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The Program lists all the Q&A sessions that happened on a dedicated Discord server.
Below you can find the abstracts of all the presentations with Q&A sessions scheduled for Friday (Presentations 23 to 43).
For the Thursday abstracts, please click here.
P23: Yujin Cho – Limited Racial Images of America In English Textbooks In South Korea
The pandemic has taken away the freedom of movement from people around the world. The restraint of space has a significant impact on education, particularly the transition from public education to online classes has created new spaces and various instructional media. Online space creates a diverse learning environment that transcends time and space, bringing vast amounts of information and exchanges. Nevertheless, the English classes presented in Korean public schools do not seem to reflect such diversity. In other words, English textbooks in South Korea present the image of America as restricted in the aspect of racial diversity. According to this issue, this paper tries to discuss the limited image of America related to the racial issues in English textbooks in South Korea for secondary education. The research conducts text analysis not only on narratives but also visual aspects. To examine how this education influences the students, this paper carries out surveys and interview methods. Therefore, this study aims to explore the limited racial image of America in the English language curriculum in South Korea and the cultural impact this education has on learners.
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P24: Indira J – America and Gender in Telugu Films
The present paper tries to understand the underlying sexist underpinnings in the cultural messages of Telugu Films (TFs from hereafter).
There are some TFs which compare Indian culture with America (for most of the Telugu film makers America is the West and the West is America) and argue that Indian culture is more superior to the American in terms of family values, respect, religion, traditions etc. These films are made with a message that the Indian NRIs (non-residential Indians) should ‘retain the Indian culture’ at any cost. Interestingly, most of their argument about culture revolves around women. In other words, these films portray that it is women’s responsibility to uphold the native conservative values and men are by default flawless and therefore they have no responsibility. Therefore, the main theme of these films is to bring the Americanized Indian woman back to normalcy so that they become obedient to their men folk. So, the main theme of these films is taming the Americanized women which involves various methods of subduing like subjecting them to humiliation, constant brainwashing, sexual attacks, isolating etc.
For instance, in Swarnakamalam, the heroine Meenakshi loves America but her father trains her in classical dance. On the other hand, the hero has deep love for Indian arts. On one occasion, she refuses to perform and the hero insists her to get ready. She tells him “You may be able to take a horse to the pond but can’t make him drink the water.” Hero replies “It depends on the man who rides the horse.” He eventually slaps her, drags her to the stage and makes her perform. The film ends with her falling in love with him and dropping her career in America and going back to him.
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P25: Ewa Antoszek – The U.S.-Mexico Border Artivisim in Social Media
Borders, edges, and margins are spatial constructs of contradictory character and as such they can be both divisive and empowering for those occupying them. Their material representations, i.e. barriers, fences, walls, usually perform the former function and generate conflicts all over the world. One of the most known examples of such a physical maker of the political line is the U.S.-Mexico border whose power to divide is documented in research, journalism, literature, and arts. So are efforts to counter this divisive power defined by Kayla Schierbecker “artivism” – actions performed near or on the border. In most cases those actions would remain unknown if it were not for the social media. Relations from various border performances on You Tube, Twitter or Instagram allow to inform broader audiences about the tenuous situation on the U.S.-Mexico border. The purpose of my presentation is to analyze the influence of the social media on the U.S.-Mexico border artivism.
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This paper aims to cast light on how persuasive practices in business are enacted for an audience on television by comparing two versions of the television programme Shark Tank. The main objective is to examine different interactional features of the programme within a cross-cultural analysis. Drawing on data from the Spanish and US versions of the programme, I take the prevailing persuasive feature of language use and try to bring forth the interactive nature of persuasion in order to conceptualise persuasion as an analytical tool that can give an account of the way(s) persuasive business discourse influences people’s behaviour and thinking and determines interpersonal relations. In this light, the present paper is placed at the intersection between routine and cross-cultural business practices on the one hand and reality based broadcast on the other. The results show that the analysis of the key structural patterns in exerting interpersonal influence makes it possible to measure the impact and effectiveness of specific social influence tactics in entrepreneurial discourse.
