About my dissertation...

I've been drafting and drafting my dissertation proposal. In our department, we have to present our proposal at our weekly PhD seminars to our graduate peers and faculty members before we defend our proposals to our committees. The original plan was to be past both of those milestones by now, but one week prior to my seminar presentation, my advisor gave me the big thumbs-down...and I was back to the drawing board.

Finally, at long last, I got the green light from Sujatha (my advisor) on Friday morning that we could schedule my seminar presentation and defense. It is SUCH a relief, only because I have to do all these things before we move to Dallas, or come back in the fall when she gets back from leave. It was never that my idea was bad, I just didn't have the theoretical section and methods ironed out enough at that point. I did a little dance Friday morning when I got Sujatha's email, though. My officemate, who is at the same point I am, just not moving in five weeks, congratulated me. He and I will be presenting our proposals on the same day at seminar.

Anyways, about my topic. I wanted to write about it here because I noticed Amad from Muslim Matters responded to my last post- very cool to see you on here, Amad. I can't remember how
I found Muslim Matters, probably on another blog, but the work your site does is so important. I hope anyone who happens upon this site- especially anyone who tried to discredit Barack Obama because they think there's anything wrong with being a Muslim- happens upon Muslim Matters as well...

To my topic: it's changed quite a bit since I came to Iowa in 2005. I never could have predicted this is what I would be doing, but that's only because the U of Oklahoma has little to no coursework on globalization, particularly as it pertains to mass communications theory, so I wouldn't have thought of it then. I came here knowing I wanted to work with
Latino immigrant communities and their relationships with media. At first, it was how Latinas negotiated gender identity in relation to mass media, but then, the immigration stuff became prominent nationally, and so I became more interested in immigrant communities in general. And, of course, I had cancer and then had Katie in two successive summers, so my other plan to do my dissertation work in Peru on an activist organizations' work to construct radio broadcasts to empower indigenous women in the Andes kinda fell through...

And then I began to study for my comps. For my primary area, International Communication, globalization, and diaspora, two of my readings sparked an idea: Benedict Anderson writes that newspapers (and so, mass media) were the catalyst for the creation for the nation. News consumption serves as a ritual that coheres the members of the nation; it is a regular reminder that others, just like them, are participating in the same process. So, the news/mass media play a crucial function in maintaining the nation, which is ultimately an imagined entity.

Globalization unsettles the nation, however, through the processes that alter the autonomy of the nation-state. We've witnessed a good example of these processes the past few weeks with the financial crises- no nation can operate independently of the global financial markets. They are all intertwined, and the nation-state (the government apparatus of the nation) must work with the financial sector to function properly. Think Hank Paulson here and his capitulation at first to the multinational banking companies.

Arjun Appadurai writes, much more intelligently than me, that the interplay between people, money, technology, media, and ideas (or, as he calls them, ethnoscapes, financescapes, technoscapes, mediascapes, and ideoscapes) characterize the processes of globalization. These "-scapes" are independent yet imbricated in one another, and activity in one sets off activity in other. An example: foreign investment in privatized Mexico, supported by the U.S. and Mexican governments, upheaved the Mexican economy, compelling its impoverished citizens to migrate to the U.S. to work, often at the (illegal) recruitment of U.S. businesses. Here, you see the interaction of money, people,and ideas (government support of certain policies, i.e., privatization of formerly communal lands in Mexico, U.S. government backing of these endeavors).

When you think about Appadurai's argument that these -scapes overlap one another, so, for instance, corporations can also have a stake in the finance, techno, and media-scapes through multiple holdings in multiple companies, including media companies and, say, government contracting, then I argue that we see the convergence of the media and ideo-scapes in relation to the ethnoscapes.

In short, my dissertation is asking how globalization and the nation-state can co-exist, and I think it's because the media serve a surveillance function that discipline the citizenry, reminding citizens first, that the nation exists (without giving too many details about its globality, per se) and second, how to be good citizens.

This is where immigrants come in. I think it is through media representations of the immigrant family that the boundaries of the nation are defined and by extension, the criteria for membership in it, and that through representations of the deviant immigrant family, we learn how we in turn should conduct ourselves based on the discursive example of them of what not to do. I'm choosing the immigrant family because it is gendered, but also because it serves as the key economic unit. This is a really complicated part of my theoretical section that I have to unpack, but that's the gist of my argument and rationale for using it. Plus, studies tend to focus on women, and I want to know the role men play in all this.

But here's the really cheesy, I guess, conclusion to my proposal, that sums up my position on all this (and yes, it's okay for researchers to have a position):

To me, immigration reform is not only about immigrants or delusions of cultural invasion as the American Right would have us believe but rather about controlling populations in light of pervasive neoliberal regimes that benefit economically from migrant peoples as well as the misdirected attention of resident citizens. The goal of this study is to examine the ways in which such control manifests, is resisted, and most importantly how the media participates in this process. On the one hand, the immigration debate results in a chilled civic atmosphere that pits people against one another and degrades and ostracizes migrant communities; on the other, the immigration debate myopically disguises the scope and mechanisms of globalization and the ways in which we are all affected by it by insisting on the primacy of the national scale. If the mass media provide the imaginary of which Appadurai (1996) writes and straddle the media- and ideo-scapes as I argue they do, then an examination of their role in constructing the public knowledge that facilitates the disciplining of docile national bodies as well as the mass media’s capacity to resist this work is crucial to the preservation of American democracy. Given the rhetoric of the current American presidential election in which we are urged by the Republican Party to put “Country First” while simultaneously vilifying the Fourth Estate, I regard the work to preserve democracy ever more pressing.