I was living in New York and wrapping up my dissertation when Erica Stein and Brendan Kredell suggested I serve as the first reviews editor for Mediapolis Journal. The position required staying up-to-date on new research on media and cities and requesting free review copies from publishers–a perfect position for a graduate student. Since Erica and Brendan had already amassed both an advisory board and an editorial board that included a significant number of key scholars in this subfield, we knew there would be too many conflicts of interest for traditional reviews. We landed on running a Q&A section instead, featuring dynamic conversations between authors of new books and a moderator with a related area of expertise. Authors and moderators have been highly receptive to the approach, which embodies the journal’s founding mission to create a space for new and ongoing conversations across interdisciplinary fields. In 2022, Scott Rodgers introduced the journal’s own podcast channel, Mediapolis Now. The podcast further expands the scope of the Q&A, reaching new audiences and featuring a broader range of international media studies scholars.
As Q&A editor, I saw how those conversations made often dense and theoretically complex scholarship accessible to new audiences, serving as an entry point and primer for advanced undergraduates interested in the field. I became increasingly interested in how I might incorporate Mediapolis into the classroom after starting my job at Marymount Manhattan College, a liberal arts college where I carry a high teaching load. By that time, Helen Morgan Parmett had organized the Student Voices section, which offered a clear point of integration. Student Voices creates a space for undergraduate publication and is typically organized by one professor teaching a course relevant to the journal (e.g. Global Media, the Cinematic City, etc.). In a separate but connected section, On Teaching, the professor frames the Student Voices essays by sharing their syllabus and relevant assignments and by writing a short piece on their course development and how it went in practice. For example, when I taught my Cinema and the City course, I coordinated with Helen and designed the class to familiarize the students with the journal and prepare them for publication. Nathan Holmes (SUNY Purchase) had already contributed to On Teaching for a similar class, so I adapted ideas from the syllabus and approach he shared to frame his students’ essays. Throughout the semester, I incorporated other parts of the journal—including Q&As and short “roundtable” pieces on the relationship between media and Covid-19, since I was teaching this course on Zoom during pandemic closures. Mediapolis’s ability to quickly publish informed research perspectives proved especially valuable during this time, and it demonstrated the journal’s significance to my students.
By the semester’s end, the students were well-versed in cinema and the city literature and very familiar with Mediapolis. For their final project, they revised and expanded essays on popular movies and television episodes that illustrate urban concepts like Mike Davis’s “Fortress LA” from City of Quartz (1990), Germaine Halegoua’s Digital City (2019), and the expansive literature on urban flaneurs, gawkers, detectives, and Michel de Certeau’s “everyday practitioners.” Approximately seven students submitted to the journal, and every essay received a version of “revise and resubmit”—some with minor changes and others quite substantial. Two students did the necessary revisions and published their essays on the “Millennial Flanêuse in Broad City” and “Real and Hyperreal Las Vegas in Showgirls,” respectively. I now include these as readings in my Cinema and the City courses. Both are strong enough to stand on their own merits, and students respond well to work created by their peers. Their inclusion also encourages more students to consider publication.
Student Voices has also featured a range of production-based projects. In “Teaching Urban Media,” Eleonora Diamanti shared several video projects produced for her upper-level Urban Media course at John Cabot University. Following the standard practice, Diamanti’s piece is cross-listed with the journal’s On Teaching section, where she provides a framing essay that explains how she developed the interdisciplinary course, and shares specific readings and assignment prompts. This 2024 contribution is immensely valuable to both students and educators (I plan to borrow liberally for a future course). However, it was also the most entry in both sections. [Editors: We’ve recently received two proposals for new Student Voices dossiers!] These coordinated sections have proven particularly difficult to sustain because they require significant labor by multiple parties: a professor must integrate publication submission into their class, and, assuming the students do their part, then the section editor must find reviewers for all submissions. Each submission is reviewed by scholars in the field, typically members of the editorial board, who offer anonymous feedback and provide publication recommendations. After this multi-stage process, the professor then has the unenviable task of convincing undergraduates to revise their essays for publication after the semester has ended (often in the summer).
