Pictures, Words, and Lies: Representing Gender & Race in the News Media

The annual Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (WGSS) Symposium at Northeastern University brings together feminist thought leaders—scholars, journalists, activists, and public intellectuals—to address an urgent concern of the moment from varieties of feminist perspectives. This year’s annual Northeastern WGSS Women’s History Month Symposium focuses on the news media in its broadest sense and how it reports on gender, race, and marginalized identities. Here, we intend to examine the multi-faceted term “media” as representation, creation, industry, ideology, and collective practice. In curated conversations, panelists will examine how progressive social movements are (mis)represented in mainstream media and news, but also how we attempt to challenge those narrow and false depictions.

Key questions for this symposium include: What is feminist journalism? How do anti-racist and feminist methodologies of truth-seeking alter journalism? Can mainstream media ever really be feminist? How do new forms of media provide platforms for marginalized voices? Are some forms of media more conducive to feminist content? How can we change the tired tropes that misrepresent gendered and raced subjects? What are the limits/potentials that exist in the current media ecosystem for the pressing issues of our times, including reproductive justice, democracy, Black lives, trans lives? How have journalistic ethics shifted in an age where news and entertainment are conflated? What are the boundaries of news media outlets and how are they dis/respected?

The symposium will use the frame of pictures, words, and lies. We will convene a group of interdisciplinary scholars, practitioners, journalists, photographers, and media-makers to dissect the many ways the news media construct and present the identities of those on whom it reports. Speakers will separately address power and possibilities in the domains of image and text. The morning panels will focus on images and the afternoon on text. The morning will conclude with a roundtable of panelists from both morning panels; the afternoon will conclude with a roundtable of panelists from both afternoon panels.

Register for all events or for single sessions as your schedule allows if you cannot commit to the full day! All events will be held live and in person at the Cabral Center on Northeastern's Boston campus.

FRIDAY, MARCH 21

9:00 am: Check in begins; breakfast available

9:45 am: Welcome from the Program

10:00 – 10:45 am: “Focus, Frame, & Feminism”
Andrea Bruce (Photographer/Educator), Adrienne Davis (Washington University, St. Louis), Lola Flash (Artist/Photographer)

How do photojournalists bring their own experiences of gender and race to what they see? Are there distinctly feminist ways to choose, focus on, and frame visual images? This panel will take us into the sensory, specifically the seeing, of subjects and objects (is there a difference?) who are captured in a literal and figurative lens. It will open up our appreciation the politics of the filmic gaze in its gendered and racialized particularity and reflect as well on the secondary view brought to bear by consumers of photographic journalism.

10:45 – 10:50 am: Coffee Break

10:50 – 11:25 am: “Curating Gender”
Robin Givhan (Washington Post), Lex McMenamin (Teen Vogue)

This panel anticipates the photographic and/or filmic lens. Based on the premise that the gendered and racialized body is a medium of its own—one of shape, muscle, color, lashes, nails, cosmetics, jewels, wardrobe, walk, posture, etc.—this panel will address the experience of being seen, especially in the political arena, as well as the tension between what is offered by the body and what is captured by the camera and the photographer who wields it.

11:25-11:30 am: Break

11:30 am – 12:45 pm: Roundtable: Pictures
Andrea Bruce (Photographer/Educator), Adrienne Davis (Washington University, St. Louis), Lola Flash (Artist/Photographer), Robin Givhan (Washington Post), Lex McMenamin (Teen Vogue)

This roundtable discussion will pull together panelists from both panels 1 and 2 into a discussion about the interplay between photo subject and photographer and the many factors that create the images portrayed in news media.

12:45 – 2:00 pm: Lunch

2:00 – 2:45 pm: “Weaponizing Information: Mis/DisInformation, Trolling, and New Media”
Alejandra Caraballo (Harvard Law School Cyberlaw Clinic), Joan Donavan (Boston University and the Critical Studies Institute), Sarah T. Roberts (UCLA)

Bringing us much of the visual world as well as the written word in this third millennium are the mysterious algorithms of new media. From the explosion of on-line news sites to social media platforms designed for “sharing,” the world wide web enables both disruption and retrenchment of misogynist, racist, and homo- and transphobic messaging. Moderating this enormous array are both professional aspirations to objectivity (using purportedly rational mechanisms) and sinister and barely hidden biases (and highly motivated proprietary governance interests) that promote trolling and disinformation. This panel will give us insight into the effects of the presumed neutrality of algorithms markets in our gendered and racialized world.

2:45 – 2:50 pm: Break

2:50 – 3:35: “Press(ing) Issues”
Errin Haines (The 19th* News), Donna Ladd (Mississippi Free Press), Lewis Raven Wallace (The View From Somewhere)
Moderator: Meg Heckman (Northeastern University)

Finally, subject-specific experts, immersed in media coverage of [whatever subject-specific writers we get, e.g.: reproductive justice, trans politics, and BLM (or maybe voting?), SCOTUS] will address how the larger news (and disinformation) landscape affects pressing contemporary issues. How have “pictures, words, and lies” advanced and/or hindered progress for constituencies in need? How have these constituencies managed problems of representation, including the framing of inconvenient truths and “embarrassing cousins”? What is and is not being covered by the mainstream press and in the interest of whom?

3:35-3:45: Break

3:45 pm – 5:00 pm: Roundtable: Words
Alejandra Caraballo (Harvard Law School Cyberlaw Clinic), Joan Donavan (Boston University), Sarah T. Roberts (UCLA), Errin Haines (The 19th* News), Donna Ladd (Mississippi Free Press), Lewis Raven Wallace (The View From Somewhere)

This final roundtable will bring together the panelists from panels 3 and 4 to discuss how news creation, trolling, and misinformation interact in the current media ecosystem. Moderators (and audience) will pose general questions for the panelists to discuss and open discussion among panelists, rather than targeting questions to specific panelists.

Host or Publisher Northeastern University Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program