Sarah Martinez
Professor John Caldwell joined the Communication Department at UCSD on January first of this year. Before joining the Department he was Professor of Film and Electronic Arts at CSU Long Beach for seven years and a visiting professor at UCLA in the Film and Television Department four years. Caldwell took his M.F.A. in Video and Photography at California Institute of Arts and his Ph.D. in Film and Television: History, Theory and Criticism at Northwestern. He has been involved in production since 1978. Caldwell began as an experimental media maker, gradually merging this direction with documentary. His work includes studies of Miskito refugees from Nicaragua (1983), the Managalase of Papua New Guinea (1985), and hippie exiles in Nepal and India (1989). He is currently working on a documentary about cultural conflict and the working homeless in Southern California which he hopes to finish this spring. He has published a number of articles as well as a book entitled Televisuality (Rutgers, 1995) which is an historical and critical study of television since 1980, and an analysis of how changes in industry practice challenge academic theories of television and mass media.
ComNotes: John, tell me a little bit about what brought you to the UCSD Communication Department.
Caldwell The job description at UCSD was in the Practice and Theory of Production which is a fairly unusual combination. The field is usually split between producers on the one hand and theorists on the other, and unfortunately there is little contact between those two subcultures. I somehow have managed to work both sides of the fence and find it a useful experience to use one discipline to interrogate the other. I think that is what I was after in my book, Televisuality, an attempt to use this knowledge of the production world and film and television as a means to reconsider theory. So it was a unique position--I felt like it was made for me--a custom job description.
ComNotes: How exactly do you see the field of "production and theory of production?"
Caldwell Geertz's notion of "local knowledge" has been particularly valuable as I reconsider film/TV production. My approach is not just about the theoretical analysis of media, it's about examining how the industries theorize about themselves. I think in the past there was a trap that a lot of academics fell into when they assumed that intellectual capital resided at the university as a unique property that allowed them to reconstruct and explain popular culture. In fact the industry is filled with people with advanced degrees: they write, research, and respond to popular cultural trends just like academics. Of course, there are widely varying ideological commitments, and that's what makes analysis so interesting. Part of what I am trying to do is to understand the critical, theoretical, and cultural commitments of the technical culture.
ComNotes: Which project do you feel was the most influential in helping you to find your "niche" in the Communication World?
Caldwell Interesting. I don't know if I have a niche...and if I do I am still searching for it. I think my interests are tremendously varied. It may be wiser to pursue a sort of linear development in one's work, but I like to operate in different camps at the same time. Whatever I do, and whatever project I approach, I try to use the experience as a basis for reconsidering media studies and culture. For example, I worked as a feature assistant cinematographer, which may sound like a pretty moronic position. In fact I learned a tremendous amount about operating and maintaining motion picture equipment, knowledge that I have since used in theorization's about television. You begin to understand images in a different way once you are forced to think in terms of exposure theory and optics. It may sound like a non-intellectual environment, but cinematography is something that is quite interesting and provocative, and I think that the people who do it for a lifetime have a cache of knowledge and expertise on culture as well. I see all these things working together in some weird sort of way that I am not quite always quite sure of at the moment.
ComNotes: In light of what you have just said, what do you see yourself doing, let's say, ten years from now? (Silence as he ponders)
Caldwell I do have plans, and projects in the works...but you know, in production work the logistical obstacles are so great that it is difficult to publicly speculate about the long term. I know however, what I need to do in the next month, or the next six months--to get a project shot, filmed, recorded and edited--and hopefully that process will lead to other things as well. It always has in the past.
ComNotes: For example?
Caldwell Well, for example, I have had my obligatory experience as documentary film maker analyzing cultures other than my own, but have since turned closer to home. There are, for instance, interesting things going on in media-defined communities of Hollywood that can be looked at socially and critically, especially group professional rituals. Technical and trade conventions are but one example of celebrated community events that help define fields and new technologies for people involved in video or television production or cable programming. There has been a lot of research and interest in recent years in Victor Turner's notion of "liminality." The way certain cultures, both indigenous and mass, use special events to create cultural identities and address social issues. And I think some of these industrial groups do the same thing: there is a tremendous spectacle thrown by the National Association of Broadcasters each year in Las Vegas which is a kind of multi-media post modern extravaganza, image and sound wise. Things happen there interpersonally and interprofessionally that change the way television is conceived and made. I plan in one of my next major projects to do a more thorough cultural analysis of this ritualistic process; to examine the staged ceremonies through which production groups define themselves and codify their technical practice.
