Community-Based Organizations\u27 Role in Combating Human Trafficking

Presentation Materials from Dr. Lengel\u27s November 15th lecture. Brought to you by the Institute for the Study of Culture and Societyhttps://scholarworks.bgsu.edu/ics_fellow_lectures/1107/thumbnail.jp

Arab Women, Social Media, and the Arab Spring: Applying the framework of digital reflexivity to analyze gender and online activism

This essay analyzes the engagement of Arab feminist activisms online, most notably during the citizen revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, and, specifically, women’s use of online social networking to aid social change. Building on research examining how Arab activists and activist organizations, including feminist organizations, mobilize, produce knowledge, and develop and share resources online and, in particular, drawing from research on Arab activisms and social media this study aims to understand how online activist discourses function, both locally and globally. To do so, we utilize a schema of information production and consumption devised to analyze activist engagement and citizen journalism, particularly the negotiation of communication messages by various agents through multiple stages of transmission and dissemination (Newsom, Lengel, & Cassara, C, 2011). We look at the ideal of local knowledge as it is transformed into global knowledge, and how the messages are open to manipulation and bias through the various stages of mediation and gatekeeping cited in the framework. Through the application of this framework, we can see how gendered messages are constructed, essentialized, reconstructed, and made invisible by the consumer media system

Framing Messages of Democracy through Social Media: Public Diplomacy 2.0, Gender, and the Middle East and North Africa

This study examines how U.S. public diplomacy directed toward the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), and public diplomacy from the MENA to other regions, including the U.S., uses social media. It analyzes how messages regarding recent events in the MENA are constructed for Western audiences, how public diplomacy rises from this construction, and the resulting the benefits and challenges within intercultural communication practice. Utilizing a framework for social media flow the processes of gatekeeping are examined, from both state and non-state actors representing MENA voices, and western actors who receive those voices, to illustrate public diplomacy from the MENA is a glocal construct of the traditions of both of those localities. To investigate social media flow we draw upon extensive field research in Tunisia and engage in discourse analysis to analyze online spaces created specifically for political engagement and agency, and for challenging hegemonic norms and political oppressions. The study highlights considerations such as women\u27s contributions to the recent MENA events as well as discourses concerning MENA women\u27s \u27advancement\u27, to illuminate the need for a culture-centric public diplomacy that moves beyond the essentializing tendencies of western discourses

Visualizing Conflict: Analyzing Visual Narratives of Photojournalistic Images of Balkan War Refugees

As part of a larger research program on media coverage and representation of the conflicts in the Balkans, we examine humanizing visualizations of armed conflict. The study focuses, in particular, on photojournalistic accounts of the humanitarian crisis in Kosovo at the 25th anniversary of the Kosovo war. Drawing, in particular, on Ariella Aïsha Azoulay’s (2008) concept of the civil contract of photography, this study analyses how victims of humanitarian catastrophes are represented and what images communicate in terms of family, gender, international communication, and conflict. We interrogate visual signifiers in conflict and global narrative constructions of refugees fleeing from conflict and how the visual rhetoric of war and conflict aims to elicit affective responses. Finally, the study highlights the work of women photojournalists in Kosovo and the Balkans and the impact of their work twenty-five years onward

Antecedents and outcomes of modular production in the Brazilian automobile industry: a grounded theory approach

Our paper focuses on how foreign automobile manufacturers in Brazil have implemented and benefited from strategic modularization. Based on our case studies and in-depth interviews, we developed a theoretical framework to examine the antecedents and outcomes of strategic modularization. Our theoretical framework suggests that strategic modularization may help improve a firm's positional advantage by reducing the cost of managing tacit knowledge. In addition, the adoption of strategic modularization influences the nature of relationships with major suppliers, further blurring the boundaries of the firm. Journal of International Business Studies (2007) 38, 84–106. doi:10.1057/palgrave.jibs.8400244