Praxis in Practice Roundtable

Our featured roundtable, “Praxis in Practice,” focused on the myriad actions and skills that media scholars and professionals employ in order to address questions of precarity and preservation within the field. We asked each of our four panelists, Dr. Randolph Lewis of UT Austin, Dr. AJ Christian from Northwestern University, Dr. Christine Becker from Notre Dame, and Dr. Lori Morimoto, an independent scholar, to prepare a brief statement about 1) how they conceptualize praxis, and 2) how they incorporate praxis into their scholarship, teaching, activism, etc. The statements were followed by an informal conversation moderated by Dr. Suzanne Scott and Jacqueline Johnson and a broader Q&A session with the attendees. The questions we sent each panelist to prompt their approach to the panel are listed below:

Rountable Questions

1. What does praxis mean to you? How have you worked to incorporate praxis into your scholarship, teaching, activism, etc.. What are some of the challenges you have encountered? What have been some of your successes?
2. Though many people in the field of media studies do want to create more accessible work for the public be that op-eds, podcasts, or blogs, many find it difficult to devote time to these activities, especially when the metrics employed within the tenure process continue to devalue them. What are some strategies that you all have implemented to confront these challenges?
3. What potentials and limitations do you see for incorporating social media use and engagement within the classroom and for communicating our own research to the broader public?
4. Can you discuss your philosophy on approaching citational practices? How have you worked to incorporate more marginalized voices into your reference lists and class syllabi? How do you grapple with or adapt scholarly citation practices to multimodal or public-facing work?