Contesting the Past: Graduate Student Workshop

How do societies remember their past, and how do those memories shape the present? This workshop brings together two graduate researchers whose work interrogates struggles over memory, media, and history in democratic and journalistic contexts.

Hybrid event — if you would like to join us virtually, you will receive a link after registration. Full papers will also be send after registering.
______

Paper Descriptions:

Adam Koehler Brown explores how political actors have struggled over the memory of the January 6th, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol. His research forwards a novel theoretical account of memory in democratic societies, born out of four distinct modes of highly partisan January 6th memory with distinct degrees of mediation, style, and form.

Though advertisements for enslaved people have been studied across the field of American history, journalism studies has barely acknowledged the relationship between the nexus of early newspapers, advertising profit models, and the slave trade. Through an empirical content analysis of advertisements in newspapers published from 1704 to 1729 and a critical discourse analysis of the same time period, this analysis by Anjali Dassarma offers a revisitation and re-working of how we understand the origins of advertising in the field of journalism.

______

Speaker bios:

Adam Koehler Brown is a PhD Candidate in Sociology at the New School for Social Research. He works on politics, culture, and theory, with a specific focus on cultural dimension of American politics in the January 6th, 2021 case. He has previously held fellowships with the Institute for Critical Social Inquiry and the Transregional Center for Democratic Studies. Brown also teaches at CUNY-Hunter College.

Anjali Dassarma is a PhD candidate at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication. Her work examines both the cultural studies and political economy of journalism, centering journalists as actors in the production of knowledge, norms, and history and as well as structures of media power, capitalism, and hegemony.Her research is focused on journalism histories for the sake of critical and radical journalism futures, with a strong focus on media reparations and decolonial/anti-colonial movements.