Modern Media Podcast

Counternarratives: A Conversation with Alexandra Bell One of the most important questions you can ask about media is how it represents – ideas, things, people. But it’s not just a question of what the mechanisms for representation are. Instead, questions about representation are questions about meaning and about power: how they are produced and maintained. And representations are a site of struggle over meanings and power. The news media are one particularly potent site for engaging with the politics of representation. How are stories told in the news? What cultural frameworks guide the construction of news stories and, in turn, our engagement with the news? How do these frameworks help perpetuate harmful ideological positions? On this episode of Modern Media, we speak with multimedia artist Alexandra Bell about her work that engages with precisely these questions of representation. In particular, we talk with her about two series of prints that she has produced over the last several years. The earlier seri