Audio: The Movie [DVD]. York,PA: Tracer Technologies, 2006

NPR analyst Juan Williams appeared on The O'Reilly Factor and said that he gets “worried” and “nervous” when he sees people in Muslim dress on airplanes. Two days later NPR fired Williams and the day after that Williams issued a serious accusation against NPR: “I was fired for telling the truth.” Criticism of NPR mounted—arising particularly from conservative commentators—and CEO Vivian Schiller disseminated a statement defending her organization. This essay applies the theory of image repair discourse to NPR's CEO Vivian Schiller's apology for firing Williams. Two accusations were in play and they prompted two distinct defenses: Her reaction to accusations that NPR had not followed appropriate procedures for termination Williams employed the strategies of mortification and corrective action and her defense of the firing itself used transcendence, bolstering, and attack accuser. This essay evaluates this defense as a poor example of image repair.     

Taking Care of Authenticity on the CBC’s Randy’s Vinyl Tap

This essay explores the radio program Randy’s Vinyl Tap, which is hosted by Randy Bachman and airs on CBC Radio 1 (2005-present). I argue that the show’s complex reception can be explained, in part, by the fact that it transgresses dominant conceptions of authenticity in both rock music and public broadcasting discourses. Drawing on the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, I explore ways in which Bachman evokes a “carnivalesque” approach to public communication.     

“New Conformism Redux”

To assess future priorities for cultural studies, this essay returns to the later writings of Raymond Williams, in particular his concerns about “new conformism.” It is argued that today we face comparable analytical challenges in which the pressures of institutionalization, and a strain of ahistoricism, have produced a “weak materialism” in contemporary cultural critique. The essay recommends a flexible and context-driven navigation of the current dominant tendencies toward micro-recuperative and macro-epistemological analysis, and proposes that this flexibility is the preferred mode of assuring that the dynamism of culture is captured by our critical methods.     

Reviewing Social Democratic Corporatism: Differentiation Theory and the Norwegian Labor Press

This article reviews the problem of disciplinary isolation in the human sciences, especially as it relates to psychology, and outlines how this problem can be addressed with the help of ideas of two figures—L. S. Vygotsky and M. M. Bakhtin. Vygotsky's claims about the social origins of individual mental functioning and his analyses of how cultural tools mediate social and individual functioning provide a means for relating individual mental functioning to cultural, historical, and institutional settings. Bakhtin's ideas about dialogicality, multivoicedness, and related phenomena complement and extend Vygotsky's claims and provide further theoretical means for integrating various disciplines’ contributions to the human sciences through the study of communication. After reviewing the contributions of Vygotsky and Bakhtin, an illustration concerned with multivoicedness in historical representation is provided.     

Stewart,Essential Radio Skills: How to Present a Radio Show

This article reports on ongoing studies of political satire in the seriocomedy genre produced by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) and its French language counterpart, la Société Radio‐Canada (SRC). We compare and contrast examples of each network's way of imagining its respective society as well as each other's society. We situate the definition of seriocomedy in a discussion of the contrasting role of private and public broadcasting in the North American context. Then we present examples from programs produced in two historical periods. The definition of seriocomedy and the analysis of texts follows the dialogical theory of discourse developed by the Russian thinker, Mikhail Bakhtin. In the conclusion, we discuss how these examples of dialogical criticism help demonstrate the complex process in which the seriocomedy genre expands and reinstitutes the normative boundaries of what can be said or represented in public culture.     

#MeToo,sexual harassment: an article,a forum,and a dream for the future

#MeToo has breathed new life into the women’s movement and especially into understanding and rectifying sexual harassment, abuse and assault. It has galvanized activists around the globe. And it has placed thousands of stories of the harassed in full view of the public. Sexual harassment, abuse and assault may occur within the organizational context or beyond; but sexual harassment, in particular has been legally labeled an organizational phenomenon. With this in mind, Robin Clair frames the early part of this article around the most recent organizational communication theories (see the appendix for an overview of these theories). Following the essay is a forum, in which invited scholars address questions related to the #MeToo movement.     

Practical Patriotism: Camp Fire Girls,Girl Scouts,and Americanization

Drawing primarily on discourses and events from the period surrounding World War I, this essay examines the methods deployed by Camp Fire Girls and Girls Scouts to recruit the daughters of immigrants and, upon joining, acculturate these new members to the American way of life. The argument begins by analyzing those discourses describing the so-called “new immigrant” from southern and eastern Europe as a threat to national unity. Turning to the ways in which the new immigrant problem was gendered through the rhetorical construction of a “girl problem,” this author argues that the advocates describing the girl problem leveraged the presumed cultural rift between foreign-born parents and their new-world children in order to induce the daughters of the foreign-born to perform as American. The essay closely analyzes the discourses of two groups committed to the project of Americanizing the daughters of immigrants: the Camp Fire Girls and Girl Scouts. The article contends that these groups, the two most popular of the period, Americanized the daughter of the foreign-born by using recruitment tactics that invited her to dissociate from an old-world ethnicity, deploying legendary heroines re-figuring the girl's American belonging, and engineering patriotic regimens habituating her to American customs. Ultimately, this essay demonstrates how these groups rhetorically refigured the cultural and social belonging of their members in order to assuage public concerns about national unity.     

