Andrew deWaard

Bio

Andrew deWaard researches the cultural industries, the political economy of media, financial capital, and media authorship. He is the author of Derivative Media: How Wall Street Devours Culture (UC Press, 2024; available open-access) and the co-author of The Cinema of Steven Soderbergh: indie sex, corporate lies, and digital videotape (Columbia University Press/Wallflower, 2013). Dr. deWaard is also the co-founder of The Cultural Capital Project, a SSHRC-funded research project that studies independent music in the streaming age, as well as the Media And Consolidation Research Organization (MACRO) Lab, which analyzes the effects of monopoly ownership on media.

Education

PhD - University of California, Los Angeles - Cinema and Media Studies (2017)

MA - Film Studies - University of British Columbia (2009)

BA - Film Studies and Media, Information, and Technoculture - University of Western Ontario (2005) 

Broadly defined, my research analyzes the relationship between culture and commerce, focusing on media systems, the social processes that shape them (capitalism, financialization, racialization, digitalization), and the roles of agents within them (institutions, corporations, workers, authors, and artists). My primary methodology for this work is the critical political economy of media tradition, though I am influenced by media studies, cultural studies, critical theory, heterodox economics, and the digital humanities. The media forms I concentrate on are film, television, and popular music, and I am motivated by questions such as: How do wealth, finance, ownership, and power affect our media industries and the cultural objects produced by them? How are social inequities shaped and perpetuated through media? How do artists and workers create within capitalist constraints? What policies and alternatives could be crafted to promote a more diverse, radical, thoughtful media system?

Major projects include:

1. Derivative Media: How Wall Street Devours Culture (UC Press, 2024) - Sequels, reboots, franchises, and songs that remake old songs—does it feel like everything new in popular culture is just derivative of something old? Contrary to popular belief, the reason is not audiences or marketing, but Wall Street. In this book, Andrew deWaard shows how the financial sector is dismantling the creative capacity of cultural industries by upwardly redistributing wealth, consolidating corporate media, harming creative labor, and restricting our collective media culture. Moreover, financialization is transforming the very character of our mediascapes for branded transactions. Our media are increasingly shaped by the profit-extraction techniques of hedge funds, asset managers, venture capitalists, private equity firms, and derivatives traders. Illustrated with examples drawn from popular culture, Derivative Media offers readers the critical financial literacy necessary to understand the destructive financialization of film, television, and popular music—and provides a plan to reverse this dire threat to culture.
   
2. CanCon and its Digital Discontents: A Public Infrastructure Model for Canadian Music - With an Insight Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Cultural Capital project is an interdisciplinary research program that criticizes the inequitable status quo of the corporate music industry and advocates for a digital music culture based on equality, sustainability, and fair pay for artists premised upon an open, democratic infrastructure. Our research group consists of Dr. Brian Fauteux (Assistant Professor of Popular Music and Media Studies, University of Alberta), Brianne Selman (Scholarly Communications and Copyright Librarian, University of Winnipeg), and myself.
   
3. Media And Consolidation Research Organization (MACRO) Lab - Formed in 2021 by Shawna Kidman and myself, the MACRO Lab is a scholarly community, research lab, and online resource about media ownership for instructors, students, journalists, regulators, and citizens. Increasingly, media production is consolidated, financialized, and homogenized. Two to four corporations dominate in each sector, limiting the diversity and democratic potential of our cultural production in news, film, television, music, and publishing. This project addresses an important gap in information and analysis: there is no easy-to-use, up-to-date, public-facing resource that explains this state of affairs. Privileging the analysis of diversity, history, power, and complexity, the MACRO Lab provides accessible data and critical materials about the democratic dangers of media consolidation for news reporting, teaching purposes, and the promotion of government regulation.
4. The Cinema of Steven Soderbergh: indie sex, corporate lies, and digital videotape (Columbia University Press/Wallflower, 2013) - The industry's only director-cinematographer-screenwriter-producer-actor-editor, Steven Soderbergh is contemporary Hollywood's most innovative and prolific filmmaker. A Palme d'or and Academy Award-winner, Soderbergh has directed nearly thirty films, including political provocations, digital experiments, esoteric documentaries, global blockbusters, and a series of atypical genre films. This volume considers its slippery subject from several perspectives, analyzing Soderbergh as an expressive auteur of art cinema and genre fare, as a politically-motivated guerrilla filmmaker, and as a Hollywood insider. Combining a detective's approach to investigating the truth with a criminal's alternative value system, Soderbergh's films tackle social justice in a corporate world, embodying dozens of cinematic trends and forms advanced in the past twenty-five years. His career demonstrates the richness of contemporary American cinema, and this study gives his complex oeuvre the in-depth analysis it deserves.
   

