Cultural and Critical Studies 2007 Abstracts
Cultural and Critical Studies Division
The Public Sphere in Print: Do Letters to the Editor Serve as a Forum for Rationale-Critical Debate? • Lucy Atkinson, University of Wisconsin • This paper explores the potential contribution to the public sphere made by letters to the editor. Drawing on theoretical claims and conceptualizations about the public sphere by Habermas, Arendt, and Eliasoph, this paper asks to what degree newspaper letters to the editor might be thought of as a kind of public sphere and whether they foster or limit rationale-critical debate. This paper explores this dilemma while incorporating the potential impact of new media technologies.
A Counterpublic Role for the Press: The Case of Latina/o-Targeted Papers in San José, California • Isabel Awad, Stanford University • This paper challenges the assimilation/pluralism continuum as the range of possible functions that media play in the life of minority groups. A comparative analysis of Latina/o-targeted newspapers in San José, California, underscores that a defining characteristic of the media produced by minority groups is their contribution to the existence of minority counterpublics. The study also suggests that mainstream media committed with social diversity should support locally produced media instead of competing with them.
Gender Crime and the Media: The Case of Mary Kay LeTourneau • Sean Baker and Dominique Helou-Brown, Towson University • This paper analyzed the Mary K. LeTourneau child rape case in Washington State, by analyzing televised coverage of the case. LeTourneau was positioned within traditional feminine stereotypes causing the criminality of her actions to be diminished while excusing her behavior. By positioning LeTourneau into an “appropriate” and constructed gender role, the media assisted in the manufacturing and upholding of our culture by rectifying counter intuitive events.
Pedagogies of Journalism and Documentary: Toward a Critical and Rhetorical Articulation • Ralph Beliveau, University of Oklahoma • The relationship between journalism pedagogy and learning in related non–fiction forms offers unique opportunities for developing a critical framework. This essay defines several questions raised by documentary and frames them so they offer critical insights for all media students, and especially journalism students. The paper develops these questions by offering a critical rhetorical analysis of the 2001 documentary Hell House.
Sex! Aliens! Harvard? A Study of How Journalists Participate in Constructing Scientific Authority • Linda Billings, SETI Institute/NASA • This paper reports on a case study of journalists’ participation in the social construction of scientific authority. The case involves mainstream print media coverage of controversial research conducted by a tenured professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. Employing the sensitizing concept of boundary-work to guide a qualitative analysis of media content, this study explores how journalists constructed scientific authority in their coverage.
A Framing Analysis of Electoral Reform Process Coverage in Bangladesh’s Newspapers • Masudul Biswas, Ohio University • This paper examined the framing of news stories of five Bangladeshi mainstream newspapers, two of which have political ownership. These stories focused on three events that became issues for determining whether Bangladesh would be able to establish a system of democratic elections. Analysis of these news stories demonstrated a connection between the presentation of news and political economic realities of media, which supports a Marxist interpretation of the theory of the political economy of communication.
Glow, Afterglow and Trick Mirror: Mobil’s Public Relations Campaign and the Influence of Its Archival Legacy • Frederick Blevens, Florida International University, and Vanessa Murphree, University of South Alabama • Mobil Oil’s legendary public relations campaign during the 1970s is framed in archival theory. This research asserts that the record of Mobil’s high-profile public relations strategy (the glow) lives on as evidence (afterglow) in the Center for American History archives of the University of Texas, perpetuating the campaign in the public sphere. The authors conclude that such corporate archives increase pressures on historians to correct the image of “trick mirrors” built into donated corporate records.
From Genre to Art: The Sandman as Case Study in the Social Dynamics of Popular Culture • Mark Brewin, University of Tulsa • The author uses the history of the Sandman comic book character to map out the changes in the cultural construction of comic book characters, their audiences, and their producers. The case study of this character is used to illustrate what the author argues is a larger change in the ways that popular culture is used to create social distinction and forms of cultural capital.
