Popular Culture Working Group - elections 2023

The Popular Culture Working Group will be holding elections for one chair and two vice-chair positions, for the term 2023 – 2027.

The elections will be held online from 24 May until 14 June using the SurveyMonkey platform.

Individual members and representatives of institutional members in good standing, who are also registered as members of the Popular Culture working group will be eligible to stand for a position and to vote. To verify if you are a member of the POP working group, log in to your account and click on "My Sections and Working Groups".

The deadline to receive candidate statements was 17 May.

Read about the Popular Culture Working Group

More information and timeline at https://iamcr.org/s-wg/elections2023

Candidates

For Chair:

For Vice-chair:

Statements

Tonny Krijnen (Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands)

tkrijnen

Associate Professor Media Studies
Erasmus University Rotterdam
Erasmus School of History, Culture and Communication
Department of Media and Communication

Niall Brennan, Florian Vanlee, and I are running as a team for the chair and vice chair positions. 

As an Associate Professor Media Studies, my research focuses on all aspects (production, content and reception) of popular television and their relations to moral imagination. Currently, my research focuses on the production of moral content in popular TV. Gender is an important theoretical lens with which I study the production of those moral messages. In addition to this specific research focus, together with Zhen Ye, I also research the production cultures in China’s livestreaming industries. Recently, co-authored with dr. Sofie Van Bauwel, the second edition of Gender and the Media - Representing, Producing, Consuming appeared with Routledge. Currently, we are working on a volume which focuses on how to study Gender and Media. Other recent publications are Identities and Intimacies on Social Media - Transnational Perspectives (edited with Paul Nixon, Michelle Ravenscroft and Cosimo Marco Scarcelli), two specials issue of Media and Communication: 1) From Sony’s Walkman to RuPaul’s Drag Race: A Landscape of Contemporary Popular Culture (co-edited with dr. Frederik Dhaenens and Niall Brennan, PhD) and 2). Gender and Media: Recent Trends in Theory, Methodology and Research Subjects (co-edited with dr. Sofie Van Bauwel), and various articles in academic journals.

As my interests cover many elements of popular TV, my work is truly interdisciplinary. Next to cultural studies perspectives, cultural sociology, literary studies, and gender studies are important contributors to my theoretical understanding of popular culture in general. Therefore, I think I would be a good candidate to chair IAMCR’s Popular Culture Working Group. Popular Culture as an academic field is interdisciplinary by origin and, in my opinion, interdisciplinarity is also the strength of the field. Combining insights from different academic disciplines including their methods, seems a fruitful way to understand what popular culture means in contemporary, globalized, societies. During the IAMCR conferences, I always perceived the Working Group’s sessions to present an interesting mix of insights in the fields of both humanities as social sciences. This, in my view, is an important task for the Working Group: safeguarding the inclusivity of the field of popular culture; not only in terms of academic disciplines, but also in terms of member-diversity.

Over the past years, I functioned as a vice-chair (4 years) and chair (2 years) of the Popular Culture Working Group. During these years, I had the opportunity to learn about the fun of international collaboration and about the politics of an academic organization. Together with the other members of the management team, I put a lot of effort in organizing interesting conference programs, working group publications, and inclusivity for the section. I would like to conclude this period with a last term as chair of the working group to share my knowledge and experience with new members of the working group and management team.

Niall Brennan, Florian Vanlee, and I are running as a team for the chair and vice chair positions. 

Please do not hesitate to contact me in case you desire any more information!

email: krijnen@eshcc.eur.nl
web: http://www.eshcc.eur.nl/english/personal/krijnen/

Niall Brennan (Fairfield University, United States)

nbrennan

Associate Professor Communication
College of Arts and Sciences
Fairfield University
Connecticut, US

Tonny Krijnen, Florian Vanlee, and I are running as a team for the chair and vice chair positions.

Hello!

I am Niall Brennan, Associate Professor of Communication at Fairfield University, Connecticut, US. I am grateful for your consideration of me as continued vice-chair of the Popular Culture Working Group (POP) of IAMCR.
I have been part of POP since at least 2010. When I was working on my PhD thesis at the London School of Economics, I gave my first, proper, conference paper at IAMCR Braga 2010, and I was, and since have been, inspired by the Working Group’s academic and community engagement with popular culture as an active area of study in exploring and understanding different facets of social life. And, since the advent of popular culture as a viable area of exploration and debate, POP has seen movement in so many theoretical and empirical ways.

I am originally from Dublin, Ireland (“you can take the boy out of Dub, but you’ll never get Dub out of the boy”). I was raised in Colorado, US, and I have lived all over the place – San Francisco, Rio de Janeiro, New York City, London. I am a media scholar whose research focuses on discourses of gender and sexuality in film, television and new media; on Latin American media history, forms and institutions; and on emerging communities of media consumers across global space. In particular, I research how mediated representations of gender and sexuality have shaped social and political life in the US, Latin America and elsewhere, and conversely, how social-political change in negotiating constructs of gender and sexuality has shaped, and continues to shape, global mediated landscapes.

I am passionate about popular culture, and I have helped to see the POP Working Group become something much greater than a die-hard collection of academic, pop-culture aficionados. Along with the efforts of Tonny Krijnen and Frederik Dhaenens, (hopefully) POP will become a section as soon as 2023!

