Article,

The Founding Mothers of Communication Research: Toward a History of a Gendered Assemblage

, and .
Critical Studies in Media Communication, 31 (1): 3--26 (January 2014)
DOI: 10.1080/15295036.2013.849355

Abstract

This paper blends historical retrieval, feminist political intervention, and an effort to think about our fields from the perspective of assemblage theory in an attempt to remember the founding mothers of the fields of communication and media studies. Entwined humanistic and posthumanistic impulses create space for voices, labors, bodies, and other material things that deserve our attention. At the narrative and moral core of the story is a group of remarkable yet unsung women who, from the late 1930s through the early 1950s, helped to invent practices, produce research, shape thinking, and establish social relationships that laid foundations for media and communication study in the United States and the world. These women are the figures we call the founding mothers of our field. Focusing on the Paul Lazarsfeld-led Office of Radio Research (ORR) and the Bureau of Applied Social Research (the Bureau) from 1937 to 1949, we attend to four representative women—Herta Herzog, Hazel Gaudet, Thelma Ehrlich Anderson, and Rose K. Goldsen—as means of illustrating roles played by women in an assemblage of human and nonhuman agents.

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