Critical and Cultural Studies Commons^™

Dialectic Tensions Experienced By Resettled Sudanese Refugees In Mediating Organizations, Sarah Steimel

Department of Communication Studies: Faculty Publications

An increasing number of global migrants are refugees who have fled religious, racial, ethnic, or other political persecution. As these refugee populations have grown, governmental and nonprofit organizations have emerged to help mediate the resettlement experience. The current study explores the dialectical tensions Sudanese refugees face in communicating with the organizations designed to make their resettlement successful. Sudanese refugees participated in semistructured interviews about their experiences communicating with mediating organizations. Four dialectical tensions emerged from participants’ stories about their communication in and with mediating organizations: (a) dissemination and dialogue, (b) emancipation and control, (c) empowerment and oppression, and (d) integration …

Discursive Struggles In Families Formed Through Visible Adoption: An Exploration Of Dialectical Unity, Meredith Marko Harrigan, Dawn O. Braithwaite

Department of Communication Studies: Faculty Publications

Grounded in the interpretive paradigm and framed by relational dialectics theory, the present study addressed the question: What discourses interpenetrate to reflect dialectical unity as parents communicate about their child’s adoption? Interviews with 40 parents across 31 visibly adoptive families—families with an obvious lack of biological connection—highlighted four instances of dialectical unity resulting from the following discursive struggles: (a) pride and imperfection; (b) love, constraint, and sacrifice; (c) difference, pride, and enrichment; and (d) legitimacy, expansion, similarity, and difference. Each struggle contains seemingly disparate discourses that, in combination, contribute to how parents discursively make sense of adoption. Practical implications of …

Constructing Family: A Typology Of Voluntary Kin, Dawn O. Braithwaite, Betsy Wackernagel Bach, Leslie A. Baxter, Rebecca Diverniero, Joshua R. Hammonds, Angela M. Hosek, Erin K. Willer, Bianca M. Wolf

Department of Communication Studies: Faculty Publications

This study explored how participants discursively rendered voluntary kin relationships sensical and legitimate. Interpretive analyses of 110 interviews revealed four main types of voluntary kin: (i) substitute family, (ii) supplemental family, (iii) convenience family, and (iv) extended family. These types were rendered sensical and legitimated by drawing on the discourse of the traditional family. Except for the extended family, three of four voluntary kin family types were justified by an attributed deficit in the blood and legal family. Because voluntary kin relationships are not based on the traditional criteria of association by blood or law, members experience them as potentially …

Gloria E. Anzaldúa’S Decolonizing Ritual De Conocimiento, Sarah S. Ohmer

Publications and Research

Gloria E. Anzaldúa’s work makes up one of the many Chican@ works that contribute another history, a history repressed by the national discourses on both sides of the border. Influenced by antecedents of U.S. Hispanic Literature who superposed “official” history with another history, Chicano activists had already enacted a retrieval of pre-conquest histories to revive their people’s historical consciousness. As Saldívar-Hull states in “Mestiza Consciousness and Politics: Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/ La frontera,” the publication of Borderlands/ La Frontera distinguished itself from the Chicano movement’s as it unveiled the curtain that hid the Aztec goddesses and kept aspects of pre-conquest history …

Perang Melawan Kemiskinan, Paulus Wirutomo

Masyarakat: Jurnal Sosiologi

No abstract provided.

Refugees As People: The Portrayal Of Refugees In American Human Interest Stories, Sarah Steimel

Department of Communication Studies: Faculty Publications

This study combines discourse analysis and narrative analysis (Yin 2007) to examine top US newspapers’ coverage of refugees in American human interest stories. I find that the refugees are presented (a) as prior victims; (b) as in search of the American Dream; and (c) as unable to achieve the American Dream. As human-interest features, the stories provide a largely positive portrayal of individual refugees and their families. However, the human interest stories also depict refugees as current victims of the American economic crisis; deeply frustrated by their inability to achieve the American Dream. Together these discourses represent a narrative of …

Exploring Links Between Well-Being And Interactional Sense-Making In Married Couples’ Jointly Told Stories Of Stress, Jody Koenig Kellas, April R. Trees, Paul Schrodt, Cassandra Leclair-Underberg, Erin K. Willer

