Aportaciones e influencia de mujeres investigadoras en las teorías de la comunicaciónuna aproximación a la Escuela de Columbia (1935-1955)

  1. Herrero Andreu, Esperanza
Supervised by:
  1. Leonarda García Jiménez Director
  2. Peter Simonson Director

Defence university: Universidad de Murcia

Fecha de defensa: 17 October 2024

Committee:
  1. Enric Saperas Lapiedra Chair
  2. Juan Miguel Aguado Terrón Secretary
  3. Filipa Subtil Committee member

Type: Thesis

Sustainable development goals

Abstract

This doctoral dissertation explores the contributions, the roles, and the influence of women researchers to the foundation of communication research, and it does so by focusing on the Columbia School (1935-1955), one of the main theoretical assemblages in the history of the field. The dissertation’s main objective, therefore, is to recover the contribution and figures of women researchers to the Columbia School as well as to the intellectual history of communication research. To respond to this objective, this thesis poses a series of research questions that articulate a theoretical, methodological and empirical approach to our object of study. Then, the thesis develops a theoretical approach to the presence and absence of female figures and contributions in the intellectual history of the field of communication, framed by the premises and possibilities of a communicative, democratic and affects-driven epistemology. Next, a methodology is proposed for the recovery of the contributions of women researchers to the history of the field, through a triangulation that combines quantitative content analysis, archival-documentary analysis, and in-depth interviews. Finally, the empirical analysis consists of, first, a gendered quantitative content analysis of the bibliographic production of the Columbia School between 1935 and 1955 (n=510). Second, an archival-documentary analysis of archival materials and historical documents of a scientific, personal and/or administrative nature (n=362) housed in 11 different archives. Thirdly, the conduction of in-depth interviews with relevant informant subjects (n=9), who were personally or professionally linked to women researchers at the Columbia School. Thus, the results reveal a significant contribution of women researchers to the work produced by the Columbia School (1935-1955) in quantitative terms. In addition, the personal, professional and academic biographies of the 8 most prolific women researchers of the Columbia School (Marjorie Fiske, Hazel Gaudet, Herta Herzog, Patricia Kendall, Jeanette Sayre Smith, Helen Dinerman, Katherine Wolf and Leila Sussmann) are recovered. Finally, a cross-sectional reading of the intellectual history of the Columbia School with a gendered gaze is shown, which introduces the female researchers to the historical and socio-emotional narratives of the center, and which also recovers a series of female contributions to Columbia’s theoretical heritage (e.g., two-step flow, focus group and critical perspectives). The paper’s conclusions raise the need to complexify shared disciplinary histories in order to build a more pluralistic field of inquiry, as well as points to the relevance of female figures for a more complete understanding of the Columbia School and of communication research in general.