By Allyson Mann
tiny@uga.edu
Andy Kavoori moves with a restless energy that reflects his quicksilver mind. He seems unable to sit still, offering sound bites about the television news industry, modernity, globalization and jokes at his own expense all in one breath. A highly productive scholar, Kavoori is adamant about relating his work to the industry he studies.
“I relate theories of global culture to television news practices,” he says.
Kavoori’s research has focused on comparative cultural analysis of European, American and Asian television news.
“I’m looking at the dynamics of news reception, the sense that people make of news across cultures and in different national contexts. The fabric of television news, whether in Germany, France, Britain, Israel or Korea, is a cultural arena for decoding our historical moment,” he says.
With degrees in cultural anthropology and mass communication and a range of journalistic experience, Kavoori rejects the traditional dichotomy between theory and praxis, teaching his students how to function in a profit-driven media industry but also how to critically disassemble texts and then recreate them in the context of popular culture. In one course, students research and develop a show concept that meets both critical and market needs, creating “models for a better television landscape of the future.” In another course, he teaches television news writing as both a journalistic skill and as a cultural discourse. His highly popular graduate seminars provide students with a vocabulary to understand media texts in comparative cultural terms.
Last summer, Kavoori took his pedagogy from the classroom and spent a month in his native India training journalists for Aaj Tak, the country’s first 24-hour news service.
“It was a unique experience to have the power to shape news agendas and to invent new modes of storytelling for an entire corps of journalists,” he says.
At UGA, Kavoori organizes a range of internationally oriented activities. The CNN World Report program brings journalists four times a year from countries like South Africa, Barbados, Chile, China, Uruguay, Pakistan, Azerbaijan and Belize. In October, about 100 people gathered to hear Palestinian journalists discuss the issues they face as media practitioners. Student encounters with these journalists can be life-changing, Kavoori says.
“American media rarely move beyond the coup-famine-earthquake syndrome in their coverage of the developing world,” he says. “These visits provide our students with a different vision of those countries.”
Kavoori’s commitment to interdisciplinary work led him to begin a “South Asia in Transition” speaker series, which has brought media scholars, anthropologists, film makers and fiction writers to UGA; he also helped organize the Center for Humanities and Arts conference on “Globalization and Change in South Asia” earlier this year. His research continues to grow beyond television news to issues of tourism, diasporic culture and film. As to what keeps him going at such a frenetic pace, Kavoori has a simple answer: “It’s fun.” |
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