In the final section of this essay, I’d like to suggest some possibilities to keep these valuable sections going through less labor-intensive means, with lessons drawn from editing the generally easy-to-maintain Q&A section: manageable word counts, relatively short time frame between conception and publication, and mutual accountability between a small number of collaborators. My first and most obvious suggestion is to break these sections apart. While On Teaching and Student Voices are technically separate, they’re typically submitted together, increasing the workload for the primary contributor. However, Robert Joseph’s On Teaching contribution, “Mapping the Media Cityscape of New Orleans,” provides an excellent example of how the section can stand alone as an educator’s resource. Joseph walks the reader through several iterations of his course design, and the trial and error that led to his most successful semester. Joseph shares the syllabus, goals and outcomes, and instructions for a mapping assignment that can be adapted for other place-based courses. In addition to sharing one student’s stand out video essay, he provides a link to the collective class mapping project that did not require additional buy-in from the students or require external reviewers. This assignment-based approach also has the potential to reduce redundancy, encouraging contributors to share pedagogical insights and course innovations rather than overviews of similar courses (Urban Media, Cinema and the City, etc.).
Sectioning off the On Teaching component would require rethinking Student Voices, since On Teaching often provides a necessary framework for undergraduate work. There may be a more straightforward approach, though. For example, the journal could put out a call-for-papers via our listserv in late Fall and late Spring (the second half of the typical semester), asking everyone teaching courses relevant to the journal’s scope to encourage students with exceptional papers and projects to submit to the journal. Instructors would sponsor the submissions, providing a paragraph or two for context to help the reviewers. This brief context could also appear alongside the published pieces. Promising submissions could then be sent to a small group of editorial board members for review. Board members can take turns doing this work (perhaps rotating semesters) so that no one person becomes overburdened. It is highly unlikely, at least initially, that we’d receive an unmanageable number of submissions but if we’re lucky enough to have that problem, we could have the section editor determine the top submissions for review. This approach would more equitably distribute the workload among professors, reviewers, and editors; it would also attract work from the type of student who is more interested and committed in following through to publication. Splitting the sections, thereby reducing the workload, would ideally make both editorial roles more appealing. It would also encourage more diverse and creative approaches and topics in both sections, making the journal more actively in conversation with undergraduate teaching and research.
The journal’s utility in the classroom could be further bolstered by Mediapolis “teaching packages” that organize dossiers, Q&As, and other work from the journal’s ten-year history by subject areas (e.g. Platform Urbanism, City at Night, Urban Production Cultures). These might be compiled by editorial board members with deep knowledge of the journal, particularly as they work on their own course design or revision. Themed teaching packages would help to keep Mediapolis in mind as contributors and readers prepare courses, ensuring that classes have more up-to-date writing than traditional publication allows, while benefiting the journal through greater circulation. It would also draw more visitors and encourage more contributors to the On Teaching and Student Voices sections, since those who incorporate the journal in their classroom would be more motivated to share their own practices.
The interdisciplinary courses that we teach are inherently challenging. Providing a foundation for students to understand film/media/screen studies, media industries, and complex urban processes is a tall order that risks information overload. Moreover, the length and density of the traditional books and articles that parse and illuminate these intersections are often exceptionally challenging for undergraduates, especially when assigned week after week. In my experience, balancing new scholarship and canonical texts with shorter Mediapolis pieces to introduce authors and concepts has lightened the load and will continue to do so as the journal’s own archive keeps expanding. Splitting the current sections and adding a new “packages” section working from the journal’s extant archive would distribute the editorial board’s workload, shorten publication timelines, and increase utility. In combination, these changes have the potential to revive the undergraduate teaching sections by making them easier to manage and, therefore, more active and dynamic.
Noelle Griffis is Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies at Marymount Manhattan College. Her research on location production, film policy, urban development, and media activism has been published in JCMS, Black Camera, and several edited volumes, including The Routledge Companion to Media and the City. Noelle co-chairs the SCMS Urbanism, Geography, and Architecture SIG.
