Working Group on the History of Media Studies: Past Sessions

1. Thursday, July 16, 2020

Published reading: Backhouse and Fontaine, “Introduction: The Historiography of the Modern Social Sciences”

Work in progress: Dave Park, “The Pre-History of ICA: NSSC, the Communication Course, and the Field of Communication in the Mid-20th Century”

2. Thursday, August 20, 2020

Published reading: Heilbron et al, “Toward a Transnational History of the Social Sciences”

Work in progress: Wendy Leeds-Hurwitz and Adam Kendon, “The Natural History of an Interview and the Microanalysis of Behavior in Social Interaction: A Critical Moment in Research Practice”

3. Thursday, September 17, 2020

Published reading: Gustavo Sorá and Alejandro Blanco, “Unity and Fragmentation in the Social Sciences in Latin America”

Work in progress: Fuentes-Navarro, “Latin American interventions to the practice and theory of communication and social development: on the legacy of Juan Díaz-Bordenave”

4. Thursday, October 15, 2020

Published reading: Perrin Selcer, “The View From Everywhere: Disciplining Diversity in Post–World War II International Social Science”

Work in progress: Sarah Nelson, “A Dream Deferred: Unesco, American Expertise, and the Eclipse of Radical News Development in the Early Satellite Age”

5. Thursday, November 19, 2020

Published reading: Jamie Cohen-Cole, “Instituting the science of mind: intellectual economies and disciplinary exchange at Harvard’s Center for Cognitive Studies” (2007)

Work in progress: Katya Babintseva, “From Control to Freedom and Back Again: the PLATO Computer and Cognitive Psychology in the 1960s-1970s”

6. Thursday, December 17, 2020

Published reading: Robert Alun Jones, “The New History of Sociology” (1983)

Work in progress: Jeff Pooley, “The Declining Significance of Disciplinary Memory: The Case of Communication Research”

7. Thursday, January 21, 2021

Published reading: Erik Vroons, “Communication Studies in Europe: A Sketch of the Situation around 1955” (2005)

Work in progress: Hynek Jeřábek, “How Empirical Social Research Gained Ascendancy in Post-war France”

8. Thursday, March 18, 2021

Published reading: Robert Dahl, “The Behavioral Approach in Political Science: Epitaph for a Monument to a Successful Protest” (1961)

Work in progress: Fenwick McKelvey, “The Modelled American Voter,” draft chapter of VOTER_MACHINE_WORLD: America’s Quest for Computer Models of Elections and World Affairs

9. Thursday, April 15, 2021

Published reading: Maria Löblich and Andreas Scheu, "Writing the History of Communication Studies: A Sociology of Science Approach" (2011)

Work in progress: Stefanie Averbeck-Lietz and Sarah Cordonnier, “French and German Theories of Communication: Comparative Perspectives”

10. Thursday, May 20, 2021

Published reading: Margaret Rossiter, “The Matilda Effect in Science” (1993)

Work in progress: Leonarda García-Jiménez and Esperanza Herrero, “Including Female Voices in the Stories We Tell About Communication Research: Memories and Narratives of Women in Academia”

11. Thursday, June 17, 2021

Published reading: Peter Galison, “The Ontology of the Enemy: Norbert Wiener and the Cybernetic Vision” (1994)

Work in progress: Katie Bruner, “Seeing the Unforeseen: The Compton Reforms and the Edgerton Flash Unit, 1939-1945”

12. Wednesday, July 15, 2021

Published reading: David Hollinger, “The Knower and the Artificer” (1987)

Work in progress: Pete Simonson, “Peirce, Nietzsche, and the Modernist Reinvention of Rhetoric”

13. Wednesday, September 15, 2021

Published reading: Hemant Shah, “Lerner at Columbia: The Voice of America’s Turkey Studies” (2011)

Work in progress: Jülide Etem, “US Government-Sponsored Audience Reception Research in Turkey and Modernization through Educational Films”

14. Wednesday, October 20, 2021

Published reading: Peter Decherney, “The Museum of Modern Art and the Roots of the Cultural Cold War” (2005)

Work in progress: Nathaniel Brennan, “Content Analysis, Inc.: Producing and Managing Cultural Intelligence at the Museum of Modern Art”

15. Wednesday, November 17, 2021

Published reading: Armond Towns, “Toward a Black Media Philosophy” (2020)

Work in progress: Wendy Willems, “Re-Reading Habermas in the Context of Slavery and the Slave Trade"

16. Wednesday, January 19, 2021

Published reading: Richard Levins, “Dialectics and Systems Theory” (1998)

Work in progress: Angela Xiao Wu, “Journalism via Systems Cybernetics: The Birth of the Chinese Communication Discipline and Post-Mao Press Reforms”

17. Wednesday, February 16, 2022

Published reading: Robert T. Craig, “For a Practical Discipline” (2018)

Work in progress: Sarah Cordonnier, “Constituted and Constituting Exclusions in Communication Studies”

18. Wednesday, March 16, 2022

Published reading: Nils Gilman, “The Cold War as Intellectual Force Field”

