Is Self-Branding Feminist Practice?

Sarah Banet-Weiser and I co-authored, “Feminist Labor in Media Studies/Communication: Is Self-Branding Feminist Practice?” for the International Journal of Communication (IJoC) new special section on “The Politics of Academic Labor in Communication Studies.”

Edited by Jonathan Sterne, this special section features 21 authors who raise difficult questions about academic labor in our field. We may have learned to speak of our work as a calling, but it is also a job. Our jobs are changing, and there are fewer of them. What is to be done? English, history and anthropology have rich discussions of the politics of academic labor; it’s time for people in communication studies to join them in reflections on the future of universities and colleges and our place in them.  These articles are meant to spur further conversation in organizing our departments, universities, and associations, as well as in coalition with others who hope to defend and advance higher education.

Authors consider a host of issues big and small, from defunding of universities to the real dilemmas facing administrators: from the changing politics of careers to the ways that gender and class play out for faculty and students; from the types of work that get published and promoted to the tyranny of PowerPoint; from the politics of fundraising, to the devolution of administration, to the role of unions in universities. The authors provide plenty of proposals and programs for change, from small but meaningful gestures to activist programs for pedagogy and research, to massive proposals for organizing ourselves and transforming the ways our departments and fields do business. In the process, they raise even more questions.

Contributors include Sarah Banet-Weiser, Fernando Delgado, Thomas Discenna, Michael Griffin, Jayson Harsin, Mark Hayward, Alex Juhasz, Kembrew McLeod, Kathleen F. McConnell, Toby Miller, Michael Z. Newman, Amy Pason, Victor Pickard, Michelle Rodino-Colocino, Joel Saxe, Carol Stabile, Ted Striphas, Ira Wagman and two chairs who elected to remain anonymous so they could tell their stories candidly.

Visit IJoC at http://ijoc.org to read these essays and more.

 

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