WHO COUNTS

Who Counts? The Complexities of Democracy in America. Penn State humanities scholars explore the ongoing quest to achieve the promise of American democracy despite the many past, present and future obstacles to equality and social justice.

John Christman, Executive Producer & Director, PSU Humanities Institute

Matt Jordan, Executive/Consulting Producer

Andy Grant, Director/Producer

Mark Stitzer, Director of Photography & Editor

Runtime: 54 Mins

Year: 2020

About The Team

John Christman

John Christman is Professor of Philosophy, Political Science and Women’s Studies.  He is the author of numerous articles and books in social and political philosophy, specializing in topics such as the social conception of the self, theories of justice and oppression, and the idea of freedom.   His books include The Myth of Property: Toward an Egalitarian Theory of Ownership (Oxford), The Politics of Persons: Individual Autonomy and Socio-historical Selves (Cambridge), and Social and Political Philosophy: A Contemporary Introduction (Routledge).  He is the editor of The Inner Citadel: Essays on Individual Autonomy (Oxford) and co-editor, with Joel Anderson, of Autonomy and the Challenges to Liberalism: New Essays (Cambridge).

Matt Jordan

Matt Jordan is a critical media scholar who works on the role of media in everyday culture. He was a double major in history and English at Allegheny College, and earned an MA from Drew University in modern European intellectual history. His doctorate, from Claremont Graduate University, is in European studies.

He teaches undergraduate courses in film studies and directs the film studies minor. His graduate teaching and research explores how popular media forms and media technologies are used to constitute and reify aspects of personal identity and cultural ideology. He has written extensively on the ways in which cultural ideologies are constructed by way of ongoing conversations in and about popular culture in Europe, Britain and America. He is currently working on two books that examine the management and mediation of sound as a problem in global modernity: one that traces the rise and fall of the Klaxon automobile horn as a feature of the early 20th century soundscape, and another that traces the genealogy of “quietness” media technologies and the phenomenon of “commodity quietness” to explain and critique the problematic ubiquity of such technologies today. His essays on media culture and society have appeared in Quartz, The Washington Post, Fortune, The Huffington Post, Scroll, The New Republic, Smithsonian and elsewhere. He was featured in the 2014 film “Happy Valley,” and in June 2018 appeared in a Brookings Institution/SSRC broadcast on “The Consequences of Misinformation” on C-SPAN.

He is co-director of Public Humanities Initiative at the Humanities Institute at Penn State, serving as executive producer of the new web series HumIn Focus. Along with serving as a Faculty Senator, and sitting on the board of the Center for Humanities and Information at Penn State, he is currently North American representative to the Board of the Association for Cultural Studies.

Andy Grant

Andy Grant is always exploring new ways to create and tell compelling stories. He has worked in television and video production for fifteen years, including long and short-form documentary work for both broadcast and digital media. Grant has worked for several production companies including Driftwood Productions in State College, PA and WNED-TV Buffalo/Toronto. He is currently the Lead Producer of Digital Media at WPSU-TV.

Mark Stitzer

For more than fifteen years Mark Stitzer has been working in television and film production in nearly major crew role including grip, sound recordist, jib operator, Steadicam operator, director, editor, motion graphics and animation, and even colorist.  Because of this diverse experience range and skill set, he has been called the “Swiss Army Knife of filmmaking.” His most recent credits include documentaries Speaking Grief (editor),  A Time to Heal (director of photography, editor), and Water Blues: Green Solutions (director of photography) for which he was awarded an Individual Craft Achievement Emmy for outstanding photography. Mark currently works as a videographer and editor at WPSU-TV.