Lecture series to explore issues in communication and journalism

Scholars in Oakland University’s Department of Communication and Journalism will offer expertise and insight during the department’s Fall Speaker Series, which runs from Friday, Sept. 14, through Friday, Nov. 9. The six campus talks will focus on an array of topics, from career management and feminism to social media and politics. All lectures are free and open to the public.

Friday, Sept. 14 

• The Discourses of Free Labor: Internships and the Ideology of Career Management
Dr. Tom Discenna, associate professor of communication, will examine the discourses of unpaid internships as an instantiation of the ideology of “career management” through which corporations have shifted responsibility for employment onto employees, thus ending the “social compact” and making way for increasingly precarious labor relations. 

• Theorizing the Role of Courage in Resistance: A Feminist Rhetorical Analysis of Aung San Suu Kyi’s “Freedom from Fear” speech.
Dr. Valerie Palmer-Mehta, associate professor of communication, will investigate how Burmese pro-democracy dissident, Aung San Suu Kyi, disentangles masculinity from courage, challenges the epistemological unconscious that guides Western notions of courage and maps its viability for nonviolent political resistance.

Friday, Oct. 12
Noon to 1 p.m. in Oakland Center Gold Room C

• Between the River and the Railroad Tracks: Speaking Marginal Bodies to Central Spaces in Appalachian Ohio
Using life history research, Dr. Rebecca Mercado-Thornton, assistant professor of communication, will examine the scarcely told experiences of Appalachian women living in Appalachia, Ohio. Focused on the life histories of three women, the talk will trace the ways in which these women resist and undermine traditional conceptions of embodiment.

• Underneath the MC’s Wit and the DJ’s Scratch: What Hip-Hop Polemic Contributes to a Globalization Ethic.
According to Dr. Jim Perkinson, special lecturer of communication, hip-hop poses a complex challenge for communication pedagogy. It is not enough to focus on lyrical propensity. The power registers rather in the viscera – and in places “lower down.” Dr. Perkinson will probe the possibilities of academic engagement with hip- hop, when its power is primarily subliminal rather than verbal, and thoroughly entangled in the radicalized and gendered dynamics of our shared history.

Friday, Nov. 9
Noon to 1 p.m. in Oakland Center Lake Michigan Room

• New Directions in Agenda-setting and Framing in a Socially Mediated World
Agenda setting and framing research have relied on legacy media when studying the salience of mediated messages. The research of Christine Stover, adjunct instructor of communications, examines how end-user contributes to online news on social media websites impact audience salience, and the differences between legacy and online audiences.

• From Nationalist Politics to (Anarcho-) Primitivism: Expanding the Frontiers of Intercultural Communication Beyond Modern Culture and Civilization
Dr. Lily Mendoza, associate professor of communication, will describe her work that chronicles her intellectual journey out of insurgent nationalist politics to the world of “anarcho-primitivism,” a theoretical perspective reevaluating the different worth of indigenous cultures and the impact that this shift in understanding has had on her theorizing of intercultural communication.

For additional information on the Fall Speaker Series, contact the Department of Communication and Journalism at (248) 370-4120.