International Journal of Communication Publishes a Special Section on
Queer Cultures in Digital Asia

What are the challenges and opportunities offered to queer communities and practices by social media and digital platforms such as Twitter, Instagram, Weibo, Grindr, Blued, Butterfly, and more, in the context of Asia? 

Inspired by Mobile Cultures: New Media in Queer Asia (Berry, Martin, Yue, & Spigel, 2003), published in 2003, and the subsequent two decades of critical scholarship on Queer Asia, this Special Section on Queer Cultures in Digital Asia aims to renew our critical interrogation of the intersection between queerness and Asia at a time when digital media and platforms are inseparable from social lives. Asia provides a complicated context for the development and survival of queer communities as social norms and laws regarding same-sex relationships and gender transition vary across regions. 

Guest-edited by Lik Sam Chan, Jia Tan, and Elija Cassidy, this Special Section examines how contemporary queer lives are platformized, investigating an array of issues from amateur gay porn cultures, lesbian and gay dating apps, trans men’s self-representation, to Boys’ Love fandom, as well as how these are mediated through specific digital platforms. 

While platformed digital media undoubtedly offers new opportunities for queer communities and practices, community-based regulations and internal stratification and discrimination also close off certain forms of queer expression and queer potential. Contributors to this Special Section offer empirical analyses of queer digital cultures, platforms, practices, and communities from one or multiple Asian regions. They highlight how regional specificity has contributed to the manifestation of queer practices and cultures. With new digital phenomena emerging—live streaming, games, robots and AI, non-fungible tokens, health tracking—and social and legal environments evolving, Queer Cultures in Digital Asia will always be in a state of flux. This Special Section can hopefully open further conversations about digital media and queerness among scholars working across a range of diverse Asian contexts. 

We invite you to read these articles that published in the International Journal of Communication on March 19, 2023. Please log into ijoc.org to read the papers of interest. We look forward to your feedback! 

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Queer Cultures in Digital Asia—Introduction
Lik Sam Chan, Jia Tan, Elija Cassidy

Digital Sexual Publics: Understanding Do-It-Yourself Gay Porn and Lived Experiences of Sexuality in China
Runze Ding, Lin Song

Attention Economy, Neoliberalism, and Homonormative Masculinity in Amateur Gay Porn Circuits on Twitter: The Case of Manila and Hong Kong
Ruepert Jiel Dionisio Cao 

“I Look at How They Write Their Bio and I Judge From There”: Language and Class Among Middle-Class Queer Filipino Digital Socialities in Manila 
Paul Michael Leonardo Atienza

Strategic, Conflicted, and Interpellated: Hong Kong and Chinese Queer Women’s Use of Identity Labels on Lesbian Dating Apps 
Carman K. M. Fung

Tracing Dystopian Insta-Emotions Among Hong Kong Trans Men 
Denise Tse-Shang Tang 

Participatory Censorship and Digital Queer Fandom: The Commercialization of Boys’ Love Culture in China
Yiming Wang, Jia Tan 

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Larry Gross, Editor 
Kady Bell-Garcia, Managing Editor
Chi Zhang, Managing Editor, Special Sections
Lik Sam Chan, Jia Tan, and Elija Cassidy, Guest Editors

Please note that according to the latest Google Scholar statistics, IJoC ranks 9th among all Humanities journals and 9th among all Communications journals in the world — demonstrating the viability of open access scholarly publication at the highest level.

International Journal of Communication Publishes a Special Section on
Digital Memory and Populism

In a world of flux, the past can become a guiding beacon; yet, in which direction do populists move and how do counter-voices mobilize memory online to respond to often divisive interpretations of the past?  

Guest-edited by Manuel Menke and Berber Hagedoorn, this Special Section on Digital Memory and Populism presents work by international academic researchers who shed light on the uses of the past by populists, their supporters, and their opponents in online discourses. Readers will gain a better understanding of digital memory and populism in the realm of party politics and beyond, since populist communication and narratives have entered civil society and people’s everyday lives in many democracies across the world. 