Books

Books

• Derivative Media: How Wall Street Devours Culture. UC Press, 2024.
•  The Cinema of Steven Soderbergh: indie sex, corporate lies and digital videotape. Co-authored with R. Colin Tait. New York: Columbia University Press/Wallflower Press, 2013.

Refereed Journal Articles

“Financialized Hollywood: Institutional Investment, Venture Capital, and Private Equity in the Film and Television Industry,” JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies 59.4 (2020).

“The Cultural Capital Project: Radical Monetization of the Music Industry.” Co-authored with Brian Fauteux and Ian Dahlman. IASPM@Journal 3.1 (2013).

“The Geography of Melodrama, The Melodrama of Geography: The ‘Hood Film’s Spatial Pathos.”  Cinephile 4.1 (2008).  58-65.

“The Global Social Problem Film.”  Cinephile 3.1 (2007).  12-18. [Full text pdf]

Chapters In Edited Collections

• “The Hood Is Where the Heart Is: Melodrama, Habitus, and the Hood Film.”  Habitus of the ’Hood.  Eds. Chris Richardson and Hans Skott-Myhre. Chicago, IL: Intellect Ltd, 2012. 253 – 270. 

  “Joints and Jams: Spike Lee as Sellebrity Auteur.” Fight the Power!: The Spike Lee Reader.  Eds. Janice D. Hamlet and Robin R. Means Coleman.  New York: Peter Lang, 2008. 345-361. “Intertextuality, Broken Mirrors, and The Good German.”  The Philosophy of Steven Soderbergh.  Eds. Steven M. Sanders and R. Barton Palmer.  Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2010.  107-119.

  Refereed Online Publications

  “ClipNotes in the Classroom: Film Annotation Software for Instruction and Collaboration.” Cinema Journal Teaching Dossier 3.3 (2016).

  Refereed Bibliographies

  “Steven Soderbergh.” Oxford Online Bibliographies. Oxford University Press. 2015.

  Selected Awards and Honors

  Collegium of University Teaching Fellowship, 2016

  Kemp R. Niver Award in Film History, 2015

  University of California Humanities Research Institute Research Fellowship, 2015

  Georgia Frontiere Scholarship In Memory Of The Humanitarian Efforts Of Aaron Curtis Taylor, 2014

  Otis Ferguson Memorial Award in Critical Writing, 2013

  Student Writing Award, Society for Cinema and Media Studies, 2012

  Jack K. Sauter Award, 2012

  Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Doctoral Fellowship, 2011

  UC Regents Special Fellowship, 2011

  Chancellor’s Prize, 2011

Graduate Courses

• COGR 200a: Communication as Social Force
  • Course Description: This course explores communication as a social force and the social forces that shape communication. The intertwined nature of race and capital is the primary social force that we analyze, with forays into technology and gender. Ultimately, we are interested in the structures of power and how they shape and are shaped by institutions and technologies of communication. Partly what distinguishes the social force area of the curriculum is scale and level of analysis. Studying communication as a social force means studying the role of media institutions, infrastructures, and policies in large-scale social processes: racialization, industrialization, commodification, digitalization, globalization, financialization, platformization, etc. This area of study as it has been practiced and developed in the Communication Department at UCSD has a long tradition of critical epistemology.

Undergraduate Courses

• COMM 100C: Communication, Institutions, and Power
  • Course Description: Communication media—from the printing press to the Internet—have played a fundamental role in the formation of modern society and culture. This course introduces students to the institutional dimensions of communication and media, and zooms out to analyze large-scale, structural elements. Specifically, we’ll examine how media and communication institutions work, how they organize power, and how they impact social life. We’ll also draw connections between the present moment and the history of media and communication to pinpoint what in our society has changed, and what remains the same. The course begins with ideas about media technology and capitalism, and then explores different institutional forces: workers, government, and business. Digital communication will be a focus of inquiry, as we ask questions about the role of workers/creators, free speech online, the regulation of social media, the impact of media consolidation on society, and the role of privacy in the era of artificial intelligence. Throughout, the course will consider the relationship between institutional structures and individual agents and make the case that structure is more powerful than agency.