Bakhtin Applied: Employing Dialogism to Analyze the Interplay of the Ideologies of Individualism and Community Within the Discourse of Alcoholics Anonymous

An ongoing debate regarding the nature of therapeutic communities concerns the extent to which these communities reinforce the ideologies of individualism and community. This article engages this discussion through a process of social text analysis informed by the dialogism theory of Russian philosopher and literary scholar Mikhail Bakhtin. Dialogism seeks to understand the multiple voices interpenetrating particular utterances, revealing an emergent social construction of meaning. Applying this approach to examples of discourse from a prominent therapeutic community, Alcoholics Anonymous, illustrates how meaning in the discourse of this movement can be understood to emerge among the interplay between the ideologies of individualism and community as expressed within the movement's narrative practice.     

Key Questions for Communication and Critical-Cultural Studies: Posthumanism,Network Infrastructures,and Sustainability

This essay addresses three key issues for critical-cultural studies: posthumanism, network infrastructures, and sustainability. The examples of Google Glass, Google's “Data Centers” online photo gallery, and James Cameron's film Avatar are used to briefly elaborate on the importance of these issues for critical-cultural studies, and to argue for the integration of materialist and representational forms of analysis.     

Aesthetic ruptures: viewing graffiti as the emplaced vernacular

This essay theorizes the notion of the emplaced vernacular, a type of vernacular expression that is mobilized by the production of aesthetics in particular places. I argue that 1970s graffiti in New York City emerged as an aesthetic rupture in response to the spatial exigencies of postwar urban renewal projects. Analysis of The New York Times coverage of graffiti writers “Kilroy was Here” from WWII and “Taki 183” from the 1970s demonstrates how the force of this emplaced vernacular was disciplined within dominant spatial ideologies, producing an aesthetic that continues to enable and constrain contemporary efforts of vernacular subjectification.     

Character sketches: The curious propaganda careers of Mary,Jane, and Willie

This article draws on the concepts of narrative interactivity and closure to investigate three World War II-era print media characters. The analysis details how Al Parker’s Mary & Jane and Norman Rockwell’s Willie Gillis developed a perceived authenticity that invited fans to envision the propaganda drawings as having lives beyond their artistic origins. The essay concludes that the narrative arcs of these characters prefigured the imagined relationships that subsequent generations developed with televised characters.     

Jingoism,Public Opinion,And The New Imperialism

This essay analyses late-Victorian understandings of the relationship between the press, imperial diplomacy, and popular enthusiasm for empire, and examines how newspapers explained their own role in the imperial rivalries of the 1890s. During imperial disputes between Britain and France (particularly the Fashoda crisis) and between Britain and the USA (the Venezuela boundary dispute) contemporaries claimed that self-interested ‘jingo’ elements of the political elite had sought to foment conflict by manipulating ‘public opinion’, but had been defeated by statesmen (who had used the press for legitimate diplomatic purposes) and by ‘the people’ (who were averse to war). This contrasted with contemporary comments about the role played by the press in provoking wars between the USA and Spain and between Britain and the Transvaal: both the press and the people seemed to succumb to an irrational popular ‘jingoism’, and to sweep statesmen along in their wake. However, this essay argues that these contemporary verdicts about the role of newspapers in focusing popular imperialism have been too easily accepted by historians. During the imperial rivalries of the 1890s the press played an important role as a medium of transnational communication, but did not push statesmen into expansionism.     

Constructing Rhetorical Borders: Peons,Illegal Aliens,and Competing Narratives of Immigration

Recent work in immigration suggests interconnections among race, nation, and immigration. This essay examines these relations, noting the rhetorical dynamics through which symbolic borders emerge and shift, in part through national debates over immigrants. Turning critical attention to mediated representations of Mexican immigrants in the 1920s and 1930s, I argue that Mexican immigrant bodies provided rhetorical space for a national discussion of race and nation. I highlight, in particular, a deportation drive and repatriation campaign that resulted in the mass exodus of hundreds of thousands of Mexicans and Mexican Americans.     

Academic Librarians,Information Overload,and the Tao of Discovery

This article explores the meaning of web-scale discovery and argues for the need to formulate a philosophy of discovery (consistent with library values) before using and deploying a discovery tool to make it easier to achieve goals and objectives. It also focuses on how user behavior and the success of Google Scholar can help guide us in improving these tools. At the same time, the essay describes the limitations of discovery tools and their perceived role in contributing to information overload.     

