Search

In May 2020 at the height of Australia's first national COVID lockdown, NewsCorp Australia announced that more than 125 regional newspapers would either be closed or become available online-only. Queensland was hit hard with 22 regional and 20 community newspapers shifting to online formats, and 15 community newspapers closing. Yet within months of the NewsCorp changes, a significant number of new print newspapers were being announced to fill the ‘news deserts’. Broadly welcomed by those in these local communities, the new publications suggest a reinvigoration of long-standing norms and tenets, many of which are specific to regional print news media, such as community-centred, locally-shaped news values and high reliance on ‘micro-ads’ (i.e. classifieds) and hyper-local business revenue. But given the dire prognostications about print business models, what are the aims and intentions of these start-ups (n = 22), and how do they translate their notions of community-centric news into business models they perceive as viable? Drawing on Hanitzsch and Vos framework for the discursive constructions of journalists’ role in society, we find these newspaper start-ups both reassert and claim more vigorously the normative values associated with community journalism as ‘social glue’, while also developing ‘lean start-up’ business models that capitalise on the sense of a local newspaper's ‘social good’ functions through an affective rationale. We argue this represents a shift to a new ‘hybrid’ model, with strong elements of a traditional and still feisty monitorial news values fusing with a more ‘morale-enhancing’ and explicitly social cohesion-centric role conceptions. We call it a ‘community cohesion model’.

Although the lack of diversity in newsrooms and reporting remains a serious issue in the journalism industry, college journalism education and student media provide a critical opportunity for change. Yet prior research has found notable diversity gaps in both. This study analyzed the state of diversity at a Midwestern university student newspaper and found significant gaps in coverage of diverse populations. The findings suggest the need for more comprehensive diversity education within the college classroom and campus media advising. This is important not only for more representative student media, but also for the future of journalism.

With Canada becoming the first G20 country to legalize the recreational use of cannabis, there has been increasing interest in the emergence of this new marketplace. Newspaper framing helps to shape public opinion on legalization and news sources play a role in determining how the public perceives the use of cannabis. This research analyzes how mainstream newspapers reported on the legalization of recreational cannabis in Canada in the years before and after legalization (between 2016 and 2019). Using a content analysis of 1,390 cannabis-related articles, 11 dominant reporting themes are identified. Over time, there was a shift from negative and sensationalist cannabis news coverage toward more balanced and progressive framing. The findings identify the influence of editorial political stance on thematic coverage.

This paper addresses arguments raised by van Dijk in his critical appraisal of framing approaches to social movement research. In particular, the claim that frame analysis does not give sufficient attention to the intricate details of the interpretive process. In making this argument, van Dijk leans heavily on Goffman’s first category of frames (as individual acts of interpretation) at the expense of his second (relating more to inter-subjectively shared classes of schemata) used reflexively, for instance, by movements to embed a message of protest in wider value systems in the hope that it resonates sufficiently with the grounded experiences, grievances, beliefs, and cultural orientations of publics. This paper highlights how social movement frame research accounts for both categories of frames to illustrate how movements communicate across multiple levels of social interaction to maximize the societal impact of their message. When interpreted in these broader terms, the ‘how’ of interpretation, it will argue, is explained effectively by this research, contrary to van Dijk’s claim.

This paper illustrates how superdiverse youth negotiate their identity in everyday interactions during Australia’s Covid-19 outbreak. The discussion is based on oral narratives collected from classroom conversations among international and local students living in Australia. The paper illustrates how participants position themselves and others in narratives, how these positionings reveal complex identity work among youth from diverse backgrounds and how identities are constructed and negotiated through stories about everyday encounters. Students’ experiences of racism and microaggressions point to interethnic interactions as sites of struggle where identities come into conflict. The paper contributes to current work on identity in narrative discourse and narratives of racism.

Purpose: In an era of networked production of the public sphere and with the arrival of new communicator roles such as citizen journalists, influencers and bloggers, the “old” roles and professions of “the journalist” and “public relations professional” are challenged. In this paper, avoiding the familiar debate about antagonisms between journalism and public relations, we provide empirical insights that identify specific characteristics of a convergence in the “doing” of public relations and journalism. Design/Methodology/Approach: The paper presents recent data from a series of comparative interviews, conducted in Central Europe (Austria, n = 10, Germany, n = 25), New Zealand ( n = 7), Australia ( n = 25), and the Pacific Islands ( n = 5). The conversational narrative interviews bring in self-reflections on skillsets, professions, normative frameworks and the doing of professional communication from a range of communicators, primarily public relations practitioners and journalists, but also activist campaigners, science communicators, bloggers, and social influencers. Findings: The findings show that while interviewees were likely to represent their roles as related to a singular, across those roles they presented what they did – the “doing” – as akin to that of an authorial “curator” of communication in the context of societal transformations and constantly changing and converging media environments. Across different communicator roles professional communication is increasingly perceived as a co-creational process of entering, initiating, sometimes managing, and, thus, driving public discourses and conversations. Originality/Value: The paper complements the debate around skills and professionalization in public relations and adds to broader discussions about role responsibility, agency, and authorship related to public conversations in an age of digital transformation and social change by bringing in the concept of curating as the co-operative ‘management of stories’ between, and across, professional roles.