In seven articles, the authors contribute unique insights into how digital memory is shared, represented, constructed, and exploited to promote or tackle populism in Germany, Japan, Mexico, Turkey, and the United States. Together, the articles in this Special Section exhibit digital memory as an important analytical lens to understand populism and its uses of the past from a media and communication perspective. The presented studies feature different conceptual and empirical approaches demonstrating how contested and therefore powerful memory is in populism, shaping digital discourses on identity, belonging, and political ideology. Some articles, however, also emphasize the potential of digital memory to organize and mobilize bottom-up voices countering populist narratives by the means of digital media, networked communication, and activism. Thereby, the research articles in this Section contribute new pieces to the puzzle of populism’s success, while also highlighting possible counter-narratives.

We invite you to read these articles that published in the International Journal of Communication on March 2, 2023. Please log into ijoc.org to read the papers of interest. We look forward to your feedback! 
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Digital Memory and Populism—Introduction
Manuel Menke, Berber Hagedoorn

Populists’ Use of Nostalgia: A Supervised Machine Learning Approach
Lena Frischlich, Lena Clever, Tim Wulf, Tim Wildschut, Constantine Sedikides 

Commemorative Populism in the COVID-19 Pandemic: The Strategic (Ab)use of Memory in Anti-Corona Protest Communication on Telegram 
Christian Schwarzenegger, Anna Wagner  

Radical-Right Populist Media Discourse in Social Media and Counter Strategies: Case Study of #ConfederateHeritageMonth 2021 Twitter Campaign
Krzysztof Wasilewski

Deploying Private Memory in the Virtual Sphere: Feminist Activism Against Gender-Based Violence in Mexico 
Emanuela Buscemi

Remembering Gezi: The Digital Memory Practices on Twitter During the Anniversaries in the Face of Populist Challenges
Duygu Karataş, Mine Gencel Bek

Remembering and Forgetting Fukushima: Where Citizen Science Meets Populism in Japan 
Yasuhito Abe

____________________________________________________________________________________
Larry Gross, Editor 
Kady Bell-Garcia, Managing Editor
Chi Zhang, Managing Editor, Special Sections
Manuel Menke and Berber Hagedoorn, Guest Editors

Please note that according to the latest Google Scholar statistics, IJoC ranks 9th among all Humanities journals and 9th among all Communications journals in the world — demonstrating the viability of open access scholarly publication at the highest level.

International Journal of Communication invites you to read these 49 papers that published in February

The International Journal of Communication is pleased to announce the publication of 49 papers in FEBRUARY 2023, which includes the “Special Section on Encounters Between Violence and Media” and the “Special Section on Media Use and Political Engagement: Cross-Cultural Approaches.” To access these papers, Ctrl+Click on the titles below for direct hyperlinking or go to ijoc.org to read the Special Sections.
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ARTICLES

#TrendingNow: How Twitter Trends Impact Social and Personal Agendas?
Maggie Mengqing Zhang, Yee Man Margaret Ng 

Perceived Exposure to Misinformation and Trust in Institutions in Four Countries Before and During a Pandemic
Shelley Boulianne, Edda Humprecht 

A Cross-Country Study of Comparative Optimism About Privacy Risks on Social Media
Hichang Cho, Miriam Metzger, Sabine Trepte, Elmie Nekmat  

Media Representations of Nüding in China (2005–2015)
Chao Lu, Ke Zhang, Jingyuan Zhang  

Visual Models for Social Media Image Analysis: Groupings, Engagement, Trends, and Rankings
Gabriele Colombo, Liliana Bounegru, Jonathan Gray  

Comparing the Effects of Traditional Media and Social Media Use on General Trust in China During the COVID-19 Pandemic
Mengru Sun, Xiang Meng, Wencai Hu 

