Alumni Voices: Bob Bednar, Chair of Communication Studies at Southwestern University

Bob Bednar, AZ-85 North, West of Tucson, Arizona, August 2006.

Today, we offer another post in our recurring “Alumni Voices” feature from Bob Bednar, who graduated with a Ph.D. from the department in 1997.

How is the work that you’re doing right now informed by the work that you did as a student in American Studies at UT?

In some ways, what I am doing now is totally different from what I did in my time at UT, but in other ways, I feel the continuity.  I am now Chair of Communication Studies at Southwestern University in Georgetown, where I teach critical media studies and work mostly in the interdisciplinary fields of visual culture, material culture studies, memory studies, trauma studies, and automobility studies.  My training at UT AMS was focused almost entirely on cultural history.  Even in grad school, I was always drawn to contemporary culture, and within that, to material, visual, and spatial cultures, so I focused my energies “outside” instead of in the archive.  I always felt supported by the faculty for this approach, but I also knew that each of my mentors focused on the archive, so it was up to me to figure out my methodology.  I sometimes complained back then about the lack of guidance, but ultimately, that process of having to figure it out on my own in a challenging and supportive scholarly community was the greatest gift the program gave me.  Just the other day a student working on an undergraduate CommStudies Capstone project who read a recent article of mine on roadside crash shrines asked me the question: “This article covers so much ground.  How do you know where to start when you are entering a new field of inquiry?” I had a ready answer, because it is something I have been doing since my time at UT.

I didn’t learn how to talk about this until several years after I was finished, but the most important thing I learned in the AMS PhD program at UT was to figure out my own way of balancing creativity with constraint.  The three classes I took my first semester became figures in this process that I still think about today.

I was required to take a core class in recent AMS scholarship taught by Bob Crunden. Crunden was a force to be reckoned with—someone who reveled in showing us how much he knew and how little we knew.  I reckoned with him the only way I knew how to deal with people like him while I was in my twenties: I butted heads with him and worked hard trying to show him he was wrong.  At one point it degenerated into Crunden and I trading charges of “You are an a–hole” across the seminar table, but we always buried the hatchet over pints in the Texas Tavern after class, and I couldn’t help feeling extremely attached the A I got in that class.

Recent Grad Research: John Cline’s “Arterial America”

Our graduates do amazing things. Like this: recent Ph.D. John Cline is preparing to walk from New Orleans to Chicago for a project entitled “Arterial America.”  He is raising funds through Kickstarter to support the trip, and there are a mere 24 hours to go! Check out his description of the project:

The original idea behind Arterial America (www.arterialamerica.com) was simple enough: get from New Orleans to Chicago. As a music historian—I graduated with a Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Texas last May—the pathway between those two cities is of enormous significance: it’s the distance between Louis Armstrong and the Art Ensemble of Chicago, or between Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters. But as this project shifted from idle thought to actual plan, it became clear that the way north has historically consisted of many routes, exceeding the bounds of a “Blues Trail” or even of an African American “Great Migration.” They go back to before Columbus, when American Indians followed what we now call the “Natchez Trace” across the states of Mississippi and Tennessee. That same trail was followed by boatmen from before the time of Mark Twain, hoofing it back to their hometowns after floating a raft full of goods to the port of New Orleans, returning with what coin remained in their pockets after the temptations of the Crescent City. The way north consists, too, of railways and roadways, and, of course, boats. And so, the plan is to walk from New Orleans to Memphis, following the back roads and bits of the Trace and Highway 61, catch a towboat from Memphis to St. Louis, and finally hop a train from St. Louis to Chicago. At the same time, I cannot travel the routes that I’m traveling and expect to find the “last of the Mississippi bluesmen.” Rather, what’s important at the outset is to keep my ears and eyes open to contemporary life.

John has raised 72% of his goal and has until Tuesday, January 15, 12:54pm EST to reach 100%. Check out the Kickstarter here and follow John on his project blog here.

