After another competitive search, the Center for Media at Risk at the Annenberg School for Communication is delighted to announce its Postdoctoral Fellows for 2021-2022, who will begin working with the Center this Fall.
Congratulations to Chaz Barracks and Perry B. Johnson! We are thrilled to welcome both Fellows, who will expand their research using interdisciplinary approaches and multi-media platforms to deepen the Center’s emphasis on free and critical media practice and scholarship. Perry Johnson will be jointly affiliated with both the Center for Media at Risk (directed by Barbie Zelizer) and the Annenberg Center for Collaborative Communication (directed by Sarah Banet-Weiser).
Dr. Chaz Barracks (he him/they them) is a scholar-in-residence at the Bonner Center for Civic Engagement and affiliated with the Rhetoric and Communications department at the University of Richmond through June, 2021. He earned the PhD in Media, Art, and Text from Virginia Commonwealth University in May, 2020. His research interests blend together Black studies, Black queer feminist narratives, and queer world making epistemologies through media arts and performance making. Chaz’s scholarly ambitions are to cultivate creative expression through interdisciplinary mediums, such as podcast and short films that illuminate local Black cultural production. Chaz is a Bonner Scholar alum and continues much of his service work at Six Points Innovation Center (6PIC) in the Blackademic-in-residence program, helping build the library space and other public knowledge opportunities.
Perry B. Johnson (she/her) is a Ph.D. candidate at the Annenberg School for Communication and a graduate affiliate with the Department of Gender & Sexuality Studies at the University of Southern California. She is the co-founder and co-director of The Sound of Victory, an interdisciplinary, multi-platform initiative dedicated to investigating the historical relationship between music, sound and sport. Perry is also a research fellow with The Popular Music Project at USC Annenberg’s Norman Lear Center, where she is working to design and implement a series of public-facing, interdisciplinary efforts dedicated to investigating gender inequality and diversity in popular music. As part of this effort, Perry is co-executive producing The New New, a new podcast and collaborative project with Gxrlschool that highlights artists, activists, and industry innovators challenging inequity through popular culture. Perry’s research and practice focus on music, popular culture, and American cultural histories, with an emphasis on archives, public scholarship, power, identity and questions of belonging.
