Media Framing and Racial Attitudes in the Aftermath of Katrina

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, many African Americans held fairly negative attitudes about effective and speedy government response to the storm. We employ framing theory to examine the role of race in shaping attitudes following Katrina. We hypothesize that a dominant media frame of Black storm victims led African Americans to develop a stronger empathy with storm victims, and thus, more negative views about government response. We test this hypothesis using a unique national poll of adults conducted in September 2005 that over sampled African Americans. Our results support the hypothesis that race strongly shaped attitudes following the storm.     

Iranian University Students' Politics in the Post-Reform Movement Era: A Discourse Analysis

Based on the discourse analysis of the statements of the university student organizations in the period between 1996–2006, this paper will address the pros and cons of five approaches to politics in the post-reform movement era based on five discourses among university students in the past decade of Iranian politics and their consequences for reshaping the Iranian polity. This article first discusses five socio-political processes, i.e., Islamicization, social differentiation, limited political competition, transformation of Shi'ite authority, and personalization of power, which led to four social and political schisms in Iranian society; inequality; political, social, and cultural discrimination; and secular/Islamist tension. Referring to these schisms, political discourses shape the ideologies and actions of Iranian student movements. These discourses are social justice, tradition, totalitarianism, pluralism, and Islamic democracy. Even if these discourses were no more than intellectual pronouncements by the university students, they have been powerful enough to extend to the Iranian political society.     

Essentialism,Memory and Resistance: Aboriginality and the Politics of Authenticity

This paper is about how the discourses of white intellectuals operating in Aboriginal Studies create a knowledgeable gaze which seeks to police the cultural practices through which Aborigines produce themselves. Aborigines have become the focus of a gaze which analyses, questions, and problematises their resistances and even their identities. Determining the boundaries of Aboriginal authenticity has become the preoccupation of some European intellectuals whose concern with situating the culture of Aborigines is at the expense of acknowledging the positioning power of their own cultural practices. This paper seeks to reverse this knowledge-power relationship by focusing on discourses operating in Aboriginal Studies and the effects of power created by the custodial pastoral roles which some white intellectuals have taken on.     

Religion and the US Presidency: Politics,the Media,and Religious Identity

Abstract

The relationship between religion and the presidency impacts both the viability of candidates and the manner in which decisions are made in the voting booth. Today we are living in culture where religion is front and center in politics. This article examines the role of religion in political discourse with special attention to the 2012 presidential election. It focuses on the manner in which religion and politics have become inextricably interwoven in the past sixty years. It begins by establishing the role of religion in the broader political arena. The article then turns to the manner in which religious identity and participation influence voting patterns, and how religious affiliation shapes the office of the presidency. The conclusion offers some reflections on the future of religion in presidential politics, an issue that will continue to be a significant factor in how and why voters support and marginalize particular candidates.     

The Imagineering of Resistance: Pollok Free State and the Practice of Postmodern Politics

The conflict over the construction of the M77 motorway in Glasgow, Scotland, is an example of a subculture of resistance which has emerged within Britain over the past fifteen years. The paper focuses upon the actions of Glasgow Earth First!, with whom the author has participated, and on the role of Pollok Free State – an ecological encampment located in the projected path of the motorway. Such resistance is characteristic of a postmodern political practice. It is heterogeneous, symbolic and extensively media-ted. It eschews the capture of state power but is a lived, immediate resistance, the experience of which may be transmitted over space and time.     

A Little Knowledge Is a Dangerous Thing: What We Know about the Role of the Media in State Politics

Abstract

This article explores the intellectual itinerary of the contemporary French political philosopher Pierre Manent. In particular, it highlights his efforts to do justice to the three great “poles” of human existence: philosophy, politics, and religion. Manent is shown to be a philosophically minded Christian, one who thinks politically and who rejects the temptation to “despise the temporal order.” Manent's reservations about the European project in its present form are shown to be rooted in a understanding of politics that emphasizes the need to weave together “communion” and “consent” if Europeans are to avoid administrative despotism and those postpolitical fantasies that prevent them from thinking and acting politically. The article ends with a reflection on Manent's impressive history of “political forms” in the Western world.     

