Cultural and Critical Studies Division
Mental Health as a Burden: Journalistic Representations of Mental Illness on Family, Society, and the Individual • Elise Assaf, California State University, Fullerton • This research study explores representations of mental illness in three mainstream, national, online publications. Individuals with disabilities make up the largest minority group in the U.S., and the language used to construct representations of these individuals have the ability to perpetuate or diminish stereotypes about these individuals. Critical discourse analysis (CDA) was used to analyze 197 articles. Of the six themes that emerged, mental illness as a burden will be the focus of this paper.
* Extended Abstract * Journalistic Power: Constructing the ‘Truth’ and the Economics of Objectivity • Gino Canella, Emerson College • Through 30 in-depth interviews with journalists, this article explores how journalists construct ‘the truth.’ Relying on theories of journalistic cultures, media power, and objectivity, I examine how some journalists seek to uphold long-standing professional norms, while others eschew these norms and position their work as adversarial. This article has implications for defining the journalistic field, understanding how grassroots media-makers challenge journalistic practices, and why a power-structure analysis is essential at all stages of news production.
Capital and legitimacy: Trans* communicators as cultural intermediaries • Erica Ciszek; Richard Mocarski, University of Nebraska at Kearney; Elaine Almeida • Through in-depth interviews with trans* communication communicators, this paper represents a turning point in communication toward a more intentional and reflexive orientation to gender identity and transgender lives. Findings demonstrate trans* communicators construct and disseminate discourses designed to counter the historical narratives surrounding gender minorities to reshape these stories for themselves (as part of their own identity work), for trans* communities, and for mainstream audiences. This article employs the Bourdieuian concept of cultural intermediation to explicate the lived experiences of trans* individuals working in fields of communication. Drawing on Bourdieu’s notions of habitus, capital, and fields, this manuscript sheds light on strategic communication to understand how trans* individuals leverage cultural and social capital to construct legitimacy. This study contributes to a broader sociological understanding of strategic communication and opens new avenues for research in considering how publicity might translate into broader socio-political impacts. It specifically asks how trans* communicators create and maintain cultural intelligibility and negotiate social meaning of transgender representations, considering transgender communicators as cultural intermediaries at the center of the struggle for symbolic and material power.
A “Gentlemen’s Agreement:” How news discourse helps to perpetuate segregation • Lourdes Mirian Cueva Chacón, University of Texas at Austin • The media are a place where influential ideas about race and its hierarchies are presented. This study focused on the analysis of news coverage of an alleged agreement that limited minority representation in Austin’s city council seeking to answer the question of how journalistic discourse reproduces inequality. CDA suggests that the agreement was a racial project perpetuated in the journalistic discourse through the use of linguistic constructions of narratives and relationships with race and power structures.
* Extended Abstract * Promotional prosumers: Advertorial labor process on mommy social media • Wan-Wen Day, National Chung-Cheng University • An Apple consumer shares his authentic experience of using the new iPhone with his friends on Facebook. Some of them do purchase the same product he promotes later on. Does it mean that the digital labor of this consumer is exploited due to creating exchange value for Apple? Now, millions of micro-influencers partner with advertisers to sell branded products to their followers by demonstrating products’ use-values. This marketing phenomenon indicates the new mode of labor exploitation in prosumer capitalism. This study unveils how mom-influencers promote parenting commodities to their followers and analyzes the political economy of the advertising industry under the new realities of social media. In his 2015 article, George Ritzer predicts the rise of a new class, prosumers. He further argues that unpaid prosumers have a higher chance of replacing paid workers partially. This study presents the stories of the mommy prosumers and their followers to address the issue of prosumer capitalism. This study investigated the triangle relation among the MCNs, the brands, and micro-influencers through the advertorial campaigns. Fifteen semi-structured in-depth interviews were conducted from September 2019 to March 2020. Each interview lasted more than an hour. The interviewees included six micro-influencers of the online mommy communities, four brand managers, and five executives from the MCNs.
