Hey Comm Majors-

Advising is upon us for the Spring 2013 semester.  Everything you could ever possibly want to know about advising can be found on this page.  Go on, click through and read BEFORE you email your advisor.  Good luck with the registration process!

Dr. Gudelunas

Chair, Department of Communication

This Saturday (October 13th), Fairfield will host the second annual Cancer Crusher Hoedown, a fun twist on the fundraiser for a great cause. The square-dance event is sponsored and organized by the Cancer Crusher Club, a campus club with over 100 members and a mission to “crush” pediatric cancer by building community through collective effort and turning the spotlight on a disease which affects the lives of children from infancy to the age of 25.

The founder of this club, and the main organizer of the event, is Amanda McKean, a Fairfield student in Communication and Leukemia survivor, who chose to come to Fairfield University because of the “tremendous student involvement” on campus. Putting her communication knowledge and organizing skills in action, McKean notes that, “It was a HUGE hit last year with over 130 people in attendance. We were able to raise over $5,000 for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society specifically towards their efforts having to do with pediatric cancer. We had a great group of volunteers who really helped to make the hoedown the success that it was.” She hopes to surpass last years figures on Saturday.

Tickets are now on sale at the info desk for $10 and will be on sale at the door the night of the fundraiser. The event is raising money this time around for the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. “This is where I was treated,” McKean says, “so it is a cause near and dear to my heart.”

The Hoedown will be held this Saturday, October 13th, from 8-10 PM in the Oak Room. And, for the freshmen, this will be counted as FYE service!

Steve Yavner is the next adjunct professor in Communication that we’ll be following. He received a BA in Psychology from Williams College and and a MSEd in Psychology from the University of Miami. Here’s more about his approach to the field:

Why Communication?

I spent 25 years in broadcast journalism – hence my interest in communications.  I started in production, moved to on-air news and sports, then moved to producing and management.  I left commercial TV to go to the University of Miami, where I ran its TV station and taught in the Masters Program at the UM School of Communication.  While there I earned my Masters in Psychology.  I left there to come to NYU for a PhD, where my goal is to blend journalism, psychology, technology and education.

What has been your favorite course to teach?

I love teaching the Mass Media and Society class because it mirrors those interests. While journalism is only one piece of mass media, technology and psychology are woven through everything — as are education, entertainment, and connection.  It’s really all about the transmission of information, and learning to think critically, process new information, and creatively express original thought… Media is a great tool for sharpening these skills, which are important for everyone, regardless of specific interest or major.

My experience allows me to bring a unique perspective to the class. For example, my class just read “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu.”  It was an essay about Ted Williams’ last game with the Red Sox written by John Updike in 1960. It may be the best piece of sports journalism ever written.  It may not be journalism at all — it may be literature. But whatever it is, I doubt it’s on the syllabi of very many other Mass Media and Society classes!  We spent a recent class talking about the latest Egypt/Libya crisis — ignited by one form of mass media (a YouTube video), the attempt to mediate the crisis through another form of mass media (Twitter), how it was covered by the mass media (TV networks), how the mass media reacted to the political spillover (Mitt Romney’s reaction), and the related issues of censorship, free speech, and hate messages (and Google’s blocking the video in several countries).

I will be teaching Mass Media and Society again next semester, along with American Media/American History.  Last semester I taught Sports Broadcasting.

Chris D’Amico is an adjunct professor in Communication. He holds a BA in Communication from Albertus Magnus College and a MS in Communication Studies from the College of New Rochelle. Here’s a little more about him and his approach to the field in his own words:

Why Communication?

We do it all the time! I recall my first “Effective Communication” course as an undergrad, the professor opens the class by saying “We can not not Communicate!” —Most of the students in the room looked at him as if he had three heads but from that moment on, it just clicked for me.  We communicate all the time without even realizing it. I love the fact that we can communicate volumes without saying a single word!

What’s the most interesting thing to you about the field?

I love the diversity of the field. One can study a specific communication context or dig deeper and see how this affects “me” and the world I live in. It really can change a person’s attitudes and beliefs.

What has been your favorite course to teach?

My favorite course to teach is Gender and Communication. It is awesome to take a step back and really examine what men and women are all about. How women and men really do communicate differently! The similarities and differences are absolutely amazing to observe and study!

Another course I love to teach is CO 101: Argument & Advocacy. I remember that this class broke me out of my protective shell. I try to help those who may have a hard time speaking in front of others to overcome these obstacles and utilize what they are feeling and channel it and use it to their advantage.

What’s the best course you’ve ever taken in or related to the field of Communication?

Mass Media Law. It was the hardest class I ever enrolled in but it was worth it. The 1st Amendment is extremely powerful. Having the opportunity to examine past court cases, laws and the many ways it has impacted past and present day society is amazing.

Do you have any interesting hobbies?

I am a Canadian and U.S. coin collector. I am also a television game show fanatic. Current day shows are great but I love to watch older game shows such as “Match Game” or ” I’ve got a Secret.” Fun fact: the game show host of “Match Game,” Mr. Gene Rayburn and I have the same birthday!

Welcome back Communication majors!  We hope everyone is having a great start to the semester.  A few notes and changes as the semester gets underway that you may want to note:

New Chair

Dr. Wills has admirably finished her term as departmental chair and Dr. Gudelunas is now chairing the department.  Consequently, Dr. Gudelunas can now be found in DMH 227 and Dr. Wills in DMH 203.  Stop by and say hello to either!

Faculty on Research Leave

This semester Dr. Searzio and Dr. Arendt are both are both on pre-tenure leave.  They won’t be teaching this semester or available for regular advising/office hours.  Wish them luck as they set the research world on fire with some exciting new scholarship.  They’ll be back next semester, don’t panic.  In the meantime if either is your advisor, please feel free to see Dr. Gudelunas or any other full-time member of the Department that can help you out.

