Hello, I’m Ellen Wartella, and welcome to this episode of the Architects of Communication Scholarship series, a production of the ICA Podcast Network. Today, our architect is Dafna Lemish. Dafna Lemish is a Distinguished Professor and Associate Dean at the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers University. She's the founding editor of the Journal of Children and Media, and a fellow of the ICA. She is author and editor of numerous books on children, media, and gender representations, including the 2022 Routledge International Handbook of Children, Adolescents and Media. Today, Dafna Lemish is in conversation with Neta Kligler-Vilenchik. Neta is an Assistant Professor of Communication and Journalism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. And here is Neta Kligler-Vilenchik.
I'm so honored to be interviewing you today Dafna, as you are so closely connected to my own journey in the field of communication. I was your undergraduate student when you were Chair of the Department of Communication at Tel Aviv University almost 20 years ago, if you can believe it. And I will never forget your Intro to Communication course where week by week you introduced us to the landmark theories of the field, or the seminar I took with you in my third year of undergrad on children and the internet, which has been so influential in the way I still think about children media and the relationship between them. Thank you for introducing me to our discipline D afna. I'm so excited for today's conversation.
Oh, Neta, this is so exciting. Thank you for your kind words.
Okay, so Dafna, tell me a little bit about your personal history and how you came into academia and into the field of communication.
I dreamed from childhood to be a journalist, I wanted to be kind of a National Geographic journalist that travels the world, goes to exotic places, and write stories. So when it was time to go to college, University in Israel, there was no journalism program. So I figured what would be the best discipline to study in order to become a National Geographic journalist. And I studied Geography but when I was done with Geography, Elihu Katz established a Communication Institute in Israel. So I said, well, here's an opportunity to study a little bit of Communication. So I studied Communication for my master's degree, hoping again, to be a journalist, I had no intention to have an academic career. And then I met Peter, who is my partner, life partner for many, many years. He's originally from California, he wanted to go back to United States to his PhD, he enrolled and was accepted to Ohio State University and received a TA position in the department of Hebrew and Middle Eastern Languages. So the chair of the departments said, oh, my goodness, we need a teacher in Hebrew. Can your wife teach Hebrew? He said, Yeah, she can teach Hebrew and I said, Great. We're going to this exotic country known as the United States, and I'm going to be a journalist, but you know, I'll teach Hebrew a little bit on the side. But then the chair well, if you want to teach Hebrew as a TA, you actually have to be a student. Okay, I enrolled with a PhD in Communication just so I can teach Hebrew, so I can be a journalist and Elihu Katz was my master's thesis advisor, I asked him to write me a recommendation, I was completely naive, I had no idea that he is a big name just happened to be somebody who taught me. So he wrote me a recommendation letter and I was accepted. And I think after two weeks in the program, I discovered that I actually love academia.
So we heard about one mentor of yours as you came into the field; Elihu Katz. Can you tell me about some other mentors you had as you came into the field?
During the PhD program, my two big mentors were, of course, Ellen Wartella, she was my mentor for the era of Children and Media, she introduced me to the field, her most important impact on me was not necessarily only the disciplinary element, but also understanding that academia is a real place with challenges and difficulties. So that was a really, really important kind of mentorship to the reality of the academic world. My other advisor, I would say a mentor was somebody who is not in our field anymore, but his name is Tom McCain. He was at the time the editor of the Journal of Broadcasting, before it was called Journalism of Croadcasting, and Electronic Media. He hired me to be his editorial assistant, and we were doing everything with, you know, in paper with little flip cards. And from him, I learned a lot about editing and about networking in the field. So that was a huge part of my mentorship. When I came back to Israel years later, the main mentor that I give credit to is Akiba Cohen. From him, I learned a lot about Israeli academic, about bureaucratic academics, about decision making process, about fighting for what you need. I try to take a little bit from each one of them.
And how about intellectually who are some intellectual influencers from maybe the early things you read?