ComNotes: Tell me about the production you are working on right now.
Caldwell A lot of people are fixated on the concept of "border culture," and on issues of illegal immigration. My project in the campo--"Rancho California, por favor"--finds something very different going on than inside-outside boundary marking. RC deals with the systematic and pervasive ways that immigrant labor is incorporated and cultivated inside of California culture. The human husbandry that I see seems to follow more closely historic codes of plantation culture and livestock management. Cultural and racial hierarchies are maintained by a taxonomy of housing, by names given to the landscape, and by the ways that cities culturally conceive of themselves in both promotion and zoning. I am, I guess, trying to come to grips with the rural landscape of Southern California. People think of it as suburban or urban, but in fact San Diego county is an agricultural region. I actually have a background in agriculture--I grew up in a rural area--and I think that the campo is something I have always been curious about out on the periphery here. It is something I want to understand better. The whole issue of "us and them," "inside and outside" is a tremendous issue in ethnographic film making as well, but in some strange way in the cross-cultural mix of California, I am also connected to this hybrid rural-suburban culture. I want to understand my role in it, and the kind of stakes that are involved in the status quo. RC looks at how this system is maintained through visual representations, through landscape, through the ways that subdivisions are named and walled, and through narratives about the land that circulate in film and television.
ComNotes: What do you think you, John Caldwell will add to the Communication Department here at UCSD?
Caldwell Well, I'll tell you this, I have learned a lot from every single member of the department I have been in contact with. There is a great opportunity here to read, discuss, and interact with the work of my colleagues. Hopefully I can make a contribution. For example, people tend to make a dichotomy between theorization and cultural analysis on the one hand, and professionalism or vocationalism on the other. I think that we might benefit by considering instead the complexity of the "lower" worlds on the intellectual food-chain; those typically written off as professional or vocational. Hopefully part of my mission, my actual job description, is to make these areas speak to each other. This is important because popular culture and mass media are not static, are not inert, concrete phenomena that remain the same at all times and places. When we create general, universalizing theories about the media, we risk losing sight of specific historical changes that may occur incrementally or in surges. I intend to keep my sights on this process. Hopefully I can shed some critical light on the historical processes and cultural implications of film and television.
ComNotes: John, do you have anything else you would like to add?
Caldwell Everybody in academia seems to be doing media analysis. There is widespread interest in film and television, in representations of ethnicity, race, sexuality, and gender. While this broad-based approach brings a lot of important insights to the field, it also highlights problems: when Ph.D.s in cinema theory presume to do ethnographies of audience without understanding the sociological tradition; or when historians presume to do film analysis without understanding the complicated issues and histories of narratology, semiotics, and film theory. My own attitude is that the media studies land-rush is great. The field can use opening up, and our culture certainly demands it. In this context, the Communication department at UCSD seems to be an ideal place to pursue media research for it is, by design, inter-disciplinary. It seems far better to explore new directions in media study in a multi-disciplinary environment where there are, in fact, both methodological checks and balances and the potential for feedback on a wide range of theoretical issues. Our program here makes available a tremendous wealth of perspectives for the study of communication: historical, sociological, political, developmental, and psychological. The challenge of electronic culture certainly merits rigorous analysis informed by the intersections of these disciplines. I think the department is ideally configured for this challenge.
Christian Reid
Prior to its full-fledged departmental status, the Communication Department at UCSD began as small program at what was then Third college. The Program, open to students from every college, worked as a joint major between communication and visual arts and featured an interdisciplinary curriculum that drew from the theoretical teachings in the social sciences, humanities, and arts. To provide a healthy balance between theory and practice, courses in the visual arts featured opportunities to discover the world of film and video while allowing students to apply their theoretical knowledge.
Such a healthy balance between theory and production resulted in growing interest among the students, and what started with only 14 majors, blossomed into a growing field of students eager to study the expanding world of communication. But as student numbers increased, faculty remained the same. In 1980, faced with nearly 500 students and only eight permanent and five temporary faculty, most of whom were appointed in other departments,, the demands on both students and faculty became intolerable. As a result, there was talk of reducing the number of students by requiring grade-level pre-requisites.
But there were many who rejected the idea of limited enrollment, fearing that they would lose quality students to other universities offering similar courses. The solution was to move toward departmental status. By doing so, the program would be able to hire qualified permanent faculty to answer the demands of the growing student needs and create a revised lower-division curriculum that utilized, to the fullest extent possible, the teaching resources of other social science and humanities departments.