Department of Communication Studies: Faculty Publications

Narrative theorizing suggests that narrating stress, difficulty, or trauma can be beneficial for improved mental health, yet extant research tends to consider narrating stress as an individual or psychological construct. However, in close relationships, people often experience shared stressors and jointly tell their shared stories of difficulty to others. Thus, joint storytelling processes likely also relate to individual health. We tested this expectation using a series of actor-partner interdependence models and path analyses in a study that included 68 couples’ video-recorded joint storytelling interactions. Findings primarily indicate relationships between husbands’, wives’, and couples’ storytelling behaviors and husbands’ mental health. Generally …

Face Needs, Intragroup Status, And Women’S Reactions To Socially Aggressive Face Threats, Erin K. Willer, Jordan Soliz

Department of Communication Studies: Faculty Publications

Given the potential negative consequences of being a recipient of such behavior, the role of positive face needs, intragroup status, and the face-threatening nature of social aggression in predicting cor-relates of negative affect experienced as a result of being a target of SAFTs, including the face threat of the response, forgiveness, and well-being was investigated. On the basis of the survey responses from 199 college-aged women, findings indicated that targets’ positive face needs and intragroup status are directly and indirectly associated with forgiveness and overall well-being. Implications for these findings in relation to theorizing about face and intragroup identity as …

Empty Ritual: Young-Adult Stepchildren’S Perceptions Of The Remarriage Ceremony, Leslie A. Baxter, Dawn O. Braithwaite, Jody Koenig Kellas, Cassandra Leclair-Underberg, Emily Lamb Normand, Tracy Routsong, Matthew Thatcher

Department of Communication Studies: Faculty Publications

This qualitative study investigated 80 young-adult stepchildren’s talk about one of their parents’ remarriage ceremony. The remarriage event was celebrated in six types of ritual enactments, five of which celebrated the couple’s marriage and one of which was family-centered in its celebration of the beginning of the new stepfamily. Three factors led stepchildren to find the remarriage ceremony empty: (i) a ritual form that was too traditional or not traditional enough; (ii) a ritual enactment that failed to pay homage to either the stepchild’s family of origin or the stepfamily as a unit; and (iii) a ritual enactment that failed …

Using The 2008 Presidential Election To Think About “Playing The Race Card”, Ronald Lee, Aysel Morin

Department of Communication Studies: Faculty Publications

Bill Clinton and Geraldine Ferraro were accused of “playing the race card” during the 2008 contest for the Democratic presidential nomination. This essay explores the different forms race cards may assume and the dangers each poses to the public dialogue. Moving away from the traditional focus on persuasive effects, the Clinton and Ferraro utterances are analyzed as argumentative discourses. Then, critical standards are promulgated for evaluating their reasonableness.

Is Disney Surfing The Third Wave? A Study Of The Pervasiveness Of The Third Wave Of Feminism In Disney's Female Protagonists, Emily S. Ellington

Senior Honors Theses

It is important to understand factors that have influenced Generation Y’s view of womanhood. One way to do this is to analyze third wave feminist messages portrayed by Disney, the media powerhouse. In order to determine if Disney reflects feminist values, the third wave themes portrayed in The Little Mermaid (1989), Beauty and the Beast (1991), Pocahontas (1995), and Mulan (1999) are examined. It is concluded that Disney portrays the feminist values of independence and multiculturalism; however, the films are set within patriarchal societies and portray women to be domestic. Ultimately, Disney portrays four messages about womanhood: Women are equal …

Women’S Rhetorical Agency In The American West: The New Penelope, Casey Ryan Kelly

Department of Communication Studies: Faculty Publications

This essay theorizes women’s rhetorical agency in the nineteenth-century American West. Contrast between fluid gender norms in frontier life and the Cult of True Womanhood highlights how agency is confined by materiality. Agency is the capacity to recognize and act in moments when material structures are vulnerable to resignification. I offer an analysis of Frances Fuller Victor’s novella The New Penelope to demonstrate how pioneer women writers reinvented womanhood in light of socioeconomic changes.