Mexicanidad on the screen: perceptions about the national identity portrayed in contemporary Mexican cinema • Gabriel Dominguez Partida, Texas Tech University • Defining the individual’s identity in times of globalization requires acknowledging the contextual factors that surround them. One of the many positionalities that converge to build that identity is the national one. Although borders are fading away in the current global context, in the case of the Mexican one, people continue relying on specific traits that help them to define Mexicanidad. Cinema plays a vital role as the audience tends to select and support particular representations over others. This study focuses on the analysis of how the audience perceives the traits that define Mexicanidad and their relationship with contemporary Mexican cinema. Participants of various focus groups relate particular reminiscences of the Golden Age period, as traditions and history, but also recognize that Mexican characters from that period serve as stereotypes that currently are not true. Finally, participants do not identify with current Mexican narratives because these films do not appeal to their real-life problems. Hence, even with the increase in Mexican cinema consumption, there is a lack of representation of what Mexicans identify as ordinary people.
EULAs as Unbalanced Contractual Power Between an Organization and its (Unannounced and Underage) Users: A Mobile Game Textual Analysis • Jeffrey Duncan; Taylor Voges, University of Georgia • This study explores how End-User License Agreements found in mobile game applications (e.g., Apple) put the player or user at a contractual power disadvantage. A thematic textual analysis was conducted of the top five film studio organizations’ mobile game applications: Disney; Warner Brothers; Universal; Sony; and Paramount. Three themes were found: producer domination, producer ownership, and the parental consent loophole. The implications of each theme as related to legal and ethical principles are discussed.
* Extended Abstract * Extended abstract: Diverging data in a Canadian media bailout • Marc Edge, University of Malta • Sharply contrasting portrayals of news media fortunes in Canada preceded a Cdn$595 million (US$450 million) government bailout announced in late 2018. Critical scholars claimed reform was required to reduce levels of ownership concentration and foreign ownership. Data offered by others, however, portrayed media as unprofitable and near collapse, with hundreds of newspapers closed and thousands of journalism jobs lost. This paper examines secondary sources of data to test the latter contentions and finds them unsupported.
Women on Fire: YouTuber Burnout and Renegotiation with the Platform • Alyssa Fisher, Miami University • This project uses a critical cultural methodology and qualitative visual analysis to examine two creators who took a hiatus from the YouTube platform in the fall of 2018. Included in the analysis are videos announcing their hiatus, chronicling previously queued videos that uploaded during the hiatus, and videos announcing their return and eventual changes to their channels’ content. Findings include themes of reflexivity, creative fulfillment, and the pressure to appeal to the mysterious YouTube algorithm.
* Extended Abstract * Assessing the Critical Political Economic Implications of Environmental NGO Funding on Meat Reduction Messaging • Christopher Garcia, Florida State University • This study expands on prior research conducted on food-based suggestions and meat reduction messages on environmental NGO websites. Utilizing a critical political economic lens, two in- depth case studies of the meat-related dietary messaging and policy suggestions of The Nature Conservancy and Greenpeace International are featured as illustrative examples of organizational contrasts – one which finds itself heavily indebted to corporate stakeholders and the other rooted in civil society as opposed to business.
“Female Empowerment Sells” or Does It? Always’ #LIKEAGIRL Campaigns’ Contribution to Feminism and “Culture-change” • Tamar Gregorian • When did doing something “like a girl” become an insult? That’s the question that Always, a Proctor & Gamble company, one of the largest makers of feminine care products, in partnership with its advertising agency Leo Burnett proposed and answered in their 360-degree take on feminine hygiene advertising spots “Like A Girl,” “Unstoppable” and “Emojis.” This textual analysis of the three campaigns “Like A Girl,” “Unstoppable” and “Emojis” was conducted to determine the value the campaigns provide in adding to the conversation about the misrepresentation of females in society, not just advertising. The three campaigns were analyzed using Stuart Hall’s encoding/decoding model and the commercials were evaluated based on their preferred, negotiated and oppositional readings (Hall, 1980). To aid in the analysis of the campaigns, an interview was conducted with Shaina Holtz, an account executive at Leo Burnett who worked on the Always team during two of the three campaigns. On the preferred level or the denotative level, Always’ goal was to break down the barriers young girls faced in society. The spots featured questions and copy that suggested that these stereotypes existed among young girls and boys, as well as adult men and, most surprisingly, women. Ultimately, the textual analysis concluded that Always was able to position itself as a company that cares about more than “hawking” its products, and more about contributing to the conversation about the misrepresentation of females in society and even taking it a step further – offering a solution.
