Cultural and Critical Studies 2016 Abstracts
Destabilizing the Nation-State: News Coverage of Citizenship in the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 • Alejandro Morales; Cristina Mislan, University of Missouri, Columbia • This study explores the discourse of citizenship in newspaper coverage of the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) of 1986. A historical analysis of a twenty-year period reveals how news media have constructed citizenship as a problematic concept threatening to destabilize the nation-state. Such discourse reinforces exclusionary politics, where employers, immigrants, and bureaucratic institutions are positioned against one another. Furthermore, the study provides insight into the ways media help reinforce the boundaries of national sovereignty.
Cognitive Film Theory and the Representation of Corporate Bureaucracy as the Apotheosis of the Banality of Evil • Angela Rulffes, Syracuse University • This study advanced a unique perspective on the banality of evil by examining how it is depicted in film and television through portrayals of corporate wickedness. Specifically, this study used a cognitive film theory lens to analyze three works by Joss Whedon. The results suggest that Whedon portrays banality of evil in the corporate world and indicates, through his works, that breaking away from corporate dominance, particularly through individual liberation, is of critical importance.
A Cowgirl and a Descendant of Slaves: Comparing Newspaper and News Magazine Coverage of Sandra Day O’Connor in 1981 and Thurgood Marshall in 1967 • Boya Xu, University of Maryland • As the first female justice and the first African American justice, Sandra Day O’Connor and Thurgood Marshall have both set irreplaceable marks in the U.S. Supreme Court’s history as inspirational embodiments. This study employs a qualitative textual analysis and examines the two justices’ nomination and confirmation process under mainstream media’s spotlight. It also investigates whether gender and ethnic stereotypes were present in news coverage of the two history-making figures. Five major influential news publications were selected to serve as the source of the study. Research results show that gender and race played some roles in determining each nominee’s qualifications and overall impression in front of the Judiciary Committee, yet the roles were not major compared to the political game analysis that all five publications engaged in larger amount of texts. The liberal or conservative viewpoints each publication shares also contributed to the diverse finding results. It is concluded from this research that news analysis was largely influenced by reporting and organizational bias. And contemporary social movements often served as a direct, larger background for the news making process.
The Corporation as Fellow Advocate: Norfolk and Western Magazine’s Reification of the Corporate Persona in the Cause of Free Enterprise – 1949-1952 • Burton St. John III, Old Dominion University • An underexplored area of organizational rhetoric concerns how the corporation attempts to position itself as a humanlike persona that speaks out on issues that concern the average man. This study of the Norfolk and Western Magazine’s rhetoric in defense of free enterprise in the early 1950’s establishes one example of the rise of the corporate persona in the U.S. and the lingering implication that such a construct presents for the understanding and discussion of pressing issues in the United States.
Doing Journalism and Sex Research: A Sociology of Knowledge Approach • Chelsea Reynolds, University of Minnesota School of Journalism and Mass Communication • This essay introduces a theory of sex reportage as normalizing discourse. It synthesizes the relationship between the normalizing gaze of sexuality studies and the normalizing gaze of news ideology. It extends the utility of representational perspectives when analyzing ideology in news content, including the importance of examining dominant-hegemonic media alongside potentially counter-hegemonic vernacular media. The essay provides methodological recommendations for analyzing sex reportage using a hybrid critical discourse analysis-grounded theory approach.
“You Have No Idea the Feeling of Insult”: Comparative Newspaper Discourses about Civil Rights • Christopher Frear, University of South Carolina • This study looks at four different types of newspapers — an African American weekly in South Carolina, a national African American weekly, a South Carolina white-run daily newspaper, and a national daily — and examines the discourses that each constructed over time and during four specific events in South Carolina civil rights lawyer and federal judge Matthew J. Perry’s career in the American South of the Jim Crow and civil rights era.
NPR, Marketplace, and the Sound of Finance • Diane Cormany, University of Minnesota • Abstract: Marketplace has self-consciously created a program that is different in tone, music, pacing, and even story selection from its financial news competitors. Yet it also claims the largest audience of any broadcast radio or television finance and business program. My paper uniquely combines political economy and generic analysis with theories of affect and financialization (the pervasiveness of finance capital) to demonstrate how Marketplace’s form interprets financial markets for its millions of listeners.
