COSME Seminar - Producing Resistance: Local Media and Community Power (Dr. Annie Laurie Sullivan)
Online
Thursday 19th November 2026
University of Liverpool's Centre for Converged Screen Media and Entertainment (COSME) presents the 2026 online research seminar: Producing Resistance: Local Media and Community Power in Black Detroit, 1970 with Dr. Annie Laurie Sullivan (Oakland University). The talk will be on teams and participants will be sent the meeting link prior to the event.
This talk examines ways Black Detroiters mobilized film, radio, and television production in 1970 to address the political concerns of the city’s growing Black population, document the material realities of everyday life in Black urban spaces, cultivate and express Black consciousness, and establish new forms of economic enterprise for a Black city. As such, this talk offers a glimpse into how the era’s political aspirations were sustained, transformed, and contested through local media. Drawing on research for my forthcoming book, I argue that examining different audiovisual practices reveals how political discourse and strategies for community enrichment took shape across media forms, while also identifying the distinct affordances and limitations of each medium. This approach illuminates varied ways local media infrastructures enabled and constrained Black cultural production, as well as the ways Black Detroiters navigated a white-dominated media system largely indifferent, if not outright hostile, to their perspectives. By centering Detroit, a city outside the dominant centers of media production, the talk also challenges histories that privilege national commercial industries and entertainment-oriented production over media designed for community empowerment.
Annie Laurie Sullivan is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English, Creative Writing, and Film at Oakland University in Michigan. Her work examines the complex ways in which race, cultural identity, and locality intersect with histories of community media production. Her research book Black Media Rebellion: The Struggle Over Local Radio, Television, and Film in Detroit traces histories of Black broadcasting and community film production alongside broader processes of urban development and social change in Detroit from the 1930s through the 1970s. It is forthcoming from the University of Michigan Press. With Lauren Herold, she also co-edited Local TV: Communities, Histories, Aesthetics for the Peabody Series at the University of Georgia Press.
This talk examines ways Black Detroiters mobilized film, radio, and television production in 1970 to address the political concerns of the city’s growing Black population, document the material realities of everyday life in Black urban spaces, cultivate and express Black consciousness, and establish new forms of economic enterprise for a Black city. As such, this talk offers a glimpse into how the era’s political aspirations were sustained, transformed, and contested through local media. Drawing on research for my forthcoming book, I argue that examining different audiovisual practices reveals how political discourse and strategies for community enrichment took shape across media forms, while also identifying the distinct affordances and limitations of each medium. This approach illuminates varied ways local media infrastructures enabled and constrained Black cultural production, as well as the ways Black Detroiters navigated a white-dominated media system largely indifferent, if not outright hostile, to their perspectives. By centering Detroit, a city outside the dominant centers of media production, the talk also challenges histories that privilege national commercial industries and entertainment-oriented production over media designed for community empowerment.
Annie Laurie Sullivan is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English, Creative Writing, and Film at Oakland University in Michigan. Her work examines the complex ways in which race, cultural identity, and locality intersect with histories of community media production. Her research book Black Media Rebellion: The Struggle Over Local Radio, Television, and Film in Detroit traces histories of Black broadcasting and community film production alongside broader processes of urban development and social change in Detroit from the 1930s through the 1970s. It is forthcoming from the University of Michigan Press. With Lauren Herold, she also co-edited Local TV: Communities, Histories, Aesthetics for the Peabody Series at the University of Georgia Press.
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