Reflections on Feminist Communication and Media Scholarship

Theory, Method, Impact

Stine Eckert, Ingrid Bachmann, Stine Eckert, Ingrid Bachmann

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000417869
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This collection brings together ten of the most distinguished feminist scholars whose work has been celebrated for its excellence in helping to lay the foundation of feminist communication and media research.

This edited volume features contributions by the first ten renowned communication and media scholars that have received the Teresa Award for the Advancement of Feminist Scholarship from the Feminist Scholarship Division (FSD) of the International Communication Association (ICA): Patrice M. Buzzanell, Meenakshi Gigi Durham, Radha Sarma Hegde, Dafna Lemish, Radhika Parameswaran, Lana F. Rakow, Karen Ross, H. Leslie Steeves, Linda Steiner, and Angharad N. Valdivia. These distinguished scholars reflect on the contributions they have made to different subfields of media and communication scholarship, and offer invaluable insight into their own paths as feminist scholars. They each reflect on matters of power, agency, privilege, ethics, intersectionality, resilience, and positionality, address their own shortcomings and struggles, and look ahead to potential future directions in the field. Last but not least, they come together to discuss the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on women, marginalized people, and vulnerable populations, and to underline the crucial need for feminist communication and media scholarship to move beyond Eurocentrism toward an ethics of care and global feminist positionality.

A comprehensive and inspiring resource for students and scholars of feminist media and communication studies.

PART I

Reflecting the Past

DOI: 10.4324/9781003102786-2

1

Feminist Editing of a Mainstream Journal

Reckoning with Process and Content Related Challenges

Dafna Lemish

DOI: 10.4324/9781003102786-3

When I founded the Journal of Children and Media (JOCAM) in 2007, I did not think of it as a feminist project. Then, I aimed to give voice to a domain in our discipline that was not given an opportunity to be heard: Mainly occupied by women scholars, this disciplinary territory marginalized persons we refer to as “children”—who are mostly in the care, responsibility, and education of women. Furthermore, many of us envisioned ourselves as engaged scholars seeking to advance real-world improvements in children’s lives.

In hindsight, how did I not see that this WAS indeed a feminist project? I recall apologizing at the time to my close friends in the Feminist Scholarship Division (FSD) of the International Communication Association (ICA) that this new project will take me away from FSD’s sessions as I will have to immerse myself in the development of the Children, Adolescents, and Media (CAM) division of the association. How did I not see that I was not moving away from FSD, but bringing FSD with me into CAM? By way of contrast, this chapter aims to assess and reconceptualize several key challenges to JOCAM, and academic editing in general, from a feminist perspective.

The Personal Is Professional: What I Brought to this Initiative

For many years I maintained two parallel streams of research while residing in my homeland of Israel. I assumed my first professional position during my master’s studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in the Israeli Educational Television Center. Later, during my doctoral studies at Ohio State University, it was then junior scholar Ellen Wartella—later a prominent leader in our field—who introduced and led me to study media and children. Initially, the research questions I asked were inspired by my three children. For example, when I had a baby at home, I studied “viewers in diapers” (Dafna Lemish, 1987); one of my kindergartners inspired me to understand this age group’s understanding of television genres (Lemish, 1997); and my daughter’s admiration for the Spice Girls led me to study tween culture (Lemish, 1998).

In parallel to my initial entry into studying children and media, I underwent a gradual awakening to gender injustices in a society I naively assumed was free of gender inequalities; after all, I served in a leadership role during my mandatory military service in Israel and Golda Meir had been prime minister (1969–1974). Given that I was without any formal education in feminist scholarship I started to read feminist work on my own and to meet with feminist scholars. This growing awareness led me to research representations of women in advertising, news, and political campaigns (Lemish, 2004), as well as to be publicly engaged in the Israeli feminist and peace movements. I exhausted myself (and our old car) driving around the country to give lectures, facilitate consciousness-raising meetings, and participate in an endless stream of media interviews on media and gender equity issues.

