This research endeavours to examine the discursive construction of blackness and whiteness by protestors spanning from Minneapolis to the entirety of America following the murder of Floyd. The data, which were analysed using the framework of van Dijk’s critical discourse analysis approach, consisted of 140 slogans collected from photos found on CNN, BBC, AP News, CBS News and Shutterstock websites. The analysis uncovered several recurring discursive strategies utilised to construct the notions of vulnerable blackness and privileged whiteness, including polarisation, concretisation, norm and value violation, victimisation, negative lexicalisation, generalisation, compassion move, self-identity descriptions, negative comparison, resource description and hyperbole. The findings revolve around ‘Othering’, which emphasises positive self-perceptions and negative perceptions of others while shedding insight into the power dynamics between White and Black people. This study offers unique perspectives on whiteness and blackness within the wider social context of the United States by addressing systemic racial inequality and societal change.

As the world undergoes profound geopolitical and cultural transformations, the Global South is emerging as a pivotal force in reshaping the international communication order and cultural narratives. Against this background, on 25 March 2025, Yuezhi Zhao invited Vijay Prashad to the School of Journalism and Communication at Tsinghua University, for a wide-ranging dialogue with doctoral students and post-doctoral researchers on the potentials and challenges for communication and cultural awakening in the Global South. The following text is an edited version of the seminar and it consists of four parts. In Part 1 and Part 2, Yuezhi Zhao and Vijay Prashad overviewed the current state of communication in the Global South, critiqued its colonial cultural heritage, emphasized the continuing importance of decolonization in Global South communication. In Part 3, Vijay Prashad responded to a list of questions from the participants. In the conclusive discussion of Part 4, cultural awaking of the Global South is hoped to reconstruct the international communication order and world structure.

International audience

Professor G. Thomas Goodnight is a distinguished scholar and philosopher, renowned for his research on argumentation in the public sphere. Recently, he has devoted himself to developing the energy communication as a subfield. In this academic interview, Goodnight first explains what energy communication is and why it is important to our field. He then turns to emerging topics such as artificial intelligence, smart cities, and the Belt and Road’s energy diplomacy to share his latest insights on the energy issue in the digital communication age, as well as the argumentation, differences, dissensus, and their productive nature in the global transition.

This study draws on framing theory to argue that the language used by women politicians may make them more effective in achieving their goals. Large numbers of voters around the world perceive men to be more effective political leaders than women. However, this study of the communications of women and male governors in the United States finds that the opposite is true and that women governors emphasize cooperation and compromise much more when communicating, which could be a factor in their greater efficacy. An analysis of 1,088 policy proposals made by governors in their State of the State addresses finds that women enacted their proposals into law at 1.2 times the rate of their male counterparts. An analysis also finds that, between March 2020 and February 2021, states with women governors had significantly fewer excess deaths due to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic and significantly lower unemployment rates than states with male governors. Analyses of speeches and tweets by governors find that women governors use significantly more communal, cooperative language than their male counterparts, and these frames might catalyze more communal behavior by partners and constituents and thereby help explain their greater efficacy.

In this essay, we draw on the history of internet-based local media at the county level in China to investigate the social implications of the internet for the local society. We take a “formative” approach and analyze the social processes of the reinvention of “locality” from the spatial, economic, and political aspects. We view “locality” not only as the assemblage of different places but also as a theoretical scaffolding that can stimulate a refreshed imagination of geography and media. The scales are reinvented, or redefined, by the digital fabrics of these social platforms which align geographical scales for content producers, including grassroots and official stakeholders. “Locality” is reimagined with internet-based local media. By discussing what is considered as “locality” in the spatial, economic, and political senses from a social perspective, we have explored the mutual shaping of internet-based media practices and the physical world. The social implications of the internet manifest themselves profoundly in the reinvention of “locality.”

This essay provides brief accounts of some critical historical moments of Alibaba, one of China’s leading platforms, against the backdrop of the country’s accelerated market-oriented reforms since the 1990s. These accounts illustrate three theoretical approaches to explain the political-economic prerequisite of Alibaba’s growth: the neoliberal model, the developmental state, and the market transition theories. The essay concludes with challenges to the systematic conceptualization of the state–market relation in which Chinese platforms are embedded.

Emerging in the mid-1990s as an alternative space, internet culture in China has transitioned from an era of youthful idealism, egalitarianism, and communal spirit to an era of intensive commerce. This essay delves into the intricacies that define the vibrancy of digital culture, including the intense competition for user attention and the interplay between digital and traditional media. Amid contemporary challenges, such as geopolitical tensions, digital inequality, and socio-economic instability, it highlights the imperative of comprehending the strategies employed by different stakeholders to wield influence. Moreover, the essay underscores the significance of investigating how the digital sphere has emerged as a pivotal space for examining the convergence of contested ideologies and diverse generations of internet users.

In this essay, I discuss feminist activism and gender politics in the #MeToo movement and post-MeToo environment in China. I situate feminism in the country’s increasingly digitalized, commercialized, and controlled media ecosystem, where unpopular feminism reflects the intentional control of feminist visibility and, therefore, the difficulty to access feminist content and the disidentification of the feminist label. Also evident is the grip of the state-market complex on the discursive rights for women’s emancipation and the struggle over meanings of feminism as only visibility or also as a form of politics that divides us while simultaneously reimagining and rebuilding various forms of communities. Feminism today is both a popular genre to be consumed and a minority political pursuit. I also document the interweaving of feminist politics in contemporary China through gendered, classed, racialized, and ethno-national discourses in transnational encounters.

This essay offers a perspective of the evolution and current landscape of computational methods in Chinese Internet studies, paralleled with a personal academic journey. Starting from a project at Columbia University in 2012, I discussed the challenges and advancements in studying online interactions between Chinese local governments and citizens. Examining existing publications about Chinese Internets, I highlight several key shifts in research topics, the adoption of computational methods ranging from content analysis to the application of Large Language Models, pinpoint several underexplored areas including leveraging video as data and longitudinal designs, and look ahead to future directions in computational methods, including the role of artificial intelligence and the importance of integrating computational studies of Chinese Internet with fieldwork and historical analysis.