Alan M. Thomas’ Concept of the Active Audience in People Talking Back • Errol Salamon • In 1959, adult educator Alan M. Thomas outlined one of the first concepts of the active broadcast audience in Canada as a force for two-way communication and direct democracy. In 1979, Thomas created People Talking Back, a six-episode participatory television series, in order to facilitate democratic decision making outside of formal educational institutions. This paper brings together Thomas’ concept of the audience, his adult educational broadcasting scholarship, and archival research on People Talking Back.
Fan Representations and Corporate Media Hegemony in The Big Bang Theory • Heather McIntosh • The CBS series The Big Bang Theory (2007-) follows four nerdy friends who regularly engage a range of fandoms, offering an opportunity to engage fan representations through the ideological hegemony of a situation comedy. An examination of the show through themes of the fans’ participatory activities, media and merchandise consumption, and their social connections reveals that while the representations appear more positive, they offer limited range of fan behaviors that aligns with corporate media interests.
Aluta 2.0: A Qualitative Exploration of the emergence of social media as space for social movement contention in Ghana • Henry Boachi, Rutgers University • This interview-based study explores reasons why the #OccupyFlagStaffHouse movement in Ghana used social media – the least accessible form of media – as a mobilization tool, amidst a ubiquitous traditional mass media landscape. The study found that the usage of social media – Facebook and Twitter – was motivated by the skills of the movement members, the comparative anonymity it provides, desire to reach their primary social media-savvy audience, and to escalate the movement’s concerns beyond Ghana.
Necessary Complexity of Transnational Media Culture: K-pop in the West • Hyeri Jung, The University of Texas at Austin • By conducting close readings of Western fans’ reaction videos to K-pop and online users’ interactive enunciative productivity, this study aims to explore the theoretical validity of imperialism traditions, the nature of transnational media culture of K-pop, Western fans’ encoding/decoding of K-pop, and how and why their reception of the so-called hybridized K-pop creates ideological twists in global/international contexts. The ‘necessary complexity’ of interconnected audiences in ‘deterritorialized mediascapes’ is exemplified in K-pop.
Everything’s a Product: Reconciling the Commodification of Critique • Jared LaGroue, The Pennsylvania State University • Critical scholars face a frustrating ethical dilemma when critique is commodified: how do we reconcile the pleasure/truth of a text when its material production serves contrary capitalist ends? Is it possible to simultaneously celebrate a narrative while condemning its medium? The Lego Movie serves as a relevant pedagogical device for exploring the tension between culture industry and cultural studies arguments that elucidate this dilemma. I first conduct comparative textual and material analyses of The Lego Movie and Screen Junkies’ Honest Trailers parody of the film. I then develop a theoretical-categorical schema in attempt to map the potential normative-axiological positions available for reconciling the ethical dilemma of commodified critique. I conclude by applying this schema to the pedagogical example of The Lego Movie, and by offering potential applications of the reflexive practices associated with utilization of this model, and how this exploration aids efforts to achieve axiological congruence.
News media development in the Afghan case: The enigma of news media “capture” • Jeannine Relly, The University of Arizona; Margaret Zanger, The University of Arizona • This qualitative study of news media development utilizing the Afghan case examines the challenges facing Afghan journalists (N = 30) nearly 15 years after the fall of the Taliban, more than a decade of news media training, and the year that the U.S. military mission ended in the country. We found that although the majority of journalists were optimistic about the level of professionalism reached in the country, there were constraints at the organization level and from pressures outside of news outlets that made conducting journalistic work remarkable in the current environment. We suggest that future research could look more closely at both media development and the paradox of news media “capture.” We suggest a typology could further refine this work with six distinct forms of capture (economic, political, cultural, legal, bureaucratic, societal) that could be further developed by country.
“Guns don’t kill people…selfies do”: The narcissism fallacy in media coverage of selfie-related deaths • Jessica Hennenfent, University of Georgia • Through a textual analysis of six major news outlets, this research argues that a misinterpretation of the original Narcissus myth leads to a fallacious critique of selfies. Instead, the language used to describe selfie-related deaths indicates exhibitionism is a more accurate description of the selfie-taking phenomenon. This discursive shift parallels the analog to digital shift, in which it is not enough to capture one’s self image, but the image also needs to be shared.
