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Lee McGuigan: Dallas Smythe Award

Lee McGuigan

Lee McGuigan

Lee McGuigan, a fourth-year doctoral student at the Annenberg School, is one of two winners of the 2017 Dallas Smythe Award from the International Association for Media and Communication Research.

The annual award, named for Dallas Smythe, a founder of the field of political economy of communication, recognizes a paper that combines scholarly excellence and a critical, innovative and engaged spirit.

Mr. McGuigan’s paper, “The Productive Capacity of Commercial Television: An Approach for Analyzing Media Systems in Society,” analyzes commercial television in the United States as a sociotechnical system oriented around the production of consumers. He suggests that capacity—the maximal limits of industrial output —is a key concept for thinking about media, technology and society.

Mr. McGuigan holds a master’s degree from the University of Western Ontario, and is the co-editor of the 2014 book The Audience Commodity in a Digital Age: Revisiting a Critical Theory of Commercial Media.

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