Critical Considerations
Representations of ‘Leftover Women’ in the Chinese English-language News Media View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Yating Yu
Single women who are older than twenty-seven have been labelled as ‘leftover women’ by the Chinese media since 2007. As Fincher (2014) argues, ‘The stigma surrounding “leftover” women intensifies pressure on women in their mid- to late twenties to rush into marriage with the wrong man’ (p.16). The scarcity of media studies from linguistic perspectives on the topic of leftover women, especially in the Chinese English-language news media, has provided a rationale for conducting this study. In order to fill this niche in the literature, this study investigates how leftover women are linguistically represented in the English-language news media in China by employing a corpus-assisted approach to critical discourse analysis. A specialised corpus of 303 English news articles (i.e., 236,254 words), covering the years between 2007 and 2017, was built for this purpose. Corpus linguistics techniques were employed to quantify the Meaning Shift Units (MSUs) of the lemma leftover women (Sinclair 1996, 2004) and van Leeuwen’s (2008) sociosemantic approach to social actors and actions was applied to inform the classification of MSUs in context. These findings shed light on media representations of leftover women, the contested ideologies emerging from these representations, and how shifting gender politics and identity shapes and are shaped by media in the world’s most populous nation.
Power of Pop: Media Analysis of Representations of Immigrants in Popular TV Shows
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Lucy Odigie-Turley, Porshea Patterson Hurst
Popular culture has the power to shape our understanding of complex issues and our attitudes toward people we perceive to be different. However, when depictions in popular entertainment persistently reflect biases, stereotypes, and inaccuracies about people and communities, they help sow division and drive audiences toward unhelpful and inaccurate perceptions. Such negative outcomes have been widely documented in existing research, which has shown how patterns of stereotypical depictions of black men and boys, and communities of color in general can negatively affect people’s attitudes toward these groups.As popular entertainment continues to shape the cultural and political landscape, and is increasingly recognized as an important predictor of political decision making, identifying harmful trends and understanding how to counter them through better informed storytelling, media literacy, and advocacy will be of critical importance. In an effort to better understand the role popular entertainment is playing in shaping attitudes toward immigrants and immigration, this presentation examines narratives concerning immigrants, immigration, and border communities within a medium with the largest reach and one of the highest levels of audience engagement— U.S. broadcast, cable, and streaming television. Key findings show that immigrant communities are not only significantly underrepresented, but that depictions of immigrants are both overwhelmingly negative and racially skewed—with White immigrant characters more frequently depicted in positive, authoritative, and recurring roles than are immigrants of color.
Where did the Nazis Go? Tracing Right-wing Extremist Movements Online
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Amy Mack
There has been a shift in research on extremism in recent years to include white, right-wing extremism and a corresponding increase in anti-hate and anti-extremism policies on social media platforms. This has resulted in the removal of users, groups, and pages expressing far-right and extremist ideologies. This poses an interesting conundrum for ethnographers who study right-wing extremism online: How do we maintain access to our interlocutors and ethnographic spaces in the midst of anti-racist censorship? In this paper, I consider this question through three specific examples from my doctoral research on far-right groups online: 1) the movement from Twitter to Gab due to the so-called ‘shadowbans’, 2) the pre-emptive relocation from Gab to other far-right sites following the Tree of Life shooting and shutdown of Gab, and 3) the removal of far-right groups on Facebook following the Christchurch mosque attacks. Each instance of censorship prompted an ethnographic disruption. While ethnographic methods are particularly vulnerable to censorship practices due to an emphasis on place-based participant-observation, I argue that ethnography allows scholars to more easily track where extremists will relocate to. Moreover, it provides insight into their experiences of and responses to censorship, and thus the effectiveness of censorship policies.
