Zoë Druick

Zoë Druick is a Professor in the School of Communication. Her primary areas of teaching and research are media studies, gender studies and cultural theory. Her research considers histories, theories and trajectories of documentary and reality-based media with an emphasis on their intersection with biopolitical projects. Her most recent books are The Grierson Effect: Tracing Documentary's International Movement (BFI 2014, with Deane Williams) and Cinephemera: Archives, Ephemeral Cinema and New Screen Histories in Canada (McGill-Queen's University Press 2014, with Gerda Cammaer). Other publications include Allan King's A Married Couple (UTP 2010), Programming Reality: Perspectives on English-Canadian Television (WLU Press, 2008) and Projecting Canada: Government Policy and Documentary Film at the National Film Board (McGill-Queen's, 2007). Her articles have appeared in numerous anthologies and journals, including Camera Obscura, Screen, Canadian Journal of Communication, International Journal of Communication, and the Canadian Journal of Film Studies. She has co-edited special issues of the Canadian Journal of Communication and the European Journal of Cultural Studies. Zoë leads the Distributed Networks project on the history of educational television in Canada and is currently working on a monograph on documentary and cybernetics.

Education

Ph.D. Graduate Program of Social and Political Thought, York University, Canada

Currently Teaching

Courses

Spring 2024

Future courses may be subject to change.

Zoë Teaches

CMNS 210 Media History
CMNS 316 Documentary Media
CMNS 800 Contemporary Approaches to Communication
CMNS 830 Popular Culture and Media Theory

publications

The Grierson Effect : Tracing Documentary's International Movement

This landmark collection of essays considers the global legacy of John Grierson, the father of British documentary.

Cinephemera: Archives, Ephemeral Cinema, and New Screen Histories in Canada

An investigation of the challenges faced by Canadian cinema in the digital age.

Allan King's A Married Couple

Zoë Druick examines the film in the context of late 1960s cinematic and cultural movements.

Long before 'Reality TV,' Canadian filmmaker Allan King caused a stir by mixing people's private and public lives in his 1969 documentary A Married Couple.

Programming Reality: Perspectives on English-Canadian Television

The first anthology dedicated to analyses of Canadian television content, is a collection of original, interdisciplinary articles, combining textual analysis and political economy of communications.

Projecting Canada: Government Policy and Documentary Film at the National Film Board

A revealing look at the role of government policy on the ideology of NFB documentaries.

Selected Book Chapters & Journal Articles

“A Journal of Insomnia: The individualization of sleep in a wired world,” in Mike Baker and Jessica Mulvogue, eds. The Interactive Documentary in Canada, pp. 269-283 (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2024).
"Documentality: The Postwar Mental Health Film and the Database Logic of the Governmental Film Agency," in Joshua Malitsky and Malin Wahlberg, eds. A Companion to Documentary Film History, pp. 107-122 (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2021).
"On (Not) Falling from the Sky: Fly-Over Global Documentary as Capitalist Body Genre," in Steve Anderson and Christie Milliken, eds. Reclaiming Popular Documentary, pp. 57-74. (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2021).
"‘Before Education, Good Food and Health’: World Citizenship and Biopolitics in UNESCO’s Postwar Literacy Films." In Christian Bonah and Anja Laukötter, eds. Body, Capital, and Screens: Visual Media and the Healthy Self in the 20th Century, pp. 249-278. (Amsterdam University Press, 2020.)
"Operational Media: Cybernetics, Biopolitics and Postwar Education." Foro de Educacion 18.2 (2020): 63-81.
“'The Best Teachers and the Best Preachers': Film, University Extension, and the Project of Assimilation in Alberta, 1917-1936,” in M. Dalquist and Joel Frykholm, eds. The Institutionalization of Educational Cinema: North America and Europe in the 1910s and 1920s (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019).
"'A Wide-Angle View of Fragile Earth': Capitalist Aesthetics in the work of Yann Arthus-Bertrand". Open Cultural Studies 2018; 2: 396-405.
"Property TV: Financialized Women and New Forms of Domestic Labour." European Journal of Cultural Studies 20.5 (October 2017): 560-574.
"Small Effects from Big Causes: The Dialogic Documentary Practice of Natalie Bookchin," Camera Obscura 92 (Vol 31.2) (2016): 1-25.
"The Myth of Media Literacy," International Journal of Communication 10 (2016): 1125-1144.
"Canadianization Revisited: Program Formats and the New Cultural Economy of the Canadian Broadcasting Industry," Journal of Popular Television 4.1 (2016): 75-89.
"New Deal Documentary and the North Atlantic Welfare State," in Brian Winston, ed, The Documentary Film Book (with Jonathan Kahana) (London: BFI, 2013), 153-158.
"Continuity and Change in the Discourse of Canada's Cultural Industries," in Ira Wagman and Peter Urquhart, eds. Cultural Industries.ca: Making Sense of Canada's Media in a Digital Age (Toronto: James Lorimer & Co, 2012), 133-148.
"Visualizing the World: The British Documentary at UNESCO," in Scott Anthony and James Mansell, eds. The Projection of Britain: A History of the GPO Film Unit (London: British Film Institute, 2011), 272-280.
“Meeting at the Poverty Line: Government Policy, Social Work and Media Activism in the Challenge for Change Program,” in Michael Brendan Baker, Thomas Waugh and Ezra Winton, eds. Challenge for Change/Societe Nouvelle: The Collection (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010), 337-353.
“Dialogic Absurdity: TV News Parody as a Critique of Genre.” Television and New Media 10.3 (2009): 294-308.
"Reaching the Multimillions': Liberal Internationalism and the Establishment of Documentary Film," in Lee Grieveson and Haidee Wasson, eds. Inventing Film Studies (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), 66-92.
"The International Educational Cinematograph Institute, Reactionary Modernism, and the Formation of Film Studies." Canadian Journal of Film Studies 16.1 (Spring 2007): 80-97.

research

documentary and educational media
media institutions and infrastructures
feminist media studies
cultural theory

School of Communication

Professor

Zoë Druick

Courses

Spring 2024

Zoë Teaches

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