Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

A Humanistic Approach To Understanding Child Consumer Socialization In Us Homes, Lucy Atkinson, Michelle R. Nelson, Mark A. Rademacher

Mark A. Rademacher

We present findings from a qualitative, multisite, multi-method, longitudinal study of parents and their preschool-aged children that explores the intersections of marketing influences in the home and in the larger outside world of children. Findings indicate that preschoolers represent complicated and nuanced “consumers in training” beyond predictions based on their “perceptual stage of development.” Specifically, our data revealed interesting ways in which marketing and consumer culture can foster a number of pro-social consumer outcomes (e.g., charity, gift-giving, financial literacy). We also noted an emerging understanding by preschoolers of the social meanings of goods for identity construction and product evaluation. Finally, …

“I’M Here To Do Business. I’M Not Here To Play Games.” Work, Consumption, And Masculinity In Storage Wars, Mark A. Rademacher, Casey R. Kelly

Mark A. Rademacher

This essay examines the first season of Storage Wars and suggests the program helps mediate the putative crisis in American masculinity by suggesting that traditional male skills are still essential where knowledge supplants manual labor. We read representations of “men at work” in traditionally “feminine” consumer markets, as a form of masculine recuperation situated within the culture of White male injury. Specifically, Storage Wars appropriates omnivorous consumption, thrift, and collaboration to fit within the masculine repertoire of self-reliance, individualism, and competition. Thus, the program adapts hegemonic masculinity by showcasing male auction bidders adeptly performing feminine consumer practices. Whether the feminine …

His Final Homily: Pope John Paul Ii's Death As An Affirmation Of His Life's Message, Joesph M. Valenzano

Joseph M. Valenzano III

Every Sunday morning, a member of the Roman Catholic clergy addresses his flock after a reading from one of the Gospels. These homilies ordinarily last between 10 and 20 minutes and allow the priest an opportunity to interpret the Gospel message from that day's reading, as well as discuss how that message relates to contemporary events and issues. During the final two months of his life, Pope John Paul II provided a longer, more powerful symbolic homily to the world. The message summarized his positions on freedom, suffering, and the dignity of human life.

Measuring Community Flood Awareness And Preparedness In The Maitland Area And Lower Hunter Valley, Nsw, Neil Dufty, Amanda Hyde, David Webber, Ingrid Berthold, Elise Armstrong

Neil Dufty

The Hunter River of NSW has a long history of flooding. February 2015 was the sixtieth anniversary of the 1955 Hunter Region flood, the largest flood in the region’s recorded history. In conjunction with the commemoration, the NSW State Emergency Service (NSW SES) and the Hunter Local Land Services commissioned consultants Molino Stewart to extend previous social research in Maitland by surveying participants about the status of their own flood awareness and preparedness. The 2015 study and previous social research found that in Maitland flood-prone communities there appears to be a relatively low perception of personal flood risk. On the …

Molding Messages: Analyzing The Reworking Of ‘Sleeping Beauty’ In Grimm’S Fairy Tale Classics And Dollhouse, Jeana Jorgensen, Brittany Warman

Jeana Jorgensen

The story of “Sleeping Beauty” (ATU 410) is one of the most consistently captivating fairy tales. It tells of a cursed princess dreaming in a tower, waiting patiently for her prince to rescue her. Those who recreate the tale for contemporary audiences spin the story anew, reconstructing again and again what it means both to sleep and to awaken. This chapter analyzes two modern television versions of the tale, one for children and one for adults, comparing their incorporation of feminist messages and parallel ideas about shaping narratives and shaping lives. The children’s cartoon Grimm’s Fairy Tale Classics (also called …

Superman Needs You, Kirby Farrell

kirby farrell

A powerful leader in politics, business, or closer to home has “magnetism.” But leaders depend on followers, who follow because it’s rewarding. Consider the attention commanded by Donald Trump or even Adolf Hitler. Lives depend on it. Both figures use scripts centered on elimination of scapegoats as a technique of converting flight to fight emergency physiology in followers. Close attention can demytify euphemized homicidal ideation.

