Hello, I'm Ellen Wartella and welcome to this episode of The Architects of Communication Scholarship Podcast series, a production of the ICA Podcast Network. Today our architect is Angharad Valdivia. Valdivia served as the Inaugural Head of the Media and Cinema Studies Department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She also served as the Interim Director of the Institute of Communication Research at the University of Illinois for five years, 2009-2014. She is also an affiliate faculty member in the Women and Gender in a Global Perspective Program and the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies. Within communication research, Valdivia combines the areas of gender studies with ethnic studies and Latin American studies. Valdivia served as editor-in-chief of the ICA journal Communication Theory from 2008 to 2011 and is a Fellow of the International Communication Association. Angie Valdivia is interviewed today by Isabel Molina-Guzmán. Isabel is a professor in Latina/Latino Studies, Communication, and a faculty affiliate of the Institute of Communication Research, Gender & Women’s Studies and Latin American & Caribbean Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Chamapign. And here is Isabel Molina.
I first met Professor Angharad Valdivia my senior year as an undergraduate in communication at Penn State. I took her course, Women and Minorities in the Media, and Professor Valdivia and that course changed my life. We continue to be in communication throughout my career, inside and outside academia. And her edited collection Feminism, Multicultural, and the Media; Global Diversities, for me filled a major gap in communication feminist scholarship and really began a field conversation about ethnicity, race, gender, and class. Her books on Blackwell, the Blackwell media studies companion, the International Encyclopedia of Media Studies, Latino Communication Studies Today, Latino/as in the Media, Mapping Latina/o Studies: An Interdisciplinary Reader, and her latest book, The Gender of Latinidad: Uses and Abuses of Hybridity, is still required reading, for so many scholars of my generation and future generations working in this area. Professor Valdivia scholarship is alongside greats like Jacqueline Bobo, and formed the foundation of intersectional feminist scholarship in the field of communication and media studies. Equally as important as her scholarship, however, is her legacy of mentorship in the United States and throughout the world. She is the exemplar of what it means to mentor for life. There are few Latinas in communication today that have not been impacted by her scholarship and her mentorship. It is a pleasure and a privilege to interview one of the architects of our field, Dr. Angharad Valdivia for the ICA podcast network series, Architects of Communication Scholarship. Professor Valdivia, it's a pleasure and a privilege to be here today. Thank you so much for giving me this opportunity to talk with you.
It is an honor for me to be interviewed by you.
So I want to start off by asking how your personal history has shaped your educational experience and the scholarship you've produced in communication.
I'm originally from Chile. And I feel that my education, even at the elementary level in Chile, was so excellent. That really set me up as a good student for the rest of my life. Also, I come from generations of professional women role models. My grandmother was a teacher, my mother is a medical professional, which is quite unusual for really upper working class kind of status. And so as I began to live in the United States, first treated as and thinking of myself as an international student, and then becoming a citizen and thinking of myself as a Latina. I've always carried that belief in education and that belief that I am well educated. So one of the things that I always tell my students is, “Don't engage in imposter syndrome because you belong here. I belong here, and you belong here.” And that's something that I have core in my subjectivity.
So our paths initially crossed at Penn State and then it went in separate ways. I started my PhD career, thanks to you, at Penn's Annenberg School for Communication and you moved from Penn State. I want to ask you, what's that move to the ICR (Institute for Communication Research), how that played a role in your academic directory and career?
Yes, that was a field-defining move for me. The Penn State job was a great opportunity. And I met amazing colleagues and students who would become leading scholars in the field such as yourself, and such as Kelly Gates. And then I moved to Illinois, and it was quite scary because teaching the doctoral students was a daunting proposition, such excellence. And they were my peers. And many times they knew more than I did about particular topics, but it's the kind of experience where your colleagues are all leaders in the field, and you can see that your students will also be. And so, there I had the freedom to pursue topics without, you know, any questioning, why are you doing this? I always felt like I was just supported. And that's the way that we used to teach our students as well. Then it was like, “What do you want to do? How can we help you pursue this topic that there is a huge gap or nothing in the field about? That was the spirit of intellectual creativity and productivity that really generates a really fruitful career.
So who were your mentors? I'm thinking, both as a graduate student, but also as a junior faculty and then as a senior colleague.
I felt like I began to get mentored even as an undergraduate student. I took many courses with Professor Herbert Schiller, who would sometimes invite me to his office, say to me, “That was kind of good when you wrote” and who encouraged me to apply to the institute's so I felt like he was both a role model. But also, I had some personal meetings with him, which would encourage me. I got to ICR. I felt very supported by the faculty at ICR. Most of them would say, “I don't think there's any research on that. But why don't you do it?” My original mentor in ICR, was Professor Thomas Guback, who's a political economist of communication. I also work with Professor Paula Treichler, Cultural Studies and gender and AIDS, Professor Cheris Kramarae, feminist scholar of communication and more from the speech communication side, but very, very much informative to me. And then as I began to transition into being a faculty member and developing my committee, Professor John Nerone was very, very much there as both an intellectual, but also kind of a spiritual mentor, and Professor Clifford Christians. And so I really did feel supported by this incredibly supportive range of scholars. And in that group, also, I would have to include Professor Ellen Wartella. And Professor Charles Whitney. This was just a stellar group of faculty, who supported students, I would say, without reservation, and, and I just wish that every graduate student had that experience, because that's how I feel about it.
