Communicating a “New” Environmental Vernacular: A Sense of Relations-in-Place

This study focuses on communication as a lens and tool for reinvigorating and empowering marginalized cultural environmental relations. We use a community-based cultural approach to identify a core Hispanic premise of a sense of relations-in-place. This premise constitutes nature as a socially integrated space that provides the grounding for human relations, and differs from dominant Western discourses that constitute nature as an entity separate from humans. The study's interpretation of a more integrated orientation to environment has the potential to inform wider alternative ecocultural discourses and applications that are more inclusive, and perhaps more sustainable.     

“Not Just the Levees Broke”: Jazz Vernacular and the Rhetoric of the Dispossessed in Spike Lee's When the Levees Broke

This essay proposes the notion of the “jazz vernacular” as a tool specific to the Creole culture in New Orleans for understanding racial discourses of disposability both geographically and historically. We argue that the jazz vernacular is a discourse structured by musical repertoire. The jazz vernacular provides a channel for the historical pain of the black diaspora by playing in the background, both literally and figuratively, of communication in and about New Orleans. This essay considers Spike Lee's documentary When The Levees Broke to understand how the jazz vernacular frames hurricane Katrina as well as how it frames Lee's film as an intervention into “neoliberal” racial discourses. We argue that Lee's film utilizes the jazz vernacular as a metadiscourse to reinforce the ways in which residents used jazz to restructure cultural memory around the rhetoric of the dispossessed in New Orleans after Katrina. When the Levees Broke uses testimonials and affective communication to structure the narrative of Katrina through elements of the jazz vernacular like: displacement, embodiment, brashness, and improvisation to connect contemporary Creole New Orleanians to a long history of structural oppression and violence. By harnessing performative elements, Lee's film performs a jazz intervention into neoliberal discourses about freedom, defense, safety, and heroism that contrasts these discourses with the despair and the resistance of black America. Consequently, Lee's use of the jazz vernacular relies on native musical culture to recontextualize what neoliberalism had erased.     

Discourses of Disability,Narratives of Community: Reclaiming an Autistic Identity Online

As increasing rates of autism diagnosis generate media interest, the autism community is bombarded with various disability discourses. Using netnographic methods, I explored how members of one online community, Aspies Central (AC), engaged these discourses to communicatively (re)claim a positive autistic identity. By assessing 561 posts on AC's forums, interviewing 10 individuals who frequent online communities, and interacting extensively with two informants, I located reclaiming discourses that allowed community members to shift their understanding of autism from a biomedical to a cultural perspective. Through these discourses, community members reclaimed (a) normalcy, (b) symptoms, and (c) agency. In this paper, I discuss implications for the narrative construction of disability identities and the activation of self-advocacy movements.     

Barack Obama as the Great Man: Communicative Constructions of Racial Transcendence in White-Male Elite Discourses

This study examined responses on the potential impact of Barack Obama's presidency from 16 semi-structured interviews with White males in leadership positions in various organizations across the United States. While numerous studies examine the circulating racial discourses on Obama, few studies explore how he is represented in first-hand accounts from those in the public, specifically from White-male elites. This study examined interview discourses from White-male elites to reveal how they imagine race through Obama. In positioning Obama among the pantheon of great-man leaders, this study showed how dominant racial ideologies get legitimatized and reworked when members of the dominant group desire to construct racial meanings onto a popular Black leader.     

A new normal? Competing national cultural discourses and workers’ constructions of identity and meaningful work in Norway

We examine how conceptions of identity and meaningful work are influenced by a nation's changing economic and political environment. We collected research in Norway – a country with a rich economy that has heavily relied upon oil production since the 1980s. Yet depleting oil resources are prompting an economic transformation. Twenty-seven interviews and a thematic analysis revealed how Norwegian workers safeguarded their traditional, collective workplace values, yet were simultaneously confronted with modern – more masculinized – workplace performances ushered in with the oil era. We contribute to theory by suggesting that work's meaningfulness is constructed by competing national cultural discourses that evolve over time. These discourses become narratives that citizens draw upon to evaluate work and to negotiate their personal and professional identities.     

