When examining diversity in mediated spheres of communication, crucial questions to be asked would be whose stories are told and through which voices, to be relevant for the widest spectrum of a society and secure an informed citizenry. Approaching questions of access and representation in media and communication, it is valuable to allow for intersecting perspectives. Instead of the binary terms associated with power relations and oppression the intersectional model references the ability of race, ethnicity, class, gender, and sexual orientation (oppressions) to mutually construct one another and ensures a broader scope of relevant representations and mediated stories. Hence it is necessary to combine knowledge from several sources, such as the Négritude movement, feminism, and queer theories. An intersectional approach proves relevant when discussing African contexts where specific historical, cultural, and economic/political contexts play together and the populations are often complex and manifold, as, for example, the Rhodes Must Fall campaign and the media coverage of athlete Caster Semenya show.
61-70 of 797 Results
Article
Race, Ethnicity, Gender, and Communication in Africa: An Intersectional Perspective
Kristin Skare Orgeret
Article
Reflection on Digital Cities
Mika Yasuoka and Toru Ishida
A global phenomenon of establishing regional information spaces in the 1990s has explored possibilities of information and communication technology for facilitating and empowering city functions such as community activities, local economy, political discourse, and public services. The experimental living lab that connected physical and digital space emerged, and such technologically empowered activities were called digital cities, community networks, virtual cities, and cyber cities. Although characteristics of such digital cities differ from region to region, these early trials of regional information spaces often have something in common: regarded as a chaotic and unstructured engineering utopia, and evaluated and emphasized heavily from a technological excellence point of view.
Looking back on the digital city activities in the early 21st century, the movements are often regarded as helping to formulate a direction of current urban digitalization and to create a solid foundation of smart city technologies that are embraced. From the digital city’s point of view, however, direct connections between the two forms of regional information spaces seem quite limited. Actors, stakeholders, and objectives and charms in the smart city largely differ from those in digital cities. In the era of smart cities, city-based information spaces become more commercialistic and political, and equivalent societal challenges in cities, which partially had emerged in digital cities, have become prominent.
By reflecting on the trajectory of advancement of digital cities, and by revisiting digital cities from the smart city era, clear differences between digital cities and smart cities become evident. Among these differences, a diversity of approaches from technological, political, and socioeconomic agendas exists with varied balance. At the same time, the ongoing social, political, and industrial challenges are comparative, have rooted, or at least have been inherited largely from those of digital cities.
Article
Rhetorical Field Methods/Rhetorical Ethnography
Roberta Chevrette, Jenna Hanchey, Michael Lechuga, Aaron Hess, and Michael K. Middleton
Rhetorical scholars have recently taken up rhetorical field methods, rhetorical ethnography, and other participatory methods to augment textual approaches. Following critical rhetoric, field researchers engage emplaced and embodied perspectives, thereby gaining an immediate understanding of rhetoric and its effects on audiences. Rhetorical field methods/ethnography challenge key assumptions and ethics about rhetorical research, including conceptions of text, context, the critic, the rhetor, and audiences. Although antecedent work at this intersection exists, only recently have rhetorical scholars given full attention to how fieldwork orientations and participatory approaches challenge the project of rhetoric. Rhetorical field methods/ethnography have been applied in a wide array of topic areas, including social movement research, public memory, environmental/ecological rhetoric, digital rhetoric, international contexts, and audience studies. Tensions that have arisen as a consequence of taking up participatory perspectives include whether such research engages in critical/cultural appropriation or can effectively be conducted within groups that researchers ideologically oppose. Moreover, incorporating participant perspectives, non-textual elements, and affective considerations opens rhetoric to forms of expression that span well beyond traditional, logos-centered criticism. Such a move may dilute rhetorical research by flattening expression, making nearly all elements of human life open for critical consideration. Finally, rhetorical field methods/ethnography have emerged in a larger context of disciplinary reflexivity, with many questioning rhetoric’s racist and colonial histories and legacies. To this end, we offer anti-colonial landmarks, orienting toward multidimensionality, liquidity, queering, and community, while disorienting from citizenship. These landmarks trouble rhetoric’s legacies, and invite scholars to engage more deeply with de/colonial possibilities of rhetorical fieldwork.
