committee

I'll write a quick post -- timing is bad, as I have to hit the road soon to get to my parents in NJ. So this may be the last post for the day, but I would love to hear more from the conversation as it goes, and will happily post over the weekend to any questions that arise.

Here's my committee:

Chandra Mukerji (Comm, Sociology, Science Studies) -- chair
Robert Horwitz (Comm, Sociology)
Carol Padden (Comm, Human Development)
John Caldwell (UCLA: Film, Television, and Digital Media)
Lev Manovich (Visual Arts)

plus, it was a small and accessible department, so I also had substantive interactions on this topic with Michael Schudson, Geof Bowker, Phil Agre, and Ellen Seiter.

So looking at the list (and I certainly wouldn't pretend that all these choices were perfectly strategic, more a combination of fit and happy coincidence)... Chandra was influential all the way through my graduate work, especially in terms f thinking about culture, materiality, and power, taking a determinedly historical and interpretive perspective, opting more for a "sociology of culture" than "cultural studies" angle, and first introducing me to STS. (I got that literature later, as I scrambled to suddenly "be" STS when I got to Cornell's program.) Robert became influential after I chose my topic, because of his work on law and regulation, and really helped me thinking about policy and its relevance to cultural production. John (who was at UCSD for a while, but was gone by the time I defended) really helped me think about industry arrangements as complex, fluid, and significant to popular culture. All of them (and this is a hallmark of that department, or at least it was) took interpretivist, sociological, critical, historical approaches in their work and encouraged it in mine.