The Power of the Left Media
A Plenary Session of RETHINKING MARXISM 2006, an international conference organized by the journal RETHINKING MARXISM, 26-28 October 2006, at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Time and Date: 7:30-9:30 PM, Thursday, October 26, 2006.
Plenary Speakers:
LIZA FEATHERSTONE is a journalist based in New York City. She is a contributing editor at The Nation, and her work on student and youth activism, the labor movement, and the struggles against sweatshops and corporate giants, such as Wal-Mart, has been published in Lingua Franca, the San Francisco Bay Guardian, Left Business Observer, Dissent, The Sydney Morning Herald, and Columbia Journalism Review. Featherstone has also written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, Newsday, In These Times, Ms., Salon, Nerve, US, Nylon, AlterNet, and Rolling Stone. She is the co-author of Students Against Sweatshops: The Making of a Movement (Verso, 2002), and most recently the author of Selling Women Short: The Landmark Battle for Worker's Rights at Wal-Mart (Basic, 2004). The New York Review of Books described her last book as "a powerful indictment of how Wal-Mart has treated its female employees."
SUT JHALLY is a professor in the Department of Communications at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He is the author of The Codes of Advertising (Routledge, 1990), and the co-author (with William Leiss and Stephen Kline) of Social Communication in Advertising (Routledge, 2004) and (with Justin Lewis) Enlightened Racism (Westview, 1992). He has also co-edited (with Ian Angus) Cultural Politics in Contemporary America (Routledge, 1988). He is well known on college campuses, to both students and faculty, through his controversial and award-winning film Dreamworlds: Desire/Sex/Power in Music Video (over which MTV threatened to sue him). Over 2 million students in the last decade have seen the film that The Los Angeles Times called "a scathing examination of pop video's use and abuse of women." As the founder and executive director of The Media Education Foundation he is also the producer of another dozen films (including The Date-Rape Backlash; Advertising and the End of the World; Tough Guise - Violence, the Media and the Crisis in Masculinity (with Jackson Katz); and Killing Us Softly 3 - Advertising's Image of Women (with Jean Kilbourne)) dealing with issues from commercialism and popular culture to violence and gender. He also co-edited the paperback Hijacking Catastrophe: 9/11, Fear & the Selling of the American Empire (Interlink, 2004), which was a text version of the DVD documentary by the same name. http://www.mediaed.org/
TREBOR SCHOLZ is currently professor and researcher in the Department of Media Study at the State University of New York at Buffalo. He grew up in East Berlin and is currently based in New York where he works both collaboratively and individually as an artist, media theorist, activist, and organizer. His interests focus on media theory, art and education. Scholz has written on media art, networks, education and participatory cultures for many periodicals such as Art Journal, FibreCulture Journal, Afterimage, and C-Theory. He has contributed essays to several books and co-edited Free Cooperation: The Art of (Online) Collaboration forthcoming with Autonomedia. http://collectivate.net/
Chair:
SUSAN JAHODA is an interdisciplinary artist, art editor for Rethinking Marxism, Professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and visiting artist at The Rhode Island School of Design. Her work includes performance, installation, images/texts, and photography. She has been the recipient of grants and awards from foundations and organizations that include the N.E.A. and the New York Foundation for the Arts, and her work has been exhibited and published widely in both Europe and North America.
About the Plenary: The Power of the Left Media
The motivation for this plenary session stems from a deep appreciation of the role various left media personalities, practices, and forms have played in the current difficult political climate, certainly in the U. S. While in the United States over the past two decades there has been relentless pressure on journalists, artists, information technologists, and performers to eliminate critical coverage and presentation of a range of events--from U. S. militarism and imperialism to the attacks on civil rights and sexual/gender liberation--the left media has been a stalwart in giving people hope that oppositional ideas and processes can be sustained and even extended.
We envision that the plenary will celebrate the inestimable value of cultural workers and the producers of left media. We also hope that the session will take stock of the successes and failures of left media to influence broader public culture and, in particular, those aspects of contemporary culture that pertain to movements for and against alternative political and economic arrangements.
The plenary is inclusive about what is meant by left media ; hence, our speakers include those who have primary interests in oppositional journalism and documentary forms as well as those whose special focus is on alternative approaches to information technologies and new media-driven art practices. The plenary is based on the idea that the new constellations of left media forms and voices need to be hailed, but also, that they need to be interrogated regarding their contributions to a left culture and oppositional political movements more broadly conceived.
In this vein, there are a range of possible questions that each plenary speaker, based upon his/her field and practice, may choose to address. These may include:
What are the challenges and obstacles--perhaps from the continuing national and global conglomeration of media/press outlets to the increased intervention and manipulation of media by national governments--that left media find themselves having to confront?
How can new media forms contribute to such oppositional confrontation?
How have left-inflected movies, television programs, documentaries, and alternative forms of journalism shaped, altered, or reflected public opinion?
In what way do the prevailing forms of media organization, ownership, production processes, and so forth affect the radical possibilities of left media?
Are there developments in media, such as open-source collaboration, that, in their associative forms and practices, aid in the making of new and radical information/cultural communities?
Is there a new "politics of information"--both in its production and consumption--that is better suited to constitute these communities?
Do new media and information technologies "aestheticize" left politics and culture, and/or do these same practices spark activist interventions in the name of "politicizing" media and the arts?
FOR MORE INFORMATION
Yahya M. Madra OR Stephen Healy
A SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY ON THE MATTERS OF MEDIA (from the pages of RETHINKING MARXISM)
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Editors, The. Rethinking Marxism: Ten Years On. Rethinking Marxism, 10 (1) Spring 1998.
Finelli, Roberto. Production of Commodities and Production of Images: Reflections on Modernism and Postmodernism. Rethinking Marxism 5 (1) Spring 1992.
Hall, Stuart. Race, Culture, and Communications: Looking Backward and Forward at Cultural Studies. Rethinking Marxism 5 (1) Spring 1992.
Jhally, Sut and Bill Livant. Sports and Cultural Politics: The Attraction of Modern Spectator Sports. Rethinking Marxism 4 (4) Winter 1991.
Kukla, Rebecca. Talking Back: Monstrosity, Mundanity, and Cynicism in Television Talk Shows. Rethinking Marxism, 14 (1) Spring 2002.
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Sweezy, Paul and Harry Magdoff. Marxism in America: The Monthly Review Experience. An Interview by Michael Hillard and Claude Misukiewicz. Rethinking Marxism, 1 (1) Spring 1988.
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