The Politics of Media Literacy: The Daily Show’s Contribution to Sophisticated Citizenry • Dwight Brooks and Kristen Heflin, University of Georgia • The Daily Show combines humor with a newscast format to construct a television program that in its critical commentary on the news media and politics promotes viewers’ media literacy. It contributes to media literacy by representing government, public servants and political news coverage in ways that promote a sophisticated citizenry. This paper’s narrative textual analysis argues for a contextual approach to media literacy and ultimately to assist in understanding television’s role in the public sphere.
Recoding New Orleans: News, Race and Spike Lee’s When the Levees Broke • Christopher Campbell and Kim LeDuff, University of Southern Mississippi • This paper contrasts the racial codes that surfaced in mainstream news coverage of New Orleans in the early days after Hurricane Katrina with the racial coding in Spike Lee’s documentary When the Levees Broke. The authors admit that there are vast differences between the daily news and documentary processes, but they argue that daily journalism might be improved by approaching stories in the more thoughtful, complicated, but still compelling, manner of Lee’s documentary.
A Rebirth of the Prison: Foucault’s Governmentality and Inmate-Produced Media • Kalen Churcher, Pennsylvania State University • This paper examines how inmate-produced media may be used as a means of (self) governance within penal institutions. Using Michel Foucault’s concept of governmentality, I argue that inmate-produced media may directly aid in establishing order and maintaining civility in much the same fashion as non-inmate-produced-culture impacts ‘free world’ society. Furthermore, inmate-produced media may become technologies of (self) governance, allowing prisoners, in addition to the state, to become active participants in the governing (control) process.
Social Control in an American Pacific Island: Guam’s Local Newspaper’s Reporting on ‘Liberation’ between 1994-2004 • Francis Dalisay, Washington State University • This study examined news articles, opinion pieces, and editorials printed in Guam’s local newspaper (1994-2004), which reported on the island’s annual celebration of its liberation from imperial Japanese occupation, by U.S. forces. A critical discourse analysis of the items revealed that Guam’s newspaper, the Pacific Daily News, downplayed a pro-local versus pro-American conflict. What emerged were ambivalent portrayals that appeared to hegemonically maintain the island’s social system as an “unincorporated” U.S. territory.
The Last True Believers: The Knoxville Journal in the Late Civil Rights Movement • Frank Durham, University of Iowa • The relationship between desegregation and Communism in the South had been promoted by the mainstream press in and around Tennessee for nearly 30 years when the Highlander Research and Education Center moved to Knoxville in 1961 from its former campus in rural Monteagle, TN. But when the Knoxville Journal launched a last anti-Communist campaign against the Highlander-based movement from 1965-1967, the vigor of its attack revealed the reluctance of the state government and other newspapers to follow.
Ugly Is the New Beautiful: Rearticulations and Recuperations of Ugliness in the Expansive Text of Ugly Betty • Madeleine Esch, University of Colorado • ABC’s hit show Ugly Betty has been lauded for challenging dominant ideas about beauty. I investigate investigate the disarticulation-rearticulation of “ugly” in the expansive text of Ugly Betty and consider to what extent any rearticulation is recuperated through commodification and/or rhetorical strategies via the textuality of websites associated with the show and ABC’s “Be Ugly ’07” public service campaign. I conclude that the resulting rearticulation does not pose a significant challenge to the beauty industries.
Something Careless This Way Comes: Medical Error and Its Consequences (or Lack Thereof) on ER and Grey’s Anatomy • Katherine Foss, University of Minnesota • This paper explores constructions of medical errors on the shows ER and Grey’s Anatomy. Medical professionals err due to overzealous ambition, hospital staffing problems, or distracting patient behavior. Consequences for medical errors include damage to one’s career and legal action. More often than not, however, medical professionals face no consequences for their mistakes. This lack of consequences especially occurs with female patients of lower socio-economic class who have no friends or family.
