Reconsidering the Work of Claire Johnston

2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 244-273
Author(s):  
Rachel Fabian

This essay examines the work of British “cinefeminist” Claire Johnston, whose activism, writings, and filmmaking during the 1970s and 1980s merged innovative feminist media production practices with new modes of theoretical inquiry. Johnston's 1973 essay “Women's Cinema as Counter-Cinema” was crucial to feminist film theory's development, yet the essay's canonization has reduced her thinking to a handful of theoretical concerns. To grasp the full political promise of Johnston's work, this article reconsiders the essay in three related contexts, examining: the historical circumstances in which it was published and the feminist debates it participated in; its ties to Johnston's less noted writings; and its relation to Johnston's filmmaking while she was a member of the London Women's Film Group, a feminist filmmaking collective committed to building coalitions among women media workers. This article won the Society for Cinema and Media Studies Graduate Student Writing Prize in 2016.

2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 142-170
Author(s):  
Bridget Kies

In the 1980s, domestic sitcoms on television proliferated with examples of men who performed domestic labor. In response to the women's movement, these “Mr. Mom” sitcoms liberated women from the domestic sphere and enabled men to claim it as their own. This article examines the potential impact of these series’ foregrounding of men and masculinities. In particular, it examines how the domestication of Mr. Moms highlighted the tensions between “new man” ideology persisting from the 1970s and 1980s Reagan-era machismo. The increasingly progressive attitudes toward women's work exhibited by Mr. Mom characters, coupled with the ultimate excision of the wife-mother character, resulted in complex, potentially queer, depictions of masculinity that help reveal feminist and antifeminist anxieties about the changing structure of the American family in the 1980s. This article won the Society for Cinema and Media Studies Women's Caucus Graduate Student Writing Prize in 2016.


2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 109-131
Author(s):  
GABRIELLE BERRY

Interrogating point of audition (POA) sound through the silences, noises, and closed captions of A Quiet Place’s critically lauded soundscapes, this article examines the ways point of audition aurally and rhetorically constructs deafness, technology, and the audio-viewer. In its sonic rendering of the post-apocalyptic world, A Quiet Place actively involves the audio-viewer in its fantastical conceit and ‘fantasy’ of deafness, folding the audience into the complex cyborgian politics and potential of the malfunctioning cochlear implant. This diegetic technological breakdown merges and tangles with the technology of the film, the point of audition sound highlighting the immersive capabilities and audist expectations of cinematic soundscapes. Yet, in this straining towards ‘immersion’, the uncaptioned silences of Regan’s point of audition further accentuate issues of access, raising questions of the composition and meaning of immersion and silence. Through the shades of silence and sharp whining feedback of A Quiet Place, this article ultimately details the possibilities and complications of analysing point of audition sound, in the process, illustrating the harmonic resonation of the studies of sound, deafness, and disability. This article is the winner of the 2020 Claudia Gorbman Graduate Student Writing Award, selected by the Sound and Music Special Interest Group of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies in conjunction with Music, Sound, and the Moving Image.


Author(s):  
Andréa Belliger ◽  
David John Krieger

In the network society and the age of media convergence, media production can no longer be isolated into channels, formats, technologies, and organizations. Media Studies is facing the challenge to reconceptualize its foundations. It could therefore be claimed that new media are the last media. In the case of digital versus analog, there is no continuity between new media and old media. A new and promising proposal has come from German scholars who attempt the precarious balance between media theory and a general theory of mediation based on Actor-Network Theory. Under the title of Actor-Media Theory (Akteur-Medien-Theorie) these thinkers attempt to reformulate the program of Media Studies beyond assumptions of social or technical determinism. Replacing Actor-Network Theory with Actor-Media Theory raises the question of whether exchanging the concept of “network” for the concept of “media” is methodologically and theoretically advantageous.


