ABSTRACT The Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade has led many states to ban or severely limit abortion access, leaving women seeking reproductive healthcare more vulnerable than they have been in decades, especially marginalized women. Legal restrictions, alongside socioeconomic barriers and cultural stigmas around abortion, are reinforced by media representations that depict abortion

ABSTRACT Taking off from the theory of social semiotics and using the methods of multimodal critical discourse analysis, this paper demonstrates how the communicative affordances of a Swedish reality makeover show, The Great Health Journey, are used to promote discourses normalizing extreme fitness ideals. It is a show that reduces health to body fitness and supports a particular health consciousness

Published in Critical Studies in Media Communication (Ahead of Print, 2022)

ABSTRACT To facilitate deeper investigations into the U.S.’s centralized emergency number, 911, this article attends to the first decade of the service’s implementation in the mid-twentieth century. Ostensibly, 911 was created to hasten responses by public services for health and safety. Yet, federal backing for 911 first occurred in 1967 in a report admonishing the recent “race riots,” articulating

ABSTRACT The animated show Craig of the Creek is an important source of animated environmental imagery for children as its main characters and plot provide the opportunity to discuss both race and environmental issues. However, these shows often only show one view of environmental degradation and ignore issues like environmental racism and urban housing issues. The history of racial environmental innocence

ABSTRACT Game design in systematically excluded communities offers a powerful framework for empowering communities. These findings are based upon The Resisters—an alternate reality game built with young people about social movement history in Providence, RI—and Vukuzenzele—a collaboration between an interactive media firm and an informal settlement non-governmental organization (NGO) in Cape Town,

Published in Critical Studies in Media Communication (Ahead of Print, 2022)

ABSTRACT In this article I examine game studies’ role in training students who go on to work in or study the games industry. Using a feminist lens to critique the leaky pipeline metaphor, I discuss how this metaphor assists in a collective amnesia that allows game studies to ignore the larger culture problems associated with games and the industry that makes them. In its place, I offer up Neil deGrasse

ABSTRACT The production of videogames routinely uses automated techniques to generate content, rig animations, map light, and script behaviors. The automation of programming and artistic functions is increasingly baked into game engines that work with other software applications in 3D production ecosystems, which are laying the foundations for what is being pitched by platform companies as the future

ABSTRACT The past five years have seen the development of what Mukherjee, S. (2018. Playing subaltern: Video games and postcolonialism. Games and Culture, 13(5), 504–520) and Murray, S. (2018. The work of postcolonial game studies in the play of culture. Open Library of Humanities, 4(1), 1–25) (amongst others) term postcolonial game studies. Postcolonial game studies looks at how games represent colonial

ABSTRACT This paper argues for transculturality in critical examinations of diversity in player communities. Transculturality enriches discussions on intersectionality in games and fandom by challenging its default male whiteness and Eurocentricity, and acknowledging the presence of non-normative players who have always existed in game communities. Intersectional game studies is transcultural game

ABSTRACT This article examines several genres of role-playing games in terms of their procedural logics of racial management as an attempt to understand how game logics can express varying and often contentious ways of enacting “diversity.” It argues that games themselves can help answer one of the most persistent questions about games today: “how do we make games more diverse?” We proceed by defining

ABSTRACT In this article I discuss close reading as a methodology for feminist game studies. Due to its centralization of the researcher’s own interpretations, close reading can be a particularly fruitful methodology for marginalized scholars discussing the ways games construct, position, and portray their own identities. However, this intimacy can also result in vulnerability, in part because reactionary

ABSTRACT As members of the Critical Approaches to Technology and the Social (CATS) Lab at UC Irvine, we are particularly motivated by this special issue’s call to action. As a collective of interdisciplinary students at various stages in relevant degrees, we are the future of game studies. As such, this question strikes us not as one for speculation, but as a space to commit a set of shared values

ABSTRACT Game studies, as a subfield of media and/or communication studies, has occupied an odd place within critical media studies. Those who are invested in critical theory of video game studies understand the importance of the subfield, those who do not study or play video games tend to think of the topic as “other”—as distinct from other theoretical compartments of media studies work. Yet, as the

ABSTRACT Game studies addresses a wide range of topics, concepts, questions, and perspectives. From reading games as technical and cultural artifacts to exploring players, player communities, and the industry itself. Toxic culture within gaming communities and the gaming industry has negatively affected and even harmed individuals, community growth, the creative potential of video games, and even the

(2022). Unmanning: how humans, machines, and media perform drone warfare. Critical Studies in Media Communication. Ahead of Print.

