International Journal of Communication Publishes a Special Section on Health Communication

This Special Section on “Health Communication through Media Narratives: Factors, Processes and Effects” brings together 10 original papers (plus an editorial introduction) on current research in the area of narrative health communication worldwide. Narrative health communication — a form of persuasive communication to promote healthy behavior — presents its message in the structure of a story.

This Special Section focuses on the primary question:  How are people influenced by health narratives and what characteristics make a health narrative persuasive?

These papers investigate a wide range of health topics, such as HPV vaccination, HIV prevention, physical exercise, organ donation, drunk driving, cancer, and cardiovascular diseases.  All 10 studies have important implications for the understanding of how people process health narratives, and moreover, contribute to the practice of designing effective health narratives. This Special Section provides a synthesis of knowledge which indicates the significant trends that are taking place in this research area and point to directions for future studies.

We invite you to read these articles that published in the International Journal of Communication on November 20, 2017. Please Ctrl+Click on the article titles below for direct linking to the papers of interest.
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Health Communication through Media Narratives: Factors, Processes and Effects — Introduction
Katalin Balint, Helena Bilandzic

Operational and Conceptual Trends in Narrative Persuasion Research:  Comparing Health and Non-Health Related Contexts
Michael Dahlstrom, Jeff Niederdeppe, Lijing Gao, Xiaowen Zhu

Transportation Into Narrative Worlds and the Motivation to Change Health-Related Behavior
Timon Gebbers, John B. F. De Wit, Markus Appel

Moved to Act: Examining the Role of Mixed Affect and Cognitive Elaboration in “Accidental” Narrative Persuasion
Enny Das, Tijmen Nobbe, Mary Beth Oliver

“Don’t Make My Mistake”: On the Processing of Narrative Fear Appeals
Joëlle A. Ooms, Carel J.M. Jansen, Saar Hommes, John C.J. Hoeks

Who Cares What Others Think? The Role of Latinas’ Acculturation in the Processing of HPV Vaccination Narrative Messages
Nathan Walter, Sheila T. Murphy, Lauren B. Frank, Lourdes Baezconde-Garbanati

“She Died of a Mother’s Broken Heart”: Media and Audiences’ Framing of Health Narratives of Heart-Related Celebrity Deaths
Hilde Van den Bulck

Engaging Doctors and Depressed Patients: Effects of Referential Viewpoint and Role Similarity in Health Narratives
Kobie van Krieken, José Sanders

Risk Versus Planning Health Narratives Targeting Dutch Truck Drivers: Obtaining Impact Via Different Routes?
Anniek Boeijinga, Hans Hoeken, José Sanders

Dispelling Fears and Myths of Organ Donation: How Narratives Including Information Reduce Ambivalence and Reactance
Freya Sukalla, Anna J. M. Wagner, Isabel Rackow

The Narrative Within the Narrative: The Effectiveness of Narrative HIV Prevention Ads Depends on Their Placement Within a Context Narrative
Anja Kalch, Helena Bilandzic

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Larry Gross
Editor

Arlene Luck
Managing Editor

Katalin E. Balint, Helena Bilandzic
Guest Editors

International Journal of Communication

Publishes a Special COMPASS Section on
Media Policy Research and Practice

What is the relationship between communication research and media policy?

What insights emerge from academic encounters with the policymaking apparatus?

How can this critical engagement help address today’s most pressing media policy problems?

This Special Section on Media Policy Research and Practice  features essays from doctoral students participating in the Consortium on Media Policy Studies (COMPASS) program. In 2004, the COMPASS program emerged as a joint effort between several leading communication departments, designed to immerse PhD students in policymaking processes to better inform their research and help build the field. At the same time, it encourages government and NGO policymakers to incorporate insights from such scholarship into their daily work. This reflects the program’s commitment to the idea that communication research, with its interdisciplinary origins, structural focus, and critical approach, can provide meaningful contributions to media policy analyses and debates.

The contributors to this Special Section secured fellowships related to their research interests in government institutions such as the State Department and the FCC, and nonprofit media advocacy organizations and think tanks like Common Cause, Free Press, the New America Foundation, and Public Knowledge. During their summer fellowships, the fellows were exposed to the daily practices of media policymaking, while contributing research to the policy work of their host institutions. The Special Section articles engage a range of important policy issues—from online privacy and surveillance, to copyright and advertising regulation—and propose policy reforms to make the policymaking processes and debates more transparent, accountable, and accessible to the public. Together, they make the case for the productive nexus of research and practice, highlighting the value of communication scholars’ interventions in key policy debates.

