feminist Media Studies, Communication, Culture, and Critique, and Spectator, as well as the edited collections White Supremacy and the American Media (Routledge, forthcoming, 2021) and ReFocus on Amy Heckerling (Edinburgh University Press). 

She is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at Loyola University New Orleans, where she teaches courses on digital media, film, gender, race, and adaptation. She has previously taught introductory and upper level courses on film, television, and digital media history, aesthetics, industry, and theory at Pitzer College, Chapman University, California State University Northridge, and Columbia College Hollywood.

Watching Teen TV: An Interview with Stefania Marghitu (Part Two)

How have shifts in delivery channels from broadcast networks to cable channels to streaming platforms reshape the genre? You describe Euphoria as a premium cable network series so perhaps it would be a good example to spell out some of your assumptions here.

I think in terms of teaching, and as this book is geared towards teaching introductory students to television, media and cultural studies, it’s important to distinguish both how historical and contemporary platforms function. One thing that has been lost amidst streaming’s prevalence is confusion with streaming “originals.” And by distinguishing the production, distribution, and reception of platforms but also by historical eras at the interaction of social movements, we can also teach students about cyclical patterns and distinguish what is actually “new.”

The interviews and inclusion of race and media scholars within the book shows how different eras allowed for more inclusion, and how droughts occurred. Linking to market demands and assumptions about demographics, as well as socio-political shifts, are key. Students get very excited about representation and visibility, and I want to acknowledge that, but also encourage them to demand more and be discerning in the same way they are towards politics and policy. Kristen Warner, Racquel Gates, Brandy Monk-Payton and Alfred Martin are scholars doing amazing work on these dynamics. Warner’s work on plastic representation has been a tremendous resource for students to understand. 

You cite Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, and Archie as key early influences on teen television for the baby boom generation.  How and where was this influence felt? It might be interesting to compare the early formulations of these characters with whats happened as all three franchises have been back in production in the past few years.

 The recombinant culture and nature of remakes, reboots and spin-offs is an opportunity both for repeated stagnant formulas as well as room for innovation and updates to beloved past examples. Literary adaptations are constant, and the serialized nature of television lends itself to how novels were first released as well. These series also both allow that prime time hybrid serial that Michal Z. Newman discusses in his work.

The core of these franchises have both a universal appeal and a malleability and flexibility to update and expand. Different eras come back in different futures- it’s most evident in fashion trends and perhaps most apparent in the aesthetics of a media text. Fashion like music and slang is integral to the teen lifestyle identities- Riverdale has this ‘50s look with the darker edge of crime series under Jughead’s narrative of a post-industrial American utopia gone dystopic. It also shows how audiences are split between fans of the genre in general and demographic targets. Fandom and nostalgia pushes audiences one way, and we can have tendencies to either be more lenient or more critical of a beloved media text being newly revamped and released. We tend to think of these as either the tent pole franchises or the cult fandoms, perhaps the “fanboy” at the heart of it too. 

As your book makes clear, the television and music industries are complexly intertwined where the teen market is concerned. Does music television represent an alternative genre to teen television in terms of attracting the youth market? You could have a successful music program which did not directly depict the lives of young people, for example?

Absolutely. Music programming or music related content is by no means limited to age. I do think a strong sense of a teen series identity is rooted in music, fashion, and language. 

It’s hard for me to imagine a successful teen series without a full sense of self- and part of that to me is the inclusion of fashion and costume design, music supervision and soundtrack , casting and acting, production design, in addition to all the traditional above the line markers. This also allows ways to look at how authorship and influence is being shown by those traditionally below the line folks in the industry, but also how you can’t really not include those integral aspects of teen media. There’s a special relationship between how identity and self expression are defined through fashion, slang, and music. The first piece I published on teen media pinpointed how Clueless is still revered by fans through these key elements, and how its influence is still seen. A strong sense of music, fashion, and vernacular sets the tone for so many of these teen series. You can’t think of My So Called Life without thinking of grunge, or The O.C. without indie rock

Your interviews with production personnel consistently point to the “mandates’ that shaped their production choices. What were some of the mandates these producers felt they needed to achieve if they were going to gain the respect and interest of a teen audience?

While my core was in US media, what is nice about including dominant or influential non-US distribution was a way to discuss the differences between public service and commercial models, then into different modes of production, distribution and reception. With Linda Schulyer and Degrassi, the decades long history of the series reveals how her and her colleagues model is essentially the answer to a lot of issues US television comes short in terms of diversity and inclusion both on and offscreen. First of all, that a middle school teacher like Schulyer could enter the media industry, and slowly develop her own series. As a teacher, she saw that educational media geared towards young people talked down to them, giving into moral panics. It’s like the abstinence only model of sex eduction. Those are the areas where teenage pregnancy is highest. Beyond the Canadian mandate, Schulyer gained freedom, and a franchise, once the show provided US audiences what it was missing. Schulyer also hired and enlisted writers, consultants, etc. to speak on topics relevant to teens who could offer expertise. 

Winnie Holzman was in broadcast television during this time that I think helps students understand periods of time where high ratings were crucial for a series, and critical acclaim and awards could not save My So Called Life from cancellation. Again it’s important to have that context when teaching television, and another reason why I find Teen TV the perfect lens for the complexities of the ecosystem.

Eric Damon was the costume designer for Gossip Girl, a show which really brought high fashion to the small screen after its initial success. The star status of Blake Lively after season one and appeal from adults, especially New Yorkers and a rising blog culture and TV recaps and reviews online, all helped boost the show’s fashion credo. And it was the same with his experience on Sex and the City, who made a multi million dollar franchise of its fashion tie ins and product placements. Comparing the relatively low budget of the original Gossip Girl to the new HBO Max iteration that has just premiered also shows how the fandom and legacy of its fashion influence is absolutely integral to the series’ identity. 

East Los High shows how early streaming models allowed this series originally funded by a non profit, with no links to the industry, to exist and thrive. It’s an anomaly to the nature of US television, but those are the interesting moments when the innovation can outweigh the convention. And the work given into the show, on par with the thoughtfulness of Degrassi, is really admirable. I think it’s what a lot of my students write about wishing they had when they were younger- we need more than PBS and Sesame Street and a few other examples. But we can’t seem to get this country to agree for universal health care, much less to further provide services to media when budgets are being slashed for what little there is. 

 Stefania Marghitu holds her PhD from the University of Southern California’s Division of Cinema and Media Studies, with a minor from The Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism. Her book, Teen Television (Routledge Genre Guidebook series), was released in May 2021. You can also find her work published in journals such as Feminist Media Studies, Communication, Culture, and Critique, and Spectator, as well as the edited collections White Supremacy and the American Media (Routledge, forthcoming, 2021) and ReFocus on Amy Heckerling (Edinburgh University Press). 

She is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at Loyola University New Orleans, where she teaches courses on digital media, film, gender, race, and adaptation. She has previously taught introductory and upper level courses on film, television, and digital media history, aesthetics, industry, and theory at Pitzer College, Chapman University, California State University Northridge, and Columbia College Hollywood.

Watching Teen TV: An Interview with Stefania Marghitu (Part One)

i’ve spent an astonishing number of hours during the pandemic watching shows set in high school and middle school — Sex Education, Never Have I Ever, Atypical, The Baby Sitter’s Club, and so many others. These years were not very fun or comfortable ones in my own life, yet there is something very comforting about the emotional legibility of teen television.

Stefania Marghitu’s newly released Teen TV examines this terrain as a market demographic and genre category with a rich history, one which sheds light on how young people understand their lives across the second half of the 20th century. Each generation seems to discover this genre on its own as producers seek to update recurring themes and conventions with new iconography, new issues that reflect how young people see themselves and their lives. Marghitu combines nuanced analysis of shows, audiences, producers, marketing and programming trends, and shifting media ecologies with interviews with leading producers of teen television series. The resulting book is short but sweet — easy to read and teach but also rich in insight and deeply grounded in historical research.

Marghitu was recently included in a Vice documentary on Teen TV. Check it out!

Marghitu is a recent graduate from the PhD program in critical studies at the USC Cinema School, where I was lucky enough to advise her dissertation — in this case, an exploration of the impact of female writer-producers at different phases of television history. She’s an exceptional television historian embarking on the early phases of her career and it is my pleasure and honor to present her to my readers. Across this three part interview, we dig deep into the premises of her Teen TV book. Enjoy!

Let’s start where your book starts -- “What is Teen TV? Does Teen TV even exist anymore? Do teens even watch television?”

I’m not an essentialist by any means- I mention anecdotes in the introduction that ask these questions while Teen TV was on a new precipice, and the boom continues across television. This line of questioning on its existence and assumed “extinction” reminded me of television and media scholars like Amanda Lotz who took on the cyclical “television is dead” statement. Television has gone through phases that need to be distinguished. In a recent job interview I was asked where I draw the line on what television is, and it’s more about discerning what early broadcast, post-network, cable, streaming, etc is.

Teen TV is both aimed at a demographic (or multiple demographics, such as TV for Teens themselves or Teen TV for fans of the genre). And what I remain fascinated about television and this genre specifically is how we can trace the history just as much as we can apply cultural specificities to different eras, movements, trends, success, failures, and flops. It’s along with the generational cord cutter argument, but it’s also connected to, say, college students traditionally not having televisions. This is what else interested me in the generational aspect of the genre- the idea that teens didn’t want to watch TV in early broadcast because it was for their parents and they were going to drive ins, concerts etc. once they had freedom, or even listening to music or using the telephone instead of TV.. That argument has been made for every generation whether it’s  new music sensation and related venues, shopping, roller rinks, the Internet…

There is presumably no market for Teen TV until there is. That’s commercial art, and the fickle and unreliable nature of the industry. Formulas can only last for so long, what Todd Gitlin calls recombinant culture that makes television go on, and teens are discerning of what they will actually like. The supply and demand nature of the medium is based on certain “universal” aspects of coming of age as well as nuances of each generation.

You describe teens as a “desired, but elusive audience”? Can you explain both sides of that phrase?

Great segue! Teens are fickle. Pre WWII youth culture can be traced to flappers,.I made a joke about how VSCO girls are like this for the pandemic, because the trend was being likened to 1920s flappers. To be a desired audience means you have money to spend in the eyes of commercial television. To be an elusive audience is to be constantly changing demographic that is one of the most difficult to cater to when generational shifts and rebellion against past generations defines the current one. That’s part of teens evolving and gaining independence in US Post World War economies because of the rise in wealth and more expendable income of teens as a new market. The socioeconomic affordances of being a teenager and having that experience, especially an American Teenager, is intrinsically linked to marketing to the new demographic.

I remember taking a music history class as an undergrad and my professor at Indiana University indicating it was the first time in modern history teens tastes were radically different from their parents. Rock N Roll provided this, not just as a music genre, but as a fashion choice, a backdrop to subversion. Alternative Rock, grunge and hip-hop did this for the MTV generation and subsequent programming. The media industries are going to try to appeal to any demographic with money to spend. Again this is an argument of why progressive programming was accepted in the ‘70s- Mary Tyler Moore for second wave feminists with their own jobs and income; The Jeffersons for Black Americans quite literally “moving on up.”