The transformation of the program evoked opposition from many who believed that Communication adhered to "flabby intellectual" standards and gaining departmental status would merely "institutionalize mediocrity." Among the many people defending the program at the time was professor Michael Cole who came to the university in 1978 and served as faculty coordinator. I had the opportunity to speak to him recently and ask him a few questions about these early stages of the department and a little bit about where it's heading.
ComNotes: Tell me about the Communication department in the early years? It was a program, right?
Cole: Right, it was a program at the time. It's important to understand the distinction between a program and a department in the way the University of California works. At the time that I came here, in order to be hired into the university, you had to be hired into a department, and the department helped to support the program. That was the structural arrangement. So the money would come down to the sponsoring departments and the program had to depend upon the departments for their goodwill.
Now, when I came here I thought that basic idea of having a program was a good idea because communication is so interdisciplinary. I didn't mind the program status at all. But I didn't want a mediocre program; I wasn't interested in that. The question was how can you have an excellent program? My idea was that if we could get the departments to cooperate on people that they wanted, that we also wanted, then that would solve the problem. We had to prove that we could do that.
So in the first two years that I was here, I went around campus and I found out where former Communication positions had sort of gone off to. We had this strange situation over the years in which conflict had reduced the number of the faculty in Communication and the student numbers had mushroomed beyond belief. At that time the university was afraid of losing students because of money. So they were afraid if they closed the program, students would go to some other campus, and at the same time they didn't like what was going on. So they brought me in to see if I could kind of solve that problem.
ComNotes: Did you have a basic model in mind when deciding upon the course curriculum?
Cole: Yes. I certainly had something in mind. The basic idea was organized around the concept of mediation, a world view which you encounter in many parts of the world. I encountered it in Russia because they sent me there as an exchange student when I got my Ph.D. I would say that one figure who would be on the HIP (human information processing) side of the curriculum would be Vygotsky, a Russian theorist. A person on the culture side would be Bakhtin, who our department uses a lot. On the social force side of the curriculum it was a problem because Russians didn't serve as real good models. But there were Europeans and scholars in America who were trying to do something like a critical mediational view of communication and society.
When I first came into the program, it was divided into what was called micro and macro. I said that the problem was that I didn't believe in the difference between the two, and I have to be here, so we need a third part. And that was when we divided it into three parts, saying all the parts are needed in order to understand what communication is all about. So I was sort of looking at it saying, "what does communication feel like from a personal point of view?" Other people were really interested in reading various texts or analyzing films and other people were interested in the media industry in relation to political economy. So we figured that the three-perspective approach would be the minimal structure and we just hired around that structure, keeping in mind that production is an important part of the overall effort.
ComNotes: Can you tell me a little more about the role that production courses played in the curriculum?
Cole: Again, this same world view says that the thing about communication theories is that you need to test your theory by trying to communicate. If you have a theory you should be able to do something with it. And that is why a lot of people in our department are actually both academics in some way and work out in the larger world in another way- then try to link the two. My view of production from the beginning was that computer networking is a form, generally speaking, of production, and that newspapers and radio, as well as video, which is the icon of production, all make room for a variety of kinds of theory and practice -- what I call "implementations." The difficulty with production was that production crosses a line between social sciences and visual arts, and we've always had trouble whenever we've tried to combine social sciences with something else because others are likely to say, "oh, you're with the social sciences." But our department is organized to pull together the social sciences, humanities, and arts. That's always been part of the reason that we get resistance -- because we're breaking the categories of the university.
ComNotes: Was there resistance because the program "crossed the line" by combining the world of visual arts and production?
Cole: At one point Visual Arts and Communication, when it was a program, included a major that was a sort of a combination of the two. Part of the faculty who were in Communication were also in Visual Arts . When I came, Claudio Fenner-Lopez was such a person. What happened subsequently was that we became a department because we were quite successful at showing that we could hire faculty, but when you hired the faculty as a program, you only got half their time in the program. But there were tons of students. And at that rate we would have had to hire something like 40 people to cover the numbers legally.
So then the university administration kind of pressured us to become a department. A lot of people were very much in favor of becoming a department. I wasn't in favor of it because I was afraid if we became a department we would become our own encapsulated little world, and that what was really neat about Communication was trying to bring together these different perspectives. And I think that tension still exists in the department.
ComNotes: What have been some of the effects of moving to departmental status?
Cole: What was good earlier was that when we were small we spent a lot of time talking about each other's work and the curriculum. The bigger and more institutionalized we became, the less time we talked jointly about the curriculum, the work we're doing, and the more we divided into small pieces -- so people don't know each other as well.
