In Focus: The Place of Television Studies

Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 2015

The Italianist Film Issue, 2014

This special issue explores the way Italian fictional series, produced from the end of the Cold War onwards, have been instrumental in rewriting the country’s public memory, in the moment of historical and political transition that followed the disappearance of political parties belonging to the Constitutional pact established in 1945. Using the provocative neologism ‘televisionism’, i.e. the usage of television as a way to promote new historical narratives which find their political and intellectual roots in post-Cold War historical revisionism, the special issue explores different points of view and debates on the ways in which television reconfigures the relation between the past and the present.

Cinema Journal, 2011

Television & New Media, 2011

As incoming editor, I have the fortunate opportunity to begin 2011 with a chance to define the journal, outline the contours of its scholarly influences, highlight the future trends, rally the troops, and so on. It's been said before. That is, a decade ago, my predecessor and founder of the journal, Toby Miller, foreshadowed the death of television (or at least its transformation), the birth of television studies (or at least its recognition as a legitimate field of inquiry), and the need to critically study anything that might be considered "new." I remember that moment. I had just finished my doctorate. I had been lurking around several different professional associations, mostly based in the United States, including the International Communication Association, the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, the American Anthropological Association, the American Sociological Association, and the then-Society for Cinema Studies, looking for people who studied popular forms of media. 1 Sometimes I found a media studies panel, one in a sea of panels examining more traditional, disciplinary concerns. At that time, I was also hard-pressed to find a venue publishing articles on youth fan cultures, on copyright law and policy, or on the emergence of this crazy little format we now generalize as "reality TV." Luckily, there were some spaces for me to enter into broader conversations. Console-ing Passions-the international conference on feminism, television, video, and all media not-film-was reliably friendly to my work. Their book series, edited by Lynn Spigel and published by Duke University Press, promised an inroad for publishing. Our Media/Nuestros Medios, coordinated by many but invented by Clemencia Rodriguez, John Downing, and Nick Couldry, was another space for dialogue among alternative media scholars and media activists across the Americas and Europe. Started in the same year as this journal, the network imagined innovative strategies for connecting media research with television and new media practices. Through them, I also got to know the International Association of Mass Communication Researchers and the Brazilian communication association Intercom. With Television & New Media, however, there seemed to finally be a place where a wide variety of media scholarship could be found and would flourish. Cut to the present. Despite continuous threats to academe, the widespread marketization of education, and the conglomeration of academic presses, including journals, television and new media studies is now established. Indeed, some of these negative trends may have inadvertently benefited these fields of study. As universities compete to be marketable, relevant, both "hot" and "cool" in student jargons, media studies has

The Television Reader: Critical Perspectives in Canadian and US Television Studies, 2013

Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 2019

In recent years, television has been reconfigured in the face of new consumption practices for television products. Audiences seeking specific content and a chance to build your own schedule. Thus, watching theses contents no longer restricted to a single support, but it is a myriad of media that includes computers, video games, tablets and smartphones. Cultural Studies bring decisive contributions to thinking about how articulations of everyday practices, culture and society are intrinsically related and can be debated with a view to the media - in these case, television. We are interested in discussing, besides technological aspects, a television as instance, which implies symbolic exchanges and diverse forms of reception

The academic discipline of television studies has been constituted by the claim that television is worth studying because it is popular. Yet this claim has also entailed a need to defend the subject against the triviality that is associated with the television medium because of its very popularity. This article analyses the many attempts in the later twentieth and twenty-first centuries to constitute critical discourses about television as a popular medium. It focuses on how the theoretical currents of Television Studies emerged and changed in the UK, where a disciplinary identity for the subject was founded by borrowing from related disciplines, yet argued for the specificity of the medium as an object of criticism. Eschewing technological determinism, moral pathologization and sterile debates about television's supposed effects, UK writers such as Raymond Williams addressed television as an aspect of culture. Television theory in Britain has been part of, and also separate from, the disciplinary fields of media theory, literary theory and film theory. It has focused its attention on institutions, audio-visual texts, genres, authors and viewers according to the ways that research problems and theoretical inadequacies have emerged over time. But a consistent feature has been the problem of moving from a descriptive discourse to an analytical and evaluative one, and from studies of specific texts, moments and locations of television to larger theories. By discussing some historically significant critical work about television, the article considers how academic work has constructed relationships between the different kinds of objects of study. In the article, the aim is not to arrive at a definitive meaning for "the popular" inasmuch as it designates programmes or indeed the medium of television itself. Instead the aim is to show how, in historically and geographically contingent ways, these terms and ideas have been dynamically adopted and contested in order to address a multiple and changing object of analysis.

In the middle of the summer, on Wednesday 9 July 1975, the Finnish Broadcasting Company (FBC) aired a documentary entitled World Television. According to the FBC’s programme information, the aim was to present ‘thoughts and images of the communicational role of television in the future’. In addition to fictional sequences, the documentary showed studio discussions between three communication researchers, Kaarle Nordenstreng, Osmo A. Wiio and Tapio Varis, whom the newspaper Aamulehti (11 July 1975) ironically referred as the ‘scientist augurs of our communication policy’. The scholars debated Marshall McLuhan’s idea of global village and the future of television, but what makes the documentary especially worthy of attention is the fact that it draws strongly on fictional scenes. The audience were presented – perhaps consciously parodic and clichéd – images of Finnish family life in the year 2000, with children and parents moving around in unisex costumes, living in a windowless apartment and receiving all their information about the outer world through television sets. Thus, World Television not only debated the future but also showed things to come. It is, therefore, an exceptional platform for analysis: in addition to arguments and hypotheses, the programme tries to capture everyday exercises of the future and, at the same time, describe ways of using television without verbalising them. The programme dramatises the meaning of information in everyday life. World Television is of special interest also because it blurs the boundaries between television and information technology and thus serves as an interesting focal point for rethinking media relations and intermediality: the future is envisioned as something that connects television and computer technologies, although this is not clearly explicated. The aim of this contribution is to read and to interpret the television discourse of the programme from the perspective of computerisation and, more broadly, of intermediality. It seems appropriate to commence with the observation that the cultural history of technology cannot be written only on the basis of the ‘new’, and that everything that is presented as ‘new’ has to be read through other media, acknowledging the interconnectedness of media and the inevitable interplay between past, present and future. This setting can be paralleled with what David Holmes (2005: 187) writes on new media and the continuous emphasis on ‘newness’. As a hypothesis, it can be proposed that the interpretation of new technology, in this case emerging information technology, can be fruitfully approached through the lens of what was labelled as ‘old’ technology, thus granting access to contemporary tensions and contradictory interpretations.

Screen Education, 2009

2013

Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 1985

Visual Anthropology Review, 1992