Cultural and Critical Studies 2010 Abstracts
Cultural and Critical Studies • Towards 2015: Nollywood’s Definitions of Empowerment and Gender Equality for Nigerian Women • AJEORI AGBESE, University of Texas Pan American One of the United Nations’ millennium development goals is the promotion of gender equality and women’s empowerment. To achieve this goal, organizations around the world are using various tools to inform, educate and sensitize people on its benefits. One such tool is film. Film is a very powerful cultural tool as people can learn values and norms from it. Its audiences are informed, educated, sensitized and sometimes persuaded on issues. One could argue that movies that use cultural values and norms to address an issue would be accepted as more authentic and representative than one that incorporates foreign values and norms. Therefore, this paper examines how Nigerian movies portray the issue of women’s liberation and empowerment. Using three movies, this paper explores the meaning of gender equality and an empowered and liberated woman, her roles, and the role men play in her life in the Nigerian context.
Encoding Ideology: How Time Magazine Represents Nationalism and Identities Through Visual Reporting • Tania Rosas-Moreno, Loyola University Maryland; Dustin Harp, University of Texas at Austin; Ingrid Bachmann, University of Texas at Austin • Visual images in news photographs guide people’s understandings of people, places and events, especially when news audiences are unable to personally experience those represented images. This qualitative analysis considers the encoding of a census of 41 Time newsmagazine covers through the first five years of the U.S.-led war on Iraq. Four themes surfaced. Images of a sanitized war conveyed the idea of an almost bloodless event. Criticism of the role of President Bush and his administration in the invasion of Iraq was another. Third, a diverse figure of the American soldier whose image transitioned from glorious to realistic and deserving of sympathy was emphasized. Lastly, the portrayal of the other side of the conflict, the enemy, pitted the notions of us versus them. In essence, qualitative research must at least complement quantitative studies to make sense of powerful media messages that serve to encode ideologies of identity.
Critical Race Theory and Counter-narratives In the Documentary Biographies of Wright, Ellison, Clarke, and Van Peebles • Ralph Beliveau, University of Oklahoma; Meta Carstarphen, University of Oklahoma • This study examines the rhetorical construct informing film and video documentaries of four prominent 20th century African American male intellectual and artistic icons: Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, John Henrik Clarke, and Melvin Van Peebles. All four were the subjects of film biographies that have earned various national and international honors and distinctions. Individually, these films are notable because of their subjects and their accolades. Collectively, they offer interlocking perspectives on race, history and art that provide insights into the social evolution of key civil rights struggles within the United States. Finally, these film biographies are important as teaching tools, particularly for their deployment of counter-narratives.
Selling News: Exploring Myth in Television Coverage of the Iraq War • Victoria Bemker, Louisiana State University • War is a profitable product for television news. The purpose of this paper is to examine two of the highest-rated television news networks’ during the Iraq War to understand how the networks constructed and marketed its war coverage to gain ratings. This study uses textual analysis to understand how news organization breakdown a complicated event like war to its audience. As past scholars have discussed, narratives and myth is often implored to explain such events. War is an emotional time for often multiple nations and it is important to understand how organizations that say they are stating facts explain such an event to its audience.
Eat this, not that: A critical analysis of using media to improve children’s health literacy and body image awareness • Kim Bissell, University of Alabama; Scott Parrott, The University of Alabama • The study examined knowledge of, and attitudes toward, nutrition and physical activity among 200 children at a school in the South. A one-month media and health literacy intervention taught children about the importance of proper nutrition, to differentiate between healthy and unhealthy foods, and the importance of physical activity. Qualitative data showed the intervention led to changes in behavior with regards to nutrition and physical activity, a necessary step in the fight against childhood overweight/obesity. As reported from unsolicited feedback from participants, parents, teachers, and administrators, the media and health literacy intervention program proved successful. Not only were positive changes in cognition, attitudes, and behavior evident, more importantly, the children themselves noted that they considered and thought about health and nutrition in new and different ways. As the open-ended findings reported above reveal, the participants in this study processed much of the information received about health and nutrition, and they took the next step in terms of bringing their concerns to the people most likely to help them implement a change—their parents. Data from the present study suggests that gains in health literacy are possible; however, the key may lie in finding an intervention program that puts health in a context they are process and understand. These and other findings are discussed.
