Being voluntarily childless (i.e., “childfree”) is a growing trend in the United States and around the world. Although most childfree people know early in life that they do not wish to become parents, the decision to forgo having children is an ongoing process that requires childfree people to construct a life that deviates from the normative family life cycle. Increasing rates of voluntary childlessness is a trend spurred by a variety of shifting social, economic, and environmental factors. Yet despite the increasing normalcy of voluntary childlessness, childfree people (and especially childfree women) face social sanctions for deciding not to become parents, being broadly perceived more negatively than childless people (who do not have children but want them) and parents. Such sanctions include social confrontations in which others (e.g., family members) question or contest the legitimacy of their childfree identity. Media coverage of voluntary childlessness forwards the notion that motherhood and femininity are inseparable and that voluntary childlessness is an issue that primarily concerns and affects women. Furthermore, childfree people face discrimination in health care contexts when seeking voluntary sterilization and in workplace contexts when “family-friendly” policies create unequal distributions of labor for those without children. Members of the childfree community use the Internet to share resources and seek support to navigate challenging interactions with outsiders. Beyond this, although some studies have begun to interrogate the roles of geographic location, race, and sexual orientation in shaping the experience of voluntary childlessness, at present, a largely White, wealthy, able-bodied, cisgender, heteronormative, and Western view of this topic is still perpetuated in the literature.
Article
Terje Skjerdal
The ethnic aspect of Ethiopian media development can be described in four phases: During the Ethiopian empire, a lasting media policy was established reflecting Amharic hegemony. In the years of the communist Derg regime (1974–1991), cultural origin was suppressed for the sake of political control. With the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) (1991–2018), the media sector developed through emerging ethnic representation and regional self-governance. After Abiy Ahmed came to power and transformed the EPRDF into the Prosperity Party (2018–), media markets became freer and ethnic frictions surfaced.
Ethnicity transpires as an undercurrent in all of Ethiopia’s media history as well as in newsrooms. The situation is reflective of a society of more than 80 ethnic groups and a similar number of languages. The political history of the country can be read as a contestation between different regions and peoples and between ethno-nationalistic and unitarian preferences. Fault lines in the media sector can be understood in similar terms. Ethnification of the media augmented after 2018, witnessed not least by the rise of ethno-nationalistic media channels established by the returned digital diaspora. The armed conflict which broke out between the federal government and the Tigray region in 2020 amplified the ethnic discord in the media. The media in Tigray pledged allegiance to its region, while the federal media remained loyal to the central government. Various newsrooms and departments in Ethiopia news organizations appear as professional monocultures where groups among staff have a similar ethnic background. The identity question has gained little attention in Ethiopian media analysis, but recent studies have put the issue on the research agenda.
Article
Keren Eyal
Over the last 3 decades, content analyses have documented large amounts of sexual content in mainstream entertainment media, on television and streaming services as well as in films, music, and video games. Most sexual content is conveyed through conversations about sex and, to a somewhat lesser extent, through the portrayal of sexual behaviors, primarily passionate kissing and suggestive actions. Attitudes—evaluations linking attributes to objects—are often presented in the media and may also be the outcomes of media exposure to sexual content. In the context of sexuality, some commonly studied attitudes include attitudes toward casual or extrarelational sexual encounters, attitudes toward contraception use, and attitudes toward sexual abuse or the acceptance of rape myths. Among the most prominent theoretical perspectives examining the links between media exposure and audience outcomes are theories of script building and activation, theories of a worldview cultivation, and theories of cognitive learning of social behaviors, and the attitudes and emotions that underlie them.
