This study investigates the impact of human trafficking laws and digital carceral technologies on Asian migrant massage workers in the United States. Drawing on community-engaged oral histories and my advocacy in human trafficking legal cases, it highlights the survival strategies these workers adopt in response to digital carceral surveillance. The paper introduces the concept of the digital imperial shackle , which reveals the punitive mechanisms of racialized, sexual, migrant, and moral control within U.S. imperialism. Despite the constraints of these digital carceral systems, Asian migrant massage workers utilize non-digital strategies to navigate their daily lives. This research reinterprets their survival tactics as a form of visceral knowledge, challenging the prevailing discourses on the intersection of digital technology, trafficking, and anti-sex work regimes.

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.

This study uses a theoretical framework grounded in alternatives to normative objectivity to investigate whether and how journalists call for a reimagining of objectivity as an operational framework for journalism. Through a textual analysis of 289 metajournalistic articles and X posts produced between 2012 and 2022, the study also compares how those discourses have (or have not) shifted within that decade. Findings indicate that calls to reimagine objectivity as a journalistic norm steadily increased in volume and gravity over the time period, with two critical incidents prompting a groundswell of discourse: The 2016 presidential election and the murder of George Floyd in 2020. It also found that the metajournalistic discourse on X was distinct but complementary to the discourse in the articles. This study shows that journalists are arguing for an alternative paradigm that retains a commitment to truth, facts, and accuracy during the newsgathering process, but conceptually acknowledges that no kind of knowledge production is inherently value-free, and thus values journalists’ standpoints as an asset, rather than a hindrance, to news coverage.

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.

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 study offers a feminist critical discourse analysis of news coverage about Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion's blockbuster single WAP (“Wet-Ass Pussy”). As WAP rose in popularity, it sparked discourses in the press that reflect the tension between transgressive politics of pleasure and hegemonic politics of respectability. Therefore, through the coverage of WAP, we interrogate how Black women's sexualities are constructed and what those articulations say about the racialized sexual politics that shape Black women's lives.

Utilizing queer theory, a textual analysis of 50 episodes of the FX horror-comedy series What We Do in the Shadows (2019–) resulted in three overarching themes: (1) representation of different forms of queerness and open expression of character identities, (2) normalization of queer identity and resistance to homophobia, and (3) inclusivity of relational configuration beyond queer-based narratives. Findings demonstrate the series promotes a queer perspective in addition to outright support for nonheteronormative characters. This reading of its dialogic and visual text adds to the literature on the positive media treatment of LGBTQ+ communities and how popular media texts serve as conduits of resistance to normative heterosexuality. Research in this vein is especially cogent and relevant given increasing antitransgender and intersex legislation that marks the U.S. political environment in recent years.

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.