Cultural and Critical Studies 2014 Abstracts
Critically Analyzing Media System Structure: A Comparison of the Origins of U.S. and British Broadcasting, 1927-1935 • Seth Ashley, Boise State University • Media systems require democratic structures in order to serve self-governing citizens. With a goal of explaining divergent policy outcomes that continue to affect media content today, this article takes a comparative historical institutional approach to examining the origins of broadcasting policy structures in the United States and Great Britain. A mix of secondary sources and primary documents is used to explore the capacity of media system structures to serve the needs of democratic life.
The Vaporings of Half-Baked Lazy Documentarians: Art, Critical Pedagogy, and Non-Fiction Literacy • Ralph Beliveau, University of Oklahoma • This argument offers three contexts for discussing art and documentary; 1) a historical context concerned mainly with an art exhibit, to see the historical roots of anti-intellectualism; 2) documentary literacy, to counter the kinds of reactions that are discussed in reference to the art exhibition; 3) the work of Banksy, to integrate history and rhetoric to raise suspicion over both the regime of value in art and the rhetoric of truth exhibited in documentary conventions.
The Era of the Pseudo-Intellectual: Think tanks, market logic, and ideological rationalism • Jesse Benn • This paper’s main effort is to describe a new era of anti-intellectualism, as it relates to the rise of advocacy-oriented think tanks over the last several decades. Pseudo-intellectuals and knowledge production that stems from a predetermined ideology and the unrelenting logic of the free market characterize this new era of anti-intellectualism. Building off the traditional strains of anti-intellectualism: anti-rationalism, anti-elitism, and unreflective instrumentalism, two new terms are proposed and expounded upon.
Miley, CNN and The Onion: When Fake News Becomes Realer Than Real • Dan Berkowitz, University of Iowa; David Schwartz, University of Iowa • Following a twerk-heavy performance by Miley Cyrus on the Video Music Awards program, CNN featured this story on the top of its web site. The Onion – a fake news organization – then ran a satirical column purporting to be by CNN’s web editor explaining this decision. Through textual analysis, this paper demonstrates how a Fifth Estate comprised of bloggers, columnists and fake news organizations worked to relocate mainstream journalism back to within its professional boundaries.
Decolonizing Mediated Pro-Native-Mascot Messages at the University of Illinois and Florida State University • Jason Edward Black, The University of Alabama; Vernon Ray Harrison, Central Alabama Community College • This essay considers the overarching ideologies from which pro-Native-mascot discourses work in citizen-media. These ideologies are mostly nineteenth century constructs that involved U.S. colonialism regarding Native American nations. The argument, herein, is that pro-Native-mascot discourses homologically reflect the U.S. government’s ideologies of expansion, territoriality, paternalism, and benevolence enacted during this century. These nineteenth century historical milieus maintained colonization through land grabbing and spatial control over Native Americans; now they can be extended to the mascot controversy as a sort of neocolonialism. This includes, then, the mediated construction, control and use of Native cultures through symbol use – like mascotting. The essay proceeds first by exploring briefly the nineteenth century ideologies, noted above, through the primary discourses of U.S. governmental leaders who helped craft U.S. Indian policies. Next, the essay analyzes pro-Native-mascot rhetoric from the University of Illinois and Florida State University – through mediated university documents, and mediated student and alumni responses – for the ways that they re/enact neo-colonial ideologies. The analysis reveals numerous stark homologies between the bodies of nineteenth century and pro-Native-mascot discourses.
Materializing Photographs: Negotiating the Materiality of Photographs in The Editor & Publisher, 1901-1910 • Jonathan Brennen, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill • This historical textual analysis of The Editor & Publisher explores how news workers discussed the materiality of early news photographs between 1901-1910. The analysis finds that the increasing differentiation of photographs from illustrations was grounded in shifting ideas about photography’s special connection to or place in the real world. This study suggests the value in investigating the materialization of journalistic objects and practices, through which they are endowed with specific, historically contingent material characteristics.