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The aim of the presentation is to provide analytical introduction upon the ways of representation of transgender minority in new media (especially YouTube). We will try to trace two ways in which this representation is differentiated and also both function under the diverse modality of speech and subjectivation. At first; we will offer an analysis of self-presentation selected transgender influencers who explicitly thematizes the topic of transgender minority (ContraPoints/Natalie Wynn and Blaire White), when Blaire White situates herself on the more of a conservative/Republican viewpoint, which is undermined by her way of speaking and using certain phrases. On the other hand, ContraPoints is much more aggressive, narrow but at the same time more open to take into consideration other points of view. Both ContraPoints and Blaire White represent the voices of the oppressed, but in a rather different manner; it is very interesting to observe dialog between those two. In their content strong refusal of (media) steoreotypes about transgender are fought. When they are invited into debates, sometimes even when one of them hosts these debates, they become representatives for the whole transgender community and they are pitted against each other as if there should be zero debate among transgender people about the meaning of their identity. They are almost becoming speechless in a sense of the symbolic violence determined by non-discursive settings, and are put into a scene or stage when the whole YouTube session is a priori constructed as a fight talk show, theatre, where nothing relevant can be said. They are set in, or there is a role inscripted into their bodies, that they should act obliged to the stereotypes (they fight against). There is no discussion. Only their “becoming” of stereotypical transgender person without their own voice. As a methodology, we will use a combination of discourse analysis and gender studies combined with social theory of (new) media.
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P28: Anna Oleszczuk – Exposing America: Comics Against Discrimination
It is hardly surprising that comics, as a medium using narratives to tell stories as well as a product of culture that always exists within its sociopolitical context, are shaped by the social norms surrounding the organization of knowledge and power relations of gender, class, and race. Similar to other media, for the majority of the last century comics relied on the perpetuation of stereotypes, underrepresentation of women, People of Color, and minorities, and distorted representations of cultural and social lives. Still, the potential of comics to conceptualize and introduce the quality of being different from the ableist, heteronormative, patriarchal, white-supremacist standard(s) has been utilized more and more frequently both in the mainstream print works and in the webcomics that can and often are used by the disempowered groups to facilitate representation and ensure inclusivity. Hence, in my presentation I focus on showing how the awareness of power structures can offer new ways of both reading and creating comics. Additionaly, I present a case study of Wendy Pini’s Elfquest as an example of an explicitly intersectional text.
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P29: Christina Wurst – American Politics Told Through Pop Culture Memes
Padmé Amidala declaring not as the Star Wars quote goes the death of liberty, but the death of “fascism … between a dildo shop and a crematorium” and Philadelphia’s NHL mascot Gritty echoing Game of Thrones’ Olenna Tyrell that he wants “Donald … to know it was me”: For many users logging on to Twitter that day, this was the first – and seemingly nonsensical – information about the 2020 presidential elections they encountered. Memes referencing characters and quotes from popular culture are more ubiquitous than ever during recent political events. What makes them so attractive? What image of politicians, users’ political stances and narrative of events do they project? While previous works on memes as political expression have focused on memes using well-known templates, less focus so far has been on memes employing intertextual references to staples of popular culture and the way not just the text itself but the framing by fictional characters adds to the message conveyed. A critical discourse analysis of recent memes on American politics spread on Twitter in the aftermath of the 2020 election demonstrates the role popular culture as a shared language plays in digital rhetoric as well as the most salient aspects of news that get over-emphasized due to their “meme-worthy” qualities, potentially distorting public memory of events portrayed.