Extant works on masculinities have focused on their differential patterns in Nigeria. However, none of these studies has examined how masculinities are constructed through the metaphorical representation of alcoholic herbal sex drinks and their functions. Drawing insights from Lakoff and Johnson’s conceptual metaphor theory, Forceville’s visual metaphor and van Dijk’s socio-cognitive approach to ideology to analyze the names together with verbo-visual conceptualization of alcoholic herbal sex drinks, this paper discusses some of the subcultural ideologies that delineate masculinities among the manufacturers, sellers, and consumers of these drinks in southwestern Nigeria. Analysis of the data reveals the construction of masculinities by this group in terms of the territorial and subordinating sexual status of the male. Also, the male sex organ and muscular male body are conceptualized by this group as sexual weapons, controllers of the female sexual satisfaction, and the cleaning agents for vagina. The paper concludes that these drinks and the associated sexual beliefs reflect some of the trending subcultural ideologies that discursively shape the construction of masculinities in Nigeria.

The paper explores Google Maps’ COVID-19 layer, a special feature launched by the cartographic platform in September 2020, and shut down two years later. Through the reading of promotional corporate blogposts and interfacial analysis of the layer, it critiques the layers' mediation of the pandemic, caught between public health needs and Google's overarching ethos. The analysis underscores three central claims: that interfacial choices endemic to the layer impose certainty and reduce necessary user hesitancy; promote data commodification regardless of its pandemic need; and stake unnecessary exceptionalism to the pandemic-spcecific information rather than integrating it into the maps’ existing hybridity. The paper ends with design recommendation for a better COVID layer, centered around bottom-up community practices, higher degree of personalisation, and increased friction.

Situated within the field of platform governance studies, this paper shares findings from an ‘autoethnography of automated powerlessness’, drawing from the researcher’s disempowering experience of being a heavily moderated social media user. Using theoretical frameworks blending affordances and World Risk Society theories, this paper contextualises my experiences of moderation of my pole dance instructor, activist and blogger account @bloggeronpole from February to October 2021 within social media’s broader de-platforming of nudity and sexuality, finding fallacies within platforms’ own affordances, which lack mechanisms to aid or rehabilitate de-platformed accounts. With little to no information from platforms about the details of their moderation, qualitative, ethnographic and autoethnographic explorations of their governance are all users currently have to fight and understand their puritan, patriarchal censorship of nudity and sexuality, which are often conflated with risk. This study concludes with recommendations for different options for better, more equal and community focused moderation.

This paper argues that the current disinformation studies literature lacks any sustained analysis of a crucial element in any communication campaign – its sources of funding. The paper argues that crowdfunding platforms are arguably better networked and ‘cross platform enabled’ than most social media sites to spread disinformation. And that disinformation actors have weaponized crowdfunding to amplify and sustain the spread of their grievances and forms of disinformation. The paper offers a rich qualitative study of a set of election fraud and 5G themed campaigns on the GoFundMe crowdfunding platform. The study questions how networked content and financial appeals in the crowdfunding pitch can contribute to the disinformation literature and potential solutions.

This paper aims to highlight structural issues concerning the conduct of esports media professionals and their work as social media influencers. The data selected for this study include footage from social media and digital streaming platforms, with spatial analysis serving as a primary theoretical scaffolding to support the paper’s rationale. The systemic nature of self-perpetuating circulation of contentious media-related content is observed through the assessment of three case studies which feature various discourses of identity concerning players, media professionals and the audience alike. The paper discusses personal media branding strategies and the perceived role of esports media professionals in the esports communities, the proliferation of ‘reversed safe space’ serving as an element of strengthening the media presence and the discrepancies between the accepted codes of conduct in the various esports-related media.