New Internship email contact

Dr. Gudelunas is no longer coordinating the undergraduate internship program die to his chairing responsibilities.  Dr. Serazio will be handling Fall internships (even while on leave), and Dr. Arendt Spring internships.  We know this may be confusing (not really) but we have simplified the contact information.  For any and all internship questions, just email com-intern@fairfield.edu.  The right person will get back to you!  As a reminder, everything you could ever possibly want to know about internships can be found here.

Don’t forget to follow us on Twitter @FairfieldComm and bookmark this blog for news and information that majors can use!  Have a great semester!

This summer, Assistant Professor Mike Serazio made the journey to Durban, South Africa to take part in the IAMCR‘s annual conference. The conference, which this year carried the theme of “South-North Conversations,” focused on communication between those empowered by their economic, social, racial, or gender-defined conditions and those who find themselves marginalized by them, all against the backdrop of globalization.

 
“IAMCR annually gathers together some of the most diverse and international media scholars of any conference around,” Serazio said of the event. “Personally, I was delighted to network with a few new contacts who work in the areas of political economy and global consumer culture and have some exciting upcoming projects planned that I’ll be keeping tabs on.  And Durban itself – and South Africa more broadly – is a rich, complex place for those who study and are fascinated by the intersection of culture and politics.”

 
He presented two papers that are summarized in the following abstracts, one of which he co-authored with a former Fairfield 2011 undergraduate, Wanda Szarek:

Crowd-Sourcing Consumer Governance:
Social Media Marketing and the Web 2.0 Populism of Viral Culture

This paper offers a production-of-culture exploration of the growth in social media marketing practices witnessed in the past decade.  Through a textual analysis of hundreds of articles in the popular and trade press and in-depth interviews with 48 agency CEOs, creative directors, and brand managers, this study goes behind the scenes to examine the tactics and processes informing this approach to consumer governance – an approach that assumes networked interactivity, as opposed to mass broadcasting, as the organizing principle for contemporary media ecology.  By highlighting a series of case studies drawn from viral and social media strategies, online self-publishing, consumer-generated video contests, and alternate-reality marketing scenarios, I identify a Foucauldian mode of power central to diverse crowd-sourced strategies: the effort to embed promotional messages in ostensibly amateur creative flows and voices so as to authenticate the collaborative, decentralized management ofconsumer subjects.  I further emphasize the presumed persuasive capacity of these new media enthymemes that rely upon a continuum of open-to-closed media content as a way of understanding how brands oblige that engagement.  The paper also represents an opportunity to update and adapt Marshall McLuhan’s taxonomy to reflect the advertising phenomena of our digital era (“the cool sell,” as I term it) and their capacity to conduct audiences through ambiguity, discovery, and engagement rather than that of the aggressively overt practices endemic to interruption marketing (“the hot sell”).  Yet the free labor interpellated that underpins this move toward populist credibility and “brand democratization,” as some have hailed it, equally heralds a dematerialization of the creative industries and a flexible, contingent, if not precarious instability that defines a more heterarchical media world.  In sum, the project contributes to anemerging school of research that seeks to critique both the marketing discourse and practices of “empowerment” and “participation” that function so commonly as buzzwords within the creative industries – and, more broadly, highlights how audience agency is increasingly co-opted by and coded into commercial structure.

The Art of Producing Consumers:
A Critical Textual Analysis of Post-Communist Polish Advertising
(co-authored with Wanda Szarek)

This paper offers a critical textual analysis of Polish advertising at a pivotal historical juncture: following the collapse of communism and at the rise of a capitalist market economy.  With its rhetoric and imagery about goods and services, advertising simultaneously summons into being, through competing parables of social ideology, loaded assumptions and expectations about the consumer subjects it seeks to cultivate.  By investigating the “secondary discourse” or “meta-narratives” that course throughout such textual material, we might better understand the larger cultural, political, and economic undercurrents of a given time and place.
Thus, by deconstructing hundreds of advertisements that appeared in Polish magazines in the late 1980s and early 1990s – an era of radical change – we argue that such commercial messages attempted to conjure a new sense of self for individuals living within an embryonic consumer society.  These messages thrust new demands of status envy upon the Polish psyche – seeking to engineer self-consciousness, to cast judgments about social differentiation, and to nurture elitist exclusivity in contrast to the egalitarian and collectivist exhortations that would have marked communist propaganda.  In a commercial act of strategic amnesia, that heritage of Soviet influence was elided behind a resolutely forward – and westward – looking entrepreneurial ethos, wherein English words tantalized with the cachet of triumph, power, and wealth.  At this critical transition in Polish history in which widespread advertising was effectively being invented from scratch, these daydreams invoked – of techno-capitalist opportunity exploited, post-rationing luxury and excess indulged, and borderless horizons with Europe and the West (indeed, a new sphere of interconnected solidarity) – sought to interpellate the prospective consumer in a “valuable” position.
In this paper, we decode these ideological premises by looking at the “common sense” advertisers attempted to instill through their visual and rhetorical data – excavating the subject advertising minted within an emerging hegemonic model of neoliberal popular discourse.  At that “end of history” moment, new ambitions, envies, and orientations were being inscribed upon these commercial subjects.  By studying the aspirations and apprehensions represented in this symbolic material, we might better understand how new consumers were ideologically shepherded through a moment of profound political transition.  This archival work represents a starting point for future investigations into how advertising “produces” its subjects in the aftermath of communism(s); moreover, it helps clarify the function of popular culture in post-socialist societies.

Congratulations to Mike and Wanda!