Narrative

Laurie Ouellette works in the areas of critical media and cultural studies.  Her recent book examines media as technologies of self-shaping and citizenship, drawing from critical theories of liberalism and neoliberalism (inspired by the late work of Michel Foucault) to address the civic and pedagogical dimensions of reality television entertainment.   Her interests include television culture, consumer culture, social class and media, media and citizenship, self-help and advice media, interactivity and labor, domesticity and popular media, cultural policy,  historiography as method, and feminist studies of media and culture.
 

She is co-author (with James Hay) of Better Living Through Reality TV:  Television and Post-Welfare Citizenship (Blackwell, 2008) and author of Viewers Like You?  How Public TV Failed the People (Columbia University Press, 2002).  She is also co-editor (with Susan Murray) of Reality TV:  Remaking Television Culture (NYU Press, 2004 and 2009, 2nd edition).

Ouellette's scholarship has appeared in a range of scholarly journals, including Cultural Studies, Media, Culture & Society, Television and New Media, Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies, The Communication Review, The Velvet Light Trap, and Afterimage.  She has contributed to number of anthologies including Feminist Television Criticism, Gender, Class and Race in Media, The Television Studies Reader, Beyond Primetime: Television Programming in the Post-Network Era and The Critical Cultural Policy Reader.  She is a regular commentator on the politics of media and popular culture for local and national media, including The New York Times, Boston Globe, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Associated Press, WCCO TV, Public Radio International, and National Public Radio. She was a columnist for the online television criticsm journal Flow (www.flowtv.org)  2006-2007, and is currently the Vice Chair of the International Communication Association's Philosophy of Communication Division.