When I was growing up the “tween” category was everywhere. The last year I taught as a graduate student a lot of students said teens shows didn’t speak to them at all, then Euphoria was able to tap in, gaining this fascination from my students more universally than any other series before.  As much as reboots and spin-offs try, they are not a guarantee. And many Teen TV reboots and spin-offs failed, as well as global adaptations. It’s a perfect case study of a genre that cannot be stagnant and must adapt to its demographic.

You describe teen television as a “gender factory,” a phrase which evokes for me Geraldine Bloustein’s phrase “girlmaking” to refer to the way femininity is produced, performed, and enforced in everyday life. So, how would you describe the role that television plays in the construction of teen’s gender identity as compared with socialization through social media or face to face encounters? Does television produce or consume or both gender norms?

I think it’s no surprise those interested in television genre such as soap opera, and all of the amazing early television scholars abroad and in the US discussing the discourse of gender and genre, are also attracted to Teen TV. Just as early teen media for middle class girls was targeted to future housewives, that still had to change. Television can both influence girl making and reflect it. And just as women in soap operas and melodramas, or audiences could queer media texts, interpreted texts beyond a one way understanding - it’s why I love citing Stuart Hall’s early writing on popular media serving as beyond propaganda, whether capitalist or nationalistic or any other intended messages, Teens are coming of age and learning along the way a new understanding of the world around them and their own identity. And teens and youth movements are traditionally associated with change and demanding more each generation.

I have a hard time telling students that writing on the “impact” of a media text is actually quite difficult- and of course it’s because media studies scholars are in direct opposition to the overly simplified “media effects” conclusions. If a generation of teens are more accepting of, and demand, equality for marginalized groups, then there is an initiative to appeal to that if it’s also market driven.

One of my favorite assignments is a media biography, and I have so many students who write about a turn or development towards understating who they are, who they want to be, and what they won’t let themselves be deterred by. Taste and material cultures and branding and lifestyle determines a lot of what give teens these feelings of identity. It’s a push pull between a commercial industry and capitalist system trying to package and promote and those trying to make sense of where they’ll fit into that world.

Aniko Imre gives this brilliant lecture on Neoliberalism in Introduction to TV, and it’s very complex and sprawling, but for some students it clicks in this really amazing way. This is why media that supports traditional expectations like gender norms can be totally rejected, and that’s when it has to change.

 We know surface level representation and tokenism is not the answer, and students who look at Teen TV see how the lens of media industries and other systems and hierarchies of power can provide an understanding of how ideology works. Because it’s their identity and their future at stake. And it’s what’s amazing about connecting to students through what they care about and connect to.

 If the teen in teen tv is a demographic group, a market construct, a genre category, a discursive formation, etc., then might we need a new genre distinction for Preteen TV to refer to shows like Never Have I Ever, The Babysitter’s Club, and Pen15 to distinguish it from teen shows that tend to skew much older and increasingly deal with sexual matters?

Absolutely.  Watching Pen15 was very cathartic for me, seeing a reflection of this awkward, confusing, strange time in your life back at you. Not just the age but the time period. It’s also why Freaks and Geeks is actually quite complex- the geeks are more like the preteens and the freaks are the teens. They’re distinguished not just by social category but also by age. We see this in Pen15 too- different levels of puberty and milestones reached at certain ages, entering these new spaces as not just the youngest and most naive, but most likely to be the lowest rung of middle school, or high school’s, hierarchy.

And we also see immigrants, children of immigrants, teens dealing with grief or loss, alongside understating gender and sexual identity, experiments with drugs and alcohol, mental health issues. And I think what makes the Preteen shows distinguishable is that parents and their children can watch together. Preteens may not quite be ready for the intense nature of the new HBO Max series, but also they’re not interested in the sexual milestones. It’s this stage where you want to be released from being a child- think about the shifts in development as well as clothes, bedroom decor.

All of these shows also present new independence but also feeling confined by parents, and that desire to bond with friends. Pen15 is about two best friends dealing with things together but also moments of tension and rupture, it taps into that same age range that Broad City did for post-college twenty somethings. Babysitters Club puts both likely and unlikely friends together, almost on the same fundamentals as a workplace sitcom, because they’re these future entrepreneurs essentially. 

Never Have I Ever is another one that so many Indian Americans and children of immigrants have identified with. Mindy Kaling has this background in both workplace sitcoms with The Office and rom-com hybrids with The Mindy Project and Love Actually. So Never Have I Ever captures something even more untapped than her previous projects.

And something like the thoughtful reconfiguring of the characters, cultural specificity and subsequent casting in the new Babysitters Club can appeal both to the nostalgia of past fans and new audiences of the preteen demographic. And it’s a balance between friendships, school, family, storylines also including parents and other family members like Claudia’s grandmother.

My students once had an argument about an indigenous coming of age series and its cancellation. One student very quickly looked up the reviews and said the show shouldn’t just keep going because of the “optics.” The student who originally mentioned it said she quite enjoyed it, although it was not perfect. And many first seasons, or first few seasons aren’t. It’s about which series are granted that time to develop, it became a conversation about privilege and what stories get to be told.

Stefania Marghitu holds her PhD from the University of Southern California’s Division of Cinema and Media Studies, with a minor from The Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism. Her book, Teen Television (Routledge Genre Guidebook series), was released in May 2021. You can also find her work published in journals such as Feminist Media Studies, Communication, Culture, and Critique, and Spectator, as well as the edited collections White Supremacy and the American Media (Routledge, forthcoming, 2021) and ReFocus on Amy Heckerling (Edinburgh University Press). 

She is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at Loyola University New Orleans, where she teaches courses on digital media, film, gender, race, and adaptation. She has previously taught introductory and upper level courses on film, television, and digital media history, aesthetics, industry, and theory at Pitzer College, Chapman University, California State University Northridge, and Columbia College Hollywood.

An Invitation to Continue the Dialogue on Educomunicación: North-South and South-South collaborations. (Part 5)

An Invitation to Continue the Dialogue on Educomunicación: North-South and South-South collaborations. (Part 5)

by Julio-César Mateus, PhD and Andres Lombana-Bermudez, PhD

In the final post of our series, we would like to address some critical questions about the future and current state of educomunicación that were not fully discussed in the webinars, and share some ideas for promoting the South-South and North-South dialogues on media education and media literacies. 

Andres: 

As we have listened in the previous entries of the series, educomunicación, as a Latin American movement and tradition, offers situated knowledges and practices that can be useful for building a more plural ecology of media education and media literacies. However, given the diversity of educomunicación initiatives, systematizing the heterogeneity of practices can be a daunting task. Moreover, there is also the challenge of translating local and situated knowledge to other languages. One of the recent efforts that aimed to extend and amplify the Latin American dialogue on educomunicacion is the collective book  Media Education in Latin America (2019). What have we learned from this project? What are the key problems and thematics addressed in that book and how can they help us to promote the North-South and South-South dialogues?

Julio Cesar:

Indeed, we edited the book Media Education in Latin America to offer an updated state of the development of this topic in the region. Likewise, we also published it in English to promote dialogue with the Anglo-Saxon world, contributing to overcome language barriers that have historically impeded a more fluid and horizontal relationship between South and North. In Latin America, educomunicacion traces a parallel route to the media literacy traditions of the Anglosphere, most of which remain relatively unknown in English-speaking countries. As Michael Hoechmann says in the book, for the most part, the Anglosphere has not been good at South-North dialogue, besides two exceptions with considerable traction in English-speaking countries: the book “How to Read Donald Duck” by Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart (1971), which is used to teach the concept of cultural imperialism, and the other, and perhaps most significant, common ground is the transformative work of Brazilian educator Paulo Freire. He did not work directly in media education, but his methods and ideas changed the teaching and learning dynamics in both Latin American educomunicación and the Anglosphere traditions of media literacy.

On the other hand, “one must remember that educomunicación was born from North-South and South-North dialogues. It is not a nativist tradition, but rather draws on multiple sources that include key authors. Jesus Martin-Babero cites Benjamin, Barthes, Williams and many others; Mario Kaplun (1998) references Bruner, Piaget, Vygotsky and Pierce; Freire himself quotes Lukacs, Lenin, Buber and Althusser. That is a recurrent factor in Latinamerican scholars”. (Hoechsmann, 2019, p. 265). 

While editing the book, we realized it was going to be useful to organize and preserve the memories from the long tradition of Educomunicación. One of the most prominent actors of this movement, Brazilian professor Ismar de Oliveira Soares (2019), explained that the first initiatives began in the middle of the 1960’s, focusing on film analysis. In fact, the first project of introducing movie analysis at schools, called “Plan de Educación Cinematográfica para Niños (DENI)”, rapidly spread to many countries. In the 1970’s, Media Education agenda aggregated printed media and, mainly, television production. At first, the predominant theoretical tendency at this period was the behaviorism theories of effects. In Latin America, moreover, many of the media education promoters working with popular groups in the communities added another perspective. As Oliveira recalled, they used “media analysis” to reinforce the critical awareness of audiences, in order to resist “cultural invasion”, as a result of the powerful media production coming from the North. Later, the strength of Latin American concepts in the field of communication for social development, with an emphasis on participatory planning, has had a profound impact on the construction of the concept of educommunicacion. Sadly, throughout this process, the school remained marginal. 

We concluded in the book that media education has had a varied presence in national policies in Latin America, and has not adequately responded to the citizen rights approach or the theoretical tradition of educomunicación. In the last 30 years, Latin American governments have made efforts to connect schools to audiovisual media, and later with digital technologies, but from the perspective of media as teaching assistants. Even when teacher education and training programmes on technology use have been undertaken, the balance is not positive because in most of these, technological action has taken priority over pedagogical action.

Andres: 

In terms of media education and literacy policies, there is a lot of work to do at the national levels in most of the countries from the region. As you mention, policy makers in Latin America have prioritized technological interventions over pedagogical ones. Digital transformation is part of several national policies but has tended to focus on promoting access to the Internet, computers and mobile phones and e-government rather than supporting access to knowledge and developing media literacies among the population. Although some governments have even included the terminology of “digital citizenship” in their policies and discourse, its conceptualization has been limited to enabling bureaucratic procedures online instead of supporting the participation of citizens across the multiple dimensions of digital societies.  Media education and educomunicacion can help to build that kind of active citizenship as our societies make the digital transformation. And it is precisely here where I see a space of opportunity for doing South-South and North-South collaborations, and for joining efforts across multiple stakeholders. The opportunity to support media education and media literacies, in all their plurality, across formal (e.g. schools, universities) and informal (e.g. home, museums, libraries) contexts is here. The pandemic and post-pandemic has even made it more urgent. And there are interesting examples of how those collaborative efforts are already taking place. The initiative of DW Akademy in Central America we heard about in one of our webinars is one of them. Other initiatives such as EducaMidia in Brazil and DigiMente in Argentina, Colombia and Mexico, reveal the potential of North-South and South-South collaborations for developing and promoting open media education resources and programs in and out of school, and for combining global and local knowledges and practices. However, the opportunities go beyond curricular and educational interventions. Which other efforts can we develop to promote a more plural ecology of media education and media literacies?

