Abstract
The January issue of Journal of Communication Inquiry offers readers critical engagements with discourses inside and surrounding media from around the world.
In the opening article, “Remaking Television: One Day at a Time, Digital Delivery and Latina/o Cultural Specificity,” Esteban del Rio and Kristin Moran employ Latina/o Critical Communication Theory to explore how the Netflix series One Day at a Time negotiates economic imperatives, textual representations, and cultural issues. Drawing on close readings of the first season of the series as well as interviews with the series showrunner Gloria Calderon Kellett, the authors trace how the text emerged from new opportunities offered to creators through digital delivery services. After developing the institutional context, they highlight how the show develops “a complex notion of Latinidad rooted in cultural specificity” in nuanced storylines that negotiate sexual identity and immigration issues.
Michel Clay Carey and Jim Lichtenwalter address how news framing of the water crisis in Flint, MI distracts from broader questions about environmental justice in the second article, “‘Flint Can’t Get in the Hearing’: The Language of Urban Pathology in Coverage of an American Public Health Crisis.” Through analyses of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, the authors argue that the newspapers frame residents as powerless to resolve the water crisis, continuing to reinforce the idea that is it solely up to the government to solve the problem and diminishing the ongoing grassroots efforts of residents like Flint’s African American community to develop solutions.
Addressing how Jadavpur University students used social media to protest on-campus sexual violence, Sreyoshi Dey explores how Twitter functions as a public sphere among the youth of India in “Let There Be Clamor: Exploring the Emergence of a New Public Sphere in India and Use of Social Media as an Instrument of Activism.” While legacy media organizations frequently gatekeep significant issues for marginalized populations in India, digital spaces like Twitter provide a way for counterpublics to continue conversations and create awareness for social messages.
Katie Foss details how fictional characters and narratives connect with real-world relationships between fans and brands in “Death of the Slow-Cooker or #CROCKPOTISINNOCENT? This Is Us, Parasocial Grief, and the Crock-Pot Crisis.” Drawing on analysis of the first two seasons of This Is Us, tweets, and promotional materials from This Is Us and Crock-Pot, Foss traces how fans blamed a real-world brand for the death of a fictional character and how the brand recovered from the “fictional crisis” by taking fans’ concerns seriously. The article concludes by addressing how parasocial relationships allow narratives to form with space for education-entertainment, although This Is Us did not fully engage with that opportunity.
Nandini Bhalla and David Moscowitz interrogate how women are depicted in Yoga magazines in the United States through a textual and visual framing analysis in “Yoga and Female Objectification: Commodity and Exclusionary Identity in U.S. Women’s Magazines.” They argue that frames of slim, white, upper-middle class women in these magazines appropriate yoga from its original cultural context by objectifying and commodifying the practice and its practitioners. These media practices remove the Indian spiritual roots of yoga to center women’s bodies as objects that are encouraged to meet specific beauty standards.
The January issue closes with Raven Maragh-Lloyd’s book review of Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism by Sophia Noble. Noting how Noble centers Black girls and women in a way the industry does not, Maragh-Lloyd concludes her review by addressing how Noble’s work importantly advocates for Black Feminist Technology Studies that prioritizes intersectionality and counternarratives while leaving room for other methodological and theoretical approaches to studying algorithms and marginalization.
Thank you to the many people who helped to complete this issue, including our authors, reviewers, Advisory Board members, Executive Editor, and SAGE production staff.