A Pedagogue's Progress,the Cunningham Turn,and the Birth of Creator Studies

At the start of Perestroika, the second part of Tony Kushner's play Angels in America (1995), Aleksii Antedilluvianovich Prelapsarianov, self-described as “the world's oldest living Bolshevik,” delivers a monologue to the audience. His name functions as a play on words, as Aleksii is addressing the Politburo “before the fall” of the Soviet Union at that moment when Gorbachev's Glasnost policies of openness closed the door for communist ideologues and old guard revolutionaries. Filled with righteous fervor and sanctimony, he entreats his colleagues, “What have you to offer now, children without theory? Market Incentives?…Change? Yes, we must change, only show me the theory and I will be at the barricades….Show me the words that will reorder the world, or else, keep silent” (Kushner, 1995: 138).

Kushner's opus about wrestling with angels over the fate of the world is set at the precipice of yet another epochal 20th century turn. In the 1980s, Reagan and Thatcher were instituting global neoliberal economic reforms as the Cold War reached its end. As political scientist Francis Fukuyuma (1992) provocatively argued in The End of History (1992), the fall of the Berlin Wall proved the triumph of democratic liberalism as the optimal political and economic system for the planet. Kushner's tale challenged any presumption of Western ideological exceptionalism. As evidence, through his brilliant narrative construction, Kushner delivered a searing indictment of the American government exercising near homicidal neglect regarding the spread of AIDS, which contributed to the decimation of a generation of gay men. Rather than some imagined end of time, “Kushner remains committed not to a historical outcome, but rather to the historical process” (Vasic, 2010: 18). This is process filled with ongoing ruptures and schism. As delivered through the character Harper at the end of the play, Kushner opines, “In this world, there is a kind of painful progress. Longing for what we’ve left behind, and dreaming ahead. At least I think that’s so” (Kushner, 1995: 285).

This essay discusses the parallels between Kushner's ideological dilemma and the plight of media scholars wrestling with grand theories of cultural and media studies in the digital age. To map these parallels, I offer a critical autoethnographic account through my own experience transitioning from media producer to creator scholar. Likened to Bunyan's Pilgrim‘s Progress (1891), this journey serves as a tale of academic redemption after decades spent in Hollywood. My role was as producer and programming executive for television movies. Had I been the HBO executive on the project, I would have likely agreed or even proposed cutting Aleksii's speech, which does not exist its mini-series adaptation. Hewn by grand theories of affective storytelling, my instincts would have deemed the scene a Non Sequitor with audiences disinterested in political diatribes.

My narrative approach also blends academic solipsism with hagiography as this journey features what the Cunningham Turn. This phrase refers to how scholar Stuart Cunningham intervened to map a career trajectory for me as a scholar with theory, not of theory. Forming an “alliance of heretics,” our quest launched contributed to a highly-generative period of scholarship, including launching a new field of study that I provocatively insist on calling Creator Studies. Cunningham does not care for the term. Nonetheless, after over a dozen co-authored and edited books and articles, I am exploiting the single author privilege—a privilege I never would have garnered without his mediation in my development as a scholar.

A pedagogue's progress

In Pilgrim‘s Progress (Bunyan, 1891), Christian declares, “this hill, though high, I covet to ascend; The difficulty will not me offend. For I perceive the way to life lies here” (55). In this religious allegory, the hill leads to redemption. My path led to Hollywood. I arrived in the mid-1980s to become a teacher, not of film, but with film. In elementary school, I had been inspired by the deeply-affecting narratives and pedagogy of race-themed films like Brian‘s Song (Kulik, 1971) and The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (Korty, 1974). My ambition was to tell stories that foreground social issues designed to educate as well as entertain. I learned these films were now made for television, for reasons far too complicated to enumerate here. Over the next few decades, I made 30 of them. In addition to ratings, these programs garnered Emmy, Peabody, and Golden Globe nominations. More notably, after broadcast, most were distributed to schools as curriculum.

In time, this path progressed from a Hollywood-based teacher to a teacher of Hollywood, landing an adjunct position in a professional Masters program at the University of Southern California in the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. However, further passage demanded certification, so I entered a doctoral program at University of California Los Angeles. Along the way, I would meet with, if more readily against, the critical frameworks of cultural studies. I journeyed by text from the schools of Frankfurt to Birmingham. I encountered ideologies, nurtured by deep-seated subjectivities, that challenged the civic-minded claims for my career and struggled with the unifying nature of grand theories. I found critiques of Hollywood, to borrow from Marcuse (1991), one-dimensional. My response was less that of great refusal than great rejection. I yearned to understand these frameworks for seeing. Nonetheless I was asked to leave the program as my feeble, under-theorized notions of entertainment as pedagogy held little appeal.

