Jefferson Pooley’s research while affiliated with Muhlenberg College and other places

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Publications (46)


The History of Communication Studies across the Americas: An Introduction
  • Article
  • Full-text available

July 2024

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8 Reads

History of Media Studies

David W. Park

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Jefferson Pooley

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Peter Simonson

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This special section investigates the history of communication and media studies across national and linguistic contexts in the Americas. It maps transnational entanglements that have shaped communication inquiry in the multiple forms it has taken in South and North America and the Caribbean. At the same time, the section’s articles attend to political, institutional, and cultural dynamics that shaped the field in different national and local contexts. In so doing, the special section throws light on topics and regions that have received little attention in English-language literature, and draws attention to historic lines of hegemony, exclusion, resistance, and alternative traditions of research across the hemisphere. In this editors’ introduction, we outline the origins of the collective effort, connect it to parallel projects in two Latin American journals, and introduce the outstanding essays that follow.

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The History of Communication Studies across the Americas: An Introduction

July 2024

·

11 Reads

History of Media Studies

This special section investigates the history of communication and media studies across national and linguistic contexts in the Americas. It maps transnational entanglements that have shaped communication inquiry in the multiple forms it has taken in South and North America and the Caribbean. At the same time, the section’s articles attend to political, institutional, and cultural dynamics that shaped the field in different national and local contexts. In so doing, the special section throws light on topics and regions that have received little attention in English-language literature, and draws attention to historic lines of hegemony, exclusion, resistance, and alternative traditions of research across the hemisphere. In this editors’ introduction, we outline the origins of the collective effort, connect it to parallel projects in two Latin American journals, and introduce the outstanding essays that follow. | Esta sección especial investiga la historia de los estudios sobre comunicación y medios en los diferentes contextos nacionales y/o lingüísticos de las Américas. Para ello, mapea los múltiples enlaces transnacionales que han dado forma a la investigación de la comunicación en sus vertientes norte y sudamericanas, así como en el Caribe. A la vez, los artículos de esta sección prestan atención particularmente a distintos contextos nacionales y locales. De esta manera, esta sección especial nos permite iluminar algunos de los temas y algunas de las regiones que han permanecido oscurecidas por la literatura anglofona, prestando especial atención a las líneas históricas de hegemonía, exclusión y resistencia, así como a las tradiciones de investigación alternativas que se han dado en el hemisferio. En esta introducción a cargo de los editores, señalamos los orígenes de este esfuerzo colectivo, lo conectamos con otros proyectos similares que se han dado en dos revistas latinoamericanas y, finalmente, introducimos los maravillosos ensayos que conforman esta sección especial.


The History of Communication Studies Across the Americas--A View from the United States

January 2024

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149 Reads

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5 Citations

Matrizes

This essay reflects on the potential for scholarship that sensitively treats the histories of media and communication research across the Americas. Writing from the contexts of U.S. communication studies, we begin by reflexively considering some of the bases of U.S. hegemony within the history and historiography of the field. We suggest the importance of work that provincializes and decenters the U.S. and also traces transnational flows and cross-regional dynamics that have constituted communication studies in all its versions across the Americas. We then illustrate what a transnational history of U.S.-Latin American entanglements might resemble, offering a provisional periodization from the early twentieth century to the present.


The Plasticity of Social Knowledge: Paul F. Lazarsfeld and U.S. Communication Research, 1937–1952

