Journal of Communication Inquiry

In this interview, Marie-José Mondzain, prominent French philosopher, historian, and cultural critic, discusses some of the key concepts in critical visual studies central to her work. In her typical keen, learned fashion, Mondzain demonstrates the unbreakable relationships among image, desire, subjectivity, collective identity, and the broader sociocultural milieu, in which image making and unmaking work in situ to constitute our political realities and the conflicts therein. Never a mere visual object, an image, as Mondzain shows, is as dynamic an element in the display of power as all the acts of negotiations and struggles that make up what is called politics. In plain but lively language and peppered with ticking examples, Mondzain’s replies to the interviewer provide a helpful introduction to her work on culture, theory, criticism, and politics over more than forty years.

This study develops upon recent scholarship about the Russian government's digital influence campaign to cultivate Black Americans during the 2016 election by rooting their efforts within a century-long strategy to exploit racial inequality to discredit and damage American democracy. Guided by Shifman’s (2013) construct of memetics, we employed a novel methodology that combined journalistic fact-checking and critical, qualitative analysis to study 164 Facebook advertisements targeted at Black Americans. These advertisements closely resembled Soviet-era propaganda and new disinformation strategies facilitated by the affordances of Facebook. Our findings reveal the advertisements exploited Facebook's interactive design and used an insider's voice to share real news about racial inequality, celebrate Black culture, and coordinate civic action. This study's methodological approach provides a meaningful framework for understanding how actors hack and deploy cultural knowledge to spread disinformation through social media platforms.

The study explores the struggles and successes of community media journalists in covering gender issues and violence against women in remote rural areas in India. The article introduces some small-scale community newspapers from the country's hindsight and presents an elaborative case study of Khabar Lahariya that prioritise gender issues in the content. The study records the presence and efforts of Khabar Lahariya in the reporting of gender issues by providing testimonies and examples from the field. The women journalists of the organisation successfully create a discourse around gender issues and bring about change in the Bundelkhand region by covering stories of violence and atrocities against women with their gender-sensitive perspective and unshakable confidence. At the same time, they put their own safety at risk for social change. Interestingly, a documentary film on the struggles of these women journalists has made its entry to Oscar nominations for the year 2022.

This research provide a case study to analyses how Chinese government’s social-media accounts were used to communicate during the COVID-19 pandemic through the lens of agenda-setting. Two most active Chinese government official accounts on Sina Weibo, the most popular Chinese social media platform, are selected as examples. The frequencies and content of postings between December 2019 and May 2020, namely the period of the first outbreak of COVID-19, are analysed. The research argues that Chinese government official accounts frequently posted during this period, and three aspects were most salient in the communication: information regarding the virus, US-China relations during the pandemic, and emotional tributes to public servants. The salience of these aspects contributed to narratives that reinforce Chinese government’s efforts in fighting the pandemic, and enable positive portrayal of government to be more visible in the online public space.