The Sacking of Kaeplanta: Who’s Voice is Valued in the Built Environment • Adrianne Grubic, The University of Texas at Austin • As former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick dominated the headlines before Super Bowl LIII in Atlanta, a mural bearing his image was demolished near Morehouse College. The artist who painted it soon became a story but how the local media covered it also told a story about who is given a voice in a community. Using a multimodal discourse analysis, this qualitative study analyzed how the news media online reported on the demolition of the mural.
Ethical Consumption as Fetishism • Nah Ray Han, University of Georgia • Although consumers live in an era of consumer sovereignty, people often consume without being aware of how products are produced and sold. This paper criticized that emphasizing consumer sovereignty and morality, ethical consumption fetishizes the act of consuming by falsely suggesting that individual consumers can solve the environmental problems of the earth. The current papers concluded that the ethical consumption movement needs to become more self-aware so that it can truly help society develop.
Documentary Maker as Worker: Precarity in the Chinese Television Documentary Industry • Jiachun Hong • Documentary filmmakers have been considered artists, authors, or intellectuals, but rarely laborers. This study investigates the changing nature of documentary work in the expanding area of TV documentary in China, in the midst of China’s shift towards a market-based economy. Based on data gathered through the interviews with 40 practitioners from January 2014 to August 2017, this paper outlines the particularity and complexity of the creative work in China. It finds that short-time contracts, moonlighting, low payments and long working hours, freelancing, internship, and obligatory networking have become normal working conditions for Chinese TV documentary workers. Without copyright over their intellectual creations, the cultural workers are constrained to make a living as waged labor and compelled to sell their physical and mental labor in hours or in pieces. The Chinese television documentary workers struggled to resist the pressures of neoliberalism to survive in increasingly competitive local and global markets.
* Extended Abstract * Virtual Reality and Celebrity Humanitarianism • Bimbisar Irom, WSU, Pullman • The paper analyzes the interactions between the emergent technology of virtual reality (VR) and celebrity humanitarianism. Marketed as “the ultimate empathy machine”, VR has been enthusiastically appropriated by humanitarian communicators. Through the textual analysis of a VR experience featuring Rashida Jones, the project seeks to understand VR’s role in the production of celebrity performances of authenticity. How does VR balance the demands of stardom, highlighting distant suffering, and endorsing the work of humanitarian agencies?
Globalization, social media and cultural change: Instagram and family traditions in Russia • Regina Marchi, Rutgers University; Maria Zhigalina, Rutgers University • This paper examines how Russian traditions around marriage and pregnancy are being transformed by Instagram. Through a visual semiotic analysis of representations of US-style wedding ceremonies and gender reveal parties on Russian Instagram accounts, it notes that these rituals, formerly not part of Russian marriage or pregnancy traditions, are fast becoming the norm. Economic and social implications of the adoption of these practices, related to spending and debt, social class and gender ideologies are discussed.
Dangerous Professors: How Public Scholars Pioneer Practices that Reconcile Intellect with Journalism • Michael McDevitt, University of Colorado • The academic-media nexus can seem like a kaleidoscopic space for public intellectuals. Rules of engagement are, at best, implicit and contingent. Interviews with faculty targeted by vigilante watchlists probe how they pioneer practices that allow them to navigate uncertainty and populist blowback. A multiplicity of epistemic communities interacting with journalism implies a faint centrifugal coherence, but the disorientation of a hybrid field induces a productive reflexivity in efforts to reconcile intellect with journalism.
“Barbie is Not Muslim”: Consumer Racism in Hijab Wearing Barbie Doll on Twitter • Suman Mishra; Amal Bakry • This paper explores consumer reaction on Twitter surrounding the launch of the first hijab wearing Barbie doll of Olympic fencer Ibtihaj Muhammed in the United States. Using the theoretical framework of consumer racism and qualitative content analysis, the study reveals four major aspects of consumer racism: 1) Antipathy towards the ethnic group’s culture and religion, which in this case is Muslims and Islam 2) (Negative) product evaluation, 3) Skepticism towards the dominant corporation producing multiethnic goods, and 4) Consumer (un)willingness to buy the product. The study highlights that multicultural products produced by a dominant corporation associated with ethnic majority can be subject to similar consumer racism as products produced and sold by ethnic minorities. Theoretical and other implications with regards to consumer racism are discussed.
