Cinema Journal is published quarterly by the University of Texas Press, in cooperation with the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. Members of the society receive the journal as one of the benefits of membership.

http://www.cmstudies.org/?page=cinema_journal

SCMS Recommended Procedures for

Promotion and/or Tenure, from Appointment through Review

 

The following guidelines address concerns of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies regarding the tenure and promotion of candidates whose work is focused in the areas covered by our organization: cinema, video, television, radio, digital media, and emerging media forms. Our purpose is to supplement and clarify evaluation standards to make them more consistent and to acknowledge the specific needs and circumstances of media scholars. While these are recommended practices, faculty need to check with their home institutions about the specifics of criteria and evaluation. We urge junior faculty to present this document to their departments and/or deans as a way to initiate conversations about the promotion/tenure process.

 

1.  The candidate should be given clearly formulated, written standards and criteria for each step in the promotion and tenure process.  These criteria should be documented in a personnel file from the time of his/her initial appointment.

 

If for any reason, the standards and criteria are changed during the candidate's probationary period, he/she should be allowed sufficient time to adjust to the new policies.

 

2. The institution should specify the exact relationships among the scholarship/creative work, teaching, and service components of evaluation, including specification of the weight of each component, and whether or not superior contributions in one area might balance or offset weaker contributions in another area.  The institution should provide clear, written indications of expectations about the relative amount of time to be devoted to each component.

 

Also, guidelines should specify how non-teaching pedagogical work will be credited and evaluated; this work may include developing new courses and programs; learning to teach online; transforming courses into online courses; developing media platforms for teaching; managing large lecture courses and teaching assistants, and other labor.   Evaluation procedures and criteria for online teaching should be specified.

 

3.  SCMS is especially concerned for media scholars hired in non-media-focused departments. The department should specify, as part of the hiring agreement, the value and relationship of the candidate's work to the mission of the department.  If a candidate is expected to accommodate him/herself to the needs of a department or faculty development plan, in terms of specific areas of research or teaching specialization, these expectations should be communicated in writing, as part of the personnel file, at the time of hire.  If developments in other areas of the department have implications for a media-studies position, they should be communicated to the candidate to allow for responsible accommodation, and they should be put into writing and become part of the personnel file.

 

4. Candidates should be given clear and detailed indication of how publications or creative work produced or distributed in new media forms are considered and evaluated in the tenure and promotion process.  New media forms produced by candidates may include the creation and design of websites and video essays, the curation of online archives, and the development of software and search engines to access or create new methods of research, writing, and media-making.  Institutions and departments should recognize the legitimacy of these emerging forms of scholarship and clarify the criteria by which they consider them to merit consideration in the tenure and promotion evaluation procedure.

 

5. The peer review process should make use of scholars familiar with the candidate's work and its relationship to similar work within the discipline of cinema and media studies.

 

Although our field is an individuated, distinct, and serious field of academy inquiry, it now comprises a great many interdisciplinary sub-areas of research and creative specialization.  In this situation, the choice of peer reviewers becomes extremely important since an ill-informed review can cause serious harm, especially if it is judged to be authoritative because the reviewer merely shares the same general field of study or is an administrative superior.  Specialists in one area of cinema and media studies or production use quite different forms of knowledge and methodological paradigms from others.  Such differences are routinely taken into account in organizing a peer review in other academic disciplines but are sometimes overlooked in cinema and media studies, especially if there are not many other such scholars or artists in the candidate's department. 

 

6. Consistent and accurate "outside" information and evaluation make possible a fair assessment of a candidate's accomplishments.

 

The Society for Cinema and Media Studies website provides resources, including lists of affiliated professional organization and journals in the field, considered appropriate venues for scholarly membership or activities. 

Three more Fieldnotes interviews coming in December/January!

SCMS Congratulates 2016 Academy Film Scholar Grant Recipients

SCMS would like to congratulate members  Dr. Donna Kornhaber and Dr. Ellen Christine Scott for being  named 2016 Academy Film Scholars by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.  Their respective book projects focus on female screenwriters in the early years of American cinema and the representation of slavery in Classical Hollywood films.  The Academy's Educational Grants Committee will award Kornhaber and Scott the scholars' $25,000 grant awards on the basis of their proposals.

"Both Kornhaber and Scott are brilliant scholars who will bring their expertise to these important but underserved topics," said Academy Grants Committee Chair Buffy Shutt. "Their unique perspectives will help illuminate and support the Academy's mission and we're thrilled to be supporting them.  We all look forward to seeing the fruits of their research once they have completed their projects."

Kornhaber is an assistant professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin.  Her project, Women's Work: The Female Screenwriter and the Development of Early American Film, is the first book-length study of the diverse group of women writers who played an outsized role in shaping the American film industry during the silent era.  The work's fundamental objective is to restore to the historical narrative these women's transformational creative contributions.

Scott is an assistant professor of cinema and media studies at the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television.  Her project, Cinema's Peculiar Institution, is the first comprehensive film-centered study exploring the evolution of censorship systems and patterns of representability that shaped the image of slavery on screen.  The work focuses on the Classical Hollywood period, a time of intensifying civil rights struggles, and emphasizes repression as  much as it does representation.

Summer Institute on Objects, Places and the Digital Humanities 

June 19-23, 2017 & June 2018

 

The Summer Institute on Objects, Places, and the Digital Humanities at the National Humanities Center in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina will focus on the theory and practice of digital work for topics in art, architectural, urban history or material culture.  The two-year Institute will provide "hands-on" training with tools for geospatial mapping, 3D modeling, photogrammetry, and data collection and visualization. 

 

Participants will develop a digital component to a research project related to the lives of things as interrogations of meaning, circulation, and change over the long life of places and objects. Participants will examine how modeling, database and mapping tools can move research in new directions, reframing evidence towards new questions and expanding scholarship into new arenas of research and public outreach. 

 

The workshop is intended for mid-career scholars engaged in research that can be expanded to include a digital dimension.  No previous experience in digital scholarship required.  The Institute will be led by Caroline Bruzelius and Mark Olson, both in the Department Art, Art History & Visual Studies and co-founders of the Wired! lab at Duke University. 

Application may be made until midnight February 21, 2017. 

Instructions are available via http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/digital-humanities

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