ABSTRACT This study examines how Reddit users engaged with the racial narratives of HBO’s Watchmen (2019) and Lovecraft Country (2020), two television series that reimagine historical racial trauma. Drawing on multistep flow theory and critical technocultural discourse analysis (CTDA), we analyze 3,879 Reddit comments using topic modeling and critical discourse analysis. We identify three dynamic social roles – advocates, adversaries, and adaptives – and explore how users move between them in response to racial discourse. Findings reveal how Reddit’s pseudonymous affordances shape role fluidity, opinion leadership, and moral engagement. While adversaries minimized or rejected the shows’ portrayals of racism and violence as exaggerated, advocates shared standpoint experiences and resources to challenge these claims. Adaptive users shifted perspectives over time, demonstrating how online publics can foster critical racial learning. This research highlights how popular culture and participatory platforms intersect in shaping collective meaning-making around race and historical memory.

ABSTRACT The practice of colonial strategy and racial discourses is a deeply intertwined process that developed in tandem, particularly during the height of traditional colonialism and empires from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. This article concludes that the discourse of ‘Orientalism’ described by Edward Said in Orientalism (1979) and the usual practice of indirect British colonial rule, in this case, solely the foreign affairs of Bhutan during the 1840s to the 1860s, evolved together to create an exception to regional and temporal trends in indirect British colonial authority. By utilising discourse analysis to examine the process of British colonialism solely in the context of Bhutan's foreign affairs, it is shown that the British opinion of the Bhutanese grew increasingly negative over the course of their colonial interactions, resulting in an ‘Orientalist’ discourse. This regionally unique aspect of ‘Orientalism’ necessitated (in the British view) a more direct colonial strategy. This article examines the development of this deviation by archival research and content analysis of key British colonial documents from the British Library's India Office Records. Specifically, the mission of Ashley Eden to Bhutan in 1863 and the Duar War of 1864 between Bhutan and Great Britain are examined closely as examples of mutual influence between racial discourse and colonial strategy.

ABSTRACT The rise of live-streaming platforms such as Twitch has transformed individuals’ everyday media practices by expanding opportunities for participation in public discourse. Within this broader media ecology, Twitch emotes, platform-specific pictorial tokens used to convey meaning in channel chat, function as key semiotic resources through which users communicate and participate in streaming communities. This study examines how three focal emotes, TriHard, C’monBruh, and XmiraCHICKEN, are deployed, transformed, and repurposed in ways that can both reproduce and subvert anti-Black racism and other racialized forms of harassment on the platform. Through a multi-sited digital ethnography, our findings show that the three focal emotes take up distinct trajectories of circulation and meaning-making across Twitch streaming communities. Taken together, the analysis demonstrates that emote practices are a consequential mode of interaction through which power relations are reproduced and contested in live-streaming ecologies.

Abstract Media adaptations, whether of narratives, identities, or racial constructs, shape how audiences interpret shifting social realities. Despite rapid growth of the multiracial youth population, scholarship on multiracial representation in college-related screen media remains limited. Multiracial characters are often deployed as narrative props in educational or racial discourse, reinforcing monoracial paradigms. This article introduces mixed-racebending as an interpretive framework that conceptualizes multiracial casting as a mode of adaptation that reconfigures the racial ‘text’ of characters. Building on debates around racebending, the practice of recasting Characters of Colour with white actors, as seen in adaptations such as The Last Airbender (2010), we argue that such practices reinforce rigid racial categories and obscure the fluidity of multiracial identities. Focusing on public debates surrounding the casting of multiracial actors in young adult, college-centred television and film, we use mixed-racebending to examine how media adaptations either constrain or expand understandings of racial identity. Approaching multiraciality through adaptation studies highlights how racial categories themselves are adapted, reworked, and contested across media forms. Ultimately, this framework positions race and identity as central sites of adaptation, with implications for how multiracial identities are negotiated, validated, and developed in college-going contexts.

