Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Ethnicity in Communication Commons^™

“I Matter”: Analyzing Self-Care, Racial Performativity, And Podcasting*, Molly Shilo

Proceedings of the New York State Communication Association

The term “self-care” has recently entered pop culture through women’s magazines, feminist blogs, social media and other digital spaces. While the rhetoric has largely been about white, heterosexual, middle-to-upper class women, many Black feminists have politicized self-care and self-love as a form of resistance against a world that continuously negates their existence and humanity. The contemporary self-care movement has its roots in the Black feminist thought’s love-politics and scholar-activists Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, and Kimberlé Crenshaw. Continuing in this Black feminist tradition, Heben Nigatu and Tracy Clayton create a digital auditory enclave with their podcast Another Round where they openly …

Strategies Exemplary Social Studies Teachers’ Implement When Facilitating Discussions About Race, Candice Nicole Jasmer

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Teachers experience difficulty in introducing some sensitive and controversial issues in the classroom environment. The purpose of this qualitative instrumental case study was to identify strategies that exemplary secondary social studies teachers implement when facilitating classroom discussions about sensitive and controversial issues, specifically, racial issues framed within Singleton and Linton’s 4 agreements of courageous conversations: stay engaged, speak your truth, experience discomfort, and accept and expect nonclosure. This study utilized qualitative data collection. Semi-structured, online one-to-one internet-based interviews were used to document the lived experiences of exemplary secondary social studies teachers and the strategies they use when facilitating discussions about …

Does This Grant Them Agency? An Analysis Of The Female Athlete As Portrayed In Espn's Body Issue, Aubri Mckoy

Senior Independent Study Theses

Since 2009, one of the world’s largest and most circulated sports mediums, ESPN, has been publishing an annual nude magazine. Formerly known as ESPN’s Body Issue, this magazine seeks to highlight aesthetics of the athletic form, as well as the power of testimony told through the inhabited bodies of the magazine’s featured athletes. Over the years, the magazine has featured many identities, including the representation of varying races, genders, body types, physical abilities, and sports. This study particularly examines the representation of a Black woman athlete, Tori Bowie, as featured in the magazine’s tenth edition. Furthermore, this study focuses on …

The Cultivation Theory And Reality Television: An Old Theory With A Modern Twist, Jeffrey Weiss

Capstone Showcase

George Gerbner, a Hungarian-born professor of communication, founded the cultivation theory, one of the most popular and regarded theories in the communications world. Developed in the mid 20th century, the theory focus on the long-term effects of television on people. Longer exposure to signs, images and people on television cultivates their perception of reality in the real world. The television became a household staple during this time. Families often spent time together watching programming together, however, it played out different effects for each person. Television's constant visual and auditory stimulation on a person made it easier to cultivate certain messages, …

The Prison-Televisual Complex, Allison Page, Laurie Ouellette

Communication & Theatre Arts Faculty Publications

In 2016, the A&E cable network partnered with the Clark County Jail in Jeffersonville, Indiana, to incarcerate seven volunteers as undercover prisoners for two months. This article takes the reality television franchise 60 Days In as a case study for analyzing the convergence of prison and television, and the rise of what we call the prison-televisual complex in the United States, which denotes the imbrication of the prison system with the television industry, not simply television as an ideological apparatus. 60 Days In represents an entanglement between punishment and the culture industries, whereby carceral logics flow into the business and …

Chitown Loves Youhip Hop’S Alternative Spatializing Narratives And Activism To Trump’S Hatefulcampaign Rhetoric About Chicago, George Villanueva

School of Communication: Faculty Publications and Other Works

Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign rhetoric about violence in Chicago spatialized a narrative that branded the city as the poster child of urban disarray. His bombast lacked any contextual understanding of the issue and offered no productive pathways for collective solutions. Alternatively, I argue in this paper that a rising collection of Chicago hip hop artists were producing musical discourses in 2016 that not only challenged Trump’s negative rants, but also spatialized a multilayered narrative of the intersections between hip hop and activism in the city. Through textual analysis of three tracks from three breakout artists in 2016, my goal …

The Affective Politics Of Twitter, Johnathan C. Flowers

Computer Ethics - Philosophical Enquiry (CEPE) Proceedings

Given the increasing encroachment of Twitter into offline experience, it has become necessary to look beyond the formation of identity in online spaces to the ways in which identities surface through the formation of affective communities organized through the use of technocultural assemblages, or the platforms, algorithms, and digital networks through which affect circulates in an online space. This essay focuses on the microblogging website Twitter as one such technocultural assemblage whose hashtag functionality allows for the circulation of affect among bodies which “surface” within the affective communities organized on Twitter through their alignment with and orientation by hashtags which …