Public (Re)construction of War Memory in Japan: Examining Audience Reception of the Documentary Film Shusenjo • Junki Nakahara, American University • This paper explores how general publics participate in war memory construction through their consumption of a documentary film. Documentary film Shusenjo: The Main Battleground of The Comfort Women Issue (2019), created by Japanese-American producer Miki Dezaki, deals with one of the most contentious historical controversies in Japan—wartime sexual exploitation of women in Asian countries under the control of the Empire of Japan. In recent decades, Japan’s effort to whitewash the memory about war crimes has often caused frequent diplomatic conflicts with its neighboring countries such as South Korea. The film juxtaposes conflicting historical views to show the process of domestic and international campaigns led by right-wing/conservative leaders and various counter-arguments against their campaigns. Diverse audience comments on the documentary film can be found on online film review websites. Those comments indicate that the audience actively interpreted the film text and discussed their thoughts online. By applying the approach of critical discourse analysis, this research examines if audience evaluation of the film reflects their political opinions regarding its subject and what prospective views of Japanese national identity shape the retrospective war memory about the “comfort women.” The film offers a space for the Japanese audience to reconstruct their prospective and retrospective idea concerning the war memory of their country by questioning the widely accepted consensus.
A Critical Discourse Analysis of The Washington Post’s DACA Coverage: An American Dream Mythology • Daleana Phillips • The Trump Administration’s rhetoric on immigration reflects a shift toward nationalistic and xenophobic political discourses, which has negative consequences for legal and illegal immigrants. News coverage on illegal immigration and undocumented immigrants has overwhelmingly been portrayed using threat narratives and metaphors. This study employs a Critical Discourse Analysis using Barthes Mythology to analyze fifty-two articles from the newspaper, The Washington Post, on the Trump Administration’s decision to rescind the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrival (DACA) Program. The findings reveal that the American Dream ideology prevails in the U.S. national imaginary. Journalists covered DACA participants much differently than traditional threat frames used for covering undocumented immigrants in the media. Journalists portrayed Dreamers as industrious adherents to the American Dream and productive members of society brought into the country illegally as children, through no fault of their own. While this narrative supports DACA participants, it reinforces white middle-class assimilation and contrasts them against undocumented immigrants who are “to blame” for being in the U.S. illegally. The consequences of this rhetoric are important because it leaves white privilege unchallenged and justifies racialized “law and order” discourses that criminalize people who appear “foreign” or carry a “figurative border” with them.
Decoding Versus Discovering: The Social Roots of Two Visions of Journalistic Excellence • Matthew Powers, University of Washington • Drawing on Bourdieu, this paper explores how one’s social position—i.e., their social origins and trajectories—shapes definitions of journalistic excellence. Through interviews, it shows that journalists from lower positions (e.g., working class families, less education) generally articulate a “decoding” view of excellence, while those from higher positions (e.g., professional families, prestigious education) describe a “discovery” view. These two socially-rooted visions differ in their assumptions of a power struggle between journalists and other power holders.
We’ll never let the past die: Five years of Disney Star Wars and the struggle to sustain a creative franchise in the digital era • Abigail Reed • This article examines and critiques the five Disney-produced Star Wars films from a critical political economic perspective. There are three primary themes that help untangle the story of the production of the first five Disney Star Wars films: diversity, production disturbances, and audience feedback. Disney’s intrinsic profit motive and the diversity it claims to value have conflicted with each other, resulting in troubled productions, upset audiences, and confusing film narratives.
This Was America: The Limitations of an Enduring Vision of American Photography • Alex Scott, University of Texas at Austin • This study explores the political implications of a reliance on the approved canon of American photographers by examining the 2018 photo exhibition, “A New Vision: American Photography After the War.” Employing a historiographic examination, the study illuminates how institutions and market obfuscate the historical reality of images. A process of de-politicization is then explicated using a multi-modal analysis of the exhibition images. The images contribute to an American myth drawn upon by contemporary political practices.
Critical Embellishment: Rolling Stone and Pitchfork Pans as Journalistic Signaling • John Vilanova • This research explores the idea of criticism—and specifically the negative review—as a useful and important means of signaling journalistic impartiality for fledgling journalistic enterprises. It historicizes negativity in criticism in relation to the foundations of journalistic practice and analyzes reviews written in the early years of two music publications, Rolling Stone magazine and the website Pitchfork. It theorizes their negativity as performances of what it calls critical expertise and critical authority.