ABSTRACT This article examines the representation of masculinity in the animated Disney film Ralph Breaks the Internet (2018). Popular reviews of the film focused heavily on critiques of toxic masculinity. Often associated with homophobic and misogynistic speech, the concept of toxic masculinity ultimately serves to reinforce and rescue elements of hegemonic masculinity by painting “toxic” male behaviors

ABSTRACT This article analyzes the cultural work of queer Salvadoran comedian Julio Torres through the Muñozian lens of queer utopian aesthetics and ethnic camp. Through textual and discursive analysis, it establishes how Torres’ comedy disrupts dominant images of male Central American migrants as violent gang members, as well as how Torres creates a space for queer U.S. Central American subjectivities

ABSTRACT This article proposes that professionalization services are significant media industry spaces because they are the first access points to industry work for many nonprofessionals. I use business-facing marketing materials from the popular self-publishing platform Wattpad as a case study, drawing on discourse analysis to argue that the platform’s strict guidelines governing which users can professionalize

ABSTRACT Studies of films of the 1980s have noted a tendency towards “ideological conglomeration”—the presence of multiple contradictory ideological registers. This article argues that 80s films’ “ideological conglomeration” is made legible and coherent through Michael Rothberg’s (2009, Multidirectional memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the age of decolonization. Stanford University Press) concept

ABSTRACT Unorthodox is a four-episode Netflix series that offers a compelling narrative of freedom from religion for feminine subjects. This paper interrogates the vision of freedom offered by the show through the lens of lived religion (which circumvents the secular/religion dichotomy by treating the moral meaning-making practices of everyday life as “religious.” A close reading of the lived religious

ABSTRACT Trump had COVID-19. The world held its breath. We, in very real terms, were on pause. Trump's reality, the reality of millions of Americans and people around the world, was one of quarantine, an existence put on pause. Here, I would like to consider the polyphony of meanings and performances foregrounding our varied understandings of the pause. Trump's pause and our own excavate a stacking

ABSTRACT Public memory serves as a foundation for national identity, so struggles to balance respect for difference with the need for common ground emerge repeatedly in struggles over how to remember the public past. Cultural pluralism and multiculturalism tend to articulate a politics of difference in which inequities are identified but common ground proves elusive. Yet, documentaries by African American

ABSTRACT Looking historically at cleanliness, care practices, and accessories, this article examines how a variety of actors—from record listeners and music journalists to inventors, advertisers, and corporations—grappled with the problem of cleaning vinyl records in the pursuit of “clean sound” in the period between the 1950s and 1970s. Detailing how washing and preserving records became a commercialized

(2022). Review of Creative Control: The Ambivalence of Work in the Culture Industries. Critical Studies in Media Communication. Ahead of Print.

ABSTRACT Black is King is a film that follows the plot of Disney’s Lion King through the use of Beyoncé’s Lion King: The Gift album that includes 14 songs that represent scenes in the film. This analysis examines the representation, regulation, and identity of the ancestor in Beyoncé’s Black is King film through the circuit of culture and Afrofuturism to investigate how the ancestor connects to the

(2022). Why Wakanda matters: what Black Panther reveals about psychology, identity, and communication. Critical Studies in Media Communication. Ahead of Print.