Representing Women’s Empowerment Online: Postcolonial Feminist Critiques • Phyllis Dako-Gyeke, Radhika Gajjala, and Yahui Zhang, Bowling Green State University • We map out a critique of discourses of women’s emancipation in online spaces from ongoing research at global/local, rural/urban and transnational intersections from three distinct locations. One discursive formation is that of the United Nations Population Fund as it is played out via its website, while a second is an examination of discourses around female genital mutilation in online activism. The third case is based in work offline trying to develop strategies for online marketing.
(Re)constructing Gender Dichotomies in the Media: The Articulation of Lynndie England to Abu Ghraib • Dustin Harp and Sara Struckman, University of Texas, Austin • In this paper, we analyze the process through which news magazines made a strong connection between Lynndie England and the Abu Ghraib scandal and how gender impacted these “articulations.” By making England the symbol of the scandal, the media were able to divert attention away from other problems while reifying dichotomous images of women in the media as virgin or vamp.
Entertaining Reality: Media as Social Experiments • Paul Hillier, University of Georgia • The purpose of this paper is to flesh out and highlight some of the key relationships between a few representative programs labeled “reality TV” and the larger social and cultural formations they are a part of. This paper argues that the practice of social experiments can’t be easily divided between the scientific and those that are not. Indeed, this paper suggests there are correspondences between the scientific and commercial practice of social experiments.
The State’s Management of Homelessness through Conceptualizations of Space: A Textual Analysis of Homelessness Coverage in The Washington Post and The Christian Science Monitor • Teresa Housel, Hope College • This textual analysis of homelessness coverage from The Christian Science Monitor and The Washington Post examines how personal, private, public, and commercial spaces are sites of struggle between dominant groups and the homeless who are routinely marginalized from these spaces. Although there are differences between the newspapers’ coverage, the articles describe how homeless people violate certain spaces.
Sudden Death and Natural Disaster: Journalistic Storytelling in the Wake of Tragedy • Janice Hume, University of Georgia • This study examines local, regional and national newspaper and television coverage of deadly natural disasters in six states to seek to understand the media’s role in the social construction of death. Journalists used a variety of metaphors: descriptions of property damage for deaths of humans; descriptions monsters to personify the disasters; descriptions of war zones for disaster sites. Coverage also memorialized victims, celebrated heroism, and grappled with the nature of God and fate.
The Digital War Hero: A Textual Analysis of the Production of Whiteness and Masculinity in the Metal Gear Solid Series • Robin Johnson, University of Iowa • This paper examines cultural conditions of production of hegemonic white masculinity in the Metal Gear videogame series. The textual analysis is grounded in theories of whiteness, masculinity, and cultural hybridity. Gender and race are implicit in the discursive meanings of production and manifest a hierarchical social organization of gender within the game industry. Changing technology in production emphasizes more “realistic” characters, and production sequences create meanings embodied in a digital body hexis of the characters.
Patriotic Passion and the ‘Sublime’ Science: Un-Searching for Journalistic Truths • Myung Koo Kang, Seoul National University, Nakho Kim, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Hak Jae Kim and Sung Min Lee, Seoul National University • In South Korea, controversy on the stem cell fraud in late 2005 created a strong and uniform oppression against journalistic truth-seeking by journalism itself. By analyzing a vast array of media coverage in the initial month of the incident, we attempted to reconstruct the discursive narrative and contexts that caused this phenomenon. With the governmentality of biopolitics as the theoretical background, we explored the major discourse strategies and journalism practices into detail.
Representing Katie: The Media Commodification of the First Female Network News Anchor • Rebecca Kern and Suman Mishra, Temple University • This study explores how women are represented in media, especially those women who seem to be challenging the status quo. Using textual analysis and feminist discourse, this study examines ten weeks of news reports on CBS news anchor Katie Couric and compares it with the coverage of Charles Gibson of ABC. The findings reveal that even though Couric received much more coverage than Gibson, most of the coverage was centered on her appearance, personality, presentation.
