By Cayce Myers, Virginia Tech, Vice Chair/Program Chair, mcmyers@vt.edu
Will and I are excited to announce the results of the panel competition for AEJMC 2021, in the midst of a supremely challenging year. We received a number of very worthy and interesting panel pitches, but had to pick six to bring forward to our sibling divisions for negotiation as cosponsors, with AEJMC’s partnering system. Our teaching awards will be our seventh panel. While there’s still a few moving parts, we’re proud to continue partnerships and add new and important ones, for the division.
Covering 9/11, Twenty Years Later
Cosponsored with the Council of Affiliates
This panel will discuss the impact 9/11 had on journalism. This panel is based on an essay series that will appear online in our division journal, Journalism History. Final panelists will be chosen based on an essay series in the journal, and confirmed at a later date. The impetus for this series is the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attack and the media’s role in covering the event.
Moderator: Pam Parry, Southeast Missouri
Panelists:
Sheryl Kennedy Haydel, Louisiana
Cayce Myers, Virginia Tech
Others to be determined from 9/11 Essay Series
Dismantling a Legacy of Misrepresentation: Critiquing the Past in Order to Improve the Present Coverage of American Indian Issues and Identity.
Cosponsored with the Cultural and Critical Studies
Issues surrounding American Indian identity and recognition are complex, and, too often, misunderstood and misrepresented. The panel will examine the historical roots of problematic coverage of Indian issues and individuals while also examining the ways those historical caricatures continue to manifest in contemporary coverage of Indian Country. It will also serve to counter the prevailing press tendency to treat the historical experiences of the numerous tribal nations monolithically, a tendency which serves to diminish the unique experiences and identities of those nations. Perhaps most importantly, this panel will offer insights into what we, as journalism, history, and communication scholars can do to counter a legacy, which, for too long, has limited the ability of Native individuals to tell their own stories and exercise self-determination in the way they are represented in the press as well as in the historical record.
Moderator: Melissa Greene-Blye, Kansas
Panelists:
John Coward, University of Tulsa
Victoria LaPoe, Ohio University
Practitioner panelist(s) to be determined, but a member(s) of the Native American Journalists Association
Media Law Research in a Time of Crisis
Cosponsored with the Law and Policy Division
In the wake of a contentious election in the U.S. and the long, global recovery from a pandemic, this panel and its members will consider how to do research on media law during an extended period of crisis. Namely, how is it approached, what are some of its key ideas and theories, methods and motivations? How do you relate your work with the broader public? Reflecting on previous eras of crisis, this panel is purposely open-ended and designed to invite conversation among its members and those in attendance, in whatever form that will take.
Moderator: Aimee Edmondson, Ohio University
Panelists:
Cayce Myers, Virginia Tech
Qinqin Wang, Louisiana
Kyu Ho Youm, Oregon
Jon Peters, Georgia
Jasmine McNealy, Florida
The Future of Historical Research: Re-envisioning the Archive in the Age of Digitization
Cosponsored with the Magazine Division
Recent progress in computer scanning, storage and processing is revolutionizing historical research. Digital archives now exist that contain well over a century’s worth of high quality, searchable content. Newspapers.com, for example, provides access to over 300 million pages from more than 8,900 papers, while Newspaperarchive.com boasts a collection that dates back to 1607. Other digital archives—from film, broadcast and oral history repositories to personal papers and government records—are equally vast. But with exponentially more information now available, anytime from anywhere, what new opportunities exist for historians? This panel will discuss the possibilities and challenges that now confront us. We will consider whether the time has come to reimagine the archive of the 21st century.
Moderator: Julien Gorbach, Hawaii-Manoa
Panelists:
Joseph Makkos, Nola DNA
Katherine Good, Miami
Joe Saltzman, Southern California
Kristin Gustafson, Washington-Bothell
Kevin Lerner, Marist College
History of Video Gaming: Moral Panics and News Controversy in the Storytelling Medium
Cosponsored with the Communication Technologies Division
This panel takes up the history of video gaming. Video gaming has been a “lightning rod” in American public discourse. The gamer themselves has been consistently co-created not only by the gaming community, but by outside actors such as gaming journalists and politicians. Given gaming’s position as the center of recurrent debate, this topic necessitates further elaboration. This panel seeks to unpack the two sides of the history of gaming: how gaming serves as a medium for the transmission of history as well as how the history of gaming has been narrated, in particular on topics such as technology, gender, and violence.
Moderator: Laine Nooney, New York University
Panelists:
Teresa Lynch, Ohio State University
Will Mari, Louisiana State University
Gregory Perreault, Appalachian State University
Dmitri Williams, University of Southern California
Flashpoint in History: How Image Shapes Historical Understanding
Cosponsored with the Visual Communication Division
This panel will examine the role of images in explaining historical events and memory. The discussion will include work focusing on major events in history and how those images become reused as “flashpoints” to understand historical moments in contemporary culture.
Moderator: To be determined, from Visual Communication
Panelists:
Jinx Broussard, Louisiana State University
Vanessa Murphree, University of Southern Mississippi
Two other panelists from Visual Communication
In addition to the above, we will continue our Broussard Teaching Awards, “Transformative Teaching of Media and Journalism History” panel, with the winners of our teaching-ideas contest (more info on that will be out later in the academic year), and to be moderated by Amber Roessner, University of Tennessee Knoxville.
Please stay tuned for more information from Maddie Liseblad about our research-paper competition, with papers due April 1.