The Center for Media Engagement and Media Ethics Initiative Present:
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#MeToo and Journalism Leadership
Ethical Leadership in Newsrooms in the #MeToo Era:
A Panel Discussion
October 29, 2019 (Tuesday) ¦ 2:00PM-3:00PM ¦ BMC 5.208
How did sexual harassment persist for so long in journalism, and what difference has the #MeToo movement made for those that run the media? What does ethical and effective leadership look like in newsrooms during the #MeToo era? This panel discussion features scholars from various fields in communication and media reflecting on the extent of the #MeToo movement in journalism, as well as its intersections with leadership in the modern media environment. Confirmed participants include:
Kathleen McElroy (Journalism, UT Austin)
Meme Drumwright (Advertising, UT Austin)
Kate West (Journalism, UT Austin)
Scott R. Stroud (Communication Studies, UT Austin)
The Media Ethics Initiative is part of the Center for Media Engagement at the University of Texas at Austin. Follow Media Ethics Initiative and Center for Media Engagement on Facebook for more information. Media Ethics Initiative events are open and free to the public.
Co-Sponsored by the School of Journalism, University of Texas at Austin, and the UT Ethics Project
Debating Civil Rights
The Center for Media Engagement and Media Ethics Initiative Present:
Debating Civil Rights: James Baldwin, William F. Buckley Jr., and the Battle for the American Soul
Dr. Nicholas Buccola
Elizabeth and Morris Glicksman Chair in Political Science
Linfield College
November 21, 2019 (Thursday) ¦ 3:30PM-5:00PM ¦ BMC 5.208
In February 1965, James Baldwin – the poet of the civil rights revolution – and William F. Buckley Jr. – the Saint Paul of the conservative movement – met for an epic debate in Cambridge, England. Baldwin took the opportunity to deliver a jeremiad against white supremacy and Buckley did his best to warn an international audience of Baldwin’s radical agenda. For the two decades prior to their clash at Cambridge, Baldwin and Buckley rose to fame as prolific authors and public intellectuals. Both men were – among other things – journalists. In the years prior to the debate, Baldwin and Buckley provide us with two very different visions of the vocation of the journalist as a witness and a storyteller. In this lecture, Professor Buccola will describe these visions and explore the implications they might have for our own time.
Dr. Nicholas Buccola is the Elizabeth and Morris Glicksman Chair in Political Science at Linfield College. He is the author of The Fire Is upon Us: James Baldwin, William F. Buckley Jr., and the Debate over Race in America (Princeton University Press), The Political Thought of Frederick Douglass (NYU Press), and the editor of The Essential Douglass and Abraham Lincoln and Liberal Democracy. His essays have appeared in numerous scholarly journals and popular outlets including The New York Times, Salon, Dissent, and the Claremont Review of Books.
The Media Ethics Initiative is part of the Center for Media Engagement at the University of Texas at Austin. Follow Media Ethics Initiative and Center for Media Engagement on Facebook for more information. Media Ethics Initiative events are open and free to the public.
Designing Ethical AI Technologies
The Center for Media Engagement and Media Ethics Initiative Present:
Good Systems: Designing Values-Driven AI Technologies Is Our Grand Challenge
Dr. Kenneth R. Fleischmann
Professor in the School of Information
University of Texas at Austin
September 24, 2019 (Tuesday) ¦ 3:30PM-4:30PM ¦ CMA 5.136 (LBJ Room)
Photo by Franki Chamaki on Unsplash
Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.” This is the first law of technology, outlined by historian Melvin Kranzberg in 1985. It means that technology is only good or bad if we perceive it to be that way based on our own value system. At the same time, because the people who design technology value some things more or less than others, their values influence their designs. Michael Crichton’s “Jurassic Park” chaos theorist, Ian Malcolm, notes: “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think about if they should.” That’s the question we have to ask now: Should we increasingly automate various aspects of society? How can we ensure that advances in AI are beneficial to humanity, not detrimental? How can we develop technology that makes life better for all of us, not just some? What unintended consequences are we overlooking or ignoring by developing technology that has the power to be manipulated and misused, from undermining elections to exacerbating racial inequality?
