Faculty Profiles
New Communication Chair Studies Expressive Culture
As the new chair of the Department of Communication, Lisa Henderson is eager to steer its future. “I look forward to engaging in the department’s operation: administering the graduate and undergraduate programs, projects and changes; addressing our beleaguered physical plant; troubleshooting and negotiating; interacting with other units in the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences and elsewhere; participating in key department committees; and continuing the outward reach of our extraordinary faculty and student body in communication and journalism.”
Henderson came to UMass Amherst in 1994 following a post-doc at the University of Pennsylvania and five years of teaching at Penn State. For the past four years, in addition to her teaching, advising and faculty business responsibilities on campus, she has been director of CISA, the Five-College Center for Crossroads in the Study of the Americas. Founded in 1997, CISA brings together faculty from Amherst, Hampshire, Mount Holyoke, Smith, and UMass to explore relational aspects of identity in the Americas, and as its director Henderson was peripatetic. “It will be good to again have a job in one place—and perhaps I can even spend a few hours a week working on the closing details of my book, Love and Money: Queers, Class and Cultural Production.”
Studying expressive culture as an area of communication research for Henderson began as an undergraduate. “I’d started in film and media production (and did work as a spoken word radio producer after college),” she recalls, “but round about my second year, I became much more interested in how expressive forms and systems work—their conventions and anti-conventions, their contexts, producers, audiences, artists, regulators, industries, and histories. I chose my graduate school knowing I could study visual media—film, photography, painting—as social practices, not only as genres, formal arrangements, or aesthetic traditions (though those are social practices too).”
Henderson’s bohemian lineage of broadcasters, actors, writers, and music teachers made expressive culture a natural line of work for her. “But it also made me really want an employer and a regular job. Being expressive and broke had its limits! I see schools and universities, then, as places where people can both master an area and experiment, wire ourselves through the work we want to do, the things we want to know and the way we want to know them, and the world we want to inhabit.”
Communication, Henderson says, is a wonderful field for studying how people figure out these things. “As a research field,” she notes, “the language becomes more technical, but it is a place to study fundamental processes of world-making in intimate contexts like families and households to industrial, national and transnational ones.”
Besides being a trained cultural critic, Henderson is also a fieldworker, an ethnographer with a deep interest in how people work things out together. “Such engagement keeps you in the game,” she says. “It makes the development of social networks and broad conversations a pleasure. Academic recognition is great, and institutional clout is a terrific resource, but I prefer to build steadily from the most immediate relationships to broader clusters and institutional arrangements. You see things take shape and step in with small solutions. I’m not a gardener, but I think of scholarship and department life a little like gardening. You can guess the similes: earth, light, air, space, weeding, nutrients, blossoms, glory. Such ways of thinking help me keep the key parts of scholarship and academic life close.”
College is a good place for students to figure out what they’re good at or what they’d like to become good at and start to build their capabilities, Henderson notes, and at UMass Amherst, they are treated as young intellectuals, researchers and professionals in the making. “Here you will combine a liberal arts education with skills development in communication research, media literacy, media making, writing, speaking, critique, group and community development, and social and communication policy. It’s a big school, so you’ll have to find your way around, but faculty will be your advisors, interlocutors, and teachers. They are creative, distinguished and engaged as researchers, scholars, journalists, filmmakers, critics, and curators, and some are the foremost figures in their areas, both nationally and internationally. You will surround yourself with other students from the Commonwealth, the country, and the world. You will experience the scholarly culture of UMass Amherst that connects fields to each other in a deep program of interdisciplinarity, that connects academic research to policy and industry, and that connects your work in school to community organizations and development in the area and around the country.”
July 28, 2009
