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Full-Text Articles in Critical and Cultural Studies

I’M Afraid Of That Water: A Collaborative Ethnography Of A West Virginia Water Crisis, Luke E. Lassiter, Brian A. Hoey, Elizabeth Campbell Mar 2020

I’M Afraid Of That Water: A Collaborative Ethnography Of A West Virginia Water Crisis, Luke E. Lassiter, Brian A. Hoey, Elizabeth Campbell

Brian A. Hoey, Ph.D.

On January 9, 2014, residents across Charleston, West Virginia, awoke to an unusual licorice smell in the air and a similar taste in the public drinking water. That evening residents were informed the tap water in tens of thousands of homes, hundreds of businesses, and dozens of schools and hospitals—the water made available to as many as 300,000 citizens in a nine-county region—had been contaminated with a chemical used for cleaning crushed coal. This book tells a particular set of stories about that chemical spill and its aftermath, an unfolding water crisis that would lead to months, even years, of …


The Alt-Right's Use Of President Donald Trump's Twitter Account As A Propaganda Device, Erin Nicole Jorden Sep 2019

The Alt-Right's Use Of President Donald Trump's Twitter Account As A Propaganda Device, Erin Nicole Jorden

Erin Jorden

The long campaign to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act situated President Donald J. Trump in a context where attacks on President Barack Obama’s signature legislation symbolized a broader repudiation of his legacy. Even more than mainstream Republican partisans, the altright blogosphere celebrated the demise of the law to symbolically cleanse the nation of Obama’s influence. Trump attempted to honor his pledge to end Obamacare in his first year of office with his support of the American Health Care Act (March 2017), Better Care Reconciliation Act (July 2017), and the Graham-Cassidy Bill (September 2017). Members of the alt-right reframed …


Sex Sells: How Advertising Agencies' Commodification Of Image Affects Older Women In Advertising, Diane Fittipaldi May 2019

Sex Sells: How Advertising Agencies' Commodification Of Image Affects Older Women In Advertising, Diane Fittipaldi

Diane Fittipaldi

The purpose of this study was to understand how advertising agency culture affects the long-term careers of women account executives as they age. The primary research questions were: 1) How do self-image and cultural stereotypes affect the decision to enter the advertising business; 2) How do women navigate the male-dominated culture of the ad agency; 3) What strategies do women use to get ahead in advertising; 4) How do women survive long term in a culture that favors youth? Qualitative data was collected via unstructured, one-on-one, in-depth interviews with a nationally sourced sample 15 female advertising account executives aged 40 …


Feed: State Transparency Amidst Informational Surplus, Mark Fenster Dec 2018

Feed: State Transparency Amidst Informational Surplus, Mark Fenster

Mark Fenster

An email arrives, promising inside information about the perfidious forces that secretly rule the nation. A Twitter feed from a prominent insider at an establishment think-tank announces the latest disclosure about the president’s secret role in the Russian conspiracy to manipulate the election that elevated him with the blast of toy cannon. Meanwhile, the President’s tweets serve to annoy, distract, humor, or comfort those who see them, and they above all announce some truth about his presidency. 

Debates about government transparency presume that the state controls an informational spigot, which can be made to allow information to flow or to …


Making On The Margins: Why Do Resource-Constrained Users Practice Frugality And Openness During Grassroots Innovation?.Pdf, Prashant Rajan Dec 2018

Making On The Margins: Why Do Resource-Constrained Users Practice Frugality And Openness During Grassroots Innovation?.Pdf, Prashant Rajan

Prashant Rajan

Interventionist human–computer interaction for development (HCI4D) research universalizes diverse non-Western sites as marginalized contexts that justify researcher involvement yet function as barriers to methodology and praxis. In contrast, reflexive HCI scholarship decenters universalizing narratives of (good) design, (for) development, and (peripheral) innovation, by valorizing user practices in rural, low-income, low-text literacy settings. Reflexive HCI has demonstrated how innovators working with advanced technologies in elite non-Western spaces of privilege produced non-Western culture and innovation in ways that resist mainstream interpretations of innovation. This study extends reflexive HCI perspectives to critique HCI4D and study innovation in marginalized settings. Findings from multisited ethnographic …


Making When Ends Don’T Meet: Articulation Work And Visibility Of Domestic Labor During Grassroots Innovation., Prashant Rajan Dec 2018

Making When Ends Don’T Meet: Articulation Work And Visibility Of Domestic Labor During Grassroots Innovation., Prashant Rajan

Prashant Rajan

Makerspaces, hackathons, and technology incubators are key emerging sites for technical communication practice and research. Yet, little is known about how resource-constrained, non-Western families practice DIY (Do It Yourself). Revisiting craft’s roots in families practicing artisanal trades, I find that the visibility of DIY innovation relies on the infrastructuring of family members who perform articulation work despite tremendous economic risk through traditional and transgressive family and gender roles and identities.