The Inaugural Chair of the Good Systems Grand Challenge, Ken Fleischmann, will present the eight-year research mission of Good Systems, as well as our educational and outreach activities. Specifically, he will discuss the upcoming Good Systems launch events and ways that faculty, researchers, staff, and students can become involved in the Good Systems Grand Challenge.
The Media Ethics Initiative is part of the Center for Media Engagement at the University of Texas at Austin. Follow Media Ethics Initiative and Center for Media Engagement on Facebook for more information. Media Ethics Initiative events are open and free to the public.
Weather Media in the Public Sphere
The Center for Media Engagement and Media Ethics Initiative Present:
Weather Media in the Public Sphere
Dr. John Durham Peters
María Rosa Menocal Professor of English &
Professor of Film and Media Studies
Yale University
May 2 (Thursday) ¦ 1:30-3:00PM ¦ BMC 5.208
On its face, weather sounds like the most banal and mundane thing possible. Ordinary people look down on talking about it and journalists often regard it as the lowest kind of news. This talk aims to show that the accusation that talking about the weather is intellectually empty is hardly the case in the age of climate change, and even dangerous. The rise of weather as a topic of conversation coincides with the rise of the bourgeois public sphere. More broadly, weather is a key part of media history. The history of human interaction with weather is also a history of cultural techniques and media technologies. Dramatists and divines have sought meaning from atmospheric events. Reading the skies is one paradigm case of human-nature interaction, and studying weather can stand in as part for whole as an inquiry into the environments humans have made or unmade. The history of modern weather forecasting is also a history of the militarization of the sky and oceans, and is co-extensive with the history of modern telecommunications, computation, and reporting. Weather raises two questions of profound interest to recent media theory: how mundane infrastructures are full of meaning and how vaporous or evanescent entities can be tracked, recorded, and programmed. Talking about the weather is not dumb; it may be essential.
Dr. John Durham Peters is a leading scholar in the area of media history, communication theory, and philosophy. He is the María Rosa Menocal Professor of English and of Film & Media Studies at Yale University. Previously, Peters taught at the University of Iowa between 1986-2016. He is the author a range of books, including Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication, Courting the Abyss: Free Speech and the Liberal Tradition, and most recently, The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media. He has held fellowships with the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Fulbright Foundation, and the Leverhulme Trust.
The Media Ethics Initiative is part of the Center for Media Engagement at the University of Texas at Austin. Follow Media Ethics Initiative and Center for Media Engagement on Facebook for more information.
Media Ethics Initiative events are free and open to the public.
Race, Democracy, and Media
The Center for Media Engagement and Media Ethics Initiative Present:
The Spectacle of Lynching Redeployed:
On the Performance of Democratic Regard
Dr. Melvin Rogers
Associate Professor of Political Science
Brown University
April 9 (Tuesday) ¦ 3:30-5:00PM ¦ BMC 5.208
America’s history is marked by a striking image—“black bodies swinging in the southern breeze.” Abel Meeropol—a Jewish American—first articulated this line in his 1937 published poem, “Bitter Fruit,” after viewing Lawrence Beitler’s horrific lynching photograph. Although Meeropol eventually put the words to music, it was jazz singer Billie Holiday’s haunting rendition of the song, now titled “Strange Fruit,” first recorded in 1939 that made it a classic. How does one practically and conceptually engage the simultaneous existence of a professed commitment to equality and liberty alongside the fact that white Americans visually digested those with whom they otherwise shared the polity? I engage this vexing issue by reflecting on the normative possibilities latent in Holiday’s performative rendition of Meeropol’s song.
Dr. Melvin Rogers is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Brown University. He is the author of The Undiscovered Dewey: Religion, Morality, and the Ethos of Democracy (Columbia University Press, 2008) and co-editor of African American Political Thought: A Collected History (University of Chicago Press, forthcoming). His articles have appeared in major academic journals as well as popular venues such as Dissent, The Atlantic, Public Seminar, and Boston Review. Rogers serves as the co-editor of the New Histories of Philosophy series at Oxford University Press. Presently, he is at work on his second book, The Darkened Light of Faith: Race, Democracy, and Freedom in African American Political Thought.