August 2023

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129 Reads

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1 Citation

Journal for the History of Knowledge

This article describes how the Austrian-American sociologist Paul F. Lazarsfeld and his Bureau of Social Research applied a consistent bundle of findings—about the interplay of mass media and personal influence—to sharply different contexts. From the late 1930s through to the early 1950s, Lazarsfeld stressed a stable set of socialpsychological conditions that complicate media persuasion, which, however, could still be effective if paired with faceto- face campaigns. He developed the claim, first, with the aim of promoting educational radio. At the outbreak of war in Europe, Lazarsfeld and the Bureau moved to apply the findings to domestic morale and propaganda. In the immediate postwar years, Lazarsfeld redirected the Bureau’s energies towards domestic-facing social problems, retrofitting his personal-influence framework to the promotion of peace and tolerance. With the Cold War, finally, Lazarsfeld reverted to a martial posture, as social progress gave sudden way to psychological warfare. Thus, the paper describes a four-stage seesaw pattern: persuasion for social ends in the first and third periods, succeeded in both cases by war service. The Bureau’s communication research in the century’s middle-third is, the paper argues, a case study in the plasticity of social knowledge—variation around a stable theme. What was pliable was the topical enclosure, dictated in the main by the sponsorship on offer.



Exclusiones/Exclusions: El papel de la historia en saldar la deuda histórica del campo

June 2022

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26 Reads

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2 Citations

En esta introducción para la sección especial sobre “Exclusiones en la historia de los estudios de los medios de comunicación”, comenzamos llamando la atención sobre el papel constitutivo que la exclusión ha desempeñado en la historiografía de los estudios de los medios de comunicación. Las exclusiones relacionadas con el género, la raza, la lengua, el colonialismo, la ubicación geopolítica y los privilegios sancionados institucionalmente desempeñan un papel importante en la configuración de los relatos formales e informales del pasado de nuestros campos. El proyecto de reversión y recuperación se basa en el pensamiento poscolonial y decolonial, en las críticas raciales y afrocéntricas, en los estudios feministas y en la crítica geopolítica. Uno de los objetivos es provincializar gran parte de la historiografía de los estudios de los medios de comunicación. Inspirándonos en los movimientos críticos contemporáneos que se interrelacionan profundamente, identificamos cuatro tareas urgentes para la historia de los estudios de los medios de comunicación: 1) poner en evidencia el estado actual de los campos académicos, 2) crear colaboraciones internacionales que reconfiguren lo que se ha considerado como “centros” y “periferias” en los estudios sobre los medios de comunicación, 3) encontrar formas de resistencia a la creciente hegemonía del inglés en el sistema global de conocimiento, y 4) apoyar una infraestructura de publicación abierta y sin ánimo de lucro. Proponemos que una historiografía informada por la comprensión constitutiva y contingente de la exclusión representa un importante camino a seguir para la historia de los estudios de los medios de comunicación.


Exclusions/Exclusiones: The Role for History in the Field’s Reckoning

June 2022

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67 Reads

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9 Citations

In this introduction for the special section on “Exclusions in the History of Media Studies,” we begin by calling attention to the constituting role that exclusion has played in the historiography of media studies. Exclusions linked to gender, race, language, colonialism, geopolitical location, and institutionally sanctioned privilege play substantial roles in shaping formal and informal accounts of our fields’ pasts. The project of reversal and recovery builds on postcolonial and decolonial thought, Afrocentric and racial critiques, feminist scholarship, and geopolitically informed critique. One aim is to provincialize much of the historiography of media studies. Drawing inspiration from the deeply inter-animating contemporary critical movements, we identify four pressing tasks for the history of media studies: 1) to throw the present state of academic fields into sharper historical relief, 2) to build international collaborations that refigure what have been taken to be the “centers” and “peripheries” in media studies, 3) to find ways to resist the growing hegemony of English in the global knowledge system, and 4) to support an open and nonprofit publishing infrastructure. We propose that a historiography informed by constitutive and contingent understandings of exclusion represents an important way forward for the history of media studies.


Writing onto the Clouds: John Durham Peters and Inscription Media

March 2022

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1 Read

This short essay suggests that John Durham Peters’ Speaking into the Air (1999) re-capitulates its arguments through form. In its written medium, with its hermeneutic mode, and by its promiscuous prose, the book exemplifies its own moral case for dissemination over (in Peters’ chilling phrase) ‘interpersonal mimesis’. The essay positions the book’s first chapter, on Jesus and Socrates, as an unannounced nesting, in which Peters uses the parable mode to endorse a parable about the virtue of parables. Another facet of the book’s formal re-enactment of its argument surfaces in Peters’ method of discrete and serialized exegesis of old texts. Speaking into the Air is, in its way, a celebration of temporary breakdown, of the otherness of the other, of slippage and ellipses. Thus, it is fitting that the bulk of the book’s page-time is given over to dialogue at a distance, suspended dialogue, dialogue with the dead. There is, finally, the book’s polymathic weirdness—aphoristic, punning, etymological exuberance. Peters, on most pages, is overtopping the levees of meaning—a nod, I argue, to the book’s skepticism about the dream of easy lucidity.