ABSTRACT This article analyzes the relationship between student productive labor, or the creation of media content like podcasts or graphic designs, and the institutionalization of collegiate esports. Through 19 semi-structured interviews with students and professionals involved in different areas around collegiate esports, we found that students’ productive labor was a key force in the institutionalization

ABSTRACT Digital news media aim to seize the opportunity of the growing market of the Internet use in India. While the rise of digital start-ups or digital native news websites in the news industry is remarkable, it has not heralded significant changes in newsroom diversity. It has been established that media in India, as elsewhere, is largely dominated by male journalists and that the narratives are

ABSTRACT The technosocial impacts of the internet are the result of a dynamic exchange in which multiple agents compete, cooperate, and coexist for a variety of reasons that stem from just as many motivations. On SoundCloud, a popular music-based social networking platform, this suspense is in full tilt—a few short years ago, it was on the brink of shutdown because of cash shortages, forcing mass layoffs

ABSTRACT Originally conceived to highlight problematic labor relations that required emotions, the term emotional labor is now deployed to describe emotional relations that require problematic labor. In this paper, we identify how digital platforms have amplified this inverted form of emotional labor and spawned a phenomenon we term technoliberal managerialism, or the use of the connection, quantification

ABSTRACT Streaming media are often placed in a lineage of electrical technologies that promise connectivity at a distance. We argue, however, that the material-discursive entanglement of streaming is a technological descendent of pre-electrical attempts to control essential resources through flow. Inspired by John Durham Peters’s emphasis on elemental media, we examine streaming media practices that

(2022). Netnography Unlimited: Understanding Technoculture Using Qualitative Social Media Research. Critical Studies in Media Communication: Vol. 39, No. 2, pp. 154-157.

(2022). Ambient Play. Critical Studies in Media Communication: Vol. 39, No. 1, pp. 59-62.

ABSTRACT Media events celebrate and re-legitimate core values of national societies. While scholars have focused on analyzing how and why media events come to matter, this article inspects how the symbolic failures of some media events reveal broader shifts in national and political cultures. After investigating the funeral of Shimon Peres, a symbol of the Israeli peace movement, I argue that while

ABSTRACT Over the past decade, an emerging number of blogs, podcasts, websites, and social media channels report on news from an intersectional perspective, actively considering the intersecting impact of raced, gendered, sexed, and classed systems of oppression. However, what it practically means to produce intersection work is still ill-defined. Through semi-structured interviews with 13 intersectional

ABSTRACT Today, U.S.-based corporations control much of the internet worldwide, but this was not always the case. During the administration of U.S. President Clinton (1993-2001), the U.S. Department of Commerce made deliberate efforts to support the development of a commercial internet. On the national and international stages, the U.S. Department of Commerce asserted its role as the manager of corporate

(2021). Manifest destiny 2.0: genre trouble in game worlds. Critical Studies in Media Communication: Vol. 38, No. 5, pp. 423-425.

(2021). Intersectional Tech: black users in digital gaming. Critical Studies in Media Communication: Vol. 38, No. 5, pp. 426-428.

ABSTRACT In the past few years, Covet Fashion and Redecor have emerged as popular options in the invest/express genre of casual games, where players create outfits and decorate rooms, respectively, to be judged by other users. This paper considers how such gamification—by turning taste considerations into a literal game—can impact judgments in everyday life. Drawing on symbolic interactionism, this

ABSTRACT This article analyzes a 2019 poster of Minnesota Representative Ilhan Omar by setting it in the context of political memes. Extending recent work on meme rhetoric, and emphasizing the roll that condensation symbols and emotional appeals play in memetic display, I argue that our understanding of political messages like the Omar poster is enhanced when they are approached as memes. Such an approach

ABSTRACT The article investigates how the union IWGB Game Workers has been introducing strategies that allow members to be more closely in control of their visibility with bosses and peers. The videogame sector has been traditionally averse to unionization. Its compulsory network sociality, and the belief that game-work should be passion-driven, limit the expression of discontent and proposals for

ABSTRACT This paper introduces a framework of five consecutive but potentially intersecting tropes of representation of intellectual disabilities. The framework was developed in a post-qualitative manner by a researcher collective of people labeled with and without intellectual disabilities. As many existing disability media analyses have been reproached for being un-nuanced, elitist and reductionist

(2021). Black or Right: anti/racist campus rhetorics. Critical Studies in Media Communication: Vol. 38, No. 3, pp. 286-289.

