Category Archives: BTMM

Seven new faculty members join SMC’s ranks

You might see a few unfamiliar faces around the School of Media and Communication this year, as SMC welcomes seven new professors to the faculty. Here’s your chance to learn a little bit about them before the first day of class.

Murali Balaji, Assistant Professor (Teaching/Instructional)

Department of Media Studies and Production

Specializing in critical media studies, namely political economy and the study of masculinity, Balaji spent the previous three years at Lincoln University, including two as the chair of the mass communications program. A former award-winning journalist, Balaji has written the critically acclaimed The Professor and The Pupil (Nation Books, 2011), which examines the lives of W.E.B Du Bois and Paul Robeson, and has co-edited two others, Desi Rap (Lexington/Rowman & Littlefield, 2008) and Global Masculinities and Manhood (University of Illinois, 2011). He is the co-founder and former executive director of The Voices of Philadelphia, a media education organization dedicated to citizen journalism and media fluency training among marginalized populations within the city.

Guillermo Caliendo, Assistant Professor (Teaching/Instructional)

Department of Strategic Communication

Receiving an MA in communication studies from California State University, Los Angeles, and a PhD in rhetoric with a concentration in media studies from the University of Pittsburgh, Caliendo’s research focuses on discourse analysis dealing with race/ethnicity and gender/sexuality. Besides serving in various editorial boards, he has published numerous book reviews and chapter contributions. Most recently, his article “MLK Boulevard: Material Forms of Memory and the Social Contestation of Race Signification” appeared in the Journal of Black Studies. He is currently working on “Disciplining Sexuality: Milk, Cultural Amnesia, and the Rhetoric of Sexual Containment.” At Temple, he will teach Persuasion, Rhetorical Theory and Political Communication

Joseph Glennon, Assistant Professor (Teaching/Instructional)

Department of Advertising

For the last 15 years, Glennon has been a highly sought after copywriter and creative consultant working with both advertising agencies and directly with clients. He has taught courses in a range of advertising topics, specializing in the art of copywriting. His professional writing career began as a screenwriter in Los Angeles, working with the producers of Cheers, Frasier, Home Improvement and other comedies. His work also included feature films. Glennon is a native of Boston and an unapologetic member of the Red Sox nation.

Stacey Harpster, Assistant Professor (Teaching/Instructional)

Department of Advertising

Since receiving her MBA in marketing from the Temple University Fox School of Business and Management and her Bachelor of Arts in Journalism, Public Relations and Advertising from the Temple University School of Media and Communication, Harpster has served a diverse list of clients in industries including: automotive, hospitality and tourism, consumer goods, homeopathy, fashion, higher education, finance and technology. She began her career at the Temple University Small Business Development Center (SBDC), where she founded and led the SBDC Creative Department. After the SBDC, she moved on to hold senior level account management positions in various Philadelphia firms, including Kanter International (now Finch Brands) and Brownstein Group.

Adrienne Shaw, Assistant Professor

Department of Media Studies and Production

Since receiving her PhD in communication from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, Shaw has held postdoctoral posts at the Mudra Institute for Communication Ahmedabad, the University of Pittsburgh and Colorado State University. Her research focuses on popular culture, the politics of representation, cultural production and qualitative audience research. Her primary areas of interest are video games, gaming culture, representations of gender and sexuality and the construction of identity and communities in relation to media consumption.

Kristine Weatherston, Assistant Professor (Teaching/Instructional)

Department of Media Studies and Production

Weatherston is a PhD candidate in the interdisciplinary Media, Art and Text program at Virginia Commonwealth University. Her interests combine theory and practice in areas of video production including genre studies, screenwriting and literary adaptation, documentary and nonfiction, producing and directing for film and television, as well as editing and post-production design.

Laura Zaylea, Assistant Professor, (Teaching/Instructional)

Department of Media Studies and Production

Since receiving her MFA in film from the San Francisco Art Institute, Zaylea has served as a film lecturer in the Department of Communication at Georgia State University. Zaylea has written/directed a feature film, has created many short films and media art installations and is currently converting her award-winning screenplay into a multimedia digital novel. Her research and creative production interests include experimental film making and media production, LGBTQ media and the process of adapting traditional media into new media forms and formats. Her feature film Hold The Sun was awarded Best Avant-garde Film from the 2010 Amsterdam Film Festival and her screenplay Closer Than Rust was one of the winners of the 2012 Atlanta International Film Festival Screenplay Competition.