Occupational Stereotypes,Perceived Status Differences,and Intercultural Communication in Global Organizations

This paper offers a novel perspective on why individuals in global organizations make culturally based attributions of their colleagues that impede effective working relations. Drawing on observational and interview data from an ethnographic study of product development work at a global automaker's engineering centers in Mexico, the United States, and India, we show the important role that occupational stereotypes and perceived status differentials play in global workplace interaction. The findings demonstrate that individuals who consider themselves to be “low-status” attempt to increase their status by leading high-status individuals to believe that they work in ways that reflect dominant occupational stereotypes. However, because these stereotypes are often inaccurate, members of the high-status culture assume that the stereotype-imitating behaviors of low-status individuals represent deficiencies in how they work. These findings have important implications for intercultural interaction in the global workplace and for theories of communication in multinational organizations.     

Structuring bodywork: control and agency in athlete injury discourse

This qualitative case study employs structuration theory to reveal d/Discourses in tension within athletic injury treatment and rehabilitation (i.e. a National Collegiate Athletic Association Division I football team). A thematic analysis exposed four concurrent discourses: injury heroism, injury recovery, athlete-centered care, and body commodification. These discourses created a structurational divergence nexus that enabled and constrained members. This nexus resulted in unintended consequences for the structuring of both injury disclosure and rehabilitation. Theoretical and practical implications of the findings are discussed as well as suggestions for practitioners in other bodywork and injury-prone organizations.     

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.     

‘No hugging please,we are Muslims’: Akademi Fantasia,Malay television audiences and the negotiation of global popular cultural forms

This paper analyses the audience reception of the Malaysian reality television programme Akademi Fantasia (AF), which first aired in 2003 and completed its ninth season in 2011. AF has been an influential pioneer in the national television industry, inaugurating the trend of local reality shows and weathering intense competition from similar shows to remain at the top of the ratings chart over the last decade. Based on the Mexican talent search show, La Academia, Malaysia's AF is a unique hybrid blend of an Idol-style talent contest and Big Brother observational spectacle. The article draws on primary audience research to investigate the ways in which Malay audiences interpret the potentially incommensurable cultural meanings generated within the context of a localised version of a global television format. Chua's concept of ‘identification and distancing’ is employed as a framework to analyse the complex ways in which perceived Malay ‘cultural norms’ assume primacy as interpretative lenses for audience evaluations of the show and measures of its local difference from similar global cultural products. The research also reveals how these cultural norms are themselves being negotiated by the audience as part of the everyday experience of inhabiting coexisting local and global popular cultural spaces. The analysis focuses on audience understandings and pleasure in the programme in relation to fashion and taste; the behaviour of the official judges; voyeurism and conflict in ‘backstage’ coverage; and emotional intimacy onstage in the public performance component of the programme.     

Transnational audience reception as a theater of struggle: young Filipino women's reception of Korean television dramas

This study examines the ‘theater of struggle’ in young Filipino women's reception of Korean television dramas in view of the American cultural imperialism that is deeply entrenched in the Philippine society. Mainly anchored on Gramsci's concept of hegemony and Stuart Hall's encoding-decoding theory, the researcher conducted a reception analysis through a textual analysis of selected Korean television comedy-dramas and focus group discussions with young Filipino women in different colleges. The young Filipino women expressed cultural affinity with the culture, storylines, values, and environment in Korean and other Asian television dramas that have invaded the Philippines in the twenty-first century. ‘Negotiation, resistance, and struggle’, in Hall's sense, against both the liberalism in American dramas and the pre-modern themes in local dramas were manifested in the young women's discourses. Consequently, American cultural imperialism in the Philippines was undermined, challenged, and to some extent subverted. The study also looked into the young women's dominant, negotiated, and oppositional readings of the dominant capitalist patriarchal values and ideologies that were embedded in selected Korean dramas. While there were young female participants who subscribed to global capitalist values showing their cooptation within Western cultural hegemonic domains, the young women largely articulated negotiated readings of capitalist values and oppositional readings with regard to the dominant ideology of capitalist patriarchy. In reading the selected Korean dramas reflexively, the young women identified social pathologies of poverty, class inequality, and capitalist patriarchal values and constructed emancipatory discourses with regard to these.     