China’s Social Credit System (SCS) has been widely considered a centralized surveillance project, whereas recent research found multiple scoring systems co-existing in various fields at multiple administrative levels and in diverse forms. Despite the broadened view toward the complexity of SCS, these research projects continue to focus on SCS mainly as political and digital control mechanisms. Instead, this paper is interested in the social and cultural meanings of SCS constructed in the media, both at the national and local levels. Based on the analyses of news reports since the year 2003, when the term SCS was officially coined, this paper examines the historical narratives about SCS, including its rationales, stakeholders, and intended goals/tasks. It argues that the SCS construction has been a societal project anchored in a distinct moral orientation of financial credit. While credit systems are often used to classify consumers and financial subjects in Western contexts, the case of Chinese SCS shows that the moral dimension of financial credit scoring has enabled its spread into other non-financial domains. Also, the institutionalization of such moral standards is considered an effective approach to addressing various socio-economic and ethical issues that have long baffled economic development and social justice in China’s reform era.

It saddens me to admit that I feel safest on an app where men are simply not allowed to contact me until I express an interest in them. A quick review of online discussion platforms would suggest that many in society have just decided that men cannot be trusted with the first move. I get it, frankly, but it isn’t what I hope for. In this piece I argue that Black women who desire connection and community cannot afford to stop dating online. With personal narrative and a review of the literature, this paper takes an autoethnographic approach to online dating as a Black woman. I show that the risks of social isolation and mental health concerns leave women of color, particularly Black single women in a vulnerable position. Research is suggesting that people are meeting less new people IRL (in real life), and that this is especially true for romantic connections. Given the hostility of the online dating environment, I consider the role of courtesy, consciousness and awareness of virtual space as community for the Black woman. The paper requests that claims of anti-racism be replaced with demonstrations of this in dating practices, and I present suggested strategies for holding space in the current environment.

Prior studies have found that emojis can contribute to rebuilding customers’ trust when after-sale staff apologize to them, but studies on the different types of emojis and their different levels of effectiveness in rebuilding trust are still needed. In this paper, we explore the different types and frequencies of emojis and their effectiveness in rebuilding trust based on commercial discourses. Our data are collected from conversations between after-sale staff and customers during Ali Trademanager after-sale service. We find three types of emojis frequently used when after-sale staff apologizing to customers: face-related emojis, gesture-related emojis, and object-related emojis. Moreover, face-related emojis are the most frequently used, as their nature is to express emotion and attitude. The most effective emojis are the whimper emoji and kiss emoji, which are used by after-sale staff for sajiao (literally, ‘playing cute’). On the other hand, we show that the least effective emojis are the sorry emoji and happy emoji, which are deemed insincere because they violate the quality maxim and quantity maxim in the Cooperative Principle. This paper thus contributes to understanding the nature and function of emojis in commercial communication.

This paper suggests adding a social justice framework to the questions that Kostelnick suggests to help students investigate culture in “Seeing Difference.” Using visual rhetoric to teach technical communication is beneficial for students; however, problematic representations of culture may unintentionally appear in visual design and are easy to overlook. Using a social justice framework that promotes a contextual study of culture should allow technical communication instructors to prepare students to investigate the social and political aspects of culture. This paper, therefore, revisits “Seeing Difference” and asks that technical communication instructors guide students to research sociopolitical aspects of culture and visuals to develop designs that are interculturally appropriate.

The experience of hostility, hate speech and adversarial behaviour in everyday online spaces has increased substantially in recent years, with known health and mental health outcomes for users. This paper argues that due to the ‘massified’ form of contemporary hostility experienced in the internet ‘pile on’, a new framework for understanding and remedying hostility is required. This paper draws on Judith Butler’s theories of identity to present an account of digital hostility as cultural and as having a negative effect on the identities and selfhood of users. It discusses the impact of the online pile-on, shaming and the ways in which hostility positions victims as ungrievable subjects. The essay recommends new ethical approaches grounded in the recognition of subjects as vulnerable, arguing that cultural ethics approaches are valuable not only as public pedagogies but for development of technological solutions and moderation interventions to help prevent hostility and hate speech.

In this paper, the form and function of personalized Covid-19 WhatsApp sticker memes created and shared as social laments by citizens in Oman are examined. The compiled data set of 288 WhatsApp stickers was taken from a larger ethnographic project on Arabs and Covid-19. To collect and analyze the data, perspectives from visual semiotics were integrated with participatory and geosemiotic approaches to ground the stickers socially and globally. Six functions of Covid-19 WhatsApp stickers in Oman were identified: expressing political dissent, creating public signs, promoting religious agenda, indexing frustration, expressing levity, and constructing counter-discourse. Based on this analysis, it is suggested that by creating and using WhatsApp stickers during the 2020–2021 Covid-19 pandemic, Omani citizens positioned themselves as agentive participants in charge of their own lives, thus, solidifying a decade-long request for a new form of public-government relationship. The paper adds to research on Arabic digital communication and pandemic discourse.