I was completely taken by Marshall McLuhan, the title of his book, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. I've been thinking about that throughout my career of looking at media as an extension of who we are of our senses of what we can do. I love that concept. The other kind of thing that intellectually made a huge difference for me was for PhD qualifying exam or comprehensive exams. One of the questions was to write about the 10 most influential articles or books or whatever that you read throughout your PhD. One of them was hugely influential on my thinking it was Berelsons article from the early 60s, where he coined the sentence that some media have some effect on some people under some circumstances with some content, I mean, so all qualified some, some, some, some. And I loved it still, because there are no one, you know, if you do this, this will happen. And there's no causality it's all so qualified by which media which shall what's the content? What are the needs? What's the context? From Elihu, I was fascinated by the concept of the active audience and I was later on drawn to Dave Buckingham with children and media, researchers from the UK, who flipped the thinking about children and media that was dominating the American Developmental Psychology tradition and flipped it into think of the child at the center, the child has an active audience, etc, you know that the child is an active person in making meaning person. And then also I was highly influenced by feminist writers. I read you know, the classic Simone de Beauvoir and Betty Friedan, psychoanalytic analysis feminists like Nancy Tudor, Carol Gilligan, and later on, you know, the intersectionality, and bell hooks, etc. I don't have one person that I would say, this was my light. And this is what I followed, it's always grabbing new ideas and those things from different people and trying to integrate them into something that meets my needs or my thinking or my projects.
I have a question about the communication, thinkers and ideas you mentioned, would you characterize them as limited effects models? Was that a term used as a at the time? Would you use that term now to think about it?
I don't like the word effects, with a strong effect and limited effect or medium effect, because I see the process of using media is more interactive, my Production to Communication course, many, many years ago, in Naftali, building in Tel Aviv University, I remember saying to the students that I don't see it as I can think of the child, the person viewing, and the content at the time, we talked about television, it was before talking about other forms of screen culture, and I see the impact somewhere in between, like the interaction between somewhere in between. So when we're talking now, the meaning we're creating is not in you and not in me, it's in somewhere in the air space between us somewhere above the Atlantic Ocean. So yes, I don't like particularly the term effects. But I'm more into thinking of interaction kind of impact or influences or meaning making, etc.
How would you describe your area of research today? And maybe how has the description that you would give it to change over the years?
So I always had two areas of research, I had the area of gender representation and gender thinking, etc, and feminist theory, and I had the children and media area, I was working on both of them parallel, I was told at the time, you know, to kind of lock down my feminist area, because it's not going to help me get tenure, and it's not considered mainstream, and it's politically sensitive, and it may raise some questions and issues. I don't recall in my American context, thinking or reading feminist literature, there was nobody there. And I was gently advised to be careful with my feminist work. So I was doing it as an addition. I mean, my area was officialy children and media. But then, after a few years, I discovered that children are also gendered. So there's two topics actually can interact. And I can do work on children and media and gender. So when those two areas crossed and integrated. That was my main path since then. My specific research questions I think were deeply influenced by life. I have three children, many of the questions because I was starting to have an immediate many of the questions I asked were kind of things I learned from my children. I did a postdoctoral year in University of Lawrence, Kansas Department of Human Development. And at the time, my older son was three and a half and I had the baby a few couple months, baby. And I was fascinated by the fact that my older son was already a regular television viewer with tastes and recognizing and understanding and I was wondering how the baby is going to become a viewer. And then when my daughter I have a third child, a daughter when she was in kindergarten, and we were in Philadelphia and Annenberg for a semester, and she was in kindergarten there and I was really fascinated by how children that age understood what television is, like. Again, we're talking about early 90s. And then when she was a twin and she was interested in the Spice Girls I said hmm, this is a really interesting feminist project. So life has determined in many ways, the kinds of questions I asked, and also my personal experiences. And when I immigrated to the United States from Israel about 13 years ago, I gradually became very interested in other academics like me, for immigrants. So I did a big study, which I'm in the process of writing. So I have diverse places around the world of immigrants, and about what does it mean to be an academic immigrant, the asset that you bring to institutions, the challenges you have the difficulties you experience, etc, etc. So again, the question arose from my own experience of being an immigrant, having an accent, always been very conscious that my English is not as good as others always feeling, oh, if I only could say it in Hebrew, it will be so much more precise and nuanced. So my area is children and media from a feminist perspective, it evolved over the years and was fertilized by life experiences.
So I'm curious in what ways being a woman being a mother impacted your career. And maybe we can connect that to this question of, you know, gender equity in academia.
