Historians, archivists, and social activism: benefits and costs

This article explores how activism by historians and archivists relates to and affects their work and how their work affects their activism. The findings are based on a survey of 195 historians (including educators) and archivists who self-identified as “someone who takes part in activities that are intended to achieve social or political change, especially someone who is a member of an organization.” The respondents participate in a wide variety of causes. Typically, their activities as activists reflect their professional skills and concerns, with a large majority involved in collecting and preserving the records of activist organizations. The article examines the benefits and costs for employers of employee activism, concluding the benefits outweigh the costs. The article also examines how activism affects the relationship between employers and their activist employees. While many activists receive recognition and other benefits from their employers for their activism, a minority suffers negative consequences up to and including firing and a substantial number feel inhibited from activism by their employers. The article also explores the effects of activism for the different occupational groups, determining that they are relatively similar but with some differences.     

Critical communication pedagogy and service learning in a mixed-method communication research course

ABSTRACT

Course: Mixed-Method Communication Research Methods

Objective: The purpose of this semester-long activity is to provide students with opportunities to cultivate mixed-method communication research skills through a social justice-informed service-learning format. Completing this course, students will be able to: recognize the unique strengths of quantitative and qualitative research methods; locate, evaluate, and utilize scholarly literature for a literature review; conduct an original research project using quantitative and qualitative research methods to gather and analyze data; and raise self and community awareness about a social issue through collaboration with a community organization.     

A dialectical analysis of a social justice process: International collaboration in South Africa

This paper presents a case study of an international team collaboration between US and South African conflict specialists and educators implementing a Community Peace and Safety Network in four communities in the Gauteng province of South Africa. The project, funded by the United States Information Agency, was a social justice initiative that provided mediation training for school and community centers to aid them in accomplishing constructive conflict management and social change. Following an overview of the project goals, stages, and accomplishments, Smith and Berg's theory of paradoxes in groups is used to analyze the negotiated relationships in the international team and the mutual influence of group tensions and community impact throughout the 18‐month project period. Discussion includes implications for dialectical analyses of groups and for social justice scholars.     

Distinguishing technologies for social interaction: The perceived social affordances of communication channels scale

The concept of affordances in communication technology research has proven to be heuristically provocative, yet perceived affordances are rarely measured. After extracting commonly cited social affordances from the literature, we developed a measure to assess participants’ perceptions of these affordances. The scale was tested across eight communication channels in two studies (face-to-face; texting; phone; email; posts on social networking sites, specifically Facebook; instant messaging; Skype videoconferencing; and mobile app Snapchat). A factor structure was developed in Study 1 and confirmed in Study 2. The resultant Perceived Social Affordances of Communication Channels Scale includes 41 items measuring 10 communicative affordances: accessibility, bandwidth, social presence, privacy, network association, personalization, persistence, editability, conversation control, and anonymity. Potential methodological and theoretical applications are discussed.     

Mediated images of success: Hegemonic media representations and social justice

This activity highlights the concept of cultural hegemony, illustrating it by a reflection on the images of success and successful people portrayed in the media. The purpose of the exercise is to introduce students to this concept, and for them to examine how hegemonic views of others and the self affect the way they conceptualize success and perceive who a successful person is. Students will understand the role of the media in reproducing hegemonic representations of reality in terms of gender, race, ethnicity, national origin, disability, and so on, and how these representations limit their world view and are detrimental for those who do not abide by the dominant stereotypical images. The exercise also intends to expose students to complex narratives of what success may mean beyond accumulation of wealth, competition, nationality, whiteness, and patriarchal values, and for them to reflect upon intersectionality, by challenging and critiquing dominant portrayals of human achievement.

Courses: Introduction to Media Studies, Introduction to Media and Culture, or any introductory communication course discussing media representation.

Objectives: Students will (1) identify the role of cultural hegemony in the mediated construction of success; (2) understand and critically evaluate how hegemonic media representations of gender, class, race, ethnicity, physical ability, national origin, and so on limit people’s world views about human achievement; and (3) self-reflect on their own representations of success and reframe “success” moving beyond hegemonic representations attached to patriarchy, heteronormativity, whiteness, physical ability, competition, and capitalist accumulation.     

Human need as a justification for communication rights

This article extends reasoning about social policy, as a response to basic human need, to the treatment of communication policy. The idea of communication as a basic human need is of vital importance in a contemporary world in which so much social interaction of a private and public nature occurs through technological mediation. Through an examination of arguments in social and political theory about human needs, this article emphasizes how “needs talk” is used to justify “rights talk,” with particular attention given to how assumptions about communication needs—what they are, how they can or should be satisfied, and the politics of need recognition—are or can be used to justify communication rights.     

