Lee Walker, media coordinator at NY NOW, speaks at the Sexism and the Media workshop at the "Sexism in the Schools" conference

General note: Title and date provided by Bettye Lane.

Jan Crawford of NOW moderates a workshop in sexism in the media at the "Sexism in the Schools" conference

General note: Title and date provided by Bettye Lane.

Future is female (Mama Media demonstration)

General note: Title and date provided by Bettye Lane.

More Media conference (Liebling conference)

General note: Title and date provided by Bettye Lane.

Media women at the Miami Democratic National Convention

General note: Title and date provided by Bettye Lane.

More Media conference (Liebling conference) with Bella Abzug

General note: Title and date provided by Bettye Lane.

Susan Kleckner (left), filmmaker with multi-media artist Alida Walsh (right) at Cerridwen Salon in New York

: Title and date provided by Freda Leinwand.

Lost in Translation? Russian Media Portrayals and Laypersons’ Interpretations of Angelina Jolie’s Breast Cancer Discourse

In May 2013, Angelina Jolie revealed that because she had a family history of breast and ovarian cancer and carried a rare BRCA gene mutation, she had undergone a preventive double mastectomy. Media coverage has been extensive around the world, including in Russia, not an English-language country, where all global news is inevitably filtered by translation. After examining the reactions of Russian mass media and members of the public to Jolie’s disclosure, I consider what transformations have occurred with Jolie’s message in the process of cross-cultural transfer. I explore the mass media portrayal of Jolie’s announcement, laypersons’ immediate and prolonged reactions, and the reflections of patients involved directly in the field of hereditary breast cancer. To my knowledge, this multifaceted and bilingual project is the first conceptualization of Jolie’s story as it has been translated in a different sociocultural environment. I start with examination of offline and online publications that appeared in Russia within two months after Jolie’s announcement. In this part of my analysis, I conceptualize the representation of Jolie’s case in Russian mass media and grasp what sociocultural waves were generated by this case among general lay audiences. Another part of my study contains the results of qualitative in-depth interviews. Eight women with a family history of hereditary breast cancer were recruited to participate in the research. The findings represent Jolie’s case through the eyes of Russian women with the same gene mutation as Jolie. Consolidating my findings, I argue that Jolie’s announcement was misinterpreted and misrepresented by Russian mass media, as well as misunderstood by a considerable part of the media audience. Jolie’s perspective on hereditary breast cancer mostly remained unheard among members of the Russian public. I make suggestions about the reasons for such a phenomenon, and demonstrate how Jolie’s case is implicated in politics, economics, and the culture of contemporary Russia.

"Biggest Scandal in Canadian History": HRDC Audit Starts Probity War (Working Paper 23)

The article describes the nearly year-long political and media uproar that followed on the release in January, 2000 of a qualitative or soft “audit” of management control in the federal government department, Human Resources Development Canada, and analyses the contributing factors. The article argues that the auditors’ examination of project files for programs delivered by grants and contributions was so abstract and poorly executed that nothing whatever can be concluded from the work. Factors that favoured the “scandal” interpretation include across-government New Public Management reforms where accountability has not been re-theorized for Canada’s Westminster system of government; Canada’s electoral volatility that starves the country of experienced politicians and spurs the tradition of political compensation for electoral support; and the political role of the Office of the Auditor General. This paper has been accepted for publication by the journal Critical Perspectives on Accounting, which holds copyright.

Television history: archives, excavation and the future. A discussion

This article considers possible futures for television (TV) studies, imagining how the discipline might evolve more productively over the next 10 years and what practical steps are necessary to move towards those outcomes. Conducted as a round-table discussion between leading figures in television history and archives, the debate focuses on the critical issue of archives, considering and responding to questions of access/inaccessibility, texts/contexts, commercial/symbolic value, impact and relevance. These questions reflect recurrent concerns when selecting case studies for historical TV research projects: how difficult is it to access the material (when it survives)? What obstacles might be faced (copyright, costs, etc.) when disseminating findings to a wider public? The relationship between the roles of ‘researcher’ and ‘archivist’ appears closer and more mutually supportive in TV studies than in other academic disciplines, with many people in practice straddling the traditional divide between the two roles, combining specialisms that serve to further scholarship and learning as well as the preservation of, and broad public engagements with, collections. The Research Excellence Framework’s imperative for academic researchers to achieve ‘impact’ in broader society encourages active and creative collaboration with those based in public organizations, such as the British Film Institute (BFI), who have a remit to reach a wider public. The discussion identifies various problems and successes experienced in collaboration between the academic, public and commercial sectors in the course of recent and ongoing research projects in TV studies.

‘Don’t look down!’: A short history of rooftopping photography

The article examines the practice known as ‘rooftopping photography’ and its significance for the representation of vertical cities. It begins by charting the historical development of architecture as a viewing platform in the age of the camera, and dwells on the imagery of cityscapes from above that emerged in the inter-war period. Against this background, the essay investigates how rooftopping arose out of the urban exploration movement and became a global trend in the early 2010s. This phenomenon is situated within its wider social and cultural context, and is discussed with reference to the online media discourse that contributed to its public visibility. A set of ideas from the philosophy of photography and visual culture inform the critical analysis of rooftopping photographs: this broad and diverse body of images is examined with a focus on two predominant modes of representation—panoramic and plunging views. The affective responses elicited by so-called ‘vertigo-inducing’ images are discussed through the concept of vicarious kinaesthesia, which offers insights into the nexus between visceral experience and visual representation that lies at the core of rooftopping. By unpacking this interplay, the essay explores a phenomenon that has hitherto been given little scholarly attention and reflects on its broader implications for the relationship between photography and architecture today.

