Search results

Racialization is an important concept when looking at structural mechanisms that perpetuate racial inequalities. The State, and its various organizational spaces of action, is often seen as a site for race to be enacted. Policy sectors such as housing, education, taxation, and immigration have been ripe areas of research that reflect this. However, media policy research has not effectively engaged with this critical conception. Media policy research has been driven by political economy perspectives within the field of Mass Communication and Media Studies, and can benefit from an approach that analyzes it in relation to social science perspectives that focus on processes which constitute, or are constituted by, actors, groups, and organizations. Our hope is that future researchers will find this volume useful in further developing critical studies of media policy that take into account race as a social force.

The chapter situates the role of narrative power in shifting media policy amidst calls for police abolition, defunding, and media reparations following the documentation of media harm. Community-based narrative intervention is not only focused on those aspects of reporting and media that deal with harms perpetuated by discourses on public safety, but also about developing what I refer to as “collective narrative self-determination” to reflect the needs and desires of communities. The chapter documents how grassroots media efforts attempt to reconfigure the space of media policy and shift narratives toward the community power needed to reckon with the consequences of vital public resources being systematically defunded for budgets and policies that entail greater police powers. The chapter concludes this is an important moment for community-based initiatives and interventions that can shift media narratives around policing and urban violence and also shift who is served by those narratives, contributing to the long-term process of building narrative power and racial justice across a wide range of community and media organizations.

Networks connecting two important supporting institutions – law firms and venture capital partnerships – explain regions’ disparate abilities to sustain diverse high-technology ventures. In order to explain the diversity of entrepreneurial activity in a region, we distinguish between institutional capacity (the number of law firms and venture capitalists in a locale), strong interinstitutional connections that span legal and financial domains, and cohesive structural communities of directly and indirectly connected supporting organizations. We argue that strong connections and cohesive communities are essential, but little examined contributors to the development of diverse research-based economies. We find support for the argument in an empirical analysis of initial public offerings (IPOs) by U.S. high-technology companies in five industries between 1993 and 2005. Linking regional outcomes to strong ties that span local legal and financial institutions and to cohesive structures that weld them into communities offers new insights for research on the institutional and network underpinnings of entrepreneurship and regional economic development.

Racism in the United States is complex given the cultural logics that uphold notions of “post-race” or “colorblindness” as a means for understanding racialized events. The various forces at play within media institutions create paradoxes in the power that the media wields in society. Utilizing the concept of “media spectacle” and putting it into dialogue with colorblind racism, the author looks at local coverage of the 2009 arrest of Henry Louis Gates. The author’s primary concern is to identify not only the narratives that uphold or challenge colorblind racism during racialized events, but also the dynamic in which racialized events are mediated in contemporary society. Through a critical discourse analysis of two Boston newspapers, the author demonstrates the way colorblind racism adapts during a racialized event. This study demonstrates the contested nature of the media and nuance to the ways we understand colorblind racism in an increasingly mediated society.

Efforts to make the television landscape more equitable for people of color have been evident both within and outside the industry as early as the 1940s. These advancements made by individuals within broadcasting were an attempt to allow more people of color to get opportunities to prove themselves competent in front of and behind the scenes in broadcast television. While these early attempts were ultimately unsuccessful, they laid the groundwork for future diversity initiative efforts. The purpose of this chapter is to expose the landmark events that introduced changes in diversity policy that eventually resulted from diversity initiatives at NBC despite the racial barriers within its corporate structure. This chapter will show that the trajectory of these early events exhibits that the diversity initiatives seen today resulted from decades of pressure from the government, the press and outside citizen activist groups.

Drawing on interviews with more than 80 scientists on two university campuses, we create a typology that offers insights into how transformations in the nature and locus of life science innovation influence academic careers and work practices. Our analyses suggest that a strong outcome of increased academic concern with research commercialization is the appearance of new fault lines among faculty, between faculty and students, and even between scientists' interests and those of their institutions. We argue that life science commercialization is driven by a mix of new funding opportunities, changing institutional mandates for universities, and novel research technologies that bring basic research and product development into much closer contact. The rise of patenting and commercially motivated technology transfer on U.S. campuses stands to alter faculty work practices and relationships, while transforming the criteria by which success is determined and rewards are allocated. Through close analysis of interviews with four researchers who typify a range of academic responses to commercialism, we demonstrate emerging patterns of conflict and agreement in faculty responses to commercial opportunities in the life sciences.

Alien franchise protagonist Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) returns in the series' second film instalment, Aliens (1986), as ‘a full-fledged hard-body hero’ (Gallardo & Smith, 2004) to assist in the rescue of a group of colonists from an Alien invasion. As each of the rescue team's male officers are killed or proven incompetent or traitorous, Ripley quickly steps forward as the surviving group's leader and principal strategist, forming a strong emotional attachment to the colonists' only surviving child and providing structure and stability to the remaining soldiers. Her heroism is defined by her maternal leadership of the group; as the most sensible and competent member, she prioritizes the group's needs above her own. Ripley's full embodiment of motherhood amplifies her machoism and maternal control over the surviving group, allowing her to reconquer her fears of the Alien species and protect her adopted child when she is kidnapped and nearly killed by the Alien Queen. This chapter thus traces Ellen Ripley's transformation from sceptical consultant to macho-mother and its importance to the franchise's overarching narrative, as well as the evolution of the macho-mother hero in more recent science fiction action films such as Mad Max Fury Road (2015) and The Cloverfield Paradox (2018).