Lynn Schofield Clark

Clark grew up outside of Buffalo, New York and attended Williamsville North High School. She received her BA from Westminster College in 1986, her MA from United Theological Seminary in Dayton, Ohio in 1990, and her PhD from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1998.[7] As a graduate student at University of Colorado she worked with Stewart Hoover with whom she has continued to publish. Before joining the University of Denver faculty in 2006, she served as Assistant Research Professor and Associate Director of the Center for Media, Religion, and Culture at the University of Colorado at Boulder.[8] She served as Visiting Professor at the University of Copenhagen’s Department of Media and Film Studies during the springs of 2009 and 2013, and as a Visiting Fellow at the RMIT (AUS) Digital Ethnography Research Center in the Fall of 2013.[9]

She is married to filmmaker Jon Clark, and they have two children, Jonathan and Allison.

Based on a 10 year study of hundreds of parents and children, The Parent App (Oxford University Press, 2012), 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 (Oxford University Press, 2003), 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.[10] 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.[11] 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.[12] 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.[13]

Clark is also co-author of Media, Home, and Family (Routledge, 2004). 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 (Rutgers, 2007). In that book, she introduced the concept of “religious lifestyle branding” as a means of discussing the products produced for religiously affiliated young people (such as Hindu nation-sponsored campus bhangra parties, Muslim pop music, KewlJu t-shirts, and fashion magazine-like Bibles) that are meant to give young people a way to identify themselves religiously.[14] 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.[15]

Clark is also co-editor of Practicing Religion in the Age of the Media (Columbia University Press, 2002), 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.

Clark’s main contributions are in the area of family media studies (particularly in ethnographic approaches to the role of media in the relationships between parents and their teenage and preteen children) 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.[14] With her latest book on technology and parenting, Clark is recognized for advocating parental trust and open communication between parents and teenagers.[16]