Article
Stepchild-Stepparent Relationships and Resilience
Bailey M. Oliver-Blackburn
Stepfamilies have existed throughout time and refer to families that form after re-partnering when at least one partner brings a child from a previous relationship into the new union. Stepfamilies can be complex, spanning across multiple residences, and may include full biological, half-biological, and step siblings. Although stepfamilies can be found within nearly every culture in the world, they are most prevalent in Westernized cultures such as the United States. Stepparents at one time were most likely the result of the death of a spouse or partner. However, since the 1970s, stepparents have served as an additional kin or family relationship, as remarriage is more likely to follow a divorce than bereavement. As the demographics of stepfamilies have changed over time, so has the stepparent role. Stepfamilies were originally studied for how they fall short of first-marriage, intact family outcomes, and research has well-documented the inherent challenges to stepparent-stepchild relationship development, noting the ambiguous roles, expectations, and boundaries for stepfamily interaction. Stepfamilies lack cultural models to derive these roles and expectations from and thus rely on communication to make sense of the relationships within their family unit, and to externally validate their family to outsiders. Instead of exclusively focusing on their deficits, current research looks to how stepfamilies are developmentally unique yet functional, and how communication can contribute to positive and resilient stepparent-stepchild relationships. Affinity-seeking strategies, remaining flexible in roles, and negotiating boundary and ritual changes can aid in developing positive and resilient stepparent-stepchild relationships over time.
Article
Support Seeking
Ningxin Wang, Wanming Ning, and Anran Mao
Support seeking refers to the communication process through which individuals elicit supportive actions from their social networks. Although the bulk of research on supportive communication has focused on support provision, theories and emerging evidence suggest that the support seeker may play a critical role in influencing the process of supportive exchange and the quality of support provided. Research on support seeking has addressed several key questions. First, what factors are inhibiting or driving individuals’ support-seeking behaviors? Individuals are more likely to seek support when they feel capable of doing so, and when they anticipate the benefits of seeking support to outweigh the costs of it. Gender and culture are among the most widely studied factors that affect the likelihood of support seeking. Second, what communication strategies do people employ to seek support, and how do they decide what strategies to use? The sensitive interactions systems theory serves as an important guiding framework for the conceptualizations of support-seeking behaviors. Most existing research has examined support-seeking strategies along the dimensions of direct-indirect, verbal-nonverbal, and approach-avoidant. The choice of support-seeking strategy is determined by the support seeker’s communication ability and subjective evaluation of the costs and benefits of using certain strategies. In particular, the literature has highlighted several factors that could increase perceived costs of direct support seeking and thus drive the use of indirect or avoidant support-seeking strategies, including perceived stigma of the stressor, dispositional qualities (e.g., insecure attachment style, low self-esteem), and collectivistic cultures. Last, how do different support-seeking strategies impact the outcomes of supportive interactions? There is some empirical evidence that direct support seeking, compared to indirect, avoidant means of seeking, is more effective in terms of eliciting helpful support and facilitating personal coping. Findings revealed a phenomenon called “the paradox of indirect support seeking” that describes an irony where individuals may strategically choose to seek support indirectly due to face needs or fear of rejection, yet the indirect strategies backfire, leading to the rejection and the unhelpful responses that they dread. Overall, support seeking maintains an area that attracts growing scholarly attention. There are opportunities for new insights on the message features and interactive process of support seeking.
Article
Delineating the World of eSport Motivation Measures
Andrew C. Billings, Kenon A. Brown, and Joshua R. Jackson
Understanding of esport from a communicative perspective is offered, covering the history, expansion, and operationalization of esport, while highlighting five main areas to bolster the understanding of communication-based esport scholarship. First, theories that are often used for explaining the phenomenon of esport are explored. This section gives particular deference to uses and gratifications approaches as the most-often adopted theoretical lens for investigations in the area, while also listing parasocial interaction as a common secondary focus. Other theories include the theory of reasoned action, self-determination theory, entertainment theory, and media dependency. Second, motivations for esport consumption are advanced, showing that as many as 30 (and likely more) could at least conceivably be part of the equation for the appeals of esport consumption. Third, the sociocultural elements of esport participation are extrapolated upon, particularly with an eye to disparities in participation based on biological sex, race or ethnicity, nationality, and elements of the digital divide. Fourth, formal measurements of the motives for esport media consumption are offered, highlighting areas of overlap and deviation in equal measure. Finally, the Motivation Scale for esport Spectatorship Consumption. Along with consumption measures, 13 factors are advanced, each with a trio of Likert-based statement for measurement. More specifically, these factors include (alphabetically): (a) aggressive behaviors, (b) communication, (c) escapism, (d) family gathering, (e) friend gathering, (f) information load, (g) information supremacy, (h) knowledge acquisition, (i) personal education, (j) skillful performance, (k) support, (l) vicarious achievement, and (m) wholesome environment. Collectively, these five areas summarize the current state of esport scholarship in the communication discipline while signaling various trajectories for further understanding.