The study of popular culture crosses all lines and boundaries of social, technological, historical and mediated life. I look forward to you crossing these boundaries with me in POP as continued vice-chair of the Working Group, and I look forward to seeing you in Lyon, if not thereafter.

web: https://facultyprofile.fairfield.edu/?uname=nbrennan

Yongliang Gao (Communication University of China)

yonglianggao

Associate professor at State Key Laboratory of Media Convergence and Communication, Communication University of China.

I obtained my Ph. D. from Communication University of China in 2009 and thereafter I was admitted to Beijing Normal University as a post-doctoral researcher at the school of Arts and Media. Since 2011 when I accomplished my post-doctoral research work, I have been working at Communication University of China as a teacher and researcher. As a Master’s supervisor, I teach cultural communication, multi-media broadcasting and other relevant courses to postgraduates. Apart from a member of IAMCR, I have some part-time jobs in certain academic associations. I was elected general secretary of China Traffic Media Association, director of Broadcasting Committee of China College Film and Television Association, part-time researcher of Institute for Study of International Communication of Chinese Culture at Beijing Normal University, and member of Beijing Literary Critics Association as well. 

My research interests are mainly in theory and communication of popular culture, film, art, and aesthetics. I published 2 personal academic books, Myths and Approaches: A Study on the International Communication Effects of Chinese Films (2019) and Critique of Consumerism in Network Communication (2014), co-authored and edited 18 books including Research on the Development of China's Traffic Broadcasting in the Era of Intelligent Media (2020), A Study on All Media News Reporting in the 40 Years of Reform and Opening-up (2019), Research on the Construction of Chinese Art Discipline System (2012). I participated in the compilation of Encyclopedia of China (2021) and Dictionary of Journalism and Communication Studies (2014). In addition, I successfully completed more than 10 scientific research projects at all levels, including National Social Science Foundation projects, and major research projects in philosophy and social sciences held by the Ministry of Education. More than 30 of my research papers were published on core journals such as Modern Communication, China Radio and Television Journal, China Literature and Art Review. 

To my knowledge, IAMCR is one of the world’s most populous, famous and influential international academic organizations for media and communication research. The long-term, arduous and highly effective work done by IAMCR has brought tremendous benefits to thousands of scholars and specialists from across the world. As a member of the Popular Culture Working Group of IAMCR, I sincerely hope I will be able to make full use of the academic platform IAMCR provided to further my research, to enhance academic exchanges with scholars from around the world, and to make as much contributions as I can to improve research on popular culture, media and communication worldwide. It would be a great honor if I could have an opportunity to serve as a head officer of the Popular Culture Working Group. That will definitely be one of the most precious and rewarding experiences I can have in my academic career and even in my lifetime.

E-MAIL: gaoyongliang@cuc.edu.cn

Florian Vanlee (Ghent University, Belgium)

fvanlee

Ghent University
Faculty of Political & Social Sciences
Centre for Cinema & Media Studies – CIMS

Tonny Krijnen, Niall Brennan, and I are running as a team for the chair and vice chair positions.

Building on my PhD research on the representation of sexual and gender diversity in domestic fiction series in Flanders – the Northern Dutch-speaking region of Belgium – I presently study how public service media (PSMs) in Western Europe navigate various, often conflicting norms on the portrayal and inclusion of sexual and gender minorities as an FWO senior postdoctoral fellow. In recognition of the crucial role PSMs have played in bringing LGBTQ+ themes to the televisual mainstream in many Western European countries and the insufficiency of existing, US-based explanatory frameworks to understand these dynamics, my work has consistently attempted to expand the scope of queer media studies by focusing on the distinctive features of local mediascapes.

The acknowledgement and addressal the specificity of peripheral contexts combined with critical attention for the cultural hegemony of the US – particularly in the West – has always been a key motivation for me to participate in sessions organized by IAMCR’s Popular Culture Working Group. Panels never just cover popular culture as a common denominator in contemporary academia, typically exemplified by the lingua franca of Anglophone films, series and games, but embrace the contingency of the popular. It is a rare thing for a network to be so self-evidently receptive for the diversity of popular culture, and given my own academic profile, I am confident in my ability to play my part to continuing this commitment. In collaboration with the other co-chairs, I hope to further stimulate productive interactions between scholars across the globe, and strengthen the international cultural studies community more generally.

To fulfill these ambitions, I can rely on various past experiences. From 2017 to 2019, I acted as the young scholar representative for ECREA’s Gender & Communication section – organizing dedicated events for early career researchers and assisting in the organization of the section’s dedicated conferences. And in 2020, I started as an editor-in-chief of DiGeSt: Journal of Diversity and Gender Studies, a mandate I continue to hold. These experiences have not only showed me that I thoroughly enjoy the ‘back office’ of research and scholarship, but have allowed me to hone my organizational and management skills too. Aside from my thematic affinity with what IAMCR’s Popular Culture Working Group stands for, then, I am convinced I have the necessary practical competencies and experiences to act as a co-chair too.

Email: florian.vanlee@ugent.be
Web: https://www.ugent.be/ps/communicatiewetenschappen/cims/en/team/florian-…