Real Men Wear Baby Carriers: An Analysis of Media Portrayals of Stay at Home Fathers • Mary Brooks, Texas Tech University • There is a rise in stay at home fathers due to the recession as well as more women seeking to work outside the home or return to school (Petroski & Edley, 2006). Although this shift for a man from a traditional role to a non-traditional role is growing, more research is still required in order to gain an understanding of males as primary caregivers to their children. Through this study, a series of interviews were conducted with stay at home fathers (SAHF) in order to gain more knowledge concerning the role of a stay at home dad along with how media play a part in their daily lives and how media portray fathers. A variety of themes were uncovered including the stigma attached to being a SAHF, the media’s representation of fathers, and the fathers’ desire to see more SAHFs featured in the media.
“The King Stay[s] the King:” The Multiple Masculinities of The Wire • Rick Brown, Marquette University • This qualitative study examines the televised police procedural The Wire (2002-2008) through the lens of Connell’s theory of hegemonic masculinity. Employing Fisher’s narrative paradigm, this narrative critique answers the question of how multiple masculinities are constructed in the program. Focusing on The Wire’s first season, the study finds that the program presents a counterhegemonic vision of police procedurals’ traditional hegemonic masculinity, positing it as a corrosive hierarchy that destroys marginalized and subordinated males.
Redefining the Advertising-Editorial Divide: Native Advertising Norm Construction and the Meaning of News Content • Matt Carlson • Professional journalism’s normative commitment to autonomy has long dictated the separation of editorial functions from advertising. However, the emergent practice of online native advertising complicates this division, resulting in conflicting visions of how journalistic authority should be established for online news. This paper examines reactions to a controversial Church of Scientology native advertisement on the Atlantic web site to assess how competing processes of norm-making and boundary work shape normative understandings of online journalism.
Manliness, Motherhood, and Mêlée: (Re)Articulating Gender in the Balkan Wars Rationale • Christian Vukasovich, Oregon Tech; Catherine Cassara, Bowling Green State University; Tamara Dejanovic-Vukasovich • News and propaganda images were ubiquitous statements in support of the conflicts that tore apart the former Yugoslavia; they rearticulated traditional gender roles that constituted “Balkan patriarchy.” This study explores the gendered nature of war, how a heterogamous nation embraced ethno-nationalist propaganda, and how the re-articulation of the sexual division of labor viewed through the lens of ethno-nationalism creates an inescapable pull toward violence. A post-modern feminist position informs the analysis via grounded theory methodology
Measuring the Impact of Globalization on German and U.S. University Students’ Attitudes and News Judgments • Sue Ellen Christian, Western MIchigan University; Robert McNutt, Western Michigan University; Yuanyuan Shao, Western Michigan University • This study explores whether or not journalism and mass communication students at a U.S. university and a German university have adopted their respective national attitudes and whether those attitudes are evident in students’ decisions about the newsworthiness of events. Analyses showed that students generally held the same attitudes as the general adult population of their country and often showed even stronger support for many attitudes. However, student attitudes were not significantly associated with decisions on the newsworthiness of hypothetical scenarios structured to elicit those attitudes. Most notably, German and U.S. students dramatically differed in their estimations of newsworthiness in 28 of 34 news stories. The results have relevance for global journalism curriculum development.
The docu-soap formula: multi-layered backstage, performed liminoid and therapeutics of the self • Xi Cui, Dixie State University • This paper assumes a ritual perspective to explicate the generic structure of docu-soaps through textual analysis of the popular reality show Duck Dynasty. The author argues that the claim of reality by this genre lies in its multi-layered backstage and the performed liminoid manifested in production and plot arrangements. The sense of authenticity conveyed through this structure contributes to media’s power to represent and reinforce certain social values such as the sacred and unapologetic self.
Communication strategies of post-soviet civic activists • Nino Danelia, University of South Carolina • Internet is essential at the start-up phase of the civic action in Georgia, one of the former Soviet republics. It retains its function as an effective communication and planning tool among civic activists throughout the protest. However, in order to mobilize large amount of public in the countries with low Internet penetration, the traditional media should be used.
Employee Gripe Sites and Everyday Life: Macro and Micro Perspectives • Maxine Gesualdi, Temple University • Organizations use websites to promote their brands and interact with customers. Disgruntled parties use websites to disparage companies for perceived ills. Previous research has examined anti-brand websites largely related to consumer interaction. However, equally important information is shared on sites populated by employees as outlets for gripes. This paper applies diverse theories from cultural studies, public relations, organizational systems, and sociology to conceptualize the employee gripe site and analyze sites about Wal-Mart and United Airlines.