Black Body Memory: A Philosophy Of The Talk, Autumn Redcross

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This project offers the term Black body memory to point toward the threatened existential disposition of Black people in society today. Moreover, Black body memory points to the narrative paradigm of a shared experience. While popular conceptions theorize race as a social construction, the lived reality of Black people is frequently imbued by racialization and racism. Black body memory emerges from the intersection of the Black body articulated by Franz Fanon, Charles Johnson, and George Yancy, among others, and body memory, as described by Edward Casey and Thomas Fuchs. Black body memory is a culturally-laden and sedimented lived reality. The …

Delicate Moments: Kids Talk About Socially Complicated Issues

Occasional Paper Series

The author offers an analysis of the failures and insights she experienced working with adolescents at a progressive school while discussing how the students understood and experienced race and identity -- their own and that of others. While she encountered students who were willing to take her into their worlds, her efforts fell flat when her questions turned out to be about their experiences of race and class. In response to such questions, Bauman received, on the whole, confusion, a few stories that distanced the teller from the events, and queries about whether this was "what she wanted." At that …

Hybrid Media Activism: Ecologies, Imaginaries, Algorithms, Dorothy Kidd

Media Studies

Review of Treré, Emiliano. Hybrid Media Activism: Ecologies, Imaginaries, Algorithms. New York and London: Routledge. ISBN: 978-1-138-21814-7.

Deconstructing Media In The College Classroom: A Longitudinal Critical Media Literacy Intervention, Andrea M. Bergstrom, Mark Flynn, Clay Craig

Journal of Media Literacy Education

While many studies have addressed the impact of media literacy interventions on knowledge of specific topic areas, few have explored improvements in media literacy skills as outcome measures. This study analyzed the impact of a media literacy intervention on participants’ critical thinking skills and understanding of media literacy principles by addressing the topics of body image and media representations of gender and race. A two-group, longitudinal experimental design was implemented using college-aged student participants across multiple course sections (n = 198) at a public university in the southeast. Results were significant for several media literacy measures for the treatment …

The Media Effect And The Implications For Racial Minority Groups, Hailey E. Hoffman

Student Publications

The Media Effects Theory explains the impact media exposure can have on both the individual and societal level. Recent studies have shown that the increase in media consumption influences the perceptions an individual develops about their self and of other groups. The attitudes individuals develop become more susceptible to media influence when they are given smart technology starting in early childhood. The lack of diversity and negative stereotypes portrayed within the media magnifies the media effect experienced by minority users. The news, entertainment, fashion, and beauty industries are areas of the media that society has become particularly fixed on. These …

Local Vs. National: How Twitter Reflects News Coverage Of Colin Kaepernick Protests, Jared Paul Joseph

LSU Master's Theses

Local and national media dedicate different levels of coverage to issues depending on its relevancy to their audiences. This study uses news outlets’ social media activity to show that coverage discrepancies occurred with former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s National Anthem protest. Because his protest reached national headlines, Kaepernick suffered the same fate of many protesting athletes in the past. This study will show how national media carried his story to national headlines and framed his protest negatively. The findings show that local media were the least active among the three media levels, local, regional and national, in covering the Kaepernick …

“All Of Our Skinfolk Ain’T Our Kinfolk;” A Triangulation Study Of The Impact Of Black Racial Identity On The Discourse Of Media Practitioners’ Coverage Of Social Justice, Political And Celebrity News, Gheni Nicole Platenburg

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Since its inception, in 1827, the black press worked to “plead [its] own cause.”[i] Following the 1968 Kerner Commission report, white newsrooms desegregated, and the number of black newsrooms sharply declined. Black journalists transitioning to the white press faced new editorial and psychological challenges.

Today’s black press functions as a shell of its former self, creating a vacancy for media that represent the needs and interests of the black community. Mainstream cable news programs possibly provide a solution to this void -- black journalists and pundits. Using a triangulation approach, this dissertation explores this possibility by examining the impact …

Hbo Series Girls And Insecure’S Depiction Of Race And Gender, Kimberley Peterson

Honors College Theses

In this research study the identification and representation of race and gender were looked at in the primetime HBO television series Insecure and Girls. The characters that were analyzed in two episodes were the young black women of Insecure and in two episodes the young white women in Girls. The method for this study was conducted using content analysis to identify the following variables focusing on identity, racial stereotypes and names used to address one another. Additionally, variables to identify gender included emotional approaches to situations, stereotypes and gender role expectations. The comprehensive findings revealed through similarities and differences …

