Creating Publics: Journalism in Comparative Perspective

This summer term, I am teaching a seminar on Creating Publics: Journalism in Comparative Perspective. The basic aim is to critically evaluate the historical, technological and cultural connections between journalism and concepts of publics. Instead of perpetuating the close alignment of journalism, publics and democracy, the focus in this seminar will be on a contextualized reflection of concepts of publics, the role and practices of journalists, their audiences and media of communication. We are interested in the changing conditions that continuously uphold journalism as a social structure of public communication. Follow the course via #createpublics or check the assigned texts. And yes, structural transformations of the public sphere will be addressed. In English.

Block 1: Critical Concepts, Histories and Theories of Publics

27 April Prehistory of the Bourgeois Public Sphere

Habermas, Jürgen (1991). The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence, Trans.). Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Download: http://pages.uoregon.edu/koopman/courses_readings/phil123-net/publicness/habermas_structural_trans_pub_sphere.pdf Chapters 1-4 (p. 1-31).

4 May The Ideal of the Public Sphere and Public Opinion

Habermas, Jürgen (1991). Chapter 5 (p. 31-43) and Chapter 12 (p. 89-102).
Optional: Scannell, Paddy. (2007). “Communication and Publicness. Habermas. Germany (USA/uk), 1950s–1990s.” Media and Communication, 233-259. London: Sage. http://media-ucn.co.uk/Seminar%20Readings/Soc%203016/Scannell%20on%20Habermas.pdf

11 May Critique of the Public Sphere, Mass Media and Pluralization

Habermas, Jürgen (1991). Chapter 20 (p. 181-195)
Keane, John (1995). “Structural Transformations of the Public Sphere.” The Communication Review 1: 1-22. https://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10714429509388247

18 May The Reading Audience of News

Leonard, Thomas C. (1995). News for All: Americaʼs Coming-of-Age with the Press. Oxford University Press. Part One The Creation of an Audience. p. 3-46

25 May The Networked Public

Dijck, José van (2012). “Facebook as a Tool for Producing Sociality and Connectivity.” Television & New Media 13(2): 160-176. https://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1527476411415291

1 June The End of Journalistic Hegemony?

Nerone, John (2015). “Journalism’s Crisis of Hegemony.” Javnost – The Public 22(4): 313-327. https://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13183222.2015.1091614

8 June no session

Block 2: Publics and their Media

15 June News and the Newspaper

Schudson, Michael (2013). “Fourteen Or Fifteen Generations: News as a Cultural Form and Journalism as a Historical Formation.” American Journalism 30(1): 29-35. https://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08821127.2013.767695
Schudson, Michael (1991). “Preparing the Minds of the People: Three Hundred Years of the American Newspaper.” American Antiquarian Society, Proceedings 100: 421-443. http://www.americanantiquarian.org/proceedings/44517753.pdf

22 June Satellite Publics

Carey, James W. (1980). “Changing Communications Technology and the Nature of the Audience.” Journal of Advertising 9(2): 3-9, 43.
Arceneaux, Noah (2013). “News on the Air: The New York Herald, Newspapers, and Wireless Telegraphy, 1899–1917.” American Journalism 30(2): 160-181. https://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08821127.2013.788439

29 June Journalism and the Network

Dahlgren, Peter (1996). “Media Logic in Cyberspace: Repositioning Journalism and Its Publics.” Javnost – The Public 3(3): 59-72. https://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13183222.1996.11008632
boyd, danah. (2011). “Social Network Sites as Networked Publics: Affordances, Dynamics, and Implications.” A Networked Self: Identity, Community and Culture on Social Network Sites, edited by Zizi Papacharissi, 39-58. New York: Routledge

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