Convener’s Note: Media Rise’s Quarantined Across Borders Collection

Convener's note.Quarantined Across Borders is our first entirely virtual multimedia online initiative. 80+ authors participated in this initiative from 30+ countries. Our goal with QAB was to create a wide platform for a broad range of diverse voices to share their quarantine stories in a timely fashion, especially from/about borderland, immigrant, and diasporic communities. All entries were submitted by May 15, 2020. Every day in June, we published three stories. We started at the end of Asian/Pacific heritage month and the beginning of Pride Month. We witnessed a global uprising as part of the #BlackLivesMatter movement this month as the stories were published.Media Rise Publication. Quarantined Across Borders collection

Mediated Mindfulness, Inter-Religious Bonds, and Collective Healing: A Quarantine Diary

Srividya "Srivi" Ramasubramanian, Co-Founder of Media Rise, and Director of the Difficult Dialogues Project, reflects on her spiritual journey through the lens of mediated mindfulness, interfaith solidarity, and community-based healing, as she teaches online guided meditation sessions during a pandemic. Dr. Ramasubramanian's research focuses on media, race, ethnicity, inclusion, social justice, and mindfulness, which she approaches from a critical perspective.In this brief essay, I reflect on my spiritual journey through my quarantine diary during the COVID-19 pandemic. I move through various phases of denial, worry, fear, peace, solidarity, betrayal, withdrawal, and finally, hope for new beginnings through oneness. Yoga, meditation, music, and art help me heal from the collective losses, trauma, and grief around me. Creating sanctuary safe spaces for peace and interconnectedness across people of multiple faiths, backgrounds, and perspectives is central to going beyond individual transformation for collective healing as a community, nation, and world. To do this, we need to build bonds of trust, mutual respect, solidarity, collaboration, and cooperation. We need to understand that all faith traditions speak the same truth of bliss and joy that comes from oneness

A Content Analysis of the Portrayal of India in Films Produced in the West

A content analysis of randomly selected films (N = 24) about India produced from 1930–2000 in the US or UK was undertaken to examine the social construction of “Indian-ness.” There were significant inter-group differences in depictions of Indian versus non-Indian scenes (N = 1016) and Indian versus non-Indian characters (N = 421) across several socio-cultural variables such as character role, occupation, poverty, religious practices, and pollution. Overall, India was consistently portrayed as backward, uncivilized, savage, and traditional. These patterns of stereotypical portrayals of India across films are discussed in the context of schema theory, social identity theory, and cultural colonization

Media exposure during infancy and early childhood: the effects of content and context on learning and development

Book Review: Media exposure during infancy and early childhood: the effects of content and context on learning and development, edited by Rachel Barr and Deborah Nichols Linebarger, Cham, Springer, 2017, 303 pp., $79.00 (ebook), ISBN 978-3-319-45102-2;$99.99 (hardcover), ISBN: 978-3-319-45100-

Are Television Deaths Good Deaths? A Narrative Analysis of Hospital Death and Dying in Popular Medical Dramas

This study explores death narratives in the popular international medical dramas Grey's Anatomy (USA), Casualty (UK), All Saints (Australia), and E.R. (USA). Using narrative analysis, we characterize death portrayals in terms of the number and causes of the deaths, the types of characters who die, the narrative structures of the deaths, and themes found within the death stories. We then compare characteristics actual patients, physicians, and caregivers identify as important in a death experience with the characteristics of deaths portrayed in medical dramas. Our narrative analysis shows that death narratives in medical dramas lack narrative fidelity with the characteristics of "good" death experiences described in the literature

Intervening in the Media's Influence on Stereotypes of Race and Ethnicity: The Role of Media Literacy Education

This article provides a review of the research record on the potential for media literacy education to intervene in the media's influence on racial and ethnic stereotypes, and explores the theoretical concepts that underlie these efforts. It situates media literacy theory and practice within particular emphases in the field and synthesizes qualitative and quantitative studies. Quantitative research on the effect of media literacy training and mediated counterstereotypes on reducing racial/ethnic prejudice is described. In addition, we report qualitative data from an ongoing study of early adolescents who took part in a media literacy curriculum on stereotypes. The research record reveals that although the topic is severely understudied, media literacy education holds great promise for its ability to shape media‐related knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors and encourage an active and critical stance toward media

Challenging Gender and Racial Stereotypes in Online Spaces. Alternative Storytelling among Latino/a Youth in the U.S.

