ABSTRACTThis essay explores and expands themes presented initially in Just Relationships, Part One, Imagining Just Relationships: Perspectives. I begin by situating the idea of justice within the assertion that relationships are moral entities. As such, communication scholars, through a focus on mindful dialogue, have a unique opportunity to recognize relationships as moral (i.e., that which makes us human). From there I make the conceptual move that “just” relationships can only be achieved through love, not by trying to exact justice. Through love “a third way” emerges from classic human tensions, such as cognition-emotion and law-mercy, transforming relational perspectives. The final section of the essay focuses on advocacy as love in action, an extension of third way principles that depict advocacy in personal relationships as creating spaces where if good things can happen, they will. That is, love in action creates safe spaces where individuals find their own voices and their full humanity.

ABSTRACTThis study examines social comparison-related emotional and enjoyment responses to entertainment television characters. Participants (N = 294) were presented with eight possible programs and chose one for viewing. Afterwards, they reported their emotional responses to the content. Factors including program type (reality, scripted), characters’ social class (low, high), and characters’ lifestyle (youth-oriented, family-oriented) affected the social comparison-related emotional outcomes measured. Appreciation of the program positively correlated to both upward and downward social comparison-related emotional responses. Fun and entertainment positively correlated only to upward social comparison-related emotional responses.

ABSTRACTThis paper argues for a new theoretical construct, the “constitutive character,” a powerful rhetorical persona that discursively stakes out a group’s ontology, epistemology, and axiology. Aligned with James Boyd White’s theory of constitutive rhetoric and expanding on the literature of personas, as described by Edwin Black, this construct emphasizes rhetorical agency and discursive relationship. This paper reveals how Red Letter Christians, a contemporary evangelical organization, constitute a nuanced ideological identity by constructing a very particular version of Jesus that interacts with and influences the social world.

ABSTRACTHow can effective business communicators keep meetings from being so boring? This case study of a volunteer organization explains how organizational leaders used humor strategically to maintain membership and keep members focused on tasks during meetings. Volunteer organizations depend on members to get work done, which means they have a large stake in maintaining members’ interest and enthusiasm about the tasks they accomplish together. Ethnographic observations and interviews of a volunteer organization revealed that the leadership of the organization employed humor, especially during large meetings, as a means of motivating members to belong as well as directing their collective efforts in productive ways. This double function of humorous meeting leadership is explored and proposed as a helpful model for business communicators.

ABSTRACTRooted in the Uses and Gratification approach, this study investigated the motives of live posting, a media behavior that is fundamental to Social TV/second screening. Focus group interviews with 33 participants generated 19 motivational items that were original to live posting. Factor analysis based on college student samples (n = 259) revealed four classes of motivations: social connection, catharsis, engagement, and extending enjoyment. Of these, extending enjoyment significantly predicted the frequency of live posting in general. Although there were no gender differences across the identified motives, different patterns in predicting the frequency of live posting via specific platforms such as Twitter and instant message services were revealed. Results were discussed in light of their theoretical and practical implications.

ABSTRACTThis study investigates the effects of competing frames in newspaper coverage of offshore outsourcing, an issue that is characterized by a predominantly negative, unemployment-focused media framing. The findings of a randomized, controlled experiment (N = 152) demonstrate that conventional framing effects do hold for this issue and for this media context by moving recipients’ attitudes in the direction consistent with the valence of the frame. However, they also show the backfire effect of the positively valenced frame among recipients with greater interest in political and economic news, who become less supportive of outsourcing if they read a story framing outsourcing from a consumer-oriented perspective. Our results contribute to the ongoing debate about the limits of framing effects on forming opinion about contentious policy issues and demonstrate the challenges for nondominant perspectives to make their way to news-savvy audiences even when the nature of the issue in question necessitates considering them.

ABSTRACTThis article analyzes YouTube comments about a Munhwa Broadcasting Company report that White “expatriates” in South Korea called xenophobic and racist. The research is important because there is a paucity of scholarship on White discourse outside the West and because there is limited work on YouTube as a space to articulate and negotiate discourses about racism. This is despite the increasingly complex flows of people and discourse around the globe. In this article, I argue that YouTube acted as a site of ideological negotiation in which Orientalist discourses were advanced under the cover of color-blind racism. Many of the YouTube comments framed Korea as xenophobic and racist, and even for self-identified White commenters sympathetic to the report, they did not challenge the construction of Korea as racist or the normative belief in postracism.

ABSTRACTTerms like “binge-watching” and the “showhole” suggest a relationship between binge-watching and emotional health. This study sought to understand the relationship between binge-watching, unhealthy emotional traits, and regular emotional states such as sadness. The study found that emotional states experienced after binge-watching had implications for entertainment gratifications. However, the study did not find a conclusive connection between binge-watching and unhealthy emotional traits.

ABSTRACTAs American and British gay, lesbian, and bisexual individuals have made major wins for “pinnacle rights,” such as same-sex marriage, attention has increasingly moved to a previously overshadowed part of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender community: transgender (trans) people. Alongside more visibility in popular culture, trans people have been the subject of policy debates and proposals in both countries, seeking to both restrict and expand their rights. In this article we examine the extent to which language choice affects public support for policies pertaining to trans people in the United States and United Kingdom. We draw upon two survey experiments conducted in the United States and United Kingdom in July 2016 and find that, in general, different ways of referring to the trans population do not affect policy opinions. This study has implications for both understandings of the effectiveness of framing in increasingly media savvy environments and for the future of trans-related policies in the United States and United Kingdom.

ABSTRACT In this prologue to a special issue on intergroup communication, we highlight areas of intersection across its field. To start, we provide a brief history of the field, simultaneously highlighting 6 central principles guiding the work in this area. We then review 4 key themes—areas of intersection uniting the contributions in this special issue: (a) a sustained interest in canonical intergroup theories and topics; (b) the notion that there are various conceptualizations of intergroup communication, both linguistic and nonlinguistic; (c) scholars’ strong interest in intercultural communication processes; and (d) the cross-disciplinary nature of intergroup communication scholarship. Thereafter, we present a 2-path model of inter- and intragroup communication that integrates interpersonal, media, and intergroup communication and overviews other contributions to this special issue.