The Politics of Representation: Wire Agencies and Local News Organizations in the Coverage of Darfur

Sociologists are not at the forefront of studying African news organizations’ coverage of atrocity despite having the tools to do so. This article works to remedy that. I investigate how a media field in Africa frames and represents an atrocity unfolding in Darfur. The article relies on content analysis of news reports published in Kenya between 2003 and 2008. To provide more nuanced analysis, I also rely my own interviews with journalists who had covered and traveled to Darfur. The content analysis delineates the article through the use of by‐line accreditation to allow for an analysis between different journalists working for either local news organizations or wire agencies with offices in Nairobi. I find that Kenyan journalists are not central actors in the process of “meaning making” when it comes to the atrocities in Darfur for the Kenyan audience. They are, effectively, silenced from the knowledge‐construction process in Kenya. Consequently, being Kenyan conspires to produce a condition of invisibility and erasure of Kenyan journalists in the global narrative construction.     

Accomplishing Profession through Self‐Mockery

One influential sociological approach to profession has it that a profession is something constructed by social actors themselves and that this work is performed through the swapping of atrocity stories. While atrocity stories are an important resource for constructing profession, they are not the only ones available to social actors. In this article, I draw on field work in an academic engineering research laboratory to document how social actors use self‐mockery to construct profession. They do this in five ways, including through the use of background knowledge to interpret self‐mockery, by reserving self‐mockery for specific conditions separate from conditions where engineering knowledge is put on display, by maintaining a preference for self‐presentations that exclude self‐mockery toward the speaker's self during presentations in lab meetings and lectures in courses, through the selection of locally insignificant selves for mockery, and by assembling their own accounts of self‐mockery.     

THE END OF THE ART CONNOISSEUR? EXPERTS AND KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTION IN THE VISUAL ARTS IN THE DIGITAL AGE

In this digital age, declarations surface of the death of the expert and the democratization of information. Crowd wisdom is seen as the new guide in constructing and evaluating knowledge. In the context of the art world, this tension between the amateurs and the experts becomes particularly pronounced as popular meets high culture. Questions arise such as: what is the role of the expert in the evaluation of art in contemporary times? Do social media dismantle age-old hierarchies and established priesthoods in the art world? And can we assume that mass participation in valuation results in better judgments? This article addresses such popular notions of participation and expertise concerning social media in the art world through a historical lens by re-examining and positioning art experts from past to present. Particularly, characteristics of intermediaries in the art market are examined closely regarding their strategies in knowledge production and the establishment of expertise. This historical situatedness enables us to move beyond the hype of new media expectations, generating more appropriate avenues of investigation to better grasp possible changes amongst actors within the contemporary art world. This examination is not just theoretically relevant but practically so, given current pressures on art institutions to embrace and reach out to new audiences online.     

The History of Affirmative Action in the USA: A Teaching and Learning Guide

This Teaching and Learning Guide is designed to accompany my Sociology Compass article on affirmative action. The sample syllabus is organized historically beginning with FDR's New Deal and the first use of the term affirmative action and ending with the most recent Supreme Court's deliberations on this policy. In doing so, it attends not only to the varied meanings and forms of affirmative action across time but also the different interest groups arguing for and against this remedial policy. Along the way, it explores the changing history of race relations in the USA, considers the value of personal narratives as sources in exploring meaning and personhood, examines the ways the news media has framed the debate in contemporary America, and finally, speculates about the future of this controversial policy.     

From cathedral to supermarket: mourning, silence and solidarity1

Where do mobile, individualistic members of modem Britain spontaneously congregate, eg, for public mourning, atid what does this tell us about the construction of solidarity and a sense of society? Where flowers were laid atid books of condoletice provided after the death of Princess Diana in 1997 provides a case study. A survey of 147 cities, towns and villages found that churches were important in cities and villages, but elsewhere, town halls, war memorials, shops and public buildings provided the magnets to bring people together. The role of war memorials and supermarkets is then examined in an analysis of the 1995 revival of the 11th November silence for the war dead. This indicates a) the payoff for companies in showing that they care, b) the impori;ance of practical logistics of space and time. In a plural and secular society, ritual ‘words against death’ become ‘silences against death.’ These congregations of contemporary nomads may not be full‐blown Durkheimian rites, but they are a representation of existing society at the same time as representing popular hope for a better society.     