Work in progress: Arvind Rajagopal, “Cold War Communication: A Global History”

19. Wednesday, April 20, 2022

Published reading: Chris Russill, “Dewey/Lippmann Redux” (2016)

Work in progress: Dominique Trudel and Juliette De Maeyer, “Franklin Ford: The Conundrum of the Day”

20. Tuesday, June 14, 2022

Published reading: Gabriella Szabó, “Communication and Media Studies in Hungary (1990–2020)” (2021)

Work in progress: Márton Demeter, “Research Collaboration of Communication Scholars from Central and Eastern Europe: A Longitudinal Network Analysis”

21. Wednesday, July 20, 2022

Published reading: Eugenia Mitchelstein and Pablo J. Boczkowski, “What a Special Issue on Latin America Teaches Us about Some Key Limitations in the Field of Digital Journalism” (2021)

Work in progress: Brian Ekdale, Kathryn Biddle, Manfred Asuman, Melissa Tully, and Abby Rinaldi, “Global Disparities in Knowledge Production within Journalism Studies: Are Special Issues the Answer?”

22. Wednesday, September 21, 2022

Published reading: Silvio Waisbord, Communication: A Post-Discipline [excerpt] (2019)

Work in progress: Christian Pentzold, Anna Seikel, Erik Koenen, & Jakob Jünger, “Talking the Talk but Not Walking the Walk: A Study of ICA Presidential Addresses”

23. Wednesday, October 19, 2022

Published reading: Jeff Pooley, “Edward Shils’ Turn Against Karl Mannheim: The Central European Connection” (2007)

Work in progress: Terhi Rantanen, “Introduction” to Dead Men's Tales: Failed Ideologies and Utopias in Transnational Comparative Communications Research

24. Wednesday, November 16, 2022

First published reading: Clara Ruvitoso, “Southern Theories in Northern Circulation: Analyzing the Translation of Latin American Dependency Theories into German” (2020) [includes translation]

Second published: Mariano Zarowsky, “Entre la renovación de las ciencias sociales y la intervención intelectual: Eliseo Verón editor en Tiempo Contemporáneo (1969–1974)” (2017) [includes translation]

25. Wednesday, December 21, 2022

Published reading: Michael J. Apter, “Cybernetics: A Case Study of a Scientific Subject-Complex” (1970)

Work in progress: Alexander Soytek, “Foucault’s Reception of the Information Discourse, 1948-1971”

26. Wednesday, January 18, 2023

Published reading: Terry Cook, “Evidence, Memory, Identity, and Community: Four Shifting Archival Paradigms” (2013)

Work in progress: Robert Riter, “Paper Archives: Stevenson’s Conceptualizations of Paper as Evidence & Information”

27. Wednesday, February 15, 2023

Published reading: Kit Coppard, Paddy Whannel, Raymond Williams, and Tony Higgins, “Television Supplement” (1961)

Work in progress: Susan Douglas, “Introduction” and “What Is Culture?”

28. Wednesday, March 15, 2023

Published reading: Stuart Hall, “Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy and the Cultural Turn” (2007)

Work in progress: Steven Gotzler, “Virtue Signals: Richard Hoggart and British Cultural Studies, a Case-Study in the History of Theory”

29. Wednesday, April 19, 2023

Published reading: Hadley Cantril & Gordon Allport, “Education,” The Psychology of Radio (1935)

Work in progress: Brian C. Gregory, “Developing Critical Listening: Educational Radio, Civic Participation, and Early Media Literacy”

30. Wednesday, May 17, 2023

Published reading: Pierre Bourdieu & Loïc Wacquant, “On the Cunning of Imperialist Reason” (1999)

Member reading: Bernard Geoghegan, “Learning to Code: Cybernetics and French Theory” (2023)

31. Wednesday, September 20, 2023

Published reading: Valeska Huber & Jürgen Osterhammel, “Introduction: Global Publics” (2020)

Work in progress: Ali Karimi, “Ephemeral Publics: An Experiment in Influencing Muslim Public Opinion in WWI”

32. Wednesday, October 11, 2023

Published reading: Marcel Broersma, “From Press History to the History of Journalism” (2011)

Work in progress: Otávio Daros, “Prehistory of journalism studies: Discovering the Brazilian tradition”

33. Wednesday, November 15, 2023

Published reading: Pete Simonson, Dave Park, and Jeff Pooley, “The History of Communication Studies Across the Americas: A View from the United States”

Work in progress: Afonso de Albuquerque, “Jornalismo E Imperialismo: Configurações Contemporâneas/Journalism and Imperialism: Contemporary Configurations”

34. Wednesday, December 20, 2023

Published reading one: Elena D. Hristova, Aimee-Marie Dorsten, and Carol A. Stabile, “Introduction”

Published reading two: Marianne Kinkel, “Gene Weltfish (1902–1980)”

35. Wednesday, March 20, 2024

Work in progress: Esperanza Herrero, “How women researchers contributed to the proposal of two-step flow: some of the hidden gendered work behind The People’s Choice”