Graduate students share media research, films at Common Ground
The Media School Report
March 12, 2025
Keynote speaker Ramón Resendiz is a Xicanx documentary media producer and visual anthropologist. His research interrogates the material and imaginary intersections of systemic violence, national borders, memory, visual culture, and settler colonialism. (Olivia Smith | The Media School)
Graduate students from The Media School, across campus, and other universities gathered this weekend for the ninth annual Common Ground, hosted by the Media School Graduate Association.
The theme for this year’s conference was “Media Studies in/at/from the Margins,” encouraging submissions that considered what has traditionally been left out, neglected, or sidelined in media studies.
The conference opened on Friday with a keynote speech from documentary filmmaker and media anthropologist Ramón Resendiz, who is also a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society and a visiting assistant professor at The Media School. Science fiction author, activist, and journalist Cory Doctorow delivered a second keynote speech following an hour-long mixer.
Keynote speaker Cory Doctorow is a science fiction author, digital rights activist, and journalist. He spoke about concept of “enshittification,” which describes the process by which internet media platforms become simultaneously unusable and un-quittable. (Katherine Maners | The Media School)
Cory Doctorow’s call to action for the digital age
by Nicole Hemmens
Science fiction author, digital rights activist, and journalist Cory Doctorow presented “With Great Power Came No Responsibility: How Enshittification Conquered the 21st Century and How We Can Overthrow” exploring the concept of the dark side of modern digital platforms.
Doctorow introduced the term “enshittification,” which describes the three-stage decay of online platforms. He explained how these platforms originally serve their users well, but go on to exploit them as they become more advanced. He highlighted applications like Uber, which has been accused of using workers’ financial data to set exploitative wages. Doctorow emphasized how these platforms deteriorate user experience as they prioritize profits over people.
Additionally, Doctorow pointed out Google’s dominance as an example of this trend, explaining how the company manipulated search results. He discussed Google’s transition to providing quality service to exploiting customers, which leads to reduced quality user experience and higher ad prices.
“When they start, they minimize ends and they spend a lot of money engineering for high quality search results, but they’re also at the same time buying their way to dominance,” Doctorow said.
“They bribe every service and every product that has a search box to make that a Google search box, which means that no matter what browser you’re using, what carrier you’re using, you’re always searching Google by default.”
Throughout his lecture, Doctorow also encouraged listeners to support local businesses to counteract exploitative monopolies. His talk was a call to action against the growing corporate control of the digital world.
Short film screenings
This was the second year that Common Ground accepted short film submissions to be screened during the conference. These films were screened on Friday at 7 p.m. in Franklin Hall commons:
Common Ground 2025 (Emma Ramirez | The Media School)
Panels
On Saturday, the second day of Common Ground, scholars attended panel discussions where graduate students presented research under topics related to the conference theme.
Media Meets Geography
Anna Stamm, “Staying Afloat: TV Station Marketing Strategies”
Drew Heiderscheidt, “Using GIS to Stretch Archival Collections: A Case Study from Colorado”
Feng Yi Yin (Temple Universitty), “Linguistic Politics, Hybridity, and Localization: The Making of Transnational Indigenous African Language Television”
Abu Mohammad Sakil Faizullah (University of Georgia), “Exploring Bluetooth Adoption Among Marginalized Rural Young Adults in Bangladesh: A Study from the Margins”
Media Practices & Praxis
Ran Wei (Washington University, St. Louis), “The Paradox of Narrating from the Margins: the Self-representations of Kamagasaki in Amateur Media”
Jenna Sears, “Digital Creative Geogrraphies: Intercultural Filmmaking as Affective Placemaking”
Julia Longo (Temple University), “Journalistic documentaries as an emancipatory practice for adolescents: dialogues between communicative citizenship and media literacy”
Narmeen Ijaz, “Ethics in Feminist Documentary: Implications of Class and Privilege in Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy’s Films”
Kristin Wells, Common Ground 2025 (Emma Ramirez | The Media School)
Black Media Experiences
Marilyn Facey (University of Illinois), “New Media and Cultural Production: An examination of new media technologies on news and music production culture in Jamaica”
Kristin Wells, “Mediated Histories of Collegiate Sporting Protests: A Digital Humanities Approach”
Fabiola D’Angelo, “Lovers Rock and The Black Sensorium”
Omoleye Adeyemi (University of Maryland), “The Shade Room—A Digital Third Space for Black Individuals”
Hermeneutics
Christopher Michael Hansen (University of Buffalo), “Conjuring Seth: On Posthuman Creative Practice in The Seth Material”
Ahmed Tahsin Shams, “Thijs Biersteker’s Screen Eco-Art as Green Publishing Prototype in the Anthropocene”
SaeHim Park (Xavier University), “Immersive Biohazards and VR Proximity”
Sohrab Mirab, “History, Allegory, and Poetics of Dissent: Pre-Revolutionary Iranian Avant-grade Animations of CIDCA”
Fan Power
Juntong Wu (Columbia University), “Mediating Film Festival in Post-Pandemic China: Cinephiles and Grassroots Media”
Selena Cotte (University of Illinois), “Video essays and fan historians as alternative academics: Considering Defunctland and other theme park studies”
Aditya Sahasrabudhe, “Investigating fan aggression as a reaction to mediated crowd behavior”
Marina Mecham, “A film they did not want you to see: Jamil X.T. Qubeka’s Of Good Report, Sexual Violence, and the Horror of Government Denial”
Rendering Media Visions
Aileen Min (Columbia University), “Digital Water and Generative Absence: Reimagining East Asian Aesthetics in Digital Art”
Ibrahim Odugbemi, “Global South Cinemas in the Face of Neoliberal Capitalism: The Examples of Nigeria and South Korea”
Aanila Tarannum, “Reassessment of the Aura: Analyzing the Categories of AI-generated Images in Facebook’s Algorithmic Landscape”
Janice Day (IU Indianapolis), “Re-visioning the Undefinable: A Generative Rhetorical Analysis of Trauma Narratives in Horror Films”
Structuring Environmental Feelings
Juntao Yang (Columbia University), “Fault Lines and Echoing Strata: Attunement and Unsecurement through East Asia’s Earthquake-Media”
Stanislav Menzelevskyi, “Staging Apocalypse: Chornobyl Cinema, Environmental Protest, and Eschatological Melodrama”
Priscilla Boateng, “Navigating Motherhood and Mental Health in Ghana: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Postpartum Depression on Facebook”
Shitemi Khamadi, “Media Representation of Indigenous Communities in Environmental Court Cases: A Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis of Landmark Judgments in Africa”
Interrogating Power Narratives
Bryce Greene, “Revisiting Media Imperialism: The Enduring Relevance Of The Propaganda Model”
Caro Reed-Ferrara, “And You’re Going to Kill Him for Me: Neoliberal Feminism and Hegemony in American National Security Media”
Jeff Moscaritolo, “The Cooley Report, Orientalist Knowlege-Making, and Dunn Meadow”
Cole Nelson and Jamie Theophilos, “Countering Repression and narrative architects in the Stop Cop City Movement”