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Hollywood movies are very popular among Egyptians, in particular, young generations who are being exposed to these movies through both terrestrial and satellite television channels besides the Internet and movie theaters. American cinema can play different roles among its audiences including movie-induced tourism which refers to the role of cinema in motivating people to travel to destinations portrayed in movies. This research study aims to examine the impact of movies on tourism among the Egyptian youth by applying infotainment to discover the elements of information and entertainment in movies which encourage the youth to travel. A survey is conducted of a disproportionate stratified sample of 500 Egyptian university students divided equally between private and public universities and between males and females who have passion for traveling. The results show that Hollywood movies encourage Egyptian university students to travel abroad. The most popular types of movie-induced tourism among the youth are traveling to destinations portrayed in movies, organized tour of portrayed locations, tour of studio sets and movie-themed parks. Also, most of the samples are motivated to travel to the U.S.A even if the movies are not about travel, but portray American atmosphere and lifestyles such as the movie “You’ve Got Mail”. The research finds that the movies influence different forms of tourism among Egyptian youth such as cultural tourism, beach tourism, leisure tourism, wildlife tourism and adventure tourism. The findings indicate that movie-induced tourism is affected by movies’ infotainment.
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P31: Larysa Soloviova – Representation of Stereotypes in American Media
In our everyday reality we are constantly facing predetermined ideas about representatives of other cultures and nationalities, although we often do not even realize it. These preconceived general ideas are called stereotypes.
There are various kinds of stereotypes. Evaluation is one of the characteristic features of stereotypical perception of the culture. Stereotypes are often emotionally colored by a positive or negative attitude of a person. The same features depending on whether they belong to your own or some different group may cause different evaluation. Prejudices, on the other hand, produce only a negative evaluation.
Media often transmit existing stereotypes using simplified schemes often exaggerating similarities and underestimating the differences between representatives of other cultures.
Stereotypes of American people often manifest in the media representation of the USA. It should be remembered that the representatives of different nations came to live together a few centuries ago creating a multiracial and multicultural community known as a “melting pot”. However the idea of the melting pot has been substituted lately with the idea of a “pizza” or “salad bowl” where the ingredients mix to a definite extent preserving their own flavour. Thus, the nations coming to live together in the USA form a multicultural community preserving their own cultural identity. A multiracial and multicultural American society has a lot of lifestyles and attitudes, as well as problems which this variety brings.
It should be noted that stereotypes do not always correspond to the reality and sometimes the discrepancy between the stereotype and real life comes to light.
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Media literacy as the ability to critically understand and interact with the media is extremely relevant in modern society, enabling citizens of all ages, including university students to navigate in the modern news environment and make informed decisions. The purpose of forming and developing students’ media competence is to enhance their ability to critically comprehend the content they receive through social media and through traditional media; increase their awareness of the veracity of online information, while promoting more responsible use of the Internet.
Within the independent field of knowledge – media education – there are such concepts as “media literacy”, “information literacy”, “media competence”, “media culture”, which are related to each other, but not identical. It should be emphasized that media competence in the European scientific discourse has long been not only a media education concept, but also a social construct, an evaluation system with certain functions in the media community, which are translated through the media.
Currently, it is an indisputable fact that the key feature of the development of modern society is the informatization of all spheres of its life. In education, this poses new challenges for educators, changing the requirements for the competencies of modern students. As a result, the paradigm of education is changing, where learning is increasingly becoming personality-oriented, the emphasis is on independent and individual work of students. Thus, crucial transformations are taking place in the educational space and the development of media competence is of paramount importance.
Further, the presentation focuses on the experience in implementing a group course on media literacy “Very Verified: a media literacy course” developed by the international organization IREX in partnership with the online education studio EdEra. This course was part of the Learn to Discern project, implemented by IREX with the support of the US Embassy and the British Embassy in Ukraine, in partnership with the Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine.