Blue-Collar Work, Career, And Success: Occupational Narratives Of Sisu, Kristen Lucas, Patrice M. Buzzanel Feb 2018

Blue-Collar Work, Career, And Success: Occupational Narratives Of Sisu, Kristen Lucas, Patrice M. Buzzanel

Kristen Lucas

This study examined underground iron ore miners’ occupational narratives to uncover how their stories socialize miners into blue-collar careers and reinforce their work identities. Through the root theme of sisu (Finnish for inner determination), underground miners create a status hierarchy that is used to construct a sense of pride around their work and to establish milestones of success for themselves and others in their workgroup. Furthermore, they communicatively construct exemplars that guide their performance and decisions during the unfolding of their work experiences. Their discourses provide alternatives to white-collar conceptualizations and practices of careers and success.


Algorithmic Legal Reasoning As Racializing Assemblage, Ezekiel J. Dixon-Román, Ama Nyame-Mensah, Allison R. Russell Dec 2017

Algorithmic Legal Reasoning As Racializing Assemblage, Ezekiel J. Dixon-Román, Ama Nyame-Mensah, Allison R. Russell

Ezekiel J Dixon-Román

This paper critically examines the use of predictive analytics in U.S. criminal justice policy and practice, with a particular focus on the ways in which these technological practices are reproducing and reinforcing structural relations of difference. Adopting a new materialist lens, which posits algorithms as more-than-human ontologies, the paper explores the process by which algorithms become racializing assemblages through their encounters with administrative data generated at various stages of criminal justice, and guided by choices made by decision makers and researchers. It addresses the following questions: In what ways do the algorithms become part of a larger sociotechnical apparatus of …


Laws Of Image: Privacy And Publicity In America, Samantha Barbas Nov 2017

Laws Of Image: Privacy And Publicity In America, Samantha Barbas

Samantha Barbas

Americans have long been obsessed with their images—their looks, public personas, and the impressions they make. This preoccupation has left its mark on the law. The twentieth century saw the creation of laws that protect your right to control your public image, to defend your image, and to feel good about your image and public presentation of self. These include the legal actions against invasion of privacy, libel, and intentional infliction of emotional distress. With these laws came the phenomenon of "personal image litigation"—individuals suing to vindicate their image rights. Laws of Image tells the story of how Americans came …


Enhancing The Epistemological Project In The Rhetoric Of Science: Information Infrastructure As Tool For Identifying Epistemological Commitments In Scientific And Technical Communities., Nathan Johnson Nov 2017

Enhancing The Epistemological Project In The Rhetoric Of Science: Information Infrastructure As Tool For Identifying Epistemological Commitments In Scientific And Technical Communities., Nathan Johnson

Nathan R. Johnson

Enhancing the Epistemological Project in the Rhetoric of Science: Information Infrastructure as Tool for Identifying Epistemological Commitments in Scientific and Technical Communities. Article discusses how the STS concept of infrastructural provides a mesolayer approach to understand global issues in science with rhetorical methodology.


Information Infrastructure As Rhetoric: Tools For Analysis, Nathan R. Johnson Nov 2017

Information Infrastructure As Rhetoric: Tools For Analysis, Nathan R. Johnson

Nathan R. Johnson

No abstract provided.