Julio Cesar: 

I think global scientific publishing gives us some opportunities. For instance, using journals to spread and discuss educomunicación approaches and practices. Spain and Brazil created two more than 20 years ago: Comunicar, born in the University of Huelva and founded in 1993, published in English among other languages, and a year later, Comunicação e Educação, published in the University of Sao Paulo. Both are committed to disseminating experiences and research related to Educomunicación. Likewise, other journals have published special issues regarding these topics, such as the one we edited in Contratexto in 2019. Also the Latin American Association of Communication Researchers (ALAIC), with UNESCO support, launched an English-written journal, which is an excellent example of the willingness to share beyond the Spanisk-speaking academic community.

Also, in 2010, Roberto Aparici gathered texts written by Ibero-American leaders in the field, editing in Spanish the book Educomunication: beyond the 2.0, an exhaustive map of what has been said and done about media in relation to education from the 1980s to date. 

May be the most promising initiative in the region regarding educomunicación is Alfamed, an Euro-American inter-university research network on media literacy which brings together more than 50 researchers from 13 European and Latin American countries, aiming to promote opportunities and to improve the academic research and dissemination on "media education". This network has promoted five congresses in many countries and the 6th will be held in Arequipa, Peru, in 2022. These events are excellent opportunities for making more visible educomunicacion. 

Andres: 

One of the questions that we couldn't fully explore in the two webinars given the limitations of time, was the one related to the possibilities of educomunicacion and media education in a context characterized by increasing datification and by the deployment of artificial intelligence systems and algorithms. This context is global, national and local, and varies according to different material, cultural and geographical conditions. However, it is pervasive across countries and is shaping our everyday lives. The pandemic and post-pandemic have revealed how it is transforming all dimensions of society and how it is also exacerbating structural inequalities. From the economy to education, politics, culture, and health, datification is reconfiguring the processes of participation, decision-making, and access to opportunities in our societies. Hence, this process is also transforming democratic processes of deliberation and governance, and changing how citizens exercise their agency and rights. In order to participate in data-driven societies, people need to understand these complex transformations and become aware of how our citizen rights and responsibilities, decision-making, and governance are changing. This is of course, a process that requires access to knowledge, critical thinking and dialogue among multiple sectors, and that needs to be supported in schools and out of schools. How can the educomunicacion approach help us to navigate and to solve the inequalities and other wicked problems that societies and communities confront in the midst of datification?

Julio Cesar: 

When it comes to inequality as well as other social and political problems, we should try to focus our efforts in empowering the individual, and society at large, so they can navigate a culture that is becoming more and more digital. The jump from a protectionist to a liberatory paradigm,  one that genuinely supports “emancipation” is a key factor in the educomunicación approach. Many initiatives are already working on that basis even if they do not use that terminology. The objective of achieving parity in education opportunities  and literacy skills may be an ideal, but it's still a goal nonetheless that can orient interventions and policies.

Andres: 

I think that educomunicacion efforts to promote emancipation, freedom, creativity, social justice and self-determination through critical thinking, dialogue, collaboration and participation can be very useful today. Particularly, I think that supporting the development of critical awareness of how data infraestructures work, how they are shaped by power dynamics, and how they are changing our social lives can foster active citizenship and strengthen democracies.  However, given the abstract qualities of datification, becoming aware of it can be a difficult task. Although there is an increasing visibility in the public discourse about how using digital platforms can affect our privacy, security, and emotions, there is still a lot of work to do in terms of helping people to understand how our rights, agency and self-determination are changing. The dialogic pedagogy that characterizes educomunicacion offers some useful strategies for concretizing datification and grounding that process in real life stories told by students and teachers. Through dialogue it is possible to learn about how others experience algorithms and data in their everyday lives when they use digital platforms, and develop critical awareness of how datification affects people differently according to their social positions. This is an issue that is directly related to structural inequalities and social injustice, and that has been addressed by several scholars and activists working on critical data studies, digital rights, data justice and design justice. It is also an issue that is currently being addressed by several media education initiatives in the Global North but that still has not been fully tackled by educomunicacion in Latin America.

And here I see an opportunity to further develop North-South collaborations and dialogues. The term data literacy, for instance,  is already being used across the Global North and has become part of educational and learning initiatives that offer tools and resources for teachers, students, and people in general. Recognizing data practices as literacies helps us to support critical awareness and reflexivity of datification, and contributes to a more complex understanding of how citizenship has changed, and continues to change in our digital and datified world. For instance, the Data Detox Toolkit offers online resources for helping people control and understand their digital privacy, security, and wellbeing. Another initiative, the Data Culture Project is a self-service learning program offering free activities and tools for improving people's capacity to work with data. Among the different learning experiences available on the Digital Citizenship + Resource Platform, there is a collection of open educational resources for teaching and learning about data, algorithms, and artificial intelligence. Like these, there are other data literacy projects that are currently being developed (the Critical Big Data and Algorithmic Literacy Network has mapped many of them) and that can be put in dialogue with Latin American educomunicacion initiatives. Such kind of collaboration could not only support teaching and learning about datification in the Global South but also help to better understand how diverse data practices, experiences and imaginaries vary across different contexts and subjects. Although the process of datification is global, it varies across national and local contexts according to specific social, cultural, economic and political configurations.

[image: social DATA justice]

Julio Cesar: 

I believe media education has the potential to help individuals in exercising their political rights in a number of issues, like the right to access information. An immediate challenge in the region is to honor the long tradition of educomunicacion and "de-technologize" the way we look at the media. Today, to speak about citizenship demands that we speak of the digital not only in relation to skill development, but also in relation to the generation of an ecosystem. Faced with scenarios with precariousness and gaps, as the practitioners said in one of the webinars, it is difficult to avoid focusing on technology because it is the greatest demand: that is why most of the educational solutions in the region have relied on the purchase of tablets and other digital devices for schools. Yet, the problem of educomunicacion is not just about the jump from a discipline to a political program. A recent paper by Narvaes (2021) reminds us that there is a risk in believing that technology alone can resolve the problems of political democratization and knowledge democratization, even without explaining how these technologies improved the cognitive and communicative processes in the first place. 

Andres: 

Addressing the political dimension of education and communication, as mixed and intertwined processes, is key for building citizenship and democracies today. That is how the educomunicación approach based on dialogical and critical pedagogies aimed to empower individuals and vulnerable populations so they could become aware of the world and transform it. However, as you mention, the risk of assuming an educational approach that focuses on functional skills and technology use is high given the rapid digital transformations that are taking place in culture, economy, politics and all social dimensions. There is a pressure to become digital, to connect, to use digital infraestructures for working, learning, socializing and entertaining. That pressure affects governments, industries and citizens, and has become stronger during the pandemic and post pandemic. While communities and societies cope with that it is important to keep in mind that fostering citizenship and democracy requires dialogue, tolerance, “listening to and encountering the other.” Supporting the development of dispositions such as dialogue and critical thinking and reflexivity needs to be balanced with the development of instrumental and functional skills. This can be quite a challenge because the business model and design of most digital platforms and technological innovations we use today tends to privilege efficiency, fast interactions, consumption, and data extractivism. However, transforming that business model and infrastructure design also opens a space of opportunity for imagining alternative futures, data decolonization,  and advancing media education.  What is in your opinion about the future of educomunicación?

Julio Cesar: 

Regarding future perspectives, I want to recall some of the opportunities we identified in our book. The first is to recognise the existence of media education in Latin America as an interdisciplinary field of study and action, and to recover the theoretical basis of educomunicación instead of focusing on purely digital and technological rhetoric. Updating it and continuing to develop educomunicacion knowledges and practices is crucial for designing public policy interventions in our countries. One of the most important points for Latin American public policies is to overcome the understanding that educational technology and media education are different issues.

Secondly, we have to project media education to other audiences and spaces beyond the school context. This is an opportunity to generate new dialogues among generations and groups about the impact of media in society. On that matter, we need to incorporate dynamics that are characteristic of social media and of digital literacies as part of a training centred around the person and democratic values. This can help to combat intolerant speech in social media, diminish the circulation of ‘fake news’ and other issues that may endanger peaceful and respectful coexistence.

And finally, to be consistent with the educomunicación approach, we have to encourage media education that is oriented toward confronting inequality in rural or marginalised areas, starting with their own interests and needs. Media education is not only about getting technology there but also about guaranteeing fundamental rights to citizens that are usually disregarded, favouring their voice and their culture.

Works cited:

• Aguirre Alvis, J. L. (2020). Development Communication in Latin America. En Servaes, J. (ed.), Handbook of Communication for Development and Social Change. Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-2014-3_135 

• Aparici, R. (2011). Educomunicación: Más allá del 2.0 (Comunicación Educativa). Gedisa.

• DeSignis. (2015). Tres décadas de educomunicación en América Latina. Caminos desde el Plan Deni. https://issuu.com/oclacc/docs/tres_decadas_de_educomunicacion_en_/275  

• Dorfman, A., & Mattelart, A. (1975). How to Read Donald Duck. Pluto Press

• Freire Institute. (n. d.). Paulo Freire. https://www.freire.org/ 

• Lumen Learning. (n. d.). Media Effects Theories. https://courses.lumenlearning.com/suny-massmedia/chapter/2-2-media-effects-theories/ 

• Mateus, J. C., Andrada, P., & Quiroz, M. T. (Eds.). (2019). Media Education in Latin America (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429244469 

• Narvaez, A. (2021). Educomunicación y alfabetización mediática: ¿tecnología o cultura ? ¿adiestramiento o educación? Pedagogía y Saberes, (55), 155-174. https://doi.org/10.17227/pys.num55-12245  

Authors

Julio-César Mateus (@juliussinmundo) is Full Professor and researcher in the Faculty of Communication at the University of Lima, Peru. He coordinates the Education and Communication research group and is editor-in-chief of the academic journal Contratexto. His PhD thesis explores the media literacy approach in teachers' initial training in Peru. He has published Media Education in Latin America (coedited with M.Teresa Quiroz and Pablo Andrada for Routledge) and several articles in indexed journals.

Andres Lombana-Bermudez (@vVvA) is an assistant professor of communication at the Universidad Javeriana in Bogota, Colombia. He is also an associate researcher at the Centro ISUR at the Universidad del Rosario, and a faculty associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University.  He is the co-author of  "The Digital Edge: How Black and Latino Youth Navigate Digital Inequality" (2018), “Youth and the Digital Economy: Exploring Youth Practices, Motivations, Skills, Pathways, and Value Creation” (2020), among other publications.