“Multicultural-phobia” in Rumors: Why Rumors about Jasmine Lee Matter • Jinsook Kim, The University of Texas at Austin • This study explores rumors about Jasmine Lee, the first non-ethnic naturalized Korean lawmaker. Although rumors are often dismissed as the distribution of false information, this paper foregrounds rumors as political discourse that reflects certain social conditions and political anxieties. Since Lee is a symbolic figure of Korean multiculturalism, I argue that the consistent production and circulation of rumors about her is crystallized from the tension between state-led multiculturalism, and Koreans’ anxieties around changing nationhood
From overt to covert: An analysis of HIV/AIDS PSAs from 1989-1994 and 2009-2014 • Kellie Stanfield, University of Missouri • Since 1981, the CDC has released PSAs about HIV/AIDS. Despite this effort, more than 1.1 million people in the United States have the infection. Using media tropes as a theoretical concept and analytical method, this study engages in textual analysis of the CDC’s first televised PSA campaign and its most recent campaign. The analysis reveals the PSAs are socially and historically bound, and shows health campaigns can provide insights into complex cultural and social values.
Knowledge ghettos: The end of the public sphere? • Kevin Curran, Univ of Oklahoma • Habermas wrote of the need for informed debate in the public sphere. Donohue, Tichenor and Olien’s knowledge gap theory said those with more knowledge have more power. Applying knowledge gap theory to media, Bard suggests people who receive information from partisan sources are living in a knowledge ghetto. This paper will examine Bard’s propositions through audience measurements, electoral results or public actions. The result is a detriment to the public sphere.
Who Uses Dewey and Why? Remembering and Forgetting John Dewey in Communication Studies • Lana Rakow, University of North Dakota • Despite the prominence of communication in John Dewey’s philosophy, the field has a history both of trying to remember and of remembering in order to dismiss his ideas. By mapping his place in speech, rhetoric, journalism, and mass communication, this critical review demonstrates there has been too little attention to Dewey’s work; a conflation with pragmatism, progressivism, and the Chicago School; and received histories that obscure his approach to power and knowledge.
Simulacra-A Concept Explication • Leah Stone, Colorado State University • American media use simulacra across various media platforms to foster a synergistic consumer “hyperreality” of an image or object. The creation of media simulacra, a generation of models of a real object without origin or reality, defines American consumption culture. This explication will examine the concept simulacra and its key dimensions and epistemology, uses in both media and other research fields, and how simulacra may be refined and used as a lens for future research.
Habermas’s Account of Public Judgment: Future Directions for the Age of Networked Communication • Lewis Friedland; Thomas Hove • This paper analyzes the degree to which Habermas’s theories remain useful for evaluating the quality of public opinion in an age of networked communication. First, we review his account of how the media system enables societies to generate considered public opinion. Second, we explain why his description of the media system is outdated. Third, we identify a series of problems that need to be addressed by any theory of rational democracy.
How to understand a woman director? : A perspective of Chinese women audience members on Ann Hui’s The Golden Era (2014) v Li Chen, Syracuse University v The issue that this study addresses is the unprivileged status of women directors and women audiences in the male-dominated film industry in China. The purpose of this study is to use the concept of gender practice to explore how Chinese women audience members make sense of Ann Hui and her films. 18 in-depth interviews were conducted. The results indicated that ordinary Chinese women audience members are still unfamiliar with the concept of gender.
When Sexual Assault Becomes the Story: The Gendered War Reporter in the Media Text • Lindsay Palmer • This paper conducts an analysis of the CBS 60 Minutes interview that followed correspondent Lara Logan’s sexual assault during the 2011 Egyptian uprising. Drawing upon a mixed set of methods deployed in the humanist field of film and media studies, I first provide some important background information on the cultural context in which Logan’s assault unfolded, analyzing the journalistic discourse on the broader coverage of the 2011 uprisings in Egypt. In order to examine this discourse, I conduct a critical reading of the English-language journalism trade articles published during the winter of 2011. I also draw upon the professional insights and cultural performances of 20 journalists I have interviewed, each of whom covered the 2011 protests. After providing this context, I finally turn to a textual analysis of Logan’s interview, illuminating the contradictory ways in which she is represented in that media text. In doing this, I argue that while the CBS video claims to facilitate Logan’s belated transcendence of Tahrir Square—casting her as an agent who can “speak out” on behalf of female war reporters—the interview ultimately represents Logan as the white, feminine victim of a racialized other: the abstract “Egyptian male,” who cannot be trusted to pilot Egypt toward a new political future.