Racial inequality remains a central, entrenched characteristic of American health and health care, and racial discourse strongly shapes health politics and policy. Despite this, discussions of race and health are rare in a core site of health policymaking-the presidency-though this varies across historical periods and political parties. This study examines the prevalence and nature of racial discourse in 90 years of presidential health speeches, from Roosevelt to Biden, addressing, in particular, a debate about whether racial discourse rose or fell after the Civil Rights Era. Quantitative content analysis and qualitative analysis of 1,359 presidential health speeches from Roosevelt to Biden. Attention to race was higher among Democrats than Republicans. It rose sharply during the Civil Rights Era and the COVID-19 pandemic but fell during the intervening period, with most presidents discussing race and health less than same-party Civil Rights Era benchmarks, Johnson and Nixon. The qualitative analysis shows that presidents of both parties mainly engaged in positive (though sometimes paternalistic) racial discourse, but often combined it with universalist or technical language, perhaps meant to reduce White backlash. The study speaks to debates about the prominence, nature and causes of racial discourse in policy-making and shows how presidents balance racial particularism and universalism.

Traditionally, parents and teachers are not included in education policy-making decisions, although they play an essential role as policy actors. Drawing on critical race theory and policy framing theory, this qualitative study investigates how parents and teachers respond to a test-based grade retention policy in an urban public school district. Through analysis of twenty document-cued interviews with parents and teachers affected by the policy as well as district documents about the policy, we document how parents and teachers interpret the policy and compare those perspectives to the district’s framings, including how racial discourses were engaged and evaded in these framings.

ABSTRACT This timely article presents a much-needed comparative analysis of recent curriculum and assessment reforms across the four UK nations of England, Northern Ireland, Wales, and Scotland, through the combined lenses of Critical Race Theory and Critical Whiteness Studies. Drawing on key government policy documents, it interrogates the extent to which each nation’s curriculum explicitly engages with systemic racism, racial representation, and whiteness as an institutional norm. Using Critical Anti-Racist Discourse Analysis, the study reveals significant divergences in reform trajectories. England and Northern Ireland largely adopt race-evasive, technocratic framings that obscure structural racism under broad categories like “disadvantage” or “diversity”. In contrast, Wales and Scotland demonstrate comparatively stronger commitments to equity and anti-oppressive education, though they, too, stop short of fully embedding decolonial or race-explicit frameworks in their core curriculum guidelines. The analysis highlights the critical need for “Conscientization”, arguing that the omission of explicit racial discourse sustains white ignorance and erases the lived experiences of racially minoritised communities. The article concludes with policy recommendations aimed at radical structural transformation, including the decolonisation of curriculum knowledge, mandatory anti-racist teacher education, and intersectional accountability measures. Ultimately, this important and original paper calls for a shift from rhetorical commitments to racial equity toward substantive, system-wide change across UK education.

Abstract Discourses of race and ability intermingled in depictions of tuberculosis in nineteenth-century American literature. Literary depictions of the illness established racialized burdens of care while simultaneously articulating a liberal individualism that embraced, rather than eschewed, physical vulnerability and social dependency. Attending to texts that disentangle the disease from its racial and ableist logics articulates an ethics of reserving care for those living with the health consequences of white supremacy.

Previous efforts to synthesise sexual and reproductive health (SRH) literature have primarily focused on singular services, specific migrant groups, or mostly individual-level influencers. In this systematic review we assessed access to comprehensive SRH services, including multilevel barriers and facilitators, among migrant and refugee women in high-income English-speaking countries. We searched seven databases for peer-reviewed studies involving quantitative and mixed methods, published between 2010 and 2024. We extracted data following PRISMA-Equity guidelines and assessed the risk of bias using the ‘quality appraisal for diverse studies’ tool. We used a socio-ecological framework to organise results into multilevel barriers and facilitators. Twenty-nine studies met inclusion criteria across four countries. Fifteen studies focused on cervical screening, 7 on maternity care, 5 on contraception, 4 on HIV and other sexually transmissible infections, and 2 on intimate partner violence. Summary findings from these studies indicate that migrant and refugee women utilise SRH services less often than native-born women. Barriers to SRH services included knowledge and risk perception gaps at the individual level; implicit bias, discrimination, and language barriers at the interpersonal level; lack of culturally sensitive practices and environments at the organizational level; and lack of health insurance coverage and anti-immigration and racist discourse at societal and policy levels. Migrant and refugee women face significant inequities in accessing SRH services in high-income countries. Eliminating these disparities will require culturally sensitive solutions that encompass multiple levels of influence, especially moving beyond an individual focus to consider interventions at interpersonal, institutional, societal, and policy-level.

