Gender-based violence (GBV) poses a significant threat to women and girls worldwide, adversely affecting their physical and mental well-being. In today's digital era, online platforms have become battlegrounds for combating abuse against women. TikTok, in particular, has emerged as a pivotal platform for raising awareness of GBV globally. Guided by Lazar's Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis framework, this study conducts a comparative analysis of GBV activist discourses in English and Arabic shared on TikTok. This study analyzes 80 TikTok videos under two trending hashtags: #stopviolenceagainstwomen and لا للعنف ضد المرأة# (No to violence against women), exploring gendered power relations and linguistic differences about GBV activism across cultural contexts. This analysis revealed two counter-discourses that challenge prevailing narratives about GBV: breaking the silence and redefining cultural norms. Through a multimodal discourse perspective, this study considers language within the context of a broader semiotic analysis of video elements, including transitions, emojis, colors, and music. Overall, the findings illuminate how gendered relations and power dynamics shape activists’ discursive strategies on social media across cultural divides.

Over the last three decades, the relationship between ethnography and communication studies has deepened. Yet, the meaning of “media ethnography” remains contested, as communication scholars describe a wide variety of research practices as “ethnographic.” This article overviews the broader literature on ethnography in communication research with a focus on the contributions of media production ethnography. Specifically, the paper examines the value of long-term, in-depth engagement with research subjects. It concentrates on ethnographic methods’ capacity to open a unique and behind-the-scenes view of media production and examines the readable and engaging storytelling style of this type of research. To illustrate the value of media production research, this article draws on contemporary newsroom ethnographies as well as the recently published books of Natalia Roudakova's Losing Pravda , Alexander Fattal's Guerrilla Marketing , and Narges Bajoghli's Iran Reframed . The analysis reveals that despite the challenges, ethnographic research remains invaluable to the study of media.

Media representations of suffering are regularly critiqued for contributing to desensitization. Grounded in media studies, journalism studies, psychology, and political philosophy, I develop a solidarity framework for media practitioners who seek to resist the normalization of what they define as suffering due to social injustice. By concretizing people's immediate needs (moral solidarity), accounting for collective resistance already underway (political solidarity), and representing a pattern of suffering due to structures that transcend an isolated incident or single issue (social solidarity), this framework provides a way for media practitioners to challenge the minimization, isolation, and abstraction of social injustice that perpetuates suffering.

This paper theorized the concept of “factional journalism” and media capture within South Africa's privately owned print media landscape. This theorization attemps to understand media capture along partisan and factional cleavages in the post democractic dispensation. To understand the factional journalism phenomena in South Africa, we employ a case study design that relies on interviews with Media24 and Independent News and Media (also known as Independent Media) aligned political editors and journalists who have covered the Jacob Zuma and Cyril Ramaphosa's presidencies. Theoretically, we rely on the political economy framework of the media. For this investigation, we wanted to understand how, if at all, media ownership structures and political-economic interests influence journalistic bias in how the Zuma and Ramaphosa presidencies are/have been represented. Findings from this study confirmed the enduring political and business pressures exerted on journalists when covering political elites. While our study observed few cases of outliers, the general trend confirms the continued relevance of the political economy framework as a viable model when seeking to understand editorial bias when covering political elites.

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.

By focusing on the 2015 Syrian refugee crisis compared to the 2022 refugee crisis from Ukraine, this study examined how Western media visually portrayed Middle Eastern versus European refugees on social media. Drawing on the current literature and guided by visual framing theory, a total of 1,590 visual tweets of forcibly displaced Middle Easterners and Europeans were analyzed. Results suggest differences in the denotative, stylistic, and connotative representations between the two groups. Significant differences emerged across variables, including scene, facial expressions, camera shot, and the dominant frame. Overall, our investigation into this area expands the comparative visual literature on social media portrayal of crises and exposes discrepancies in pictorial representations of refugees in Western media based on geographical and temporal contexts.

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.

People with disabilities represent a significant portion of the population in any given country. Across contexts, media representations of disability tend to reproduce existing tropes and follow established narratives. One of the most enduring is that of the helpless victim in a tragic story, but that of a resentful villain or inspiring hero is also intimately linked to suffering. In this article, I discuss language use, algorithmic bias, and AI-generated content concerning online representations of suffering by people with disabilities in South Africa. This is a country characterized by profound social inequalities, a sophisticated media and regulatory framework, and one of the highest Internet penetrations on the African Continent. Rather than providing practical recommendations, the envisaged contribution of the present paper is to advocate for critical awareness and emphasize the need for further problematization.