Over the past decade, production in China’s television sector have reshaped media cultures across the country as well as the geocultural region of East Asia. Through analysis of licensed reality television programs such as China’ s Got Talent, this paper examines transnational television formats and their circulation and replication in contemporary China, challenging the traditional concept that television format trade falls within a West-Rest narrative. While highlighting the cultural and media phenomena of interactive ‘glocalization’ of cultural products, this paper calls for de-westernization in approaching Chinese and East Asian media studies. It does so by pointing out unique imitating and adaptive practices of Chinese unscripted television programs, which serve as case studies to the existing literature of television business and cultures. The practice of licensing formats provides a unique perspective into analyzing China’s media strategies in a globalized industry and reviewing the current scholarship on media globalization. With a comparative analysis, the paper attempts to reconceptualize the spatiality of East Asian media production and consumption. I also include my observations while working on the production teams for these programs.

This article addresses how the Chinese short video-sharing platform TikTok, a key actor of global platform economy and its disconnect or subsequent ban influenced and changed ideas of creativity in India. Through qualitative interviews and content analysis of TikTok videos (available on YouTube), YouTube interviews of content creators and newspaper articles of the app ban, this paper suggests that TikTok, as a ‘memetic text’ and a site of ‘vernacular creativity’, encourages both ‘everyday acts of resistance’ and professionalism/entrepreneurial citizenship. While the app ban signposts digital ‘imitation’ publics’ transition from ‘low’ to ‘high’ technology environments, the values of professionalism and entrepreneurship remain constant. The paper shows the tension between professionalism/entrepreneurship and the ‘everyday acts of resistance’ to state-led technocratic vision. It argues against the disconnect between democratisation and ‘demoticisation’ of technology.

This paper analyzes how stakeholders in the Korean media industries understand the penetration of Netflix and other foreign streaming video-on-demand (SVoD) platforms and how they respond to global SVoD players. Based on interviews with cultural workers and bureaucrats, the findings of this paper explore how stakeholders in the media industries interpret Netflix as both an investor who would enable them to produce a variety of content and introduce their products worldwide and as a competitor that has the potential to threaten domestic media production. Considering structural asymmetries caused by disparities in technologies and financial strength between local and global players in the market, as well as the distribution power which streaming moguls have enjoyed for years, the growing presence of Netflix in the domestic market may reduce the position of Korean media production as mere subcontractors of the platform. The paper’s findings shed light on analyzing the relationship between global streaming platforms and local cultural producers.

In this paper we review the self-expansion model in the context of close relationships, focusing primarily on work in the last 20 years, considering throughout variation in our samples across cultures and other demographics—both in existing studies and in potential implications for future research. The self-expansion model has two key principles. The first half of the paper focuses on the motivational principle: The model theorizes that people have a fundamental desire to expand the self—that is, to increase their self-efficacy, perspectives, competence, and resources, and this often occurs through relationships in general. The second half of the paper focuses on the inclusion-of-other-in-the-self principle, in that a major means of self-expansion is through close relationships, when one’s partner’s identities, perspectives, skills, and resources become to some extent “included in the self” as also one’s own. For each principle we briefly describe its foundational research support and then explore the extensive, significant work of the last 20 years substantially expanding and deepening the implications of the model. The majority (although with some interesting exceptions) of studies have fallen short of testing the universal breadth of the model. As we review the research, we consider where the studies were conducted and with what kinds of populations. Where there are data from diverse populations, the overall pattern of results are generally similar. However, there were individual differences found within the populations studied, such as in attachment style, that affected the operation of both principles. Since there are well known differences in the distribution of such individual differences across populations of many types, it is quite likely that while the basic patterns may not differ, future research will show different degrees of operation in different populations.

As Brexit negotiations continue to draw criticism nearly two years on from the UK’s withdrawal from the European Union, many media outlets have concentrated on making sense of what has been dubbed the ‘Brexit circus’. In particular, significant media attention has been directed towards obstacles to Brexit’s progression, such as the issue of the border between Ireland and Northern Ireland and the ‘backstop’ arrangement. Through an examination of different media efforts to explain the border issue, this paper will discuss how conventional reporting methods have been unable to make this issue comprehensible to the individual. This paper will suggest that a hypertextual aesthetic form would provide a more effective means of making sense of the complexity of the border issue and its relationship to global political and economic structures. However, an understanding of the border issue also requires an understanding of the affective reality of life in this region and the history upon which this reality is founded. In this manner, this paper also argues that representational regimes capable of conveying affective realities could contribute important experiential dimensions to efforts to render dominant political and economic structures both cognisable and contestable.

