Journal of Communication Inquiry

Incarceration means more than physical isolation; it disconnects prisoners from society, culture, and community. In U.S. prisons, access to media is shaped both by institutional structures and informal social processes. Although state and federal regulations set regulations, wardens have broad discretionary power and often use media access as a tool for reward or punishment. Media use and access in prisons becomes a form of currency that affects status, relationships, and perceived legitimacy within prison life. Through in-depth interviews with 26 individuals formerly incarcerated in Georgia, we examine how access to media resources defines and distributes power in closed and surveilled environments. With Bourdieu's field theory as a conceptual framework, we investigate how media becomes economic, political, cultural, social, and symbolic capital. We foreground the voices of those with lived experience and find that media is a mechanism for preserving identity, navigating social hierarchies, and maintaining ties to life beyond prison.

This study examines how an IKEA advertising campaign in Spain titled Efectos Colaterales (“Collateral Effects”) interacts with structural violence and socio-cultural peace in the country. For this investigation, we conduct a visual analysis on all four advertisements comprising Efectos Colaterales. While the campaign was found to effectively utilize humor and several other narrative techniques to portray a lifestyle adhering to the brand's identity, its storyline implicitly makes the customer solely responsible for attaining this aspirational lifestyle, thereby ignoring the institutional and socio-political realities that currently limit a substantial portion of the population's ability to obtain affordable housing. This article draws attention to the importance of studying truth claims embedded in everyday advertising and the ways in which these shape our construction and understanding of what a peace culture—or a lack thereof—could potentially look like.

This study explores how Latinx content creators harness social media to challenge established mental health narratives in postcolonial family systems. Using Social Media Grounded Theory, we coded 69 Instagram and TikTok posts about mental health from 23 social media accounts, including Latinx influencers, advocacy organizations, therapists, and artists/musicians. Our findings demonstrate that Latinx mental health content creators act as intercultural super peers—thought leaders who create online counterspaces that destigmatize conversations about mental health. They help young Hispanic Americans resist colonial logics by transforming discourse about familismo, generational trauma, and machismo. As intercultural super peers, content creators also help audiences navigate nepantla, a Nahuatl word used by Gloria Anzaldúa to describe the state of cultural in-betweenness. Together, Latinx content creators and their audiences interrogate cultural expectations that suffering is an anticipated part of existence.

Several corporate social media accounts have recently practiced uncouth and eclectic approaches to social media practice to promote engagement and demonstrate the authenticity of their brands. This paper introduces paradiastolic personae as a rhetorical device used by fast food social media accounts to reframe crude, unprofessional behavior into virtues of authenticity. I analyze a recent trend in corporate social media engagement that marks a turn away from a dispassionate advertising model to personalized practices of memeing and shitposting. Using a critical rhetorical analysis of corporate Twitter accounts, I argue that these accounts constitute their consumer base by appealing to countercultural signifiers of rebellion, unprofessionalism, and anti-work sentimentality, and organize narratives of post-ironic disidentification from elite perceptions of taste while elevating fast food consumption to a normative ideal.

This study contributes to our understanding of how people utilized a WhatsApp group for activism in Nigeria's EndSARS movement, a protest that fights police brutality and attempts to entrench good governance. Through the digital ethnographic study of a WhatsApp group from October 20, 2021, to October 20, 2023, this article answers the question: How do the WhatsApp group members dedicated to the EndSARS movement engage in activism, and what practices do they employ to mobilize support within this digital space? Through the reflexive thematic analysis of the dataset, two themes and a subtheme were constructed to drive the results and discussion. In the first theme, the paper argues that due to WhatsApp's semi-public nature, the research participants employ the platform for one-on-one activism practice. A subtheme within this first theme, “WhatsApp Status and Activist Practices,” was also discussed. The second theme suggests that the use of WhatsApp for activism engenders the emergence of a distinct group of socio-political actors whom I termed “private activists.” Overall, this study contributes to the literature on WhatsApp as a platform for activism, specifically within the context of Nigeria, an environment characterized by the suppression of dissenting voices, and in the Global South.

The rapid decline in biodiversity and its environmental impact have become critical global concerns, prompting governments and organizations to implement policies based on recommendations from institutions like the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). However, in the pursuit of modernization and globalization, indigenous conservation practices that have long conserved the environment are often overlooked. This study examines the cultural beliefs of the Uli people in Anambra State, Nigeria, and their role in environmental preservation. Using qualitative methods such as interviews, autoethnography, and content analysis of a short YouTube video, it explores cultural communication codes, including language, social networks, and songs, that have sustained these practices for generations. Grounded in the eco-philosophical theory of nature–culture relations, the decolonial narrative, and cultural communication theory, the findings reveal that the Uli community maintains well-defined conservation practices, such as preserving forest groves, protecting species like the sacred python and monitor lizard, and conserving 14 tree species. The study underscores the need for policies that recognize and integrate cultural heritage into environmental sustainability efforts.

Home Box Office's The Last of Us (Season One, 2023) vibrates with symptomatic meanings that transpose contemporaneous sociopolitical anxieties. The horror/monster-genre series constructs contrasting models of “the art of governance” in a febrile moment in the United States when formerly presumed as settled questions about governmentality have been challenged. The analysis argues that the series enacts transposition from the human penchant for flawed governmentality to the monstrosity of the fungal infection, a move that can be interpreted as the locus of symptomatic meaning in the series. During their transcontinental journey in which the infected are often spectral, Joel and Ellie encounter communities that assume different forms of governmentality: Hobbesian Leviathan (and corruption of it), neoliberal gated community, and fundamentalist/authoritarian, each of which fails to meet human needs. By contrast, the “small socialism” of the compound in Jackson, Wyoming briefly presents governmentality that enables subjects to flourish. While the series is broadly progressive and favorable toward equality, it conveys chimerical accents around gender and LGBTQ.