Professionalism under the threat of violence: journalism, self-reflexivity, and the potential for collective professional autonomy • Celeste Gonzalez de Bustamante, University of Arizona; Jeannine Relly, The University of Arizona • Mexico is one of the most dangerous places in the world for journalists, as more than 100 journalists have been murdered between 2000 and 2014, with most of those killed in the northern states. Through an analysis of in-depth interviews with journalists in northern Mexico, this essay examines how violence has influenced journalists’ self-perceptions about professionalism. Utilizing the concepts of self-reflexivity and collective professional autonomy, the authors explain the complexities and contradictions of professional identity.
Alternative Spaces for Feminist Voices: Social Media’s Influence on CNN’s Steubenville Rape Coverage • Josh Grimm, Louisiana State University; Jaime Loke, University of Oklahoma; Dustin Harp, The University of Texas at Arlington • In this discourse analysis, we examined CNN coverage of the Steubenville rape case in the spring of 2013. Examination of 56 video news segments reflected a hegemonic struggle for meaning through negotiations of traditional and feminist conceptions of rape. After CNN started moving toward replicating traditional rape myths, the station’s coverage suddenly shifted to supporting (rather than blaming) the victim, which coincided with a social media backlash against the station’s handling of the case.
Who lost what?: An analysis of myth, loss, and proximity in news coverage of the Steubenville rape • Erica Salkin, Whitworth University; Robert Gutsche Jr, Florida International University • This paper extends previous research on the application of mythical news narratives in times of great community loss, death, or destruction by taking into account the role of perceived dominant news audiences. This paper analyzes six months of coverage surrounding the 2012 rape of a 16-year-old girl by two teenage boys in Steubenville, Ohio. The paper argues audience proximity to news events contributes to the mythical archetypes used to explain everyday life.
Extra Chromosomes and Mama Grizzlies: Sarah Palin Negotiating Down Syndrome as a Political Mother • Kirsten Isgro, State University of New York at Plattsburgh • In 2008, when Republican VP candidate Sarah Palin was introduced to the U.S political scene, there was emphasis on her position as a mother of a child with Down syndrome. Palin received both criticism and praise for bringing her youngest child out into the public arena, making visible his developmental differences. She became a contentious spokesperson for families with special needs, aligning her in uneasy ways with bioethicists, disability rights activists, feminists, and conservative anti-abortionists.
The Governmental Discourse on Food and Its Articulation of Koreanness • Jaehyeon Jeong • Drawing on the anthropological notion of food as deep play, this research examined the Korean government’s discourses on Korean food and their articulation of the Koreanness, with which people identify themselves as Korean. Through the visual analysis of the organizational magazine of Korean Food Foundation, this study found that national cuisine, as invented tradition, contributes to the (re) construction and perpetuation of the nation-ness, strengthening a boundary between “we” and “they.”
K-pop Idol Girl Groups: Cultural Genre of Neoliberalism in Confucian Korea • Gooyong Kim, Temple University; Kyun Soo Kim, Chonnam National University • By deploying Raymond Williams’s notion of cultural genre, this paper investigates how post-IMF neoliberal, Confucian Korea as historical specificity has rendered a proliferation of K-pop idol girl groups, which commodify highly sexualized young female bodies, as a formal universality. As a critical reaction to the existing K-pop scholarship, this paper analyzes how the music genre should be examined within the continuum of Korea’s Confucianism and state-developmentalism, and contributes to enriching scholarly examination on the sociocultural phenomenon.
Illusion vs. Disillusion: How Chinese Viewers Articulate the Meaning of “House of Cards” • Zhaoxi Liu, Trinity University • Using Stuart Hall’s articulation concept, this paper examines comments posted on the website of “House of Cards” on Sohu Video, a Chinese online streaming service, to see how viewers in mainland China articulate the meaning of the show. The analysis reveals three themes. Some viewers extoll the show as a demonstration of a superb, much better political system featuring democracy, others regard it as proof that American political system is just as dark and evil as the one in China. A third theme expresses people’s discontent over the lack of freedom of speech in China as the show offers a great example of how a dicey and outspoken show like it is not possible to be created in China. The study argues that through examination of articulation, researchers can gain more insight into the tension and struggle in a fast changing Chinese society.
