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This essay analyzes the Ph.D dissertation of Jesús Martín-Barbero, written in 1972 in Louvain, Belgium. Equipped with Paul Ricoeur's explorations on how a text is constructed and Paulo Freire's insistence on the emancipatory nature of the communicative action, Martín-Barbero centered his scholarship on the urgency to study and understand Latin American popular cultures. Martín-Barbero's dissertation centers the great problem of academic analysis on language as the subject that acts in the world. To explore the connection of language and action, Martín-Barbero proposes three historically situated language devices that allow individuals to position themselves and move toward praxis: myth, prophecy, and poetry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Roots and Trajectories: Essays on the Legacy of Jesús Martín-Barbero in Global Communication Studies" is an introduction to this special collection for Media, Culture & Society's Crosscurrents. Our introduction serves to contextualize and frame the role of Martín-Barbero's theoretical roots and epistemological gaze in the essays authored by Omar Rincón (Colombia), Amparo Marroquín Parducci (El Salvador), Marwan Kraidy (Lebanon) and Nick Couldry (United Kingdom). This introduction positions Martín-Barbero's work as strong evidence of Latin America's own epistemological and theoretical formation, as we remind our colleagues in the Global North of the need to dialogue with the South in an effort to de-Westernizing communication theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special issue 'relocates' video cultures by focusing on the specific industrial dynamics and practices of six different countries. It is in conversation with scholarship that challenges the conceptualization of streaming as a universal force, and instead foregrounds the importance of location. The emergence of streaming and its disruptive influences on audiovisual industries have mostly been approached in relation to US-based multinational streaming services, and the articles in this issue demonstrate how the implications of streaming vary significantly depending on national contexts. Each contribution traces the trajectory of pre-digital cultures that led to the nation-specific consumption patterns of streaming video to date. We hope this special issue helps advance approaches that are attentive to locality and diversity beyond the US streaming culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Beginning in 2020, the Crosscurrents section of this journal featured 10 provocative essays on the theme of "Encounters in Western Media Theory." These essays stemmed from scholars' engagements with various canonical texts in media, cultural, and communication studies that took the Anglophone Global North as a taken-for-granted site for making sweeping theoretical claims. In this editorial, we reflect on the critiques and arguments that scholars have developed to move past debates about "internationalizing" and "de-westernizing" the field of media, communication, and cultural studies. Taken together, the essays published in this themed section grapple with the shifting terrain of academic knowledge production and the potential for redefining practices of reading, citation, and teaching. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers how three competing subscription video on-demand services (SVODs) – Jewzy, ChaiFlicks, and IZZY – attract American Jewish subscribers via content selection, platform design, and marketing rhetoric. Although these three SVODs offer similar catalogs, they nonetheless foreground distinct elements of Jewish life, history, and practice. This process of commercial framing, the paper argues, creates unique brand identities for the three services that align with three different approaches to the construction of American Jewish identity. The article goes on to show that these SVODs offer an opportunity to revisit core assumptions embedded within Jewish screen studies and minority screen representation studies more broadly. Minority identity on screen is most often studied through the interpretation of key instances of minority representation. These SVODs instead emphasize the dynamics of interpellation, as they hail viewers by appealing to limited, pre-constructed concepts of cultural identity while offering entire platforms worth of representations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Explicit images and descriptions of violent death are typical within the Mexican media landscape, and especially within the context of the War on Drugs. Here, I share observations of my encounters with these media, particularly television narcotelenovelas and tabloids. I also center the voices of people with firsthand experience of the narcoscape in Mexico City and Ciudad Juárez, including Mrs. Luz María Dávila, the mother of two youths slain in a 2010 drug cartel-directed massacre. Across the two main sites of this study, a university seminar and a public town hall meeting, a professor and a self-politicized mother each question the role of the media in upholding investments in violence within news and entertainment. As the professor asks, 'News are not simply news, right?' These insights invite reflection on the public's participation as spectator-voyeurs in the more than 105,000 Mexican deaths facilitated by cross-border trade in illicit narcotics to-date. The interactional data also suggest effective ways of encouraging critical media analysis in and beyond university settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What happens to journalists when hit by a pandemic in a country governed by authoritarian media regulations? We examine journalists' experience in Turkey's mainstream and alternative media and find that while the pandemic has deepened their economic precarity, journalists further suffer from bodily and political precarity. In the context of Covid, the body emerges as a site on which precarity with multiple dimensions (economic anxiety, illness, and state violence) is inscribed. Under the conditions of what we deem political precarity, most journalists cannot speak truth to power as the pandemic is politically instrumentalized. This retheorizing of precarity dewesternizes the term by connecting it to state-induced forms of violence relying on relations of political recognition and value ascription. We urge journalism and media labor studies to refrain from Eurocentricism and technological determinism that center the standard employment model and the disruptive cultures of technology at the expense of body and politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes Moroccan discourses around media infrastructures and their intersection with carceral culture, taking up Mamfakinch's responses to state-sponsored spyware attacks and judicial harassment as symbolic of shifting imaginaries of the digital. This work is situated within a growing subset of the media and communication literature on media infrastructures, which works to connect the materiality of media systems with everyday media cultures, practices and power. Mamfakinch's experience with spyware and subsequent evolution into a digital rights organization are indicative of attempts to transfer a lingering carceral culture into