Undaunted, I soon found a kind of absolution in the emerging field of media industries (Holt and Perren, 2009), most notably, critical media industries studies (Havens et al., 2009), or CMIS. CMIS set forth a research agenda to better “explain and explore the role that human agents play” (240) in an industry that represented “a crucial site of struggle and resistance” (250). These frameworks yielded a throughline for my twined career trajectories abundant with balancing acts between the material and the spiritual. Referencing De Certeau (1984), while navigating the commercial strategies of the industry, I cultivated resistance tactics in order to produce message movies. I was both activist and advocate. During the day, I ventured into studios to sell LGBTQ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Questioning)-themed projects. At night, I marched outside them as an activist for GLAAD (Gay and Lesbian Alliance against Defamation). Unlike Aleksii, I was less a revolutionary than a reformer, a believer in ideology, but not an ideologue. My righteous career avocation was tempered by my realpolitik attitude towards Hollywood dues-paying in order to secure access and power. While nonetheless privileges, I still endured toxic working environments to keep my eye on the prize—the ability to produce stories that mattered, to me at least.

In a sense, my dissertation about the critical pedagogy of LGBTQ-themed television movies was also a defense of my Hollywood career. I engaged with frameworks about media interventions (Howley, 2013), narrative imagination (Nussbaum, 1997), and television's moral imaginary (Dant, 2012). My methods borrowed from CMIS and production studies (Mayer et al., 2010) with case studies of these programs featuring interviews with their producers and television programmers. In their responses, I found vital data for my thesis, if also validation for my producing career. Referencing TV movie producers and executives, the former head of NBC TV movies remarked, “I think that we are socially repressed activists. All of us in another time may have been out there raising the flag, pounding the pavement.”

Yet, even as I stood on the top of the hill, diploma in hand, I surveyed the landscape and realized, there were more academic alps to climb only I was ineligible. Despite my credentials, my value as a professor lies in my industry knowledge and teaching and not research or scholarship. Besides, as a well-intentioned colleague told me, “you will never be a theorist.” My response, born of spite and ego, would lead me to Australia and Stuart Cunningham.

The Cunningham turn

Stuart Cunningham is the distinguished Australian communication scholar, whose books lined my shelves. To canvas the breadth of his ideas across over a dozen books, hundreds of articles, years of academic management, and decades of accomplishments, would require volumes. However, Cunningham's corpus around creative industries holds critical “implications for theory, industry and policy analysis” (Cunningham, 2002: 54), if also proves vital to this tale. Cultural industries frameworks suffer, according to Cunningham, a blind spot around commercialism. In response, creative industries advanced new frameworks around creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurship, particularly in response to media convergence and the digital age. Cunningham's ideas were more instrumental than theoretical, designed more for crafting interventions around policy and education than philosophizing. Rather than a new “school” of thought, creative industries launched new and convergent schools of media practice, research, and methods, if also, a wave of acolytes and emulators around the world.

Cunningham has been pilloried for challenging cultural studies orthodoxy by critical scholars invested in theories of the destructive influence of capitalist media. While vital as diagnostics of media power, these theories often prove untenable as prescriptives for media reform. Unlike Aleksii, these critics had theories, but mostly performed revolution, whereas Cunningham ran it. Cunningham's arguments were vilified, deemed complicit with pro-business and market-based incentivism. The attacks bordered on the personal, accusing Cunningham of suffering from a “misconception of actual cultural industries policies” (O’Connor, 2007). Although a painful progress as Kushner foretold, Cunningham focused on reform of the field of communication, particularly in the wake of ever-increasing of industries and fields by digital technology. He would obliquely reference the backlash noting that “given that the creative industries concept was developed as a joint industry-policy initiative … scholarly attention to and criticism of it (emphasis added) is a function of its existence, as a hybrid assemblage of industry activity, human creative endeavour, research work, state policies and programs, and curriculum, pedagogy, and training” (Cunningham and Flew, 2019: 1).

