Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: The central chapter of Herbert Marcuse’s relatively well-known 1941 work, Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory, presents what is actually an abbreviated version of a more through investigation of the social relevance of Hegel’s absolute idea Marcuse first developed in Hegel’s Ontology and the Theory of Historicity, published a decade earlier (1932). In addition, Marcuse’s initial, more comprehensive interpretation blunts the critical points he makes against the social relevance of Hegel’s absolute idea in the later work.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper argues that in its relative inattention paid to Herbert Marcuse’s work media and communication theory has overlooked a key conceptual resource in the study of contemporary mass communication and consumption, as central themes of Marcuse’s work - the relationship between self, nature and society in Eros and Civilisation (1956) and the absence of the possibility of qualitative change in industrial societies in One-Dimensional Man (1964) - provide fundamental insights into the self and its symbolic context in a modern, mass-mediated world and thus constitute an important framework for the study of contemporary media audiences. The paper therefore suggests that Marcuse remains a key point of reference as we move from documenting forms of mass communication to evaluating their purpose and social and cultural consequences, linking the micro frames of (qualitative) audience research with the macro concerns of social and cultural theory.

Publication Type: Individual Paper
Abstract: Both DuBois and Garvey saw an opportunity to shape the future of Africa In the aftermath of WWI.
Through his involvement in the Pan African movement DuBois advocated a gradual development of African territories guided by African Americans and Africans in the Caribbean which would lead to the
integration of Africa into the mainstream of global economic and political activity. Garvey on the other hand, based on his Nationalist sentiments, advocated emancipation of territory in Africa to be developed by Black people in the Caribbean and the US without European interference or cooperation. While the positions of both men appear to be at odds, they are actually closer to agreement on a number of key points and issues.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: The current understandings of the global culture industry and specifically the role of technology in the global culture industry have been extensively influenced by the early works of the Frankfurt school. However, this area has not been significantly engaged by feminist theorists or even by the technoscience area of feminist theory. A feminist engagement of the theorizing of technology as it relates to the global culture industry is over due. Marcuse’s paper “Some social implications of modern Technology” (Marcuse, 2002) and Habermas’s paper “Technology and Science as Ideology” (Habermas, 1970) are examined for their theoretical treatements of technology. The perspectives on technology in these ‘classical’ texts are then compared and contrasted with the perspective of leading feminist technoscience theorist Donna Haraway using her paper “A Cyborg manifesto: Science, technology, and socialist-feminism in the late twentieth century” (Haraway, 1991). Her paper is used to provide both critique and to suggest possible ways that a blended theoretical position might move us forward in our understandings of technology and our understandings of technology as it relates to the global culture industry.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: On May 15, 2003, Marcus Dixon, an 18-year-old African American from Rome, Georgia, was sentenced to 10 years in prison for allegedly raping a white 15-year-old girl. After 14 months in prison and a substantial amount of national media attention, the more serious felony charge was dropped and Dixon was released. I use newspaper coverage of the Dixon trial as a case study for my argument that the concept of “discursive gridlock” (Tucker, 1997) is a useful analytic tool for understanding how mass media can continue to talk about racism in fundamentally regressive ways. That is, by generating a gridlock between two binary positions, mass media are able to set the terms of debates about racial issues to exclude radical critiques and to avoid addressing more than one form of oppression or social inequality at once. Specifically, I analyze two ways that discursive gridlock operates in newspaper articles about the Dixon trial: (a) how the tensions between race and gender push issues of youth sexuality and agency to the margins and (b) how arguments pitting the trope of old South racism against the fantasy of a US post-civil rights colorblindness obscures structural racisms. To illustrate the extent of the rhetorical traffic jam, I argue that the discourses about the Dixon trial in three newspapers for different audiences—one local mainstream, one national mainstream, and one regional African American—each take up a limited range of binary positions on particular debates, thereby excluding all other issues.