Jeremy Packer is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication and the Director of the Communication, Rhetoric, and Digital Media PhD Program. He is also a faculty member in the Science Technology and Society program. He teaches undergraduate courses in critical media analysis and cultural studies, though he has also taught courses in surveillance, cinema, and media history. His graduate courses cover such topics as cultural studies, communications theory, qualitative research methods, network society, technology, and the work of Michel Foucault.

Dr. Packer's research areas are cultural studies and communication technologies. More specifically, he has considered the interrelationships of communications and transportation technologies and the political implications that arise from their use and governance. In particular he has looked at the historical formations of safety and security as the means for justifying and organizing automotive governance. He has published on these and other topics in Cultural Studies, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, The Communication Review, and a number of collected volumes. He serves as the Book Review Editor for the journal Communication Review and serves on the Editorial Boards of Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies and Communication Inquiry. He is the author or editor of the following books.

Mobility Without Mayhem: Cars, Safety and Citizenship (Duke University Press, 2008) provides a cultural history spanning the 1950s to the present of how automotive conduct was reorganized by safety concerns having to do with women drivers, motorcylists, hitchhikers, African American drivers (DWB), truckers, road ragers, and most recently car bombers.

“Jeremy Packer has scoured the byways of American history and media to bring back this telling account of how mobility is governed. Along the way, he deepens our understanding of how a culture of individualism, risk, and competitiveness is in fact organized and controlled—by inculcating self-discipline in the name of safety. Freedom is constrained by security, self-expression by surveillance; the American Dream fizzles out in ‘road rage.’ What does this tell us about contemporary America?”—John Hartley

Thinking With James Carey: Essays on Communications, Transportation, History (Peter Lang, 2006), co-edited with Craig Robertson, investigates the ongoing application and extension of the work of the late James Carey. The book includes eight original essays by communications scholars and historians as well as two interviews with James Carey conducted in 2004 by Lawrence Grossberg.

“For those of us fortunate enough to have known James Carey, who died in 2006, this book provides a wonderful ongoing conversation about topics close to the center of his thinking. For those who did not know him, the book proves a wonderful complement to his own essays and gives a hint to the reasons so many treated him with enthusiasm as well as a bit of frustration.”--Paul A. Soukup

Foucault, Cultural Studies, and Governmentality (SUNY Press, 2003), co-edited with Jack Bratich and Cameron McCarthy, assesses Michel Foucault's work on governmentality and applies it to cultural studies in general and the U.S. context in particular.

“It provides an impressive array of discourse, ethical/technical, and   institutional foci for assessing the positive contribution that governmentality promises for cultural studies. In so doing, the chapters, some stronger than others, provide important clues as to how the field of culture might be reconceptualized once objects undergo a process of “governmentalization.” In other words, when the book thinks of culture as a set of “reflections, techniques, and practices to regulate conduct,” the questions asked and the methods for doing cultural studies change. As such, this volume’s most significant contribution is to challenge the taken-for-granted assumptions about cultural studies by reimagining culture as a field, object, and instrument for regulating conduct.”- Ronald Greene and David Breshears

Secret Agents: Popular Icons Beyond James Bond (Peter Lang, 2009) is a collected volume that attempts to update the seminal work by Tony Bennett and Janet Woollacott, Bond and Beyond (Palgrave, 1987), by investigating new popular culture iterations of the secret agent as they proliferate across film and other media.

Jeremy Packer

North Carolina State University

106 Winston Hall

Raleigh, NC  27695

jpacker@ncsu.edu