Alumni Voices: Dr. David Wharton, Director of Documentary Studies at Center for the Study of Southern Culture, University of Mississippi

Today we share some insights from Dr. David Wharton, the Director of Documentary Studies at Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi. He is the author of The Soul of a Small Texas Town: Photographs, Memories, and History from McDade, Texas (2000) and will release Small Town South, a collection of photographs of the south, in Fall 2012. In addition, a selection of his photographs can be found at his website.

How is the work that you’re doing right now informed by the work that you did as a student in American Studies at UT?

The work I do now, both my teaching as a member of University of Mississippi faculty and my personal photographic work, have been directly informed by the graduate work I did at UT.  As a teacher, I demand that students search beyond the obvious to discover deeper meanings in nearly all things cultural.  I learned this, not always happily at the time, from seminars with Professors Goetzmann and Crunden.  Goetzmann knew intuitively that everything was connected to just about everything else and took delight in showing us how.  Crunden insisted that we constantly dig deeper and that we think clearly all the while.  Jeff Meikle’s quiet good humor assured us that we could be both good scholars and good people, while Bill Stott’s grand embrace of a broad spectrum of ideas gave us intellectual license to roam.  I try to incorporate all of these qualities into my teaching.  Occasionally I succeed and that makes me feel good.

As a photographer whose work lives in the gray area between art and documentary, I am also able to credit my grad school years.  While working on my MFA in the Art Department, Mark Goodman and Lawrence McFarland made me wrestle with the complicated relationship between photography and reality.  The AMS doctoral program demanded that I steep myself in the study of America’s past and present (something I had managed to avoid as an undergraduate) for several years, but then set me free to do whatever I wanted.  That was a vote of confidence I am thankful for to this day.  It propelled me into completing a photographic/ethnographic/historical dissertation on a small bit of rural culture that was eventually published in book form: The Soul of a Small Texas Town: Photographs, Memories, and History from McDade (University of Oklahoma Press, 2000).  I continue to work in a similar vein, traveling throughout the American South to photograph various aspects of rural and small town culture.  Another book of photographs—Small Town South—will be published this fall (see www.gftbooks.com for more information).  I truly believe that my UT graduate school experiences opened these intellectual doors for me and gave me the confidence to walk through them.

Do you have any words of wisdom or advice for students in our department about how to get the most out of their time here?

Do something you truly care about—not something you think you should care about—but something you REALLY do care about.  Find a mentor who will support and encourage you but won’t insist that you do things his/her way.  Life’s too short to always be jumping through hoops.

Announcement: Digital Humanities Project, “The End of Austin,” Seeks Contributors

An end of Austin

Last year, we featured a fascinating digital humanities project, “The End of Austin,” that emerged from a graduate seminar led by Dr. Randy Lewis. This week, we’re pleased to share the news that a small editorial collective will be continuing the project and broadening their call for content to the community at large. Randy offers this call for contributions:

We are moving forward on the second issue of The End of Austin, a digital humanities project that explores the idea of endings in our fair city. We would love to have a contribution from you–a bit of writing, photos, video, art, a song, anything that somehow explores this idea that things are dying, ending, expiring, collapsing in the midst of our growth-obsessed sunbelt burg.

If you are curious, here is an article about the original project, and here is the first installment of the project.

We hope to do something bigger and wilder for issue number two. Our goal is to assemble something interesting, beautiful, meaningful, and disconcerting for release in early 2013. If you would like to contribute something, that’s wonderful. But also think about sharing this with friends, students, and colleagues who might be good at exploring this nexus of art, documentary and cultural geography broadly conceived.

If you have questions, comments, or a submission for the project, get in touch with the board at endofaustin (at) gmail (dot) com. And, again, the first installment can be found here.

Announcement: RTF Panel Features AMS Chair Dr. Elizabeth Engelhardt

Next Tuesday afternoon from 3:00-5:00, head on over to the Belo Center for New Media (5.208) to catch AMS professor and chair Dr. Elizabeth Engelhardt, who will be one of the panelists for the Department of Radio-Television-Film’s event, “Scholarly versus Popular: Filmmaking, writing and other adventures of academics looking for a larger audience.”

The following description of the event comes to us from RTF:

Can scholars reach a wider audience without sacrificing their academic reputations? What happens when they try?

