Deploying visual "Asian-ness" can create racial solidarity - sometimes at the expense of cross-racial solidarity
This article examines how uses of ‘Asian-ness’ as racial presence becomes used discursively and visually to form affective racial counterpublics around #Asians4BlackLives/#Justice4AkaiGurley and #SavePeterLiang/#Justice4Liang. Specifically, Rachel Kuo looks at how Asian American racial positioning becomes deployed to produce feelings of solidarity. Approaching hashtags as both indexical signifiers of solidarity and as an indexing system that archives together an array of media objects, she tracks media objects across multiple sites to examine visual modes of storytelling that affectively mobilize publics and investigate solidarity as discursively mediated, embodied, and affective phenomena. Kuo closely examines how #SavePeterLiang protestors create narratives of victimization in response to the singularity of Liang’s racial body and how the #Asians4BlackLives selfie project uses representational visibility to activate affective politics.
Women of color remain spatially marginalized in digital feminist publics online
Using critical discourse analysis and network analysis, I address how racial justice activist hashtags #NotYourAsianSideKick and #SolidarityisforWhiteWomen circulate discourse across networked online publics within and outside Twitter. These hashtags showcase relationships between feminist online publics, demonstrate ways that hashtags circulate racial justice discourse, and exemplify the fluidity and intersectionality of racialized and feminist online publics. I draw on critical technocultural discourse analysis (CTDA) (Brock, 2012) as my technique in order to examine the hashtag’s discursivity. In order to analyze message spread and network relationships, I then provide a network analysis that illustrates message circulation in online feminist spheres.
Identity, stories, and emotions shaped the hopes of white voters in the 2016 election
This article argues that a set of recent books published in advance of the 2016 U.S. presidential election provides a road map for understanding its outcome and a research agenda for political communication scholars in the years ahead. This article focuses on sociologist Arlie Hochschild’s Strangers in Their Own Land, a field study that documents the roles that identity, narratives, and emotions play in shaping the political beliefs and behavior of White Tea Party supporters. Building on these insights, through an analysis of 123 content analyses published in Political Communication between 2003-2016, we demonstrate gaps in our field and argue that scholarship can grow analytically and empirically by accounting for the findings of these books. We conclude with suggestions for future research into people’s perceptions of identity, group status, deprivation, and political power, as well as the role of media, political actors, and social groups in creating these narratives of American politics.