It was only later in my career that it dawned on me that these two areas of research could be merged naturally: that children are gendered too; that they use and are impacted differently by the media; and, consequentially, the media reflect to them who they are and should be. Upon reflecting on the contribution of feminist theory and research to my own study of children and media (Lemish, 2013), I realized that feminist theory promoted my thinking about childhood as a social construct. This understanding differs in several key ways from conventional knowledge—then and now. First, rather than viewing “childhood” as a reductive, essentialist biological age, a social constructivist view understands that childhood (just like the concept of gender) varies by culture and historical period. Second, it acknowledges that age-based categories evolve through social-economic changes (e.g., creation of such categories as “tweens,” “young adults,” “millennials,” or “Generation Z”). Similarly, feminist theories led me to challenge conventional binary thinking that distinguishes between adulthood and childhood (echoing the rational/emotional binary, as well as the West/Rest one); school and leisure (echoing the culture/nature, and the public/private binaries); study and play (echoing the mind/body and the rational/emotional binaries). Again, the fundamental understanding applied is that such categories are socially constructed and value-laden (Lemish, 2013).

Such binaries are evident, for example, in the resistance of education journals and conferences to consider the roles of media in children’s lives (beyond implications for media literacy); in the emphasis on the effects of media on children’s behaviors and cognition while neglecting their emotional inner worlds; and in methodological approaches that do not explore the richness of children’s private lives—their bedrooms, toys, collections, artwork, and make-believe worlds. The dominant paradigm in children and media research in the USA at the time of my graduate studies was grounded in developmental psychology and employed strong experimental and quantitative methodologies. My gradual exposure to alternative, mostly European approaches, offered me alternatives grounded in cultural studies and qualitative methods that were better suited to my own ways of thinking.

Consequentially, I also adopted several key aspects of feminist research methodologies: First, rejection of claims and aspirations for objectivity and value-free scholarship. Second, nonhierarchical exploration of human behavior. Furthermore, I continue to seek, provide for, and honor individualized voices of diverse participants, even when they are five years old; refrain from comparing their social-psychological-physical abilities and skills to those of adults as the “ultimate” human being, and respect their experiences at each stage of their development. Finally, consistent with my Jewish heritage’s principle of “Tikkun Olam” (translated from Hebrew: “repair the world”), I re-committed myself to creating knowledge that explores social structures, is attuned to injustices and inequalities, and that has the potential to better the lives of real children, worldwide. According to this principle, humans are responsible for repairing a world made unjust by them, and doing so collectively increases chances for the longevity of their transformations.

Founding and editing JOCAM was a huge undertaking, well beyond what I anticipated. Based on my training and scholarly endeavors for two decades, it had become very clear when I started planning for it in 2004 that JOCAM needed to be interdisciplinary, international in scope, multi-method, multi-media, committed to social change, and dedicated to the wellbeing of children. Accordingly, throughout the years, JOCAM published work from all disciplinary traditions and methods, from many countries, on a host of topics. It became a shared space for the discipline, which I named unsurprisingly in my farewell commentary upon stepping down as editor in 2018 “A room of our own” (Lemish, 2019), a respectful adaptation of the title of Virginia Woolf’s book (1929). Creating a community of children and media scholars as well as a collaborative space of solidarity and shared purpose, were clearly central goals imported from my feminist worldview.

This noted, editing a journal involves so much more than is captured in focusing on its mission. In sharing, here, my critical reflections on my experiences as an editor as well as the struggles and challenges of employing a feminist worldview in this scholarly endeavor, I hope to highlight the contributions of feminist principles for the editing project itself, independent of topics explored and/or theoretical frameworks of the articles submitted and published in the journal.

Accordingly, the following discussion of the feminist editorship addresses process-related as well as content-related issues in scholarship and journal editing, their interactivity, as well as how they contributed to formal editorial policy and informal practices of the everyday labor of journal editing.