Mapping Educomunicacion Projects (Part 4)

Mapping Educomunicacion Projects (Part 4)

Edited by Julio-César Mateus, Ph.D. and Andres Lombana-Bermudez, Ph.D

Mapping the geography of educomunicación projects in Latin America is a pending task. Inspired by Martin-Barbero´s cartographic method we tracked four media education projects across the region that stand out for their contributions and diversity of approaches. These initiatives range from NGOs to community groups doing educomunicacion at schools, and through Internet and community radios. While some have been working for more than 20 years, others are just starting. Some have been born in the digital world and connected to the global media education debates, others come from local educomunicacion traditions and have recently transitioned to the digital. Such heterogeneity of projects reveals the evolution of educomunicacion in the region and the diversification and fragmentation of the field. On the 15th of june we reunited them at the second webinar “Post Pandemic Educomunicación. Learnings from Latin America 2”

“A mí no me la hacen” (AMNMLH) is a media education group born in Peru in the middle of the pandemic. Composed of an interdisciplinary team of communicators, philosophers, artists, geologists, internationalists and pedagogues, their objective is to provide a “bottom-up” response to the infodemic and public distrust in media. The group’s effort complements several Peruvian “fact-checking” initiatives which have had a limited impact fighting disinformation. Through workshops in schools, universities and institutes, as well as the creation of educational content on networks, AMNMLH seeks to “empower people so that they can judge the messages and media ecosystems where they are found”. For Manuel-Antonio Monteagudo, coordinator of the group, “many fake news thrive because one wants to question, but lacks the training to articulate their response. We want to explain to people how information creators work, how this information reaches us, how our biases process it, and how to evaluate the quality of the information we access ”. In a local context characterized by the proliferation of disinformation related to the pandemic and the 2021 Peruvian presidential elections, AMNMLH work has been on demand. Currently, AMNMLH is  organizing a Peruvian media education symposium, which will take place from October 26 to 29, 2021, during UNESCO's Global Media and Information Literacy (MIL) Week.

Poster of the school contest “Media education to decipher the world” sponsored by AMNMLH 

From Argentina, Ezequiel Passeron is the co-founder of an NGO called Faro Digital, whose purpose is to promote a reflective, critical and creative digital citizenship. “We consider the Internet as a public space, where it is crucial to have moments of critical thinking about our relationships with information, with others and with the world,” he says. Among other projects, the training program ‘I am digital’ (#SoyDigital) stands out, supporting creative and imaginative uses of social media among youth and adults.  The program promotes strategies for dealing with  issues such as grooming, gender violence, hate speech and disinformation. Another project is ‘Digital RAP, a contest promoted in conjunction with UNICEF. “RAP” is an acronym for respect, art and participation, values ​​that the members of Faro Digital seek to promote through the voices of young people.

[Image: Workshops Faro Digital]

Free on-line workshops “How to confront hate speech” and “Children and screens” sponsored by Faro Digital in Argentina 

Members of Faro Digital also participate in research projects and are aware of the need to disseminate scientific knowledge through the new formats and channels that are familiar to youth. Along these lines, together with the Esbrina Group of the University of Barcelona, ​​they created the “Educar con sentido” (“Teach with sense”) program, a cycle of conversations and interviews with voices from the educational, communication and media ecosystem.

For its part, Comunicarte, in Colombia, is a group led by Alma Montoya that has been working for more than 25 years in educommunicacion projects, specifically with school children in conflict zones across the country. “We work on human mobility issues, whether due to migration or displacement; climate change; and human rights, such as freedom of expression”. From the production of information sheets to workshops, they found a strategic ally in community and educational radio stations. As Alma says, “it is not about becoming a teleclass, but rather generating a real and tangible learning community; remember that today there are no longer senders and receivers, but prosumers, all of us. The media are in everyone's hands, and the real question is about the content”.

[Image: Comunicarte]

School radio project in Arauquita, Colombia (Photo: Comunicarte)

Along the same line of work with vulnerable groups, the DW Akademie, the center of the German channel Deutsche Welle for the development of media and financed with public funds, promotes several initiatives of media and information literacy (AMI) in various countries, including some in Central America. For Patricia Noboa, the DW AMI project coordinator, “the idea stems from the right to access information and freedom of expression, that's why we deal with things like populism, propaganda, misinformation, etc.” They help to build networks of individuals and organizations that work on digital rights issues and participate in the public debate. At the regional level, they have developed training kits for indigenous groups, as well as an e-learning course to teach informational skills in a pandemic context. At the local level, they support initiatives conceived by local partners (mainly community radio stations and youth groups) through participatory methodologies.

Challenges and opportunities on the field 

For Ezequiel Passeron, the social and digital gaps in the region are the main stumbling block, something that became even more visible with the pandemic. “Social and cultural inequalities, pre-existing and reproduced in digital spaces, should be the flags to raise from activism with a clear horizon: continue to expand the human rights of all”. Alma Montoya highlighted the challenge of access, explaining that in many of the rural areas of Colombia where she works, there are children and youth who must travel long distances to have internet access. These gaps transcend connectivity barriers and are mixed with structural socioeconomic inequalities. 

The four projects aim to promote dialogue and “the encounter of the other,” the basis of educomunicacion. “The school cannot be virtualized simply by copying what was done in class. We must promote spaces where teachers and student interventions are welcomed”, says Ezequiel. Along the same lines, Patricia Noboa explained the urgency of adapting interventions to different local contexts and people's needs. That is why DW Akademy works in collaboration with local communities for their projects. For instance, “our partner in Guatemala, Comunicares, worked with members from each language community in the country and with a group of teachers to teach AMI to indigenous youth. They speak their language as well as Spanish, and that ensures that they help their communities''. Such is the importance of conceiving projects that adapt to the local context: “A game, a course, a workshop can be adjusted to the reality of another country or region”, Patricia pointed out.

Workshop on media literacy and indigenous languages in Guatemala  (Photo: Comunicares)

In terms of sustainability each project is different. While some have robust public financing as in the case of DW Akademie, others have very limited funds as those provided by the Colombian Ministry of Education and local governments to Comunicarte. “Sometimes communities call us in an emergency and we have to pay the tickets, bring something to keep us warm, and find a place to sleep. We don´t say no to anything”, Alma explains. Other projects have self-financing mechanisms as in the case of AMNMLH, whose team is made up of part-time volunteers. “We do interventions in universities that allow us to have a common fund for future initiatives such as podcasts, digital materials or series on media education”, explains Manuel. In the case of Faro Digital, they fund their activities and work through multiple funders, “with international and private organizations, with the state, etc.”

Finally, the projects are very clear about the advantage of the interdisciplinary approach to create new pedagogies and imaginaries. Creating spaces for reflection and criticism goes beyond schools and educators: they can take place inside of people's homes, where media also reaches. “Digital gaps, of course, are not limited to connectivity problems: they include socioeconomic conditions, cultural capital, disposition of the homes, etc.”, affirms Ezequiel. In this sense, a major challenge is to form multidisciplinary teams that address complex issues, such as how artificial intelligence changes the production and consumption of content. “In order to be critical we must understand how digital platforms work.” It is from that critical, creative and dialogic perspective that Latin American projects meet and respond to the principles of educommunicacion. 

Webinar Panelists 

Manuel-Antonio Monteagudo (@ManuelMontea) is a French-Peruvian filmmaker and coordinator of “A Mi No Me La Hacen”, an association dedicated of providing Media and Information Literacy workshops and stimulating a national conversation on MIL as a way to answer to the Infodemic and reinforcing democracy. He has a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Sciences from Sciences Po Paris, and a Master’s Degree in Journalism from Sciences Po’s School of Journalism. He directs fiction and documentary projects in France and Peru.

Ezequiel Passeron, (@farodigitalok) Institutional director at Faro Digital. Ph.D candidate in “Education and Society” at the University of Barcelona. Coordinator of “Conectados al Sur” network. Associate professor at the University of Barcelona. Member of “ESBRINA — Subjetividades, visualidades y entornos educativos contemporáneos (2017SGR1248) research group. His research activity focuses on the intersections between communication, education and digital media.

Patricia Noboa Armendáriz (@PatyeNoboa), is the DW Akademie program director in Guatemala and Central America. She develops media projects for freedom of expression and access to information focused on Media and Information Literacy (MIL). She is Ecuadorian journalist with experience in radio, television and media production for youth. She has a degree in communication and journalism from the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Ecuador and a Master in “International Media Studies” from the University of Bonn and the Hochschule Bonn-Rhein-Sieg, in Germany.

Special thanks: 

We want to thank Alejandro Núñez Álberca for his committed help transcribing the two educomunicacion webinars, and editing and translating this post. Alejandro is a research assistant at the Institute of Scientific Research (IDIC) at the University of Lima and a lecturer in the Peruvian Institute of Arts and Design (IPAD).

“Welcome again to Chaos.” Educomunicación’s Challenges and Opportunities. (Part 3)

“Welcome again to Chaos.” Educomunicación’s Challenges and Opportunities. (Part 3)

Edited by Julio-César Mateus, Ph.D. and Andres Lombana-Bermudez, Ph.D.

Continuing with the dialogue about Educomunicación, the media education movement and tradition from Latin America, in this entry we share another excerpt from the webinar “Post Pandemic Educomunicación. Learnings from Latin America 1” (May 25, 2021) and listen to the voices of Maria Teresa Quiroz (Peru), Silvia Bacher (Argentina), Amparo Marroquín (El Salvador) and Eduardo Gutierrez (Colombia). We start listening to their answers to the following question: 

What are the most pressing challenges and opportunities that Educomunicacion confronts as countries, cities, and communities adapt to the new normality of the pandemic and post pandemic?

Silvia:

We face several challenges. To begin with, it is undeniable that connectivity is the new face of inequality. Latin America was already a continent of inequalities, but the pandemic has enhanced them even more. 

I cannot avoid mentioning that there is a gender bias: women support the household, their children, and sometimes they have also had to replicate the pedagogical content that schools used to supply in a traditional way. It is a time of crisis, but it is also urgent to account for these aspects. My fear is that we do not take the time to be critical and end up replicating pre-pandemic cultural patterns to the post-pandemic world. 

This crisis is an opportunity to transform culture, to look at technology and the links between people with different eyes. New ideas allow us to build different paths in education and communication, otherwise this will again be a wasted opportunity. We do not know what will happen and we are building it as we go along, but we have to start at some point.

Maria Teresa:

Economic and social gaps have widened as poverty, inequality and vulnerability have spread. The great challenge is to address our diversity. The history of education and communication is different depending on the country, but the only common thing is this urgency to assume social heterogeneity, to bring the voice of all to public policies.

A great Peruvian educator, Juan Cadillo, is optimistic and thinks that in this period has significantly increased the mastery of teachers on digital tools. They are developing very creative proposals to address their precarious situation. Of course, as far as the media industry and large technology corporations are concerned, as well as other public and private institutions, a lot of support is required for these initiatives to grow. 

It is true that several institutions have prepared learning strategies, as well as all kinds of materials, but their success depends on developing and designing them with teachers. It is not a process that can be done from above. A constant dialogue must be maintained with the teachers who are on the front line, who know the children, their interests and talents.

Eduardo Gutiérrez:

It is something that my work has taught me to notice. For years I have been in direct contact with teachers, I am close to them in many places and I gather their experiences. This seems important to me because, historically, the work of teachers has been made invisible. The school, as a space where knowledge is produced, is very little valued. This invisibility must be addressed from below: how do we teachers face this situation and build possibilities? These are some of the current challenges of educommunication.

A curious thing has happened with the pandemic. Many teachers have had time to meet, talk and compare experiences. The network in which I work, Chisua, has an international seminar on knowledge networks, school and discipline, and every week we have meetings and presentations of teachers from Chile, Argentina, El Salvador, Colombia, etc. “Chisua” is a Muisca word that means 'knapsack' (mochila in Spanish), it is a good metaphor for what we do: we weave knowledge, we carry and share our content with others, motivating them and recognizing the teacher as a mobilizer of citizenship. It is an emerging network of collective actions. 

