Research and Teaching — Golden M. Owens

RESEARCH

Research Interests

Race and Representation

Film, Television, and New Media

Intelligent Virtual Assistants

Artificial Intelligence

Cyclical portrayals of Blackness in media

Black women/womanhood

Stereotypes

Embodiment

Haunting/Possession

Domestic Space

Service and Servitude

Domestic labor

Reality television

Digital humanities

Publications

“From Maid to Machine: Her, Hegemony and the Uncanny Female Servant” (Journal for Cinema and Media Studies, forthcoming)
“‘Hey Google, Talk Like Issa’: Black Voiced Digital Assistants and the Reshaping of Racial Labor” (Sounding Out, June 2023)
https://soundstudiesblog.com/2023/06/05/google-talk-like-issa-black-voiced-digital-assistants-and-the-reshaping-of-racial-labor/
“Producing ‘Reality’: ‘Authentic’ Representations of Black Women in Reality Television” (MMUF Journal, 2015)

Invited Talks and Conference Presentations

“Mammies, Media, and Laborsaving Devices: Aunt Jemima Ads as Catalysts for Contemporary Virtual Assistants”
Ford Fellows Conference, National Academies, June 2024
“The Sound of Her Voice: Vocal Performances of Race, Gender, and Subjecthood in Spike Jonze’s Her”
Performance Studies Summer Institute, Northwestern University, July 2023
“It’s Like Having You There in Person: Laborsaving Devices and Domestic Service in the United States”
Backward Glances Conference, Northwestern University, Fall 2022
“Mechanical Maids: Virtual Assistants and Black Women’s Labor Histories”
School of Communication Graduate Research Symposium, February 2022
“Alexa, Siri, and Aunt Jemima: How Black Women’s Labor Haunts AI Assistants”
Office of Fellowships Dissertation Research Salon, Northwestern University, May 2021
“Queering the ‘Real’: An Exploration of Realness in Paris is Burning”.
Queertopia Conference, Northwestern University, February 2019

TEACHING

Teaching Philosophy

As an educator, I challenge students’ reading and analysis of scholarship, popular media, and popular culture by crafting discussions designed to diversify students’ understanding of media texts, the histories surrounding them, and their implications for and revelations about mainstream societies and cultures. I believe in teaching courses and creating spaces that are interactive, interdisciplinary, entertaining, thought-provoking, and inclusive. I prefer discussion-based pedagogy, but can and do adapt to courses which better suit a lecture-based model.