Process-Related Editorial Issues

Overall, I found that intense labor was required to accomplish even the slightest editorial changes. In doing so, I learned, nearly immediately, how two fundamental feminist principle-values function through an entangled, symbiotic inter-relationship—equitable representation and mentorship.

Equitable Representation

Diversification

Representation concerns have haunted and challenged me throughout my tenure as editor in such activities as establishing an editorial board, recruiting and constantly expanding the pool of reviewers, as well as efforts to recruit and support research from the margins of English-language-centered academia.

The following are among the key questions I was considering as I approached such activities: How can we guarantee that we are not creating a limited forum for scholarship where we speak to ourselves about our own research, done in our own societies, about our own interests, for our own audiences, from our own standpoint while “pretending” that we are addressing global realities—in this case—of research on children, adolescents, and media? How do we correct through an editorial process for structural inequalities of resources and opportunities for scholars from minoritized academic backgrounds? (Gabriella Gutiérrez y Muhs et al., 2012). How can we offer a fair and equal chance of exposure when the playing field is unequal to start with? Furthermore, what role does a journal have in promoting the visibility of “the invisible children of media research” (Amy Jordan & Katherine Prendella, 2019); for example, children from the Global South, marginalized populations, and disabled children.

As entrée to discussing the dilemmas involved, let me recount how establishing the journal’s editorial board proved to be a representational challenge. On the one hand, I understood that the composition of the editorial board served, too, as a statement of the journal’s vision, interests, and commitments. Thus, viewed broadly, I needed to invite scholars from all relevant disciplinary domains, theoretical perspectives, methods, countries, areas of inquiry, diversity of social categories, and various levels of seniority in academia. On the other hand, I knew that members of an editorial board lend status and prominence, especially in the case of a new journal, and as such can assist, greatly, in assembling a community of scholars. However, at the time, the “big names” of the leading, most prominent scholars, were all white and mostly from the Global North. Thus, their reputation, expertise, networks, and endorsement supported a wobbly, toddler-of-a-journal as it learned to stand on its own feet; yet, in doing so, we perpetuated the existing exclusionary publishing practices. Furthermore, finding and including less well-represented voices in academia was—and still is—a challenge: not everyone publishes in a certain version of “White” English, not everyone employs the same standards and style in writing that we have learned to associate with and expect as the accepted norm of reliable knowledge that counts in Western academia (April Baker-Bell, 2020). Indeed, I struggled with representational issues a decade before our discipline started to openly and painfully come to terms with our built-in historical disciplinary and institutional biases in the debates that erupted under the hashtag #CommunicationSoWhite (Paula Chakravartty et al., 2018; Roopali Mukherjee, 2020). As these lines are being written, ICA’s President Claes de Vreese announced two new policies: first, guidelines to address the need to diversify editorial boards; second, authors of submissions to ICA journals will need to respond to questions about inclusivity (2020).

Gender Imbalance

The dominance of women researchers in our field is a representational issue of a different order. Factually, men constituted 30 percent of CAM division’s members in June 2020. I found a similar percentage in an inclusive review of the JOCAM contributors (2007–2018; Lemish, 2019). Most recently, I attended two COVID-19-related children and media events. The first, an information session during the virtual Prix Jeunesse International Festival (June 7, 2020), presented research undertaken in 42 countries about the roles media had in children’s lives during the pandemic. Apart from the session’s host, only three of the 21 presenters were men. Organized by the Center for Scholars and Storytellers, the second event (June 26, 2020) convened a virtual “think tank” to develop guidelines for creating quality media for children during the pandemic. Thirty-four scholars and professionals in attendance were self-selected representatives of key industry players in children’s media, including Apple, Disney, Google, HBO, Netflix, Nickelodeon, PBS, YouTube, and others. Five participants were men.

As in other domains of society, this imbalance has included women’s strugg...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Foreword
• List of Contributors
• Introduction: Squaring Feminist Scholarship with Media and Communications Studies
• PART I: Reflecting the Past
• PART II: Taking Stock of the Present
• PART III: Writing the Future
• Index