Guest Editorial

oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/1The launch of Stream is a significant event for Communication scholarship in Canada. This new and highly innovative e-journal has been conceived, designed, and directed in its entirety by graduate students in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University, and it represents a bold and creative approach to the dissemination of new and emerging Communication research in communities of graduate scholars

The Urban Square: Remediating Public Space

Emerging technologies challenge the conceptualization of contemporary urban public space, both in where it is located and of what it consists. With the advent of the digital medium and the internet, the public realm is expanded, dispersed and reconnected in new ways. At the same time, technologies profoundly impact the realization of apparently conventional public spaces, as architects' design process and building materials undergo technological renovations, staged in the digital medium. This paper explores how the public square can be reconceptualized as a place of convergence of the digital and physical domains

Looking Beneath the Skin: Reconfiguring Trauma and Sexuality

Since the New Queer Cinema explosion, the style and content of Gregg Araki's films have changed in seemingly drastic ways. However, my paper argues that his films, although more mature, are just as radical today as they were in the beginning of his career. Mysterious Skin is a controversial film that looks at early childhood sexuality and its relationship to teenage sexual development. I argue that Araki looks at contemporary queer life in all its complexity and demonstrates that both sexuality and sexual development are far too complicated to quantify and categorize

Racial Ideology and Discourse in the NBA: Ron Artest and the Construction of Black Bodies by White America

This paper examines white spectatorship of the black athlete's body through an analysis of NBA basketball player Ron Artest's 2004 suspension. In examining the discourse surrounding the event, there emerges a covert ideology of simultaneous idealization and denigration of black athletes. While most in the sports world would claim to be colour-blind when evaluating talent or watching a game, the discourse surrounding Artest and the NBA in general seems to suggest that the invisible lens of white superiority shapes the perceptions of sports fans when viewing a predominantly black sport such as professional basketball