The people in the department have been extremely successful academically in terms of their own academic careers. As a consequence, they are often away. Those things tend to water down the intensity of the discussion that you can have about, "what are we doing here as a department?" Right now the department is going through a period of self-examination because we've been able to hire people in production, our graduate program is under review, and there are things that could be better.
ComNotes: What do you recommend to the undergraduate student who wants to see changes in the department?
Cole: I think that if I were among the students I would try to identify faculty and types of courses that students would really find useful and to realize that the Wednesday Course Group meetings are open to undergraduates and graduates. It's just that once we got successful, Course Group became bureaucratized and the students stopped coming, and that's natural; it's just part of the process. For example, I think that Phil Agre is now teaching a senior seminar on public relations. He's not teaching the type of public relations course you would take at a city college, but I would say that it is genuinely useful to the students, and I would say that if Phil can do it as a senior seminar, why can't he do it at a lower level? Then the student should identify three or four topics and make it clear to the faculty that they want to talk and that they want courses in this area. So students can come in and lobby for change; they can go talk to the chair. But when you tell the chair what you want, you want that person to understand that you've looked at the system, thought about it, and that you can identify people currently on the faculty who might be able to teach such a course -- even though they might not be able to for practical reasons, but the practicality can be negotiated.
ComNotes: You said once that you think UCSD has the best Communication department in the nation. Do you still believe that?
Cole: Yes, I really mean that. When we began to do this we were oddballs on the block and now there are people all over imitating us. Now some of them emphasize more public opinion kinds of things, they have different sorts of emphases. But the idea of an interdisciplinary department is around, and our department is highly rated. People send us good students. It's been a gigantic success.
C. Chandelle Hopkins
Communication and Human Information Processing 175 will review the history of Distance Learning from correspondence courses to the World Wide Web. Students will experience distance learning programs and will develop systems of their own using communications technologies from video production to HTML programming.
-from the course description.
This quarter Professor Edouard Lagache is teaching a new course on Distance Education. The class is the first of its kind at UCSD and promises to be a valuable addition to the communications curriculum. Distance education has emerged as a current buzz topic due to the advances in communication technology that promise to change the possibilities and applications of the field considerably.
Comm/HIP 175 will address both the problems and the advantages of distance learning. Professor Lagache will begin with an overview of the development of the field, and then move on to a more hands-on approach. Students will work collaboratively on developing a distance learning site, and look closely into the process to see what works, and what does not. The class will focus primarily on the Internet version of distance learning, the area which Professor Lagache is currently studying. There is a web site ( http://communication.ucsd.edu/Distance.Learning/) that will follow the progress of the class, including outlines of the lectures.
Marc Camras published "Youth A.V.E.: A Program for Empowering Youth in Community Service Settings" in the Journal of Child and Youth Care Work , Vol 11, 1996.
Visiting Associate Professor Bob Hooper recently published two articles: "America's Retreat from the New Pacific" in the Los Angeles Times , on December 26, 1996 and "Teaching Film and Television in Developing Nations: A Malaysian Case Study." in the Journal of Film and Video 48.4/1996.
Hooper has also been invited to the Asia-Pacific Institute for Broadcasting Development in Kuala Lumpur Malaysia, for the month of July, to develop documentary television production and training for the staff of Radio Television Malaysia.
Robert Horwitz has two new publications: "Broadcast Reform Revisited: Reverend Everett C. Parker and the 'Standing' Case (Office of Communication of the United Church of Christ v. Federal Communications Commission" to be published jointly by the United Church of Christ and The Communication Review ; and Telecommunications Policy in the New South Africa: Participatory Politics and Sectoral Reform" will be published by Media, Culture and Society .. Horwitz paper, "Telecommunications Policy in the New South Africa" won a "top three paper" prize at the International Communications Association annual meetings in Montreal in May, 1997.
Dennis W. Mazzocco made panel presentations based upon his dissertation research at the 1996 ICA and AEJMC conferences in Chicago and Anaheim. His paper entitled, "Democracy, Power, and Equal Rights: The Battle to Unionize U.S. Broadcast Technicians, 1926-1940," was selected as a top-three AEJMC student paper and awarded the 1996 Edwin Emery Award for exceptional historical research in the History Division. An expanded version of Mazzocco's Ph.D. dissertation, Democracy, Power, and Equal Rights: The AFL vs. CIO Battle to Unionize U.S. Broadcast Technicians, 1926-1940 is forthcoming from the University of Illinois Press. Mazzocco also worked as a producer/director on NBC's gymnastics coverage of the 1996 Atlanta Olympics.
