By Elisabeth Chen

Dr. Elizabeth Patton, who teaches MCS 399: Methods in Media and Communication Studies (the class the precedes MCS 499, the capstone seminar), is an Associate Professor for Media and Communication Studies as well as an affiliate faculty member for Gender, Women’s, + Sexuality Studies. Dr. Patton recently received an award from The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) for her research. Her book Easy Living: The Rise of the Home Office was published in 2020, and she is currently working on a new book project. She will be teaching MCS 399 again as well as MCS 101 in the Fall 2022 semester. 

Dr. Patton graciously agreed to this interview even though she is currently on sabbatical.

What was your research about? Why is it important to you? Why is your research important for others? 

“Most research on tourism and leisure does not examine personal media practices in relation to race, representation, resistance, and the role of place. My current research seeks to understand how everyday leisure practices are intertwined with public narratives and in conflict with them through the lens of media history. My goal is to examine how Black people resisted white supremacy during Jim Crow by documenting leisure practices and creating safe spaces for leisure and tourism. The right to leisure is important because everyone should be able to make time for rest, relaxation, and entertainment as part of our collective survival. Historically, the right to leisure has been connected to limiting the workday to eight hours and is defined in Article 24 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This article argues everyone has a fundamental right to rest and leisure, which includes a limit on work hours and paid holidays. In terms of Black identities, I want to consider what the right to leisure means and its implications for those whose historical worth was defined by labor.”

As mentioned previously, Dr. Patton has taught MCS 399, which is a class that focuses a lot on how to effectively conduct research and what methods of research to use. As someone who has taken the class, I wanted to know how this class informed the way she conducted her own research:

How do you think the concepts specifically in MCS 399: Methods in Media and Communication Studies have factored into your research process?

“I used several of the research methods taught in MCS 399. For example, I plan to conduct oral history interviews with people that are willing to share their memories traveling during Jim Crow. I also use other historical methods, such as archival research, and textual methods such as ideological analysis and semiotics to analyze the meaning and significance of historical records such as advertisements and home movies. Many of the theory-informed methods discussed in class, e.g., intersectionality, and theories used in cultural studies, such as political economy also guide my theoretical perspective in interpreting historical records.” 

What is your new book project about and what inspired you to begin this project? 

“My new book project, Documenting Black Leisure as a Form of Resistance, is based on the research I previously described. I was inspired by two recent experiences. First, I recently looked through my grandparents’ photo album, which I hadn’t done since I was a child. My family’s collection of photographs and home videos will provide a starting point for my book. These records provide an insight into my family's leisure and travel experiences and their response to and resistance to segregation during the Jim Crow era. Second, I have always loved to travel and increasingly have engaged with online travel blogs, Facebook groups, such as Nomadness, and Black content creators’ vlogs on YouTube to identify safe places to visit. The Black Travel Movement community is a network of resources for travelers of color. It is a digitized Green Book on steroids!”

What do you hope readers will gain from this book? What have you gained through the writing process so far? What have been some challenges?  

“The pandemic has certainly been a problem for research regarding travel and leisure, especially accessing archival documents. Fortunately, travel is starting to happen again, and I have been able to visit a few archives, such as the Kodak archives at the University of Rochester. Ultimately, I hope readers will understand the political importance of leisure in a system of capitalism and how African-Americans during Jim Crow practiced leisure as a form of resistance.”

by Jordan Lomax 

Photo credit: Jamyla Krempel

I recently got to sit down with Jamyla Krempel, an Adjunct Instructor in the MCS Department. She teaches MCS 366: Podcasting, and works as a Digital Content Director at WYPR, a public radio station in Baltimore. Today, we get to learn about the new podcast Professor Krempel worked as well as a behind-the-scenes look at what podcast production is like.

Q: What’s your podcast called, and what’s it about?

It’s called Wavelength: Baltimore's Public Radio Journey, and it looks at four public radio stations in Baltimore: their origin stories, their evolutions, and what’s next for them. We focus on WEAA, WBJC, WTMD, and WYPR.

Q: How did the idea for this podcast come about?

It came from our General Manager, LaFontaine Oliver. It’s WYPR’s 20th anniversary year, and he wanted to do something that takes a look at our history, but he didn’t want it to be just a vanity project. We have a really great radio community in Baltimore, and so he wanted to talk about this shared story about radio in Baltimore, so we decided to look at those four stations and chronicle their rise and evolution. 

Q: What topics do you cover in the podcast?

A lot of the stations started as college-run stations, so we started at the beginning, from the origins of radio period and then the origins of radio in Baltimore, going back to the 1920s. And each episode covers a specific time period, so the one that drops next Wednesday [per the date of this conversation] covers 1985 to 1995, so we’re looking at specific time periods and what was going on at those stations at the time. We have first-hand accounts from people who have worked at those stations, so there’s a lot of voices, we have some sound, air checks, and clips from shows during those particular years that we’re covering, so there are a lot of elements in each episode.

Q: What was it like doing the preparation, research, and pre-production for the project?

It was a lot. I have a Google folder that’s probably over 40 articles long of just things I’ve been reading– everything from newspaper articles, to old program guides, to academic articles about radio, videos, lots of things I’ve been collecting as I started to learn about these stations. I grew up in this area, so I was familiar with a lot of these stations but certainly not how they got started, so I learned a lot about them. I also learned a lot just from speaking to people. There's three of us on the team –myself (I’m the executive producing it), and then we have a producer and an audio editor– and so myself and our producer just started calling people and getting recommendations from people, and getting a lot of history that way just from talking to folks who were there at the time.

Q: What was the biggest challenge in producing the podcast?

Trying to cover such a wide span of history with so many different stations, because you want to be fair and you want to make sure every station is getting their story told. For example, for this episode, I have four voices from one particular radio station and two from another, and I was a little stressed about that, like “should I have four voices from each?” But that’s just not possible for everyone. But just wanting to do justice to each station’s story and trying to get as many voices as possible. There are a lot of people that want to participate that we don’t have the ability to incorporate, so that’s a little bit of a challenge.

And then, as we’re talking about the 60s and 70s, people don’t always remember every single detail, so trying to make sure this is a product of journalism where you want to fact check and you want things to be accurate, but sometimes there’s just no way to check these things. There was a funny thing that happened with the last episode in which someone gave us some tape. They didn’t lead us to believe it was their voice, but they didn’t say that it wasn’t, and it sounded like their voice. But after the podcast dropped –because in the script “this is so and so’s voice”– and they came back to the producer and said “oh, that wasn’t my voice,” and the producer was like “what do you mean?” So it can be tricky when you’re going back in time with something that covers history, but the pros outweigh the cons, so it’s fun.

Q: What has been your favorite part about producing the podcast?

Probably interviewing people, because it’s been a couple years since I’ve had the opportunity to do that. Just getting people’s stories, writing questions, and kind of letting the interviewee direct where the conversation was going, and go on tangents and remember things. I was listening back to an interview today with a host that I recorded, and he started singing one of the songs that he always used to play on the air. It’s just these really nice, personal moments and people have such a connection to that kind of work and are really proud of it, so it’s nice to be able to remind people of their contributions to the radio community.

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