CFP Teaching Celebrity

From Joshua Morrison <morr1512@umn.edu>

CFP from Teaching Media Quarterly‘s upcoming special issue: 
Teaching Celebrity

Deadline: January 1, 2020

Teaching Media Quarterly is an open-access journal dedicated to sharing approaches to teaching media topics and concepts. Please consider submitting a lesson plan to our current call: Teaching Celebrity. You can access our journal HERE, and please note that we also have an ongoing open call for lesson plans. Information about the latest call is below. Please share with friends, colleagues, and grad students who teach media classes!

Call for Lesson Plans: Teaching Celebrity

While often dismissed by critics as a shallow or morally corrosive, celebrity culture has become a vital site of academic inquiry as its practices, priorities, and affective attunements come to bear upon the lives of even those who do not aspire to work in the entertainment or cultural industries. As scholars trace the celebritization of public life, it is necessary that we share these conversations with our students, who may be particularly vulnerable to living and practicing the logics of celebrity without critical interrogation 

As the desire for fame and opportunities for microcelebrity saturate contemporary culture through social media platforms and compulsory self-branding, teaching celebrity provides media instructors with opportunities to make critical interventions into conversations that many students are already invested in. Teaching Media Quarterly is interested in learning and sharing how, and why, instructors do this work.

We welcome work that engages the following questions:

·       How do you teach the migration of celebrity practice and the logics of celebrity to the realms of politics, newsrooms, everyday life, and others?
·       How do you situate celebrity in the context of neoliberal capitalism?
·       How do you attend to the intersections of celebrity and identity?
·       How do you consider celebrity in relation to the political economy of media?
·       How do you provide students with an understanding of celebrity’s history and evolution?
·       How do you engage celebrity as a phenomenon in non-Western contexts?
·       How do you attend to the production of fame or other issues that emerge when considering the industries that produce celebrity?
·       How do you teach the distinctions and commonalities between macro- and micro-celebrity?

These questions are, of course, suggestions and we also welcome lessons that explore other issues relevant to the broader topic of celebrity. The deadline for submissions is January 1^st.