Gordon Coonfield, PhD
Associate Professor of Communication | College of Liberal Arts and Sciences | Villanova University
Villanova , PA, UNITED STATES
Gordon Coonfield, PhD, has expertise in visual communication, popular culture, philosophy of technology and new media.
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Areas of Expertise (5)
Visual Communication
Gender and Media
Race and Media
New Media
Popular Culture and Cultural Studies
Biography
In this age of mobile device apps, Skype and the 24-hour news cycle, most of us are bombarded by a constant and dizzying array of video and print images. Dr. Gordon Coonfield, an expert in the interrelation of technology and visual imagery in contemporary culture, can explain how communication is either fostered or hindered by this relationship, how it is processed and the effect it has on individual identity and society. He can also speak to the emergence and proliferation of the issue of addiction in contemporary discourse.
Education (3)
Michigan Technological University: PhD
Yakima Valley College: AAS
Central Washington University: BA
Links (2)
Select Media Appearances (5)
I Documented Dozens of Shrines to People Who've Died in North Philly—Here's What They Tell Us About Memory, Grief and Trauma
The Conversation
2024-08-28
"As a communications professor whose research has focused on collective memory and trauma in the wake of 9/11, I am fascinated by the makeshift memorials that proliferate in Kensington, a neighborhood that has long been at the center of the city's drug, poverty and violence epidemics... Memorials like those to Bough and Caraballo use collective memory to expand our notions of whose traumas matter. As with collective memory of other traumas, they invite us to expand the circle of compassion."
Free-Speech Debate: How Does a Tolerant Society Defend Its Values?
The Christian Science Monitor
2017-08-30
"Where is the line between protected speech and that which is unacceptable in public discourse?" says Gordon Coonfield, an associate professor of communications at Villanova University in Philadelphia. "This is a question that we as a society have struggled with—not always to our credit—and we must continue the struggle."
Social Media Harnessed to Expose White Nationalists at Rally
U.S. News & World Report
2017-08-14
Gordon Coonfield, communications professor at Villanova University, said there is an important difference in the reasons people get doxed. "Doxing an advocate of racial equality is an implicit—and often explicit—call for violence against them," he said in an email. "Doxing a white nationalist is a call for accountability. Compelling individuals to be accountable for their words and deeds online or off is not a threat to freedom of expression. It is the foundation of freedom of expression."
What's Wrong With Too Many White Men in One Place?
CNN
2017-05-27
Villanova University's Gordon Coonfield says the White House photo op with Trump and Republican leaders celebrating the passage of their health care bill wasn't accidental... "It's a certain staging of power," says Coonfield. "An image of a bunch of white guys seeking to undo health care coverage for millions of Americans sends a strong [and] unambiguous message about whose interests are being represented and whose are not."
Symbols and Civil Rights
Voice of America's American Café
2016-09-02
Professor Gordon Coonfield, of Villanova University in Philadelphia, said that images and symbols, including logos, slogans and photographs, often have a more immediate and more lasting impact than a real solution. "With social media, these images, these symbols, these icons become... almost instantaneous in their ability to reach millions of people..."
Select Academic Articles (3)
What Is Called Presence
Text and Performance QuarterlyGordon Coonfield, Heidi Rose
2012 This essay rethinks what is called presence in a way that links important past and present ways of thinking in performance studies. Bringing Wallace Bacon's writing into conversation with Walter Benjamin, we reflect from a phenomenological position on presence as an experience of "thisness." Our aim is neither to defend presence as a simple, ontological fact, nor to dismiss it altogether as an anachronism of a premedia age. Rather, we seek to affirm what is called presence as an historically situated mode of experience with a view toward clarifying and revaluing the stakes performance studies has therein.
News Images as Lived Images: Media Ritual, Cultural Performance and Public Trauma
Critical Studies in Media CommunicationGordon Coonfield, John Huxford
2009 This article considers the relation between news images—images captured, selected, written about, printed and distributed in the course of the news process—and cultural performances, those everyday embodied modes of expressive enactment by which individuals meaningfully and collectively create their worlds. While scholarship on media from a ritual perspective has contributed a great deal to understandings of the cultural dimensions of the production of news images, it remains focused on the sites and practices of encoding. This article calls upon the concept of performance to explore those sites, relations and practices in which the decoding of news images obtains. After a review and critique of the literature on news as ritual and a definitional overview of the performance concept, it considers two cases that explore the ways news images of September 11, 2001, became lived images through specific cultural performances.
Mapping Addicted Subjection
Cultural StudiesGordon Coonfield
2007 Conceptions of the subject have been a critical site of intervention for cultural studies, especially where such studies concern those processes by which meanings, practices, and institutions and relations of power are articulated in the constitution and control of social life. This article considers the analytic potential of re-thinking the subject, as Deleuze suggests, not in terms of ‘a subject’ but as a force-field of intensities. Following the work of Deleuze and Guattari, this article develops a cartographic approach to the study of such force-fields and applies this approach to one uniquely potent mode of modern subjection: that associated with addiction. In addition to intervening in those discourses and practices which produce contemporary addictions, this article offers a potentially useful approach to the study of such cultural epidemics, as well as further exploration of Deleuze and Guattari's significance for cultural studies.
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