Article
Ecological Rhetoric
Chris Ingraham
As the problems wrought by anthropogenic global warming have become more urgent, scholars of rhetoric have turned more than ever before toward environmental topics and ecological perspectives. These interests have influenced the contemporary study of rhetoric enough that it is now possible to identify some different yet overlapping strains of research at the nexus of ecology and rhetoric. Doing so, however, is not without ongoing contestations, including over the nature of ecological thought, expanding systems of rhetoric, environmentalisms, ecofeminisms, and critical eco-futures. Despite these challenges, rhetoric and ecology may pair so well together because each is a capacious figure of thought, capable of accommodating others.
As a way of thinking about interconnectedness in particular, “ecology” has been taken up by many scholars in diverse fields and disciplines. As a result, the ways the concept is mobilized in studies of rhetoric reflect an unruly assortment of approaches to, and understandings of, ecology, the influence of which cannot be traced to any pure or universal version of the term, because, as with “rhetoric,” no such common meaning exists. Grappling with the complex convergence of both terms might help scholars to constellate a semi-stable image of what it can mean and involve to study these topics together.
Article
Memorable Messages in Families
Haley Kranstuber Horstman, Ellen Jordan, and Jinwen Yue
Families are (one of) the first and most influential socializing agents of our lives. Among the innumerable messages family members convey to each other, a select few are regarded as “memorable.” Memorable messages are “distinct communication units considered influential over the course of a person’s life.” Those messages that are most memorable are typically brief, direct, oral messages delivered by a higher-status, older, and likable individual to the recipient during their teen or young adult years. Although memorable messages were initially regarded as having positive implications for the receiver’s life, newer research has provided space for the negative implications and perceptions of these messages. Nonverbal communication elements and relational contexts and qualities are influential to the receptivity of memorable messages. Although memorable messages often originate from a family member, the sources of memorable messages can also be friends/peers, teachers, coworkers, or, in some cases, the media. Research on memorable messages has been largely concentrated in health and interpersonal/family communication contexts; organizational and instructional contexts have also been explored. Memorable message research in families has focused much on health topics (i.e., mental health, sexual health, body image and weight), socialization (i.e., around school, work, race, other topics), and coping with hardship. In these studies, memorable messages have largely been investigated through mixed-method survey-based research, but also through purely quantitative (i.e., survey-based) and qualitative (i.e., interview) methods as well. This research has been largely atheoretical but has been grounded in control theory and, more recently, the theory of memorable messages and communicated narrative sense-making theory. Future research and practical applications of family memorable message research include informing health campaigns and family life education programming.
Article
Aging Grandparents and Grandchildren and Communication
Quinten Bernhold
Grandparents and grandchildren report their relationships with one another are meaningful in many respects, including having the opportunities to exchange affection, receive support, and learn new things from one another. Since 2000, theoretically grounded communication research on grandparent–grandchild (GP–GC) relationships has notably increased. This research has been largely centered in three theoretical domains: research using affection exchange theory (AET), communication accommodation theory (CAT), and communication theory of identity (CTI). AET is a bioevolutionary theory that holds that giving and receiving affectionate communication help facilitate viability and fertility. Consistent with this theory, grandparents have reported better mental health when they express more affectionate communication for their grandchildren, and grandchildren have reported better mental health when they receive more affectionate communication from their grandparents. Researchers can advance the study of GP–GC affectionate communication in the future by examining if affectionate communication is indirectly associated with health outcomes via certain indices of relational solidarity (e.g., shared family identity, relational closeness, perceived availability of social support).