The Media Ethics Initiative is part of the Center for Media Engagement at the University of Texas at Austin. Follow Media Ethics Initiative and Center for Media Engagement on Facebook for more information.
Media Ethics Initiative events are free and open to the public.
The Ethical Study of Digital Fan Culture
The Center for Media Engagement and Media Ethics Initiative Present:
Cloak of Invisibility:
Perceived Privacy and the Ethical Study of Digital Fan Culture
Dr. Suzanne Scott
Assistant Professor of Radio-Television-Film
University of Texas at Austin
March 26 (Tuesday) ¦ 3:30-4:30PM ¦ CMA 5.136
What ethical challenges arise when scholars research the passionate fan communities that surround popular films, games, or books? Because many academics studying fan culture self-identify as fans and also participate in the fan communities they study, there has long been an unspoken “fans first” policy governing approaches to ethics in the field. But what happens when we ethically feel we owe our research subjects more protections than those required by our Internal Review Boards (IRB), and if so, what motivates this and would these protections meaningfully look like? This presentation will contextualize ongoing ethical debates around whether fan discourse and forms of textual production (like fanfiction or fanart) should be conceptually approached as “texts” or “people.” Through a survey of these histories and core ethical debates, we will explore several interrelated issues ranging from the perceived privacy of fan communities to the ethical best practices of researching industry/fan interactions through contemporary case studies.
Dr. Suzanne Scott is an assistant professor in the Department of Radio-TV-Film at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research and teaching interests include fan studies, media convergence, digital and participatory culture, social media, transmedia storytelling, comic book culture, and gender studies. Dr. Scott’s current book project, Fake Geek Girls: Fandom, Gender, and the Convergence Culture Industry (NYU Press, April 2019), considers the gendered tensions underpinning the media industry’s embrace of fans as demographic tastemakers, professionals, and promotional partners within convergence culture.
The Media Ethics Initiative is part of the Center for Media Engagement at the University of Texas at Austin. Follow MEI and CME on Facebook for more information. Media Ethics Initiative events are free and open to the public.
Media Freedom and the Middle East
The Center for Media Engagement and Media Ethics Initiative Present:
Media Freedom and the Middle East: Pursuing a Self-Regulatory Approach in Qatar
Associate Professor of Journalism
University of Texas at Austin
February 19 (Tuesday) ¦ 3:30-4:30PM ¦ BMC 5.208
Laws throughout the Middle East and North Africa dramatically limit freedom of expression by prohibiting journalists from engaging in basic newsgathering functions, including taking video and photos in public. Historically, journalists and the general public alike have faced potential criminal punishment for violation of these laws, which also often prohibit the publication of information deemed offensive, embarrassing or sensitive. Recently, however, Qatar has begun to explore ways to promote media freedom and Western investment in media through the initiation of the Qatar Media Hub. Organizations operating through the QMH would ascribe to a code of professional ethics as a means of regulation, potentially taking them outside the scope of traditional criminal law. During a recent consulting trip to the country, I urged government leaders to adopt this self-regulatory approach in lieu of traditional government regulation as a means of advancing free expression. My current work explores the benefits of ethical self-regulation as well as global approaches to media self-regulation in the hope of drafting a workable model for Qatar’s new initiative.
Dr. Amy Kristin Sanders is an award-winning former journalist, licensed attorney and associate professor. Before joining the faculty of The University of Texas at Austin, she taught for more than four years at Northwestern University’s campus in Doha, Qatar. Her research focuses on the intersection of law and new technology as it relates to media freedom. Specifically, she focuses on international and comparative media law and policy issues, including media freedom, Internet governance, social media and digital literacy. She has authored more than 20 scholarly articles in numerous law reviews and mass communication journals, and she is a co-author of the widely recognized casebook “First Amendment and the Fourth Estate: The Law of Mass Media.”
The Media Ethics Initiative is part of the Center for Media Engagement at the University of Texas at Austin. Follow MEI and CME on Facebook for more information. Media Ethics Initiative events are open and free to the public.
