Sheila Webb, PhD
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This past year has been a wonderful mix of travel, new curricular innovations, and research.
I was delighted to be able to spend a week in Paris in June with my daughters. I did a year of graduate study in Paris, so it’s always a treat to visit the city, walk 18,000 steps each day, and frequent the exhibitions and street markets. We then went to Portugal and explored Lisbon. We were amazed by the tiles decorating entire facades of buildings and the textiles and pottery.
In September, I again taught the Viking Launch Photo + Design class, a success since 2015. The program is a way for first years to get acclimated and to have the chance to incorporate an academic experience with getting to know campus and all of the resources.
In light of the stressors on journalistic practice, I focused projects and presentations in the Ethics J351 class on AI and was gratified by the level of both interest and understanding of challenges by the students. We are all called to teach the required classes to get our students through the curriculum so it’s a treat to be able to teach electives. This year, my Magazine Design and Production class, in which students develop a magazine from editorial concept to audience plan to design, allowed me to do just that.
My article “Bon Appétit: A Legacy Food Magazine as a Site for Social Reckoning” appeared in Studies in Popular Culture [ 45, no. 1 (2024): 85-120]. The study approaches Bon Appétit as a lens through which to explore how recipes and profiles in the pages of the magazine construct the broader social context of food culture at a time of social turmoil.
My chapter “Jezebel — How the Digital Pioneer Exploited a New Mode of Production, Constructed an Audience, and Became the Voice of Contemporary Feminism,” will appear in the forthcoming book The Feminist Press: From The Una to Jezebel, published by the University of Illinois Press. This is an oral history of Jezebel, the groundbreaking blog, based on interviews with the founding editor Anna Holmes, the editor from 2014-2017 Emma Carmichael, and the current editor Lauren Tousignant.
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The 2021-2022 academic year found us re-emerging into face-to-face classes, which I know all appreciated. After being remote, we then adjusted to hybrid, and are now in person for the most part. One aspect of pivoting the way we had to was an in-depth dip into the pedagogy of teaching online. With the expectation of even more moves to such modalities. WWU provides an invaluable resource in Western Online. As part of their offerings, a faculty mentoring program began Fall of 2022. I am pleased to have been named one of two faculty members dedicated to assisting faculty develop curricular offerings that leverage that environment.
In addition to our regular offerings, it’s always a treat to teach the Design + Photo Viking Launch class. This year, we were back on campus and it was a pleasure to introduce the incoming first years to the class as well as to campus.
On a personal note, my older daughter Claire’s graduation from MIT had been delayed due to Covid, so in May we traveled to Cambridge to see her get hooded in her Ph.D. regalia. We left from Boston straight for Paris, where I had lived for a year and where my younger daughter Elana had spent a summer. Thanks to Prof. Carolyn Nielsen’s recommendation, we booked an apartment on Île Saint-Louis, a quiet oasis mere feet from Notre Dame. As one does, we walked everywhere, averaging 20,000 steps each day.
Inspired by Profs. Keller, Bowe, and Nielsen, who all have taken advantage of WWU’s program which offers faculty the opportunity to take classes, I took several advanced French classes to reinvigorate my skills and to get the chance to converse in French. One memorable quarter on French language and culture was focused on the French elections, which was a stimulating outing for all. -
Last year presented unique challenges for students, faculty, and staff. Faculty had to adopt classes to a remote format, and all in all, my experience was mostly positive. I am grateful I had taken the workshop on remote teaching that the Center for Instructional Innovative and Assessment offered right before March! I missed being able to engage with students face to face especially in the lab in the production classes, for example, the Magazine Design and Production class in the summer, but students were appreciative that the class was still offered and produced great projects. In a related activity, in my role as Chair of the Academic Coordinating Commission, I served on the WWU Covid Incident Response Team from the academic side, and was able to represent faculty and curricular issues as WWU dealt with all of the emerging concerns that Covid presented. I continued my national service in my role as Chair of the AEJMC History Division Covert Award Committee, which reviews and then gives an award to the best article published in a given year. My research continues to be engaged in the intersection of periodicals and American cultural and social life, especially as it involves gender. My chapter “Curating Community: Reiman Publications 1970-2007 — A Model of Reader-Submitted Content” in the book Curating Culture: How 20th Century Magazines Influence America is in press at Rowman & Littlefield.