Always Already Hailed: Negotiating Memory and Identity at the Newseum • Lori Amber Roessner, University of Tennessee, Knoxville; Carrie Teresa, Niagara University • This autoethnography considers the experiences of two media scholars at the Newseum in Washington, D.C., on August 10, 2013, and their digital return in February 2016. It considers the Newseum’s role in how we remember and why we forget certain aspects of American journalism and the relationship between this institutional site of memory and our individual and collective identities (D’Amore & Meriwether, 2013; Kitch, 2002; Schudson, 1995). The self-reflexive, autobiographical methodological form allows the historians of media and culture to consider the calls of Zelizer (1995), Kitch (2006), and Hume (2010) for more conceptual clarity in our understandings of public, social, cultural, and collective memory; for new understandings of the reception and negotiation of media memory-texts and sites of memory; and for the operation of memory in physical and digital landscapes, respectively.
A Normative History of Identifying Native-Americans as Mascots: The Redskins Case Study • Meghan Delsite; Bob Trumpbour, Penn State Altoona • The use of Native-Americans for team names in American sports teams has elicited a broad range of reactions in media, ranging from anger to aggressive defense of such practices. This research focuses on the use of the Redskins name in professional sports and the use of Native-American mascots in general as a practice that has within it an implicit and explicit power-dynamic. Normative approaches are presented to suggest a resolution that transcends power-based ideologies.
Identity, Representation and Travel: Negotiated and Transactional Communication in Tourism • Meta G. Carstarphen, University of Oklahoma • Discourse about tourism is not just about a living, breathing space. It is a narrative about ourselves, if we are tourists, and how we see ourselves in relationship to others. Considering Stuart Hall’s key ideas about identity and representation, this paper argues for a new critique about how the experience of travel is constructed in journalism, marketing and public relations.
Please exit through the gift shop: On the ethics of the 9/11 Memorial Museum Store • Miles Sari, Washington State University • Is it ethical for the 9/11 Museum to have a gift shop? Adopting Bandura’s notion of moral disengagement, this paper addresses this question by arguing that the shop is unethical because it forges an inhumane commercial space where visitors’ anxiety and need for closure is negotiated through consuming souvenirs. By capitalizing on the deaths of dehumanized 9/11 victims, under the guise of sustaining the memorial, visitors are alienated from the devastation associated with Ground Zero.
Mobile Masculinities: An Investigation of Networked Masculinities in Gay Dating Apps • Nathian Rodriguez, Texas Tech University; Jennifer Huemmer, Texas Tech University; Lindsey Blumell, Copenhagen Business School/Texas Tech University • This study argues that hegemonic masculinity and inclusive masculinity are conciliatory when applied to networked masculinities in homosexual spaces. It contends hegemonic masculinity is a macro-level process that informs micro-level processes of inclusive masculinity. Employing a textual analysis of 500 individual profiles in gay dating apps (Scruff, GROWLr, GuySpy and Hornet), findings indicate networked masculinities informed by hegemonic masculinity. A process of “mascing” also resulted from the data.
What were newspapers for? Artistic and literary responses to the 2009 newspaper crisis • Nicholas Gilewicz, Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania • 2009 newspaper closures caused extensive reflection in journalism about newspapers’ future and generated responses from interrelated fields. Two case studies—the 2010 New Museum of Contemporary Art exhibition The Last Newspaper and the 2009 literary journal McSweeney’s publication of the San Francisco Panorama newspaper prototype, and news coverage of each—illustrate how representatives of the art and literary worlds mediatize the newspaper materially and conceptually as a mnemonic deposit of sociocultural ideas about newspaper journalism.
Constructing a “First” First Lady Through Memory: The Case of China’s Peng Liyuan • Qi Ling, The University of Iowa; Dan Berkowitz, University of Iowa • Our study analyzed how cultural memory of previous and contemporary first ladies was used as journalistic devices to make sense of the unusual case of Peng Liyuan, the current first lady of China. When faced with reporting international news in little-understood cultural dimensions, the media turn to memory of the familiar to make the news resonant, thus reaffirming the cultural and gender values that are associated with the a typical Western first lady.
Living with Images of Suffering: A Critical Examination of News Photographs Depicting the Dead • Richard Lewis, The University of Southern Mississippi • This paper examines the historic development and contemporary reactions to images of corpses published in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Framed by a discussion of Susan Sontag’s concern over the anesthetic effect of photographs of suffering and Stuart Hall concept of preferred, negotiated and oppositional readings, it argues that Hurricane Katrina represented a rare circumstance when shocking images of dead bodies were published by the commercial press without presenting obvious and overt challenge to hegemony.