Unveiling Factors Impacting Social Media Reshare in Racism Discourse

ABSTRACT Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) based in Global Minority Countries have, for decades, exerted considerable influence over the visual and discursive representations of Black, Brown and Indigenous populations in Global Majority Countries. Often perpetuating reductive narratives conflating poverty with racialized bodies, these representations have crafted a racial hierarchy reminiscent of the colonial era. In response, a growing number of African NGOs are challenging this single conflation of poverty and Blackness through mediated performances on TikTok to reframe these narratives. However, this article argues that such efforts are marked by a paradox. While seeking to disrupt these reductive narratives, many NGOs are inadvertently reproducing racialized humanitarian discourses to attract visibility and financial support. Through a racial discourse analysis of the comment sections, this study interrogates how racialized discourses are reconstituted through audience engagement. Drawing on literature, centred on Fanon’s [1967. Black skin, white masks (C. L. Markmann, Trans.). Grove Press] concept of ‘crushing objecthood’, this article explores how the white gaze persists, even among Black African actors, which maintains Blackness as an object of poverty.

Abstract Focusing on the 2020 case of Okonkwonwoye (a Nigerian man) who attacked Wang (a Chinese nurse), this study analysed over 37,000 posts and comments from Weibo (a popular Chinese microblogging platform) to explore the representation and contestation of Africanness and Blackness in Chinese cyberspace. Utilising a mixed-methods approach combining thematic and critical discourse analyses, the study argues that digital racial conflict in this context is best understood as an “asymmetric discursive struggle”. The findings revealed a racist discourse that constructs Black people as a dehumanised and dangerous “Other” through animalistic nomination and ethnocentric predication, while framing African immigrants as an illegitimate demographic threat via nativist threat inflation. Contrastingly, the counter-discourse, while challenging these narratives, is quantitatively marginalised and qualitatively marked by cautious mitigation. This asymmetry demonstrates how the linguistic forms of online debate can reinforce and normalise dominant racial ideologies, revealing the unequal power dynamics that structure the entire discursive field.

ABSTRACT This paper examines the potential of using comics in museum mediation as a symbolic reparation activity that responds to colonial legacies in museums. The analysis focuses on two comic creation workshops developed in conjunction with the Education Team of the National Museum of Colombia. The workshop's theme addressed the representations of racialised identities in the Museum and aimed to reflect on racial discourses present in the collection, inviting participants to redress previous images of oppression by creating a comic page about the objects and characters displayed in the galleries. Findings suggest that comic creation can facilitate symbolic reparation initiatives from colonial legacies in museums by raising awareness of the discourses that tie together objects and images, and by giving participants tools to mediate and, in some cases, remediate hurtful representations. The dialogue between anti-racist comics and museum collections can also encourage critical reflections towards everyday acts and representations of racism.

Abstract: The aim of this analysis is to show that racial discourse and the categorisation of the human species that it induces and sustains are nothing more than fiction. And this fiction always takes the form of a scientific discourse, fuelled by observation and anecdotes. It is not for nothing, moreover, that the entire structure of the bundles of representations of the self and the other is based on the use of fiction. Anthropologists and ethnologists, while prepared to use science (based solely on the analysis of observed facts) to present the results of their fieldwork, nevertheless make room, as if it were self-evident, for narrative. So they choose to “tell” rather than “expose”. They also like to give the floor to a narrator. Keywords: Race – Fiction – Fantasies – Inequalities – Biogeography - Law of curiosity - Overhanging universal - Differentialist universal - Cultural diversity