The folk cacography of Woody Guthrie • Matthew Blake, California State University, Chico This essay looks at the methods of composition used by Woody Guthrie in his contributions to the People’s World newspaper, during his 18-month period as a contributor. Focusing on his use of cacography, the author considers Guthrie’s methods to be similar to those used by Dunne and Browne during the nineteenth century.
News Coverage of the Federal Right of Refusal Regulation: A Feminist Textual Analysis Kathryn Blevins, The Pennsylvania State University • One of the final legislative acts of the Bush Administration was to pass a Health and Human Services Regulation which has the potential to substantially affect millions of women’s access to reproductive health care services. This Regulation, based roughly off of state right of refusal clauses which legally allow health care institutions and professionals to deny care based on moral and religious objections, has been a point of public debate since July 2008 when a controversial draft was leaked to the public. This paper conducts a qualitative feminist textual analysis to look at the frames of discourse presented in the newspaper coverage of the Regulation. Results show a shift in the few traditional feminist frames found, and that the overarching frame for the discourse is actually about President Bush vs. President Obama, sidelining women in the discussion almost entirely. These results therefore also show a need for improved journalistic standards in news stories about prominent women’s issues.
Stealing past the dragons: Disney’s postmodernist pursuit of audiences in marketing The Chronicles of Narnia • Susan Brockus, California State University, Chico • Disney’s participation as marketing- and distribution-only partner for The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe marked a notable departure for the traditionally secular company. In the process of promoting the movie, Disney pursued multiple audiences, even as it ventured toward the colonization of Christianity through promotion of a family-targeted spectacle of global and blockbuster proportions. This concept is developed through exploration of cultural colonization by media via the spectacle.
Throwing a Right Cross: U.S. Conservative Counterpublic Discourses on Academic Freedom Christopher Brown, Ohio State University • On September 11, 2001, Ward Churchill wrote an essay suggesting that the attacks on the World Trade Center were a logical response to the depravity of U.S. foreign policy. Many on the U.S. political Right became irate as word of his essay surged across the United States within a few days. In understanding the impact of conservative responses to Churchill’s essay, this paper analyzed how right-wing commentators used indecorous, or offensive, forms of communication to strengthen and further their position with regard to academic freedom. Notably, Churchill strategically emerged in U.S. conservative commentators’ discourses as the poster child for making sense of how professors practice their academic freedom in the classroom. Discourse analysis revealed the degree to which online discourses of U.S. conservative commentators function to support their engagement with counterpublicity; a mode of resistance typically engaged by marginalized groups. More specifically, the paper examined how conservative commentators on FrontPageMagazine online, a popular conservative website, engaged counterpublic discourses to discredit the practices of academic freedom in the university.
Yes We Can?: Race, Myth and the News Revisited • chris campbell, u. of southern miss. school of mass comm & journalism; Kim LeDuff, U. of southern miss. school of mass comm & journalism; Rockell Brown Burton, Texas Southern University, School of Communication • This paper revisits the troubling representations of race on local television news identified in Campbell’s 1995 book, Race, Myth and the News, by examining local TV news coverage of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Holiday in 2009. In this myth analysis, the authors discuss the day’s coverage in 10 cities and examine two specific stories that aired in Phoenix that typified that coverage. The authors argue that the myths (marginality, difference and assimilation) that Campbell identified in 1995 persist, and that such myths continue to fuel racist attitudes and ill-informed public policy.
