April 2004

SOC's Pat Aufderheide Named Scholar-Teacher of the Year

To Pat Aufderheide, communication means responsibility. “All successful communication has power implications. There’s an awesome responsibility that comes with communication,” she said. “If you do it well, it will matter to people.”

Aufderheide’s teaching and scholarship has long mattered to people on campus and beyond, so much so that the award-winning film and video critic, author, policy analyst, 14-year professor in the School of Communication, and director of SOC’s Center for Social Media was named this year’s Scholar-Teacher of the Year.

Specializing in the social impact of mass media and communication policies, whether Aufderheide is bringing well-regarded filmmakers to campus or introducing students to little-known works, she tries to bolster students’ knowledge so that everything fits together. “What I really love about my work is how research and teaching really work together,” she said. “I’m sharing information I’m really interested in and sharing it at a level where I’m learning about it.”

This semester she pioneered a class on social documentaries, dealing with work designed for social change and community engagement, such as development projects and nonprofits.

Aufderheide came to AU in 1989 after serving as senior editor of American Film and In These Times and working as a policy analyst. She has served on many juries, including the Sundance Film Festival and at the National Endowment for the Arts, and has numerous articles and book chapters and several books to her credit, including The Daily Planet: A Critic on the Capitalist Culture Beat (2000). In addition to the Center for Social Media, her recent work has included research on public access to documentary films, funded by the MacArthur Foundation, and research on the production of socially engaged documentaries, funded by the Ford Foundation.

She hopes, in particular, that students leave her classes with an awareness of media as a construction and not simply as a nonjudgmental recording of truth… “that every aspect of media is constructed and made by somebody. There is no natural anything, no simple ‘fact’ shown by anybody. For me, the very basic first step is intentionality. All communication has motive. All communication involves choices. People construct it according to certain expectations and understandings of what they want people to get from it.”

Often, students start out with the notion that media programming is either true or biased. “It’s not necessarily ‘biased,’ but everything’s constructed, so everything has perspectives on what you want or need to know.”

-By Sally Acharya, excerpted from American Weekly, April 6, 2004 issue

Photo by Chris Zimmer