Fans’ Practice of Reporting: A Study of the Structure of Data Fan Labor on Chinese Social Media
Haoyang Zhai, Wilfred Yang Wang 

“I Have Learnt These Things by Myself, Because I Always Thought That I Must Overcompensate for My Disability”: Learning to Perform Dis/abled Identity in Social Media
Nomy Bitman

Digital Patronage: Toward a New Model of Building a Radio Station
Patryk Galuszka, Piotr Chmielewski

Governmentality in North American and Post-Soviet Political Discourses: An Analysis of Presidential Speeches and Their Analogues in the United States, Canada, Russia, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan Delivered From 1993 to 2021
Anton Oleinik 

When Right-Wing Populism Becomes Distorted Public Health Communication: Tracing the Roots of Jair Bolsonaro’s Epidemiological Denialism
Stuart Davis, João V. S. Ozawa, Joseph Straubhaar, Samuel Woolley 

10,000 Social Media Users Can(not) Be Wrong: The Effects of Popularity Cues and User Comments on Sharing Controversial Social Media News Stories
Arjen van Dalen 

Online Pre-Events During the COVID-19 Pandemic 
Luigi Di Martino, Lukasz Swiatek

“We’re Not Just Telling Stories, We’re Changing Lives”: Dhar Mann’s Progressive Neoliberalism
Sean T. Leavey 

Contact-Tracing Apps as Boundary Objects of Pandemic Governance: The State-by-State Approach to Contain the Spread of COVID-19 in the United States
Eugene Jang, Jeeyun (Sophia) Baik, Katrin Fischer

A Transactional Framework of Parenting for Children’s Internet Use: A Narrative Review of Parental Self-Efficacy, Mediation, and Awareness of Online Risks
Seffetullah Kuldas, Aikaterini Sargioti, James O’Higgins Norman, Elisabeth Staksrud 

The Linguistic and Message Features Driving Information Diffusion on Twitter: The Case of #RevolutionNow in Nigeria
Oluwabusayo Okunloye, Kerk F. Kee, R. Glenn Cummins, Weiwu Zhang 

Two Trusts and a Court: Adapting Legal Mechanisms for Building Trust in Technology Governance
Opeyemi Akanbi, Stephanie Hill 

Do Not Use This Hashtag: Fat Acceptance (Mis)information and Discursive Boundary-Work as Content Moderation on Instagram
Melissa Zimdars 

Race, Class, and Sonic Autonomy in the Tower Blocks: Pirate Radio’s Exilic Possibilities
Larisa Kingston Mann 

Political Relational Influencers: The Mobilization of Social Media Influencers in the Political Arena 
Anastasia Goodwin, Katie Joseff, Martin J. Riedl, Josephine Lukito, Samuel Woolley 

Changing Mass Media Consumption Patterns Before/After Relocation: East Asian International Students’ Mass Media Use and Acculturation Strategies
Lin Li, Chengyuan Shao 

Temporal Citizen Science After Fukushima
Yasuhito Abe 

Managing Pandemic Communication Online: Turkish Ministry of Health’s Digital Communication Strategies During COVID-19
Emel Ozdora Aksak, Ergin Şafak Dikmen, Nilüfer Pinar Kiliç

FEATURES

A Discussion of Think Tanks in Climate Obstruction in Response to the “Analysis of the Moreno et al. (2022) Publication on EIKE Using Peter Gleick’s Toolbox”
Jose A. Moreno, Mira Kinn, Marta Narberhaus 

Analysis of the Moreno et al. (2022) Publication on EIKE Using Peter Gleick’s Toolbox 
Horst-Joachim Lüdecke 

BOOK REVIEWS

Kylie Jarrett, Digital Labor
Micky Lee 

Francesca Bolla Tripodi, The Propagandists’ Playbook: How Conservative Elites Manipulate Search and Threaten Democracy
Jose Mari Hall Lanuza

