Media Studies and the Academy: A Tangled Tale

In 1982 Richard Dyer MacCann and Jack Ellis, past editors of Cinema Journal, wrote, "Cinema is unlike any other field of study. Its source material is shadowy, unsteady, indescribable. We are still searching for our best approach, our discipline."¹ This characterization remains true of media studies today. The National Research Council still labels media studies an "emerging discipline," even though courses on movies have been taught in American universities since 1915.² To what can we attribute this continued understanding of our discipline as amorphous and embryonic? At least part of the answer lies in the fact that media studies has historically been intertwined with numerous other subject areas. The realities of academic life, the protean character of our field itself, and the distinctive characteristics of SCMS have all contributed to this entanglement.

The choppy seas media scholars have encountered within academia are nowhere else as turbulent as in the university. Our field has been victimized in part because of its popularity; media is exploited by many but respected by few. As we know too well, a wide array of departments freely draw on film and media resources as pedagogical aids to prop up their bottom lines. Courses in fields like history, literature, and art routinely incorporate media materials like clips from movies and TV shows, documentaries, and entire feature films to make connections with students, to clarify key concepts, or just to give faculty members a break.³ The departments that rely most heavily on the engaging accessibility of media texts are those in foreign languages and literatures. These disciplines routinely use films and other media texts to exemplify pronunciation and idiomatic language usage as well as to attract students to their areas of study with course offerings that feature movie adaptations of great literary works. This phenomenon explains the growth of the film division of the Modern Language Association (MLA), which currently has more members than SCMS itself. Unlike SCMS members, many if not most MLA Film Division types teach film and media courses as a service to their departments while their major research interests are focused on traditional literary fields.⁴

Because media texts bring together elements from many of the traditional arts, numerous disciplines can claim a legitimate connection with our object of study, including literature, theater, art, and music. Further, the constantly evolving nature of media has led to the application of an ever-expanding range of disciplinary approaches. The emergence of television studies in the 1950s brought sociology departments into the mix, and sociological methods have also driven numerous reception studies of cinema itself. Digital media forms have engaged researchers in engineering schools and computer programs, further complicating the potpourri of disciplinary approaches that characterizes our field.

Numerous commentators have celebrated the way in which the tentacles of media studies have reached across disciplinary boundaries to extract a wide array of methodological models.⁵ At the same time, however, this intellectual ferment has had practical consequences that have not always served the profession well. Even when media studies has managed to separate itself from more traditional disciplines, its institutional identity has remained inchoate. Top media studies programs exist today in departments with titles like Communication Arts, Radio-TV-Film, Visual Cultures, Screen Studies, Film and Broadcasting, English, Art History, Comparative Literature, and even Rhetoric.⁶ Moreover, media production courses are frequently found in departments separate from those housing media studies—or even in separate divisions or schools within the university. The escalating pace of technological innovation ensures that our hazy institutional profile will not become more sharply defined as the years go by. More than likely, future scholars of media will find it increasingly difficult rather than easier to settle into neatly defined slots within the academy.

The good news is that even as media forms and media studies methodologies proliferate, the study of cinema itself is likely to acquire an ever greater aura of cultural capital in the world of higher education. As new modes of communication and entertainment gain currency, older forms move up the cultural hierarchy: as moviegoing replaced theatergoing in the...