When I was doing my PhD, I had absolutely no, and also my BA in my masters and my PhD, and my postdoc, I did not know one woman in our field, one who has a family with children, like Ellen Wartella, her two sons were born much later, you know, I became pregnant my first year of my PhD student, I had the second chapter. So I had no role model of anybody who's done that and worked around it. And I think it's different now. And I'm sure it makes a huge difference to young women coming into academia, that they have role models of women who are successful, who are great and still can balance family and children and career and, and go to conferences, but I had several bumps in the road that were gender related. And when I share those experiences with colleagues and friends, I couldn't find one woman colleague of my generation, and even younger, even 10 years younger, who did not have similar stories. And I walked them in the corridor one day, and I was greeted by one of the top professors, not in our department, not in our field. I know his intention was good. But just to show you how deep the bias, he said, what do you care about promotion, you know, that everybody loves you. And it was so hurtful. I mean, the idea that women don't care about their ranks or promotion, their income, they're making their reputation. Where all we want is to be loved. You know, all we want is to please others. But it showed me how the bias and the discrimination is so ingrained, that people don't even feel that they they think they're equal rights for women. Now this was 20 years ago, there's still some, you know, there's there's still disparity and that's very clear in all universities. Women, women do not know how to negotiate they give in much earlier in negotiation. They make less money, they're not promoted as quickly. When a woman is ready for promotion, often she'll say, well, why don't you wait another year? You know, just let's strengthen your case. There have been studies done about promotion letters, and recommendation letters. So women are described as she's industrious, she's caring, she's very social, she's a good team, player. And men are more about their accomplishments. And nobody cares if they are warm and caring. So there's still things have improved since I was 20 years ago, denied my first promotion. But so clearly, things have changed. But we're still not there. The other thing that I want to say is that there is this expectation that you have this linear path. So suddenly, if there is a break, what did she do in 2017? This is suspicious, you know, how come she didn't publish during those years and not considering the possibility that women happen to have babies during this time, especially when you're up for promotion and tenure, and most women are still in their childbearing years. So being open to the possibility that our careers are not necessarily linear, that life gets in the way, and it could go like this. And still, you can have a brilliant career. I mean, so even how you look at women's records. Oftentimes, there's a bias, the teaching reviews by students, we know from lots of systematic research, women get lower teaching reviews, and women of color, in particular get lower teaching reviews, especially women and and women of color, who raise sensitive issues. So if you dare talk about feminism and racism and whatever, at least in today's climate in United States, which is so politically sensitive, the chances of getting terrible reviews are very high. So it's a complicated issue. There's still lots to do in terms of gender and race, equality in academia like in other places in society,
What would be some important lessons you feel you've learned along the way that you'd like to impart to younger scholars?
Take advantage of opportunities that come your way that you didn't expect. I love when we have a new cohort of PhD students, I always quoted them a quote from Eleanor Roosevelt, which I love, there, do the things that you think you cannot do. And so opportunities come your way grab them, you know, even if you think, Oh, am I ready for this? I often go to ICA conferences, and they go to a panel and they listen to people talk and say, Oh, my goodness, they're so smart. And they're doing such wonderful work. What the hell am I doing here? You know, who am I to be sitting in. So particularly my advice to him is to be aware of impostor syndrome and grab opportunities that come your way, that will be one big advice.
Sometimes I feel like for younger scholars, it's a careful balance between sort of doing you know, especially when you're dealing with a high workload, dealing with all of the things you already have to do, when versus taking up new opportunities, or you know, new things that you're asked to do. So do you have also well, maybe advice about that?
I mean, choose carefully who you're working with, because that makes a huge, huge difference. So when I say grab opportunities, I don't mean do everything that falls in your lap, because you need to be selective, you need to be able to say no to things that don't fit your interest, or your you know, your timeline or your load or whatever it is. So choosing the right partners is part of the consideration of which opportunities to grab and which to say, I actually, you know, that person and I, we don't have a good chemistry, I better not do that. But my other advice would be follow your passion. I mean, really, study, explore, learn, research, teach the things that you really care about, there are so many obstacles on the road, you really have to love what you're doing, you really have to believe in what you do, you really have to want to do it, you really have to have that curiosity to want to study it. And your topic might change. It doesn't mean that you have to be wedded to one particular research question or one particular area, you can change, you can grow, you should change and grow. You learned from your partners, and they help you expand and grow.