You were trained and your dissertation was really grounded in political economy, you see yourself as a political economist. So at what point did you sort of transition to or engage your work on Latinidad? How did that kind of come to be?
I was trained as a political economist of international communication with a specialization in Latin America. And I was hired at Penn State. I still remember this lunch, where they looked at me and they said, “Oh, you can teach women minorities something.” And I'm like, “I can?” And they say, “Yeah!” and I think it was, as I've said before, an assignment by biology–that, to them, I look like a minority. So therefore, I could teach that. It was the first time I began to research sources on what was then called Hispanic Studies, like Hispanics and African Americans, Native Americans and Asian Americans. And then when I came to the University of Illinois, I was immediately kind of located within a social environment of Latino Studies. Professor William Berry made sure that I met some of the newly hired postdocs which would become assistant professors. We really formed a little cohort of scholars who were trying to work with the university towards the formation of our Latino Studies program, which was instituted, and then supporting it as much as we could until you, Professor Molina, took over the program. We were, here, working with each other towards a trans-ethnic, interdisciplinary, gender-inclusive, Latino Studies at Illinois.
What do you think are the sort of big intellectual questions for communications scholars to address in the next 10 years?
One of the ones that we've been trying to deal with, and I think we're still at the baby stages, is we're trying to diversify the field. And we're trying to, especially in ICA, activate the “I”, International. And there's tension within our organization and within our field in coming to terms with understanding the difference between international and intersectional. A lot of its “internationalization” has been done in relation to particular parts of Western Europe, which feel to a lot of us as, “Oh, wow, we’re recolonizing ourselves in terms of Euro-colonization of the Americas?” And in terms of particular parts of Asia. That has partly been accomplished through a displacement of some of the gains we have been making on race and ethnicity in our field. And I have participated in fora, where it has been clear that participants in those fora have a different take or cannot tell the difference between internationalization and dealing with issues of inclusion of race and ethnicity. And so I think that our field is really having a hard time trying to begin to understand this, trying to take the research of our own scholars who are doing research on race and ethnicity seriously. Another example of this would be that, when we have an opportunity to have a major, say, opening plenary on these issues, instead of inviting our own scholars on it. And we have scholars in our field who are working on this, including you and me, Professor Molina. They invite scholars from other fields. And that's a little bit of a troubling situation, and then the only time that we get included is if and when those scholars for whatever reason, pull out. And so I think that's one of the major issues in our field because there's a lot of talk about, “internationalizing”. And that's been done in a particular way. Another one is, and this is a pet peeve of mine, that everybody in all sorts of other disciplines takes media as, “Oh, we can all talk about media.” We should come together as a field to get the fact that we are a major scholarly area of study and that you cannot just talk about these issues as if, or just because I watch TV, I can talk about it. When people talk about psychology, they talk to psychologists. So people should talk to us when they want to talk about risk communication. The whole thing with, for example, AIDS, my University being a major, example of this. They didn't talk to any of the people in our faculty who are experts on risk communication and health communication. We have people who do that and who do it very well. So I would identify those two as my major areas that I would like to address.
I'm gonna ask you about one more area. That is the sort of myth of discovery that continually happens around research on ethnicity and race by communication scholars. I was wondering, in terms of thinking through big intellectual questions and communication, how you think through that issue?
Encourage the lit review, no matter what topic you're doing. As scholarly practice, this is something we teach in undergrad and graduate seminars, you should begin with a lit review. In relation to, for example, Latinas, Latinos, and Latinx people, as many scholars have noted, we predate the existence of Anglos on this continent. And so, to act like you just discovered them in 2000, 2005, or 2022 is really ahistorical and non-intellectual because you have not done the research. And if you do the research, then you will find people like you, me, Yeidy Rivero, Maria Elena Cepeda, Jillian Báez, Arcelia Gutierrez, Diana Leon-Boys, and Christina Ceisel. I could go on and on and have been writing about these issues, and you can draw on their research, which is what scholars do.
What are the grand societal challenges that from your perspective, as a scholar, as an activist, you think communication scholarship, the scholarship that's produced today, should and could be making a major contribution to?