Visual Rhetoric And The Promotion Of Scientific Ideas: The Strange Case Of The Prion, Carol Reeves

Carol Reeves

In the field that investigates infectious brain diseases such as mad cow disease, the verbal and visual packaging of scientific visuals associated with identifying the agent, prion, its processes, and structure served the community ritual of establishing belief in a highly unorthodox phenomenon. Visual promotion fed into cultural expectations of single agents and simple processes, even though the actual agency and disease process have proven highly complex and perhaps unknowable.

Exoticizing Poverty In Bizarre Foods America, Casey R. Kelly

Casey R. Kelly

No abstract provided.

“I’M Here To Do Business. I’M Not Here To Play Games.” Work, Consumption, And Masculinity In Storage Wars, Mark A. Rademacher, Casey R. Kelly

Casey R. Kelly

This essay examines the first season of Storage Wars and suggests the program helps mediate the putative crisis in American masculinity by suggesting that traditional male skills are still essential where knowledge supplants manual labor. We read representations of “men at work” in traditionally “feminine” consumer markets, as a form of masculine recuperation situated within the culture of White male injury. Specifically, Storage Wars appropriates omnivorous consumption, thrift, and collaboration to fit within the masculine repertoire of self-reliance, individualism, and competition. Thus, the program adapts hegemonic masculinity by showcasing male auction bidders adeptly performing feminine consumer practices. Whether the feminine …

Neocolonialism And The Global Prison In National Geographic's Locked Up Abroad, Casey R. Kelly

Casey R. Kelly

This essay examines the reformulation of colonial ideologies in National Geographic Channel's Locked Up Abroad, a documentary program that chronicles the narratives of Westerner travelers incarcerated in foreign nations. An analysis of Locked Up Abroad evinces neocolonialism in contemporary media culture, including: the historic association between dark-skin and savagery, the backwardness of the non-Western world, and the Western imperative to civilize it. The program's documentary techniques and framing devises sustain an Otherizing gaze toward non-Western societies, and its portrayals elide a critical analysis of colonialism in its present forms. I advocate for neocolonial criticism to trace how NatGeo remains haunted …

Are Journalists Qualified To Write About Health And Science?, Burnis R. Morris

Burnis R. Morris

This article examines the preparation of journalists to report on health and science issues. It traces the historical linkage between the news media and health and science and reports the results of a survey of college professors who teach reporting courses at 86 departments and schools of journalism and mass communication. The article, also intended to help explain the journalistic method to scientists, concludes that many young journalists are qualified to cover simple stories about health and science and other topics when they leave college and acquire the skills to report on more complex issues through on-the-job training and specialized …

Physical Activity And Cognitive-Health Content In Top-Circulating Magazines, 2006–2008, Anna Greer, Sara Corwin, Daniela Friedman

Anna E. Greer

Physical activity may promote cognitive health in older adults. Popular media play an important role in preventive health communication. This study examined articles discussing associations between physical activity and cognitive health in top-circulating magazines targeting older adults. 42,753 pages of magazines published from 2006 to 2008 were reviewed; 26 articles met inclusion criteria. Explanations regarding the link between physical activity and cognitive health were provided in 57.7% of articles. These explanations were generally consistent with empirical evidence; however, few articles included empirical evidence. Physical activity recommendations were presented in 80.8% of articles; a wide range was recommended (90–300 min of …

Remembering Radical Black Dissent: Traumatic Counter-Memories In Contemporary Documentaries About The Black Power Movement, Kristen Hoerl

Kristen Hoerl

Contemporary rhetoric about race and racism has been shaped, in part, by popular films. Since the late 1980s and 1990s, Hollywood has provided a variety of what Kelly Madison refers to as "anti-racist-white-hero" films.1 Movies including Amistad, Cry Freedom, The Long Walk Home, Mississippi Burning, and Ghosts of Mississippi have routinely positioned white protagonists as civil rights heroes who win justice for the black community by punishing or humiliating white antagonists. Each film frames racial injustice as the consequence of closed-minded individuals, rather than as the outcome of the U.S. economic and political system. More recently, the motion pictures The …

The Creation Of Chronicity: An Institutional Case Study Of Social Policy And Severe Retardation In The Progressive Era, Philip Ferguson

Philip M. Ferguson

The theme of this volume is emerging issues in disability studies. To the extent that disability studies is a relatively new field, new issues are constantly emerging and the discipline could hardly be characterized as in a state of "normal science," to borrow a phrase from Thomas Kuhn. Too, since the field of disability studies is interdisciplinary, new issues constantly emerge as researchers synthesize concepts and approaches from various more traditional disciplines (e.g., sociology, political science, psychology, law).

