Research

My current research projects examine, in various ways, the political economy of the U.S. media system. Although my focus is on the last 2-3 decades, my approach is broadly historical in the way it grounds the narrative of big media in social, cultural, and economic context. I use "archival" sources--legal records, economic and financial data, and contemporaneous trade & financial reporting--to strip away some of the Hollywood storytelling strategies that tend to construct this industry's history pure in its own terms.

Several of my recent publications examine the political economy of film exhibition over the last two decades. Like many businesses across the U.S. economy, movie theaters faced new—and enormously destructive—challenges in the decade leading up to the pandemic. Year after year, the crises deepened, while government regulators and business leaders in associated sectors sat silently on the sidelines. The explosive blow of the pandemic, which helped solidify the drift of consumers online, was certainly not expected. But the outcome of that existential disaster is hardly surprising given the lack of infrastructural support that plagued every aspect of exhibition prior to the pandemic. But the problems exhibitors faced were not of their own making; treated as an auxiliary business by oligopolistic  Hollywood studios and the Wall Street financiers, movie theater owners were forced into a reactive stance, protecting (and sometimes flailing) against the intense pressures of monopoly capitalism. 

My work with the MACRO Lab has involved a close analysis of corporate strategy in media the 2010s, specifically related to franchise filmmaking and the ripple effects it had on labor practices, trends in filmmaking aesthetics, and anticompetitive practices in Hollywood. This work is data-intensive and is periodically updated on the MACRO website.

I'm also currently working with comic book scholars nationwide on a collaborative ethnographic project funded by the SSHRC and built around San Diego Comic-Con 2023. Using a "swarm" methodology to conduct our fieldwork, we generated a rich, multimodal dataset that examines how conventions like SDCC intervene in the production, circulation, and consumption of cultural goods. Published results are forthcoming.