A decade ago, Dan T. Carter, a Bancroft Award winning historian, and Paul Stekler, an Emmy Award winning UT filmmaker, collaborated on a documentary biography of George Wallace, George Wallace: Settin’ the Woods on Fire (which the Austin Film Society will screen at the State Theater on the night of October 10th). The film won a Special Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival, an Emmy, and was broadcast nationally on PBS. Using that collaboration as a starting point, this panel, including Carter, Stekler, and a trio of UT scholars, will talk about treading the line between scholarly research and mass appeal, and the decision to go broad or institutional.

Panelists include:

• Jacqueline Jones
• Elizabeth Engelhardt
• Eric McDaniel
• Dan T. Carter
• Paul Stekler

Hope to see you at what is shaping up to be a great panel!  And make sure not to miss the screening of Carter and Stekler’s George Wallace: Settin’ the Woods on Fire on Wednesday, October 10 at the State Theater. More info here.

Announcement: Food for Black Thought Symposium This Weekend!

This Friday and Saturday, head on over to the Warfield Center for African and African American Studies (UT Austin) and the George Washington Carver Cultural Center for the Food for Black Thought Symposium. This event features presenters from UT Austin, including our own Dr. Elizabeth Engelhardt, as well as members of the wider Austin community.

Here is a description of the symposium from the event website:

Critical discussions of food and the food system are on the rise in academic research, public policy, and in popular media. Food for Black Thought (FFBT) will explore how these issues involve, impact, and engage Black populations from transdisciplinary and community-based perspectives. FFBT will explore Black experiences with food and the food system, past and present, in Austin and beyond.

The 2-day community + action symposium will take place at the Warfield Center for African and African American Studies (UT Austin) and at the George Washington Carver Cultural Center. Facilitators and presenters include youth and adults, from the University of Texas at Austin, the greater Austin community, and from across the United States.

The two-day symposium will feature interactive workshops, roundtables, film screenings, and keynote talks with Dr. Naa Oyo Kwate (director of the research lab for Race, Neighborhoods, and African-American Health) and Toni Tipton Martin (chef, culinary historian, and Founder and Director of the SANDE Youth Project). The symposium is free and open to the public.

Sponsored by the John L. Warfield Center for African and African American Studies, the George Washington Carver Museum and Cultural Center, the Center for Women’s and Gender Studies, the Advertising and Public Relations Department, the Geography and The Environment Department, the African and African Diaspora Studies Department, the Black Media Council, and Foodways Texas.

More details and a complete schedule can be found here.

Faculty Research: Dr. Randy Lewis discusses new book, ‘Navajo Talking Picture’

This past July, Dr. Randy Lewis published his third book, Navajo Talking Picture (University of Nebraska Press). I sat down with Randy to discuss the conception of the book, its challenges, its delights, and how the narrative he tells engages with broader conversations within American Studies and beyond.

Where did the idea for this book come from? How did the film [Navajo Talking Picture] and the filmmaker [Arlene Bowman] come onto your radar screen initially?

Probably about ten years ago, I realized that there wasn’t much scholarly literature in film studies and none in American Studies on Native American cinema or indigenous media in a global sense. I started thinking about how to remedy that. I began collecting texts to consider and got deep into Alanis Obomsawin’s work, which I thought was just going to be a chapter of a book that would look at some of the major figures in Native American cinema who had been neglected. It just kept going into a book. It’s hard to imagine this, but it was the first one devoted to a Native filmmaker. This says something about how much “Native art” is narrowly associated with traditional art forms in opposition to modern, technologically-dependent art forms, as well as how rarely Native people have been able to get their points of view on screen, even as they are obsessively represented by outsiders like John Ford.

While I was writing the Obomsawin book that came out in 2006, I was aware that I had these other things that I was really interested in. Part of it stemmed from writing in the southwest at the School of Advanced Research in Santa Fe for a year. I was really close to Navajo Nation, and I was coming across a lot of amazing Navajo artists and getting a sense that not only were they doing a lot with Navajo-language radio on the reservation, but there were a lot of Navajo media professionals doing all kinds of projects that were not on the film studies or American Studies radar. And I learned that there was a Navajo filmmaker named Arlene Bowman, who was really early in this story of Native filmmaking, who seemed to interest and dismay audiences equally. I wanted to see this film she made as a graduate student that had made a little splash in the 1980s when it came out, at a time when she was the first Native woman in film school at UCLA or probably anywhere else.