U.S. Presidential Discourse about Immigration in an Era of Neoliberalism: Where the Golden Door Leads • Carolyn Nielsen, Western Washington University • In the past 30 years, the U.S. has seen its largest influx of immigrants at the same time it has experienced the growth of neoliberal politics. This study found that neoliberal thought has increasingly dominated presidential discourse about immigration. Presidents from both parties have primarily discussed immigration reform in terms of market solutions and economic growth. These discourses facilitate the creation of a permanent underclass rather than a “golden door” to the American Dream.
Orientalism and Objectification in the Evolution of the Singapore Girl, 1972-2013 • Fernando Paragas, Nanyang Technological University; Joshua Hong; Eugene Lee; Rachael Lim; Mai Yun Wong • The Singapore Girl, an icon that personifies Singapore Airlines, has been a locus of discussion on female imagery in branding. This study explores the depiction of the Singapore Girl in four decades of print advertisements that feature her. Using textual analysis, the study finds the limited use of the male gaze and the savvy moderation of orientalism and objectification to harness and downplay the sexualization of the Singapore Girl. The paper shows how advertising depicts the complex paradoxes and tensions in the life of the Singapore Girl and the Asian woman.
Psy-zing Up the Mainstreaming of “Gangnam Style”: Embracing Asian Masculinity as Neo-Minstrelsy? • Michael Park, University of Idaho • Through the media mania of “Gangnam Style,” this paper examines the ideological implications of the meme’s appeal and its celebrated reception on mainstream television programs. A critical reading addresses whether the popular reception of “Gangnam Style” offer alternative discourses or reinforce ideological constructions of Asian masculinity. An analysis of Psy’s music video and his mediated public appearances identifies the ideological implications that reflect and reinforce the emasculation discourse that situates Asian masculinity as neo-minstrelsy.
Scarlet Letters: Digital Sexual Subjugation of Revenge Pornography • Caitlin PenzeyMoog, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee • Revenge porn is the distribution of sexually graphic images of individuals without their consent. Most revenge adds a twist worthy of the Facebook age: personal information is included, so anyone with an internet connection can view sexually explicit images posted without consent next to the victim’s full name and, depending on the site, home address, phone number, and link to Facebook profile. I analyze revenge porn by first placing it in contextual history of pornography and prostitution. I argue that revenge porn can be viewed as a contemporary phenomenon that is part of a long line of practices used to repress women. Next, I place revenge porn in the context of the industrial capitalist system that allows it to flourish. I then turn to analyzing revenge porn itself, tracingthe life of the images that become revenge porn, highlighting the narrative arcs these images come to represent and their transformation from private sexual representations to public sexual commodities. I analyze the images themselves to understand the value of the “authentic” revenge porn image. The processes of feminization and masculinization of the participants involved. The act of posting revenge porn complements a hegemonic-masculine paradigm, wherein men assert or re-assert a hegemonic masculinity by posting revenge porn images. These images also act as capital, both economically and socially: economically for the owners of the websites, who gain monetary profits through advertising on popular revenge porn sites, and socially, as revenge porn images and stories act as cultural capital for those who post them.
Speaking Truth to Sorkin: Interpretive Community and the Critical Response to The Newsroom • Rachel Powers, California State University, Fullerton • This study examines the reactions of 35 television critics to season one of The Newsroom, a drama created and written by Aaron Sorkin and airing on HBO during the summer of 2012. A content analysis of season one reviews from June 2012 and corresponding critic Twitter postings was conducted. Regardless of a critic’s overall rating or assessment of The Newsroom, the critics approach the show as members of an interpretive community by structuring reviews around certain show elements, using a specific language to talk about the show, and relying on the intertextual elements inherent to both their profession and the television drama in order to shape audience opinion. Because of the critics’ unique relationship to the plot and setting of the show, and ability to share opinions through the media, reviews demonstrated a range of personal reactions and continued the larger national dialogue about politics, government, journalism and cable news that the show triggered.