A Changing Field Requires Dynamic Methods: Ethnography Rises to the Task • Hillary Lake, University of Oregon • This essay explores issues about using ethnography to study media, and offers insight and information that may benefit media researchers and professionals who seek new modes of inquiry. The author notes the complex crossroads where ethnography and journalism intersect, and reiterates a call for a ”second wave” of news ethnographies that privilege our diverse news ecology and the individuals who work within specific news contexts.
Taking Needlecraft to the Extreme (Right): Rose Wilder Lane and the Woman’s Day Book of Needlework • Amy Lauters, Wichita State University • In the 1950s, journalist and writer Rose Wilder Lane crafted a set of articles about different needlecrafts for Woman’s Day magazine. In private correspondence, Lane called the works a “right-wing extremist” series of needlework articles. This paper interrogates Lane’s 1950s-era needlework features for Woman’s Day magazine and the subsequent Woman’s Day Book of American Needlework, which compiled those articles and disseminated them, as a collection, to a wide audience.
Limited or Limitless? Nokia’s Mobile Regulation of Everyday Life • Jonathan Lillie, University of Hawaii, Manoa • This study used a qualitative textual analysis to examine several online and magazine advertisements that portray mobile devices-in-use as tools of identity performance, presenting the individual to the world, and tools of social and cultural mobility, presenting the world to the individual. The paper, which considers the contexts of the Nokia and postmodern advertising, critiques the limited commercial vision of the company’s marketing narratives and mobile technologies.
Culture + Power: Synthesizing Hall, Carey and Foucault for a Cultural Understanding of the Power of the Press • Lise Marken, Stanford University • This paper approaches the question of the power of the press while viewing journalism as a cultural force, bringing together the thinking of Stuart Hall, James Carey and Michel Foucault. Hall’s model of culture incorporates power, but ultimately allows culture to be eclipsed by ideology. Carey makes space for an understanding of culture, but loses sight of power. These views are reconciled by applying a Foucauldian view of power as positive, distributed, unstable and ubiquitous.
Defining the Community: Constructions of Race and Cultural Identity in a Small Midwestern Newspaper • MaryAnn Martin, University of Iowa • Using a multi-method approach, I examined the ways in which the newspaper in the small town of West Liberty, Iowa, forges a cultural identity for the community, given 40 percent is Latino and the renewed call for immigration reform in the U.S. This study indicates that the news staff and content of the newspaper relegate Latinos in the community to the status of cultural “Other” while maintaining a discourse of inclusivity and diversity.
The Lord of the Rings, “Dépaysement,” and the Neo-Colonial: Film and Tourism as (Problematic) Identity in the Aotearoa New Zealand Context • Robert Peaslee, University of Colorado • This paper problematizes the ongoing concatenation of Aotearoa New Zealand identity with fictional or foreign places such as The Lord of the Rings’ “Middle-earth.” This process, related to “dépaysement” or “out-of-nation-ness,” is intentional and aimed at attracting both tourists and film productions. I argue that it diminishes the importance of biculturalism relative to the indigenous Maori population and risks a kind of neo-colonialism by erasing an important aspect of national culture.
Evidential Bodies: The Abject and Forensic Gaze in C.S.I.: Crime Scene Investigation • David Pierson, University of Southern Maine • This paper examines how C.S.I. fosters an abject gaze toward the victim’s corpse, which is both repulsive and attractive in its focus on the effects of death on the body. The abject nature of the corpse is mediated by the investigators’ forensic gaze, which seeks to control crime, death, and abjection. The series’ representation of biological identification and surveillance technologies can be associated with changing discourses of crime, identity, and citizenship in the 21st century.
Sex and the University: The Presentation of Liminal Phase Behaviors in Campus Newspaper Sex Columns • Daniel Reimold, Ohio University • Approximately ten years after its debut in a single student publication in California, the campus newspaper sex column has become the most publicized, electrifying, and divisive phenomena in U.S. college journalism. Currently, more than 10 percent of the roughly 1,200 newspapers that claim membership in the Associated Collegiate Press run a sex column. This study aimed to ascertain the social world constructed within the columns, in respect to gender roles and sex and relationship practices.