Respect My Authori-tah: South Park and the Fragmentation/Reification of Whiteness • Phil Chidester, Illinois State University • As a postmodern parodic television cartoon, South Park has much more to say about race than its crudely stereotypical and even crassly juvenile depictions of the racial Other would suggest. This paper argues that the text manages, instead, to communicate its potent messages about difference largely in and through the absence of the Other. Considering the cartoon as a form of phenomenological experience, interrogating the meanings it generates and perpetuates through its relation to other texts in the cartoon genre, and exploring the program’s dialectical role in both effacing and fostering a desire for difference, I trace South Park’s reinforcement of viewer perceptions of whiteness as subject position in a contemporary American society.
Mythologizing Memories: Veterans, a Memorial, and the Korean War • Suhi Choi, University of Utah • Echoing the nation’s belated memory boom in regard to the Korean War at its 50th anniversary, Utah Korean War veterans in 2003 erected a memorial in Memory Grove Park, Salt Lake City. The memorial largely resonates with three mythical scripts – resilience, local pride, and the good war – that emerged from both the local and national contexts of remembrance. I argue that the official commemoration of the war has shifted local veterans’ rhetorical positions from potentially subversive witnesses of the peculiar realities of the Korean War to uncritical negotiators who translate local experiences to national topoi.
America’s Sports Authority: Interrogating Race, Power and Consumption • Catherine Coleman, Texas Christian University • Through socio-historical analysis and ethical theory, this research examines relationships between discourses of race, power, and consumption in definitions of consumer vulnerability and proposes the application of a dialogic ethic of empowerment and responsibility that is grounded in historical circumstance and community. The circumstances and discourses surrounding the sneaker killings of the late 1980s and 1990s and the implication of Nike and Michael Jordan in these crimes is a powerful venue through which to explore expressions of American race relations and is an opportunity to address the dynamics of consumption and power—the power over symbol systems, the power to create meaning, and exertions of power in economic systems. A dialogic ethics is presented as a means by which to approach consumer vulnerability.
Mimicking Bollywood in Slumdog Millionaire: A Political Economic Analysis • Nicole Cox, Florida State University; Jennifer Proffitt, Florida State University • In an age when mass media transcend geographic barriers and blend cultural ideologies, the emergence and evolution of the film industry in the twenty-first century is ever-changing. As film-going provides a site for ideological and cultural production, this paper examines the film success, Slumdog Millionaire (SDM), as a product imitative of Bollywood film. Due to its recency, few scholars have critically examined SDM as a product that crosses both cultural and geographic boundaries with political economic ties to the major Hollywood media conglomerates. This research examines the reasons for Hollywood involvement in a film production that is mimetic of the Bollywood film genre in an attempt to better understand the global political economic factors that drive the film industry today.
Liberal House on the Prairie Exploring Pioneer Medicine Through the Lens of 1970s Television Katherine Foss, Middle Tennessee State University • Like many pioneer families, disease and tragedy plagued the family and friends of Laura Ingalls Wilder. As conveyed in the Little House book series and in biographies of Laura Ingalls Wilder, out on the Midwest prairie, a physician’s visits were rare and accomplished little. Only the gravest situations warranted the expense and effort of seeking medical attention. For example, when Mary Ingalls began to lose her sight from Scarlet Fever, two doctors were called to the Ingalls’ home, yet neither could prevent Mary’s impending blindness. In 1974, the television program Little House on the Prairie first aired, fictionalizing Wilder’s experience in rural Minnesota. Unlike the book series, the Ingalls and other townspeople frequently sought care from the local practitioner, the fictional Dr. Hiram Baker, for ailments ranging from sprained ankles to Typhus. This program also addressed other medical issues, including drug addiction and the dangers of patent medicine. This research examined the influence of 1970s context on depictions of medicine in the Little House on the Prairie television series. Findings indicated that while the TV series visualized some aspects of pioneer life, the political, economic, and social context of the 1970s clearly influenced the show’s content, particularly in attitudes toward social injustice, disability acceptance and health care accessibility. With over 40 million book copies sold and 192 episodes of the show produced, few cultural products have reached as many people as the stories of Laura Ingalls Wilder. Therefore, these messages, however inaccurate, have likely shaped people’s perceptions about frontier medicine.
