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Discourse analysis is an interdisciplinary field of inquiry that has been increasingly used by climate change communication scholars since the late 1990s. In its broadest sense, discourse analysis is the study of the social through analysis of language, including face-to-face talk, written media texts, and documents, as well as images and symbols. Studies in this field encompass a broad range of theories and analytic approaches for investigating meaning. Due to its focus on the sociocultural and political context in which text and talk occur, discourse analysis is pertinent to the concerns of climate change communication scholars as it has the potential to reveal the ideological dimensions of stakeholder beliefs and the dissemination of climate change-related information in the media. In contrast to studies under the rubric of frame analysis and survey-based analyses of public perceptions, this research places emphasis on the situated study of different stakeholders involved in climate change communication. Here attention is paid not only to the content being communicated (e.g., themes) but also to the linguistic forms and contexts that shape language and interaction. Both of these require an understanding of audiences’ cultural, political, and socioeconomic conditions. From the participatory perspective, discourse analysis can therefore illuminate the moral, ethical, and cultural dimensions of the climate change issue.

Neighborhoods are central to popular and news media portrayals of crime and theories of social control. By setting agendas and framing crime problems, news media in particular are an important part of the policy process. Media representations influence public perceptions and attitudes about crime as well as public responses to crime, which are known to vary across neighborhoods. Media representations of crime are thus likely to have important implications for the distribution of social control across neighborhoods. Media and crime literature has focused primarily on the social construction of crime by examining victim, offender, and situational characteristics of crime. Concerns about over- or underrepresentation of racial groups or genders have driven attention to these characteristics. Research finds consistently, for example, that “normal crimes” and “deserving victims” are differentially present in media accounts of crimes. In addition to the normative consequences, there are methodological reasons for taking more seriously the study of neighborhoods for the broader media and crime literature. Few studies have contributed to the understanding of neighborhood context in the study of media and crime. The findings of the research are mixed and are limited in a variety of ways, although there is evidence that disadvantaged communities and communities of color are underrepresented in news media accounts of crime. These findings confirm expectations from theories typically applied to individual characteristics. Research on the intersection of media, crime, and neighborhoods is of importance to the study of crime and social control, but can be expanded upon in a number of ways. Focusing research on qualitative differences across neighborhoods, expanding the scope of variables connected to common theoretical perspectives used in the literature, accounting for neighborhood dynamics, and drawing upon a wider array of variables connected to concepts of community power, interest group politics, and control of institutions are all recommendations for advancing this line of inquiry.

Racially demeaning representations of persons of Latin American origin, also known as Latinas/os or the more gender inclusive Latinx, as criminally inclined can be found throughout US literature—broadly defined in this article to include laws, fiction and nonfiction, news stories, as well as movie, television, and theatrical scripts. Rooted in a history of conquests, hemispheric domination, and an expansionist ideology premised on the myth of Anglo-American racial superiority, this literature promotes the idea that Latinx populations are racially alien and inferior. These depictions involve negative stereotypes depicting Latinxs as criminals. For instance, in the period following the US war against Mexico through which the United States wrested half of Mexico’s land base by 1848, popular novels about the post-conquest era typically depicted Anglo-American settler colonialists as noble and heroic, while persons of Mexican ancestry were commonly portrayed as bandidos (bandits) and denigrated as “greasers”—shiftless, deceitful criminal threats to white society. Mexican women were typecast as devious “halfbreed harlots.” Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, and Colombians and other groups of people of Latin American descent continue to be portrayed as innately criminal in novels, newspapers, movies, and other media, whether it be as greasers, pachucos, knife-wielding gang members, or drug traffickers. These abject characterizations are a recurring trope in some of the most popular and iconic works of fiction and entertainment media. Even in popular social science literature—from the controversial 1960s “culture of poverty” to the discredited 1990s “superpredators” theory—deviance, depravity, and criminality are presented as being at the core of Latinx nature and the problems their communities face. Since the late 1970s, a range of writers, scholars, activists, and organizations have sought to present a counter-discourse to these ubiquitous dehumanizing and demeaning caricatures. Often equipped with empirical data and social scientific analyses, a more accurate account of the lives of Latinx persons in relation to criminal justice issues in the United States has been emerging. These efforts notwithstanding, racist and negative narratives associating Latinxs with illicit drug cartel operations and other criminal activity endure, influencing and distorting the public discourse and the perceptions about Latinx communities in contemporary US society.