We have so many challenges right now. And it's not difficult to become paralyzed in the face of war, environment, social injustice, Black Lives Matter, indigenous rights. And I do believe that we, in our field, can contribute to social justice, can contribute to greater understanding. I taught an undergraduate class on Disney, and a lot of my colleagues that don't know Disney say things like, “Oh, yeah, I like animation too.” And this is not just animation, and teaching Disney is not just about content, right? Even today, for example, we are discussing the film McFarland USA (2015), Disney, starring Kevin Costner, and what most people would say is a white savior role. Just Disney at its best–by the time you finish watching it, if you're not crying, there's something wrong with your soul, right? It's just like swords pulling all your strings. But it gets you to think about issues of incarceration, environmental justice, chemical pollution, production of our basic foods. You watch that, and the students say, “Wow, I went back home. And I talked about this with my relatives.” You can learn that lesson from watching and discussing that movie, and take it for the rest of your life. I could have probably taught environmental justice. I'm not sure it would have been as powerful as watching this movie. And so, I think that we can make a real contribution to understanding and to furthering social justice through engagement with these issues. And I'm hoping that some of my former students are also producing media, and they're producing it with a much greater sensitivity than those who produce the media they watch.
As you reflect back on your career, which I know is far from the finish line, you're so productive, who do you see as your major intellectual influences?
I tell my students now you're so lucky because when we were coming up, there was nobody writing about this, I know you can get a PhD on this. But in terms of the people that were so influential to me, I have to mention the work of the great Ella Shohat. She co authored a book on Unthinking Eurocentrism. But I read that and I thought, when I grow up, I want to write something a tenth as incredibly insightful as this is. That book to me and the work of Ella Shohat, in general, are just incredibly inspirational. And it's expansiveness of the transnational and of gender, race, and history, and just taking up third world cinema. I still go back and reference the work of Cardoso and Faletto Dependency and Development, and driving home the message that the economy is cultural, and the culture is economic. And if you try to separate those two, you're nowhere in terms of understanding anything. The Mattelarts, and especially Michèle Mattelart and her work on Women, Media, and Crisis–I love the work of Jacqueline Bobo and Janice Radway. And Michèle Mattelart was talking about audiences and intersectionality before people started taking it up in the United States: Jacqueline Bobo in relation to African American women and Janice Radway in relation to Reading the Romance. So I put those three together. And that's the dream trio to look at it transnationally, politically, race, and gender.
So how would you describe your role as an architect of communication scholarship? How would you describe yourself as an architect?
My Zoom background is Greg Hall, at the University of Illinois, Champaign Urbana campus, where the College of Media now resides, where the Institute of Communication research now resides. So I am in relation to a huge piece of architecture that's so meaningful to so many of us. and, I also think of Professor James Carey. When I was a doctoral student, and he told us that this is about bringing a seat to the table. And at this point, he told us, “There's a big table, and there's people talking, some of whom are dead, but they're still talking, and some of whom were present. And you're sitting on the outside, and someday you will bring a seat to the table. And where's your seat going to be? Who are you going to sit between? Who are going to be your interlocutors?” When he said that, of course, me and Sharon Mazzarella, who were sitting next to each other, we're like, “Yeah, right. We're never gonna sit at that table. We don't even belong here,” because we couldn't understand what anybody was saying at the moment. But now I see that yes, I have brought my seat to the table. Thank you, Professor Noshir Contractor and Professor Ellen Wartella for inviting me to do this. My commitment has been to diversify the professoriate. I see that working. I see so many diverse professors, many of whom I had something to do with, and all of whom if they asked me to, I will support them. I will throw down. And so that's building, that's diversifying, that's expanding the building of communication studies. So now you can see somebody like Bryce Henson, who's writing about Afro Latinidades, and Brazilenidades that kind of intense intersectionality, looking at another Hispano America that is inclusive, beyond just Spanish. That's institutionalized. That's what I and you have, Professor Molina, institutionalized Latino/Latina studies here at this university. And I just see that as the most profound kind of contribution to the architecture of academia because I want you to institutionalize a department, and you have tenure track lines. That is a kind of presence and visibility that is almost impossible to erase–that you can only build on.
Well, I couldn't have done it without you. That's exactly it. I love the way you said that you've contributed to the building, to adding chairs to the table, to expanding the table. We wouldn't be here without you. I personally wouldn't be here without you. You know that. Literally, I wouldn't have been a graduate student. I wouldn't have done a postdoc and Latino studies. I wouldn't be at the University of Illinois without you. And I think that is true for so many of the people that you've mentored. It's not just the US, it's global. Your impact on the field just expands throughout the Americas, throughout Europe, throughout Asia. It just is everywhere. So I want to thank you for the work that you've done in forcing some really difficult conversations, making it possible for many of us to have a voice. I just think about the students you've mentored and the impact they're having on the field, like Kelly Gates. It's really overwhelming to see how your role in building aspects of the field is going to continue giving back to communication scholarship for decades to come. So, I want to express my gratitude for myself, but also for others who wouldn't be here without you pushing us, without you writing about these issues, intervening in journals in our conferences. Thank you for being an architect of our field.
This episode of Architects of Communication Scholarship podcast series is presented by the International Communication Association and is sponsored by The Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information in Singapore. Our producer is Troy Cruz and Dominic Bonelli. Our executive producer is DeVante Brown. The theme music is by Humans Win. For more information about our participants on this episode, as well as our sponsor, be sure to check the episode description. Thanks for listening.