Othering in Twenty-First Century Town Meetings: Critically Examining the Dialogic Role of Public Deliberation in AmericaSpeaks’ Kansas City Mental Health Forum • Corey Reutlinger, Kansas State University • This study examines the Kansas City Mental Health Forum for underlying Othering of the Mentally-Ill, exploring Bakhtin’s dialogic “sense-making” discourse between participants in AmericaSpeaks’ 21st Century Town Meetings. Using survey responses, ethnographic notes, and transcribed facilitator interviews from the Institute for Civic Discourse and Democracy, the study finds reinforced cultural stigmatization and dissuasion from continued civic participation in public deliberation. This study’s contributions lie in mathematical and critical solutions to improve deliberative theory and practice.
Properly Preggers: Media Representations of Celebrity Mommies and the Social Capital of the Ideal Pregnant Body • Chelsea Reynolds, University of Minnesota • This critical essay uses discourse analysis and historical analysis to understand media constructions of the ideal celebrity pregnancy. It positions coverage of Kim Kardashian’s and Kate Middleton’s pregnancies against mid-20th century coverage of celebrity pregnancies. Analysis shows the ideal pregnant body is guarded by a man, is fashionably accessorized, and is carefully restricted in size and shape. Applying Foucauldian principles of surveillance and examination, I suggest pregnancy coverage constructs pregnant women as ultimate “docile bodies.”
All is Wells with My Soul: Analysis of community and conditioned agency via The Defender’s coverage of the construction and opening of the Ida B. Wells Homes • Loren Saxton, Bowie State University; Elli Lester Roushanzamir, University of Georgia • This critical textual analysis explores how people exercise spatial and communicative agency through media, such as the Chicago Defender, and in social and physical space, such as the Wells Homes. The research suggests that the Defender’s coverage of the Wells Homes’ construction is an exemplar of how media practices reinforced restricting structures of race, class and space, while simultaneously providing opportunities for residents and community members to collectively produce sites of social resistance and transformation.
Bridging the Neoliberal Capitalist Divide • Nathan Senge, University of Colorado at Boulder • In the spirit of Richard Hoggart’s iconic tripartite scale for assessing public literacy rates, as articulated in The Uses of Literacy, this paper is an examination of the inherent conflict between ‘mass society,’ as defined by C. Wright Mills and which corresponds to Hoggart’s “basic literacy” level, and ‘culture,’ as used in the British Culturalist sense and which corresponds to the “critical” and “cultivated” literacy levels that Hoggart believed were required of a functioning democracy.
The Top Executive on “Undercover Boss”: The Embodied Corporate Persona and the Valorization of Self-Management • Burton St. John, Old Dominion University • Reality television has customarily been studied as an arena where individuals perform who they are within episodic and often highly-dramatic contexts. This work, however, finds that the program “Undercover Boss” offers a different approach: the corporate persona, embodied through the “undercover” top executive, interacts with front-line workers and, in the process, 1) elicits from employees their own self-managing observations, 2) focuses on employees who appear to be significant role models (for good or ill) and 3) provides rewards to employees who exhibited positive self-governing and/or role modeling. With this approach, “Undercover Boss” offers up the image of a beneficent corporate persona whose vision is consonant with American values and norms.
“I Kill Czervenians”: Adolescent Video Game Users as a Commodity Audience for War • Margot Susca, Ph.D., American University • Little research exists about audience interaction with the U.S. Army’s military recruitment video game, America’s Army. Using a political economic lens, this paper hopes to add to the literature about military video games through a critical review of nearly 10,000 comments posted to America’s Army message boards. Jenkins (2006) suggested that gamers are active parts of the online audience and that they can and do negotiate meanings from that participation. The further study of America’s Army audiences can help to broaden our understanding of the moral and political consequences of allowing the U.S. Army to produce a game targeted at youth that has military recruitment as its primary goal. This paper seeks to better understand a heterogeneous audience and how it makes meaning from the game’s messages of violence, war, and U.S. military service. Evidence in these online comments must be understood as a product of structural realities of the corporate systems and government doctrine that make the media possible in the first place. Analysis reveals themes of militarism, violence, recruitment, and sanitized and unrealistic feelings about dying in combat; each related to the U.S. Army’s need to exploit and commodify its adolescent audience during a time of war.