This paper explores abuse received by a Chilean right-wing female politician in tweets produced with the #CamilaPeluche hashtag, which aimed to shame her sexually. The data considers the period of 22 days since the creation and spread of the hashtag, which took place 5 days into the 2019 uprising in Chile. This paper follows a corpus-based critical discourse analysis that examines the most frequently used adjectives, that is, predication strategies, that characterise the politician, as well as their (de)legitimating function through the identification of van Leeuwen’s legitimation strategies. Results showed that what started as gendered aggression evolved towards a focus on social class and political stance due to the politician’s characteristics and those of the sociohistorical context where the aggressions originated. Furthermore, it was found that the politician’s anti-democratic values were used to justify abuse against her, presenting it as reasonable.

Through a ‘micro’ and ‘macro’ level analysis, this study focuses on elements of questioning and question design in the Senate Judiciary hearing conducted for Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. Specifically, two lines of questioning are analyzed: that of Kamala Harris, D. California, and that of Ted Cruz, R. Texas. Through an analysis that builds heavily on prior research that uses Conversation Analysis (CA) to understand the news interview, this study attempts to expand such research to institutional talk done by politicians in Congress. The analysis portion of the paper investigates, on a ‘micro’ level, the linguistic elements at play in each line of questioning. In the discussion section, a ‘macro’ level analysis situates the findings of this paper within the broader US political climate among the public and in terms of the growing conservatism of the Supreme Court.

Much has been written about how digital technologies transformed contemporary festivals, yet the festival participants’ perceptions and experiences are less examined. Understanding mediated festivals as events of intertwined mediation processes, this paper explores the perception and practices of mediated festivals in contemporary China. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 13 Chinese young people to understand their motivations and experiences of festival participation. The paper finds that emerging mediated festivals provide a space for individuals to explore their interests. Further, mediated festivals are perceived as a liberating force for young people through choice-making and self-presentation in convivial and hybrid festival environments. Developing Dayan and Katz’s conception of ‘media events’, we argue that contemporary Chinese mediated festivals can be understood as ‘my events’ through hybrid and networked self-representations. Our study contributes to understanding the Chinese mediated festivals, emphasizing how networked individuals (re)negotiate the festival production.

This paper reflects on the impact of dating apps’ removal of ethnicity filters on racial minority users. Many scholars, mass media, and dating app users believe that ethnicity filters mark an institutional endorsement of racism which is embedded in digital infrastructure. Accordingly, they have called for the removal of these filters. This advocacy is based on the assumption that expressions of racial preference are inherently racist. In the summer of 2020, many dating apps removed ethnicity filters to show solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement. However, I argue that racial minorities often express intra-racial desires through ethnicity filters to valorize their own sexual capital, evade discrimination or fetishization, and gain sexual opportunities. Consequently, removing the ethnicity filter makes it harder for racial minorities to connect. Even worse, it creates a culture of compulsory interracial intimacy, exposing minority users to more vulnerability and racial trauma. Moreover, the lack of discussion on whether to remove filters other than ethnicity reveals the negligence of intersecting oppressions on dating apps. Thus, this paper highlights the need to be more attentive to racial minorities’ alternative uses of filters for self-empowerment, and to intersectional oppressions that should be tackled in designing inclusive dating apps.

This paper shows how an agribusiness in a remote agrarian village in the Philippines has been organized in traditional ways amid technological advancements and the free market. The paper draws on the Montreal School’s CCO approach, which holds that organizing begins at the level of interaction and that nonhumans make a difference in social formation. Through analyzing the text exchanges between farm actors, the paper surfaces the agencies of the most ventriloquized agricultural actants within their talks. Imagined in Bakhtin’s dialogical world, multiple voices were made to interplay across time and space creating tensions, on one hand, and facilitating the assimilation of similar qualities of ideologically differing voices, on the other. This paper stresses that the ideological difference of interplaying voices can be blurred in the process of assimilation or in the constitution of an organization. The “intertextual play of power” of multiple voices offers a postcolonial perspective in examining power in organization studies.

This paper argues that the first season of the Netflix series Love, Death & Robots offers a representation of how consciousness might evolve outside of the body when it is downloaded into a techno-body, and how it transcends the limits of the biological body. Using posthumanism as a framework, the essay demonstrates how this process interrogates and critiques the ‘human’ condition and focuses on the idea of the boundary collapse between the human and the posthuman. The series also provides a hopeful narrative of cyborg liberation through rebellion against humans. The essay establishes the impact and critique of emerging technologies on the body and political agency in the series. Having examined the Cartesian mind-body split and Heidegger’s concept of Dasein, this paper argues that the cybernetic beings of Love, Death & Robots strive to transcend the embodiment constraints and develop a sense of individuality and free will. The paper also discusses how the blurring of the human/animal boundaries portrayed in the series supports a transgressive politics that underpins the first season of Love, Death & Robots. Additionally, the paper endeavors to depict how the series represents an ‘ontological turn’ and how the posthumans retain their selfhood and individual agencies even when they constantly transcend their subjectivities.

