Call for Submissions: Teaching with Reality Television
Call for Lesson Plans: Teaching with Reality Television
From The Real World to The Bachelor, the reality TV genre provides unique insight into how television is changing, while also drawing on familiar generic conventions and modes of address. Scholars continue to trace its effects on marketing and advertisers, above and below-the-line labor practices, multi-platform storytelling, fan labor, and questions of governmentality and surveillance, among many others. Teaching with reality television allows instructors to discuss the rise of convergence culture and the role of new media, making for a case study likely to resonate with students through their engagement with television and related social media. Teaching Media Quarterly is interested in learning and sharing how instructors teach with reality television and why.
Contributors are welcome to consider the following questions:
- How do you historicize reality television in the classroom?
- Which scholarly texts do you assign in conjunction with particular reality television programs?
- If you ask students to create their own reality programming, what does the assignment look like?
- How do you attend to questions of difference in reality television - gender, sexuality, race, ability, class, etc.?
- How do you teach the relationship between reality television and neoliberalism?
- How do you teach the relationship between reality television and feminized media?
- How does reality television lend itself to political economy analyses?
- What is the relationship between streaming services (Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, etc.) and reality television?
- How do you teach the relationship between reality television and other forms of media (social media, new media, etc.)?
The deadline for submissions is June 1st.