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A mass-marketed remediation of the New West,[1] Yellowstone inarguably leads the pack in a resurgence of Western spaces, characters, tropes and more on television (as well as in other media) in the past decade.[2] Oscillating between social realism and Neo-Western, we contend that showrunner Taylor Sheridan channels a little over two decades of New West(ern) scholarship into a popular culture format. More specifically though, Sheridan excavates and indeed tries to rehabilitate a carefully braided brand of nostalgia that has been endemic to the mythical West as imagined by the white Anglo-American consciousness. Afforded the patriarchally charged position as narrative focalizer, it is primarily John Dutton’s (Kevin Costner) interactions with the different agents and forces that shape “his” New West—from gentrification to Aspenization—which yield moments where this nostalgia is candidly articulated; coded in the romance of a cattle baron’s ranching empire and a swan song for cowboy labor, it serves to bemoan the threats to and/or loss of local land ownership to “equity refugees”[3] and/or what Justin Farrell has identified as the “charitable-industrial-complex.”[4]
In our paper we will strive for more than a simple mapping of the show’s cowboy aesthetics and antics, and rather discuss how Taylor Sheridan—through explicitly marked claims to authenticity—tries to rehabilitate the image of livestock ranching and horsemanship economies, and their attendant cultural traditions (e.g., roughstock sports), in an attempt to make clear that “the Old West has not and will not fade away in any simple manner;”[5] a position most ardently embodied and articulated by Kevin Costner’s character. Ultimately, the same “jaunty impertinence—simultaneously grandiose and defensive”[6] that Nina Baym has attributed to the literatures of the New West, we argue, also applies to a TV-series like Yellowstone.
[1] For a concise overview of the cyclical historiography of the “New West” see Taylor, Joseph E. “The Many Lives of the New West.” Western Historical Quarterly 35, no. 2 (2004): 141-165.
[2] For example, Hell on Wheels (AMC, 2011-16), The Son (AMC, 2017-19), Longmire (Netflix, 2012-17), Killer Women (ABC, 2014), Wynonna Earp (Syfy, 2016-), Justified (FX, 2010-15), and Deputy (FX, 2020).
[3] Taylor, 159.
[4] Justin Farrell, Billionaire Wilderness (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2020): 45.
[5] Taylor, 161.
[6] Nina Baym, “Old West, New West, Postwest, Real West,” American Literary History 18, no. 4 (2006): 814.
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The Black Lives Matter movement was formed in response to American law enforcement’s repeated fatal violence against people of color. When the motion started gaining momentum, it was only a matter of time before it found its way onto the big screen. The complex issue of racial inequality calls for a delicate, balanced treatment and most filmmakers tend to explore it only partially.
Three movies released in 2018 – Blindspotting (dir. Carlos López Estrada), Monsters and Men (dir. Reinaldo Marcus Green) and The Hate U Give (dir. George Tillman Jr.) – focus on how witnessing police brutality may affect the witness and their community. Although varying in genre, they all emphasise the trauma experienced by their young and vulnerable protagonists, who soon learn that taking action against injustice often comes with a price. The movies offer different approaches to the emotional aftermath of traumatic events but seem to agree on the importance of representing it in the media.
The proposed paper aims to explain how trauma of witnessing police brutality is portrayed in the aforementioned works and to discuss how they relate to the current public discourse regarding this issue. It is crucial to address how cinema can appropriately recount racially motivated violence and seek new ways of representing the ongoing social change.
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The paper sets out to compare the representations of the Angel across the two types of adaptations of Tony Kushner’s play Angels in America: the staged productions (a 1993 Walter Kerr theatre premiere on Broadway and a 2017 staging at the Royal National Theatre in London) and the 2003 HBO series. Using Karen Barad’s theoretical framework of intra-action, I argue that the Angel both in the play and in the TV adaptation stands for the dynamism of competing forces of Heaven and Earth which she both represents and challenges, though with a different take on cosmology, depending on the affordances of the theatrical and televised medium. Her goal is to compel human beings to “stop moving,” or stop being human in order to restore God’s interest in her fellow angels. Through a comparison of the truly spectacular but technically challenging impersonations of the Angel on stage and on a TV screen, I identify the components of this character which bring to the play Barad’s notion of intra-action where all designated elements of the story world are constantly exchanging and diffracting, influencing and working inseparably.