Covering Captain Cool: The Miracle on the Hudson as a Hero Tale • Russell Frank, Penn State • In the tradition of mythological studies of the news, this paper examines coverage of the airline pilot who safely ditched his disabled aircraft in the Hudson River in January 2009 as a hero tale. Specifically, the paper examines a month’s worth of coverage of Captain Chelsey Sullenberger’s heroics in New York’s four major daily newspapers (The New York Times, the Daily News, the New York Post and the Wall Street Journal), a period during which Captain Cool was widely hailed for his skill, his cool, and his modesty – the very model of the American hero. The paper concludes that the Sully stories may be read, collectively, as a chronicle of how a hero behaved, a guide to how a hero should be behave and a case study of journalistic groupthink. News stories are both determined and determinative; that is, in reflecting the culture’s mythos, they reinforce that mythos.
We Will Be Missed: Self-Commemoration in 2009 Newspaper Failures • Nicholas Gilewicz, Temple University • Despite ongoing newspaper crises, little research exists about the social meanings of newspaper failure. The Rocky Mountain News, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and the Ann Arbor News ceased daily publication in 2009. Textual analysis of their final editions reveals self-reflexive commemorative formulations and underscores connections between scholarship on the functions of journalism, literature on social memory, and frame theory. In these critical incidents, journalists construct memory texts that defend their claims to authority and cultural value.
Photographic Sharing: A Ritual (Over) View Timothy R Gleason, University of Wisconsin Oshkosh • This paper examines the sharing of ideas, techniques, and photographs within James Carey’s ritual view of communication approach. It is argued that past and present modes of sharing are historically connected through what Carey called the maintenance of society. Using existing macro and digitally archived micro examples, photography journals from 1890 and 1906, this paper aims to offer an avenue into the cultural history of photography. Photographers used sharing as a collective act of agency. The early history of TV news coverage regarding veteran/soldier opposition to the Vietnam War Mark Harmon, University of Tennessee • GI opposition to the Vietnam War arose early and grew rapidly, sometimes expressed through a vibrant underground press. Eventually much opposition took the form of Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW). Network television news was a dominant news source in the 1960s and 1970s. Contrary to popular mythology, television news did not lead the way on questioning the war. That only came after the Tet Offensive and with validation of that criticism through official sources.
Star-Spangled Controversy: Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf and Media Discourses of Nation, Religion, Race and Sport • Sarah Jackson, University of Minnesota • This paper presents a cultural critique of the public controversy that surrounded Denver Nuggets’ player Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf after he refused to stand for the national anthem citing his Islamic faith and America’s history of tyranny as his justification. While the NBA and Abdul-Rauf quickly came to a compromise on the issue, extensive and often contentious public debate that explicitly required acknowledgement of cultural ideologies of citizenship and religion was enabled. A literature review that includes sport sociology, critical race theory, cultural studies, and political science scholarship details the intersectionality of ideologies of sport, religion and race in contributing to public and media discourses of nationhood. Specifically examined are the discourses of citizenship that emerged around the controversy and the intersections of this discourse with those of race, religion and politics. A qualitative discourse analysis of Sports Illustrated’s coverage of the controversy is presented to demonstrate the hegemonic and counter-hegemonic potential popular media offer in representing moments of dissent by high profile public figures and the social and cultural norms which bind these mediated representations. Ultimately, while Sports Illustrated’s discourse is found to both delegitimize and defend Abdul-Rauf, the absences on both sides of this discursive struggle reveal the ways in which dissenting agents are largely silenced and dehumanized in popular culture.