This collective took advantage of the production of content for a series called Viajemos por Colombia desde casa (Let's travel through Colombia from home). There we have managed to include themes of interculturality, diversity, territory, rurality, etc. Several dimensions that are not traditionally addressed in pedagogy.

Amparo:

From Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua, in Central America in fact, educommunicacion has developed with several particularities. On the one hand, due to the war and social conflicts of the 1990s, liberation theology has had a considerable influence on how we think about education and its emancipatory role for children and youth. At the same time, another particularity has been the migratory phenomena in the region, which have reached international media long time ago, are accelerating the process of appropriation of technologies. This was happening even before the pandemic, and I see it as something very specific to the region in contrast to the rest of Latin America.

During the pandemic we did several exploratory works with different groups of teachers. In one of them we asked people what was their predominant feeling during this crisis. Almost all of them said they felt anguished, fragile in the face of everything that was happening around them. And it is doubly hard because, commonly, the networks and technology of the algorithmic culture give us a sense of control over the apparatus. From this secure position, suddenly, comes COVID-19. The main thing in this scenario is to know how to deal with so much uncertainty. The educommunicacion projects are much clearer about that. Communication and education, I believe, raise the question of how we want to live together and build a society that can cope with the levels of anxiety.

How can educomunicación, as a media education and media literacies approach, mediate the social, economic, and political crisis that are unfolding in several Latin American countries?

Silvia: 

I would rather say those are  the new challenges of educommunicacion. When Martín-Babero was in Buenos Aires he gave a presentation called "Welcome back to chaos". Note: he said 'again', and he saw chaos as an opportunity. He said that the school must face multiple dilemmas, and that if society does not invent new forms of integration for children, they will be left out of it as citizens and will only exist as consumers. Chaos produces fear, but it is also a notorious opportunity. The problem, I believe, is that our vision is of the 20th century, but the problems are of the 21st century. We continue to ignore the voices of the youngest, we forget that democracy must go hand in hand with informed control of the media. We must put technology at the service of human beings, defend freedom of participation and dialogue through the media. Without that the dream of democracy is diluted. This is not new: Freire said it back in 1993, and there is still much to be done. 

Eduardo: 

It is precisely in these cracks and fractures caused by chaos that there are many opportunities to think. In the Colombian case, schools are raising questions about water, memory and territory. From these school spaces we can understand the living pluralities that exist among us. When I see young people protesting I ask myself what happened in their school that led them to decide to march for a different country, how was their civic education. School is a very important place to think about these questions, as long as we do not talk about what the school is but about what it could be: new futures, new ideas.

Amparo: 

It is evident that we are societies with very absent states. Faced with this, the processes of educommunicacion are fundamental from a local dimension: what kind of schools build a citizenship without roots, where the main dream of young people is to go elsewhere? This is where we have challenges and questions. As Freire said, we are still very silenced cultures. Our teachers, I think, are still very afraid to create content in social networks, even if it is beneficial for their class. The fear of creating one's own things should gradually disappear.

Webinar Panelists 

Maria Teresa Quiroz holds a PhD in Sociology. She is director of the Scientific Research Institute of the University of Lima (IDIC) and vice-president of the National Institute of Radio and TV of Peru (IRTP). She is also past-president of the Latin American Federation of Social Communication Schools (FELAFACS) and former dean of the School of Communication at the University of Lima. She has studied the relationship between children and young people and the media. Among other books, she has published Todas las voces: comunicación y educación en el Perú, Jóvenes e internet: entre el pensar y el sentir and La edad de la pantalla.

Silvia Bacher holds a Master 's degree in Communication and Culture (Universidad de Buenos Aires). She is a journalist specialized in culture and education, awarded first prize by the University of Buenos Aires for education reporting. She is the founder and director of the NGO Las Otras Voces, Comunicación para la democracia. awarded by UNESCO Media and Information Literacy Alliance Award. Bacher has published Navigate among cultures. Education. Communication and Digital Citizenship (2016), and Tattooed by the Media: Dilemmas in Education in the Digital Era (2009). She is a member of the National Advisory Board at the Audiovisual Communications in Childhood (CONACAI). She coordinates in Argentina ALFAMED an Euro-American inter-university research network on media literacy for citizenship. https://silviabacher.com.ar/

Eduardo Gutierrez is a professor at the Communication Department of the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana of Bogotá, where is a member of the research groups Communication, Media and Culture, and Young Cultures and Powers. He is a participant of the Political Communication and Citizenship Group of CLACSO. He is also a doctoral student in Education at DIE-UD of the Pedagogical, Distrital and Valle Universities, and holds a Master’s Degree in Communication from the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana. Gutierrez is a member of the Editorial Committee of the journal Palabra Clave (Colombia), of the editorial team of Chasqui (Ecuador) and of the external editorial board of Comunicación Social (Bolivia).

Amparo Marroquín, Ph.D., is a professor and researcher at the University of Central America (UCA) of El Salvador since 1997. Her work has focussed on cultural studies, reception studies and communication in Central America. She is also Visiting Professor at UCA Nicaragua; the Faculty of Social Sciences (FLACSO) in Quito, Ecuador; the National Universities of La Plata, Córdoba, Jujuy and Salta in Argentina; and the University of La Frontera in Chile, among others. She is part of the coordinating team of the research group on Political Communication and Citizenship for CLACSO and researcher of the International Center for Studies on Epistemologies Borders and the Political Economy of Culture in Temuco, Chile.

Educomunicación Matters: Media Education in a Pandemic and Post Pandemic World (Part 2)

Educomunicación Matters: Media Education in a Pandemic and Post Pandemic World  (Part 2)

Edited by Julio-César Mateus, Ph.D. and Andres Lombana-Bermudez, Ph.D.

In the second post of the series on Educomunicación, we present an excerpt of the dialogue we had on May 25, during the webinar “Post Pandemic Educomunicación. Learnings from Latin America 1”  co-organized and co-hosted by Universidad de Lima (Peru) and Universidad Javeriana (Colombia). In this webinar we had the opportunity to listen and exchange ideas with four Latin American researchers that have worked on media education and media literacy projects in different countries of the region for several years: Maria Teresa Quiroz (Peru), Silvia Bacher (Argentina), Amparo Marroquín (El Salvador) and Eduardo Gutierrez (Colombia). Below we present, translated to the English language, their responses to the questions Why is educomunicación important today? Why does it matter?

María Teresa Quiroz: 

At this juncture, educommunicacion is at the center of new forms of learning. A recent report published by the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (CEPAL) suggests that we should ask ourselves about the role of education and its relationship with information technologies. In this sense, covid-19 has brought educommunicacion to the very center of education and has eliminated the distance between the two. This approach invites us to conceive education not as a sum of courses, but as a set of different learning processes that must be carefully designed and prepared.

The educommunicative approach helps us to see that this cannot be reduced to a simple technical problem. There is a serious deficit in the ability to make proper educational use of the new platforms. For that we need children and teachers to develop practices that allow them to communicate and form the same social ties through other modalities: from face-to-face to blended and distance learning. From the educommunicacion perspective, we wonder what the effects of this situation will be on the competencies of citizens, especially those who are still in training.

This is especially critical in Latin America, where it is estimated that 120 million children have lost their classes. One of the biggest problems to be solved, according to the World Bank, lies in unequal access: we have children living in very dissimilar geographical, health and social conditions. 

Silvia Bacher:

Personally, I still prefer to think of 'education and communication' instead of educomunicacion, even if it sounds longer. I think it is easier to understand that we are dealing with fundamental rights for millions of people, the same rights that allow us to influence and transform social scenarios. This makes it easier to understand the urgency for post-pandemic life.

We cannot look at covid-19 and its effect without understanding the continuity of policies that have failed, even if they have had some successes. We have worked hard on education and communication, but it has not been enough. If we do not guarantee and demand that governments account for this disparity, the rights of thousands of young people and children will be at stake. 

We can imagine many possible futures, but if we don't listen to the voices of youth and children I don't think we can get very far. This is what we work for in Las Otras Voces, to promote the exercise of the right to communication from childhood and, from there, to strengthen participation in democratic life. What we need most is to reinforce critical thinking about the media and information, because we run the risk of deepening and expanding inequalities in Latin America. 

Eduardo Gutiérrez:

We have to think about the place of educommunicacion in our culture. From this point of view, we should not only talk about the school, but also about different emerging forms of work that dynamize social and educational processes. By inverting the game, by seeing it from the broad spectrum of the social fabric, the map expands and we can involve different elements.

Something that helps us a lot is the metaphor of “the anthill”: there is a real collective work, but it depends on a multiplicity of processes, actions and educommunicacion strategies that operate in isolation, and little by little show us results. We have a multiplicity of processes and actions in the field of educommunicacion, teachers and institutions work each in their own work, but they all advance the system even if they are not aware of it. The objective is to unify our actions, to be able to weave networks.

We do not have the possibility of seeing the complete map of everything that is being done, but we know that we have an 'anthill' of various actions that are already underway. We have to find the emerging configurations, see the dialogue between actors, the network of contents that is being produced. Educommunicacion must work with this proliferation of initiatives, but also encourage them and allow them to meet and work together.

[Image: Anthill]

Amparo Marroquín:

The processes of educommunicacion based on the Latin American heritage give us the tools to build new citizens who understand the importance of combating caudillismo, populism and authoritarianism, which is key in a region that is democratically very fragile. At the same time, we have a challenge: classrooms remain deeply oriented towards rote learning. The pandemic has only transferred a very precarious type of education to the virtual environment, while meaningful student interaction is very little. The student interacts with guides, takes exams, and nothing else. 

The way we think about education has to change if we want to take advantage of this opportunity. In Central America we still risk falling into technophilia, believing that giving a laptop to every child solves the whole problem. That kind of intervention does not mean that we are training the child to be a citizen, not from an educommunicative paradigm. That is why we must bet that education-communication has a place in the communities again. The problems of mental health, but also those of inclusion, coexistence, food sovereignty and respect for the environment, should be discussed at school. 

María Teresa Quiroz: 

Carlos Scolari says that the pandemic throws us into a world of uncertainty, affects the social fabric and the way children socialize. Faced with this, the educommunicative paradigm proposes a space for reinvention. We have to rethink school and education in conjunction with technological and economic changes. The compulsory public school, created three centuries ago, is outdated today and other forms of teaching, which strive to fight against the misunderstanding of the digital environment, are urgent.

Webinar Panelists 

Maria Teresa Quiroz holds a PhD in Sociology. She is director of the Scientific Research Institute of the University of Lima (IDIC) and vice-president of the National Institute of Radio and TV of Peru (IRTP). She is also past-president of the Latin American Federation of Social Communication Schools (FELAFACS) and former dean of the School of Communication at the University of Lima. She has studied the relationship between children and young people and the media. Among other books, she has published Todas las voces: comunicación y educación en el Perú, Jóvenes e internet: entre el pensar y el sentir and La edad de la pantalla.

