lewis levenberg - 21 October 2009 - Thesis Prospectus/Research Design - Dr. Michael Coventry
Media, Society, and Censorship
(on the Work of Mumia Abu-Jamal)

Statement of Problem

	I am studying the work of Mumia Abu-Jamal, a journalist, activist, and death row inmate. I want to find out how it has been censored in three different mediations. These are in print, on the radio, and online. I am interested in what the conditions of censorship were for each of those forms. Since these conditions include interpersonal, systematic, and internalized practices, I want my reader to understand that censorship is a complex system with both technological and social factors. Therefore, a change in one part of this system can have profound effects on the structure of social relations.
Introduction

	There are many issues bound up with, and forming the background of, this problem of censorship across media in Mumia Abu-Jamal's work. In order to organize this study, I will divide the introductory part of my thesis into two main sections. One of these is historical, which I will further subdivide into two parts. First, I will briefly trace the development of censorship in the United States. Since this is a broad topic in itself, I will focus on the emergence of contemporary conditions of censorship. Then, I will review the legal case history of Mumia Abu-Jamal. Through these two narratives, I hope to set up the connections between society, censorship, and media for my readers, connections which I will try to make explicit through the arguments of each chapter.
	I will then frame several theoretical and methodological issues in the literature review, which will be divided into three parts, corresponding to the major chapters of the thesis. In the first part, I will invoke theories of literary and comparative cultural criticism. I will concentrate on deconstruction, which relies on the continental tradition of philosophy, and address questions of authorship, meaning, and value in the content of a text. In the second part, I will introduce theories of communication. These theories, especially adaptive structuration, third-party effects on perception processes and media systems dependency, work to explain how meaning is contingent not only on a message's internal content, but also on its mediation and environmental context. The third part of the review will concentrate on theories of visual culture, especially cultural semiotics. This approach seeks to decode the relationships between culture, vision, and meaning. I hope to use the literature review as a sort of narrative in itself, to tell the reader how I will argue that society, media, and censorship are linked in each of the chapters to follow.

print, prison, and personal attacks
	In the first main chapter, I plan to examine a few short essays, composed and written by Abu-Jamal while interned on Death Row at SCI Greene, in Waynesville, PA. Many of these essays take the form of opinion/editorial essays, in the tradition of journalism which draws on personal experience. I will read these essays, which will probably include one or two pieces from the late twentieth century and another or two from the twenty-first century, with several purposes. First, I want to show the radical political project at stake in Abu-Jamal's writing. Specifically, I want to know what literary value these essays might hold, and how these values might be subject to (and how they might challenge) traditional rationales for censorship. Second, I want to explore the relationship, in his work, between composition and writing, and the complementary relationship between writing and editing. This leads directly to the question of how Abu-Jamal might have conceived of and related to self-censorship, at the levels of his choice of language and style of writing. 
	I will stay close to the texts in this section, applying theoretical interventions and interpretations such as deconstruction. Still, I hope to remind the reader of the broader implications of Abu-Jamal's work. In this sense, I will apply the theoretical lenses of literary criticism with attention to the author's interpersonal relationships, not taking the text in a vacuum. I will look for meaning in these essays, but I will also look for Abu-Jamal's conceptions of ethics, history, and culture. I will read this work critically and with attention to its specific medium of print. Thus, I hope to introduce the question of what reading and writing can become in a context of race relations, incarceration, and a constant, immanent existential threat.

recordings, radio, and regulation	
	The first move across media with which I will deal is of recording. This is also a moment of a shift in the mode of censorship for Abu-Jamal's work. Some major institutional factors, especially the role of the prison and the media system, become explicit in this case. In this chapter, I will examine Abu-Jamal's attempts to record several of his essays for National Public Radio, especially the sessions on and around 31 October 1996. This case study will illuminate the conditions of censorship that exist as a dynamic, complex system involving relations of power, economics, and media dependency. 
	Since many of the essays which Abu-Jamal recorded were more or less identical to their written and printed versions, I will move out one level of analysis in this chapter, from the texts themselves to their conditions of production and suppression. I will examine the environmental factors, interpersonal relationships, and network of institutions that converged on these recording sessions, using the vocabulary and methodology of communications theories. I will use media systems dependency theory and the theory of third-party effects on perception processes to explain the relationships between Abu-Jamal, the reporter from NPR who was making the recordings, the prison guards and other prisoners, the institutional systems of NPR and of maximum security prison, and the social, economic, political, legal, and media systems in which this case took place. These theories address, in particular, how all those factors external to the message itself can affect the meaning of the message embedded in the message.
	Another important intervention from communications theory is adaptive structuration. I will use this framework to show my reader that this study of Mumia Abu-Jamal's work is generalizable at some level to the relationship between society, media, and censorship practices. This theory can also help explain how a small change in any of the social norms and rules, media resources and technologies, or practices of censorship itself, can have lasting effects on the structure of the entire system of relationships in which those practices take place. In this case, I will use structuration to examine the structural changes in United States media policy towards incarcerated individuals, and in practices of censorship of those individuals' work, based on the outcomes of Abu-Jamal's recordings and subsequent legal proceedings. An examination of prisoners', and especially Abu-Jamal's, access to communications technologies can show these structural relationships, and it can also serve as a transition to the next chapter of the thesis.

mediations, modes, and motives of censorship
	This chapter of the thesis will apply theories and methods of analysis from visual culture studies and cultural semiotics to the work of Mumia Abu-Jamal as it appears online. There are several directions in which this part of the study could diverge or converge, and as such, this portion of my proposal is relatively underdeveloped. In general, however, this section of my project will address how Abu-Jamal's work has moved from print and radio to digital media, what has been preserved, and what changed in both the content of the work, and the conditions of its possibility for meaning and censoring.
	One way to address these concerns is by a comparative, semiotic analysis of the same essays in their digital contexts. Since the works appear as videos and sound files online, their modes of signification, or how they make meaning, are literally encoded by layers of software. They are also metaphorically encoded, as parts of websites that tend to have social and political agendas which are not always the same as that expressed in the works themselves. This leads to another question which visual culture and cultural semiotics can explore, of the various websites which represent (or occlude) the figure of Mumia Abu-Jamal, rather than (or in addition to) his work.  The relationship between these websites, and the groups which put them together, can lead to an examination of the internalized norms that work together with codes of representation, in order to describe the limits of communication.
	
conclusion: question
	In the last part of this project, I want to bring together the threads of the three discussions I have outlined above. This section will review the arguments I have made, and introduce one last theoretical question. If censorship is a social practice, what can we learn about the structure of society from studying changes in censorship practices?