Will an Electronic Medical Record Policy Maintain Privacy and Cut Costs?: A Comparison of Frames Hannah Kang, University of Florida; Dae-Hee Kim, Graduate student • This study conducted a framing analysis on Obama’s new electronic medical records (EMR) policy in order to investigate media frames and to compare the frames of different types of media. Also, six framing devices including sources, metaphors, exemplars, catchphrases and depictions and effects or consequences were analyzed for each frame. This study identified three framings types that were used in varied types of U.S. newspapers: Applause, Expectancy-doubt, and Antipathy.
Candidate Obama in the News: True blue populism and social production of empty signifiers in political reporting • Anup Kumar, Cleveland State University • This paper is about populist politics and the news media. Building on Ernesto Laclau’s (2005) argument why empty signifiers are important to understand the politics of populism I propose that empty signifiers also matter to political reporting. They lead to production of emptiness in the news frames. Emptiness is valuable social artifact of articulation to understand production of signification in political reporting. I show in this paper how empty signifiers such as change, hope, we’ and Barack Obama’s identity emerged as empty news frames in the news in the print media.
Trying on Media Literacy: Analysis of Open-Ended Responses to Objectification in Fashion Advertising • Jacqueline Lambiase, Texas Christian University; Tom Reichert, University of Georgia; Mark Adkins, Accenture; Michael LaTour, UNLV • Media literacy has lagged in the U.S., focusing on protection against the disease of mainstream media (VanMeenen, 2009). Studies about advertising media literacy have been focused on effects, rather than theories (Eagle, 2007). This qualitative study analyzes 145 open-ended responses by women and men to fashion advertisements. Toggling attention between the text and the context, participants tested, contested, and made meaning with complex strategies, providing grounded theory that may be helpful in developing new predictive theories about consumer behavior.
The Truth About Karma Capitalism: Corporate Mobilization of Compassionate Consumerism, Interactive Labor, and Participatory Citizenship • Hye Jin Lee, University of Iowa • This paper critically examines karma capitalism, a holistic business operation that focuses on corporate social responsibility and consumer values. As I examine how karma capitalism mobilizes consumers’ compassion for consumption and affect for consumers’ free interactive labor that can benefit businesses I argue how karma capitalism deeply operates within the system of capitalism. Also, I counter the celebratory claims of karma capitalism bringing more accountability and transparency in business practices and leveling hierarchies between consumers and producers by suggesting the possibilities of karma capitalism’s role in consolidating corporate power.
From Poisonous Weeds to the Shining Spot: A Discourse Analysis of Presentation of Chinese Popular Culture by the People’s Daily in 1979 and 1993 • Zhaoxi Liu, The University of Iowa • Through a critical discourse analysis of the presentation of Chinese popular culture in the People’s Daily, China’s No.1 party organ, at two different eras, 1979 and 1993, this study demonstrates how such discourse differs in different historical circumstances. While the key terms in 1979 were politically charged expressions such as condemning the Gang of Four, glorifying Zhou Enlai, let go and ideological emancipation, those that gained currency in 1993 were market economy, money making and personality. Popular cultural forms were very much political tools directly controlled by the Party in 1979, but became mainly entertainment and less controlled by political power in 1993. The Party modified its cultural policies to adapt to different historical, political, economic and social conditions, and the People’s Daily presented popular culture in a way mostly resembled the Party’s cultural policies.
Same Earthquake, Different Story: Cultural Values in the News Coverage of the Sichuan Earthquake in China Youth Daily and the New York Times • Zhaoxi Liu, The University of Iowa; Dan Berkowitz, University of Iowa • Through a textual analysis of the China Youth Daily and the New York Times coverage of the Sichuan earthquake in the first week after the shock, this study compared the difference between the coverage in terms of what was covered and how, in an attempted to show how cultural values both shaped as well as being reinforced by the coverage. The study found the China Youth Daily coverage largely represented collectivism, nationalism and authoritarian values by focusing on group effort, highlighting authorities’ relief work, and avoiding individual suffering. The New York Times, in comparison, maintained individualism, ethnocentrism and altruistic democracy values, by highlighting individual suffering and criticizing the Chinese government.
