newsletter spring 2002

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When Sylvia Manning spoke in early March at the “Women in Higher Education” luncheon, she had her large audience in stitches with a series of prefatory observations about “PowerPoint and the demise of public speaking.” Manning’s presentation, which was accompanied by only a handful of projected images, reminded all of us that a powerful public performance, fueled by improvisatory energy and witty interaction with an audience, doesn’t require (and is in fact often hampered by) the formulaic bullet-point slides to which we’ve all become so accustomed. They force a speaker to stick to a script.

Later that same afternoon, I attended a lecture on multimedia literacy by Steve Anderson that was accompanied by a fluid, imaginative, beautifully rendered program of still images, avant-garde video clips, music, portions of news broadcasts, and digital art. Talking afterwards to Stephanie Barish, Director of the Annenberg Center’s Multimedia Literacy Program (which sponsored the lecture), I was astonished to learn that Anderson’s presentation had been mounted, of all things, in PowerPoint. Barish was unsurprised by my surprise, noting how much time all of us spend living in the “land of the default setting.” She explained, however, that once the PowerPoint templates are deleted, “you can do whatever you want [with the program]. It doesn’t even have to be linear.”

Launched in 1998, the Multimedia Literacy Program provides training, technical and t.a. support, and a new form of scholarly community for faculty who want to incorporate a whole range of literacies (visual, aural, digital, as well as print) into their field-based courses. Barish–along with MLP’s staff, teaching assistants, post-doctoral fellows, and faculty fellows–is centrally concerned with shifting MLP-affiliated faculty away from our own intellectual version of the “default setting,” which for many of us has tended to be print-bound, linear, and only occasionally interactive. In the process she has incubated an innovative style of field-based pedagogy that during the last five years has extended its influence across departments and schools at USC and beyond, into partnerships with other universities and with local high schools. Like Manning, Barish has little patience for some of the key conventions that have arisen over the last decade around the use of technology in the classroom–exemplified by those ubiquitous bullet-point slide shows. MLP’s materials stress again and again that their program is not driven by technology, but by an integration of various media into a challenging new interpretive matrix.

A strong and early presence in MLP has been USC’s Gender Studies faculty, both core and extended. Barish herself has been connected to Gender Studies at USC for some time; she completed dual M.A.’s (one in film production; one in the social sciences) at USC, and during that time she was a teaching assistant in courses in the SWMS program, working with faculty like Michael Messner, Amy Richlin, and Barrie Thorne. Her own Gender Studies background notwithstanding, Barish credits the strong presence of Gender Studies in MLP to the GS faculty’s own initiative; “We’re concerned with flipping over and changing perspectives,” she commented, “and we attract people like that and people from disciplines like that.”

GS core faculty member Elinor Accampo (History) and former GS Chair Judith Grant (Political Science) were among the first faculty associated with the Multimedia Literacy Program during the late 1990s, both by way of Thematic Option. Accampo’s course dealt with issues of human rights across an array of historical contexts from the French Revolution to the present, and Accampo notes that the multimedia focus of the course enabled her and her students to focus, for example, on the use of visual imagery and its political meanings during the French Revolution; “what is done with gender is fascinating in that context,” she points out. Grant, for her part, notes that three years after her involvement with the program she still uses a mix of media in all of her courses: film clips, audiotapes, websites, and so on, as well as using e-mail and listserves extensively as pedagogical tools. Barrie Thorne, who by the time of MLP’s inception had already moved to UC Berkeley, worked with MLP in its early phases and established a partner program in Women’s Studies at Berkeley (MLP staff made site visits to Berkeley, and a UC faculty member attended MLP’s summer institute). A number of other core or affiliated GS faculty–including Sheila Briggs and Mark Kann–have also been involved with MLP over the years.

I asked Barish to comment further about why the Multimedia Literacy Program had proven so appealing to faculty who work in interdisciplinary fields like GS and American Studies and Ethnicity (whose presence in MLP is also very strong). Barish noted that faculty from free-standing departments (e.g. Slavic, Religion, and English) have also participated energetically in MLP; she speculated, however, that faculty from the GS and AMST programs find MLP congenial because they are well-accustomed to working across departments and disciplinary traditions, and as such are also inclined towards “think[ing] against the grain in certain ways.”

She compared MLP’s approach with some of the basic premises of the early years of Women’s Studies programs in the U.S. academy. Barish reminded me how we were constantly admonished in those days against the use of a simple “add-on approach”–for example, tacking a woman writer on at the end of a traditional syllabus without making any other alterations. Instead, we were trained to devise a mix of intellectual elements in which all were transformed as a result of the revisionary focus on gender. Similarly, MLP doesn’t simply add a technological component to existing courses, but encourages its faculty to refocus the premises of their home disciplines through the lens of an idea of “literacy” that includes print-based as well as visual, audio, and mixed media in linear and in non-linear formats, and that involves both interpretation and production of work in emerging media. A final attraction of the program, for faculty who are inexperienced with new media, is that Barish works hard to provide a “nurturing environment for learning about technology,” complete with strong, ongoing support that includes workshops, lectures, a library, and the aforementioned summer institute.

Several faculty members will be teaching new courses during 2002-03 that include a strong gender studies component. These include Judith Jackson Fossett, whose “African-American Popular Culture” course (AMST 285) will be dealing centrally with questions of embodiment, in a course that, as Fossett puts it, “attempts to account for the traffic in black forms (bodily, discursive, etc.) in the New World.” During the semester, Fossett plans to look closely at the example of the Hottentot Venus, and to consider more broadly the “visual and textual discourse on the black female body from the colonial era to hip hop culture.” Lisa Bitel’s upcoming course (History 270) is titled “From Goddesses to Witches in Premodern Europe.” Bitel, editor of the web-based “Matrix” project (which deals with communities of religious women between 400 and 1600), will be working with her students to create an electronic archive of images and texts; she notes that her attraction to the program is “all about feminist collective research and building a tradition of collective women's history at USC.” She remarks that the particular emphases of MLP are useful to her because “students find the ancient past of women to be one of the most difficult and exotic areas of feminism to understand. They can handle suffrage, the Second Wave, Roe v. Wade, even multiculturalism, but not the urgent relevance or inherent importance of the very distant past. Multimedia techniques help them to absorb, analyze, and (re)create our past via methods outside the traditional, patriarchal approaches to History (capital H).”

In a number of cases, GS affiliates have taught courses through MLP that are not centrally focused on gender; thus GS core faculty member Tara McPherson, who has taught an undergraduate MLP course on “Technology and the Body” that included “quite a bit of gender studies content,” also taught a grad-level film theory course that “had less overt gender studies ‘content’” although it “reflect[ed] [her] feminism in the day to day.” McPherson, however, went on to point up broader areas of overlap between her own philosophical and practical orientations and those of the program: “. . .because I’m interested in links between theory and praxis at multiple levels across my work (in media production, in anti-racist activism), I’ve found teaching in the MLP especially productive and rewarding. The program allows students (and faculty) an excellent opportunity to navigate that seeming divide.”

I’ve noted many times this year that one of my key concerns during my time at CFR is to draw attention to projects that create opportunities for dialogue among feminist scholars at USC, as well as between feminist scholarship and contiguous bodies of emerging knowledge. Barish and her program provide one of the best examples I know of at USC of this kind of collaborative work.

--Alice Gambrell

director's letter