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Last year offered wonderful opportunities, including a trip to Paris. I continue to enjoy teaching ethics, research methods and theories, magazine design and production, editing and design, and history. I enjoyed partnering with Brian Bowe to collaborate in providing an innovative approach to our Senior Seminar class, and am doubly gratified that we received a teaching award from AEJMC’s Mass Communication & Society Division for the project. For some time, I have been interested in internationalizing the curriculum, and as part of that, do a survey in my ethics class on the possibility of global ethics. It is this survey that I presented at the 5th World Journalism Education Congress in Paris. After the conference, I was privileged to be able to spend the following week there with my older daughter Claire. I lived in Paris for a year as a graduate student, and it’s always intriguing to see both changes and continuities. Especially moving was walking through the Tuileries Gardens to arrive at Shakespeare and Co. and to see the wounded Notre Dame across the Seine. One of my sabbatical projects, “The Delphian Society and Its Publications: A Historical and Cultural Analysis of a Primer for Middle-Class Women’s Education,” was published in Journalism History. This continues my engagement in the intersection of periodicals and social activism, especially as it involves gender. My service work primarily focused on my role as ACC Chair. Among those many duties is curriculum proposals. Last year, we approved 800! ACC also worked last year to respond to student concerns about equity and justice in the curriculum. ACC has charged the Committee on Undergraduate Education to examine the curriculum with that focus in mind and to make recommendations.
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This past year was punctuated by medical leave in the spring for foot surgery. I would love to share a photo of me that a student snapped while I was rolling across campus on my scooter, but another time. I am grateful to have had the opportunity to get the surgery and for the support of the department.
I have become Chair of WWU’s Academic Coordinating Commission, which reviews curricular proposals. This committee is an integral part of faculty governance on campus. Last year, we approved over 600 proposals. Another service activity that is very meaningful to me is serving on the Student Publications Council. It is always an interesting process to interview and then hire the editors for all of the student publications. Their answers to our questions in the interview process reveal a sophisticated and considered approach toward the responsibilities of being a student editor.
I always enjoy participating in the AEJMC annual conference. This year it was in Washington, D.C., so that provided the opportunity to tuck in a visit or two to some national landmarks. I was especially taken with the official portraits of Michelle and Barak Obama at the National Gallery. Seeing these was a new museum experience, as people lined up behind a rope waiting their turn to take a selfie with the former president (or at least his image).
We continue to extend our curriculum. For example, the history class in the summer is done online. To engage the class, students participate in a robust discussion section on all of the readings. They also “hire” a dream team of important practitioners throughout eras from the Colonial Period to today. This allows them to go beyond a simple bio approach to propose a team that might, for example, cover the immigration debate or global warming. I continue to regularly teach Senior Seminar and Ethics. I redid the case examples to deal with the rush of new challenges the media face in the given political climate. I was pleased to see students grapple with coverage of burning issues, for example, an ethics audit of the coverage of the MeToo and Time’s Up movements.
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This past year I was pleased to teach our mass media history class in the summer quarter. This innovative class, taught entirely online, leverages both the benefits and challenges of digital media to engage students and to create community among the participants. I also taught our, now permanent, Publications: Design & Production class. This class had generated such interest, we are now offering it during the regular year.
I was honored to receive the Covert Award for my monograph “Creating Life Magazine — ‘America’s Most Potent Editorial Force.’” This award is presented by the History Division of AEJMC to the author of the best mass communication history article or chapter in an edited collection published the previous year, nationwide.
I also continued my work on photography in “Radical Portrayals: Photojournalist Dickey Chapelle on the Front Lines in Algeria and Cuba,” published in American Periodicals. Another thread of my research is women’s publications and visuals surrounding suffrage, and I presented “The Spectacle of Suffrage: Visual & Cultural Representations of Suffragists in Popular Magazines,” at the AEJMC/AJHA Joint Journalism and Communication History Conference, New York City, March 2017.
My new service activities include becoming co-chair of the Academic Coordinating Committee. This committee serves a vital function in faculty governance, as it reviews all proposed new classes as well as broader curricular issues. I am also now serving on the Post Tenure Review Committee, which evaluates faculty contributions after receiving tenure, another important aspect in faculty governance.