Silvia Bacher holds a Master 's degree in Communication and Culture (Universidad de Buenos Aires). She is a journalist specialized in culture and education, awarded first prize by the University of Buenos Aires for education reporting. She is the founder and director of the NGO Las Otras Voces, Comunicación para la democracia. awarded by UNESCO Media and Information Literacy Alliance Award. Bacher has published Navigate among cultures. Education. Communication and Digital Citizenship (2016), and Tattooed by the Media: Dilemmas in Education in the Digital Era (2009). She is a member of the National Advisory Board at the Audiovisual Communications in Childhood (CONACAI). She coordinates in Argentina ALFAMED an Euro-American inter-university research network on media literacy for citizenship. https://silviabacher.com.ar/

Eduardo Gutierrez is a professor at the Communication Department of the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana of Bogotá, where is a member of the research groups Communication, Media and Culture, and Young Cultures and Powers. He is a participant of the Political Communication and Citizenship Group of CLACSO. He is also a doctoral student in Education at DIE-UD of the Pedagogical, Distrital and Valle Universities, and holds a Master’s Degree in Communication from the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana. Gutierrez is a member of the Editorial Committee of the journal Palabra Clave (Colombia), of the editorial team of Chasqui (Ecuador) and of the external editorial board of Comunicación Social (Bolivia)

Amparo Marroquín, Ph.D., is a professor and researcher at the University of Central America (UCA) of El Salvador since 1997. Her work has focussed on cultural studies, reception studies and communication in Central America. She is also Visiting Professor at UCA Nicaragua; the Faculty of Social Sciences (FLACSO) in Quito, Ecuador; the National Universities of La Plata, Córdoba, Jujuy and Salta in Argentina; and the University of La Frontera in Chile, among others. She is part of the coordinating team of the research group on Political Communication and Citizenship for CLACSO and researcher of the International Center for Studies on Epistemologies Borders and the Political Economy of Culture in Temuco, Chile.

Educomunicación: Dialogues on Latin American Media Education (Part One in a Series)

Earlier this year, I had a Zoom conversation with Andres Lombana-Bermudez, a former student from my years at the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program who worked with Craig Watkins at the University of Texas-Austin for his PhD and who has returned to his native Columbia to do work on media literacy. He shared with me some writing he had done on the Educomunicación movement. These theories have had an enormous impact across Latin America but are little known in the global North. I instantly knew that I wanted to share some of these conversations through this blog. Andres reached out to other colleagues, including his co-editor on this series, Julio-César Mateus, a leading voice in the media literacy movement, to bring more South American voices into this conversation. And the results, you see before you. I will let them take the story from here.

Educomunicación:  Dialogues on Latin American Media Education. (Introduction to the Series - Part 1)

By Julio-César Mateus, Ph.D. and Andres Lombana-Bermudez, Ph.D.

Media education and media literacies, as fields of knowledge and practice, continue to evolve in the 21st century through initiatives, programs and policies developed at global, national and local levels. In the past years, the context of the pandemic, characterized by the exacerbation of inequalities, proliferation of information disorders, and virtualization of many education and learning processes, has given these fields more relevance, as  multiple stakeholders have explored ways to cope with the crisis. However, as media education and media literacies gain more attention around the world there is an urgent need to recognize them as an ecology of diverse knowledges and practices developed across different contexts. Particularly, there is a need to make visible approaches to media education and media literacies from the Global South that have not been fully included in the international and Global North debates, policies, curricula, and research. Due to the existing power asymmetries and epistemic hierarchies, some of the situated knowledge and practices developed in the Global South remain to be rediscovered.

This entry is the first of a series about "educomunicación," a media education movement from Latin America that has been developed and applied since the 1960s by scholars, activists and practitioners working in this region. The series is based on two webinars co-organized by Universidad de Lima (Peru) and Universidad Javeriana (Colombia) in May and June 2021, in where educomunicación researchers and practitioners from different Latinamerican countries got together to exchange ideas and talk (in Spanish) about the current state of educomunicación,  and the opportunities and challenges confronted during the pandemic and post pandemic context. Our aim is to provide a space for amplifying and translating the ongoing educomunicacion dialogue that is taking place in Latina America, and to help to overcome some of the language barriers and epistemic asymmetries that have shaped the international discussion about media education and media literacies. In this way we hope to contribute to a more plural and diverse media education and literacy ecology. 

Before entering the educomunicación dialogue, we offer, as a prologue, a brief explanation of the political and pedagogical foundations of the Latin American media education and media literacy movement.

The Origins of Educomunicación

The term “educomunicación” is a portmanteau in Spanish language (in Portuguese the term is “educomunicação”) combining the words education and communication. This mix of words highlights a radical understanding of education and communication as interrelated fields that are transformational and liberatory. Its approach differs from others in its attention to the political and cultural dimensions of communication and educational processes, which is a hallmark of Latin American thought. Educomunicación emerged in the 1960s and 1970s as part of several efforts developed in the region to empower marginalized populations, transform structural inequalities, and gain economic, cultural and political autonomy. Like other theories born in Latin America during this period of time  (e.g. Dependency Theory, Participatory Action Research), Educomunicación unfolded as an alternative paradigm for reconfiguring power asymmetries, particularly those related to the processes of education and communication.  As Barranquero points out in our recent book Media Education in Latin America (2019): 

“Unlike functionalism or dissemination-focussed approaches that are dominant in other contexts, educomunicación emphasised the cultural and political dimension of the education process, as well as its inter-subjective and transformative nature. This emphasis was the result of a series of common conditions and ‘historical singularities’ in the region: military dictatorships, economic dependence, cultural imperialism, exclusion of the lower class, etc.” (Barranquero, 2011).

Debates on the role of the media became more political and institutional in the 1970s around the world. UNESCO began to take an interest in communication policies through its International Council for Film and Television (ICFT) in 1973, defining that:

“Education in communication (“educación en materia de comunicación”) can be understood as the study, teaching and learning of modern means of communication and expression which are considered an integral part of a specific and autonomous field of knowledge in pedagogical theory and practice, as opposed to their use as aids to teaching and learning in other fields of knowledge such as mathematics, science and geography.” (Morsy, 1984, p. 7, in Barbas, 2012, p. 139).

In 1977, the International Commission for the Study of Communication Problems was created, chaired by Sean McBride, Nobel Peace Prize winner, which produced the famous report Many Voices, One World: Towards a New, More Just, and More Efficient World Information and Communication Order, whose objective, markedly political, was to criticize the existing world order in the field of communication, characterized by media concentration and asymmetry in the quality of information between the so-called "first and third world" countries, generating a risk of cultural domination. Here, the emphasis was placed on the recognition of communication as a fundamental right, and on the responsibility of the mass media for culture "since they not only transmit it, but also select and originate its content" (MacBride, 1993, p. 55).

Report: Many Voices, One World

At the same time, an important movement promoting media education began to take shape in Latin America, which, with its own nuances, acquired the denomination of Educommunicacion. The pioneering work of Paulo Freire on the "pedagogy of the oppressed" and Mario Kaplún on popular communication, among other authors, allowed the development of a relevant critical production at the theoretical level and inspired the simultaneous development of many initiatives and interventions of critical media literacy and popular education, with greater or lesser scope, but always in small spheres that did not escalate to public policy levels. 

Dialogical, Critical, Participatory and Liberatory: The Principles of the Educomunicación Approach

Given the diversity of cultural and social contexts of the Latin American region it is not surprising that Educomunicacion interventions and projects have taken multiple forms when developed in specific communities and territories. The approach has also evolved conceptually and adopted different names such as “communication in education,” and “education for critical audiences” to emphasize particular objectives and contexts. However, at the core of all the diverse Latin American media education initiatives developed during the past five decades, we can identify certain principles that structure the media education practices and relationships of the educomunicacion approach. Promoting and fostering dialogue, critical reflection, participation and collaboration among educators and learners, and aiming to empower individuals and communities so they can become aware of the world and transform it, are at the core of the educomunicación. These principles have their roots in some of the alternative paradigms developed in Latin America such as dialogic pedagogy, community development, and popular education and communication (“educación y comunicación popular”) .

We can find the roots of these principles in the works of several intellectuals such as Paulo Freire, with his radical proposal of a critical pedagogy based on dialogue and horizontal, reciprocal and interactive relations, which highlights the political dimension of education aimed at social change and its liberating function. Also in the work of Jesús Martín-Barbero, who criticized the fact that the school has systematically refused to accept the cultural decentering of the book as an intellectual axis and as a privileged instrument of access to information. Similarly, the works of Guillermo Orozco from Mexico and the Chilean-Equadorian Valerio Fuenzalida, developed valuable pedagogical proposals for the critical formation of audiences, framed in the so-called "reception studies". 

Authors such as the Peruvian Rosa María Alfaro and the Uruguayan Mario Kaplún were decisive in promoting a communication more linked to community development, understanding the media more as "relationships'' than as a set of technologies (Trejo-Quintana, 2017, p. 233). For popular communication, educomunicacion meant an opportunity to reduce social inequalities and overcome the obstacles to access knowledge, ideas from which emerged several teleducation projects mainly with community radios. Several community radio projects developed in Argentina, Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Nicaragua and Peru, for example, have empowered indigenous, rural, women and youth populations and fostered sociocultural change (Montoya 2010).

In short, educommunication proposes a model based on dialogue and conceives learning as a liberating process that assumes knowledge as a collective creation. It adopts the premise that society is intrinsically mediatized and the school cannot remain quiet in the face of this condition. The media, under this view, play a role of mediation or intermediation that does not necessarily facilitate the communicative process, but rather creates new problems and challenges, and demands another type of more complex view. As Jesús Martín-Barbero (1999) said, "What is at stake in the relationship between education and the communicative ecosystem is the relationship between the school and its society".

Works cited

• Barbas, Á. (2012). Educomunicación: desarrollo, enfoques y desafíos en un mundo interconectado. Foro de Educación(14), 157-175. https://forodeeducacion.com/ojs/index.php/fde/article/view/22 

• Barranquero, A. (2011). Rediscovering the Latin American Roots of Participatory Communication for Social Change. Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture, 1(8), 154-177. https://www.westminsterpapers.org/article/id/159/ 

• Freire. P. (2017) Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Penguin Classics

• Kaplún, M. (1992). A la educación por la comunicación: La práctica de la comunicación educativa. Santiago de Chile: UNESCO/ OREALC.Mateus, J.C.; Andrada, P.; & Quiroz, M.T. (2019) Media Education in Latin America. London: Routledge.

• Martín-Barbero, J. (1999). La educación en el ecosistema comunicativo. Comunicar, 13, 13-21. https://doi.org/10.3916/C13-1999-03 

• McBride, S. (1980). Many voices, one world: towards a new, more just, and more efficient world information and communication order. Unesco. https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000040066 

• Montoya, A. (2010). Logros y desafíos de la educomunicación desde la razón y la radio popular en estas últimas tres décadas. Cedal. Comunicacion Educativa. Revista No.51.

• Trejo-Quintana, J. (2017). Apuntes sobre la incorporación del término alfabetización mediática y digital en América Latina. Píxel-Bit. Revista de Medios y Educación(51), 227-241. http://dx.doi.org/10.12795/pixelbit.2017.i51.015

Further Readings

• Lombana-Bermudez, A. (2020) Re-discovering Educomunicación: The Latin American Movement of Media Literacy Education. Flow Journal. Vol 27.03. December 2020.