Arlene Bowman, 1980

So I watched the film called Navajo Talking Picture, and I found it kind of confusing and unfamiliar. Then I’d show it to other people, to friends and students. What got me really hooked on it was that I had never seen something upset people and divide audiences so much. Apparently back in the 1980s when she screened it at festivals, Bowman said, there were these camps that were set up. Some people said, “You have the right to make this film, and you have a right to put your traditional grandmother on film even if she appears unwilling.” And other people would say, “This is an example of everything that you should not do in documentary.”

As I started to register the depth of the divide and the racially-infused animosity, I became interested in the film itself as a cultural object, as a kind of wound, as I write in the book. I’m probably more interested in this question of wounding – or, let’s use the metaphor of a rock and ripples, because I have to have my eccentric metaphors. The rock is the text under consideration, and it drops into the pond of the culture, and it creates ripples. The ripples are the things that really fascinated me: why there were so many strange responses and strange resonances to this very small film.

Reading the ripples

The fact that it’s a film almost became incidental. I became fascinated by what you could learn about the way different audiences responded. About why some viewers had such strong expectations about what Native artists, or Native women, were “supposed to do.” About what was “authentic” and “appropriate” for Native artists, things we rarely ask about non-native artists, you know? I ended up writing some of the first pieces about the reception and intentionality involved in the reception of native art. Why do we want it to be this way and not that way? Why do we think it was meant to do x and not y? And who is the “we”? These are revealing questions in terms of race, power, and gender.

Grad Research: JFK, Reality, and Mediation at the Sixth Floor Museum

I probably don’t have to tell you that Austin is a vibrant, exciting place to live and work: with a killer live music scene, ubiquitous tacos, and barbecue that’ll make you weak in the knees, it certainly ranks near the top of my favorite cities in America list.

That said, one of the benefits of living in Austin has also been having opportunities to explore other parts of Texas, from Marfa to Houston. This past weekend, I decided to venture out of the Austin city limits to Dallas, a city I had only ever experienced through way too many layovers at Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport.

Though Dallas has its share of tourist destinations, my motivation was research-related. At the moment, I’m knee-deep in my Master’s Report, which explores representations of John F. Kennedy’s assassination in two video games, and how their odd, perhaps ethically questionable gamification of the event – an incredibly traumatic moment in American history – reconfigures and negotiates our understanding of history and politics. What kind of residue is left in our historical memory if we play these games? What do they do to our imaginations of power, official state accounts of history, our ability to interact with history and meaning-making? How do we understand history if we only experience it virtually?

But to me, a 25-year old, Kennedy’s assassination always felt remote, a moment in a textbook rather than a lived, traumatic experience. So I embarked on a journey to the place where it happened, to make it feel as real as it probably could to someone who was never there: Dealey Plaza, and the Texas State Book Depository, now a museum dedicated to Kennedy and the assassination.

Placard on the museum's exterior (click to enlarge; photo by author)

Grad Research: The End of Austin, a Collaborative Documentary Project

Here at AMS :: ATX, we’re – perhaps not surprisingly – huge fans of academic projects that engage with the digital realm in meaningful ways. We’re particularly excited by projects like the Archive of Childhood, which we featured last week, and other digital archives like these (among myriad others, naturally). Public access, multimedia, and interactivity all open up possibilities for innovation in research.

But what about digital academic work of a different sort – those that blend the creative and the scholarly on a digital platform?

American Studies and Occupy Wall Street

Since September 17, a large group of protesters has been convening in New York City’s Zuccotti Park in the Wall Street district to express their dissatisfaction with America’s financial system, corporate greed, and economic inequality.  Similar protests have sprung up in hundreds of cities worldwide (Austin included, naturally). Because these protests have been so widespread, we’re likely seeing the birth of a lasting social movement, one that will potentially have substantial political consequences. This is an important moment.