One Hundred Strong: A Colloquium on Transforming Natural History Museums in the Twenty‐first Century

In February 2012, the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History (NMNH) convened 100 colleagues from 43 organizations to initiate a collaborative learning research agenda focused on examining important areas for innovation to better serve twenty‐first‐century audiences. The conference organizers anticipated that scientists, educators, exhibit professionals, and other members of the natural history community would identify and prioritize research questions about what, how, why, when, and where people learn about natural history. We prepared to engage in a conversation about how natural history museums could change what they do. The participants' overwhelming passion for their work, and for natural history museums and their transformative potential for society, quickly turned the conversation toward how natural history museums should change what they are. The result was an emergent learning research agenda situated within a broader vision for natural history museums.     

Reconsidering Consultants' Strategic Use of the Business Case for Diversity

The business case for diversity—the practice of connecting human differences to an organization's bottom line—has been critiqued for its compromised treatment of human difference. Through a grounded in action discursive analysis of 19 interviews with diversity consultants, this research identifies three occupational demands that prompted consultants to use the business case: organizational access, motivation, and emotion work. The analysis also identifies strategies consultants used that met these demands without relying on the business case: connecting to mission statements, connecting to individual tasks, appealing to personal experience, sequencing, combining, balancing discourses of emotion and business, drawing on spiritual grounding, and using humor. By identifying these alternatives, this analysis seeks to decrease consultants' dependence on the business case when meeting occupational demands and consequently mitigate the negative effects that scholars have attributed to its common use and consequent discursive dominance in diversity work. Additionally, the conclusions suggest that diversity professionals and scholars might more explicitly use the notion of “discursive merger” to advocate for social change in organizations.     

A Telecommuting Interlibrary Loan Librarian's Experience: The Views of Both the Telecommuter and the On-Site Supervisor

Because of the changing world of librarianship and the introduction of new technologies, telecommuting has become an innovative option for certain jobs in the library. Telework gives an organization the opportunity to retain skilled employees and cut the costs of recruiting, selection, and training of a new employee. There are certain tasks in the workflow of the interlibrary loan department that could permit an employee to work from a distance. This is specifically due to resource sharing management systems such as ILLiad. Florida Atlantic University decided to retain an interlibrary loan employee who had to relocate and try telecommuting on a trial basis. This paper details the employee's experiences.     

Challenges & compromises in Spike Lee's Malcolm X

–This study looks at Spike Lee's Malcolm X as an important text in understanding Afrocentric perspectives that challenge the ideological stereotypes of mainstream Hollywood film. Malcolm X intervenes between Lee, the filmmaker, and the powerful media industry and is emblematic of the larger discussion of hegemonic and counter-hegemonic views in media culture. This film is not only an interesting case study but a significant part of an ongoing cultural discourse that is as relevant now as when Malcolm X lived. The relevance of this essay lies in its contribution to the discussion of media perspectives with a focus on furthering media literacy. It aids the viewer in understanding the social discourse surrounding a mediated racist ideology and the ongoing cultural work of social equality in the United States. This research finds that in the continuing struggle over media representation, Lee's film is an instrument of media politics, controversy, and commercialization.     

Communication and recovery: Structuration as an ontological approach to organizational culture

This inquiry focuses on the world's largest and most successful group of Alcoholics Anonymous. It adopts Giddens's theory of structuration as a framework for studying the deeply layered social interactions within the organization. Ethnographic data were analyzed by means of an interpretive interactionist methodology. The results indicated that the organization is a “disembedding mechanism,” in which structures from the global organization are disembedded by the founder, transformed, and recreated in the local organization. The alcoholic self is both agent and outcome as it evolves through recursive group practices and individual actions. As used in this study, the structurationist perspective on organizational culture provides a fuller understanding of the ways in which organizations are created and sustained through interaction, as well as the significance of their historicity and cultural contexts, and can help guide future research on organizational culture.     