Lazarsfeld's Legacy FORUM

January 2022

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54 Reads

David E Morrison

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Joseph Malherek

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Jefferson Pooley

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[...]

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Ralph E. Schmidt

The special 'Lazarsfeld's Legacy' FORUM of the International Journal of Communication celebrates legacy of the American Sociologist Austrian Origin Paul F. Lazarsfeld, who influenced the shape and methodology of Sociology in the Post-War Years in the U.S. and in Europe.



Citations (25)


... An example is the German Kriegseinsatz der Geisteswissenschaften, meant to provide a scholarly justification for the Nazis' new order in Europe. In the United States, research by social scientists on the engineering of public opinion, on stress resistance among American soldiers, and on psychological warfare had long-lasting effects on the sciences involved (Pooley, 2023). As in the previous world war, research on man-machine interactions coupled social scientists with engineers (Schweber, 2002). ...

Reference:

Trans-, Inter-, and Monodisciplinarity: Some Historical Considerations
The Plasticity of Social Knowledge: Paul F. Lazarsfeld and U.S. Communication Research, 1937–1952

Journal for the History of Knowledge

... To avoid the risk of exclusion, each canon must always be put forward as a fundamentally flexible informative product (Westphal, 1993), and we must approach canons in the understanding that they are artifacts which allow the critical reinterpretation and inclusion of potentially complementary canons (Alatas y Sinha, 2017). The complementary canon Alatas and Sinha wrote about has been articulated here with a focus on the scientific output by women researchers, who have been traditionally excluded from the men's narrative involving the great names, the great models and/or the figures of the founding fathers (Dorsten, 2012;García-Jiménez and Simonson, 2021;García-Jiménez, 2021;Simonson, Park and Pooley, 2022;Vera Balanza, 2012). We have called this complementary canon the "anti-canon" because of the authors' gender -women, as opposed to men. ...

Exclusions/Exclusiones: The Role for History in the Field’s Reckoning

... Efforts are increasingly underway to denounce and counteract these exclusionary processes (Freelon et al., 2023;Salvador-Mata et al., 2023). Initiatives aim not only to raise awareness of these processes but also to bring visibility to excluded voices and place on the academic agenda those "other narratives" that offer renewed perspectives on the field (Simonson et al., 2022). Noteworthy among these endeavors is the publication by Oliveira Paulino et al. (2020), which engages Latin American researchers affiliated with AlAIc in a dialogue with their European counterparts from ecreA (European Communication Research Association). ...

Exclusiones/Exclusions: El papel de la historia en saldar la deuda histórica del campo

... Los empiristas abstractos, de acuerdo con Mills son incapaces de ir más allá de sus microscópicos hallazgos para generar una perspectiva más global. 5 A pesar de que se señala a Lazarsfeld como positivista, desde los primeros estudios que hizo en Viena a los estudios que realizó en el final de su carrera, en Columbia, utilizaba métodos cuantitativos y cualitativos e hizo trabajos de reflexión metodológica acerca de las metodologías cualitativas (Pooley y Jeřábek, 2022 Gratificaciones se considera que la audiencia es activa y que los individuos utilizan la comunicación de masas para conectarse (o, en algunos casos, desconectarse) a través de relaciones instrumentales, afectivas o integradoras con la familia, los amigos, la nación, etc. El modelo propuesto desde la Teoría de usos y gratificaciones intenta abarcar toda la gama de gratificaciones individuales incluidas en la necesidad de "estar conectado" y encuentra regularidades empíricas en la preferencia por determinados medios para diferentes tipos de conexiones, atendiendo a las condiciones sociales e individuales (Katz, Blumler & Gurevitch, 1974). ...