Burning Mississippi Into Memory? Cinematic Amnesia As A Resource For Remembering Civil Rights, Kristen Hoerl

Department of Communication Studies: Faculty Publications

The 1988 film Mississippi Burning drew extensive criticism for its misleading portrayal of the FBI’s investigation of three murdered civil rights activists in 1964. As critics noted, the film ignored the role of Black activists who struggled for racial justice even as it graphically depicted the violence that activists and other Blacks faced during the civil rights era. This movie’s selective depiction of events surrounding the activists’ deaths constituted the film as a site of cinematic amnesia, a form of public remembrance that provokes controversy over how events ought to be remembered. An analysis of the film and its ensuing …

Deranged Loners And Demented Outsiders? Therapeutic News Frames Of Presidential Assassination Attempts, 1973–2001, Kristen E. Hoerl, Dana L. Cloud, Sharon E. Jarvis

Department of Communication Studies: Faculty Publications

There were 7 assassination attempts on U.S. presidents between 1973 and 2001. In this article, we critically examine coverage of each attack in the New York Times and the Washington Post, describing how the coverage employs therapeutic discourse frames that position the president as vulnerable and portray the attackers as lonely and demented outsiders. Noticing contradictions in this pattern, we also identify counter-frames, including those acknowledging the political motivations of the assassins, the diminished public sphere that is a context for those actions, and the contradictions in a legal system that denies the insanity pleas of those framed so …

Telling Tales: Enacting Family Relationships In Joint Storytelling About Difficult Family Experiences, April R. Trees, Jody Koenig Kellas

Department of Communication Studies: Faculty Publications

Narratives help people make sense of difficult experiences. In addition, stories provide insight into people’s conceptualizations of the world, including their understanding of their family relationships. Given these two functions of storytelling, the ways in which family members tell stories about difficult experiences together should reveal or reflect relational qualities. This project focused on how the family relational context relates to jointly enacted sense-making behaviors as families tell stories of shared difficult experiences. Findings indicate that interactional sense-making behaviors, in particular coherence and perspective-taking, predict important family relational qualities. This suggests that family qualities affect and are reflected in the …

Commemorating The Kent State Tragedy Through Victims’ Trauma In Television News Coverage, 1990–2000, Kristen Hoerl

Department of Communication Studies: Faculty Publications

On May 4, 1970, the Ohio National Guard fired into a crowd at Kent State University and killed four students. This essay critically interprets mainstream television journalism that commemorated the shootings in the past 18 years. Throughout this coverage, predominant framing devices depoliticized the Kent State tragedy by characterizing both former students and guard members as trauma victims. The emphasis on eyewitnesses as victims provided the basis for a therapeutic frame that promoted reconciliation rather than political redress as a rationale for commemorating the shootings. This dominant news frame tacitly advanced a model of commemorative journalism that promoted reconciliation at …

Will They See Me Coming? Do They Know I'M Running? Los Lobos And The Performance Of Mestizaje Identity Through Journey, Richard Pineda

Selected Works Temporary Series

Los Lobos’ album The Town and The City represents a lyrical narrative and performance of journey. The album’s strength and appeal is that it offers a poignant commentary on journey at time when the odyssey undertaken by immigrants to the United States are often demonized, misunderstood, or purposefully manipulated for political benefit. I argue in this essay that the Los Lobos album illustrates and complicates the performance of Chicana/o identity, mestizaje, and hybridity through the metaphor of journey. This metaphorical journey is represented as both a process and event that establishes a sense of connectivity for audiences.

Communication Privacy Management Within The Family Planning Trajectories Of Voluntarily Child-Free Couples, Wesley Durham, Dawn O. Braithwaite

Department of Communication Studies: Faculty Publications

Although the phenomenon of voluntary childlessness has garnered increased attention from researchers in a number of disciplines over the past 20 years (Connidis & McMullin, 1996; Letherby, 1998; Morrell, 1993; Park, 2002), little is known about the interaction processes that compose the family planning of couples who choose to remain child-free. In the present study, the researchers used Communication Privacy Management (Petronio, 2002) as the theoretical framework to describe the intradyadic communication processes that made up the family planning and decision making of voluntarily child-free couples. An interpretive analysis was performed on the transcripts of interviews with members of child-free …