A Brief History Of Fake News, Amy Fry Mar 2017

A Brief History Of Fake News, Amy Fry

Amy Fry

Many have argued that the 2016 Presidential election was influenced by an unprecedented upsurge in “fake news,” facilitated by evolving technology and relationships with social media. Where did this subgenre of media come from, how is it promoted and consumed, and what role does it currently play in popular culture? How do “information bubbles” form and how do they influence information-sharing and beliefs? What role do institutions, from libraries to the mainstream media, play in the social life of misinformation in popular culture? In an effort to answer some of these questions, this paper will present an overview of the …


The Computational Turn In Education Research: Critical And Creative Perspectives On The Digital Data Deluge, Elizabeth De Freitas, Ezekiel J. Dixon-Román Dec 2016

The Computational Turn In Education Research: Critical And Creative Perspectives On The Digital Data Deluge, Elizabeth De Freitas, Ezekiel J. Dixon-Román

Ezekiel J Dixon-Román

In his exceptional survey of current big data methods in the social sciences, Kitchin (2014) describes the current state of affairs as a “data deluge”. Indeed, the diluvian metaphors of flood and deluge abound in our current computational culture, as we surf the dynamic surface of a seemingly inhuman quantity of data. Kitchin (2014) emphasizes the challenges and opportunities for researchers in the social sciences as they delve into this deluge. In the digital datafication of life and learning, the impact on education can already be felt, but has yet to be adequately theorized; there is a growing need for …


Regenerative Capacities: New Materialisms, Inheritance, And Biopolitical Technologies In Education Policy, Ezekiel J. Dixon-Román Dec 2016

Regenerative Capacities: New Materialisms, Inheritance, And Biopolitical Technologies In Education Policy, Ezekiel J. Dixon-Román

Ezekiel J Dixon-Román

Inheritance and social reproduction have been widely theorized and studied concepts in the social sciences. What is assumed in theories of social reproduction is a focus on social position and identity; a focus on moving from one position to another at the cost of overlooking the rich and arguably more important movement, process, and flow in between. Turning toward new materialisms for theoretical insight, this article points toward an alternative post-humanist perspective. Leaning on Massumi (2002) and Puar (2007), the author asserts that expanding the analytical focus to include the movement and process of biopolitical capacity will further sharpen the …


Horstman, Anderson, And Kuehl Doulas Health Communication 2017.Pdf, Haley Kranstuber Horstman, Jenn Anderson, Rebecca A. Kuehl Dec 2016

Horstman, Anderson, And Kuehl Doulas Health Communication 2017.Pdf, Haley Kranstuber Horstman, Jenn Anderson, Rebecca A. Kuehl

Rebecca A. Kuehl

No abstract provided.


Aboriginal Australian And Canadian First Nations Children's Literature, Angeline O'Neill Apr 2016

Aboriginal Australian And Canadian First Nations Children's Literature, Angeline O'Neill

Angeline O'Neill

In her article "Aboriginal Australian and Canadian First Nations Children's Literature" Angeline O'Neill discusses Canadian First Nations and Australian Aboriginal children's picture books and their appeal to a dual readership. Inuit traditional storyteller and writer Michael Kusugak, Nyoongar traditional storyteller and writer Lorna Little, and Wunambal elder Daisy Utemorrah are cases in point. Each appeals to Indigenous and non-Indigenous, child and adult readerships, thus challenging two assumptions in Western scholarship on literature that 1) the picture book genre is necessarily the domain of children and 2) that traditional Indigenous stories are, similarly, best suited to children. O'Neill considers the ways …


Selective Amnesia And Racial Transcendence In News Coverage Of President Obama’S Inauguration, Casey R. Kelly, Kristen Hoerl Apr 2016

Selective Amnesia And Racial Transcendence In News Coverage Of President Obama’S Inauguration, Casey R. Kelly, Kristen Hoerl

Casey R. Kelly

The mainstream press frequently characterized the election of President Barack Obama the first African American US President as the realization of Martin Luther King's dream, thus crafting a postracial narrative of national transcendence. I argue that this routine characterization of Obama's election functions as a site for the production of selective amnesia, a form of remembrance that routinely negates and silences those who would contest hegemonic narratives of national progress and unity.