Global Imaginary as Global Village: McLuhan and Mumford Reconsidered • Jack Lule, Lehigh University • This essay is a theoretical and critical exploration of globalization and media. Its starting point is the imaginary, a concept that has enriched scholarship in numerous fields. Briefly reviewing work by Lacan, Castoriadis, Anderson, and Taylor, the essay focuses on the ways those theorists have employed the imaginary in study of how individuals, nations and societies imagine themselves and the world. The essay extends such work and argues that the intersection of globalization and media today has created new ways of imagining. Drawing here on the writings of Appadurai and Steger, the essay contends that the media have not only physically linked the globe with cables, broadband, and wireless networks, but have also linked the globe with stories, images, myths and metaphors that have helped bring about a global imaginary – the globe itself as imagined community. In the 1960s, McLuhan had anticipated this phenomenon with his controversial conception of the global village. The essay revisits the global village debate, with particular attention to the historian of technology and science, Lewis Mumford, who savaged the global village, a moment in which Carey finds the roots of modern media analysis. Ultimately, the essay argues, globalization is producing a macabre marriage of the visions of Mumford and McLuhan. In the dawning global imaginary, McLuhan’s global village is indeed being realized, but it is not the utopia he prophesied. Instead, globalization and media are combining to create a global imaginary of the dark, dystopian world that Mumford dreaded.
The Fetus, the Football Game and the First Amendment • Carmen Maye, University of South Carolina • Prior to Super Bowl XLIV, a pro-life advocacy group announced its purchase of a Super Bowl commercial featuring Heisman Trophy winner Tim Tebow and his mother. The ensuing criticism from abortion-rights advocates gave rise to this paper’s topic: How might the author of Roe v. Wade, the late Justice Harry A. Blackmun, have viewed arguments presented in criticism of the Tebow commercial, and was Blackmun’s free-speech jurisprudence a natural progression or a reversal of field?
Conceptualizing the Popularization and Democratization of News • Anthony Nadler, University of Minnesota • This paper argues that critical-cultural media scholars need to seek new ways of understanding popular news. In an effort to counter biases against sensationalistic and tabloid media, many scholars have readily, perhaps unwittingly, accepted economic assumptions that commercially successful news fare reflects the authentic tastes, interests, and desires of popular audiences. I suggest an alternative way of understanding how particular news forms become popular and of the relationship between the popularization and democratization of news.
World Narrow Web: Sanitizing Online Participatory Democracy in South Korea • Siho Nam, University of North Florida • The inauguration of the conservative Lee Myung-Bak administration in 2008 signaled a new challenge for Internet-driven participatory, democratic public culture in South Korea. One of the most visible effects was immediately found in media policy. A series of anti-democratic regulations was introduced to control and tame civic participation and public deliberation on the Internet. In light of this, this article first summarizes some main debates regarding the role of the Internet in promoting or hindering democracy. It then takes up the case of the recent spate of Internet content regulation in Korea to shed critical light on how the Internet is reconfigured as a new site of cultural politics. Finally, it advocates anonymity as a constitutional free speech right and ascertains that anonymity in cyberspace contributes to, rather than impairs, the quality of public culture and democracy.
I Did it For Me!: Agency and Cosmetic Surgery Advertising • Lisa Pecot-Hebert, DePaul University; Heidi Hennink-Kaminski, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill • Scholars have debated the feminist critique of female beauty practices for years with the fundamental disagreement revolving around the notion of agency. Some argue that beauty practices such as cosmetic surgery subordinate and oppress women by coercing them to resculpt their bodies to fit a male-defined vision of femininity. Others cast women as agents, asserting that the decision to undergo surgery is an active process, one that requires reflexivity. This study used textual analysis to explore how the concept of agency has been employed in cosmetic surgery ads placed in large city magazines. Three themes emerged: realize, deserve, and control. This research expands our understanding of how physicians are repositioning cosmetic surgery to women through discourses that empower, appeal to their sense of self, and play upon feminist sensibilities that privilege individual choice. This research also contributes to the literature surrounding the ongoing debate of agency by examining how it plays out in another form of text previously unexamined (physician advertising) and how it touches upon a new player in the beauty system (physicians) rather than prior studies, which focus on idealized images in the media.