Framing the Poor: Media Coverage and U.S. Poverty Policy, 1960–2008

Public policy toward the poor has shifted from an initial optimism during the War on Poverty to an ever‐increasing pessimism. Media discussion of poverty has shifted from arguments that focus on the structural causes of poverty or the social costs of having large numbers of poor to portrayals of the poor as cheaters and chiselers and of welfare programs doing more harm than good. As the frames have shifted, policies have followed. We demonstrate these trends with new indicators of the depth of poverty, the generosity of the government response, and media framing of the poor for the period of 1960–2008. We present a simple statistical model that explains poverty spending by the severity of the problem, gross domestic product, and media coverage. We then create a new measure of the relative generosity of U.S. government policy toward the poor and show that it is highly related to the content of newspaper stories. The portrayal of the poor as either deserving or lazy drives public policy.     

Challenging the discipline of migration: militant research in migration studies,an introduction

Abstract

In the last two decades, we have witnessed a proliferation of studies on migrations that, taking human mobility as their focus, contributed to the profiling of migrations as an object of research and to the institutionalization of its stakes. While, on the one hand, this has coincided with the becoming a discipline of migrations (i.e. their acquiring the status of a specific field of scholarly knowledge), it has, on the other hand, coincided with a disciplinarization of migrations themselves, a sort of disciplining effect of migrations' contested politics at the very moment of their academic heyday. This contribution interrogates the discipline of migrations as an academic domain of knowledge, as the governmental conduct of mobility, and as the governmentality at the intersection of these two layers.     

Vehicle Writings in an Iranian Context: The Interplay of Habitus and Field

The main objective of this paper is to problematize writings on vehicles in an Iranian context. Previous studies have indicated that vehicle stickers can be employed to express emotions and social status, political views, ideology and identity, and religious beliefs. However, very little has been done on this discursive practice in Iran. This study is the result of the content analysis of 122 vehicle writings collected from April 2011 to March 2012. This paper will draw on six of the most frequent themes: religion, humor, playing pessimism, didactic expressions, ethnic-geographic identification, and love. Employing Bourdieu's conceptual frameworks of “habitus,” “field,” and “doxa,” and Heath and Street's social practice perspective on literacy, it will be argued that vehicle writings in this study can be regarded as situated literacy practices reflecting the dominant undisputed discourses in the context, but at the same time displaying the dynamic interplay of power relations, the relationship of cultural structures and individual customized versions of those structures in vehicle writings.     

A Two‐Tiered Method for Identifying Trends in Media Framing of Policy Issues: The Case of the War on Terror

Research on media framing of policy issues has flourished. Yet the varied approaches to conceptualizing and operationalizing issue frames that make this literature rich also hinder its advancement. Here, we document the benefits of a two‐tiered method: the first level accounts for issue‐specific frames, while the second level tracks frames that generalize across issues. For this study, we draw on generalizable frames from prospect theory (loss vs. gain frames) and social identity theory (self‐referential vs. other‐referential frames). We discuss the theoretical merits of a two‐tiered approach, arguing that it should yield compound insights greater than the sum of its parts. Applying this method to newspaper coverage of the war on terror, we find a strong trend at the generalizable level: media framing of the war shifted over time from a predominant use of “fear” (self‐referential loss) frames to an increasing use of “charity” (other‐referential gain) frames. Our approach further reveals that the fear frames used in the lead‐up to the Iraq War were not driven by issue‐specific frames related to terrorism or weapons of mass destruction as we might have thought, but rather by frames related to the anticipated threats to U.S. troops. This study sharpens our understanding of how framing of the war evolved, but more broadly it suggests that a two‐tiered approach could be applied both within and across policy issues to advance our understanding of the framing process.