Women’s football. Notes for a social history of women’s sport in Spain, 1900-1936

In the context of demands by the European feminist movement at the beginning of the 20th century, in Spain women’s sport flagged up aspirations to what were considered to be male practices. The first experiences of women in football stand out because of their use of the media to appear as a symbol of social transformation to modernity in the 20th century. It was not in vain that women’s football highlighted the demands of the feminist movements, although it did come up against male disapproval from an opposing group. The research sets out from a bibliographical and media review of specialist press and sports news of the time. Other current studies have also been considered in order to place it in a social and historical focus on sport. This has enabled us to highlight that football in Spain was established as an unequivocal space for (re) producing male hegemony where women were relegated to the representation of a symbolic ritual in a scenario of accessory and condescension.

Uses of history in history education

This compilation thesis contains an introductory chapter and four original articles. The studies comprising this thesis all concern aspects of how historical culture is constituted in historical media and history teachers’ narratives and teaching. It is argued that the teaching of history is a complex matter due to an internal tension resulting from the fact that history is both a product and a process at the same time. While historical facts, and knowledge thereof, are an important aspect of history, history is also a product of careful interpretation and reconstruction. This study analyses and discusses how history is constituted in history textbooks and popular history magazines, i.e. two common historical media, and in teachers’ narratives and teaching of history. The study finds that the historical media studied generally tend to present history as void of perspective, interpretation and representation, suggesting this to be the culturally warranted form of historical exposition. Moreover, the teachers studied also tend to approach history as if it were not contingent on interpretation and reconstruction. These results indicate that the history disseminated in historical media and history classrooms presents history in a factual way and disregards the procedural aspects of history. Applying the history didactical concepts of historical consciousness, historical culture and uses of history, this thesis argues that an essential aspect of historical understanding is an appreciation of the contextual contingency that characterises history. All history is conceived within a particular context that is pertinent to why and how a certain version of history is constructed. Furthermore, all history is also received within a particular context by people with particular preconceptions of history that are contextually contingent, in the sense that they are situated in a certain historical culture. Readers of historical media are members of societies and are thus affected by how history is perceived and discussed in these contexts. This thesis argues that an awareness of these aspects of history is an important factor for furthering a complex understanding of history that encompasses the tension highlighted above.

Re-viewing history: antiquaries, the graphic arts and Scotland's lost geographies, c.1660-1820

This thesis examines topographical art depicting Scotland’s natural scenery and built environments, architecture, antiquities and signs of modern improvement, made during the period 1660 to 1820. It sets out to demonstrate that topography and topographical art was not exclusively antiquarian in nature, but ranged across various fields of learning and practice. It included the work of artists, geographers, cartographers, travel writers, poets, landscape gardeners, military surveyors, naturalists and historians who were concerned with representing the country’s varied, and often contentious, histories within an increasingly modernising present. The visual images that are considered here were forms of knowledge that found expression in drawings, paintings and engravings, elevations, views and plans. They were made on military surveys and picturesque tours, and were often intended to be included alongside written texts, both published and unpublished, frequently connecting with travels, tours, memoirs, essays and correspondence. It will also be argued that topography was a social practice, involving networks of artists, collectors, publishers and writers, who exchanged information in drawings and letters in a nationwide, and often increasingly commercial enterprise. This thesis will explore some of the strands of such a vast network of picture-making that existed in Scotland, and Britain, between 1660 and 1820, as visual images were circulated, copied, recycled and adapted, and topographical and antiquarian visual culture emerges as a complex, synoptic form of inquiry.

Reconciling History and International Law: Territorial and Maritime Claims in the South China Sea and East China Sea

High-ranking Chinese military officials are often quoted in international media as stating that China cannot afford to lose even an inch of Chinese territory, as this territory has been passed down from Chinese ancestors. Such statements are not new in Chinese politics, but recently this narrative has made an important transition. While previously limited to disputes over land borders, such rhetoric is now routinely applied to disputes involving islands and maritime borders. China is increasingly oriented toward its maritime borders and seems unwilling to compromise on delimitation disputes, a transition mirrored by many states across the globe. In a similar vein, scholarship has found that territorial disputes are particularly intractable and volatile when compared with other types of disputes, and a large body of research has grappled with producing systematic knowledge of territorial conflict. Yet in this wide body of literature, an important question has remained largely unanswered - how do states determine which geographical areas will be included in their territorial and maritime claims? In other words, if nations are willing to fight and die for an inch of national territory, how do governments draw the boundaries of the nation? This dissertation uses in-depth case studies of some of the most prominent territorial and maritime disputes in East Asia to argue that domestic political processes play a dominant and previously under-explored role in both shaping claims and determining the nature of territorial and maritime disputes. China and Taiwan are particularly well suited for this type of investigation, as they are separate claimants in multiple disputes, yet they both draw upon the same historical record when establishing and justifying their claims. Leveraging fieldwork in Taiwan, China, and the US, this dissertation includes in-depth case studies of China’s and Taiwan’s respective claims in both the South China Sea and East China Sea disputes. Evidence from this dissertation indicates that officials in both China and Taiwan have struggled with how to reconcile history and international law when establishing their claims, and that this struggle has introduced ambiguity into China's and Taiwan's claims. Amid this process, domestic political dynamics have played a dominant role in shaping the options available and the potential for claims to change in the future. In Taiwan’s democratic system, where national identity is highly contested through party politics, opinions vary along a broad spectrum as to the proper borders of the nation, and there is considerable evidence that Taiwan’s claims may change in the near future. In contrast, within China’s single-party authoritarian political system, where nationalism is source of regime legitimacy, views on the proper interpretation of China’s boundaries do vary, but along a much more narrow range. In the dissertation’s final chapter, additional cases, such as South Korea’s position on Dokdo and Indonesia’s approach to the defense of Natuna are used as points of comparison to further clarify theoretical findings.