Framing “Big Jim”: The CIA, US News Media, and Press Coverage of Jim Garrison’s JFK Assassination Investigation • James Tracy, Florida Atlantic University • Framing research and method are applied to historically situate and analyze US press coverage addressing New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison’s independent investigation of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination (1967-69). A sample of articles from major newsweeklies taken over the inquiry’s two-year span suggests a concerted effort to present the case in negative terms. Three overarching frames are evident in reportage focusing on Garrison’s alleged physical characteristics and personal and professional behavior, alongside the backdrop of New Orleans’ exoticized milieu. Documentation further suggests a working relationship between the Central Intelligence Agency and major news media indicated in coverage of what Agency personnel recognized as a potentially momentous probe. At this juncture the term “conspiracy theory/theorist” emerges in journalistic faire and is imbued with certain aberrant connotations, making it a powerful device that is routinely wielded to direct and shape public discourse and opinion.
A Re-conceptualization of Lumpenproletariats: The Collective Organization of Poverty for Social Change via Participatory Media • Cindy Vincent • This paper contributes to critical media theory by challenging Marx’s conception of the lumpenproletariat and analyzing the activist-oriented participatory media processes of those who would be classified as contemporary lumpenproletariats in San Francisco, CA. Based on ethnographic research conducted at POOR Magazine, this paper argues that despite obstacles of disenfranchisement and disindividuation, people living in poverty and homelessness are able to collectively organize for social change via participatory media processes.
Obama hands out condoms, hires half-naked people: Individualized and personalized discourse in Echo Chamber 2.0 • Fred Vultee, Wayne State University • This paper expands on Jamieson and Cappella’s (2008) “echo chamber” of right-wing opinion media by expanding it to traditional-styled news as well as a range of opinion and social media sites. It analyzes a discourse of personalization focused on Barack Obama and his associates that resembles the Manichean furor of Hofstadter’s (2008/1964) “paranoid style” of American politics. Though a personalized style of political communication has advantages for candidates and audiences alike, an extreme personalization tilts the scales toward delegitimization and misrepresentation.
Reporting Jim Crow Abroad: Press Images and Words for African-American Deployments in World War II • Pamela Walck, E.W. Scripps School of Journalism, Ohio University • “Prior to the civil rights movement, African Americans rarely appeared in mainstream newspapers unless they were glamorous entertainers, tremendous athletes or frightening criminals. Growing scholarship argues that America’s march into World War II marked a turning point toward racial equality in the United States. This paper utilizes semiotics to evaluate images and words used by the mainstream and black press to tell the war story of “others” in Great Britain.
A Way of Life at Risk: Taxes, Borders and the Myth of the Country Store • Richard Watts, University of Vermont; Cheryl Morse, University of Vermont • This study explores the relationship between public policy and myth by examining the ritualistic responses to three tax policy proposals in the news discourse. In each proposal, similar arguments are raised immediately—arguments that draw from mythologies of pastoral arcadia and archetypical figures of independent, hard-working country-store owners, a key element in the state’s cultural landscape. The ritualistic display of the “cross-border” narrative obscures the opportunity for more detailed policy analysis.
An Analysis of Black and Mainstream Newspaper Coverage of Benjamin Jefferson Davis Junior 1945 -1955 • Prince White, Howard University • This research explores the media frames present in Black and mainstream newspapers’ portrayals of Black, Communist Party leader and New York City Councilmen Benjamin Jefferson Davis Junior from 1945 to 1955. The results indicate that the newspapers portray Davis with a variety of media frames prior to his indictment under the Smith Act and the portrayals of coalesce in portraying him as an outsider, an agitator and a puppet of a foreign totalitarian dictatorship.
Newsmagazines’ Coverage of the David Petraeus and Paula Broadwell Affair: Textual Analysis of Differences in Portrayals and Descriptions • Tetyana Lokot, University of Maryland; Antonio Prado, University of Maryland; Boya Xu, University of Maryland, College Park • Drawing on a media bias perspective, this study examines the Petraeus/Broadwell scandal coverage in three newsmagazines. It attempts to identify main story themes, agency assigned, and stereotypical content. Results showed considerable discrepancy in journalistic descriptions toward David Petraeus and Paula Broadwell. It is concluded that interpretations of the female party in sex scandal coverage involving men in power remain on a similar level of constructed news frame as coverage of scandals of similar contexts.
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