• Mateus, J.C. & Quiroz, T. (2017). Educommunication: a theoretical approach of studying media in school environments. Revista Latinoamericana de Ciencias de la Comunicación, 26(14), 152-163. http://alaic.org/revistaalaic/index.php/alaic/issue/view/29

• Soares, I. (2009). Caminos de la educomunicación: utopías, confrontaciones, reconocimientos. Nómadas, (30), 194-207.

Authors

Julio-César Mateus, Ph.D. (@juliussinmundo) is Full Professor and researcher in the Faculty of Communication at the University of Lima, Peru. He coordinates the Education and Communication research group and is editor-in-chief of the academic journal Contratexto. His PhD thesis explores the media literacy approach in teachers' initial training in Peru. He has published Media Education in Latin America (coedited with M.Teresa Quiroz and Pablo Andrada for Routledge) and several articles in indexed journals.

Andres Lombana-Bermudez, Ph.D. (@vVvA) is an assistant professor of communication at the Universidad Javeriana in Bogota, Colombia. He is also an associate researcher at the Centro ISUR at the Universidad del Rosario, and a faculty associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University.  He is the co-author of  "The Digital Edge: How Black and Latino Youth Navigate Digital Inequality" (2018), “Youth and the Digital Economy: Exploring Youth Practices, Motivations, Skills, Pathways, and Value Creation” (2020), among other publications.

Back to School Special: The American Film Comedy Tradition

At the very start of my career, more than three decades ago, I taught.a class on the comedian comedy tradition at the University of California-Santa Barbara, and I began the class with a screening and discussion of Laurel and Hardy’s The Music Box. This term, I am returning to this terrain with a class on the American Film Comedy, which again, out of nostalgia, I am beginning with The Music Box. So much has changed in my understanding of film comedy between the two that I thought have The Music Box as a constant might keep me somewhat grounded. It occurs to me as I am about to post this that my first two books, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture and What Made Pistachio Nuts?: Early Sound Comedy and the Vaudeville Aesthetic are mirrored by the two classes I am teaching this term. Everything old is new again

What motivates me to get back into film comedy is the sheer range of film texts which are available now that were impossible to access three decades ago. These new discoveries are surfacing as a consequence of archival restorations, silent film festivals, small dvd publishers, and the writings of film buffs and collectors. As a consequence, I am trying to introduce students to canonical works (Chaplin, Keaton, Langdon, and Lloyd still structure the opening weeks of the class) but also to disrupt that canon by showing how those performers are connected, existed alongside, and drew upon many performers who are today much less well known. For example, generations and generations of women as comedians, as directors, have been written out of the classical accounts of film comedy, but we now can see many of their works if we care to focus our attention in their direction. Similarly, we can start to locate today’s minority comics in a larger historical context and thus to reappraise the range of radicalized representations within the film comedy tradition with a greater engagement with Black creative agency.

As a consequence, the class places much greater attention onto screening works of comedy from all periods and writing responses to what you see than it places on film scholarship per se. I plan to tell my students that given the necessary choice to either watch films or do the readings, they should watch the films. And I am including many films, accessible online, to watch outside the class time, even as I am cramming the class period with clips, shorts, and features which we will watch together, hopefully with some collective laughter, despite the fact that we will all be wearing masks.

My book, What Made Pistachio Nuts? explores the intersection between film comedy and comic performance in other media. I plan to extend this work by showing connections between film comedy and comic expression in circus and popular theater, radio, television, recorded sound, standup, printed comics. and other related media practices. I will similarly be putting American film comedy into conversation with other international traditions and I am going to look for points where I can connect historic film comedy with contemporary comic texts.

If there’s a weak point here, it is that I give disproportionate attention to comedian-centered comedy at the expense of the romance comedy tradition — this reflects my interest in performance and my own knowledge and investments as a film scholar. I need. to figure out how to integrate that romantic tradition more fully into the course the next time I teach it, but I opted to follow my passion this go around.

CTCS 688: Moving Image Histories: Methods and Approaches 

The American Film Comedy

Fall 2021 | 4.0 Units

COURSE DESCRIPTION AND LEARNING OBJECTIVES

Across the semester, we will explore the American film comedy tradition -- from the role of slapstick in early cinema to the role that contemporary screen comedies play in fostering debates around gender, race, and sexuality. My approach is decisively revisionist with canonical figures and text read alongside those that history has tended to forget -- for example, what happens when we re-center silent film comedy from Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd, and Langdon, to incorporate a broader range of recently rediscovered silent performers, including a number of women who had their own followings at the time? Performance is a recurring focus here, in speaking not only about comedian-centered comedies but also romantic and social comedies. Performance is understood in relation to a broader range of media traditions -- particularly those associated with popular theater (the circus, Vaudeville, music hall, Commedia Dell'arte) but also radio, records, nightclubs, and television. Through this focus on performance, we gain core insights into bodies, pleasure, and emotions, but also disruption and transgression, as central attractions of the cinema. Along the way, we will be asking what it means to write the history of a film genre as pervasive as comedy.

Note: As we will discuss across the course, I do not guarantee that any given film will make you laugh. Comedy as a genre is only partially defined through laughter. Laughter, like comedy, has a history. Comedies may be especially interesting when they confront us with things that once made people laugh -- in specific cultural contexts -- but challenge us to understand why they were meaningful in the past. I also am pretty sure at some point in this class, you will find something you will find offensive. These films deal with stereotypes and show us more directly than many other genres do attitudes about race, ethnicity, sexuality, gender, class, etc., which are problematic. There is a power in confronting these moments directly and understanding how they fit into the larger history of American film comedy rather than avoiding them and simplifying our understanding of the past.  Performers of color often struggled to nuance or disrupt these stereotypes through their staging of them, and we do them a disservice if we ignore these important sites of struggle. 

REQUIRED BOOKS AND SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIALS

Henry Jenkins and Kristina B, Karnick, Classical Hollywood Comedy

Rob King, Slapstick Comedy

Additional readings will be accessed via Blackboard or online. In addition to viewings via the SCA Viewing Portal, many viewings will be accessed online. See the Media Resources List attached to this syllabus for a full listing of required viewing/listening for the semester.

GRADING BREAKDOWN

• Collaborative Writing Round 1 20%

• Collaborative Writing Round 2 30%

• Collaborative Writing Round 3 30%

• Final Paper 20%

DESCRIPTION AND ASSESSMENT OF EACH ASSIGNMENT 

Collaborative Writing: Students will be paired and asked to engage in a written conversation each week around the class materials. This is your space to frame questions, offer reflections on what you have read and seen, and help to set the class agenda. I will write feedback intended to further push your thinking. Each student should right at least 500 words per week. Ideally, each group will go back and forth twice each week so you want to allow time in your course preparation to do this.  This will be the primary means you demonstrate mastery over the course material. I will give grades three times across the term (Round 1 20 percent, Round 2 30 percent, Round 3 30 percent)

Final Paper -- Students will write a 10-page paper on a topic of their choosing related to the course content. They should consult with me as your plans are taking shape.

 WEEKLY SCHEDULE 

The following weekly schedule is subject to change. Please consult the Blackboard site for the most current information, assignments, and due dates. 

Each week, we will be watching (and listening to) a range of different media artifacts—short and long—which help us to explore diverse aspects of that week’s topic.  Many weeks, we will be watching films prior to class as part of the assigned homework. We will be providing information about the best way to access this material. If you have to make a choice between watching the films and reading assignments, focus on watching the films. But where possible, do both and incorporate reflections on each into your collaborative writing. I will be assuming familiarity with video/audio material assigned prior to class as we discuss each week’s material.  You should be asking questions as you watch and you should bring those questions to bear on our discussions, in class and on Blackboard.

Week 1 Rethinking the History of American Film Comedy (Thursday, August 26th)

Readings:

James Agee, “Comedy’s Greatest Era,” Life, 1949, https://scrapsfromtheloft.com/2019/11/17/comedys-greatest-era-james-agee/.

Henry Jenkins and Kristine Brunovska Karnack, “Introduction: Golden Eras and Blind Spots -- Genre, History, and Comedy,” Classical Hollywood Comedy.

Louise Peacock, “Clowns and Clown Play,” in Peta Tait and Katie Lavers (eds.), The Routledge Circus Studies Reader (London: Routledge, 2016).

Rob King, “Historiography and Humorlects,” Journal of Cinema and Media Studies 58(3), Spring 2019.

Maggie Hennefeld, “Looking for Leontine: My Obsession with a Forgotten Film Queen,” Los Angeles Review of Books, 24 September 2019, https://www.lareviewofbooks.org/article/looking-for-leontine-my-obsession-with-a-forgotten-screen-queen/.

Recommended Reading: 

John Rudlin, “Playing Commedia,” Commedia Dell’Arte: An Actor’s Handbook (London: Routledge, 1994).

Henry Jenkins, “How Is It Possible for a Civilized Man to Live Among a People Who are Constantly Joking,” What Made Pistachio Nuts?: Early Sound Comedy and the Vaudeville Aesthetic (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992).

In Class Screening:

The Music Box (James Parrot, 1932) (27:42) 

The Sprinkler Sprinkled (Louis Lumiere, 1895) (1:12)

Une Histoire Roulante (Alice Guy Blache, 1906) (2:35)

The ? Motorist (W. R. Booth, 1906) (2.26)

Lea and the Ball of Wool (Lea Giunchi, 1913) (3:36)

Polidor contro La Suocera (Ferdinand Guillaume, 1912) (8:18)

Onesime Clockmaker (Jean Durand, 1912) (8:04)

Be Reasonable (Roy Del Ruth, 1921) (15:34)

Mable’s Strange Predicament (Mabel Normand, 1914) (11:54)

Week 2 The Pie and the Chase (Thursday, September 2nd)

Readings:

Donald Crafton, “The Pie and the Chase: Gag, Spectacle and Narrative in Slapstick Comedy,” Classical Hollywood Comedy.

Tom Gunning, “Response to Pie and Chase,” Classical Hollywood Comedy.

Douglas Ribblet, “The Keystone Film Company and the Historiography of Early Slapstick Comedy,” Classical Hollywood Comedy.

Murial Andrin, “Back to the ‘Slap’: Slapstick’s Hyperbolic Gesture and The Rhetoric of Violence,” Slapstick Comedy.  

Recommended Reading: 

Peter Kramer, “Derailing the Honeymoon Express: Comicality and Narrative Closure in Buster Keaton’s The Blacksmith,” Velvet Light Trap 23, Spring 1989.

Noel Carroll, “Notes on the Sight Gag,” in Andrew Horton (ed.), Comedy/Cinema/Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).

In Class Screening:

His Wooden Wedding (Leo McCarey, 1925) (19:35)

Pass the Gravy (Leo McCarey, 1928) (24:40)

What’s the World Coming To (Richard Wallace, 1926) (10:36)

The Playhouse (Buster Keaton, 1921) (22 mins.)

