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This article offers a critical analysis of the mediation and commercialization of “bum fighting” (videotaping two or more poverty stricken individuals engaged in low-dollar bloodsport). In recent years, the production of pugilism has emerged in the US as popular—and indeed highly lucrative—features of the media-sport landscape. This paper looks into what we can learn from these 1) deeply corporeal mediations and 2) radically political public pedagogies. Regarding the corporeal dimension, we deconstruct the ways in which bodies—and particularly bodies of the street—are framed within these popular discursive formations. We also explore the ways in which these media representations valorize, and are articulated within, broader political mediations on the underprivileged and “living welfarism”—which largely portray individuals living with homelessness as social welfare “parasites,” drug addicts, or nuisances to a nation's economic growth. We consider how these popular media constructs locate certain bodies as abject and thereby disposable. We conclude by discussing what these public pedagogies tell us not only about public space but most importantly about bodies that inhabit them. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Accomplishing critical literacy within a mediascape where texts present as polysemous and ambiguous may be the challenge of our times. This article uses the example of a seemingly paradoxical newspaper column, which contains paratextual elements, to illustrate how an assemblage of critical analytical approaches is needed to make fuller sense of the text. The column is read in three ways, focusing first on the main column, its location, imagined audience, its use of rhetorical devices such as satire, irony, humor, and repetition to critique the state of global football. The second reading uses a postcolonial feminist perspective to focus exclusively on the curious supplementary tailpieces (shirttails) that end the column. It reveals how specific translation strategies and the representation of certain bodies as sexually voracious, deviant, and excessive frame such bodies as absurd exotic-erotic objects of a neo-colonial gaze. The third reading leans on Derridean ideas of writing and text to understand the seemingly discrepant relationship between column and shirttails, and raises critical questions about the role of the reader/readership. Each analysis brings different sensibilities to the work and illustrates the value of assembling multiple analytical approaches to work towards critical media literacy. The conditions and caveats of such working arrangements are also considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study brings together autonomist Marxist and feminist visual methods to critique forms of immaterial labor employed by international development programs focused on adolescent girls. Analyzing The Girl Effect's (TGEs) development testimonials, initiatives, and promotional materials, this article identifies how business models of development establish new subjectivities and modalities of empowerment. A critical analysis of communicative and affective labor recognizes the different work performed by visual and discursive representations of subjects of aid, donors, and the brand as they are strategically employed by development organizations. Examining the visual and discursive relationships between donor and beneficiary, cosmopolitan capitalist and local laborer, this project traces three communicative and affective strategies employed by development brands: individualizing empowerment, embodying entrepreneurship, and constituting affective capacities. After challenging existing gendered development strategies, this study turns toward the critical project of imaging alternative representations and realities of development rhetorics. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Hybrid reality games (HRGs) employ mobile technologies equipped with Internet access and location awareness to create a multiuser game space that occurs simultaneously in physical, digital, and represented spaces as denoted by the player's mobility. This essay analyzes and compares two HRGs: I Like Frank and Day of the Figurines. The goal is to understand games and play as activities intrinsically and inseparably connected to our physical spaces and to our daily lives by focusing on the interconnection between play and ordinary life, game community, and player identity. The essay also interrogates how these games reconfigure and reflect current concepts of surveillance, community and anonymity in city spaces. The development of these concepts expands current research about how new Internet-connected mobile communication technologies change our experience of physical spaces by adding to them imaginary playful layers that influence player mobility through the city and promote singular types of interactions among physical, digital and represented spaces. Our analysis considers the intertwined and complex consequences of HRGs and other locative media, illustrating how such media can both normalize and provide modes of resistance to certain power relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using a critical analytic lens, this essay examines how race, racism, and race relations depicted in the movie Crash reflect complicity, coherence, and implicature. The essay first utilizes complicity theory to offer a critical analysis of the film, then provides a thematic analysis of student reactions to the film as a means of gaining insight into multiple possible readings of the film. The analysis demonstrates how a simultaneous, multilayered experience of complicity, coherence, and implicature functions as a process of mediation for the viewing audience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]