Abstract
The October 2020 issue of the Journal of Communication Inquiry critically examines how individuals, communities, and institutions support and engage with questions of safety.
The first article in this issue, “Reimagining Religiously Segregated Spaces: Building Interfaith Sites Through Participatory Photography” by Kiran Vinod Bhatia and Manisha Pathak-Shelat, argues that the use of religious identifiers as categorical imperatives in public spaces reinforces interfaith community divisions. The authors instead argue that interfaith sites provide a safe space for young individuals to collectively participate in making sense of their community and its norms. Participatory photography provides a way for youth to engage with the questions.
“Unexpected Negative Participant Responses and Researcher Safety: “Fuck Your Survey and Your Safe Space, Trigger Warning Bullshit” by Jocelyn DeGroot and Heather J. Carmack offers insights into an underexamined area of methodological work in communication and media studies. While many methods-focused pieces discuss research participant safety and ethics, less work examines the safety of qualitative and quantitative researchers in communication. DeGroot and Carmack critically reflect on participants’ threatening trolling behaviors within a study they completed, noting the emotional labor often enacted by researchers.
The third article, “Corporate Affirmations of Self-Identity and Mutual Self-Help: Transmedia Rhetorics of Marvel Rising” by J. Richard Stevens and Burton St. John III, examines how Disney’s Marvel Rising transmedia campaign pushed a “commercialized feminism” that offered a pro-social, feminist message for young audiences while aiming to maximize marketplace revenues. The examined texts offered both economic opportunity for the corporation while offering audiences pleasure and support.
Finally, “We Heart Japan: Fan Citizenship and the Role of Institutions in the Response to Japanese Earthquakes” by Lucy Joanna Miller explores how fans enacted citizenship in response to the 2011 Great East Japan earthquake. Although fans are often positioned as deviant in media, fans collectively worked to support Japanese people through the tragedy and policed other fans who did not adhere to supportive fan messages. This supportive behavior was driven by institutional organization of fan citizenship through sites like Crunchyroll.
JCI would like to thank all of the authors, reviewers, advisory board members, editorial board members, and workers at SAGE publishing for their work to make this issue possible.