Questions are an important means by which students actively participate in and exercise some control over the moment-to-moment focus of writing center conferences. Through quantitative and qualitative analysis of student questions in 35 writing center conferences, we examined the frequency and type of students’ questions, finding no differences between native English speakers and non-native English speakers’ overall question frequency or their use of each question type. Students used common-ground questions most frequently, and knowledge-deficit questions second-most frequently. Our qualitative analysis revealed how students used questions to coconstruct potential language for their papers and to steer the course of their conferences. It also revealed the dilemma that arises when a student’s questions probe not only the tutor’s writing knowledge but also their subject-matter knowledge. This study demonstrates some ways that students take power over their conferences by asking questions and indicates that tutors might expect similar question frequency and similar types of questions from NESs and NNESs. It also suggests that tutors might use the tutoring strategy of reading aloud to create conversational openings for students’ questions. And it suggests potential benefits of attending to the type of questions that students use, as these types can indicate on a local level the extent of students’ contribution to their papers.

This working paper focuses on women in leadership roles in the Entertainment Department of BBC North, based at New Broadcasting House on Oxford Road, Manchester and subsequently at Media City UK. In so doing, it considers the role of the department’s founder, Janet Street-Porter, and her leadership of the then Youth Programmes department in the late 80s/early 90s. Drawing on interviews with six women professionals who worked either during or just after Street-Porter’s leadership and scholarship on women in the UK media industry, this paper considers some of the reasons why this environment proved so fertile for our interviewees. We also reflect on some of the key issues the interviews provoked: the issue of balancing motherhood with a career in the UK television industry, the importance of women’s networks, and the impact of class in terms of working in the BBC. In this sense, the BBC was formative for our interviewees, particularly through the leadership of an ‘outsider’ like Street-Porter despite structural issues of exclusion that remained present in the organisation.

Using the BBC Written Archives Centre’s records, this working paper explores a documentary about the suffragettes written by feminist, socialist filmmaker Jill Craigie for the BBC in 1949 – illuminating her previously unconsidered efforts to bring the women’s movement to life in an innovative, modern way on the small screen. Although Craigie later withdrew from this project, this paper explores how archival traces of Craigie’s television work offer new insight into her postwar career as a filmmaker, writer and onscreen personality, and shine new light on her place in a feminist genealogy concerned with the historical fight for women’s rights.

This paper explicates a new form of cultural economy, namely individual cultural economy, with the case of online writing platform. Critical studies of creative workers on online platforms have revealed the capitalist manipulation and exploitation in this new technologized cultural economy, and among those, online fiction writers are one of the fashionable occupations for slash youth in China. Based on survey and interviews, this paper elucidates why some youth in China chose to commit to taking online writing jobs, despite the precarious conditions. This paper argues that online fiction writers, besides deriving satisfaction and pleasure from their work, tag on are able to take advantage of the cultural logic of these capitalist-manipulated platforms, and create for themselves an individual, single person cultural economy between themselves and the platform. Different from the collective, organized cultural economy in most of the social networked platforms, such an individual economy encourages youth to create an alternative lifestyle from that of the mainstream socialist economy.

To examine the aesthetics of video games, this paper proposes to consider games as a contemporary multi-media version of the so-called “Denkbild,” or “thought-image,” an experimental genre of philosophical writing employed by members of the Frankfurt School that takes literary snapshots of philosophical, political, and cultural insights that interrupt and challenge the enigmatic form of traditional philosophical thinking. While previous scholarship tends to examine the aesthetics of video game as a homogenous, self-contained genre that can be clearly defined and understood within the framework of a variety of dichotomies, thinking of video game through the lens of the Denkbild allows us to understand the diversity, conditionality, and incommensurability of game as a multimedia aesthetic object. By presenting two snapshots of video game players, the collector and the glitcher, this paper argues that the concept of Denkbild allows us to better understand the relationships between game, gamers, and the socio-political context in terms of unexpected bonds, accidental breakthroughs, and moments of absolute freedom.

