This special section, “Remembering Todd Gitlin: His Life and Legacy,” honors Gitlin’s contributions to the sociology of media, and media and communication studies writ large, as a scholar, public intellectual and writer, activist, teacher, mentor, and colleague. This special section builds on the presentations delivered at a packed memorial session held at the 2023 International Communication Association conference held in Toronto, cosponsored with the ICA Divisions of Philosophy, Theory, and Critique; Communication History; and Media Industries.
The contributors to this section, who represent several generations of students, colleagues, and sympathetic scholars inspired by his writings and his life, comment on Gitlin’s importance for their own work as well as for the academy and the broader public debate.
Dan Hallin, an early student of Gitlin’s at UC Berkeley, sees Gitlin as a foundational figure in the development of media sociology and journalism studies, and calls for renewed attention to Gitlin’s conception of hegemonic crisis.
Susan Douglas wrote an appreciative review of The Whole World is Watching for In These Times in February 2022, shortly after Gitlin’s death. When Douglas discovered that we had planned this panel, she wanted to contribute to the special issue by adapting and elaborating on her earlier article, given her high regard for Todd and his work.
Andrea Press, another former UC Berkeley student, recalls her experiences working as a research assistant for Inside Prime Time and the formative effect of his example of interdisciplinary scholarship and principled activism.
Rodney Benson, among Gitlin’s last UC Berkeley PhD students, was initially inspired by his Gramscian approach but came to admire Gitlin’s open-minded encounter with a complex and changing world, one in which no single theory possesses a monopoly of truth.
Lluis de Nadal, who completed his PhD under Gitlin’s supervision at Columbia, notes his mentor’s intense curiosity in his research on the Spanish movement-party Podemos, and suggests that Gitlin’s stance on the proper balance between outside and inside politics may offer the best solution to what he called “the great conundrum of left-wing politics in our time.”
Florence Zivaishe Madenga, a doctoral candidate at Penn-Annenberg, reached out to Gitlin in the early months of the global pandemic, responding to his well-known kindness and willingness to speak with junior scholars: she shares his reflections on contemporary politics, his career and relationships, and the legacy he envisioned he would leave.
Concluding the special section, as he did at the ICA panel in Toronto, Michael Schudson, Todd’s colleague for nearly two decades at Columbia, shares several of the tributes written by Gitlin’s PhD students in the wake of his death, which provide a window on Todd Gitlin as an inspirational teacher.
We hope this special section will resonate with other scholars, activists, journalists and media creators who have been deeply influenced by Todd Gitlin’s writings and his example as a public intellectual and whose work has emerged the better for the encounter.