Twitter and non-elites. Interpreting power dynamics in the life story of the (#)BRCA Twitter stream

In May 2013 and March 2015, actress Angelina Jolie wrote in the New York Times about her choice to undergo preventive surgery. In her two op-eds she explained that - as a carrier of the BRCA1 gene mutation - preventive surgery was the best way to lower her heightened risk of developing breast and ovarian cancer. By applying a digital methods approach to BRCA-related tweets from 2013 and 2015, before, during and after the exposure of Jolie’s story, this study maps and interprets Twitter discursive dynamics at two time points of the BRCA Twitter stream. Findings show an evolution in curation and framing dynamics occurring between 2013 and 2015, with individual patient advocates replacing advocacy organisations as top curators of BRCA content and coming to prominence as providers of specialist illness narratives. These results suggest that between 2013 and 2015, Twitter went from functioning primarily as an organisation-centred news reporting mechanism, to working as a crowdsourced specialist awareness system. This paper advances a twofold contribution. First, it points at Twitter’s fluid functionality for an issue public and suggests that by looking at the life story – rather than at a single time point – of an issue-based Twitter stream we can track the evolution of power roles underlying discursive practices and better interpret the emergence of non-elite actors in the public arena. Second, the study provides evidence of the rise of activist cultures that rely on fluid, non-elite, collective and individual social media engagement

What\u27s Race got to do with It? Press Coverage of the Latino Electorate in the 2008 Presidential Primary Season

This article presents a critical analysis of press coverage of Latinos and the presidential election during the Democratic Primary, from January through June 2008. The foundation of this article is a content analysis of 408 articles published in four newspapers about Latinos and the presidential election during the primary season. The four newspapers -- The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The Chicago Tribune and The Dallas Morning News -- were selected because they are well respected as newspapers of record and because they represent diverse regions of the country (two from the northeast, two from the southwest). Each is a daily newspaper in a metropolitan area with a population ranging from twenty to forty-five percent Latino. The first section provides background and initial assumptions about a number of topics, including the diversity of the Latino population, the complexity of Latino racial identity and the medias role in the reproduction of racial ideology. The second section of the article describes the methodology and data in more detail and also presents an overview of the major findings. The third section delves deeply into the prevalence in the press of the black-brown divide as a major theme in coverage of the Latino electorate and the 2008 presidential election. I describe its origins early in the primary season, debunk it based on contemporary and historical evidence and analyze why the media was drawn to it as racial common sense. In the conclusion, I offer some speculations about the future role of Latinos in American politics and changing racial dynamics in the United States

Reconciling childhood and deviance: an historical analysis of media depictions of young 'deviants'

The shared meaning and value placed on children impacts how institutions respond to juvenile "deviants." This study explored ways in which news media constructed images of young "deviants" and corresponding conceptions of "childhood" across two key historical time periods. The key areas of focus included: first, the ways in which the print media reconciled the contradictory notions of "childhood" and deviance; second, power dynamics across sociocultural contexts; and third, how depictions of young "deviants" were reflective of their historical context. Data consisted of 157 newspaper articles from The Washington Post, The New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times, ninety from 1960-65 and sixty-seven from 1980-85. Dual methods of content analysis and critical discourse analysis yielded telling results. First, there was a distinct shift in focus across the two time periods from older juveniles to younger ones. The age of the "deviant" played a role in setting the tone of the articles regarding institutional responses and punishment approaches. Second, use and types of predications were found to be important tools across both time periods that contributed to negative depictions of young "deviants" while also trying to individualize and normalize them. Third, the attribution of responsibility was used to reconcile "childhood" and deviance, where the power of the family and social class were significant factors. Lastly, an emphasis on workforce involvement was used across both time periods as a romanticized concept and as a way to gauge a young person's societal value. Such an emphasis was shown to reconcile deviance with adulthood. Similar findings from both time periods were specifically interesting considering their differing sociocultural climates towards juvenile "deviants." This study also provided useful knowledge regarding narratives about "deviants" provided by the media and the importance of critically analyzing them

Sexual Assault Adjudication on Campus: Examining the Underlying Discourses of Title IX

It is estimated that 20% of college women have been victims of sexual assault (Krebs, Lindquist, Warner, Fisher, & Martin, 2009), an alarming rate that drew the attention of the Obama-Biden Administration. During their time in office (January 20, 2009-January 20, 2017), the Administration bolstered institutional requirements to address sexual assault in higher education under Title IX (U.S. Department of Education, Office for Civil Rights, 2011). Even though addressing campus sexual assault was a stated priority of the (seemingly progressive) Obama-Biden Administration, there was a lack of representation among students with marginalized identities reflected in the national media conversation at the time. The purpose of this Critical Discourse Study was to examine the ideologies underlying sexual assault and its adjudication in higher education. To uncover and examine these ideological discourses, I conducted this study through a poststructural feminist paradigm (Peters & Burbules, 2004; St. Pierre & Pillow, 2000), and applied intersectionality as a theoretical framework (Crenshaw, 1991, 2014). I chose to analyze the ideologies conveyed through print news media because of its ubiquity and relationship to the formation of public opinion. I analyzed 340 print news articles from The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today and The Chronicle of Higher Education that were published during the Obama-Biden Administration (January 20, 2009-January 20, 2017) and identified four ideological findings: (1) violence as the problem and solution, (2) money motivates action, (3) preventing sexual assault is up to everyone, except perpetrators, and (4) the University is its football program. Each of these four underpinning ideologies support social stratification through dynamics of affluent, white, cisheteropatriarchal values and norms being dominant over others. Ultimately, dynamics of power and oppression supported by the rhetoric rely on the same attitudes and beliefs that uphold sexual violence as a social issue. This study is significant to the field of higher education because it provides a critical examination of ideological assumptions surrounding sexual assault adjudication in a contemporary legal and political environment and contributes to the growing body of literature in higher education applying intersectionality as a theoretical framework. Intersectionality can help us understand the complexities of sexual assault and the reproduction of dominance perpetuated through white, cisheteropatriarchal systems such as higher education

Comparing the hierarchy of keywords in on-line news portals

The tagging of on-line content with informative keywords is a widespread phenomenon from scientific article repositories through blogs to on-line news portals. In most of the cases, the tags on a given item are free words chosen by the authors independently. Therefore, relations among keywords in a collection of news items is unknown. However, in most cases the topics and concepts described by these keywords are forming a latent hierarchy, with the more general topics and categories at the top, and more specialised ones at the bottom. Here we apply a recent, cooccurrence-based tag hierarchy extraction method to sets of keywords obtained from four different on-line news portals. The resulting hierarchies show substantial differences not just in the topics rendered as important (being at the top of the hierarchy) or of less interest (categorised low in the hierarchy), but also in the underlying network structure. This reveals discrepancies between the plausible keyword association frameworks in the studied news portals