Selling American Wanderlust: Tourism, Classlessness, and Mobility in Postwar Magazines Richard Popp, Louisiana State University • Using historical methods and narrative analysis, this paper examines how consumer magazines of the mid-1940s through the mid-1960s seized upon mass tourism as an emblem of American mobility and in turn invested it with ideologically-charged notions of classlessness and political freedom. While a small number of working class Americans did take the first lavish trips of their lives in the postwar years, celebratory narratives glossed over the vast majority of people for whom such vacations were still economically out of reach. And while quick to condemn travel restrictions abroad as a mark of totalitarianism, these narratives also ignored the constraints African American tourists met at home as they navigated their way through a segregated country. By framing spectacular vacations as a universal part of American life, magazines collaborated in the business community’s long-running campaign to sell the public on free enterprise. In this way, the study casts light on how popular journalism helped to construct a unique American standard of living during a pivotal era in the growth of consumer culture. Moreover, it shows how media have encouraged audiences to draw connections between appealing cultural developments, like mass vacationing, and political ideologies that favor business interests.
The Dialectic of Dinner: Cultural Contestations on News Magazine Covers • Joan Price, Marietta College • This paper discusses the situation of food in U.S. culture, as represented in food-related visual images and text on the covers of news magazines over 10 years. The dialectical frames that emerged in this social construction of food reflected cultural norms and oppositional themes, but generally supported dominant ideology, such as the supremacy of technology over nature and self-reliance over mutuality.
Girls between cultures: Media and multicultural identity negotiation in pre-adolescent girls Rebecca Hains, Salem State College; Judi Puritz Cook, Salem State College • This study examines how multicultural girls use media culture in negotiating their own identities. The authors conducted interviews with sixteen pre-teen girls who are immigrants or first-generation Americans. Qualitative data analysis yielded three themes: multicultural competency, evaluating authenticity, and pursuing American girlhood. Discourse about Miley Cyrus, the Hannah Montana star, served as a key unit of analysis, offering examples of the three approaches to the multicultural pre-adolescent identity negotiation process.
Understanding the Local and the Global in Mexican Rock Music: An Alternative Theoretical Framework • Magdelana Red, University of Colorado at Boulder • In the available literature, Mexican rock music’s import and meaning has been characterized as resistant and counter-cultural without adequately accounting for it as a local phenomenon tied up in global economic, political, and ideological currents. This paper brings the theoretical frameworks of Clifford Geertz and cultural sociology together with the contributions of global media studies and postcolonial theory and offers an alternative analytical framework for the study of this popular cultural form.
Accounts of Identity: Gamer identity and the decentered self • Adrienne Shaw, University of Pennsylvania • The institutional construction of identities is a prevalent theme in both media representation and social theory. Drawing on theories of identity which seek to decenter the self, herein I address how identity as a gamer is described by interviewees as something relative and contextual. Rather than look at what it means to be a gamer, I look instead at why individuals do or do not identify as gamers.
