Lynn Schofield Clark, Ph.D., is a media critic and scholar whose research focuses on media studies and film studies. She is Professor and Chair of the Department of Media, Film, and Journalism Studies at the University of Denver. She is a prize-winning author of several books and articles on the role media plays in the lives of diverse adolescents. In her 2017 book co-authored with Regina Marchi, Young People and the Future of News, Clark uses an ethnographic approach to tell the stories of youth engagement with media both as producers and consumers. Clark's book regarding parenting in the digital age is titled The Parent App: Understanding Families in a Digital Age. Clark’s main contributions are in the areas of family media studies and the mediatization of world religions. Clark’s work is interdisciplinary, drawing upon a variety of scholarly disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. She has published in the areas of media studies, sociology, religious studies, theology, and American studies. She is also Director of the Edward W. and Charlotte A. Estlow International Center for Journalism and New Media at the University of Denver. She is President of the International Society for Media, Religion, and Culture and was co-director of the first International Conference on Religion, Media, and Culture in 1996. She is also a member of the academic advisory board for the Pew Internet & American Life project and chaired the host committee for the 2013 meeting of the Association of Internet Researchers in Denver. Clark has been recognized for her innovative teaching and was recognized as the 2012 Service Learning Faculty of the Year at the University of Denver. She recently oversaw a class parody production of the popular television show The Office, which allowed her to apply her expertise on technology's use in higher education. The video has since gone viral.
Based on a 10 year study of hundreds of parents and children, The Parent App, offers parenting strategies for navigating digital and mobile media. Following her interviews with mothers and fathers of varying economic backgrounds, Clark points to different approaches to technological use and its valuation between upper-class and lower-class families. Other issues addressed include family communication, online predators, cyber bullying, sexting, gamer drop-outs, helicopter parenting, technological monitoring, and the effectiveness of strict controls. Clark’s first book, From Angels to Aliens: Teenagers, the Media, and the Supernatural, analyzed how young people of different religious backgrounds - and with no religious backgrounds at all - made meaning of popular culture’s representations of the supernatural, based on their religious understanding. She introduced the term “the dark side of evangelicalism” to draw attention to the ways that popular culture such as horror films and apocalyptic video games draw upon Christianity’s historic narratives of demons, hell, and the afterlife, often in ways leaders of religious conservative movements reject in spite of the perennial interest these stories garner among young people. Basing her findings on the differing ways in which young people respond to popular cultural stories of the supernatural, Clark argued against the media effects perspective. Instead of people taking media alternatives more seriously than those of religion, popular media narratives reflect and contribute to ongoing challenges to traditional religious authority as lived out in everyday life. The book received the Best Scholarly Book Award of 2003 by the National Communication Association’s Ethnography division. As the first book on contemporary lived religion in the U.S. that explored the role of popular culture in young peoples’ lives, the book was reviewed in Washington Post Book World, Publishers Weekly, Christianity Today, Christian Century, and in several academic journals. Clark is also co-author of Media, Home, and Family. This book contributed to family media studies through its focus on the discursive practices of parents. The book introduced the phrase the “accounts of the media” to describe the fact that parents both give stories or accounts about how they wish their family set and followed rules governing media use, and how these stories are always inflected by parents’ senses that they are accountable as parents for establishing and following through on such rules. Clark is also editor of Religion, Media, and the Marketplace. In that book, she introduced the concept of “religious lifestyle branding” as a means of discussing the products produced for religiously affiliated young people that are meant to give young people a way to identify themselves religiously. Clark and contributors point out that such processes of identification are never divorced from sources of power – sometimes at the level of the commercial industries, sometimes at the level of the nation-state – that would benefit from those identifications. Clark is also co-editor of Practicing Religion in the Age of the Media, and has had articles appear in the Journal of Communication, Critical Studies in Media Communication, New Media & Society, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, and in several other journals and edited volumes.
Theoretical Contributions
Clark’s main contributions are in the area of family media studies and the mediatization of world religions. She is recognized as a contributor to studies of the mediatization of religion, and has written on how online fan groups reinforce norms of religious understandings. With her latest book on technology and parenting, Clark is recognized for advocating parental trust and open communication between parents and teenagers.
