Barbie Zelizer Wins AEJMC's 2011 Tankard Award
Congratulations to ICA Past President Barbie Zelizer for winning the 2011 Tankard Award at AEJMC's Conference in St. Louis. Zelizer received the award for her book About to Die: How News Images Move the Public (Oxford, 2010). Zelizer is the Raymond Williams Professor of Communication at the U of Pennsylvania and also serves as the Director of the Scholars Program in Culture and Communication.
Zelizer's book has met with much acclaim, dubbed by Slate.com as "[An] enlightening new book," and by the Austin Chronicle as "an audacious and often chilling examination of how visual media handle the moment of death, from engravings of the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 to the Pacific tsunami of 2004."
The publisher, the Oxford University Press, describes Zelizer's work:
"Due to its ability to freeze a moment in time, the photo is a uniquely powerful device for ordering and understanding the world. But when an image depicts complex, ambiguous, or controversial events-terrorist attacks, wars, political assassinations--its ability to influence perception can prove deeply unsettling. Are we really seeing the world "as it is" or is the image a fabrication or projection? How do a photo's content and form shape a viewer's impressions? What do such images contribute to historical memory?...Through a survey of a century of photojournalism, including close analysis of over sixty photos, About to Die provides a framework and vocabulary for understanding the news imagery that so profoundly shapes our view of the world."
To receive the Tankard Award, authors who are AEJMC members may self-nominate any first-edition scholarly monograph, edited collection, or textbook published in the current year of the call that is relevant to journalism and mass communication. Nominated books can be coauthored or coedited, and must be well-written and break new ground.
Named in honor of U of Texas at Austin Journalism Professor James Tankard Jr., the Tankard Award was first presented in 2007 and is awarded annually at AEJMC's Conference.