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Some observers of Canadian politics and political campaigning have dubbed Justin Trudeau, Canada’s incumbent prime minister, „the first prime minister of the Instagram age”. Such an opinion, naturally, gives credit to Trudeau’s apparently skillful use of social media in boosting his popularity and promoting his image among the Canadian and international public. The paper will explore the evolution of social media image of Canada’s prime minister. In particular, it will take interest in how Trudeau’s presence and impactful use of traditional and social online media helped popularize and convey his positive portrayal to wider audiences, which at peak of Trudeau’s popularity amounted to a phenomenon called “Trudeaumania”. The paper will evaluate the effects and political implications of Trudeau’s media activity on his political career and posture, but will also look comparatively on Justin Trudeau’s and President Donald Trump’s efforts to capture public interest through media presence.
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P37: Edyta Frelik – “Aspects that our retinas will never record”: Man Ray’s Photography
Man Ray’s reputation as one of the greatest fashion and glamour photographers stands in stark contrast to how he himself understood his relevance as an artist and aesthetic thinker. Though both the public and the critical establishment largely ignored his accomplishments as a painter, sculptor, filmmaker and writer, he relentlessly struggled to be recognized as a key figure of the modernist avant-garde. He believed that the advantage of working with many different media was that by comparatively exploring their unique capabilities and limitations he developed deeper insights both into the general nature of imagination and creativity and art’s relation to the world at large, especially in terms of how artists employ media and forms to grasp, reflect or distort perceived reality.
Man Ray’s ideas about photography’s documentary and utilitarian purposes vis-à-vis its potential as an artistic medium will be discussed based on his autobiographical and critical writings. They are evidence that his pioneering experiments which juxtaposed aesthetic judgment and technique, dexterity and mechanical action, invention and reproduction, intention and accident and freedom and repetition, to name a few examples of oppositions/contrasts, prefigured and anticipated considerations about photographic ontology and indexicality both by practitioners and by theorists who in the course of the 20th century continued to expand the study of art and aesthetics by invoking a broad range of ideas and concepts from other disciplines, including philosophy, anthropology, sociology and cultural history as well as literary and language studies.
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This paper explores the image of the United States of America in Bhutan’s most popular newspaper. The Kingdom of Bhutan is a Buddhist country in the Himalayas that for centuries remained in the self-imposed isolation that influenced its culture, customs, and media that were introduced at the end of the 20th century. This constitutional monarchy is run under the auspice of the Gross National Happiness (GNH) index that measures the development not in monetary value, but in terms of personal achievements. Such peculiar circumstances influenced Bhutanese media, which tend to avoid harsh judgments, sensationalism, and tabloidism, therefore it’s fascinating how the USA is presented through a Bhutanese lens. This study is based on a qualitative paradigm and used as the media content analysis method. The research sample (300 texts) was drawn from articles published in “Kuensel” between 2015 and 2020. Authors used leading software for qualitative and mixed methods research as their investigation tool. The results fill a research gap in the context of the study of America’s image worldwide.
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P39: Karolina Burno-Kaliszuk – American celebrities on Polish gossip websites
Based on the concept of the global circulation of celebrities – the belief that as a result of the development of new media, celebrities become figures of international interest, and the framing theory – the assumption according to which the way of covering characters and events in the media depends on the cultural context, I would like to investigate how the same media actors from the United States are presented in American and Polish gossip websites. For this purpose, I will carry out a comparative content analysis of news on three main groups of celebrities: (1) celebrities with assigned status – represented by Melania Trump; (2) celebrities with gained status – Taylor Swift; (3) celebrities with status conferred by the media – Kylie Jenner. The analysis will include all materials about indicated celebrities, which were published on TMZ.com (US) and Pudelek.pl (PL) in 2020.