Week 3 Crazy Machines and Their Inventors (Thursday, September 9th)

Before Class Screening:

Buster Keaton: The Art of the Gag (2015) (8:35)

Backstage (Roscoe Arbuckle, 1919) (19:39)

The Electric House (Buster Keaton, 1922) (23:30)

One Week (Buster Keaton, 1920) (22.24)

Readings:

Tom Gunning, “Crazy Machines in The Garden if the Forking Paths: Mischief Gags and the Origins of American Film Comedy,” Classical Hollywood Comedy.

Henry Jenkins, “‘That Keaton Fellow Seems to be the Whole Show’: Buster Keaton, Interrupted Performance, and the Vaudeville Aesthetic,” in Andrew Horton (ed.), Buster Keaton’s Sherlock Jr. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

Rob King, “The Art of Diddling: Slapstick, Science and Antimodernism in the Films of Charlie Bower,” in Daniel Ira Goldmark and Charles Keil (eds.), Funny Pictures: Animation and Comedy in Studio-era Hollywood (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011).

Recommended Reading:

Tom Gunning, “Mechanisms of Laughter: The Devices of Slapstick,” Slapstick Comedy.

(cont.)

In Class Screening:

Sherlock Junior (Buster Keaton, 1924) (45 mins.)  

Now You Tell One (Charles Bowers, 1926) (22:19)

It’s A Gift (Hugh Fay, 1923) (10:12)

Plastered (Norman Taurog, 1930) (10 mins.)

Jackie Chan: Master of Silent Comedy (9:13)

This Too Shall Pass (O.K. Go, 2010) (3:53)

Week 4 Tramps, Immigrants, and Other Outsiders (Thursday, September 16th)

Before Class Screening:

Easy Street (Charles Chaplin, 1917) (23:27)

The Immigrant (Charles Chaplin, 1917) (24:31)

Modern Times (Charles Chaplin, 1936) (1:27:24)

Readings:

Jennifer M. Bean, “The Art of Imitation: On the Originality of Charlie Chaplin and Other Moving Images Myths,” Slapstick Comedy.

Tom Gunning, “Chaplin and the Body of Modernity,” Early Popular Visual Culture 8(3), 2010.

Elizabeth L. Sanderson, “Bert Williams: Minstrelsy and Silent Cinema,” Spike Lee’s Bamboozled and Black Face in American Culture (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2019).

Recommended Reading: 

Alan Bilton, “Accelerated Bodies and Jumping Jacks: Automata, Mannequins and Toys in The Films of Charlie Chaplin,” Silent Film Comedy and American Culture (New York: Palgrave-MacMillan, 2013).

In Class Screening:

Sidewalk Stories (Charles Lane, 1989) (1:40:45)

Cinderella Cinders (Alice Howell, 1920) (19:23)

Just Imagination (Harry Watson Jr., 1916) (13:59)

Week 5 Comedy and the Modern City (Thursday, September 23rd)

Before Class Screening:

It (Charles G. Badger, 1927) (1:16:25)

Readings:

Steven Jacobs, “Slapstick Skyscrapers: An Architecture of Attractions,” Slapstick Comedy.

Charles Musser, “California Slapstick Revisited,” Slapstick Comedy.

Recommended Reading: 

William Solomon, “Harold Lloyd’s ‘Thrill’ Films,” Slapstick Modernism: Chaplin to Kerouac to Iggy Pop (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2015).

Alan Bilton, “Consumerism and Its Discontents: Harold Lloyd and the Anxieties of Capitalism,” Silent Film Comedy and American Culture (New York: Palgrave-MacMillan, 2013).

(cont.)

In Class Screenings:

Safety Last (Fred Newmeyer and Sam Wood, 1923) (1:13:33)

A Thrilling Romance (Jess Robbins, 1926) (16 mins.)

On the Loose (Hal Roach, 1931) (20 mins.)

Week 6 Comedy and Sound: Radio (Thursday, September 30th)

Before Class Screenings:

Jack Benny Show (radio)

Buck Benny Rides Again (Mark Sandrich, 1940) (82 mins.)

Readings:

Rob King, “Sound Went Along and Out Went the Pies,” in Andrew Horton and Joanna E. Rapf (eds.), A Companion to Film Comedy (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012).

Kathryn Fuller-Seeley, “Eddie Anderson, Rochester, and Race in 1930s Radio and Film,” Jack Benny and The Golden Age of American Radio Comedy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017),

Recommended Reading: 

Scott Balzerack, “Queered Radio/Queered Cinema,” Buffoon Men: Classic Hollywood Comedians and Queered Masculinity (Detroit: Wayne State University, 2013).

In Class Screening:

Lambchops (Murray Roth, 1929) (8:01)

It’s A Gift (Norman Z. McLeod, 1934) (1:07.53)

Week 7 Vaudeville, Music Hall, and Comic Anarchy (Thursday, October 7th)

Before Class Screening:

Love and Hisses (Sam White, 1934) (17:47)

Dumb and Dumber (Farrelly Brothers, 1994) (117 mins.)

Readings:

Henry Jenkins, “A Regular Mine, a Reservoir, A Proving Ground,” What Made Pistachio Nuts?: Early Sound Comedy and the Vaudeville Aesthetic (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992).

Henry Jenkins and Kristine Brunoska Karnack, “Acting Funny,” Classical Hollywood Comedy.

Rob King, “The Cuckoo School,” Hokum!: The Early Sound Slapstick Short and Depression-Era Mass Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017).

Recommended Reading: 

William Paul, “Animal Comedy,” Laughing Screaming: Modern Hollywood Horror and Comedy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).

In Class Screening:

Hotel Anchovy (Al Christie, 1934) (17:52)

Duck Soup (Leo McCarey, 1934) (1:09:42)

Thursday, Oct 14th Fall Recess

Week 8 Comedy and Femininity (Thursday, October 21st)

Before class screening:  Booksmart (Olivia Wilde, 1929) (105 mins.)

Readings:

Kristin Anderson Wagner, “Pie Queens and Virtuous Vamps: The Funny Women of the Silent Screen,” in Andrew Horton and Joanna E. Rapf (eds.), A Companion to Film Comedy (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012).

Henry Jenkins, “Don’t Become Too Intimate with That Terrible Woman?” What Made Pistachio Nuts?: Early Sound Comedy and the Vaudeville Aesthetic (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992).

Mary J. Russo, “Female Grotesques: Carnival and Theory,” The Female Grotesque: Risk, Excess and Modernity (London: Routledge, 1994).

Natalie Zemon Davis, “Woman on Top,” Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975).

Recommended Reading: 

Henry Jenkins, “You Don’t Say That in English,” The Wow Climax (New York: New York University Press, 2006).

In Class Screening:

The Patsy (King Vidor, 1928) (78 mins.)

The Introduction of Mrs. Gibbs (1930) (10 mins.)

Week 9 Comedy and Masculinity (Thursday, October 28th)

Before Class Screening: 

The Chaser (Harry Langdon, 1928) (1:02:46)

Readings:

Scott Balzerack, “Someone Like Me for a Member,” Buffoon Men: Classic Hollywood Comedians and Queered Masculinity (Detroit: Wayne State University, 2013).

 Tamar Jeffers McDonald, “The View from the Man-Cave,” in Andrew Horton and Joanna E. Rapf (eds.), A Companion to Film Comedy (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012).

Joanna E. Rapf, “Doing Nothing: Harry Langdon And the Performance of Absence,” Film Quarterly 59(1), Fall 2005.

Recommended Reading: 

Alan Bilton, “Shell-Shocked Silents: Langdon, Repetition-Compulsion and World War I,” Silent Film Comedy and American Culture (New York: Palgrave-MacMillan, 2013).

Scott Bukatman, “Paralysis in Motion: Jerry Lewis’s Life As A Man,” in Andrew Horton (ed.), Comedy/Cinema/Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).

In Class Screening:

The 40-Year-Old Virgin (Judd Apatow, 2005) (116 mins.)

Week 10 From Screwball to Rom-Com (Thursday, November 4th)

Before Class Screening:
Bringing Up Baby (Howard Hawks, 1938) (102 mins.)

The Lady Eve (Preston Sturges, 1941) (94 mins.)

Readings:

Kristine Karnick, “Commitment and Reaffirmation in Hollywood Romantic Comedy,” Classical Hollywood Comedy.

In Class Screening:

Game Night (John Francis Daley/Jonathan Goldstein, 2018) (100 mins.)

Week 11 Comedy and Race (Thursday, November 11th)

Before Class Screening:

Dolemite Is My Name (Craig Brewer, 2019) (118 mins.)

You Must Remember This: “Hattie McDaniels” (podcast) (30 mins.)

Readings:

Mel Watkins, “Race Records and Black Films,” On the Real Side: A History of African American Comedy (New York: Lawrence Hill, 1994).

George Derk, “Inverting Hollywood from the Outside in: The Film’s within Cheryl Dunye’s The Watermelon Woman,” Screen 59(3),Autumn 2018.

Recommended Reading: 

Bambi Haggins, “The Post-Soul Comedy Goes to the Movies,” Laughing Mad: The Black Comic Persona in Post-Soul America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007).

Racquel Gates, “Subverting Hollywood From the Inside Out,” Film Quarterly 68(1), Fall 2014.

In Class Screening:

The Watermelon Woman (Cheryl Dunye, 1996) (90 mins.)

Week 12 Vulgar Modernism (Thursday, November 18th)

Before Class Screening:

Hellzapoppin (H.C. Potter, 1941) (84 mins.)

The Stan Freberg Show (1957)

Bob and Ray (1955)

Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner, “2000 Year Old Man” (1950s/1960s)

The Goon Show (1955)

Readings:

Frank Krutnik, “A Spanner in the Works?” Classical Hollywood Comedy.

Henry Jenkins, “I Like to Kick Myself in The Face,” in Daniel Ira Goldmark and Charles Keil (eds.), Funny Pictures: Animation and Comedy in Studio-Era Hollywood (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011).

(cont.)

Henry Jenkins, “Mel Brooks, Vulgar Modernism, and Comic Remediation,” in Andrew Horton and Joanna E. Rapf (eds.), A Companion to Film Comedy (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012).

Ethan De Seifie, “Tashlin, Comedy and the ‘Live-Action Cartoon’,” Tashhlinesque: The Hollywood Comedies of Frank Tashlin (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2012).

Recommended Reading:

Ethan Thompson, “What Me Subversive?” Parody and Taste in Postwar American Television Culture (New York: Routledge, 2010).

In Class Screening:

Blazing Saddles (Mel Brooks, 1974) (93 mins.) 

Thursday, November 25th Thanksgiving NO CLASS

Week 13: Comedy, Politics and War (Thursday, December 2nd)

Before class screening:

You Nazi Spy! (Jules White, 1940) (18 mins.)

To Be or Not to Be (Ernest Lubitsch, 1942) (99 mins.) 

Readings:

Maria DiBatista, “The Totalitarian Comedy of Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be” in Andrew Horton and Joanna E. Rapf (eds.), A Companion to Film Comedy (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012).

Louis Kaplin, “It Will Get a Terrific Laugh,” in Henry Jenkins, Tara Mcpherson, and Jane Shattuc (eds.), Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003).

In Class Screening:

The Death of Stalin ( Armando Iannucci, 2017) (107 mins.)