ABSTRACT For decades, Egyptian cultural production has adapted the story of Raya and Sakina, the nation's first women to receive the death penalty for murder. In 2017, their story crossed borders as Warde Shamia, a Syrian musalsal, or Arabic-language television drama serial. This project discusses the story's movement across nations and mediums, exploring the way that it illuminates the precarious nature of cultural production in post 2011 Syria. In a space where production is often appropriated by competing nationalist discourses, the invocation of these women as tricksters evades and destabilizes nationalist appropriations. By turning to the way that content is driven forward by polarizing regional forces, this analysis takes seriously the productive nature of media processes in shaping content. It offers that the move from nationally broadcasted programing to regionally broadcasted satellite programing mirrors the transformation of national uprisings into proxy wars, reflecting a loss of sovereignty over nationalist articulations. It examines the trickster's role in occupying multiple positionalities, working to dismantle appropriative narratives of cultural production as always-already identifiable with a dominant nationalist discourse. Rather than asking how Syrian drama reflects reality, this paper examines how this adaptation reflects the conditions for producing that reality.

ABSTRACT This introduction to the special issue Afrofuturism’s Transcultural Trajectories aims to provide momentary insights into the state of the art of an expanding and increasingly diversified field of exploration, cultural and artistic practice and theoretical debate. Momentary indeed, because so much is happening under the umbrella term of Afrofuturism that we can only relegate readers, quite literally, to the future for further assessments. We outline some avenues of thinking with and through Afrofuturism of the more distant and the recent past. We also chart some alternative spaces of thinking and practice, detours or planes that challenge established concepts of Afrofuturism while not denying the latter’s potential and significance within specific contexts of resistance. Eventually, this introduction, as well as the essays in this special issue, showcase examples of Afrofuturist takes not only across cultures, but also across diverse medial forms of expression and articulation.

ABSTRACTComedy news show Last Week Tonight, hosted by John Oliver, expands the genre of satirical news by incorporating the rhetorical style of trolling. The show’s host coordinates raids, propagates memes, engages in overtly agonistic behavior, and uses irreverence to reveal flaws in systems of power. These trolling techniques provoke responses from both the target of the trolling and from the audience that wants to participate in the trolling. The responses generate news cycles for topics that may be receiving very little media coverage. As a result, Last Week Tonight’s trolling techniques function rhetorically to amplify attention and engage the audience in social activism.

ABSTRACTAlthough the Syrian refugee crisis has received global media attention, studies exploring the representation of Syrian refugees in American media have been lacking. Using both content and critical discourse analysis methods, this paper examines the discursive constructions of Syrian refugees in the New York Times during the 2016 presidential election. The findings reveal that despite the overall “neutral” tone of media coverage, this did not negate the existence of implicit bias toward refugees. The linguistic strategies employed, though at times engaging in narratives of victimhood, result in the demarcation of Syrian refugees as “universal refugee subjects” rooted in past historical and geographical contexts. Together with an emphasis on vulnerability over agency, pernicious depictions of Syrian refugees as terrorists or political bargaining tools, and an assumption of popular resentment by the public, these seemingly disconnected discursive strategies collectively contribute to the dehumanization of Syrian refugees, with damaging implications for the case of their acceptance into American society.

ABSTRACTThis article explores the media advocacy strategies utilized by Hispanics in the 1980s through an examination of the National Hispanic Media Coalition’s (NHMC’s) campaign against KCBS-TV, Los Angeles. Relying on archival materials and interviews, it argues that through their deployment of Hispanic panethnicity, embodiment of respectability politics, management of the aesthetics of media activism, and reliance on post-civil rights laws, the NHMC utilized the threat of a petition to deny a license renewal as a means to enter into minority agreements with broadcasters and improve the employment of Hispanics in the media at the national level. The NHMC would be the first media organization to speak nationally and pan-ethnically for all Hispanics in media-related litigation issues and use this rhetoric as a way to push stations to comply with Equal Employment Opportunity requirements.

Peter Vasterman’s edited book From media hype to twitter storm: news explosions and their impact on issues, crises and public opinion aggregates a variety of contemporary studies contributed by 31 ...

“Identity asks important questions of animation,” writes Jane Batkin (2017). If there is no physical presence, what happens to self? If there are no boundaries, what of otherness? If binary codes n...

ABSTRACTThis study is a qualitative analysis of Public Service Announcement (PSA) storyboards produced by 177 fourth and sixth-grade students as part of a Media Literacy Education program on advertising and commercial culture. The program curriculum addressed the ubiquity and hidden nature of ads, as well as gender portrayals, violence, and nutritional messages in advertising content. Textual analysis revealed differing patterns in student reception of the varied lesson topics. Students called for specific behavioral changes in PSAs for the topics of nutrition and gender, although most were limited to non-media-related behaviors such as improving eating habits and encouraging fluidity across roles more traditionally associated with masculinity or with femininity. The analysis also suggested responsibility for the problems students identified with advertising were largely based on individual, consumerist perspectives rather than on collective or social, citizen-based terms. Fourth graders’ storyboards especially indicated an apparent mimicry of mainstream commercial productions and practices. The analysis further explores these fourth and sixth graders’ underlying orientations toward the U.S. commercial media system as well as the potential strengths and limitations of a production component in MLE programs to promote outcomes associated with critical media literacy.

ABSTRACTOver the last two decades, international scholars have studied representations of intimate partner violence against women in news media reports. Although these studies contributed to current understandings of how such violence is constructed in the media, few studies have specifically examined how perpetrators are represented in newspaper reports. The present study draws on social representations theory to interrogate how perpetrators of IPV are constructed in the print news media of the Western Cape Province. An inductive thematic analysis was conducted on 21 articles reporting men’s perpetration of violence against their female partners between the periods of September 2012 and February 2013. The findings revealed perpetrators were mainly represented as pathological, victims of an unjust justice system and characters readers could possibly sympathize with, which obscured their responsibility for the act(s) of violence. The article discusses implications of these representations in the context of violence against women in South Africa and how they resonate with current research internationally.

ABSTRACTThis article develops a theoretical model to understand media framing of teachers as part of an interdiscursive flow moving between the public, policymakers, and educational practitioners. The existing literature on media framing is then synthesized in light of this interdiscursive model, so that dominant frames are seen as being reflective of dominant discourses and the power structures they legitimate. Lastly, the significance of social structure for this model is highlighted through a discussion of how neoliberal logics have cycled through it. The economic downturn in the 1970s here serves as external stimulus that was re-contextualized into discourses faulting public schools and teachers for the nation’s problems, and, in turn, were re-contextualized as popular culture tropes. This dominant view then manifested as education policy focused on ever greater teacher and student evaluation, and ultimately has led to teacher resentment and growing resistance to the dominant discourses, logics, and power structures.