Sidelined by Gender: Examining the Representation of the Female Sideline Reporter • Lori Amber Roessner, University of Georgia • In this study, feminist critical theory and textual analysis are utilized to examine the representation of the female sideline reporter in the 2005-2006 NCAA Division I-A college football bowl season. Analysis showed that female sideline reporters were under-represented, objectified and commodified in four select games of the 2005-2006 NCAA Division I-A college football bowl season. The study revealed that representations of female sideline reporters reproduce masculine hegemony.
Community Media in the Divided Digital City: When the “Talk of Austin” Turns to Class • Lou Rutigliano, University of Texas, Austin • Newspaper websites are providing more opportunities for readers to contribute content. This paper studied the Austin-American Statesman’s online forum “Talk of Austin,” which launched amid rapid change and development in the city. Through a discourse analysis the author found the voices of the disadvantaged on the Statesman’s forums, but no signs of involvement of political, economic, or media elites, raising questions about the political impact of these online public spheres.
The Marketplace of Ideas and Uncomfortable Speech: The Free Speech Fight of the Unabomber • Karen Sichler, University of Georgia • Theodore Kaczynski (the Unabomber) is attempting to regain possession of his personal property that were seized by the FBI. The federal government has refused to return said items as Kaczynski may not “profit” from his crimes. This paper will argue that the government’s position is flawed as it ignores the rich tradition of the “marketplace of ideas” and transforms the theoretical marketplace into an actual one with the expansion of the idea of profit.
Robert E. Park’s Legacy for Mass Communication and Civic Engagement Research • Susan Sivek, University of Texas, Austin • This paper discusses the legacy of Robert E. Park, Chicago School sociologist and communication researcher. I evaluate the relevance and utility of his theoretical and methodological approaches for today’s communication researchers, particularly those studying mass communication and civic engagement. Park’s work is in fact fundamental to this research, though not always recognized explicitly as such, and more application of his views–plus willingness to help guide solutions to social problems–could enrich this field.
The Hollywood Cinema: Representation of American Hegemony or Universal Values? China’s Debate from 1994 to 2004 • Weiqun Su, University of Minnesota • This study critically analyzes the extensive cultural debate in China that lasted from 1994 to 2004 over the meaning of the Hollywood cinema. Three positions are found to emerge from China’s debate: the belief in Hollywood films’ representations of the American way of life, the argument of Hollywood films’ reflection of universally applicable values, and the understanding of Hollywood films as a carrier of both American spirit and universal values.
Mass Participation, Youth Revolt and Grassroots Idol-Making in the Shackles of the State: Cultural Politics of the Supergirl Contest • Tao Sun, Plymouth State University, and Zixue Tai, University of Kentucky and • This study offers a critical analysis of the Supergirl contest of 2005 in China. An American Idol-type reality show that features live broadcast of participants, the show made ratings history in Chinese television by attracting over 400 million viewers in its finale. The paper situates the phenomenon within the broad sociopolitical context of China’s economic liberalization and media transformation, and explores how audience members, led by Chinese youngsters, engage in collective meaning-making and counter-discourse construction.
You Become the Thing You Hate the Most: Letters to Brill’s Content • Patrick Wehner, University of Pennsylvania • This paper examines the evolving relationship between the magazine Brill’s Content and its readers, examining the nearly 600 letters that were published during the magazine’s three-year run from 1998-2001. The letters published in Content testify to the promises and perils of media-savvy readers as a target audience. Ultimately, advertisers’ reluctance to accept publisher Steven Brill’s category of “media enthusiasts” as a promising audience niche, at least within magazine publishing, sealed Content’s fate.
Promotional Culture and the Aura of Authenticity • James Wittebols, University of Windsor • Promotional media have begun to appropriate authenticity as a vehicle for selling products and experiences by projecting an aura of authenticity on products, celebrities and politicians as a means of generating publicity and/or sales. This paper looks at examples of promotional culture using authenticity to market food and restaurant experiences and identifies authenticity as a key idea in the early discussion about the upcoming presidential campaign.
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