It is difficult in the current climate to describe these differences in language that is not already over-determined by culture wars and conflicts, rifts in our field that go back at least to the 1980s, if not earlier. I think it is safe to say that most of the world, reading our work in isolation from our institutional context, would see us as representing very different theoretical and ideological perspectives on some of these same issues. And I have found her collection on Commodity Activism very important as we are thinking through my current research on youth, new media, and participatory politics. Both represent attempts to come to grips with the contradictions and challenges of our current moment of media change. More recently, her Authentic (TM) book was released just a few months before Spreadable Media.
Our work seems to have paralleled each other - starting with her early work on children's culture and media, which emerged at about the same time I was publishing The Children's Culture Reader. We often find ourselves closely aligned on departmental policy concerns and she has in some ways been a mentor for me as I have adjusted to a new institutional setting. She is beloved here as a teacher and mentor who is incredibly dedicated to her students. I have come to develop enormous respect for Banet-Weiser during my time at USC. I anticipate Banet-Weiser bringing a very needed critical perspective to our discussions, one which is skeptical of the claims of some of our corporate participants, but one which is also open-minded and curious about their visions of political change. Banet-Weiser will be speaking at the event, drawing on her two recent books, the single-authored Authentic(TM): The Politics of Ambivalence in a Brand Culture and her anthology, co-edited with Roopali Mukherjee, Commodity Activism: Cultural Resistance in Neo-Liberal Times. Transmedia Hollywood 4: Spreading Change is coming up on Friday of this week, and in anticipation of that event, which is scheduled to have some substantive discussion about the intersection between brand cultures and political activism, I wanted to share this interview with my USC Annenberg School colleague Sarah Banet-Weiser.
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