Sexual attitudes can be conveyed through mainstream entertainment media content in diverse ways. First, the mere presence of certain topics in the content (e.g., casual sexual encounters) might convey an attitude about the behavior’s importance and relevance to people’s lives. At times, such inclusive depictions can empower audience members. The opposite—the exclusion of certain sexual topics from media content (e.g., sexual minority characters) might undermine the serious attitude with which they should be addressed. Second, attitudes may be conveyed through the focus placed upon them in the mediated content. Sexual health, recognized as intrinsically associated with sexual behaviors in the real world, is largely missing from media depictions. The rise in the prevalence of sexual crime storylines, especially in television law-and-order crime drama series, has introduced diversity in the attitudes conveyed toward this topic in the media. Sexual consent is another topic that has received more attention in entertainment media in the last couple of decades; the attitudes most commonly depicted about sexual consent seem to be the minimization of its importance through the portrayal of either altogether absent or implicit and nonverbal consent cues. Third, sexual attitudes in mainstream entertainment content may be depicted through the portrayal of consequences of sexual references and behaviors and through the depiction of the emotions associated with them. Research finds that portrayals of sexual consequences are relatively rare in entertainment narratives but when present, they tend to focus on the emotional and negative outcomes of sex. Fourth, sexual attitudes are often depicted in the media in the context of humor. Humor in its many forms may communicate a lighthearted, discomfort-easing attitude toward sex, but it might also trivialize the behavior and endorse a less serious attitude toward the decisions it entails. Finally, sexual attitudes are often depicted through stereotypes in media content. Common stereotypes in entertainment media include the narrow and biased presentation of sexual minority characters, which tends to marginalize their sexuality and support a heteronormative attitude. Other stereotypes include sexual gender roles and the sexualization of female characters, both communicating demeaning and nonvalidating attitudes toward women and their sexuality.
Article
John Oddo
Propaganda was first identified as a public crisis following World War I, as citizens discovered that their own governments had subjected them to deception and emotional manipulation. Today, it seems no less disturbing. Accusations swirl decrying fake news, spin, active measures, and, again, propaganda. But with nearly every accusation there is also a denial and, more important, a counteraccusation: that propaganda is merely a label applied to messages one dislikes, a slippery word that says more about the accuser’s politics than it does about supposed defects in communication.
The slipperiness surrounding propaganda has fascinated scholars for over a century, as they have grappled with whether and how it can be distinguished from other kinds of rhetoric. One crucial sticking point concerns propaganda’s means of persuasion. It is commonly supposed that propaganda relies on falsity, emotion, and irrational appeals. However, adjudicating what is true and reasonable is not as clear-cut as it may seem, and much work attempts to differentiate manipulation from legitimate persuasion. Another key concern is the morality of propaganda. Some theorize that it is intrinsically wrong because it seeks its own partisan agenda. But others argue that partisanship is characteristic of all advocacy, and they wonder whether propaganda can and should be employed for worthy democratic purposes. Finally, scholars propose different models for how propaganda works. One model features a propagandist who deliberately targets a passive audience and attempts to move them for selfish ends. But other models see propaganda as a more collective activity, something that audiences pass around to each other, either purposefully or without any design. Difficult as it is to define propaganda, however, scholars do agree on two things: It is enormously powerful, and it shows no signs of slowing down.
Article
Srividya Ramasubramanian, Emily Riewestahl, and Anthony Ramirez
There is a long history of scholarship documenting the prevalence of racial and ethnic stereotypes in media and popular culture. This body of literature demonstrates that media stereotypes have changed over time across specific racial/ethnic groups, media formats, and genres. Historically, the bulk of this research has focused on representations in the U.S. mainstream media and on representations of African Americans in popular media. In the last few decades, media scholars have also examined media stereotypes associated with Indigenous groups, Latino/a/x populations, Arabs, Asians, and Pacific Islanders. Recent work has gone beyond traditional media such as television and films to also examine other types of media content such as video games, microblogging sites such as Twitter, and media sharing sites such as YouTube. Emerging research addresses racial biases in AI, algorithms, and media technologies through computational methods and data sciences.
Despite individual variations across groups and media types, the underlying social psychological mechanisms of how, why, and under what circumstances these stereotypes influence audiences has been theorized more broadly. Cultivation, social identity theory, priming, framing, social cognitive theory, and exemplification are popular theoretical perspectives used within media stereotyping literature. Several experimental studies have examined the effects of mediated racial/ethnic stereotypes on individual users’ attitudes, beliefs, feelings, and behaviors. The lion’s share of these studies has demonstrated that negative stereotypes shape majority audiences’ real-world stereotypical perceptions, social judgments, intergroup emotions, and even public policy opinions. More important, media stereotypes can have negative effects on communities of color by affecting their self-concept, self-esteem, and collective identity in adverse ways. Recent studies have also parsed out the differences between positive and negative stereotypes. They demonstrate that even so-called positive stereotypes often have harmful effects on marginalized groups.