It Cuts Both Ways: Fight Club,Masculinity, and Abject Hegemony

Offering a critical interrogation of white masculinity within David Fincher's Fight Club (1999), this essay uncovers a key strategy through which hegemonic systems persist, positing the abject body as a trope for understanding the life of hegemonic ideological formations. Adopting the “interspace” of abjection allows hegemonic masculinity to become everything and nothing at the same time and is a “dangerous” strategy that must be denied at all costs. Insofar as hegemony requires its abjection to remain invisible, this essay names hegemonic masculinity “abject” in order to offer critical prophylaxis against white masculinity's attempts to reproduce its cultural privilege.     

A Likely Past: Abortion,Social Data,and a Collective Memory of Secrets in 1950s America

This essay analyzes the collective mnemonics embedded in the statistical discourse of Planned Parenthood's 1955 conference, Abortion in the United States. Conferees recalled a culture that was diseased, remembered both through social data on abortion pathology and epidemiology. The essay conceptualizes how to think of social data as a collective memory of secrets that is incumbent to biopower, particularly regarding statistical anonymity as a form of strategic amnesia. Although primarily a study of this conference, the essay notes the broader importance of collective memory and secrecy for the study of biopower.     

Cultivating consubstantiality with the land institute: Organizational rhetoric and the role of place-making in generating organizational identification

This essay examines the organizational rhetoric of the Land Institute in order to address the ways place-making contributes to the inducement of organizational identification (OI). In addition to defining place-making as a practice of cultivating arrangements, the essay unpacks two ways in which a strategically arranged place facilitates OI: (a) materializing the places and times imagined in textual materials, and (b) generating encounters with OI targets. By analyzing the Land Institute’s Prairie Festival alongside discursive materials, the essay also demonstrates how organizations take control of place’s inherently inventive character and thoroughly distributed rhetoricity in order to achieve organizational ends. In order to make these arguments, the essay employs a critical method that operates through both field immersion and textual criticism.     

The Post-Nuclear Family and the Depoliticization of Unplanned Pregnancy in Knocked Up,Juno, and Waitress

This essay explores three films from 2007, Knocked Up, Juno, and Waitress, which foreground young women's unplanned pregnancies. These movies depoliticize women's reproduction and motherhood through narratives that rearticulate the meaning of choice. Bypassing the subject of abortion, the women's decisions revolve around their choice of heterosexual partners and investment in romantic relationships. Although they question the viability of the nuclear family for single pregnant women, these films represent new iterations of post-feminism that ultimately restore conservative ideas that valorize pregnancy and motherhood as women's imperatives. We conclude by addressing how these movies present a distorted and short-sighted depiction of the politics of reproductive agency and the challenges that single mothers face.     

Macroappraisal in Theory and Practice: Origins, Characteristics, and Implementation in Canada, 1950–2000

Macroappraisal as developed in Canada has had significant currency in archival literature over the past decade, and aspects of its program and ideas have been implemented in other jurisdictions. For the first time, this essay probes the theoretical and practical origins of macroappraisal in Canada since 1950 and why its originators no longer found convincing the predominant status quo on appraisal as articulated by T.R. Schellenberg. The essay then summarizes the theory of macroappraisal as articulated at the National Archives of Canada, and the strategic and program infrastructure developed in the 1990s to turn the new theory into operational reality. As no archival concept is universally locked in time, the evolution and changes in the macroappraisal program, both in theory and strategy, are also analysed in its Canadian home base over its first decade, as well as some internal and external criticisms of it. The essay intends to illuminate the deeper context of macroappraisal, so that an international audience may better understand its strengths and weaknesses. As the author is the principal architect of macroappraisal, the essay consists of equal parts of archival history, theoretical analysis, and personal reflection.     

Speaking into Silences: Autoethnography,Communication, and Applied Research

Editor's Note: Given the rare use of autoethnography in the field of communication, I invited Dr. Tillmann to discuss autoethnography as a valuable tool in applied communication research. This discussion serves as a prelude to her essay “Body and Bulimia Revisited: Reflections on ‘A Secret Life.’”

In 2004, two articles in the Journal of Applied Communication Research (Ashcraft & Tretheway, 2004; Goodall, 2004) celebrated the merits of auto- and narrative ethnography, methods of research grounded in lived experience and evocative modes of representation that seek to engage readers emotionally, aesthetically, ethically, and politically. Despite these and other persuasive calls for auto- and narrative ethnographic works, few have been published in communication journals. More than four years ago, JACR offered readers arguments for this kind of scholarship, yet no full-length autoethnography appeared in its pages—until now. This essay, a prelude to its companion, “Body and Bulimia Revisited,” speaks into that silence.