Collaborative Musical Expression and Creativity Among Academics: When Intellectualism Meets Twelve Bar Blues

The Professors are a blues, rock, and sometime heavy metal band made up of communication professors from a number of New Jersey schools. Formed in 1995, the band has played in clubs in New York City as well as a number of academic venues, including the annual conference of the International Communication Association in Chicago in 1996 and the annual conference of the National Communication Association in New York City in 1998. The Professors have been featured in both local and national press, including the Chronicle of Higher Education. When we learned of the call for papers for this special issue of the American Communication Journal addressing the creative endeavors of Communication scholars beyond their regular research agendas, we were delighted to have the opportunity to reflect upon the place of musical creativity within our lives as working academics. What follows in this paper are the thoughts of a number of band members, past and present, who trace the relationship of the musical, the creative, and the intellectual in terms of their own personal histories and academic interests

Weather conditions and daily television use in the Netherlands, 1996–2005

This study examines the impact of daily atmospheric weather conditions on daily television use in the Netherlands for the period 1996–2005. The effects of the weather parameters are considered in the context of mood and mood management theory. It is proposed that inclement and uncomfortable weather conditions are associated with lower human mood, and that watching entertainment and avoiding informational programs may serve to repair such mood. We consequently hypothesize that people spend more time watching television if inclement and uncomfortable weather conditions (low temperatures, little sunshine, much precipitation, high wind velocity, less daylight) coincide with more airtime for entertainment programs, but that they view less if the same weather conditions coincide with more airtime devoted to information fare. We put this interaction thesis to a test using a time series analysis of daily television viewing data of the Dutch audience obtained from telemeters (T = 3,653), merged with meteorological weather station statistics and program broadcast figures, whilst controlling for a wide array of recurrent and one-time societal events. The results provide substantial support for the proposed interaction of program airtime and the weather parameters temperature and sunshine on aggregate television viewing time. Implications of the findings are discussed

A Televised Social Problem Construction? Pushing Back Against the Invisibility of the Male Rape Victim in American Crime

Building on the view of popular culture as a conduit through which social problems are defined, debated or even resolved (Maratea & Monahan, Social Problems in Popular Culture. Bristol: Polity Press, 2016), this chapter evaluates the contribution of fictional television to the demarginalisation of the male victim of sexual violence. The research adopts a case study design and offers an ethnographic content analysis of ABC’s American Crime. It highlights the blaming and stigmatisation of the male rape victim, the shortcomings of the dominant feminist framing of sexual victimisation as well as the failure of the criminal justice system to effectively handle male rape cases. The author concludes that ‘socially aware’ TV shows like American Crime could serve as a form of ‘edutainment’: they have the strong potential to push back against dominant male rape myths and offer a better insight into the victims’ experiences, getting audiences much more emotionally involved than pertinent factual sources of information

Information and digital literacies; a review of concepts

A detailed literature reviewing, analysing the multiple and confusing concepts around the ideas of information literacy and digital literacy at the start of the millennium. The article was well-received, and is my most highly-cited work, with over 1100 citations