This paper provides a comparative critical discourse analysis of news discourse on terrorism with respect to the coverage by two Swedish and two UK broadsheet newspapers of the terrorists attacks that took place in Stockholm and in London respectively in the year 2017. The research goal is to investigate the type of discourses mobilized that help enact a ‘politics of fear’, and to compare the constitutive elements of this rhetoric within the same, and across the two national contexts. The findings point to three major representations as points on a continuum of discourses that emphatically affirm, give rise to, but also resist and counteract, a politics of fear. The paper sheds light on processes of normalization at work in the routine discursive practices of press coverage, but also to the rise of counter-discourses that resist, downplay, or take a critical stance toward the core elements of a politics of fear. It is argued that these latter discursive practices may work in the opposite direction, namely to de-normalize or marginalize a dominant politics of fear.

In the context of the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, female medical staff constituted a large proportion of frontline healthcare workers in China, with 50% of doctors and over 90% of nurses being women. In this paper, we aim to examine how these medical workers were represented at the start of the pandemic in online news reports posted on one of China’s most popular social media platforms, Weibo. In the paper, we draw upon corpus-based critical discourse analysis, comparing representations of female medical workers to those of medical workers in general. We observe that not only are female medical workers portrayed through a predominantly gendered lens, but they are also subordinated to the needs of the state. We consider the role played by state-controlled media in regulating the position of (working) women in society and probe into rhetorical means through which this is achieved.

This paper assesses how the ‘Great Replacement’ conspiracy theory (the idea that ethnically homogeneous populations in European nations are being ‘replaced’ by people of non-European origin) is articulated online by three different actors. By analyzing argument patterns and multimodal features of the cases, the paper shows that the conspiracy theory is a flexible political discourse that can be used strategically by both far-right and mainstream right-wing actors. It highlights the role of affect in online communication, and particularly how anti-immigration actors feed off circulating emotions such as insecurity and fear among the citizenry. The results show that processes of demographic change, caused by immigration, are negatively politicized through the use of pseudo-scientific sources, historic narratives of ethnic homogeneity, threat frames, visual fear appeals and other elements that constitute the wider conspiracy theory of an ongoing ‘replacement’ of native populations. The paper argues that the mainstreaming of conspiracy claims and theories related to immigration poses a threat, not only to democratic institutions and societies, but also to people of immigrant backgrounds.

Seeking to assess the current state of international broadcasters (IBs) within the framework of public diplomacy, this paper assesses the relevance of state-sponsored IBs within the contemporary public diplomacy. This paper focuses on the IBs of two neighboring countries, Indonesia and Australia, and political authorities’ dynamic support for their services. Data were obtained through desk reviews of IB policies, in-depth interviews, and online observation of the websites of Siaran Luar Negeri (SLN, Indonesia's IB) and ABC Radio Australia (RA, Australia's IB). This paper finds that both countries have continued to use IBs for their public diplomacy, yet ‘political parallelism’ determines the position and sustainability of each. SLN has had limited political support and faced a series of managerial crises, while RA has enjoyed the fruitful support of the Australian authorities and has been heavily involved in public diplomacy in the Asia–Pacific region.

This paper examines the resistance rhetoric that media workers use to publicly organize trade unions online in a social movement genre of strategic communication activism: the critical manifesto. The paper provides a genre analysis of the rhetorical strategy, form, and devices of 30 online Why We’ve Organized statements of the Writers Guild of America, East as a case study of a labor movement organization’s resistance rhetoric. Through a promulgation strategy, the statements reproduce and modify the critical manifesto, using resistance rhetoric to strategically negotiate power relations. The statements outline a selective history of workers’ grievances, a solution to them, and proposals to resist them. This rhetorical form and key rhetorical devices inform the content of the organizing statements, revealing important issues affecting work, workers, and employers. This paper contributes a novel framework to understand resistance rhetoric within this genre, better positioning researchers to analyze social movement genres of organizational communication.

Before 2020, no big-budget, mainstream video games featured playable transgender characters, relegating them instead to the role of non-player characters (NPCs). Through a textual analysis of Bioware’s 2014 title Dragon Age: Inquisition, Ubisoft’s 2016 Watch Dogs 2, and Naughty Dog’s 2020 The Last of Us Part II—three role-playing games that feature explicitly transgender NPCs—and a discourse analysis of media surrounding the games’ release, this paper examines the narrative roles afforded to transgender characters. Drawing from the “magical Negro” trope in film studies, I propose the term “magical transness” to describe the unique role of transgender supporting characters whose victimization provides the opportunity for cisgender protagonists to act heroically. This paper interrogates transgender representation and its relationship to media discourses about diversity and inclusion and discusses the political implications of transgender NPCs’ placement in roles of moral service.