Expanding the Public Sphere? An examination of print and Web site commentary at the Washington Post • Ed Simpson, Ohio University • Many questions have been raised as to whether Website operations of the mainstream press have enhanced, harmed, or done nothing to the public sphere, which Habermas suggested must have four elements: a public space available to all; topics of general concern; opportunity for feedback, and rational discourse. Using discourse analysis, this study examined and compared 276 Internet comments, representing 11 percent of the more than 2,500 comments associated with President Barack Obama’s unusual op-ed column in the Washington Post, and 31 letters to the editor, editorials, and guest columns addressing Obama’s economic plans in the print edition of the Washington Post. This study found that the Website did serve to expand the public sphere in four important ways: volume (2,538 comments on the Website versus 31 printed commentaries); directionality (22 percent of the sample pulled from Website commentary was directed at the president, while none were directed at the president in the print edition ); structure (85 percent of the Website commentary was categorized as informal, while none of the print commentary was classified as informal); and content (12 percent of the Website sample offered alternatives and new ideas compared to 22 percent in the printed editorial pages). This study has important implications for the debate taking place both in the academy and the industry about the effect of communication technologies on the public sphere and the role of the traditional media.
Hip Hop versus Dancehall: Caribbean Popular Culture, Is It Cultural Hegemony or Contestation? Juliette Storr, Pennsylvania State University • This paper reflects on the dynamism of cultural and ideological terrain in contemporary Caribbean popular culture. For the purpose of this paper, the ideological and cultural terrain is framed by the contest of American popular music, hip hop/rap, and Caribbean popular music reggae dancehall as they negotiate the consent of Caribbean youth in the English speaking Caribbean.
‘Up or Out’: Shifting Identity, Shifting Cultural Capital: Narratives of Women Online Journalists from 2000 to 2010 • Shayla Thiel-Stern, University of Minnesota • This paper revisits and updates an article presented at a previous AEJMC conference that focused on the identity negotiation and workplace negotiations of women online journalists who worked in the field from the very early days of the Web. By conducting interviews with ten of the women interviewed in the first study, the author explores their career trajectories in a field in flux.
New media, old criticism: Bloggers’ press criticism and the journalistic field • Tim Vos, University of Missouri School of Journalism; Stephanie Craft, University of Missouri; Seth Ashley, University of Missouri-Columbia • Bourdieu’s field theory suggests that the rise of the Internet and blogs could generate a shift in the journalistic field – the realm where actors struggle for autonomy – as new agents gain access. This textual analysis of 282 items of media criticism appearing on blogs reveals an emphasis on traditional journalistic norms, suggesting a stable field. Occasional criticisms of the practicability of traditional norms and calls for greater transparency, however, may suggest an emerging paradigm shift.
Mapping discourses about minorities: Locating Thai Muslims on Flickr • Treepon Kirdnark, Bangkok University; Melissa Wall, California State University – Northridge • This paper probes discourses about Thai Muslims occurring through online collaborative maps made available via the world’s largest global photo-sharing site, Flickr. Thailand has long been viewed as a solely Buddhist country even though it has historically been home to many other religions and minority groups. Our study aims to expand our understanding of social media to include non-Western countries as well as to provide a critical assessment of these participatory media in terms of their abilities to truly alter existing power structures.
Crumbling Infrastructure or Job Killer: An Examination of Gasoline Taxes in News Media Discourse Richard Watts, University of Vermont • This paper examines the media discourse surrounding proposed gasoline tax increases in six states: Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Idaho and Oregon. Gasoline taxes provide the majority of the funds for the transportation system in the U.S. yet have failed to keep pace with the costs for maintaining and improving transportation infrastructure. Combined state and federal gasoline taxes in the United States average 40.4 cents per gallon, far lower than most industrialized nations. Aging infrastructure, increased vehicle miles traveled (VMT) and increasingly dispersed populations have all contributed to a massive funding gap between present gasoline tax revenues and transportation systems needs. Researchers use a media frame analysis approach to examine the prominence of certain gas tax issue frames in six states that have recently approved or rejected gasoline tax increases. Results indicate that frequently occurring frames promoting gasoline tax increases emphasize the deterioration of the transportation system, funding shortfalls and job creation. Frames opposing tax increases highlight difficult economic times, more efficient government and general opposition to tax increases. Results are instructive to policy-makers examining gasoline taxes as a transportation funding source.
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