Abstinence Cinema: Virginity And The Rhetoric Of Sexual Purity In Contemporary Film, Casey R. Kelly Mar 2016

Abstinence Cinema: Virginity And The Rhetoric Of Sexual Purity In Contemporary Film, Casey R. Kelly

Casey R. Kelly

Follow a decade of cinema relatively silent on virginity loss, films from the 2000s onward both reflect and help constitute American culture’s anxious preoccupation with subject. In Abstinence Cinema, Casey Ryan Kelly examines the rhetorical and political weight of films about virginity from the Twilight film series to The 40-Year-Old Virgin. This book connects the emergence of more conservative and fearful representations of sexuality with the success of the contemporary abstinence-until-marriage movement. Kelly shows how many contemporary films overinflate the personal and social value of remaining chaste, imploring audiences to think more carefully about the potentially dangerous repercussions of sexual …


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 Mar 2016

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

Guowei Jian

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 …


Lifestyle Drugs And The Neoliberal Family, Kristin Swenson Feb 2016

Lifestyle Drugs And The Neoliberal Family, Kristin Swenson

Kristin Swenson

Since 1997, advertisements for lifestyle drugs have saturated the U.S. airwaves, print media, and the Internet. Viewers are asked to see their children’s difficulty in school as attention deficit disorder, their worry as anxiety, and their flagging sex life as dysfunction. And for each disorder, there is a corresponding pharmaceutical solution. Through the lens of these advertisements, Lifestyle Drugs and the Neoliberal Family unpacks our contemporary obsession with obtaining easy solutions for difficult problems. The ads’ discourse illuminates the experience of living within a society increasingly affected by the policies of neoliberalism, one that requires us to invest and manage …


Capital, Consumption, Communication, And Citizenship: The Social Positioning Of Taste And Civic Culture In The United States, Mark Rademacher Jan 2016

Capital, Consumption, Communication, And Citizenship: The Social Positioning Of Taste And Civic Culture In The United States, Mark Rademacher

Mark A. Rademacher

In this paper, we analyze the field of cultural consumption in the United States, drawing on the methods of correspondence analysis employed by Bourdieu (1979/1984). Using the 2000 DDB Lifestyle Study, we analyze a cross section of Americans (N=3,122) in terms of their occupational categories, media usage, consumption practices, social behaviors, and indicators of civic and political engagement. In doing so, we find many parallels to the determinants of taste, cultural discrimination, and choice within the field structure observed by Bourdieu in 1960s French society, though there are also some notable differences, consistent with Peterson and Kern's (1996) concept of …


Downshifting Consumer = Upshifting Citizen?, Mark Rademacher Jan 2016

Downshifting Consumer = Upshifting Citizen?, Mark Rademacher

Mark A. Rademacher

Critics suggest that contemporary consumer culture creates over-worked and over-shopped consumers who no longer engage in civic life. We challenge this conventional criticism against consumption within an individualistic lifestyle and argue instead that consumers who are "downshifting" do engage in civic life. In particular, this research examines downshifting attitudes among members of freecycle.org, a grassroots "gift economy" community. Results of an online survey show that downshifting consumers are indeed less materialistic and brand-conscious. They also tend to practice political consumption (e.g., boycotts, buycotts). Most importantly, they tend to engage in a digital form, but not a traditional form, of civic …


Fashion And The College Transition: Liminality, Play, And The Structuring Power Of The Habitus, Mark Rademacher Jan 2016

Fashion And The College Transition: Liminality, Play, And The Structuring Power Of The Habitus, Mark Rademacher

Mark A. Rademacher

Fashion has long been a signifier of social divisions within the education system as well as society at large. This paper seeks to examine how young people’s use of fashion varies in two distinct social milieus – the high school and college peer cultures. Interviews with 19 college freshmen were conducted to ascertain how fashion contributed to, or hindered, social divisions within each milieu. While informants recognized numerous social divisions marked by fashion choices within the high school milieu, during their initial weeks on campus no social divisions were identifiable. In this new milieu it appears fashion contributed to a …


Habermas In The African E-Village: Deliberative Practices Of Diasporan Nigerians On The Internet, Farooq A. Kperogi Jan 2016

Habermas In The African E-Village: Deliberative Practices Of Diasporan Nigerians On The Internet, Farooq A. Kperogi

Farooq A. Kperogi

This chapter examines a many-to-many, collaborative, transnational, diasporic sphere of public discourse called the Nigerian Village Square, which over the years has functioned as an arena for the vigorous exchange of ideas among Nigerians both at home and in the diaspora and as a veritable locus for the initiation of online petition drives to change or influence state policies in the homeland. It is the reinvention, in an electronic form, of the deliberative content of the “village square” in the pre-colonial African social formation where “people from all corners [met] at the Village Square after a hard day's work to …