Picture Imperfect: Re-Reading Imagery Of Aborigines In Walkabout, Mitchell Rolls

Aboriginal Policy Research Consortium International (APRCi)

The representation of Aborigines in the popular Australian magazine Walkabout has attracted the attention of a small number of scholars. For the most part their analyses draw a distinction between the portrayals of primitive natives and those of the emergent modernising Australian nation. It is argued that Aborigines appear as debased, as noble savages, or as bearers of an idealised and imagined traditional culture. These representational strategies are evident in both photo- graphs and text in Walkabout. Whilst not necessarily disagreeing with these critiques, more nuanced readings of Aboriginal photographic representation in Walkabout are possible. This article seeks to reveal …

Family Legacies: Constructing Individual And Family Identity Through Intergenerational Storytelling, Blair Thompson, Jody Koenig Kellas, Jordan Soliz, Jason Thompson, Amber Epp, Paul Schrodt

Department of Communication Studies: Faculty Publications

The current study focused on discovering the ways in which the intergenerational transmission of family legacy stories both enables and constrains individual family members’ sense of their own identities. Using semistructured interviews, 17 third-generation family members identified a multitude of both positive and negative family legacies. Both positive and negative legacies were influenced by the storytelling context. Positive legacies portrayed families as hardworking, caring, and cohesive while negative legacies were more idiosyncratic. Individual family members typically responded to their family legacies by embracing the positive and rejecting the negative. However, individuals’ responses also pointed to additional complexities in accepting or …

Communicative And Relational Dimensions Of Shared Family Identity And Relational Intentions In Mother-In-Law/Daughter-In-Law Relationships: Developing A Conceptual Model For Mother-In-Law/Daughter-In-Law Research, Christine Rittenour, Jordan Soliz

Department of Communication Studies: Faculty Publications

From the perspective of daughters-in-law (N = 190), this study examined communicative and relational factors associated with positive and negative mother-in-law/daughter-in-law relationships. A structural model tested perceptions of shared family identity as a mediator between communicative factors (supportive communication, nonaccommodation, self-disclosure), family-of-origin factors, and daughter-in-law intentions regarding caregiving and future contact with the mother-in-law. Further, open-ended responses were content analyzed to identify additional relational aspects associated with satisfying mother-in-law relationships. Results from both analyses were integrated into a conceptual model to guide future research on this relationship.

Cinematic Jujitsu: Resisting White Hegemony Through The American Dream In Spike Lee’S Malcolm X, Kristen Hoerl

Department of Communication Studies: Faculty Publications

Spike Lee’s film Malcolm X (1992) presented Malcolm X’s life story using the narrative framework of the American Dream myth central to liberal ideology. Working from Gramsci’s notion of common sense in the process of hegemony, I explain how Lee appealed to this mythic structure underlying American popular culture to give a platform to Malcolm X’s controversial ideas. By adopting a common sense narrative to tell Malcolm X’s life story, this movie functioned as a form of cinematic jujitsu that invited critical consciousness about the contradictions between liberal ideology and the life experiences of racially excluded groups. Other formal devices …

An Assessment Of Local People’S Opinions Of Community Conservation Initiatives In Relation To Livelihood Strategies In Kenya, Jill Mechtenberg

Department of Environmental Studies: Undergraduate Student Theses

Abstract This paper analyzed the changing livelihood strategies in Kenya, and their cultural impacts via a literature review. I then combined this understanding with the data I collected while in Kenya to examine the opinions local people have of community conservation initiatives, based on their changing livelihood strategies. I expected to find that the following factors would have an affect on the opinions local community members have of community conservation initiatives: livelihood strategy, gender, ethnicity, whether or not they believe the distribution of benefits coming from wildlife conservation is equitable, what issues they would like to see improved within community …

A Social Relations Model Of Everyday Talk And Relational Satisfaction In Stepfamilies, Paul Schrodt, Jordan Soliz, Dawn O. Braithwaite

Department of Communication Studies: Faculty Publications

This study examined the intrapersonal and interpersonal mechanisms underlying reported frequencies of everyday talk and relational satisfaction in stepfamilies. Participants included a parent, stepparent, and child from 114 stepfamilies (N = 342) from the Midwest and Southwest regions of the United States. Social relations model analyses revealed that everyday talk and relational satisfaction vary across stepfamily relationships as a function primarily of actor and relationship effects. Stepparents’ reports of everyday talk with the parent (i.e., their spouse) varied primarily as a function of actor effects, whereas reports of both children’s and parents’ satisfaction with the stepparent varied primarily as a …