Session A-1: Coolhub.Imsa: Collaborative Innovation Networks, James Gerry, Carl Heine, Branson Lawrence, Aracelys Rios

Carl Heine

The use of social networking for students to learn from each other and experts around the world.

Session C-1: Coolhub.Imsa: Collaborative Innovation Networks, James Gerry, Carl Heine, Branson Lawrence, Aracelys Rios

Carl Heine

The use of social networking for students to learn from each other and experts around the world

2014 Journalism Graduate Skills For The Professional Workplace: Expectations From Journalism Professionals And Educators, Bernard Mccoy

Bernard R. McCoy

With 2015 graduations approaching, accuracy, ethical principles, and good news judgment were identified as top skills college journalism graduates should possess for the professional workplace, according to a national survey of journalism educators and professionals. There are sharp differences, though, between respondent groups over how well college journalism programs are doing preparing journalism graduates for journalism careers, as well as the perceived importance of social media, mobile, and digital reporting skills. The survey asked journalism professionals and educators to rank skills and experiences journalism graduates need for the professional workplace. Respondents included 665 professional journalism managers, non-managers, and educators. Respondents …

Structural Pluralism And The Community Context: How And When Does The Environment Matter?, Leo Jeffres, Edward Horowitz, Cheryl Bracken, Guowei Jian, Kimberly Neuendorf, Sukki Yoon

Cheryl C Bracken

Several long-standing theories intersect in discussing the impact of community characteristics and of the mass media. The structural pluralism model popularized by Tichenor and his colleagues says that social structure influences how mass media operate in communities because they respond to how power is distributed in the social system, whereas the linear model says that the increasing size of a community's population leads to more social differentiation and diversity and corresponding increases in subcultures with their own beliefs, customs, and behaviors. Recently, there has been a concern about how changes in society have led to a decline in organizational activity …

Towards News Verification: Deception Detection Methods For News Discourse, Victoria Rubin, Niall Conroy, Yimin Chen

Victoria Rubin

News verification is a process of determining whether a particular news report is truthful or deceptive. Deliberately deceptive (fabricated) news creates false conclusions in the readers’ minds. Truthful (authentic) news matches the writer’s knowledge. How do you tell the difference between the two in an automated way? To investigate this question, we analyzed rhetorical structures, discourse constituent parts and their coherence relations in deceptive and truthful news sample from NPR’s “Bluff the Listener”. Subsequently, we applied a vector space model to cluster the news by discourse feature similarity, achieving 63% accuracy. Our predictive model is not significantly better than chance …

Critical Animal And Media Studies: Communication For Nonhuman Animal Advocacy, Nuria Almiron, Matthew Cole, Carrie Freeman

Carrie P Freeman

ABSTRACT: Suitable for a media studies graduate or upper level undergraduate course (or a critical animal studies course), this book aims to put the speciesism debate and the treatment of non-human animals on the agenda of critical media studies and to put media studies on the agenda of animal ethics researchers. Contributors examine the convergence of media and animal ethics from theoretical, philosophical, discursive, social constructionist, and political economic perspectives. The book is divided into three sections: foundations, representation, and responsibility, outlining the different disciplinary approaches’ application to media studies and covering how non-human animals, and the relationship between humans …

Facebook Frets: The Role Of Social Media Use In Predicting Social And Facebook-Specific Anxiety, Lee Farquhar, Theresa Davidson

Lee Farquhar

Framing Of Jacob Zuma And Polygamy In Die Burger (2008-2013), Margaretha Geertsema-Sligh

Margaretha Geertsema-Sligh

No abstract provided.

Women's Enews: Reaching Out To The Arab World, Margaretha Geertsema-Sligh

Margaretha Geertsema-Sligh

No abstract provided.