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P40: Patrick Vaughan – The Rise of Opinion Journalism and the Changing Power of Information
This paper will examine that state of American media in the age of a cultural and technological transition. The role of journalism dating back to the Progressive era served as a necessary investigative tool that helped expose the shortcomings of government and business-two forces that were often aligned at the expense of the public interest. Over the past thirty years it has been argued that journalism has gradually been transformed into a tool of the ruling elite, rather than an investigative arm protecting the interests of the general-public. This could be seen in the annual “Gridiron” dinners and other journalistic events in Washington DC that in the 1980s began to resemble Hollywood award shows where celebrity journalists sat next to their fellow celebrities-television stars rather than actual news reporters. It can be argued that this trend has only intensified in recent years leaving an increasingly corporate and nepotistic media culture to lose touch with what is “really” happening in areas outside of their own immediate upper middle-class social circle. This left the craft of investigative journalism to semi-journalistic art forms such as “Hoop Dreams” and “What’s the Matter with Kansas?” which focused on marginalized “small people” in the middle of the country falling through the cracks of globalized capitalism. In recent months Spotify has made Joe Rogan, a “plain speaking” martial artist and stand-up comedian, one of the highest paid voices in the “new” media. This has led to charges within the profession that it is dangerous trend to grant such a platform to a person who is not a professionally trained journalist-while others note this is a natural “populist” response to the growing trend of a corporate media being out of touch with the rest of the country. This paper will address these issues, and what, if anything, can be done to correct this trend.
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The presentation will be focused on the analysis of “Nomadland” reportage by Jessica Bruder, written as a tribute to people who had to or wanted to change their lifestyle entirely after the financial crisis and recession in 2008. Polish translation of the book was published by “Czarne” in “American Series”, next to such titles as “Shitshow!” and “Detroit” by Charlie Leduff. For many years, America was “the promised land” to Polish readers as they liked to believe that somewhere, over the ocean, life is much better than in Poland. Reportages written by American writers, such as Bruder and Leduff, allow Poles to broaden their point of view, to change fictional images into non-fiction, to understand how deeply has American society changed over the last ten years. The aim of the presentation will be to analyse how humanistic and empathic reportage can be and how – among sadness and hopelessness – the characters of Bruder’s stories are able to show the readers the deeper meaning of life.
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“I have a dream” speech, delivered by Martin Luther King on August 28, 1963, is often indicated as the best oration in the United States’ history. This opinion is followed by a long-lasting and constantly vivid discussion on rhetorical qualities of the performance.
From explanatory and normative points of view, crucial is the choice of analytical tools being employed to present King’s speech’s rhetorical characteristic.
Employing classical rhetoric concepts such as orator-speech-art or logos-pathos-ethos could lead towards recognizing King’s performance as a text, being a mixture of spontaneous and arranged elements. In light of this interpretation, the speech seems to be a manifesto of social justice directed not only to those who participated in the March on Washington. Simultaneously, it has to be understood as a part of a broader and planned, media-oriented spectacle which possessed all features of a media event in a sense proposed by Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz.
However, there is a possibility to interpret “I have a dream” speech in a non-classical way, defining it as a situation co-created by all participants of the manifestation. In this context, Martin Luther King should be defined as one of the co-authors of a historical moment when the whole generation recognized and identified its voice, formulating and sending its essential message to other generations.
The author of the paper is convinced that the second methodological approach advantages significantly over the first. The presentation will aim to present the main line of his argumentation in this respect.
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Before the 2020 presidential elections, Confederation Liberty and Independence, a Polish right-wing party, organized American-style presidential primaries with a complex delegate system. The final convention took place on January 18th in Warsaw. Krzysztof Bosak, Vice-Chairman of National Movement, was named the victor and delivered a nomination acceptance speech, a genre that had been absent in the Polish political scene. The genre is deeply rooted in American discourse. According to Neville-Shepard (2016), there are five features of the genre: accepting the nomination, calling for unity, presenting the vision of the candidate, a ceremonial style, and a positive tone.
Genre is herein defined in accordance with Rhetorical Genre Studies – a response to a recurrent rhetorical situation (Miller, 1984).
The aim of the paper is to discuss Bosak’s acceptance speech through the lens of genre criticism (Foss, 2009) in order to demonstrate how the politician adapted a predominantly American genre into a Polish setting.
Furthermore, Bosak’s discursive strategies (Reisigl & Wodak, 2009) will be taken into consideration with a view to exploring the character of the discourse of the rapidly growing contemporary Polish far-right. Referential and predicational strategies will be investigated, as well as a selection of topoi.
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For the Thursday abstracts, please click here.
Media in America, America in Media 