Agenda Setting Of Arabic Related Content On German Tv: A Content Analysis On Deutsche Welle Tv Arabia, Nadine Abdel Latif Rashwan

Archived Theses and Dissertations

In today's media, international broadcasting is a tool to communicate with a world wide audience. Most of the networks, especially those that are linked with their country's government, try to use their international channels to deliver national policy or want to convey certain important factors of their home culture to nations all over the world e.g. language.

The question of broadcast content is a very controversial issue. That is why in this thesis the researcher has focused on the content of the German TV network Deutsche Welle TV Arabia in order to analyze what kind topics the channel focuses on …

Intergenerational Support And The Role Of Grandparents In Post-Divorce Families: Retrospective Accounts Of Young Adult Grandchildren, Jordan Soliz

Department of Communication Studies: Faculty Publications

The purpose of the current study was to examine grandparent support to grandchildren following the divorce of parents. Participants (N = 42) responded to questions focusing on the enactment of support and relationships with grandparents. Through these retrospective, self-report accounts, six categories of grandparent support were identified. Additionally, four barriers to grandparent sup-port emerged from the responses of the grandchildren. These categories of and barriers to intergenerational social support are discussed as they relate to characteristics and expectations of provided support in post-divorce families.

Mississippi’S Social Transformation In Public Memories Of The Trial Against Byron De La Beckwith For The Murder Of Medgar Evers, Kristen Hoerl

Department of Communication Studies: Faculty Publications

In 1994, Byron de la Beckwith was convicted for the 1963 murder of civil rights activist Medgar Evers. Journalistic coverage of the trial and the 1996 docudrama Ghosts of Mississippi crafted a social values transformation myth that depicted Beckwith as the primary villain of the civil rights past and cast his conviction as a sign that racism had been cleansed from Mississippi. Popular media naturalized this myth intertextually though narrative repetition and through symbolic cues that established the film as a source of historic understanding. These cues deflected critical attention from contemporary social conditions that have maintained racial inequity and …

An Emerging Native Language Education Framework For Reservation Public Schools With Mixed Populations, Phyllis B. Ngai

Communication Studies Faculty Publications

Currently, we lack a viable indigenous language education framework for reservation public schools with mixed Native and non-Native student populations. Can stakeholders holding different and often conflicting points of view agree to accept and nurture Native language education programs in the public school arena? In search of a workable framework that will guide language education efforts acceptable to most (if not all) stakeholders in mixed districts, the author gathered grassroots input across communities with mixed populations on the Flathead Indian Reservation in Montana. Study participants suggested approaches for dealing with existing obstacles and ways to include diverse local perspectives. The …

Capitalizing On Affect: Viagra (In)Action, Kristin A. Swenson

Scholarship and Professional Work - Communication

Recent cultural criticisms of Viagra’s advertisements and promotional materials have argued that rhetorical constructions of Viagra users reestablish a hegemonic masculinity premised on heterosexual standards of traditional gender norms (Baglia, 2005; Bordo, 2000; Loe, 2004). Cultural critics have also noted that Viagra’s promotional materials allow “for alternative readings by potential users who do not fall into the category of the ‘traditional/ideal’ Viagra user” including women and homosexual men (Mamo & Fishman, 2001, p. 14). What most criticisms fail to take into account is that Viagra, like other lifestyle drugs, does not only reestablish cultural constructs of the contemporary gendered body …

Blogging About Feminist Lnterdisciplinarity In The Study Of Communication, Language, And Gender, Cynthia Berryman-Fink, Janet Bing, Deborah Cameron, Amy Sheldon, Anita Taylor

English Faculty Publications

This article provides information about several blog posts discussed during a round-table discussion on feminist interdisciplinary studies in relation to communication, language, and gender. Topics under discussion include the nature of interdisciplinarity and its relevance to feminist studies, intercultural communication, and the study and teaching of gender in women's studies programs in higher education.