As part of my job, I go to academic conferences each year. One of my favorites is the International History of Public Relations conference at Bournemouth University in England. Here are some of the subjects I have covered over the past nine years. Oh, by the way, this is what Bournemouth looks like when you're not at the actual conference. Of course, I've only spent about an hour on this beach in the last nine years. The conference is pretty seriously engaging. Stop laughing.
IHPR 2021
Because of Covid, IHPR skipped a year, but I had a concept accepted, so I rolled it over for this year. This year's remote conference was different, but I still got reaquainted with old friends and watched a bunch of great presentations. My subject was the promotion of flapper culture in the 1920s. It seemed to me that something as fully formed as that lifestyle must have been planned. I don't think it was, but there was an awful lot of buy-in from the burgeoning mass media in the early 20th century that helped push it into existence and maintain it until the stock market crash at the end of the decade.
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IHPR 2019
For IHPR's 10th anniversary, I decided to present a case study from my early corporarte PR days. It involved a creative community relations campaign in the Alaska bush explaining the advent of satellite delivered telephone service to nearly 200 Native villages. Our target was mostly children. It was a wild time, with lots of travel to remote parts of the state, but it brings back fond memories.
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IHPR 2018
My research took a different turn exploring industrial film making in the 1930s used as promotional public relations. I focused specifically on U.S. Steel's groundbreaking films utilizing Hollywood-type techniques and the newly developed Technicolor process tied together by well-known documentary producers. The result gave a boost to USS even as the Great Depression deepened.
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IHPR 2016
IHPR 2015
IHPR 2014
IHPR 2013
IHPR 2012
My first presentation at IHPR dealt with a little explored part of Edward Bernays' early PR efforts. Although widely known as one of his greatest achievements, I cast some doubt on the ethicality of his work for General Electric in the late 1920s via the celebration of "Lights Golden Jubilee." This was subsequently published in American Journalism.
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other presentations
The ubiquitous "poster" presentation
In the academic conference world there is special designation called "poster presentation." What that originally meant was that the paper you submitted didn't quite make it to the serious, sit-down, presentation with four or five other lucky souls, followed by a "discussant" who tried desperately to tie the presentations together while criticizing them and praising them at the same time, and then fielding incoherent questions from the meager audience who managed to show up at 8:00 a.m., mostly hung over from the "social functions" of the night before. In the early days, most people just thumb-tacked onto a rolling cork board several pages of what they had hoped would have been accepted into the aforementioned circus, but now which was consigned to the purgatory of the vacuous "poster hall."
However, things have progressed somewhat. Today, the new generation of academics, at least in the media and communications areas, have begun to understand that the word "poster" actually means something—a well-designed and graphically interesting presentation that is easy to follow, and with a little help from its author, may actually make sense. In fact, these events, held in vast halls with row upon row of display boards (still the rolling cork boards of yesteryear), are now designated as "Scholar-to-Scholar" sessions, wherein hundreds of eager presenters and viewers, plus a few harried "discussants" who wander the ailes seeking some semblance of gestalt, gather to admire the work of both novice and expert poster designers.
I believe that, no matter the subject, it's the image that wins the day! Here are some of my latest endeavors. As you can see, my technique has changed from wordy to "picturey."
However, things have progressed somewhat. Today, the new generation of academics, at least in the media and communications areas, have begun to understand that the word "poster" actually means something—a well-designed and graphically interesting presentation that is easy to follow, and with a little help from its author, may actually make sense. In fact, these events, held in vast halls with row upon row of display boards (still the rolling cork boards of yesteryear), are now designated as "Scholar-to-Scholar" sessions, wherein hundreds of eager presenters and viewers, plus a few harried "discussants" who wander the ailes seeking some semblance of gestalt, gather to admire the work of both novice and expert poster designers.
I believe that, no matter the subject, it's the image that wins the day! Here are some of my latest endeavors. As you can see, my technique has changed from wordy to "picturey."
And, if you're an academic purest, click here to see a copy of my CV. If you're not an academic purest, you probably don't know what "CV" means. It is shorthand for "curriculum Vitae," which is Latin for "course of life," which I like better than "resumé," which is actually what it is.