Soon, we would forge an alignment of heretics. Cunningham and I first met in the fall of 2014, as I delivered a job talk at his home institution of Queensland University of Technology. Although the job fell through, I received a far greater concession prize—what has become a 6-year-long collaboration with Cunningham. Six months later, while visiting Southern California, he asked for my assistance on a project funded through a Fulbright Scholarship. The goal was to secure interviews with YouTubers to better understand their practices of cultural production. What followed was, as Henry Jenkins (2016) would describe, “the ultimate ‘odd couple’ academic buddy adventure.”

The birth of creator studies

In life, Cunningham is an avid hiker, for days at a time in precarious terrains often in inclement weather. I am not. Yet, as academic pilgrims likened to Bunyan's Christian, we traversed steep and wide terrain, both academically and literally. Three interviews morphed into 300 conducted in 25 cities in 10 countries with creators, platform executives, and an array of media professionals who work at diverse firms operating in between. On our journey, Cunningham declared ours an equal partnership, elevating me to co-author status, and sometimes lead. Over the past 6 years, we have published three books and over a dozen articles, led panels and appeared in podcasts, crafted curriculum and solicited contemporaries interested in our research.

Our work identified and mapped the contours and dimensions of two emerging new screen ecologies, if also, a new field of study. In Social Media Entertainment (Cunningham and Craig, 2019b), or SME, we described how a wave of cultural producers were emerging globally off of social media platforms, while operating with vast distinction from traditional media professionals. These social media entrepreneurs are alternatively described as influencers, youtubers, gamers, vloggers, key opinion leaders, zhubo, and wanghong. We preferred the term, creators, which has become industry-standard. Our efforts to align these phenomena with media studies frameworks proved challenging. Whereas power and control by media industries focused centrally around deeply-capitalized and corporatized ownership of media distribution or intellectual property, creators lacked either. Creators rarely produced films, programs, or formats. They did not own their platforms. Rather, what most distinguished creators was their ability to harness platforms to aggregate and engage online communities of interest, which they convert into varying forms of cultural and commercial value.

Creator practices aligned with ongoing claims about precarious creative labor, but also advanced practices of creativity and innovation, management and entrepreneurialism, affirming key foci of creative industries. Yet, even these frameworks lacked precision to distinguish these industries. We sought out scholarship in emergent fields of science and technology studies, platform studies, and social media studies (SMS). To cite but a few, Burgess and Green (2009) delivered prescient accounts of “vernacular creativity” that we witnessed in creator practices. In detailing the affordances and algorithms of social media platforms, Bucher (2015) helped us better understand the precarity and agency of platform-based creators. Baym's notion of relational labor (2015) vitally aligned with our accounts of how creators connect with fans “towards building and maintaining an audience that will sustain a career” (14). While admittedly underdetermined, in subsequent books, we listed “social industries” as a conceptual framework to compliment cultural and creative industries. These frameworks provide scholars a more refined tool kit to critically differentiate media industries from industries emerging off of social media platforms, including new fields and practices like social journalism and social gaming.

While conducting our research for SME globally, we became aware of the growth of China's own autarkic alternative. Co-authored with Chinese scholar Jian Lin, Wanghong as Social Media Entertainment in China (2021) features a comparative account of the wanghong and SME industries. The term wanghong is polysemic, used to describe Chinese creators and, more broadly, this industry, if also pejoratively, Chinese female live streamers securing revenue through their affective appeal to lonely men. Foregrounding the critical role of China's cultural, creative, and social policies, we identified how this industry has fostered greater platform competition and innovation than its Silicon-Valley counterparts, including frictionless integration of mobile access, ecommerce and online banking. These structural and material conditions fuel and distinguish wanghong creator entrepreneurialism, including the rise of a “most unlikely” class of rural and grassroots creators (Lin and de Kloet, 2019). As these platforms extend beyond the great Chinese firewall, wanghong faces headwinds that both affirm and challenge prior conceptions of media globalization and cultural imperialism. The impending clash between these two industries anticipate the backlash against rising Sinopower and platform nationalism, if also masking efforts by Western tech to replicate the success of wanghong in accelerating the rise of the global and national digital economies.