The Herman–Chomsky Propaganda Model: A Critical Approach to Analysing Mass Media Behaviour

The Propaganda Model (PM), developed by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky and published in Manufacturing Consent in 1988, sought to explain the behaviour of the mass media in the United States. Analysing the function, operation and effects of the media are essential to any understanding of contemporary societies and the article begins by sketching out the contours of the liberal-pluralist vs. critical-Marxist debate about the role of the media. The article then presents an overview of the PM, locates it within the field of media and communication studies, considers its reception, discusses a number of complementary methodological and theoretical approaches, and argues that the PM, more than 20 years after its formulation, continues to provide an invaluable tool for understanding the media within contemporary capitalist societies.     

New soldiers and empty boys: imaging traumatic memory

This essay reconstructs one important context for images published by the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW): the testimonial practices of anti-war veterans. First in small rap sessions, and then in unofficial public hearings, anti-war veterans recollected their war experiences in an effort to inform civilians about the US war in Vietnam, and mobilise them to oppose it. Photographs of introspective veterans – lost in memory – provide a visual idiom for the experience of ‘flashing back’ that was the basis for veterans’ testimony. If these photographs signify the central role of self-reflection in veterans’ anti-war organising, they also imply a distrust of graphic war photography – both images disseminated by the mainstream media and atrocity photographs taken by soldiers themselves. Anti-war veterans worried that war photographs catered to a consumerist appetite for intense, vicarious experience and provoked only a fleeting sense of revulsion. Compounding this distrust of graphic imagery was the circulation of war souvenirs, atrocity photographs taken by soldiers of their dead and wounded victims. Exploring portraiture as an alternative to photojournalism, this essay situates images of introspective veterans in relation to the pioneering activism of the VVAW and allies them with images produced by other activists working in the visual field, focusing on Martha Rosler’s ‘Empty Boys’.     

Social media teams as digital vanguards: the question of leadership in the management of key Facebook and Twitter accounts of Occupy Wall Street,Indignados and UK Uncut

Recent protest movements such as Occupy Wall Street in the US, the indignados/15M movement in Spain, and UK Uncut have witnessed the rise of social media teams, small activist groups responsible for managing high-visibility and collective activist social media accounts. Going against dominant assertions about the leaderless character of contemporary digital movements, the article conceptualises social media teams as ‘digital vanguards’, collective and informal leadership structures that perform a role of direction of collective action through the use of digital communication. Various aspects of the internal functioning of vanguards are discussed: (a) their formation and composition; (b) processes of internal coordination; (c) struggles over the control of social media accounts. The article reveals the profound contradiction between the leadership role exercised by social media teams and the adherence of digital activists to techno-libertarian values of openness, horizontality, and leaderlessness. The espousal of these principles has run against the persistence of power and leadership dynamics leading to bitter conflicts within these teams that have hastened the decline of the movements they served. These problems call for a new conceptual framework to better render the nature of leadership in digital movements and for new political practices to better regulate the management of social media assets.     

Heavenly Monsters: The Politics of the Male Body in the Naked Issue of Attitude Magazine

The male body in contemporary gay culture is subordinated to distinct aesthetic and ethical norms that reflect an all-male idolization of the young, muscular, smooth, and transcendent physique. The queer body is manipulated in different techniques including daily work at the gym, diet, hair supplement/removal, tanning, and dying. Liberating the body from heteronormative oppression does not necessarily guarantee the liberation of the (gay) body from other powerful systems that produce and commercialize body fascism. This article problematizes these body politics and economy of identity focusing on the naked issue of Attitude (October 1999), a six-year-old British life-style glossy magazine. This analysis mainly focuses on the illuminating interview with five gay men who express their intimate feelings and criticize the body worship in the gay media: an over-weight man, a skinny man, a psoriasis sufferer, an old and heavily tattooed and pierced man, and a bodybuilder who works as an escort.     

Media and Disasters: Demarcating an Emerging and Interdisciplinary Area of Research

This article provides an overview of the research and literature on media and disasters. Drawing on the central idea of a disaster as a social and media construction, I identify this young and rapidly emerging body of research as an inherent interdisciplinary area that has attracted the interest of many disciplines within social sciences. A first section of the article focuses on a characterization of (mediated) disasters and the question of academic relevance. Second, I adopt a historical perspective to reflect on issues of disciplinary concern, followed by an outline of the contemporary body of literature. In the final section, directions to advance future research on media and disasters are discussed.     