Author(s):  
Cecile Badenhorst

While playfulness is important to graduate writing to shift students into new ways of thinking about their research, a key obstacle to having fun is writing anxiety. Writing is emotional, and despite a growing field of research that attests to this, emotions are often not explicitly recognized as part of the graduate student writing journey. Many students experience writing anxiety, particularly when receiving feedback on dissertations or papers for publication. Feedback on writing-in-progress is crucial to meeting disciplinary expectations and developing a scholarly identity for the writer. Yet many students are unable to cope with the emotions generated by criticism of their writing. This paper presents pedagogical strategies—free-writing, negotiating negative internal dialogue, and using objects to externalize feelings—to help students navigate their emotions, while recognizing the broader discursive context within which graduate writing takes place. Reflections on the pedagogical strategies from nineteen Masters and PhD students attending a course, Graduate Research Writing, were used to illustrate student experiences over the semester. The pedagogical strategies helped students to recognize their emotions, to make decisions about their emotional reactions and to develop agency in the way they responded to critical feedback. By acknowledging the emotional nature of writing, students are more open to creativity, originality, and imagination.


2014 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-45
Author(s):  
Siobhan Holohan

The perceived failure of minority communities to integrate into mainstream culture and society has been of such concern in recent years that there have been a series of political endeavors to shore up notions of citizenship, inclusion, and (national) identity, indeed about what it means to be British. This paper considers political discourses about the failure of multiculturalism and the subsequent implementation of community cohesion strategies in relation to David Cameron’s recent treatise on muscular liberalism, in order to reflect upon notions of segregation, identity and cohesion in the United Kingdom. Data from the Muslims in the European Mediascape project is used to consider to what extent dominant hegemonic discourses of Muslim communities permeate media production practices. Based on an analysis of interviews with mainstream media producers in the United Kingdom, the key concern of this paper is to explore whether media production practices can be said to reinforce the current form of hegemonic liberalism.


Author(s):  
Dougal McNeill

Introduction  Dougal McNeill is a Senior Lecturer, School of English, Film, Theatre, and Media Studies Shintaro Kono is an Associate Professor at Hitotsubashi University, Tokyo. Alistair Murray is a graduate student in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Chicago.


2016 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 178-191 ◽  
Author(s):  
David F. Feldon ◽  
Kathan D. Shukla ◽  
Michelle Anne Maher

Purpose This study aims to examine the contribution of faculty–student coauthorship to the development of graduate students’ research skills in the sciences, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) by quantitatively assessing rubric-measured research skill gains over the course of an academic year compared to students who did not report participating in coauthorship with faculty mentors. Design/methodology/approach A quasi-experimental mixed methods approach was used to test the hypothesis that the influence of STEM graduate students’ mentored writing mentorship experiences would be associated with differential improvement in the development of their research skills over the course of an academic year. Findings The results indicate that students who co-authored with faculty mentors were likely to develop significantly higher levels of research skills than students who did not. In addition, less than half of the participants reported having such experiences, suggesting that increased emphasis on this practice amongst faculty could enhance graduate student learning outcomes. Originality/value Qualitative studies of graduate student writing experiences have alluded to outcomes that transcend writing quality per se and speak directly to the research skills acquired by the students as part of their graduate training. However, no study to date has captured the discrete effects of writing experiences on these skills in a quantifiable way.


2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 141-158
Author(s):  
EVELYN KREUTZER

This essay explores the relationship between ‘highbrow’ classical music traditions and ‘lowbrow’ associations with television culture in the collaborative oeuvre of Charlotte Moorman and Nam June Paik. Contextualizing them within the history of classical music broadcasting conventions on TV on the one hand, and the countercultural avantgarde on the other, I argue that Moorman and Paik’s acts of disrupting and breaking with musical, performative, and/or televisual notions of flow prevent the immersive listening experience that had marked classical music and TV discourses, and in so doing empower the listener in an anti-authoritarian, participatory appeal. This article is the winner of the 2019 Claudia Gorbman Graduate Student Writing Award, selected by the Sound and Music Special Interest Group of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies in conjunction with Music, Sound, and the Moving Image.


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