By generating broad claims about these industries, we lay our scholarship open to swift critique, which further affirmed our heretical bonafides. Our creator-centric approach has been deemed, to borrow the term frequently cited, “celebratory” if, in our perception, advocatory. In SME (2019), we championed the rise of multicultural voices like LGBTQ creators and Asian Americans fostering a new wave of cultural politics, still denied agency and representation in traditional media. We lauded progressive creators using their platforms to engage in real-world social activism. In commentaries (Craig and Cunningham, 2017), we described how creators from the Left were risking their careers, brand relationships, and fan fidelity to engage in political activism in response to populist nationalism. In support of greater tech accountability, we entreated bureaucrats and scholars to recognize the value of creators as they craft, promote, and critique platform governance and policy (Cunningham and Craig, 2019a, 2019b).

Our co-edited volume, Creator Culture (Cunningham and Craig, 2021) was an attempt, as Cunningham penned in a personal email, to align creator scholarship “more fully into media industry studies, not only as a threat to established industries and not only as a parallel media universe.” Featuring chapters by established and emerging scholars, the book posits a new subfield of studies for theorizing and evaluating the dynamic interplay of these industries from interdisciplinary fields, frameworks, and methods. I prefer a more precise term creator studies to further differentiate these epistemologies from media, platform, and SMS. As yet more creator advocacy, I wish to reify the value of these social media entrepreneurs within these industries and more broadly creator scholarship and pedagogy.

Along with the core texts of cultural and creative industries, these creator studies volumes feature centrally in my masters-level courses designed for students aspiring to careers within or conducting research about creator culture. Borrowing from the research agenda set forth in CMIS, students conduct case studies to evaluate the commercial and cultural value of SME and wanghong platforms, creators, and creator service firms. Like the industry and culture they define, creator studies pedagogy demands constant assessment and revision. In the wake of the CoVid-19 Crisis and the Great Reckoning within America, marked by the rise of the MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements, engaging with a more critical creator pedagogy assumes greater urgency. Students need the skills to map and critique the power relations generated within and fostered by these creator industries. In further affirmation of my progression as producer, activist, and pedagogue, I ask that students also acknowledge and celebrate the progressive practices of creators who represent and advocate for greater diversity, inclusion, and social justice.

The great work begins

Towards the end of Angels in America, one character argues, if somewhat tautologically, “You can't live in the world without an idea of the world, but it's living that makes the ideas. You can't wait for a theory, but you have to have a theory” (Kushner, 1995: 278). Bearing that in mind, while I am not a scholar of theory, I have many theories that I cannot wait to use, even if poorly understood. Cunningham would often humorously complain about my rapacious need to introduce half-baked theories into our drafts. Borrowed from a Groucho Marx joke, he described my approach as “these are my theories. If you don't like them, I have others.”

While I remain awed by philosophers who dare advance grand unifying ideas about media industries, I have grown reticent of becoming one, were it even possible. Here I reference yet another mentor. In setting forth the “politics of ambivalence” in her book Authentic (Banet-Weiser, 2012), Sarah Banet-Weiser maps the twined nature of brand culture as both commercial and cultural, blurring the distinctions between our commodified and authentic selves. “Such an explanation … allows us to analyze cultural meanings of branding without resorting to a binary that is often unproductive” (13). More often, I find the exercise of theory more performative than generative, capable of securing academic capital but limited real world change. I am weary of becoming a revolutionary like Aleksii, whose ideology has been abandoned by history. Rather, I remain emboldened by Kushner's vision of the progress of humanity. I find providence in better understanding the world for what it is, than what it isn't, if also for what it could be.

As with the message movies I produced in Hollywood, these are a few “takeaways,” or lessons, from my journey. If so incredibly fortunate, find your Cunningham. Identify a mentor who both champions your ideas and challenges your assumptions. Better yet, be like Cunningham. Manifest an unrequitable curiosity about our fields and our objects of study as there will always remain hills to summit and fields, metaphorically and interdisciplinarily, to part. Challenge the orthodoxy, particularly those scholars and theories that prove regressive. Embrace interventionist frameworks like creative industries and a holistic research agenda like that advanced by critical media industries studies. Risk and reclaim the celebratory. Before demanding that those operating within culture industries operate more equitably, first consider whether some already do and, if so,how. To borrow from the Quaker and Civil Rights slogan, inspire students to produce truth to power, whether in an academic journal, a Hollywood film, a snap, chat, or tweet.

At the end of Pilgrim‘s Progress, before ascending the hill, Christian declares, “Come, pluck up, heart; let's neither faint nor fear” (Bunyan, 1891: 55). Similarly, at the end of Angels in America, the prophet Prior Walter turns to the audience and declares, “the Great Work Begins” (Kushner, 1995: 290). Indeed, it does. See you on the next hill.