Sparking debate? Political deaths and Twitter discourses in Argentina and Russia

The big question that pervades debate between techno-optimists and their detractors is whether social media are good for democracy. Do they help to produce or accelerate democratic change or, alternatively, might they hinder it? This article foregrounds an alternative perspective, arguing that individual social networking applications likely do not fulfil a single political function across national contexts. Their functionality may be mediated instead by language and by pre-existing relationships between the state and offline domestic media. We arrive at this conclusion through examining reactions on Twitter to two fatal events that occurred in early 2015: the death in suspicious and politically charged circumstances of the special prosecutor Alberto Nisman in Argentina, and the murder in Russia of opposition activist Boris Nemtsov. Several similarities between the two deaths provide the conditions for a comparative analysis of the discourses around them in the Spanish-language and Russian-language Twitter spheres, respectively. In Russia, a hostile social media environment polluted by high levels of automated content and other spam reduced the utility of Twitter for opposition voices, who work against an increasingly authoritarian state. In Argentina, a third-wave democracy, Twitter discourses appeared as predominantly coextensive with other pro-government and opposition online, print, and broadcast information and opinion sources, thus consolidating and amplifying a highly polarized and repetitive wider public political conversation. Despite the potential for social media to help citizens circumvent formal and informal restrictions to discursive participation in national public spheres, in the cases that we compare here domestic political structures play a key role in determining the uses and limitations of online spaces for recounting and expressing opinion on current affairs stories involving the state.     

Blindspots and Blurred Lines: Dallas Smythe,the Audience Commodity,and the Transformation of Labor in the Digital Age

Dallas Smythe's notion of the audience commodity provides a starting point for much work within the political economy of communication. First advanced when commercial television was the dominant medium, the controversial idea has proven to be an increasingly useful way of conceptualizing media economics in the digital age. Originally posited as a critique of Western Marxism's concern with ideology over materiality, two generations of media scholars have elaborated upon the idea. First, scholars offered it greater specificity and utility by connecting the political economy of media to more general concerns regarding labor, gender, and race. More recently, the audience commodity has become an increasingly useful theoretical tool, demonstrating how digital technologies enable new forms of economic exploitation. Rather than binding media studies to a rigid structuralism, the audience commodity helps illuminate the fluidity of media economies and culture under neoliberalism. I conclude that scholars may productively utilize and expand upon the audience commodity to answer contemporary questions about media and alienation, the state, and social movements.     

A Postmodern Turn for Social Media Research: Theory and Research Directions for Public Relations Scholarship

The public relations literature on social media has focused primarily on how social media platforms can be leveraged to the advantage of organizations for relationship building and so-called dialogue with publics. Yet most research has positioned relationships in social media merely as opportunities for information exchange, perpetuating models of public relations grounded in systems theory that ignore power imbalances. Consequently, this article offers insights from postmodernist theories to first deconstruct existing research and then offer suggestions for future social media scholarship. The article argues that social media scholars have privileged dominant rational models of social engagement. Dissensus and disorder, according to Lyotard, may be as legitimate and more liberatory states of discourse for marginalized publics. Postmodern theories of language games and differential consciousness are also positioned as ways in which social media theory and practice may be advanced. The article thus complicates how relationships are theorized in contemporary scholarship and challenges both scholars and practitioners to rethink approaches to social media practice through a postmodern lens.     

Understanding the Role of Immigrant Families' Cultural and Structural Mechanisms in Immigrant Children's Experiences beyond High School: Lessons for Social Work Practitioners

The destinies of the contemporary immigrant generation are challenged by the profound reshaping of the U.S. economy and the increasing diversity of new immigrant communities from the Latin American and Asian regions. Family represents a key link between immigrant children's social adjustment beyond high school and relationships with mainstream society. Placing an emphasis on culture and social structure, this article reviews contemporary literature and provides a framework for knowledge that helps social work practitioners and policy planners explore the distinguishing features of immigrant families that confer an advantage within their children's post-secondary education or labor market participation. Also considered is how culture and social structure overlap and interact to exert a significant influence on the future economic prospects of immigrant children.     