Discourse and Localization of Children’s Rights in Youth-Produced Digital Media in the Global South • Sanjay Asthana, Middle Tennessee State University • Through the study of four UNICEF supported youth media initiatives from Palestine, Israel, Ghana, and South Africa, the paper will theorize and generate new empirical knowledge about the encounter between constructions of youth in rights based discourses of UNICEF and young people’s digital media narratives. The research on children and youth media practices, encountered instances where the universal discourse of children’s rights does not connect with the local realities of youth (constraints), but found that young people translate children’s rights to construct new meanings to suit their local contexts and experiences (possibilities). It is this double dialectic, of constraints and possibilities, revealed in youth digital media narratives that the article examines in greater detail, and offers reflections on the interconnectedness among the triptych children’s rights, digital media, and youth life-worlds.
Precarious copycats: The subaltern problem in Shanzhai culture • Sara Liao, Department of Radio-TV-Film, The University of Texas at Austin • This study evaluates the discourse of Shanzhai culture, that is, the copycat phenomenon, in its historical, social-political, and cultural context. A close reading of Shanzhai cellphones and fashion copycats complicates the subaltern problem which posits stable social relations between elites and subalterns or bourgeoisie and workers. In contemporary China, I see precarity embodies both a material condition of one’s socio-economic position, and an anthropological or existential condition of ontologically uncertainty, both of which intensify and approach closer to each other. Precarity in Shanzhai reflects and constitutes today’s sensibility of class, labor, and gender. Today’s sensation of Shanzhai culture in general and Shanzhai fashion in particular, where women make fashion copycats, challenges the way we perceive and experience the precariousness under neoliberalism.
Journalists’ Normative Discursive Constructions of Political Viewpoint Diversity • Tim Vos, University of Missouri; David Wolfgang, University of Missouri • This interview-based study with 18 U.S. political journalists explores how they conceptualize political viewpoint diversity as a journalistic norm in a time in which news and the news media ecology are changing. The political journalists still embrace the normative role of providing audiences with a range of political viewpoints, but have assumptions about democracy that seem to thwart their intentions. The implications for field theory are considered.
“LinkedIn is my office; Facebook my living room, Twitter the neighborhood bar”: Media scholars’ liminal use of social media for peer and public communication • Victoria LaPoe, WKU; Candi Carter Olson, Utah State University; Stine Eckert • This study grounds 45 interviews with media scholars in liminality theory and analyzes how they use social media as they transition to an offline and online communication paradigm. Scholars employ personal strategies to decide if and how to integrate social media into their professional lives for peer and public communication. Scholars struggle with a double bind of needing to be social media savvy while worrying about career consequences of posting publicly. Few best practices exist.
Reproducing the “Imprint of Power:” Framing the “Creative Class” in Putin’s Russia • Volha Kananovich; Frank Durham • This textual analysis traces the framing of the 2011-2011 anti-Kremlin protests in Russia by the nation’s most popular newspaper Komsomol’skaya Pravda. Findings show that the newspaper shifted its position from discounting the seriousness of the protests to adopting an increasingly negative frame of the protesters once the Putin government made its opposition clear. The pattern shown here describes the abandonment of the newspaper’s nominally middle-ground position in favor of adhering to the state’s political power.
The Spectacular Mo’Ne Davis: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in U.S. Belonging • Zachary Vaughn, Indiana University • Building on Sarah Projansky’s spectacular girlhood proposition, I investigate how Mo’ne Davis complicates our understanding of national belonging in the United States. Davis first became popular in the U.S. mediascape for her phenomenal success in boys Little League baseball, in which she pitched her team into the Little League World Series tournament. Primarily, I am fascinated with a short documentary produced by Spike Lee: “Throw Like a Girl.” I argue that Mo’ne Davis can be seen as a case study in how issues related to gender, race, and perceived sexuality can inform us of the deeply demarcated divisions always already infused in the United States as an imagined community. Davis, and girls like her, expose these ideological and cultural instantiations and can allow us to deconstruct and then reconstruct a new national consciousness that is held together by both our similarities and our differences to begin the process of imagining the U.S. as a melting pot in the truest sense.
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