Toward A Theology Of Transformation: Destroying The Sycamore Tree Of White Supremacy, Hannah Kathleen Griggs

Celebration of Learning

Black liberation theologians come to terms with white supremacy by collectively remembering the story of the Exodus and Jesus' crucifixion--affirming God's preference for freedom and in-the-world salvation. The particular history of white American Christianity requires a different story to provide the foundation for our social memory. As white American Christians, we have certain blind spots—blind spots created by historical and social privileges that have given white people unequal access to power and resources. The story of Zacchaeus has the potential to help reframe white Christianity’s conception of race relations in the United States, shifting from a reconciliation paradigm to a …

Political Affiliation And White Privilege: The Effect Of Exposure To Symbols Of Political Affiliation And Race On Perceptions Of White Privilege And Anti-Black Discrimination, Hannah Knechel

Undergraduate Theses and Capstone Projects

This thesis explored the effects of exposure to different political affiliations and races on participants’ perceptions of white privilege and anti-black discrimination. Current research has studied the effects of race, framing, and guilt on the acknowledgement of white privilege, but none have explored how political affiliation can affect these perceptions. If simple exposure to these symbols of political affiliation can alter the perceptions of those exposed, perhaps the results of this study could be used to bring about awareness and ease political tensions. Participants were placed in one of six groups consisting of either a white or black experimenter wearing …

Partners In Research And In Life, Sarah Asp Olson

Frontiers

Married Communication Studies professors team up to understand race, expression and what it means to belong.

Whither The Gender Of Get Out: A Critique Of The Cinematic (Im)Possibilities Of The Black Political Imagination, Daelena Tinnin

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis investigates the entanglements of spatialized racial-sexual violence, conceptualizations of black female subjectivity, questions of the limitations and excesses of media representations and the socioeconomic, cultural and spatiotemptoral relations that make black images visible and (im) possible as they are situated in the cinematic black political imagination. Through a materialist media analysis of the 2017 film Get Out, I argue that the film and its articulation of the afterlife of slavery fails to account for gender by tangentially engaging black women in its dissection of race and racism. I contend that black women are the absent presence in …

Racial Identities On Social Media: Projecting Racial Identities On Facebook, Instagram, And Twitter, Nolan Brinkman

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

Because social networks are an important aspect of the lived realities of those who participate in them, this study examined the way racial identity was signified, indicated, or displayed on social networks. A survey was distributed to 347 college students from a medium sized Midwestern university to assess ways in which participants depicted their racial identity on social media. The study looked at the use of photos, textual communication, concealment of racial identity, and interactions with race related content to assess how participants projected racial identity on social networks. Results suggested that racial identity is not intentionally projected on social …

To Pass Or Not To Pass? Constructing And Negotiating Biracial Identity, Anthony Peavy

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

The purpose of this research is to show how biracial people narrate their identities and how people in society influence biracial individuals' constructions of their self. This is significant because this research obtains perspectives from individuals who simultaneously occupy a privileged and underprivileged identity. In highlighting the experiences of biracial people and their constructions of the self, this research answered questions surrounding how they perform their identities in social situations and how they negotiate passing privileges granted to some based on visual perceptions and/or skin tone.

This research was done using qualitative research methodologies, as these give more insights into …

Gettysburg Social Sciences Review Fall 2017

Gettysburg Social Sciences Review

No abstract provided.

Course Syllabus (Su17) Coli 331: “‘World-Traveling’: Alterity And Liminality In Spike Lee’S Do The Right Thing And Amiri Baraka’S Dutchman”, Christopher Southward

Comparative Literature Faculty and Student Scholarship

Course Description:

This semester, we’ll view Spike Lee’s 1989 Do the Right Thing and Shirley Knight’s 1966 cinematic production of Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman through the critical lenses of Maria Lugones’ notions of ‘worlds’ and ‘world-traveling,’[1] which she develops in Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition against Multiple Oppressions. Our task is to analyze a number of the problematics addressed in these visual works as discernible ‘world(s)’ of meaning and experience constituted by the libidinous investments, concrete practices, and ideological convictions of the human subjects who bear and circulate them.

