Elizabeth Rodwell Marks

Graduate Student
Curriculum Vitae
Email: emarks@rice.edu

My dissertation fieldwork is among television professionals in Japan's commercial networks, with a specific focus on morning television programming (jouhou bangumi). The intention of this project is to explore how this industry is responding to a decline in viewership and revenue, particularly among those under 30, and to identify the strategies being developed to adapt television broadcast to the age of digital, participatory content.

My project is also about the nature of large Japanese corporations and how expertise is mobilized and cultivated in these settings. I am further interested in the notion of developing an expertise in representing the desires of others, and therefore in workplace articulations of audience identity. Further, I am interested in challenging the conception of Japanese television as mimetic and conservative, and engaging TV staff on the domestic criticism and foreign fetishism of its output.

In a past life I was a graphic design and media professor.