Renyi Hong, Passionate Work: Endurance After the Good Life
Thomas A. Discenna 

Kelli Moore, Legal Spectatorship: Slavery and the Visual Culture of Domestic Violence
Ke M. Huang-Isherwood 

Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth 
Sue Curry Jansen 

D. Bondy Valdovinos Kaye, Jing Zeng, and Patrik Wikström, TikTok: Creativity and Culture in Short Video
Parker Bach 

Páraic Kerrigan, LGBTQ Visibility, Media and Sexuality in Ireland
Aiden James Kosciesza 

Christian Vaccari and Augusto Valeriani, Outside the Bubble: Social Media and Political Participation in Western Democracies
João Carlos Sousa

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Larry Gross, Editor
Kady Bell-Garcia, Managing Editor
Chi Zhang, Managing Editor, Special Sections

Please note that according to the latest Google Scholar statistics, IJoC ranks 9th among all Humanities journals and 9th among all Communications journals in the world — demonstrating the viability of open access scholarly publication at the highest level.

International Journal of Communication Publishes a Special Section on Media Use and Political Engagement: Cross-Cultural Approaches

While democracies around the world are struggling with the decline of traditional civic and political engagement, new forms of engagement are on the rise in many parts of the world. These new forms of engagement are exemplified in countless social movements, including the current Iranian protests for women’s rights, Black Lives Matter, the Gezi Park protests, and the Arab Spring. These movements have convincingly shown the enabling power of digital media, especially social media, for political engagement. Around the globe, media are increasingly at the center of political engagement, most notably in countries where political rights and civil liberties are restricted.  

In this global climate of media-enabled citizenship, this Special Section on Media Use and Political Engagement: Cross-Cultural Approaches, guested edited by Özen Odağ, Frank Schneider, Larisa Buhin, and Jinhee Kim, takes up a cross-culturally comparative perspective to the uses of media for political engagement. Central questions of this Section are: In what ways does cultural context affect the enabling power of the media toward political engagement in various parts of the world? What are the roles of diverse media formats, such as visual communication, news podcasts, and entertainment media, for political engagement and mobilization cross-culturally? What are the social-psychological drivers of mediated political engagement across countries? How do these differ across repressive countries in which human rights are violated versus democratic countries in which civil liberties are protected? The Special Section speaks to a broad audience of academics and practitioners alike, interested in understanding and embarking on the potential of the media for mobilizing citizens for political action.

The study of digitally-enabled political engagement brings together a highly interdisciplinary and multicultural group of authors in the Special Section. Communication scholars, media scholars, political scientists, and psychologists from in Asia, Europe, Oceania, and North America have created this edited Section together. The works compiled are empirical, based on rigorous quantitative and qualitative data collection and analysis procedures. The Special Section therefore represents an effort to collate state-of-the-art scholarship across disciplinary, cultural, and methodological borders. 

We invite you to read these articles that published in the International Journal of Communication on February 14, 2023. Please log into ijoc.org to read the papers of interest. We look forward to your feedback! 

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Media Use and Political Engagement: Cross-Cultural Approaches—Introduction 
Özen Odağ, Frank M. Schneider, Larisa Buhin, Jinhee Kim

News Podcast Use, Press Freedom, and Political Participation: A Cross-National Study of 38 Countries
Yoonmo Sang, Sunyoung Park, Jiwon Kim, Sora Park

When Pop and Politics Collide: A Transcultural Perspective on Contested Practices in Pop Idol Fandoms in China and the West
Qian Huang, Simone Driessen, Daniel Trottier 

What Role Does Media Entertainment Play in Emerging Adults’ Political Identity and Engagement Across Cultures?
Frank M. Schneider, Katharina Knop-Huelss, Jinhee Kim, Larisa Buhin, Miriam Gröning, Audris Umel, Özen Odağ 

Political Engagement Through Visual Mediation: The Visuality of the Christchurch Attack and a Cross-Governmental Analysis of Performative Populist Responses
Balca Arda

