March 11, 2013
Sut Jhally leans onto the lectern, delivering a lecture on “Media, Public Relations & Propaganda” with the ease and presence of a well-seasoned professor. He has spent the entirety of the hour-long class, recorded for online education, pacing back and forth at the front of the room with no lack of hand gestures to accompany his talk. Jhally’s voice fills the room as he looks around at his students, who are silent with the exception of a few quickly stifled coughs.
Jhally’s accent is a testament to his British roots, though he was born and lived in Kenya until he was six. The way various identities mix within Jhally himself helped him to realize the fluid nature of identity, said Jhally, and in combination with his university experiences prompted him to study how identity can be affected by its environment.
The way Jhally’s interests and work at the Media Education Foundation, of which he is founder and executive director, are incorporated into his career at UMass lends passion to his teaching.
Before coming to UMass in 1985, Jhally completed graduate degrees in Sociology and Communications in Canada, and taught for a year in New Hampshire. “My background is fragmented. I’ve always been, I wouldn’t say an outsider, but someone who didn’t fit in directly,” said Jhally in a recent interview at the MEF in Northampton, Mass. “When you’re not inside [the culture], you think about the culture you’re in in a different way.”
In the lecture recordings, Jhally wears a blue V-neck tee, looking as comfortable in front of his projected slides as he might relaxing at home. His glasses are tucked into the collar of his shirt, and his thin gray hair drifts across his shoulders as he motions towards the advertisements and commercials reproduced on the screen behind him.
“I’ve always thought there was a very strong relationship between what I taught and the way I taught and what I was interested in and the kinds of research I was doing. I never think of myself as a teacher or a researcher, it’s so integrated, it’s a total experience for me,” Jhally said.
For Jhally, online classes are similar to teaching in large lecture classes; in both settings, he said, the only students a professor really gets to know are those that attend office hours or seek to connect on an out-of-class basis. Both platforms give him the chance to teach as many students as possible, one of his goals as a professor; “Over the last five years, I know I can say for a fact: I’ve taught the most students,” Jhally said.
Jhally first became interested in the relationship between media culture and identity as an undergraduate student at York University in England in 1974. The multidisciplinary studies of Stuart Hall and his colleagues at the Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham helped to shape Jhally’s academic interests from the start of his college career.
The videos he produces through the MEF cater to young students and are designed to be used in high school and college classrooms, according to an interview with Jhally on the MEF website. The MEF works to make complicated subject matter more understandable with its videos: “We think these issues are too important to be left just to a discussion by experts,” said Jhally. There is no division between his research and the undergraduate courses he teaches on similar subjects, which range from gender and race to health and politics.
The most renowned of Jhally’s films is “Dreamworlds: Desire/Sex/Power in Music Video,” produced in 1990. This video challenges young students in particular to examine the music culture they are surrounded in by analyzing the glamorized sexism in music videos, according to the MEF website.
The most jarring part of this film is that the music of the videos is replaced with Jhally’s narration and analysis: “The challenge, then, for something like “Dreamworlds” is making sure people do not get lost in the seductive power of the images, and to make the images problematic, to take familiar images and make them strange so that they can be seen at a critical distance in new ways,” Jhally said a 2005 interview with Lynn Comella and Jeremy Earp.
The images of the video were certainly problematic. Though it was initially only distributed for educational purposes within the UMass Communications and Women’s Studies Departments, MTV Network’s legal department soon contacted Jhally with a cease-and-desist letter and the threat of a lawsuit for copyright violation. Though MTV did not pursue its legal case, the coverage “Dreamworlds” received “became a catalyst for Jhally’s future successes by increasing sales,” according to a MEF-produced factsheet about “Dreamworlds 3,” the most recent installment in the series.
The threat of a lawsuit also pushed Jhally to found the MEF. At the time, Jhally said UMass encouraged him to quiet his bolder opinions and publications. The university was implicated in MTV’s claim both because it employed Jhally and because the film was founded in his teaching. Rather than “essentially shutting up,” Jhally said he used media attention to draw attention to his film and make a publicized statement about academic freedom, free expression, and copyright laws.
The decision to create the MEF did not strain Jhally’s relationship with the university, however, and the foundation is now fully incorporated into his life: “What I do at UMass and what I do at MEF is not a job, it’s what I do. Friendships and other things happen around that, but that’s not what really drives me. And I don’t make that separation between, this life over here, and that life over there.”
“Dreamworlds” exemplifies the integration of Jhally’ research and productions with his teaching. The narration of the original installment is a succinct compilation of his classroom lectures, and most of the clips had been originally used in Jhally’s media criticism-oriented classes. According to the MEF factsheet, classroom responses to the film helped revise it into the 55-minute final production, which incorporates images from more than 160 music videos.
Ana Reyes, who graduated from UMass in 2003 with a bachelor’s degree in communications, interned with the MEF the summer after taking a class with Jhally. Though it was a large lecture, her experience with the class helped her to decide on her major: “I wanted to take more classes like it,” said Reyes. Jhally’s lectures included “subversive things I’d never heard before. It was absolutely riveting.”
Reyes’ most memorable experience with Jhally was an in-class illustration of the power of symbols. Everyone in the large class was instructed first to draw a picture of the American flag on a piece of notebook paper, and then to write the words “American flag.” When Jhally asked students to crumple and step on the words, most did so without hesitation. Asking the same for the picture of the flag, however, was “met with a really loud silence,” said Reyes. “There was just this sense that it felt wrong.”
The power of symbols penetrates most aspects of society, says Jhally, who chooses to focus on media and advertising in many of his productions. Reyes said her work with the MEF was to review a “real collage of images” ranging from commercials to print ads to billboards. In doing so, Reyes was ultimately helping to choose what would be featured in the MEF film on college binge drinking, “Spin the Bottle: Sex, Lies & Alcohol.”
Jhally’s classes are popular, something he attributes to a mixture of teaching crowd-drawing topics like advertising and gender and his evident passion for teaching. Jhally checksRateMyProfessors.com occasionally when bored, and finds a broad variety of student-submitted reviews on the website. Students’ comments ranged from “This class really opened my eyes” to simply “Sut Jhally lectures are wild.” One student said, “He just preaches his own views,” while another said, “Very biased, but well informed in his subjectivity.”
Jhally is not at all upset by the occasional negative comments, though. Said Jhally, “Good teaching should disturb you. If everyone likes and agrees with you then you’re doing something wrong.”
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