CAT is an intergroup and interpersonal communication theory that describes the adjustments speakers make during interaction, as well as the ramifications of those adjustments for receivers. Receivers might interpret a speaker as overaccommodating them (i.e., going too far in the adjustment necessary for appropriate interaction, such as patronizing talk) or underaccommodating them (i.e., not going far enough in the adjustment necessary for appropriate interaction, such as engaging in painful self-disclosures). When grandchildren receive more overaccommodation and underaccommodation from their grandparents, they report more negative prejudicial attitudes toward older adults as a whole. Future researchers should examine how perceptions of accommodation and nonaccommodation in GP–GC relationships are associated with other types of prejudice, such as religious prejudice. Finally, the CTI posits that people hold four frames of identity: personal identity (how people internally view themselves), enacted identity (how people behave or perform their identity), relational identity (how people perceive that their relational partners view them and how people define themselves as in relationships with others), and communal identity (how large social collectives are broadly defined, such as in the mass media). These identity frames can contradict one another, creating identity gaps. Both grandchildren’s and grandparents’ identity gaps (personal-relational and personal-enacted identity gaps) have been indirectly associated with lower intentions on the part of grandchildren to provide care for their grandparents via grandchildren’s reduced communication satisfaction. Future researchers would be well served to examine identity gaps between three or four frames of identity. In sum, many insights have been generated by GP–GC communication research informed by these three theories, and there are numerous ways to continue these lines of research in the future.
Article
Animal Rhetorics
Jeremy Gordon
Before reading the essay in its entirety, readers should note that this entry about animal rhetoric is arranged thematically. More than a chronologically arranged summary, the entry attempts to outline three themes that ground theories and practices of animal rhetoric. The three themes include (a) a synthesis of how animal rhetoric has been featured in the history and myth of rhetorical studies; (b) a synthesis of how animal rhetoric has been theorized as an embodied rhetorical style that foregrounds interconnective, interdependent, and intimate relationships between humans and more-than-humans; and (c) a narrative of how animal rhetoric is inherently rooted in attention to specific ecological contexts, spaces, and places. The three themes emphasize that scholarship featuring animal rhetoric is radically interdisciplinary and maintains an ethical impulse toward more just and vibrant multispecies relations.
According to a number of animal rhetoric scholars, rhetoric has always been bestial (Theme 1, point “a”). The mythic roots of rhetoric can be seen and heard in the “classical” narrative of Korax, a raven who pollutes norms of decorum and challenges anthropocentric assumptions of “good” speech. More than mere myth, classical rhetorical practices and habits are furry, feathery, and tentacled. Octopuses and foxes play a part in teaching the cunning intelligence (metis) needed for performing rhetoric. In rhetorical histories, all manner of creaturely figures have been called on to model eloquence—making rhetoric always already a multispecies affair. Whether fabled caricatures of eloquence or Aristotelian models of intelligence, rhetorical scholars have detailed how an array of creatures jump from pages of rhetorical treatises and handbooks to interrupt anthropocentric assumptions about how meaning, identity, power, and place are constituted. Beyond presence in mythic and historical legacies of rhetoric, more-than-human animals have been situated as performing unique yet shared rhetorical styles to animate relations, arrange belonging, shape meaning, and create identity (Theme 2, point “b”). Those styles are corporeal, fleshy, and sensual. Ultimately, theories of animal style center bodily arts of rhetoric that energize, move, and delight. The senses (sight, sound, touch, smell, and more) of animal rhetoric expand the manners of rhetoric - or the ways that rhetoric can and might be performed. With feet and beaks, tooth and claw, more-than-human animal forms of rhetoric transgress assumed binaries between human and animal, nature and culture, feral and domestic, speech and noise. Animal styles of eloquence resignify presumptions of what it means to be a political, rhetorical animal. According a number of scholars, fostering intimate, caring relations between humans and animals happens in the process of learning and practicing various forms of internatural communication, such as play, howling, and walking. Finally, as animals walk, glide, slither, scurry, and slide across streets and sidewalks, they cross borders, shuffle categories, and call into question assumptions of anthropocentric perspectives of place (Theme 3, point “c”). The study and practice of animal rhetoric is contextual, intimately grounded, specific places and spaces. The styles and manners of creaturely communication are deeply emplaced and emerge in relation to biocultural surrounds. More than this, the senses and styles of animal rhetorics help constitute biocultural surrounds, raising questions about who takes part in constituting communities and shaping a public. Many of the scholars cited in this entry foreground being attentive to the emplaced contexts of animal rhetoric, as well as the politics of whose voices are deemed worthy of belonging and whose presence is marked as unwelcome, unloved, and beyond the borders of a multispecies place. Most importantly, then, attending to animal rhetoric foregrounds concerns for how to practice manners—the capacity and willingness to be responsive and affected by the calls, caws, claws, and cries that share everyday ecological, political, and economic life. Being responsive to animal rhetoric marks the practice of multispecies manners and invites possibilities for more just multispecies relations and peaceful earthly coexistence that contest settler-colonial logics, the death work of capitalism, and climate derangement.