Chandra Mukerji's book, Territorial Ambitions and the Gardens at Versailles , is due to be available in August from Cambridge University Press. Becky Cohen, who made the photos for the project, has arranged for book signings during shows of the photographs which will be held in San Francisco and San Diego in the Fall.
Mukerji was also involved in a teleconference as part of a Sociology of Culture conference at UC Santa Barbara. The conference was designed to stimulate discussion of the value of cognitive science research for rethinking the sociology of culture.
Mujerji is also participating in a web-based discussion of the "object-turn" in science studies and the role of the material in structures of power. This discussion has been organized by David Brain at USF.
Vince Rafael was recently awarded a residential fellowship at the Humanities Research Institute at Univ. of California Irvine where he is participating in a research cluster called "Histories of the Future" for the winter and spring of 1997. Rafael was also awarded a month long residential fellowship at the Bellagio Study Center by the Rockfeller Foundation for the fall of 1997. Rafael's recent essay, entitled "'Your Grief is Our Gossip: Overseas Filipinos and Other Spectral Presences" appeared in the Winter 1997 issue of Public Culture .
Rafael also organized two conferences over the last year: the first, "Southeast Asian Diasporas" was co-sponsored by the Social Science Research Council (New York) and the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies (Singapore) and was held last December 1996 in Singapore; the second, "Crime and PUnishment: Criminalities in Southeast Asia" was co-sponsored again by the SSRC and the International Institute of Asian Studies (Leiden) and was held in March 1997 at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands.
Claire Ramsey has been working with a group of researchers in Mexico City who study deaf education, LSM (Mexican Sign Language) and deaf child-hearing parent relationships, Grupo Tésera. Her group has been awarded an international partnership grant (approximately $10,000 dollars US) from Gallaudet University's International Center on Deafness to set up a lab preschool for deaf children (about 3 to 6 years old) with a deaf teacher .
The school will provide:
1. an educational alternative for parents who want their deaf children to have abilingual start,
2. a school program rather than a traditional Mexican oral-aural rehabilitative program,
3. pilot testing of an alternative assessment procedure for deaf children's cognitive development (which is based on a Piagetian pre-school curriculum already used with hearing children in Mexico),
4. an employment and training opportunity for the deaf teacher, a 4th generation Deaf Mexican
5. LSM classes for hearing parents and family members that include lessons based upon videotapes of their own children signing with the deaf teacher,
6. research site for several of us who are studying LSM acquisition, the ways that deaf and hearing adults interact with deaf children in Mexico, deaf child - hearing parent "bonding" and more;
7. data on LSM as first language and as a medium of early instruction. This is part of a larger goal of contributing to more empircally-based policy decisions about deaf education in Mexico.
Mauro Porto , recently presented two papers: "New Political Strategies in Brazilian Television? Globo's 'Jornal Nacional'" in Comparative Perspective, XX International Congress of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA), Guadalajara, Mexico, April 17-19, 1997; and "Telenovelas and Politics in the 1994 Presidential Election" at the 47th Annual Conference of the International Communication Association (ICA), Montreal, Canada, May 23-27, 1997.
Doug Willliams will be presenting a paper on the "Communism is a Disease" metaphor in film at the Christine Saxton Memorial Film Studies Symposium at SF State. The theme of the symposium is "Foreign Bodies in Cinema" and it will run April 18-19, 1997.
In the past year, six more Ph.D.s have joined the ranks of Comm Department alumni. They are (along with the titles of their dissertations):
Enrique Bonus: Ethnicity and the Cultural Politics of Space in Southern California
Katherine Brown: Between Photography and Digital Imaging: The Acquisition and Transformation of Skill
Gregory Stephens: On Racial Frontiers: The Communicative Culture of Multiracial Audiences
Jennifer Troutner: Language, Culture, and Politics: English in China, 1840s-1990s
Dennis Mazzocco: Democracy, Power, and Equal Rights: The AFL vs. CIO Battle to Unionize U.S. Broadcast Technicians, 1926-1940
Doug Williams: The Eagle or the Cross: Rome, the Bible, and Cold War America
If you wish to contribute to the newsletter or have suggestions for us, please contact: Bruce Jones, Communication Dept., UCSD, La Jolla, CA 92093-0305 (bjones@ucsd.edu - 619/534-0417 - FAX 619/534-7315).
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