(2021). The digital lives of black women in Britain Palgrave Studies in (re)presenting gender. Critical Studies in Media Communication: Vol. 38, No. 3, pp. 290-292.

ABSTRACT In 1917, over 1,000 miners were deported from the mining town of Bisbee, AZ by a mob of deputized vigilantes. One-hundred years later, Bisbee ‘17 revisits the community as its residents engage the town’s shameful past through a re-creation of the mass deportation. The documentary film demonstrates that the shameful past is never silent, only quieted. Bisbee ‘17’s cinematography, sound design

(2021). Experiencing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: children, peace communication and socialization. Critical Studies in Media Communication: Vol. 38, No. 4, pp. 370-374.

(2021). Hegel in a wired brain. Critical Studies in Media Communication: Vol. 38, No. 4, pp. 367-370.

ABSTRACT This study examines how Nicaraguan print media discursively construct Indigeneity in the midst of land encroachment and new movements for self-determination in order to explore the nuanced modes through which neoliberal multiculturalist governance operates. Based on a critical discourse analysis of 133 news articles reporting on the five main Indigenous, Afro-Indigenous, and Indigenous-Kriol

ABSTRACT This paper presents a visual analysis of 1,236 Instagram posts from cannabis brands during the immediate period after Canada’s 2018 cannabis legalization. Promotional texts crafted by brands, whether print advertisements or social media content marketing, are rich sociocultural communicators. For decades critical scholars have analyzed deeper ideological stories from the common tropes, codes

ABSTRACT Through its portrayals of the intersectional identities of race and gender divergence, the FX series Pose illustrates how social structures fail marginalized communities as a disciplinary function of hegemony and perpetuate a biomedical model of health that serves to reinforce health disparities. For this study, researchers took a critical cultural rhetorical approach to the series through

ABSTRACT Utilizing Critical Race theory, this essay constitutes an ideological critique of recent mediated discourses that construct police officers as “heroic first responders.” Through the rhetorical archetype, this analysis reveals how the discursive shift to describe police as “heroic first responders” operates as a covert, ideological response to Black Lives Matter and the mediated depictions

(2021). Atlas of AI. Critical Studies in Media Communication: Vol. 38, No. 4, pp. 365-367.

ABSTRACT How do the media critique the media? How do comedy and fiction advance political critique? A British and American format, here identified as the “parliamentary sitcom,” illustrates the continued advantages of episodic television in a hyperpolarized environment. Located between the immediate reaction of daily programing and the long-term production of film, the sitcom’s popularity and anonymity

(2021). The Hollywood Jim Crow: the racial politics of the movie industry. Critical Studies in Media Communication: Vol. 38, No. 2, pp. 205-209.

(2021). Gaming sexism: gender and identity in the era of casual video games. Critical Studies in Media Communication: Vol. 38, No. 3, pp. 282-285.

ABSTRACT This article examines how the El Rey Network departs distinctively from other competing Latinx television channels catered to the young bicultural and bilingual millennials. The cable network’s emphasis on working-class masculinity aims to appeal to the Latino millennials who increasingly identify themselves as the new working class. The deployment of a working-class perspective into its original

ABSTRACT This article details a study of mythological storytelling in the Ghanaian media. It analyzes a number of news articles about a Ghanaian celebrity, Yvonne Nelson, in the wake of leading a protest to pressure the government to find a lasting solution to a two-year energy crisis in Ghana. Drawing on discourse-mythological analysis, the paper explores the discursive construction of hero mythology

ABSTRACT This essay reads iterations of Pete Souza’s “Situation Room” photograph across media contexts as an effect of an overdetermined public desire for U.S. redemption in the War on Terror. I argue that repetitions of the photograph's “about to die moment” invite a visceral identification between citizen-subjects and militarized state action through the subjunctive tense. The image’s tension reflected