ABSTRACT Research on WhatsApp political memes is still scarce. Nevertheless, since the 2018 Brazilian elections, the platform has attracted the attention of the media in general, after complaints of its use to spread misinformation and extremist messages by supporters of the Bolsonaro Government. Despite this, the effects of the WhatsApp platform on the user practices of sharing memes are still poorly understood. This article proposes a cross-platform comparative approach, between the digital memes on Twitter and those on WhatsApp, to better understand how user practices are affected by some of the structural singularities of these platforms. Based on a sample of 1,794 memes collected on both platforms, this study finds that there is a higher than expected frequency of ideological memes on WhatsApp in relation toTwitter. The findings suggest that WhatsApp’s environmental opacity favors the emergence of an extremist memesphere.

ABSTRACT Entrepreneurship is often associated with masculinity as well as symbolic and actual male bodies, which creates discursive and material constraints for women entrepreneurs. This study synthesizes an intersectional reinscription analysis and new materialist approaches to agency to explore 34 mainland Chinese women entrepreneurs’ identity construction or boundary-makings in and beyond their work encounters with various actors. Materializing through participants’ narratives are abstract, intangible ‘ideas/ideals’ that become real ‘things’ capable of stirring/halting/altering women’s entrepreneurial activity, including ‘the feminine,’ ‘family harmony,’ ‘stable job,’ and ‘Chinese traditions.’ Already within and as open-ended relations, these nonhuman agents also get reconfigured in encountering women’s entrepreneurial enactments, whereby situated systems of power (apart from gender and occupation) also arise. Practically, this study maps potential sites of intervention in gendered entrepreneurship ecosystems and highlights cultural, work-life, and political insights shown through participants’ boundary-making practices.

ABSTRACT Attention to public problems is increasingly being driven by data. Given that data is used as a communication tool, a lack of data may further exacerbate existing inequities when allocating public resources, especially around infrastructure. Using a co-creation and power-sharing approach to community involvement, this field report describes how a rural community and academic partners worked together to collect photo and video data to create a community-driven flood map that communicates flood issues. The results indicate community members felt like they belong, are valued, and their flooding challenges are visible. These are all important steps to achieving attention and support to address their flooding infrastructure challenges. We end by offering six concrete suggestions, ranging from centering community needs to interdisciplinary collaboration, for how this approach can be used in other applied communication projects.

ABSTRACT Communication may play a key role in deconstructing existing stigmas. One popular initiative to reduce the stigma of opioid use disorder (OUD) is to increase contact between people in recovery and the public through digital storytelling. Why do some stories and storytellers make a more powerful impact? We drew upon the theory of character construction to offer new explanations for why mediated intergroup contact can facilitate positive intergroup outcomes. Across two studies (N = 209 and N = 191), exposure to recovery stories increased positive stereotypes and promoted future, interpersonal contact via transportation, intergroup ease, and outgroup variability. Two storyteller perceptions – fluid and multidimensional character – facilitated contact effects. The findings advance our understanding of how story content shapes a form of narrative persuasion, and its ability to improve intergroup relations.

ABSTRACT High-risk organizations, such as chemical companies, are urged to engage in long-term, dialogic community relations with local residents. Community engagement can establish organizational legitimacy and help to address local concerns. However, stakeholders may be skeptical toward communication efforts made by high-risk organizations, especially during crisis situations. This qualitative study explores whether two Belgian communities are skeptical of the communication efforts made by chemical companies regarding pollution crises, what motives they attribute to the crisis communication, and which communication characteristics shape those attributions. In-depth interviews with 47 local community members reveal that the crisis communication efforts were considered self-serving and attributed to corporate concerns over (a) legitimacy, (b) financial consequences and (c) legal liability. Interviewees believed that these self-serving motives took precedence over public interests. This study also describes communication cues that triggered or strengthened suspicions. Practical recommendations are proposed for chemical companies to improve relationships with local communities.