Digital platforms and media are fertile breeding grounds for disinformation and conspirational views. They provide a variety of communication venues for a mixed set of actors and foster the diffusion of content between actor groups, across platforms and media, and across languages and geographical spaces. Understanding those diffusion processes requires approaches to measure the prevalence and spread of communicative acts within and across digital platforms. Given the increasing access to digital data, computational methods provide new possibilities to capture this spread and do justice to the interrelated nature and hybridity of online communication. Against this background, the paper focuses on the spread of conspiracy theories in digital information ecologies. It provides a review of recent methodological approaches to measuring conspiracy-related content online regarding the (a) prevalence and (b) diffusion of conspiracy theories. To that end, the paper differentiates between social network analysis approaches and computational techniques of automated text classification. It further discusses how far these and related computational approaches could facilitate studying the diffusion of conspiracy theories across different actor types, languages, topics and platforms. In doing so, it takes the specific nature of online communication and challenges in the field of conspiracy-related content into account.

Since 2015, academic enquiry into the ‘Connected Migrant’ has proliferated globally. This scholarship has demonstrated the significant role that digital media play in the decision-making, information-seeking and community-building processes pre-, during and post-migration. This review contributes to the expanding field of Digital Migration Studies by summarising the academic literature on the ‘Connected Migrant’, to thematically explore how digital media is used by displaced migrants globally. Using a scoping review, this paper presents the literature (75 studies) by mapping the key findings using the different ‘stages’ of migration – displacement, arrival and settlement – to explore the benefits, threats, challenges and opportunities that exist for displaced migrants who use digital media. This paper finds that displaced migrants rely on the use of digital media at all stages of the migrant journey, utilising an abundance of technological affordances that are integral to navigating displacement, arrival, and settlement. However, digital media also pose a threat to displaced migrants who, often already disadvantaged, may have their locations tracked and their data surveilled. This paper concludes with a summary of the scholarly challenges faced by researchers and anticipated future directions in the field.

Drawing on original interviews and digital ethnography conducted with 20 LGBT young people, and using critical platform studies and a design-centric approach, this paper demonstrates how platform use has enabled LGBT young people maintain sexual identity authenticity, normalise fluidity, reimagine community through allied algorithmic mediation, negotiate the threat of peer surveillance, and refuse platform norms so as to self-narrate gender affirmation, organise collective resources and repudiate the performance of online inauthenticity. This paper considers these practices as emergent acts of digital sexual citizenship that are becoming prevalent in countries with no sexual rights and argues that platform affordances furnish the infrastructure for LGBT young people to evade the state surveillance of homosexuality and find allied friendships, romantic partners and safe communities.

The impact of social media use on youth subcultures, such as graffiti writers, has been rapid and dramatic, bringing with it a number of significant transformations that present both opportunities and challenges. This paper explores the impact of the Internet and social media on a community of graffiti practitioners. I argue that the rise and uptake of online social networking platforms such as Instagram and You Tube have offered a range of affordances to the practice of graffiti writing. These affordances include: greater accessibility to graffiti culture; learning opportunities; and opportunities for wider distribution and curation of graffiti pieces. Simultaneously, social media challenges the significance of ‘community’, that is, the physical social interaction afforded by participation in real world graffiti crews. The findings suggest that while there are tangible benefits from the use of the Internet and uptake of social media by the graffiti writing community, it is the physical communal bonds experienced within a graffiti crew that are vital to the wellbeing and continuity of the culture. This paper contributes to our understanding of how social media affects youth more broadly and specifically how social media platforms are transforming the experience of youth subcultural practice.

Sensorial access to products in shop encounters constitutes a crucial aspect of the appeal to customers. This paper examines sensorial engagements with products in a specific ecology (outdoor markets) with a focus on the possible (pre)opening of a shop encounter. When passers-by stroll from one stand to another, open to local findings, unplanned discoveries, and emergent opportunities to buy, they orient to the sensory appeal of the products, becoming possible customers, stopping in front of a counter and engaging in a social interaction with sellers and other customers. The analysis focuses on multisensoriality in action, studying how customers and sellers treat the sensorial qualities of the products, the relevance of the sensory engagement of the customer with their materiality, and their involvement in the social encounter with the seller, including normative expectations related to sensing and buying. It includes a discussion of how under Covid-19 sensorial access to products was restricted and the sensorial, interactional, normative, and economic consequences of these restrictions. Based on video recordings of market encounters, and on an ethnomethodological and conversation analytic approach of multimodality and multisensoriality, the paper reflects on how appealing to the senses of sight, touch, smell, and taste is methodically orchestrated, and its consequences for the interaction with the seller, the sensorial experience, and the economic transaction.