In addition to presenting at the International Association for Mass Communication Research conference in Hyderabad, India, I had one book review and one article published this summer.
My IAMCR paper, co-written by my UW SJMC colleague Alicia Wright, described how the mainstream Indian media covered the allegations of sexual assault brought against Tarun Tejpal, founder-editor of the alternative weekly newsmagazine, Tehelka. Our argument was that the coverage was about the magazine (the institution) not the man (the individual) and that the mainstream media — often the brunt of criticism from Tehelka — would not have attacked the CEO of a non-media company the way they did Tejpal. I should clarify that none of the paper is about the merit of the accusation or the case itself, rather that the coverage of the case is another example of the battle between mainstream and alternative media.
The book review, which appeared in New Media & Society, discussed Sunetra Sen Narayan’s dissertation-cum-monograph, Globalization and Television: A Study of the Indian Experience, 1990-2010, published by Oxford University Press in 2014. The book had a lot of potential and Narayan did a lot of work, but there was no compelling argument that brought the grand theory of globalization and the study of televisual media product development together.
The original article is a revision of my M.A. thesis that told the institutional history of the University of Illinois-Chicago’s Communication Department, told through the lens of disciplinarity. Rather than look at discipline as a fixed place, I argue that it is more lucrative to conceptualize the disciplinization process when it comes to evaluating and explaining the decisions made by faculty and administrators to build a department in a particular way. The article is part of a special issue of Review of Communication on the Microhistories of Communication.
I’m currently working on a long review essay on books about print culture in India.
Jordan Stalker 