FSD Awards Committee Report – 2006

Cynthia Carter, Immediate Past Chair FSD
Coordinator, FSD Awards Committee 2005-2006

The FSD Awards Committee 2006 worked very hard from the end of the summer until well into January putting nomination packages together for four separate ICA Awards in 2006. Those categories are:

• Most Outstanding Applied/Public Policy Research Program – nominating the Global Media Monitoring Project and its principal investigator, Margaret Gallagher (nomination organised by Carolyn Byerly, Howard University, USA and Karen Ross, Coventry University, UK)
• Best Article Award – nominating Deepa Kumar’s 2004 essay “War Propaganda and the (Ab)uses of Women: Media Constructions of the Jessica Lynch Story”, Feminist Media Studies, 4(3): 297-313 (nomination organised by Usha Zacharias, Westfield College, USA)
• Young Scholar Award – nominating Karin Wahl-Jorgensen, Cardiff University, UK (nomination organised by Yoo Jae Song, Ewha Woman’s University, Korea)
• Outstanding Book Award – nominating Katherine Sender’s 2005 Business, Not Politics: The Making of the Gay Market, New York, Columbia University Press (nomination organised by Cynthia Carter, Cardiff University, UK).

The following are reports from each of the organisers on their nominations, which as Chair of the FSD Awards Committee 2006 I would like to share with all FSD members.

Sincere thanks to Carolyn, Karen, Yoo Jae and Usha for their stellar efforts this year in putting FSD’s nominations together. In addition, thanks to Lisa McLaughlin for starting the work of putting together a nomination for one of the UN awards, which was withdrawn this year (but we did not find out about it until well into November). Now all we can do is wait for the outcome of all of these efforts. In the meantime, best of luck to all of our four nominees!

Most Outstanding Applied/Public Policy Research Program: Global Media Monitoring Project led by Margaret Gallagher

Since many FSD members have been very involved in the GMMP in their respective nations over the years, either as coordinators or data gatherers, we were in a strong position to advance this particular nomination. We had ten letter writers from nine different nations, together representing both feminist scholars and media activists.

The GMMP responds to a serious global problem of women’s marginalization in the news. Such marginalization has long inhibited women’s self-determination and right to communicate. The project represents the application of feminist theory and scholarship across the 76 nations that presently participate, and is enabling social change at both grassroots and other levels. Additionally, the project has enabled the establishment of a research and action infrastructure, training both academic and grassroots leaders to work together for common goals, and helped to set standards for news coverage of women's experiences and issues.
Report by Carolyn Byerly and Karen Ross

Best Article Award: Deepa Kumar (2004) “War Propaganda and the (Ab)uses of Women: Media Constructions of the Jessica Lynch Story”, Feminist Media Studies, 4 (3), pp.297-313.

Dr Kumar’s contribution to the field of communication has been in two areas: one concerning media, class, and labour, and the second, that of war propaganda. Her article, “War Propaganda and the (Ab)uses of Women” is theoretically important for the ways in which she interweaves gender into the political economy model that dominates propaganda analysis. As one of the scholars who wrote in support of her nomination pointed out, the article “provides one of the most comprehensive articulations of connections between institutionalized bias, international conflicts, and U.S. categories of race, class, and gender.”

The Iraq war has demonstrated the necessity for communication scholarship to engage with questions of gender, race, and sexuality in the context of media events starting from the Jessica Lynch rescue right up to the current kidnapping of Christian Science Monitor reporter Jill Carroll. Dr Kumar’s essay promises to be influential not only in flagging the rhetorical dimensions of ‘woman’ as floating signifier in war narratives, but also in terms of dealing with the new media phenomenon of embedded reporting.
Report by Usha Zacharias

Young Scholar Award: Dr. Karin Wahl-Jorgensen is a Senior Lecturer at the Cardiff School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies.

Karin Wahl-Jorgensen has been active in ICA since 1998 and was a Student Representative during the period of 1999-2000. She is currently the coordinator of the Media Associations Project (MAP) for the Feminist Scholarship Division of ICA. Karin Wahl-Jorgensen's productivity is an exceptional and remarkable one. Her publications include two books, twenty-one articles, seven book chapters, two reports, and six book reviews. Besides the thirty-three papers presented at various national and international Communication conferences, she is the author of Journalists and the Public (Hampton Press, 2006), and Citizens or Consumers? (Open University Press, 2005, with Sanna Inthorn and Justin Lewis). Her work on journalism and democracy has appeared in more than 20 international journals.

She has received research funding from the Economic and Social Research Council, the British Academy, the Danish Research Academy and the Danish Academy of Sciences. Recently, she received confirmation that she will be the British lead investigator and coordinator of one of the four main research strands on a 5-year, 17-country FP6 European Commission Integrated Project.

Karin has an excellent reputation as a kind-hearted and sincere person with warm regards toward others, well respected, and liked by her students. She is an outstanding young scholar, full of promise for the future of her research and teaching in the field of journalism and mass communication.
Report compiled by Yoo Jae Song

Outstanding Book Award: Katherine Sender’s Business, Not Politics: The Making of the Gay Market (2005, Columbia University Press)

Katherine Sender’s important new book represents a critical departure in media research examining the GLBT consumer market. The book draws upon GLBT and feminist theories to examine a range of connections between marketing to gay consumers and the politics of gay rights and identity. As the title suggests, Sender challenges the claims made by US advertisers and marketers that appeals to gay and lesbian consumers are a matter of "business, not politics". Instead, she argues that the business of gay marketing cannot be considered independently of the politics of gay rights, identity, and visibility. Moreover, the gay community is not a pre-existing entity that marketers simply tap into; rather it is a construction, an imagined community formed not only through political activism but also through a commercially supported media. In order to support these claims, she examines a range of contemporary media, including prime time dramas and situation comedies that feature GLBT characters as well as print and broadcast advertising. Marketing has not only been formative in the constitution of a GLBT community and identity, concludes Sender, but also has had significant impact on the visibility of gays and lesbians in US society more generally.
Report compiled by Cynthia Carter