On January 10, 2020, I appeared on Good Morning Texas, WFAA’s morning variety show, to talk about the multiplication of streaming services and how they fared against cable subscriptions. The initial producers’ pitch to my university’s communications team was for someone to talk about subscription prices for streaming versus cable. Fortunately, the producers also allowContinue reading “TV Appearance to Discuss Streaming Platforms”
Author Archives: Juan
The Other Hidden Figures
The historical film drama Hidden Figures (Theodore Melfi, 2016) depicts how the work at NASA of three black women — Katherine Johnson, Mary Jackson, and Dorothy Vaughan — helped launch the first American man into orbit. Although all three women start in the West Area Computing unit, the segregated group of black women computers, KatherineContinue reading “The Other Hidden Figures”
The Datalogical Drug Mule
This month marks the publication of my article “The Datalogical Drug Mule” in the Data issue of Feminist Media Histories. This article had a varied lifetime, first as a final paper for a media theory class, then as an award-winning conference paper for the International Communication Association, and finally as a journal publication. In short,Continue reading “The Datalogical Drug Mule”
A Revolution of One
This spring I had the opportunity to program a film screening at UC Santa Barbara’s Pollock Theater and chose La Revolución de los Alcatraces (2013), an award-winning documentary by Mexican filmmaker Luciana Kaplan. La Revolución tells the story of Eufrosina Cruz Mendoza, a native of Santa María Quiegolani, a small indigenous community in southern Oaxaca, Mexico.Continue reading “A Revolution of One”
A Job (Un)like Any Other
In my role as Graduate Student Representative, for this year’s Society of Cinema and Media Studies conference I organized a workshop on graduate student labor titled “A Job (Un)like Any Other: Graduate School as Academic Labor.” The impetus for this workshop was to disabuse the notion that graduate school is merely training for a career to come.Continue reading “A Job (Un)like Any Other”
Trains As Precarious Worlds, from Snowpiercer to La Bestia
Two trains have commanded significant attention this past summer: the Snowpiercer, the fictional train in Bong Joon-ho’s post-apocalyptic film, and “La Bestia”, the freight train travelling from Mexico’s southern border to Mexico City. The first holds the last survivors of a global climatic catastrophe; the second holds hundreds of Central Americans hoping to immigrate toContinue reading “Trains As Precarious Worlds, from Snowpiercer to La Bestia”
Video Cultures, Communities, and Circulation in the 21st Century
On February 1998, the New York Times decreed that Blockbuster Video had established itself as the main video rental outlet, pushing all other independent video retailers into marginal and niche markets. Fifteen years later, the closure of the last Blockbuster locations still in operation heralded the end of an era, where online streaming services hadContinue reading “Video Cultures, Communities, and Circulation in the 21st Century”
juan llamas-rodriguez 