[1] Maria Lugones, Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition against Multiple Oppressions, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, …

Black Models Matter: Challenging The Racism Of Aesthetics And The Facade Of Inclusion In The Fashion Industry, Scarlett L. Newman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The global fashion market is expanding every day, but often, the global fashion runways do not reflect that reality. On average, black models make up for six percent of models used on the runway during the fashion month calendar. This small percentage is also mirrored in advertisements and editorials featured in popular fashion magazines. In the 1970s, black models were met with great opportunities, and that success trickled down into the 1980s and the 1990s. As the 90s came to a close, top designers opted for an aesthetic that ultimately excluded models of color, but black models beared the brunt …

'You Become A Rock': Conceptions Of Motherhood And Lessons Of Race As Told And Photographed By Four Mothers From Cape Town, South Africa, Kaitlin Abrams

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

This study will discuss conceptions of motherhood and lessons of racial identity through the lens of four women from Cape Town, South Africa. Utilizing both semi-structured interviews and photovoice, stories of motherhood are told as a journey from childhood to adulthood, in which one’s experience of being mothered influences decisions in current motherhood. In interviews, mothers pinpoint conceptions of good motherhood that encompass both financial support for one’s children and attentiveness, informed mostly by one’s race and class background. Additionally, experiences surrounding discrimination and silencing in childhood differ between races, later informing the way that mothers chose to share lessons …

Diversifying The Stem Education To Career Pipeline, Adrienne Coleman

Publications & Research

This webinar will provide participants with the results of the Diversifying STEM Think Tank and provide strategies to enhance diversity in the STEM Education to Career Pipeline. It will further focus on the motivation of Black and Latino students to engage in STEM. With an understanding of strategies to diversify, matriculation to higher education may improve, STEM engagement may be enhanced, and visibility in STEM careers may increase. Diversifying the STEM fields may indirectly impact the socioeconomic status of these communities with opportunities to increase their earning potential, have more consistent employment, and obtain leadership positions; while enhancing the industry …

Perceived Benefits And Challenges Of A Multiethnic-Racial Identity: Insight From Adults With Mixed Heritage, Jordan Soliz, Sierra Cronan, Gretchen Bergquist, Audra K. Nuru, Christine E. Rittenour

Department of Communication Studies: Faculty Publications

The purpose of this inquiry was to explore the lived experiences of multiethnic-racial individuals (i.e., individuals with parents from different ethnic-racial groups). In-depth interviews were conducted with 29 adults from the United States with mixed ethnic-racial backgrounds ranging in age from 18 to 52 (female n = 20, male n = 9). We identified a number of themes related to perceived benefits (e.g., pluralistic world views, stronger sense of self) and challenges (e.g., identity tensions, communal concerns) of having a mixed heritage. Findings are discussed in terms of four considerations for ethnic-racial identity of individuals with mixed ethnic-racial backgrounds: emphasizing …

Experiences Of Credibility: Female Instructors Of Color At Faith Based Universities, Jamilah L. Spears

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Research shows that the credibility of instructors of color is often questioned by White students, while other studies prove that male instructors are also perceived as more credible than female instructors (Hendrix, 1997; Perry, Moore, Edwards, Acosta, & Frey, 2009). When these two findings are coupled, it seems that there might be a significant barrier to overcome for female instructors of color in their everyday instruction. The purpose of this phenomenological study was to explore perceived credibility for female instructors of color at faith-based universities, namely, Evangelical Christian universities. Based on my analysis of the interview data, these six female …

(Re)Positioning Black: Negotiating Racial Subjectivities In White Discursively Constructed Spaces, Elisa Davidson

Masters Theses, 2010-2019

This thesis is both a personal and social inquiry of the experience of Black students at a predominantly white university. Within this inquiry, I extend Nakayama and Krizek's (1995) concept of whiteness as having "no true essence" to conceptualizations of blackness to assert that blackness is “a pattern of negotiation that takes place in conditions generated by specific discursive formations and social relations” (McLaren, 1999, pg. 40) rather than a fixed, essential category. Viewing blackness as encounter means that it is emergent through specific social and discursive conditions that are constantly constructed and negotiated through interactions with whiteness. I approach …

Investigating The Intersection Of Whiteness And Racial Allies, Tyler Rife

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Through a critical qualitative approach, four focus groups of exclusively white or non-white participants were conducted in order to discover the ways in which individuals enact and navigate whiteness in discussions of racial allies. Further, this study attempted to capture how white and non-white individuals may differ in their approach to this subject matter and in their recommendations for racial allies. Findings revealed that eight themes defined these interactions: “Whiteness”, “Experience & Voice”, “Whitewashing Advocacy”, “Polite Protest”, “(Dis)Comfort”, “White Fragility”, and “The Complexity of Allyship”. The study finds that while whiteness is frequently perpetuated throughout this dialogue and white and …