digital spaces and a shift in state and activist internet imaginaries. In a global era and as part of a hypersurveillant state, Mamfakinch demonstrates how the digital becomes an increasingly important site for the surveillance and policing of dissent while presenting new modes of publicness and activism that directly challenge those endeavors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the past decade, a new generation of filmmakers has committed to establishing a local film market via the film school, Ciné Institute, in Jacmèl, Haiti. Film production in Haiti today, grounded in a virtually non-existent cinema historiography, is particularly challenged by the neocolonial politics following the earthquake in Haiti in 2010 and Hurricane Matthew in 2016. Via lowest-budget productions, Haiti’s filmmakers are not only contributing to new modes of translocal media production but are also attempting to create economically viable exhibition networks and subsequent distribution infrastructures on a transglobal scale. This analysis draws on the local prolificacy and global orientation of Haiti’s emerging film cultures, and demonstrates that both aspects are influenced by and intervene in the broader contexts of geo-political debates in global cinema. Finally, this study considers the extent to which Haiti contributes to new configurations of film and media cultures in the Caribbean. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article proposes visibility as a new lens through which to examine the politics of Internet censorship in China. It focuses on the practice of recoding, that is, the use of code words and images to circulate information that is deemed “sensitive” and therefore removed from the web. While commentators in the West have often described censorship-evading practices like this as a form of “resistance” against state domination, little academic attention has been paid to how and why recoding holds political and cultural significance. The prism of visibility, by conceptualizing recoding as a cultural response to censorship, opens up a more critical perspective to comparatively analyze examples drawn from both China and the United States. It therefore invites a careful rethinking of China’s Internet censorship beyond the framework of the nation-state, by calling attention to the social dimension of meaning making and the negotiation of power in a transnational context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article draws from qualitative and ethnographic work conducted in Malawi to interrogate anew questions of cultural influence by foreign media. Malawi presents a fascinating case for examining such questions, given the almost complete lack of local film or television production and an imperiled music industry, which combine to suffuse film, television, and radio with foreign content. In recent years, moreover, concerns about cultural influence have bubbled up in Malawi. Respondents were therefore asked to discuss their feelings regarding the foreign media presence in the country. Responses suggest the importance of third and subsequent parties to an understanding of cultural influence, as the article examines how Nigerian and American film and television compete with each other, and then examines how minority Tumbuka listeners suspiciously regard Zambian music sung in Malawi’s national and majority language, Chichewa. The article aims to complicate theories of cultural influence first by illustrating how multiple cultures jostle for influence, and second by arguing that the often-unitary focus on nation as unit of reception for culture obscures the equal importance of both supranational and subnational cultural units as sites of reception and meaning-making. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Increased transnational partnerships, commercialization, and convergence largely shape the organizational and industrial dynamics of Brazilian media industries today. This article examines the current Brazilian blockbuster cycle as a production model as well as through discourses of exceptionality and distribution mentalities. Based on interviews and field research, trade stories suggest Brazilian filmmakers are not trying to replicate Hollywood but adapt parts of a production strategy to reimagine the scale and commercial nature of this national cinema. Overall, the 2000s blockbuster cycle follows traditional discourses surrounding the blockbuster such as scope, scale, and exceptionality on a local level, yet reflects an aim to promote the Brazilian economy and national identity as a powerful player on the global stage. A closer look at the Tropa de Elite film franchise reveals how the local blockbuster reflects industrial practices and discursive patterns of culture-as-resource. As a “mode of differentiated production,” the local blockbuster model trades on exception and cultural particularities as currency within the transnational economy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article comments on the increasing number of written works and studies related to the field of cosmopolitan memory. It states that collective memory can be viewed as transcending the traditional perception towards nation state. According to the author, such transformation can be viewed as a result of international processes concerning deteriorialization of culture and politics.

This article considers new approaches to media industry development and the field of Asian media studies. It argues that new patterns of integration have emerged within the global media economy. The rise of East Asian ‘newcomers’ such as South Korea, Taiwan and the People's Republic of China has come about from a combination of institutional realignment and strategic (often state-assisted) responses to regional industrial growth. The article proposes a five-part framework of international exchange that encapsulates challenges confronting mid-level markets that are aspiring to target international content markets. The framework is also a critique of the US-centric approaches that argue that global integration effects are normatively disadvantageous to ‘peripheral’ industries and societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the author's comments on communication research and its political aspects. The author was nonetheless more convinced than ever that communication research was not only of huge significance for society, but because it was so, the strongest arsenal of concepts and tough-minded empirical research that could be mustered were needed. Initially, the author found the field almost asphyxiated still in the U.S. by the dreary empiricist canons of true research, canons still mechanically rehearsed to this day in communication conference panels. But then a number of constructive influences began to make themselves felt in the field, particularly political economy, cultural studies, feminism, and what today people often call globalization. There was nothing inevitably required of researchers by these foci, but they did represent in their different and sometimes clashing ways a certain push toward what might be called knowledge for the people. In other words, the possibility of perspectives and research questions representing the aches, joys, angers and wit of the general mass of humanity.