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. 

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.