Media play an important role in perpetuating racial and gender stereotypes that harm the self-esteem and self-concept of marginalized youth, especially for Latino/a youth in the US context. However, this article illustrates that through a participatory media and media literacy approach, media can also become part of the solution. The main aim of this article is to document Latinitas, the first digital magazine in the United States created by and for young Latinas that challenges stereotypes through participatory digital storytelling. Explored through an interview with one of Latinitas’ co-founders and press coverage about the organization, this case study sheds light on the importance of alternative community-based initiatives for minority youth to redefine their identities in their own terms. The findings shed light on how to design alternative youth media programs, negotiate funding, build relationships with the surrounding community, and adapt to the changing media landscape. Such initiatives point to the importance of media literacy programs and participatory storytelling initiatives aimed at redefining youth identity and empowering youth voices

Challenging Gender and Racial Stereotypes in Online Spaces. Alternative Storytelling among Latino/a Youth in the U.S.

Media play an important role in perpetuating racial and gender stereotypes that harm the self-esteem and self-concept of marginalized youth, especially for Latino/a youth in the US context. However, this article illustrates that through a participatory media and media literacy approach, media can also become part of the solution. The main aim of this article is to document Latinitas, the first digital magazine in the United States created by and for young Latinas that challenges stereotypes through participatory digital storytelling. Explored through an interview with one of Latinitas’ co-founders and press coverage about the organization, this case study sheds light on the importance of alternative community-based initiatives for minority youth to redefine their identities in their own terms. The findings shed light on how to design alternative youth media programs, negotiate funding, build relationships with the surrounding community, and adapt to the changing media landscape. Such initiatives point to the importance of media literacy programs and participatory storytelling initiatives aimed at redefining youth identity and empowering youth voices

Teens and the new media environment: Challenges and opportunities.

Researchers interested in the impact of media on the adolescent audience often use content analysis as a first step in assessing the kinds of messages available in mainstream media. These content-analytical studies typically sample from prime-time television programs, blockbuster movies, or top-selling video games. But do these samples accurately reflect the media content to which teens are exposed? The sheer increase in the number of media types and information sources available to teen audiences has opened up a wide variety of options to choose from. This proliferation of media technologies has brought about dramatic changes to when, where, and how adolescents access media content. In this chapter, we provide an overview of our efforts to assess teens’ exposure to media content and the challenges we have encountered in developing our measures. Specifically, we present data from an exploratory study which illustrates that adolescents are growing up in a multiple-media environment, much of adolescent media use is idiosyncratic, and their media encounters are increasingly “interactive.” Content analysis methodology needs to adapt and adjust to these revolutionary changes in the media ecology. We propose an audience-centered, media-ecological approach to content analytical research in response to this emerging interactive new media scenario

Critical Media Effects Framework: Bridging Critical Cultural Communication and Media Effects through Power, Intersectionality, Context, and Agency

In this essay, we advance the Critical Media Effects (CME) framework as a way of bridging two major subfields of communication that seldom speak to one another: media effects scholarship and critical cultural communication. Critical Media Effects is situated within the dominant mode of social scientific theorizing within media effects scholarship and draws on four key interrelated concepts from critical cultural communication: power, intersectionality, context, and agency. Critical Media Effects advocates for greater reflexivity, rigor, and nuance in theorizing about media effects to better respond to the complexity and dynamicity of emerging global sociopolitical mediated contexts. Recommendations, salient examples, and future directions for co-creating a shared research roadmap for CME are discussed. Through this work of bridging, we hope to promote more collaborative partnerships, productive engagement, and mutual solidarity across these two important subfields to address the most pressing social issues and challenges of the world today