Algo-Ritmo: More-Than-Human Performative Acts And The Racializing Assemblages Of Algorithmic Architectures, Ezekiel J. Dixon-Román Dec 2015

Algo-Ritmo: More-Than-Human Performative Acts And The Racializing Assemblages Of Algorithmic Architectures, Ezekiel J. Dixon-Román

Ezekiel J Dixon-Román

What happens when more-than-human digital acts tell us something about ourselves? This article examines the ways in which the algorithms of data analytics function in relation to other ontologies and assemblages and how they are shaping and forming our lives. Beginning by critically questioning the ontology of data, data are argued to be an assemblage that is materially and discursively produced from a multiplicity of apparatuses including sociopolitical relations of power and “difference.” The concept of algo-ritmo—that is, the repetition of data with alterity—is introduced as a way of understanding how the performative acts of the “soft(ware) thinking” of algorithms …


Diffractive Possibilities: Cultural Studies And Quantification, Ezekiel J. Dixon-Román Dec 2015

Diffractive Possibilities: Cultural Studies And Quantification, Ezekiel J. Dixon-Román

Ezekiel J Dixon-Román

The belief in the methods of quantification has not been widely shared in cultural studies. On the one hand, the dominant orientation of quantitative social science research continues to hold on to positivist assumptions of objectivity and the privileged access to the “truths” of natural phenomena via the logics of mathematics. On the other hand, cultural studies has maintained a hermeneutics of suspicion toward the methods of quantification. But, to what extent does this suspicion toward quantitative inquiry compromise the deconstructive project of cultural studies by falling into the trap of the quantitative/qualitative and, related, nature/culture binaries? Building on new …


Alternative Ontologies Of Number: Rethinking The Quantitative In Computational Culture, Elizabeth De Freitas, Ezekiel J. Dixon-Román, Patti Lather Dec 2015

Alternative Ontologies Of Number: Rethinking The Quantitative In Computational Culture, Elizabeth De Freitas, Ezekiel J. Dixon-Román, Patti Lather

Ezekiel J Dixon-Román

Introduction to special issue.


Diffracting Enfolding Futures: Critical Inquiry In Quantitative Educational Research, Ezekiel J. Dixon-Román Dec 2015

Diffracting Enfolding Futures: Critical Inquiry In Quantitative Educational Research, Ezekiel J. Dixon-Román

Ezekiel J Dixon-Román

This article demonstrates an alternative ontological and epistemological approach to critical
inquiry with quantitative methods. By building on new materialists thought, the critical
possibilities of quantification are reconsidered via a diffractive methodology. By diffractively
reading through multiple sources of data the article demonstrates how to critically analyze the
multiplicity of “difference” in parenting practices. The diffracted results point toward the ways
in which parenting practices are a result of myriad forces that cannot be reduced to pathology or
deficiency but rather convey the inheritance of constraining and disenabling sociocultural and
historical conditions. Concluding remarks suggests the quantitative turn for critical …


The Digital Dionysus: Nietzsche & The Network-Centric Condition Dec 2015

The Digital Dionysus: Nietzsche & The Network-Centric Condition

Dan Mellamphy

No abstract provided.


Analyzing Interpersonal Metafunction Through Mood And Modality In Kaine Agary’S Yellow-Yellow From Critical Discourse And Womanist Perspective, Léonard A. Koussouhon, Ashani M. Dossoumou Dec 2015

Analyzing Interpersonal Metafunction Through Mood And Modality In Kaine Agary’S Yellow-Yellow From Critical Discourse And Womanist Perspective, Léonard A. Koussouhon, Ashani M. Dossoumou

Bahram Kazemian

The aim of this paper is to analyze mood, epistemic and deontic modality patterns in an extract culled from Yellow-Yellow (2006) by one of the Nigerian new millennium female writer, Kaine Agary. The findings data revealed by the interpersonal meaning analysis are discussed against the backdrop of critical discourse analysis and womanist theory. The discussion contended that, despite the blend of monologic and dialogic organization of the novel, Kaine Agary has tried to portray the sociological schisms making up the daily life of young girls in the oil-resourced region of Nigeria. More importantly, the authoress has shown women’s determination and …