In your area of research. What do you see as big intellectual questions, big societal challenges for scholars to address in the next decade or so?
One of them is I'm fascinated by the fluidity or the blurring of online life, and in the concrete, real world life, because online life is just as real in the sense of using that word real life versus online life. So they're both real. So that's the concrete physical, and there is the online, the blurring of them, the meaning of them, the relationship between the two of them, the ability of us as humans, and especially the young generation, to naturally and seamlessly flow from one world to another, to take from both to build relationships in both. I think this is a huge, huge issue, which will become more and more, it's already you know, dominant, it will become more and more dominant in our lives. And I think the pandemic accelerated it because of our dependency on technology and zoom technology, etc, etc. Related also is the area of multi-modality literacy, I mean, the idea of you know, that we are now communicating via so many modalities and our need to develop literacy and ability to manage them, to be proficient in them, to create in them in all of them to move from one to another to do multiple modalities. At the same time. I think that would be a really interesting research area for the field of children and media, new and young people. I think another area which is crucial for all of us is communicating across differences. How are we going to learn to use our disciplines of communication, to be able to communicate across differences and create and burst those bubbles and create a shared reality? That to me is a huge, huge challenge for our field. And a huge, huge opportunity for our field to make a huge difference.
Since this podcast series is Architects of Communication Scholarship. If you think of yourself as an architect, what would you say that it is you have built?
I see myself as a bridge because all my career I bridged between different things or different perspectives. So I bridge between qualitative and quantitative research, I bridge between developmental psychology dominance of children, media and United States and the cultural studies meaning making ethnographic more qualitative aspect of human media. I bridge between Feminist Theory and Media Studies. I bridge between Israel and United States that which is clearly different cultures and really important for me a bridge between scholarship and industry of practical production. So throughout my career, I've always been involved in all kinds of organizations that are production oriented, with industries with policymakers, with educators, with parent groups, translating the research into something that will make a difference. One of the projects maybe the one that I'm one of the ones that i'm most proud of was a project, a while back when I was I was giving lots of conscious raising lecturers to Israel at the time to parent groups and educators and industry advertisers and about gender representation in the media. They love the critique of gender representations. And they were just establishing the channel, they really want to learn and do better. There was a small group and one of the participants says, I completely agree with you. Absolutely. So what should we do? And it caught me off guard and said, Oh, my goodness, I know what is wrong. But do I have a good answer? What do I want to see on the screen for children? Do I just want all the boys to sit there and cry and express their emotions, and all the girls to be aggressive and climb trees in overalls? No, that's not what I want. I'm on the board of a very famous organization called the Prix Jeunesse. It's an international festival for children's quality television. And I was just about to go to the Prix Jeunesse for the festival, which happens every two years. And there are people from around the world. And they're all busy creating very high quality television and other media for children. And I said, Well, I'm going to meet all these wonderful people, I'll ask them, What do you do? You know, so I interviewed three, four people. And i was so fascinated that I ended up interviewing 135 People from 65 countries around the world, I couldn't stop because I learned so much about different cultures and the meaning of gender in different cultures, and what are the issues for them, but gender equality, they learned so much, not only about media and children, but about the world. And so what I did is I took their many examples. And I created the model, conceptualize into a model of eight principles of creating better television for children. And it was published in the book. So it ended up being the books "Screening Gender in Children's Television". It's a perfect example, in my view of my desire to bridge between academia and the real world, because I took my skills as a researcher and somebody who can conceptualize and I interviewed them and what they told me it was their knowledge. So I gave them a voice, and helped organize their knowledge and give it back to the world if you may. I actually did what I dreamed of doing. So it's not called journalism, It's called scholarship. So to answer what kind of an architect I am. I build bridges.
Thank you so much for this conversation Dafna. I was so honored to interview you. And I learned so much from our conversation today as I have from you in the 20 years or so that we've known each other so thank you so much.
This episode of Architects of Communication Scholarship Podcast Series is presented by the International Communication Association Podcast Network, and is sponsored by the School of Communication at Hong Kong Baptist University. Our producer is Troy Cruz. Our executive producer is Aldo Diaz Caballero. Our production consultant is Nick song. 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.