This essay examines how cultural hybridity is articulated through the manifestations of cultural reconversion in South–South diasporic relations. Through a critical discourse analysis of the Facebook page “General Consulate of Lebanon in Rio de Janeiro,” created for the Lebanese diaspora living in Brazil, I review definitions of cultural hybridity and offer a new perspective on how cultural hybridity, under certain conditions and contexts, morphs into a horizontal exchange of cultures, where the diaspora can move from the margins to becoming a part of the social fabric of the host country. This reformulated outlook on cultural hybridity allows diasporic communities to navigate and negotiate the space between home and host countries through a reinvention of cultural practices in digital spaces. This paper provides a critical analysis of how the Lebanese diaspora in Brazil utilizes social media to strengthen their connection to their place of origin.

In this essay, I identify and analyze a narrative style found across a range of artifacts in popular culture that I call fantastic autonomy. Based on careful readings of durable, quotidian, and spectacular exemplars, I show how these narratives seduce viewers and ultimately produce a distorted view of capitalist production wherein materials and techniques yield finished products as if by magic, ultimately perpetuating commodity fetishism. Understanding the rhetorical appeal and consequence of such stories tells critical scholars much about the ways that labor is denigrated and, more often, erased in popular culture.

Jean Baudrillard's (1929–2007) theoretical writings are applied to an examination of today's global virtual economy and society. New advances in virtual culture, which flourished during and after the COVID-19 pandemic—esp., metaverses (immersive virtual worlds), non-fungible tokens, and deepfakes (synthetic media)—are discussed to show the prescience of Baudrillard's theory for how our global consumer society of the image is now defined by the problem of simulation. Baudrillard is shown to have theorized important trends and phenomenon in our contemporary global hyperculture that have hitherto been neglected: non-communication, anti-work, and anti-consumption are, among others, explained as developing phenomena because they are pathologies of a new nihilism, a hatred of capitalism, that is not realized through destruction, but through the simulation and deterrence that now defines contemporary global culture and society.

Within film industry discourses, U.S. Latinxs are said to be important to the future of Hollywood due to their sheer size and buying power. However, Latinxs remain underrepresented both in front of and behind the camera. Focusing on Lionsgate as a case study, I examine how studio executives have discursively constructed the “Latino audience” and the degree to which this construction allows for films that are oppositional to hegemonic narratives. I ground my analysis in critical political economy and base my findings on a review of Lionsgate's internal and public facing documents, industry reports, and press coverage of Lionsgate's Latino initiatives. I argue that, as a discursive construction, the Latino audience has two defining characteristics. First, they are a market to be exploited rather than a public to be served. Second, studios have been incentivized to conceptualize U.S. Latinxs as part of a transnational market, which imagines the audience as residents of some other nation. Finally, I argue that this conceptualization of the audience limits the resources invested in Latinx films and the kind of counter-hegemonic discourses which Latinx filmmakers can engage.

This essay suggests that there is a variant of what Stephanie Kelley-Romano calls the “conspiracy genre on American television,” a subgenre targeting children that we call kinder-conspiracy theories. Treating Disney's Gravity Falls as an exemplar of the subgenre, we argue that kinder-conspiracy theories differ from the larger genre in three ways. First, while inspiring social mistrust like most conspiracy entertainment, the programs portray some conspiracy theorists as hucksters, encouraging viewers to build their defenses against possible deception. Second, by serving as an introduction to reading conspiracy culture, the genre also serves as a kind of conspiracy literacy training and an inoculation against a milieu of rampant suspicion and polarization. Finally, due to their prosocial messaging for younger audiences, the genre also emphasizes a kind of collectivistic agency that privileges community over the traditional individualism and fantasies of the lone wolf conspiracy theorist.

This interdisciplinary study investigates representations of cannabis in 386 Australian newspaper reports from the latter-part of the nineteenth century. During this time, periodicals were the primary means of information circulation, and the Australian press shared much of its reporting with other jurisdictions. Using a reflexive thematic analysis, this research reveals that in this period, in which cannabis was being introduced into colonial pharmacopeias but had not yet been regulated in Australia, periodicals were at the heart of communicating cannabis to Australian audiences. These newspapers represented cannabis as both a dangerous recreational drug and a legitimate medicine, with these very distinct representations largely siloed from one another. These discourses, facilitated and perpetuated by mass media, were representative of a patchwork of influences, including international anxieties of drug use. Therefore, such reporting both legitimized and de-legitimized cannabis, influencing popular understandings of cannabis in nineteenth-century Australia at a pivotal time in the drug's history.

This essay is a close reading of YouTube's Michael & Anthony's video content in which mixed-race Black male pro wrestler Anthony Bowens and his white boyfriend Michael Pavano's romance is represented. The goal is to deploy queer of color critique to unpack how the interracial aspects of Bowens and Pavano's romance offer moments to question, critique, and reimagine the queer politics of interracial dating. Three themes emerge from this reading: reconstructing masc/femme coupling trope, counteracting interraciality, and optimism (and pessimism). This essay considers how Bowens and Pavano's romance reifies or resists postracialism working with the LGBTQ+ liberation movement.