Media scholars are increasingly interested in practical solutions to address media stereotypes. For instance, one content-based strategy has been to study the effects of counter-stereotypic portrayals that challenge stereotypes by presenting stereotype-disconfirming information. Other related measures are encouraging positive role models, implementing media literacy education, and supporting alternative media spaces that are more racially inclusive. The recent scholarship suggests that it is important to be intentional about centering social change, amplifying the voices of marginalized groups, and working toward reducing systemic racism in the media industry and research.
Article
Santiago Fouz Hernández
LGBTQ+ lives in Spain have experienced drastic changes since the days of the Franco dictatorship. Then, laws were made to prosecute and incarcerate queers. Now, Spain enjoys one of the most comprehensive legal frameworks to protect LGBTQ+ rights. Spanish cinema, in part, reflects this evolution. Heavy censorship made representation of LGBTQ+ characters almost impossible during Franco, although in the early years crusade films created homosocial scenarios which could be read against the grain. In late Francoism and in the early years of the transition visibility was very rare and would typically involve damaging stereotypes of gay men in degrading comedies or oversexed lesbian vamps in exploitative horror films. After the abolition of censorship in 1978, filmmakers including Ventura Pons, Pedro Almodóvar or Eloy De la Iglesia made considerable headway in normalizing the presence of queer lives and stories on the Spanish screen. Growing (but vulnerable) levels of social acceptance and visibility in the last three decades or so have made LGBTQ+ characters and stories increasingly more visible. The 1990s saw the proliferation of films set in the then emerging “gay villages” in major urban centers, especially Madrid’s Chueca. In the 2000s, legal advances such as same-sex marriage or the right to adopt led to more romantic comedies and some melodramas dealing with these issues (weddings, families, and so on). More recently there is a greater diversification of spaces, characters, and stories, including immigration and trans issues. New generations of queer creators have found considerable domestic and international success in streaming services, with representation becoming much more explicit and noticeably more complex and diverse.
Article
Adelaide McGinity-Peebles
In the post-Soviet era, ethnocultural identity and nationhood have been dominant themes in the cinemas of Kazakhstan and the Sakha Republic (officially known as the Republic of Sakha, or Yakutia). Despite their different sociopolitical contexts (unlike the Sakha Republic, which remains a federal republic within the Russian Federation, Kazakhstan has been an independent nation for 30 years), both were colonies within the Russian Empire and were later subjected to Soviet rule. Furthermore, both cinemas are keen to project their visions of collective identity to local, national, and global audiences. Sakha cinema seeks to consolidate and promote an ethnocultural Sakha identity against the encroaching presence of Russian culture in the republic, resulting in the manifest absence of Russian culture within its films. The growth, promotion, and success of Sakha art house cinema (which focuses on Sakha history, customs, and folklore) in recent years is a central part of its strategy to appeal to global audiences, allowing it to bypass the national (i.e., Russia), both offscreen and onscreen. Debates around post-Soviet nationhood remain an important aspect of the political discourse in Kazakhstan, which is reflected in the country’s cinema. Despite operating within an authoritarian regime, cinema remains one of the few areas in which sociopolitical discord can be articulated in Kazakhstan. Nation-building narratives have centered around Kazakhstan’s pre-imperial history and the Kazakh steppe, and these have likewise been a preoccupation of state-sponsored cinema and its alternative since the 2000s. While Russia is not such an overt “other” in Kazakh cinema as it is in Sakha film, the fact that debates around post-Soviet Kazakh nationhood and society continue to dominate Kazakh cinema three decades since the collapse of the Soviet Union suggests that its colonial past nonetheless remains a significant context against which the Kazakh nation is imagined.