Introducing computational social science for Asia-Pacific communication research

ABSTRACT

Computational social science has caused a shift of research paradigm in social science in general and communication in particular. The special issue brings together a community of active researchers to introduce computational social science for Asia-Pacific communication research. The special issue outlines major computational methods closely related to communication research and demonstrates how computational methods can be applied to address theoretical and practical questions in Asia-Pacific societies. The advantages and limitations of computational methods have been conceptually discussed and/or empirically illustrated. Finally, the special issue provides a guideline of conducting computational research for communication researchers in Asia-Pacific societies and beyond.     

Back-ups for the future: archival practices for data activism

Literature on activist archiving theorises the power of recordkeeping to give voice to marginalised communities. However, missing from this archival literature are analyses about the political practice of preserving data as an act of grassroots resistance. Simultaneously, existing scholarly literature on grassroots data activism analyses the creation of new statistical representations to challenge official ones. This literature has largely ignored what will happen to this data over the long term, nor has it treated data archiving as an activist project in its own right. This theoretical article seeks to close the gap between literature on archival activism and literature on data activism, in hopes that both sets of research can draw productively from each other. There are clear affinities between activist archives and data activism: both address the failure by mainstream institutions to account for marginal voices, both have the power to make issues visible and legitimate within the public sphere, and both experiment with traditional forms of memory and statistical evidence. The authors believe that these two powerful forms of activity have much to learn from each other, particularly as the need to steward data over the long term will only grow.     

The department of communication at Michigan state university as a seed institution for communication study

A seed institution is an organization that plays a dominant role in a new scholarly field by shaping intellectual directions for theory and research. The Department of Communication at Michigan State University was a seed institution in defining the new field of communication study in the 1960s because (1) of its focus on an integrated perspective of communication, emphasizing commonalities across mass and interpersonal communication, (2) of its quantitative focus, (3) of its internationalization and intercultur‐alism, and (4) of its considerable resources devoted to research and doctoral training. We focus here on how Wilbur Schramm ‘s vision for communication study was implemented and modified by David K. Berlo and his colleagues at Michigan State University.     

Teaching communication and conflict as a game

Courses: Communication and Conflict.

Objectives: Through the use of a game-based framework, students will build intrinsic motivation to engage with course material and course content, and will engage their critical-thinking, problem-solving, and communication skills in relation to conflict management over the length of the course.     

Television as a medium of communication: Implications for how to regard the child viewer

Children respond to television in toto, as a medium of communication. Three repesentational codes are involved: iconic, media‐specific, and generic, e.g., verbal language. Children actively process the codes and messages, by calling upon both generic and media‐specific knowledge.     

Fake News as a Critical Incident in Journalism

This study examines how American newspapers made sense of the issue of fake news. By analysing newspaper editorials and considering the problem of fake news as a critical incident confronting journalism, this study found that news organizations in the US recognize fake news as a social problem while acknowledging the challenge in defining it. They generally considered fake news as a social media phenomenon thriving on political polarization driven by mostly ideological, but sometimes also financial, motivations. Therefore, they assigned blame for the rise of fake news to the current political environment, to technological platforms Google and Facebook, and to audiences.     

Toward a typology of government social media communication: Democratic goals,symbolic acts and self-presentation

Social media have provided new environments for both individuals and organizations to communicate. The literature on government use of social media has noted that these platforms provide a variety of democratic functions for government institutions, in their ability to increase transparency and citizen participation. However, there is less recognition and understanding in this context about the symbolic and presentational content governments communicate on social media. This is the case despite the fact that social media are tools for self-presentation, the exchange of symbolic content, and marketing. We have conducted a literature review from diverse sources, including e-government, business, human-computer interaction, social psychology and human communication to develop a typology of government communication on social media. We present a classification scheme with 12 specific categories and discuss the potential purposes of these various types of communication. Via empirical content analysis, we code a total of 2893 Facebook posts of local governments across the U.S., in a pilot and in a confirmatory study. This analysis allows us to better understand the categories of communication and the extent of their presence. Although we find that most content on local government Facebook pages falls into the category of democratic information provision, almost half of all messages refer to symbolic and presentational types of information exchanges. We illustrate our results with examples, and present a discussion of these findings with implications for practitioners and future research.