This article analyzes the way the relationship between technology and nature shapes the Chilean roto as a historic figure of mestizaje. Through analysis of Raza chilena (1904) by Nicolás Palacios, it examines the structural anomalies of mestizaje as racial discourse, which echo the emergence of biopolitical state racism in Michel Foucault’s theories. Palacios employs what I call a technic of revelation, a formal compulsion to reveal the roto as a previously hidden natural Chilean essence. The technic of revelation is best understood, following Slavoj Žižek’s theories about ideological form, as a continual unmasking of the minimal difference between the thing and itself: as mestizo, the roto becomes his own mask. The empty character of his identity, like the empty character of Chilean mestizaje described above, involves a technical maneuvering of nature that biopolitics alone cannot account for. To the roto’s subjection as nature in bare life must be added the nature of Mapuche polities he is meant to supplant. Recognizing this structural composure of the Chilean race alters the terms under which mestizaje may be reconfigured in the neoliberal era, a question considered in conclusion through the 2010 media events of the rescue of 33 Chilean miners and the Mapuche hunger strikes.

This article studies intimacies that emerge through the traffic of media forms between India and the Caribbean in relation to discourses of race and ethnicity that have developed around the histories of African enslavement and Indian indentureship. I develop the framework of jammin’ to entangle intimacy as a method with Caribbean theorizations of Relation and creolization. In particular, I map the stickiness of transregional flows and blockages, the rubbing up of familiarity and estrangement, of proximity and distance, through the performative repertoires of an Indian orchestra singer, Kanchan, and a double diasporic, Indo-Caribbean-Canadian drag queen, Priyanka. These femme performers illuminate tactical media negotiations across the jammin’ of center and periphery, city and hinterland, the large and the small. The media intimacies that Kanchan and Priyanka make visible between India and the Caribbean invite us to reflect on relating across difference, and on solidarities and disjunctures across transoceanic connections.

Globalizing "Race" in International Student Research

This article offers a critical analysis of the trajectory of Ifemelu, the protagonist of Americanah, from the perspective of gender theory, aiming to highlight the practices of resistance present in her diasporic experiences. The theoretical framework is grounded in decolonial feminist studies, articulating the categories of race, class, and gender. The analysis of the corpus reveals that Ifemelu re-signifies structural oppressions through her critical writing in the blog Raceteenth, challenging conservative patterns within both social and academic spheres in the United States. The study concludes that the protagonist transforms patriarchal and racialized discourses into insurgent narratives, critically exposing the confrontation with structural sexism in contemporary societies.

Abstract This article examines the national and international context within which Colombian immigration policy developed in the mid-twentieth century. Focussing on Republican refugees from the Spanish Civil War, it traces how and why policymakers and public opinion began to see these groups as potentially harmful to society. It argues that Colombian immigration policy emerged at the intersection of multiple, evolving discourses of race which both helped frame and were shaped by anxieties over a mass influx from Spain. By exploring the stories of several Republicans who tried to come to Colombia, the article also reveals how they helped shape immigration policy.

This paper examines the role of the popular yet short-lived Instagram page @MinorityVoices in mobilising an anti-racist movement among ethnic minority youths in Singapore. Historically, discussions of racism in the multiracial city-state have been muted, with minorities often experiencing discrimination in silence due to expectations of racial harmony. The rise of Web 2.0 and social media has transformed how racial issues are reported and debated. By analysing narratives shared on @MinorityVoices and the collective engagement it fostered, this paper argues that it functioned as a nascent digital site of resistance and discourse, where ethnic minority youths could render visible both the everyday experiences of racism and the embodied effects and emotional trauma it produces. It challenged state narratives of racial harmony and expanded what could be publicly discussed about race. The platform also highlighted the uneven distribution of ‘racial capital’ and its impact on social mobility and daily interactions within Singapore’s racial hierarchy. Although @MinorityVoices’ activity declined following legal repercussions for anti-racist activists, its brief presence underscores the structural limits of anti-racism efforts in Singapore, where public conversations on race are often constrained by dominant narratives of national cohesion and social stability.