• COMM 106t: Cultural Industries: TV, Culture & the Public – “How to Watch TV”
  • Course Description: This course examines American television with a focus on style and form, industry and politics, and issues of representation. In our first unit, we will learn how to analyze television programs from a formal perspective, considering visual, aural, and narrative properties, as well as notions of realism, liveness, and reflexivity. In our second unit, we will learn about the history and contemporary context of the television industry, considering issues of labor, political economy, advertising, neoliberalism, and politics. In our third unit, we will learn how to analyze television programs with a focus on issues of representation and identity, considering race, gender, sexuality, and class. Ultimately, we aim to improve our understanding of how the television industry operates, how television programs generate meaning, and how we can interpret television from various analytical frameworks.

• COMM 142: Film Authorship: Spike Lee & Kathryn Bigelow
  • Course Description: This course serves as an introduction to the concept of film authorship with a focus on Hollywood filmmaking in the last thirty years, as seen through two case studies: Spike Lee and Kathryn Bigelow. We begin with the tradition of “auteur theory” -- the idea that the director, not the screenwriter, is the true “artist” and “author” in filmmaking -- before moving to the broader contemporary conception of the filmmaker as a site of encounter for many elements: collaboration, identity, industry, intertext, reception, and context. Spike Lee is our first case study, and through the films Do the Right Thing, 4 Little Girls, Clockers, Inside Man, BlacKkKlansman, and Da 5 Bloods, we will analyze traditional authorial elements, such as a formal “signature,” as well as recurring themes and motifs. We will also consider how authorship intersects with issues of race, class, violence, and representation. Kathryn Bigelow will be our second case study, and Near Dark, Blue Steel, Point Break, The Hurt Locker, Zero Dark Thirty, and Detroit will allow us to consider issues of gender, genre, and authorial responsibility, in this case the depiction of war. 

• COMM 190: Streaming Media
  • Course Description: This course critically examines the ecosystem of streaming media, focusing on the seven key corporations that shape our experience of it: Netflix, Disney, Spotify, Apple, Google, Facebook, and Amazon. What changes when we "stream" media, rather than broadcast, exhibit, or own it? How do big corporations shape and control the infrastructure of streaming media? What opportunities and obstacles are there in streaming media for more diversity and equality? What is a "platform" and what is the broader historical and financial context for this development? What is a “feed,” how is it prone to misinformation, and how does our engagement and experience with media change in a streaming environment? What is the effect of streaming media on creatives, laborers, and producers of content? This seminar will aim to answer these questions and more, exploring the streaming media transition from the perspective of power and political economy. Each week we will analyze a major media company with regards to a social issue: Netflix and power, Disney and commodification, Spotify and labor, Apple and supply chains, Google and identity, Facebook and misinformation, and Amazon and surveillance.

• COMM 196A: Honors Seminar
  • Course Description: This seminar is designed to enable Communication students admitted to the Senior Honors Program to conceptualize, research, and ultimately write and/or produce a full-length Honors Thesis. Working in conjunction with a faculty advisor, each student will produce a substantial research essay (which may or may not incorporate a multimedia/web-based project) of no less than 40-50 pages exclusive of endnotes and bibliography. Along the way, Honors students will learn about how to ask research questions, how to think about different research methodologies, and how to use resources that will enable you to master a complex research agenda over a nine-month period. The assignments for this class include a work plan, a concept map, an annotated bibliography, a methods justification, and a research proposal.

• COMM 196B: Honors Seminar
  • Course Description: This seminar continues the research project conceptualized in COMM 196A by working on the following tasks: 1) Research/Data Collection, 2) Data Analysis, and 3) Writing and Revising. These are not separate activities but shifts in primary emphasis, as students continue to engage in data collection, analysis, and writing throughout the quarter. This integrated approach is characteristic of qualitative research in general, but it is especially true for Honors projects given the short time frame with which students have to complete the thesis. The assignments for this class include a work plan, and expanded annotated bibliography, a conceptual framework, a literature review, a data/evidence memo, a revised argument, an outline, a presentation, and a thesis rough draft.