Popular culture has always displayed a fascination with topics of criminological significance. Crime, deviance, and the agencies of their control have long been a staple concern of multiple entertainment industries, and nowhere is this more pronounced than in television. From classic serialized “whodunits,” to the countless police procedurals, right up to CSI and other investigative shows, the notions of good and bad, law and order, justice and retribution (to name but a few) have never been far away from television screens across the globe. However, in recent years, the quality—along with the availability—of television shows has undergone something of a transformation. From the somewhat kitsch roots of the genre, TV crime dramas such as The Sopranos, The Wire, and Boardwalk Empire are now widely recognized as existing at the very high end of cultural significance. Put simply, these shows and others like them have moved on—they currently demonstrate a standard of production and artistic merit that their forerunners simply could not. There are good reasons why the television medium transformation occurred how and when it did, yet they are not of great concern here. What does matter is the fact that, as the standard of TV crime dramas has improved, so too has the level of attention they have received from criminologists, sociologists, and other cultural theorists interested in crime and deviance. The evolution of criminology’s relationship with media representations has—just like the representations themselves—moved at an increased pace of late. The case has been made by some scholars that the days in which representations could be understood as existing somehow separately from peoples’ social worlds are now long gone; that the line between representation and reality is now irrecoverably blurred. As such, and crucially here, this has come to mean that representations can—and indeed should—be treated as sites of knowledge and meaning in and of themselves. That is, some crime dramas are now better understood as examples of social science fiction than they are as mere television shows. The results of these concomitant developments in both the standard of broadcast television and the attention it receives from criminologists have been significant for the broader field of cultural criminology. This is primarily the case because of the ways in which the study of crime dramas can free criminology from some of its intellectual constraints. That is, the study of crime dramas as social science fiction can take intellectual inquiries in directions that—for any one of a multitude of reasons—other forms of criminological investigation do not (or cannot) go. This is not to say that representations constitute a strictly alternative understanding of crime per se (and it is certainly not to say that they constitute a superior one), but rather that they should be understood as offering complementary knowledge of criminological subjects; and moreover, and importantly here, they have the realistic capacity to reshape and redirect on-going criminological debates in new and innovative ways.

Since the 1980s, media literacy has been a central topic in the field of communication, media, and education studies as a result of a parallel growth of polarization between societal groups and use of digital technologies for self-representation. In this article, we present a brief overview of the evolvement of media literacy and other competing terms and discuss emerging approaches that incorporate issues related to the politics of difference, representations and voice of marginalised groups. Although existing concepts and projects focus on singular aspects such as representation and media production by minorities, they do not commonly integrate concerns of diversity and media literacy education from a critical and holistic perspective. Building on critical pedagogy, feminist and decolonial theory, there is a need for a more inclusive and intersectional approach to media literacy education. Such an approach should focus not only on marginalized groups but also on society as a whole, it should advocate a critical understanding of the mediated construction of reality and offer grounds to successfully challenge dominant representations, and it should equip people with the skills not only to participate and raise their own voices but also to pay more attention to practices of listening to work toward a level playing field between mainstream and marginalized groups.

Among the Eastern European nations, Romania experienced one of the harshest forms of communism that imposed an ethnically homogenous nation and gradually cut the nation off from the rest of the world. The violent revolution to overthrow the communist regime in December 1989 was widely covered by the international news media and foreign correspondents who came to report from the ground: Moving images of a backward, poor country, with disabled children abandoned in orphanages, made headlines at the time. They have shaped the first representations of postcommunist Romania in the West, generating in turn outrage and heated debates within Romanian society over the negative stereotypical image of the nation thus projected to global audiences. Competing discourses over what is representative for the Romanian nation and how it should be promoted abroad have been recurring since then in the institutional, media, commercial, and cultural public spheres. Romania’s relationship with the West has been, and continues to be, discussed particularly along the lines of how “others” (in the West) perceive and evaluate the nation. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the European Union (EU) membership in 2004 and 2007, respectively, have been constructed as symbolic victories, legitimizing the democratic transition of the nation, while its progress has constantly been evaluated in comparison with its neighbors. These have been part of nation-building efforts aimed at constructing a certain relation of difference between Romania and the other Eastern European postcommunist nations. They have added to the ongoing self-reflective identity efforts that have also included facing and dealing with uncomfortable aspects in Romania's history throughout the 20th century: ethnic homogenization, discrimination and the oppression of minoritieswere hidden before and during communism and have been marginally discussed after the fall of communism. These debates and competing discourses have influenced Romanians’ representations and perceptions of self, “others”, and their own history, amplifying their emotions of pride, inferiority complex, or shame at “belonging” to this nation and this Balkan, or Eastern European, space. The negative image of Romania has often been discussed in terms of who is to blame for generating such negative representations. Initially, it was the communists and the horrors of their regime. Then, it was the foreign media that, every now and then, subjected Romania to negative media campaigns. After 2010, it has been the politicians, sometimes the West, the millions of Romanian migrants and, especially, the Roma migrants. Romania’s postcommunist development has been constantly evaluated through the “eyes” of the West and the imperative of a better nation branding has been turned into a dominant discourse. Since the fall of Ceausescu, Romania’s negative image that needs to be corrected, the tensions between Romanians’ (self) representations and perceptions of “others,” and the constant identity negotiations after 45 years of harsh communism have been intertwined public issues and are to date recurring in public debates.