Bromley, Pinchevski to join Annenberg as visiting scholars

Michael Bromley, left, and Amit Pinchevski

Michael Bromley is the Head of the School of Journalism and Communication and Professor of Journalism at the University of Queensland. He is a former journalist and worked for a number of daily newspapers in the UK, including the Daily Mail, for more than 20 years. He has taught Journalism and Media Studies at universities in the U.K., the United States, where he was Howard R. Marsh Visiting Professor of Journalism at the University of Michigan, and in Australia. He joined the School of Journalism and Communication in October 2004 as Deputy Head of School and was appointed Head in August 2007. His research and teaching interests are in journalism practices, investigative journalism, journalism education, citizen journalism and the socio-cultural uses of journalism. This includes an interest in the media, especially newspapers and their pasts and futures.

Amit Pinchevski is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Communication and Journalism at the Hebrew University. His research and publications focus on philosophy of communication, communication ethics, witnessing, and media and collective memory. He is the author of By Way of Interruption: Levinas and the Ethics of Communication (2005) and coeditor, with Paul Frosh, of Media Witnessing: Testimony in the Age of Mass Communication (2009).

In addition to colloquia and lectures, they will each teach a class in the fall term.

COMM - 877 - The Citizen Moment: Citizen-Centeredness in Journalism

The term ‘citizen journalism’ is widely used but poorly defined. This course will attempt to disentangle the various descriptors in use and to construct taxonomy of citizen-centeredness in journalism which acknowledges but is not determined by media technologies. It will draw on concepts such as thick citizenship, social brokerage, situatedness, assembly and networking to locate stages of citizen journalism in relation to their mediation, and will ask whether a shift to a more participator model of journalism represents a substitution of economic liberalism with social libertarianism, a subjugation of political institutions to social mediation, and/or new forms of democracy. It will look empirically at citizen journalism projects to test theoretical approaches and will explore contingent situations in which citizens are at the centre of what used to be governmental and/or media controlled actions. The course will start with the debate between Schudson and Lund over models of citizenship exemplified in The Simpsons. Readings will include texts by Stuart Allen, Mike Ananny and Carol Strohecker, P. Kim and A.B. Lund.

 

COMM – 876 - Media and Witnessing

The seminar will be concerned with witnessing as a discursive, historical and ethical practice and its relation to media, old and new. Witnessing will be cast as a crucial concept for contemporary ethically-informed discussions in media and communication. Among the issues to be discussed: witnessing and responsibility according to Levinas; the trauma testimony discourse; media and trauma: the case of the Eichmann trial; testimony and the Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies; witnessing via the media: the media witnessing discourse; distant suffering. Readings will include texts by Emmanuel Levinas, Dori Laub and Shoshana Felman, Giorgio Agamben, Geoffrey Hartman, Jeffery Alexander, Luc Boltanski, John Ellis, John Durham Peters, as well as my own work.