Modern Mourning: The Violence and Potentialities of Public Grief Online • Alyvia Walters, Rutgers University • After nineteen-year-old Mollie Tibbetts was allegedly murdered by an undocumented immigrant in her Iowan hometown in July 2018, her family faced two violent mourning processes: not only were they processing their undue loss, but they were also compelled to enter the public spotlight in order to counter hostile ideologies concerning her undocumented alleged murderer. As this study shows, from the moment his citizenship status was released, the story of importance was no longer that of the loss of Mollie, it was rather the “illegality” of her alleged killer. This article thus investigates the unique mechanisms of modern media which both provide and force space for public expressions of grief: outlets which can both damage and heal. In a mixed methods approach, I performed a Twitter-based events-sequence analysis paired with content and ideological analyses to identify how the local, tragic story of Mollie became a national story of immigration policy—one with such force that the President of the United States commented on it—which led to the Tibbetts’ difficult positionality in the media spotlight. Though social media and its rapid information sharing had caused their daughter’s erasure, the Tibbetts family was also able to use social media to re-center Mollie’s life and values: a violent necessity with empowering ends.
Food, exoticism, and spectacle: Commodifying African otherness in Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern • Tewodros Workneh, Kent State University • The marked reluctance to incorporate African agency in African image-making in the West quite predictably brought about flat and simplistic caricatures of the continent and its peoples. With the aim of interrogating continuity and change in the representation of Africa, this paper explores African exoticism in Travel Channel’s Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern. Framed within a critical cultural/postcolonial perspective that anchors discourses of exoticism in Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern, the study identifies the spectacular representational modes of the “crude” native, poverty, and primitivism as evidences of African otherness. Key findings of the study indicate that food in many African destinations is portrayed as mere materiality, and that African foodways are unsophisticated and lack any perceptible aesthetics or influence. Furthermore, the show stubbornly insists on Africa’s “primitiveness” as a binary condition to be contrasted with Western modernity, which, like the spectacle of poverty, marks the salience of African alterity.
“So F***ing Glad We Got Osuna!”: Feminist world building in sports journalism • Kate Yanchulis, University of Maryland • Sports Illustrated reporter Stephanie Apstein turned a Houston Astros executive’s “offensive and frightening” outburst toward women reporters from a closed-door act of aggression into a public discussion of Major League Baseball’s dismissive attitude toward women. This paper takes coverage of that same incident as an opportunity to consider sports journalism as a potential space for feminist world building, drawing particularly on the work of black feminists.
Post-feminism in China: a discourse analytic examination of the sell of successful intimated relationships advice in Ayawawa’s book • hanlei YANG, Chongqing University • The intimate relationship advice industry in modern China reveals insights about neoliberalism, self-surveillance, emphasis on choice and empowerment, individualism, market-oriented principles, the science of successful sex and relationship, and the revitalization of Confucian conservatism and patriarchy. But it has long been neglected by previous scholars conducting studies on reconceptualization and reconstruction of emotional experiences and subjectivities in China context. Ayawawa is regarded as one of the renowned writers of bestsellers in mainland China for the intimate relationship advice industry. This paper will use her anthology “The cultivation of Love” as the research object by adopting Fairclough’s Critical discourse analysis method and regard postfeminism as a sensibility or a critical subject instead of as an analytic viewpoint. Specifically, this research aims to answer: (1) how she mobilized rhetorical devices and cultural resources to present a seemingly scientific method of managing intimate relationships; (2) what kind of intimate relationship and sexual subjectivity are established. By way of conclusion, females could take advantage of their sexy bodies, seeking financial and emotional support from others in an intimate relationship. successful intimacy is embodied in dramatically increasing the intensity of self-surveillance as a form of regulation for women. The extensiveness of surveillance over an entirely new life and intimacies includes the focus on psychology, and the requirements to transform oneself and reshape one’s deeper inner life. Women are constantly monitoring their looks and reproduction capability when they encounter unequal treatment in the intimate relationship, they first think of monitoring themselves and self-adjustment, instead of paying attention to the fact that men and women are unequal in the intimate relationship.
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