 

Professor Morris to study Chilean protest music through Fulbright award

Professor Nancy Morris, BTMM, has received a Fulbright Scholar Award to continue her study of Chilean New Song music, a genre that became the soundtrack to 1960s social movements in the South American country.

“The story of New Song has yet to be told, and there is a need to collect oral histories of key participants before it is too late,” Morris said.

She will spend the fall semester in Chile (where she will also teach at the University of Chile) and then return to Philadelphia in the spring to write up her research.

“The musicians’ claims that they were combating cultural imperialism piqued my interest and led ultimately to my academic specialization in international media,” she said.

Why does music unite?

With 50 years of history to examine, Morris has decided to focus on the music’s ability to unite people more closely behind a cause.

“The genre reflects and interacts with Chilean political events of the past 40 years,” she says. It has pervaded, “a Marxist presidency, a military coup d’etat and subsequent 18-year dictatorship, the return to democracy and the ongoing massive student protests of the past year.”

This fall, she plans to speak with the musicians, promoters and producers of New Song, including some of the people she interviewed while studying abroad in Chile in 1983.

“I expect these interviews to be fruitful, as these are thoughtful and articulate artists whose vocation is to express their ideas,” she said. “The founders of New Song have been involved with this music for over 40 years, and those younger musicians who allied with this musical current did so with conscious motivations. In all cases, their perspectives have matured, allowing a degree of reflection that simply was not feasible in decades past.”

Watch New Song in action at this 2011 demonstration for greater government support for education.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The Hunger Games symposium discusses the messages behind the cultural phenomenon

Osei Alleyne encouraged the devoted fans of The Hunger Games who gathered May 23 at Temple University Center City to “put your three-sign up.”

They all responded appropriately by mimicking the sign of defiance and unity that Katniss Everdeen, the main character in the hit book and film, uses to communicate with the people of Panem. The audience enjoyed taking its turn flashing the symbol they saw as a sign of their hero taking power from her oppressive government.

Leah Wilson, editor of The Girl Who Was On Fire.
Sherri Hope Culver brought an invitation to a Hunger Games-themed birthday party. She said it was an example of how children are sometimes immune to violence in the media.
Fans of The Hunger Games gathered at TUCC to learn more about its messages.
Angela Cirucci, MMC, compared Katniss to Kim Kardashian.
Guests throw up the "three-sign" made famous by Katniss Everdeen.
Osei Alleyne discusses some of the similarities in real-life riots, like after the Rodney King verdict in Los Angeles, and the District 11 riot in the film.
Barry Vacker: the professor who was on fire?


photos by Joseph V. Labolito/Temple University

Then Alleyne, an anthropology PhD student at the University of Pennsylvania, showed the photo of Olympic athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos raising their black-gloved fists during a medal ceremony in Mexico City in 1968. The similarity was immediately apparent.

“Put your three-sign up again,” said Alleyne. “It feels a bit different, doesn’t it?”

This moment of connection between the themes of The Hunger Games and the real world was one of many revealed at “Our the Odds in Our Favor?: The Hunger Games on Fame, Fashion and the Future of Humanity,” a symposium co-hosted by Center for Media and Information Literacy at Temple’s School of Communications and Theater and the Center for Media and Destiny.

“The Hunger Games is already true,” said Associate Professor Barry Vacker, BTMM.

Alleyne and Vacker were joined by Assistant Professor Sherri Hope Culver, BTMM, as well as Leah Wilson, editor of The Girl Who Was On Fire and Angela Cirucci, MMC, an adjunct professor at Lincoln University.

During her turn at the podium, Cirucci compared Katniss to Kim Kardashian. She said both have to appeal to the public for success, both need to keep their sponsors happy and both keep their relationships – whether real or staged – in the spotlight.

Culver said The Hunger Games is so popular because people sense something familiar in the story – “a comfortable, secure, paradigm-affirming familiarity” of the worst things we watch on the news and reality television.

As director of the Center for Media and Information Literacy, Culver is well-versed in the relationship children have with media. She takes pause when she hears that young girls aspire to be Katniss.

“They picture themselves as the teen hero; the savior of their towns,” she said, an ignore the horrors of her fight to the death. “As a mom, I’m simply concerned.”