ABSTRACT This essay explores the conflicting discourses circulated ‘on the ground’ in rural West Bengal regarding blame, water, and health. We take a culture-centered approach that builds on environmental health communication literature through qualitative research with health workers and rural community members living with arsenicosis. Local discourses about structural dilemmas and water as savior/medicine reveal important practical and cultural considerations to water contamination solutions in West Bengal. This study makes three key contributions. First, we illuminate how empowerment discourses reinforce neoliberal and lifestyle theories of health while concealing important realities connected to water contamination and water access. Second, we demonstrate how cultural discourses of water as a savior disrupt Eurocentric health narratives and argue for free, decommodified water. Third, we argue that the narratives based on people’s lived illness experiences could be used to foster solidarity with healthcare workers and should be the basis of practical solutions to create water access.

ABSTRACT When multiple types of disasters occur sequentially – a cascading disaster – certain adaptive capacities might become temporarily ineffective or invalid. Advancing an understanding of community resilience in the context of cascading disasters, the current study provides empirical evidence of a hybrid hyperlocal community of practice (HCoP), a novel communicative process facilitated by hybrid organizing, during the 2021 Texas, U.S.A. winter storm. Using interviews with 30 residents in a city that experienced critical infrastructure failures⁣ – i.e. power or water outages – we conducted a constant comparative analysis to explore how residents coped with a cascading winter storm through communicative practices. This study contributes to the community of practice literature by explicating how a sense of community is strengthened during a disaster through a hybrid hyperlocal community of practice (HCoP), and elaborates the actual mechanisms leading to community dysfunction when adaptive capacities became temporarily ineffective or invalid during a cascading disaster.

ABSTRACT The purpose of the current study was to explore the benefits and dilemmas of supportive communication within BIPs and how dilemmas influence participants’ ability to access support resources and benefit from educational content. Specifically, this study examines competing goals, strategies, and interpretations of supportive communication within a BIP group located in the midwestern United States, targeting heterosexually-identifying DV perpetrators. Results suggest men encounter several support dilemmas that must be overcome to gain access to BIP group benefits. Specifically, openness to seeking and receiving support in BIPs involves threats of negative evaluation, threats to identity, and loss of control. Additionally, the artificiality of the BIP group conditions creates challenges for men once they leave and support resources are reduced in their existing social networks. This study makes a theoretical contribution by extending the theory of support dilemmas [Albrecht, T. L., & Adelman, M. B. (1987). Communicating social support. Sage.] to illuminate the unique challenges that BIPs present, several of which are specific to norms of masculinity. Practical applications are recommended to BIP practitioners with the aim to increase the efficacy of BIP curricular delivery and program outcomes.

ABSTRACT This study examines communicative enactments of compassion in mHealth-based coaching in the context of a prolonged pandemic. We conducted individual interviews with mHealth intervention participants in high and low resilience groups to investigate (a) the emerging patterns of compassionate coaching in mHealth and (b) the differences in coaching practices between the two groups. Our findings reveal how communication constitutes compassion by illustrating emerging mHealth practices that co-constructed the three subprocesses of compassion via virtual interactions: recognizing, relating, and (re)acting. Our study focuses specifically on unique communicative strategies designed according to mHealth affordances, environmental and relational contingencies, and participants’ health-related conditions and engagements. Further, the frequencies of compassionate coaching practices differed in high and low resilience groups, implying the influences of compassion on fostering resilience in a sustained crisis.

ABSTRACT Addressing calls for increased communication scholarship that interrogates power in stigma processes, we develop a critical postmodern approach to stigma management communication (SMC) theory and demonstrate how it can be used in the context of difficulty orgasming. Semi-structured interviews with mostly white, cisgender women experiencing orgasm difficulties in mixed-sex relationships (N = 31) revealed how dominant discourse creates an idealized standard of sexual behavior that stigmatizes women with orgasm difficulties, and how stigma management strategies act as discursive practices that reify, resist, and transform the status quo. We extend SMC theory by articulating a critical postmodern approach that can be used to interrogate power in stigma processes, and by illuminating how stigma management strategies are enacted in varied ways and toward different ends. Practically, our findings underscore the need for multifaceted interventions aimed at addressing the underlying causes of stigma and offer recommendations for reducing stigma through health campaigns, programming, and care.