Article
Mark Pedelty and Elja Roy
This article is about making media as a method for studying media, specifically focusing on film. Production-based methodologies can be particularly revelatory, especially when it comes to better understanding aspects of media production that might not be accessible via textual methods and audience ethnography alone. Scholars in communication studies, media sociology, media anthropology, media literacy pedagogy, and film studies have argued that a praxis combining media production and reflexive analysis can help us to better understand “backstage” realities that are less accessible to textual analysis and audience research methodologies. Who or what “authors” a film? Working as a scholar–producer can usefully complicate notions of authorship in the field of media studies, moving the field from an implicit auteur model (the media “text” as “authored”) to more complex understandings of the collective and institutional processes involved in most filmmaking, and in media production more broadly. Production-oriented methods are advancing as new media scholars, accustomed to making media, enter the academy.
Article
John Sinclair
The term cultural industries was first coined in the 1980s as a comprehensive means to understand production, distribution, and consumption in the traditional information and entertainment industries—press, radio, and television—and others such as film and recorded music. Closely related industries, such as advertising, marketing, and public relations, were also included. With the subsequent popular embrace and commercialization of the internet, especially the social media platforms, the concept was necessarily expanded to incorporate such “new” media of the digital age. The relevance of these cultural industries for racial and ethnic groups living within the nations of the developed world is significant in at least two contexts: national and transnational.
Within the frame of the nation, the issues concern the status of these groups as minorities; and in a global perspective, the groups come to be seen as members of transnational communities, with ties both to a putative nation of origin and to their counterparts in other nations. Most theoretical and research attention has focused on media representations—that is, on how racial and ethnic minorities are portrayed in the content of the cultural industries’ outputs, seen both in a national context, such as the perpetuation of stereotypes in news and television series, and globally, as in film. Yet such a focus on representations tends to position minorities as passive victims of the media. Less common is research in which minorities are viewed as active agents producing their own information and entertainment, as they do, with local, national, and even transnational distribution.
Minorities’ own media can range from local community radio to globally available television channels and internet platforms serving vast diasporas, the largest of these being those of non-resident Indians (NRIs) and the Chinese-speaking world (the “Sinosphere”). Each of these provides a case in which the industrial structure of the huge home media market provides the basis for far-flung consumption in all those countries in which members of the respective ethnicities have settled. In situations in which they attain a certain critical mass, such racial and ethnic minorities form a market for the cultural industries and consumer goods industries more broadly.
Also to be taken into account is the phenomenon of racial and ethnic minorities having an impact on the cultural industries of the dominant cultures of the nations in which they dwell. The most striking case in that regard is how African American popular music made the profound cross-over from segregated radio stations and live venues to infuse the commercial mainstream of music recording and performance in the United States and, ultimately, the world. Although such creativity is valued, there remains a diversity issue about the actual participation of racial and other minorities in executive, management, and production roles in the major cultural industries.
Article
Erica Scharrer and Yuxi Zhou
Media literacy refers to the ability to interact with media from a position of active inquiry, carefully considering media texts, the forces and factors that shape those texts, and the ways in which audiences interpret the texts or otherwise respond. Media access, use, creation, analysis, and evaluation skills are considered essential for citizenship in the contemporary world. Media literacy education encompasses efforts to advance media literacy within a group of individuals and spur their motivation to apply media literacy skills and perspectives in interactions with media. Yet, there are barriers that impede the widespread adoption of media literacy education in various global locations. There is disparity, for instance, in the degree to which local, regional, or national policies support media literacy education in schools as well as in the training, funding, or other resources available to educators.
Considerable variability in the assumptions and objectives that scholars and practitioners bring to media literacy education has been identified. Some of that variability reflects differing emphases in Communication and Media Studies paradigms including whether media literacy education should be considered as a means of protecting children and adolescents from the potential for negative effects of media. Sometimes positioned as an alternative to a more protectionist approach, media literacy education can be viewed as a platform from which to encourage young people’s creative self-expression and to emphasize their (and others’) agency rather than vulnerability. The ways in which media literacy education is carried out and how and what is assessed to determine what such education can achieve differs, as well. In spite of these differences, there are overarching commonalities in media literacy conceptualization and empirical evidence that media literacy education can build skills necessary for citizenship in an increasingly media- and information-rich world.