But she admits that the element of danger is vital to the story’s success. “Danger is actually an attraction in itself. So we read and we watch.”

 

Professor Morris, BTMM, MMC, presents conference paper in Uruguay

Professor and Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Studies Nancy Morris presented “De lo normativo a lo practico: Nuevas direcciones para a investigacion en comunicacion participativa” (“From the normative to the practical: New directions for research in participatory communication”), co-authored with Silvio Waisbord, at the conference of the Latin American Association of Communication Researchers (ALAIC), May 9-11 in Montevideo, Uruguay (details about the conference are here). While in Montevideo, Morris was also an invited participant in a public roundtable discussion, sponsored by a Uruguyan think tank, on the role of communciation in development processes (details here).

After a life in TV, Lew Klein donates papers to Temple – Philadelphia Inquirer

When Lew Klein started working in broadcasting, television was not yet a household word. After a career that has run the gamut, Klein has donated his papers to Temple Libraries’ Special Collections Research Center. Margery Sly, director of the SCRC, said many of the 10,000 items would be digitized and posted online. Klein and his wife worked closely with Temple archivists for about two years to gather the material.

Click here to read the full story.

SCT professor, doctoral student, undergraduate to appear on panel at ICA conference

Professor Barry Vacker, BTMM, doctoral student Angela Cirucci, MMC, and undergraduate Genevieve Gillespie, BTMM, will be part of a panel accepted for presentation at the 2012 International Communication Association (ICA) conference in Phoenix over Memorial Day weekend. The panel is titled “Whole Earth, Fragmented Cultures and Apocalyptic Futures: Visualizing Community and Destiny on Spaceship Earth” and the papers and participants are:

Angela Cirucci — “Social Media and Facebook: Fragmented Communities, Virtual Tribes, and Video Games at the Center of Everything”
Genevieve Gillespie  — “Spaceship Earth in a Violent Universe: Apocalypses in Science Documentaries”
Jarice Hanson (University of Massachusetts) — “Reclaiming Earth after the Apocalypse”
Barry Vacker — “Art, Media and Cosmology: Visualizing Our Place and Destiny in the Universe”

Song offers message of hope at Japan earthquake’s first anniversary

Many Temple students, including Sydney Daviston-Atkins (L) and Julia Basak, attended recording sessions in Annenberg Hall to lend their voices to the chorus of "Fukkatsu no Uta." (by Ryan S. Brandenberg/Temple University)

As the world marks the first anniversary of the March 11, 2011, earthquake and tsunami that devastated parts of northeastern Japan and sparked a crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, BTMM Associate Professor Jack Klotz offers up a message of hope, as well as a way the world can support those still suffering from the disaster.

With the assistance of many volunteers, including Temple alumni, staff and students, as well as music industry professionals in Philadelphia and Toyko, Klotz, the director of the department’s recording industry concentration, has produced “Fukkatsu no Uta” or “The Song of Rising.”

Watch his story here:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Watch a music video of the song with an English translation of the lyrics. The video was created by SCT senior web developer Naoko Masuda and Tyler School of Art student Natsumi Kitano.

To make a gift to the Temple University Japan Relief Fund, which was set up to help those most impacted by the devastation of the earthquake and tsunami, click this button:

All of those who make a gift to this fund will receive an e-mail with directions to download “Fukkatsu no Uta.”

Professor Postigo gives invited talk at Temple’s Center for Humanities

Professor Hector Postigo, BTMM, MMC, presented a talk on April 21, 2011, as part of the Distinguished Faculty Lecture Series at the Center for the Humanities at Temple University. The lecture, titled “The Digital Rights Movement: Free Culture Activism and the YouTube Generation,” explored the emerging “Free Culture Movement,” discussing its dynamics, ideology and impact on consumption and creation of mass media content. The case of the Free Culture Movement was used to weave together a number of themes currently debated by internet and digital media scholars in the field of mass communication. These include 1) the tensions between optimistic participatory audience viewpoints on the power of a Web 2.0 audience and critical perspectives on the cooptation of audience “labor” by increasingly complex corporate owned systems of participation 2) the tensions between techno-legal regimes that regulate and shape participation and the resistance to those regimes through legal and extra –legal means and 3) the emergence of participatory rights discourses among media consumers vs. the legal and corporate discourse legitimating authors’ rights.