Media Use and Green Lifestyle Politics in Diverse Cultural Contexts of Postmaterialist Orientation and Generalized Trust: Findings From a Multilevel Analysis
Laura Leissner

Between Individual and Collective Social Effort: Vocabularies of Informed Citizenship in Different Information Environments 
Emilija Gagrčin, Pablo Porten-Cheé 

The Role of Media Use in Political Mobilization: A Comparison of Free and Restrictive Countries
Regina Arant, Katja Hanke, Alexandra Mittelstädt, Rosemary Pennington, Audris Umel, Özen Odağ

____________________________________________________________________________________
Larry Gross, Editor
Kady Bell-Garcia, Managing Editor
Chi Zhang, Managing Editor, Special Sections
Özen Odağ, Frank Schneider, Larisa Buhin, Jinhee Kim, Guest Editors

Please note that according to the latest Google Scholar statistics, IJoC ranks 9th among all Humanities journals and 9th among all Communications journals in the world — demonstrating the viability of open access scholarly publication at the highest level. 

International Journal of Communication Publishes a Special Section on Encounters Between Violence and Media

Guest-edited by Anu A. Harju and Noora Kotilainen, this Special Section on Encounters Between Violence and Media offers new approaches on encounters between violence and media and how these are circulated, negotiated or contested, or altogether rejected. The Section brings together scholars from media and communication studies, social sciences, as well as the humanities, with contributions ranging from interrogations of the more visible and often spectacularized violence to the more invisible violence, for example, gendered violence and violence against marginalized groups. Drawing on the philosophical notion of recognition, the articles in this collection examine what kinds of frames of recognition are assigned to victims of violence, to perpetrators of violent acts, or indeed to different types of violence and injury. Thus, problematizing regimes of visibility as regimes of power, the authors ask in what ways are the different forms of violence obscured or absent from the media, but also which types of violence gain hypervisibility and what implications this has for recognition, on the one hand, and marginalization, on the other. With this collection, we ask what happens to conditions for recognition in the context of violence, suffering, and death when recognition’s mutuality and relationality are altered through mediation and distance? Or indeed, what potential for recognition might lie in our collective existence when faced with violence, given that the roots of recognition are social and embedded in communal life? 

With this thematic issue, we bring into the discussion of recognition real-life perspectives on violence in contemporary media contexts. The collection highlights the need to focus on the recognition of suffering and violence experienced by those often existing on the social margins. 

We invite you to read these articles that published in the International Journal of Communication on February 6, 2023. Please log into ijoc.org to read the papers of interest. We look forward to your feedback! 
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Encounters Between Violence and Media—Introduction 
Anu A. Harju, Noora Kotilainen 

Remembering January 29: The Québec City Mosque Shootings and the Struggle for Recognition  
Yasmin Jiwani, Marie Bernard-Brind’Amour 

“We Are One”: Mediatized Death Rituals and the Recognition of Marginalized Other
Tal Morse  

“You Will Never Hear Me Mention His Name”: The (Im)possibility of the Politics of Recognition in Disruptive Hybrid Media Events
Katja Valaskivi, Johanna Sumiala  

Echo of Experience: A Feminist Response to Racialization of Sexual Crime in the Hybrid Media Event 
Kaarina Nikunen

Trafficked Women in Press Journalism: Politics and Ambivalence in the Quest for Visibility
Tijana Stolic

Sticky Violence—Afterword 
Barbie Zelizer 

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Larry Gross, Editor  
Kady Bell-Garcia, Managing Editor
Chi Zhang, Managing Editor, Special Sections
Anu A. Harju and Noora Kotilainen, Guest Editors

Please note that according to the latest Google Scholar statistics, IJoC ranks 9th among all Humanities journals and 9th among all Communications journals in the world — demonstrating the viability of open access scholarly publication at the highest level.