Lazarsfeld's Legacy - Introduction

International Journal of Communication

... Lowenthal (1944) looked at the "mass idols" constructed and served for consumption through popular magazine biographies. Duffy and Pooley's (2019) "idols of promotion" are overwhelmingly situated in the sphere of entertainment (film, television, music), following the trend detected by Lowenthal in the 1940s. However, success in the 21st century is owed to promotional skills and self-branding, articulated through three key tropes: "(a) a promise of meritocracy; (b) a spirit of cross-platform self-enterprise; and (c) an incitement to express oneself authentically" (Duffy & Pooley, 2019, p. 28). ...

Idols of Promotion: The Triumph of Self-Branding in an Age of Precarity

... An example of problems inherent in generalisations was evident in the early twentieth century when the emerging phenomena of people's engagement with the mass media became an area of scholarly interest. At this time, particularly in Western countries, the 'effects tradition' began formation as sociologists and other researchers turned their attention to the mass media's effect on audiences, which resulted in the widespread notion of audiences as a homogeneous mass whose engagement with the media was direct, uniform and uncontested (Park & Pooley, 2008;Pooley, 2021). Thinkers such as Raymond Bauer, Joseph Klapper, Russell Neuman and Lauren Guggenheim made important contributions towards this understanding. ...

Suggestion Theory Across the Disciplines: The History of Communication Research Before Communication Research
  • Citing Article
  • June 2021

Journalism & Communication Monographs

... At the time of his 1922 book, "social problems" were central to an activist sociology defended by Charles Ellwood in his text Sociology and Modern Social Problems (1910). As Philippe Fontaine and Jefferson Pooley note in a recent edited volume about US social scientists' engagement with social problems, "American sociology was, in organizational terms at least, built on the idea of 'social problems'" (Fontaine & Pooley, 2020;p. 3). ...

Introduction: Whose Social Problems?

... The history of PBT intersects with other major storylines in the history of the recent human sciences that have explored how racism (e.g., Geary, 2015), classism (e.g., O'Connor, 2009, sexism (e.g., Schmidt, 2020;Vicedo, 2013), political ideology (e.g., Cohen-Cole, 2014), and shifting disciplinary politics (Fontaine & Pooley, 2020) have played into the coproduction of social scientific knowledge in the United States. By telling a critical history of PBT, I hope to contribute to a growing literature (e.g., Arvin, 2019;Burch, 2021;Waldram, 2004) that is analyzing how settler colonialism, too, has played-and continues to play-a role in the coproduction of behavioral scientific knowledge in contexts like the United States. ...

Society on the Edge: Social Science and Public Policy in the Postwar United States

... Regarding the realm of influencer-fan relationships, prior research indicates that influencers can enhance their perceived attractiveness through practices such as selfbranding, content sharing, and opinion exchange with followers (Duffy and Pooley, 2019). Additionally, the process of value transfer suggests that influencers can leverage their appeal to create a perception of value in the products or services they endorse (von Mettenheim and Wiedmann, 2021), including fostering emotional connections with these offerings (Gong and Li, 2017). ...

Idols of Promotion: The Triumph of Self-Branding in an Age of Precarity
  • Citing Article
  • January 2019

Journal of Communication

... 2 RELATED WORK 2.1 Microcelebrities and Self-representation Studying celebrities, Internet celebrities, and microcelebrities has been an important research agenda for internet research and related disciplines [2,110,113]. In the internet research and social media literature, they have been described as "influencers" or "stars"-people who motivate and inspire others on a mass scale [2,38,66]. Microcelebrities, in particular, have been gaining more recognition lately because unlike traditional celebrities, they construct their public persona as a commodity or a product that increases the likelihood of their persona to be consumed by others. Their opinions and beliefs-and the ways in which they express those-are their main capital whereas the traditional celebrities have other consumable attributes. ...

Idols of Promotion: The Triumph of Self-Branding in the Social Media Age