Contemporary Challenges
NUI Galway
Featured Destroying the Capitol: Narrating the Settler Colonial Urge to Destroy Government, Blame Aliens, and Start All Over View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Michael Lechuga
In this paper, I frame the January 6, 2021 insurrection on the U.S. Capitol Building as the predictable culmination of decades of agitation felt by the white settler class in the U.S. I offer a theory of settler colonial media psychology, a mode of narrative production that relies on the manufacture and circulation of colonial subjectivities to order the sets of political relationships between land, people, and governing institutions. In this mode, the settler subject, endowed with unlimited individual sovereignty, commits to a life of "self-defensive" violence against perceived threats to their freedom: violence against non-white others, violence against the environment, and violence against the central government. I describe how the third violence especially has become a common trope in popular U.S. narratives, particularly in the extraterrestrial invasion genre where the anxieties and hopes of a ruined government at the hands of alien invaders usually manifests in a brighter settler future. I look at films like Mars Attacks! (1996), Independence Day (1996), and Dark City (1998) as evidence of a decades-old anti-government attitude and the genre as the vehicle for the narratives of settler agitation. Finally, I compare the narratives undergirding these films with those leading up to and emerging out of the events of the January 6th insurrection to make a case that popular culture is often inscribed with cultural coding for colonial subjectivity.
Crush the Enemy: Hymns of the Insurrection View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Theodore Trost
Religious imagery, biblical quotations, and hymn singing all figured prominently in the flow of events that took place in Washington, DC, on the day of Epiphany, 2021. Some in the crowd sang the hymn "Amazing Grace." Others waved banners that bore the image of a lion under which was written "Proverbs 30.30"—a biblical reference that some in the crowd might have recognized as containing the words "The lion in you never retreats." Still others called upon God in song to "Crush the Enemy" on behalf of his people--presumably the protesters congregated to "Stop the Steal." What might these scenes, preserved by their perpetrators and published by the Uncivil Religion project (among others), suggest about orderly or disorderly political protest? How does the hymnodic and biblical literature engaged by the crowds advance their purposes in challenging power, or in manifesting empowerment, as they approach the cradle of democracy on the day of Epiphany? These are the questions this paper explores.
Motivation to Correct Misinformation: Third-person Perceptions and Perceived Norms View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Ryan Geesaman
The proliferation of misinformation is an ongoing problem in the United States. The public’s trust in news from the mainstream media is down, and the sharing of news items on social media is up – even the sharing of made-up news. Koo et al. (2021) found third-person perceptions (TPP) indicate that people tend to believe that others are more influenced by misinformation than they are. People also believe they are more likely to correct their own misinformation than their perceived norm of how likely others are to correct misinformation that they have propagated. This replication of Koo et al.’s study found that TPP and perceived norms influence a person’s likelihood to self-correct and correct others when misinformation has been spread. Those with lower media hostility are also more likely to correct.