Relational tensions,narrative, and materiality: intergenerational communication in families with undocumented immigrant parents

ABSTRACT

This research explores the competing discourses and relational tensions that emerge in intergenerational communication in immigrant families with undocumented parents through in-depth interviews with undocumented Latino/a parents and their children living in New York City. Through the articulation of three themes, we illustrate how material realities affiliated with a lack of legal status incite unique discursive tensions in family relationships that manifest in family narratives. This study lends scholarly insight into the ways undocumented immigrants and their families communicatively navigate their uncertain life terrain through conversation about immigration status, conflicting career dreams, and hybrid cultural values. Using these findings as guidance, we offer practical applications related to communal coping and family advocacy for professionals and volunteers working in immigrant-serving community organizations.     

Diversity and the Museum of London

Increasingly, some — but not all — urban history museums are facing the challenges of reaching out to and serving growingly diversified populations. Described here is the Museum of London's The Peopling of London, which recognizes the history and contributions of immigrant communities and their descendants. Planning for the exhibition required an about face from the museum's traditional in-house method of exhibition development — involving members of minority communities. Both the planning process and the resulting exhibition serve as a model for consideration and possibly emulation as urban history museums look at the growing diversification of the populations they serve.     

Documentary Film as Policy Analysis: The Impact of Yes,In My Backyard on Activists,Agendas, and Policy

The production and distribution of social-issue documentaries can have a wide range of significant impact on community organizations, educational institutions, citizens, and policy makers. What this article seeks to demonstrate, using the example of Tracy Huling's Yes, In My Backyard, is the utility of an “issue-centered model” that allows a comprehensive and systematic analysis of the full range of political impact, including impact on producers, activists, and policymakers. Much of the way Yes, In My Backyard “worked” within the rural prison issue network parallels the way that policy analysis can affect public agendas and public policy. Although many documentaries can be regarded as “implicit” pieces of policy analysis, Huling's is the most explicit, and her measure of success is how well her work can alter the agenda of activists and policy makers, stimulate research to support policy change, and then help implement that change.     

Engaging with Korean dramas: discourses of gender,media, and class formation in Taiwan

This paper attempts to explore the politics of differential engagements with Korean drama, particularly with relation to the formation of gender and class identities. As social identities are mediated through the cultural, discourse becomes a significant site for understanding the relationships between structures and the formation of subjectivities. The imported Korean drama falls mostly into two genres – trendy drama and family drama. Both of them deal with family and love, and both of them aim at women audiences. As such, discourses of femininity provide a productive avenue for understanding: on the one hand, their place in social formation, that is, how women inhabit different discourses of femininity which in turn position them hierarchically in the social domain; on the other hand, how social processes, including globalization and nation formation, play a central role in constituting the different meanings and hierarchy of discourses of femininity. However, discourses of femininity also intersect with discourses of television in structuring women's engagements with Korean drama. This paper therefore traces the transformations of the discourses of femininity and television and explores how they regulate, constrain, or enable women's engagements with Korean drama. In doing so, this paper aims to highlight the hierarchically structured gendered discourses in the process of social formation in contemporary Taiwan.     

#OscarsSoWhite: how Stuart Hall explains why nothing changes in Hollywood and everything is changing

ABSTRACT

Stuart Hall’s work on culture, representation, ideology and hegemony positions Hollywood as a cultural institution informed by and informative of US social values and norms. Thus contemporary debates over Hollywood's diversity are indicative of broader social conflicts. Empirically the article examines 2014–2015 news coverage of Hollywood to question the Hollywood paradox—the lack of diversity in film/TV production yet TV’s increasing shift towards on-screen diversity. It maps three discursive frames: Hollywood exceptionalism, economic imperatives, and institutionalized racism and sexism. The article concludes by using Hulu’s East Los High to reflect on TV’s digital turn and innovative models in production and representation.