Anti-War Activism: New Media and Protest in the Information Age

This starts out by distinguishing between communication and communication mediums when examining social movement-powered formations of collective identity and collective action. We then focus on communication mediums to examine the different ways that old and new media are utilized in urban social movements under neoliberal capitalism. Based on shifts in the political economy and correspondingly in the contemporary composition of the working class, we focus on the Media Mobilizing Project in Philadelphia to argue that contemporary urban social movements and networks utilize a multi-media platform to further class-based politics. The respective use of old or new media depends on important contextual questions, regarding technology access and geographic aspects of movement building work.     

Rearticulating Black Mixed-Race in the Era of Globalization

Since the mid-2000s, the term multiculturalism has entered the Korean lexicon as migration has become more and more prevalent due to globalization. The cornerstone of this multicultural explosion was a 2006 visit by American football star Hines Ward, born to an African-American father and a Korean mother. As a black mixed-race sports celebrity, he suddenly became an emblematic media figure in the Korean televisual landscape, signifying a broader racial reconfiguration in Korean society. This media event – what I shall call ‘the Hines Ward moment’ – created and opened the discursive space for racial politics and multicultural issues in Korean society. Hence, this article aims to look at what this discursive explosion of multiculturalism and mixed-race means in the context of globalization. Reading the Hines Ward moment as a symbolic media text, the paper examines how the media discourse on Hines Ward articulates the issues of national identity and racial politics in contemporary Korean society. For analysis, newspaper articles, television programmes and television commercials that deal with the Hines Ward case are examined. By analyzing the modes of articulation of the Hines Ward moment, this study deconstructs the image of a ‘global, multicultural Korea’ shaped by the Korean media and examines the struggle for Koreanness in the televisual area of contemporary Korean media.     

Japanese Modernity and Media Studies of Screens

This article aims to construct a new perspective for analyzing the recent omnipresence of screens, the diversity of images, and their impact on our daily lives. Because of the diversification of digitalized images today, research based on film and television studies is unable to grasp the fluid relationships among screen images, spaces, and the bodies of their audience, and important task for recent scholarship is to determine how to include these screen images in media and cultural studies. In response to this issue, this article seeks to reconstruct the concept of screen practice, guided by the perspectives of Jonathan Crary and Friedrich Kittler on media and practices; Koji Taki and Ai Maeda's historical research on Japanese modernity; and Erkki Huhtamo and Yussi Parikka's media archaeological perspectives for screen and visual culture. Although the notion of screen practice was originally proposed in the field of film history, it should be expanded for broader screen cultures as the sites at which scientific discourses and technologies act on the bodies of viewers. Taking the experiences of Japanese modernity as its subject, this is a critical issue, because at these sites we can find traces of dynamic negotiations between the circulation of science and media derived from Western modernity, and existing physical and cultural vernacular practices. Moreover, going back to the screen cultures at the end of the 19th century will make clear how the process of our contemporary media environment was formed.     

Advancing a qualitative turn in news media trust research

The contemporary media environment represents the greatest challenge ever to journalism's legitimacy. Surveys conducted in different parts of the world highlight a decline in trust in news media. Due to the numerous changes in the news media environment, different investigative tools are required to grasp the mechanisms underlying news media trust from those adopted so far. This article provides a review of existing media trust research and argues that it is necessary to investigate news media trust (also) from a qualitative perspective because today understanding media trust is as crucial as measuring it.     

Gender,race and global modernity: A perspective from Thailand

Abstract

This paper draws from cultural studies, postcolonial studies and political economy to track the trafficking in racism and sexism in the cultural economy of contemporary globalization. It approaches this by looking at how global modernity is enacted by Thais and Westerners in Thailand. The author argues that the pursuit of global modernity in Thailand leads Thais to invite and embrace global modernity's racist and sexist core, thereby constituting their self-orientalization. Globalization's racist and sexist economy of desire is shown to be manufactured and retailed by both global and local corporations and to operate in international education, public health, the mass media and public culture. The paper is based on a decade of participant observation and field research.     

Public Dying: Death in the Media and Jade Goody

Abundant in books, on television, in film, on the internet, and in newspapers and magazines, in the twenty-first century death is hugely accessible. Within recent years, sociologists have responded to this visibility by examining death in the media, including its role and status in popular culture and ‘public mourning’, seen for example following the death of Diana, Princess of Wales in 1997. This article considers a third strand of death in the media that requires sociological attention: public dying. Drawing on the extensive media coverage of reality TV personality Jade Goody’s dying and subsequent death in early 2009, the article examines the way in which Goody’s dying illustrated how it can be commodified.