We invite you to read these feature essays that published in the International Journal of Communication on November 8, 2017.  Please Ctrl+Click on the essay titles below for direct linking to the papers of interest.

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Media Policy Research and Practice: Insights and Interventions ‒ Introduction
Pawel Popiel, University of Pennsylvania
Victor Pickard, University of Pennsylvania
Mark Lloyd, University of Southern California

Who’s Behind that Political Ad? The FCC’s Online Political Files and Failures in Sponsorship Identification Regulation
Rachel E. Moran, University of Southern California

Critical Communication Policy Research and the Attention Economy: From Digital Labor Theory to Digital Class Struggle
Brice Nixon, Temple University

Measuring the Journalism Crisis: Developing New Approaches That Help the Public Connect to the Issue
Alex T. Williams, University of Pennsylvania

Television Versus the Internet for Information Seeking: Lessons from Global Survey Research
Sonia Jawaid Shaikh, University of Southern California

Race, Class, and Privacy: A Critical Historical Review
Matt Reichel, Rutgers University

New Media, Work Boundaries, and Privacy
Opeyemi Akanbi, University of Pennsylvania

Training Doctors to Communicate: Lessons from Integrating Behavioral and Social Science into Medical Education
Jillian Kwong, University of Southern California

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Larry Gross
Editor

Arlene Luck
Managing Editor

Pawel Popiel, Victor Pickard, Mark Lloyd
Guest Editors

International Journal of Communication
Publishes a Special Section on Global to Village

While McLuhan’s famous “global village” concept invokes the village in a metaphorical sense without paying any attention to rural issues, media and rural development was a primary concern in communication as a nascent post-World War II social science discipline. Today, despite massive urbanization and various premature pronouncements about the “death of the peasantry,” the size of the world’s rural population is larger than ever, and rural people all over the world continue to demonstrate themselves to be formidable social forces and cultural agents.

How can we deepen the study of global communication?  How can the communication field renew its engagement with the rural population and village communities in our globalized and digitalized world?

How to conceptualize and integrate the urban–rural divide, and along with it, the “metabolic rift” that Marx had also concerned himself with, as a relevant analytical framework for research perspectives that have systematically privileged the urban and prioritized the labor–capital relationship in studying the intersections of communication, culture and global capitalism?

In the Summer of 2015, Yuezhi Zhao, a Canadian-based communication scholar and editor of this Special Section, took a group of young Canadian scholars to Heyang, her native Chinese village, to “ground” their respective research topics in the rural context.  Participants included current Simon Fraser University (SFU) doctoral students and graduates of both SFU and the Communication University of China global communication MA double-degree program. The result is a test bed in a new rural communication research agenda and a unique experiment in global communication pedagogy.

Informed by the transcultural political economy of a global communication perspective and immersed in field research in the village, this “Global to Village: Grounding Communication Research in Rural China” Special Section turns McLuhan’s global village concept inside out. In combining political economy with field research and engaging with the multifaceted lived experiences of villagers, Heyang serves as a vantage point from which global systems and systemic issues are reassessed, reexamined, and even reimagined. The insights generated by the papers add nuances to the grand narratives of China’s rise and its soft power projection overseas. They also demonstrate the pressing need for communication and cultural scholars to move beyond the instrumentally focused concerns with information technologies and development to engage with the place of the rural in the sustenance of cultural identity, community, and local ecology, as well as ways to live a “good life.”

We invite you to read these articles that published in the International Journal of Communication on October 30, 2017  Please Ctrl+Click on the article titles below for direct linking to the papers of interest.

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Introduction to Global to Village: Grounding Communication Research in Rural China
Yuezhi Zhao

The Political Economy and Cultural Politics of Rural Nostalgia in Xi-Era China: The Case of Heyang
Linda Qian

When Technological Closeness Begets Social Distancing: From Mobile Phones to Wired Radio and a Yearning for the Mass Line in Rural China
Byron Hauck

A Dreamland or the Land of Broken Dreams: Juxtaposed Conceptions of the Good Life in Heyang
Xiaoxing Zhang

Toward Multiple Conceptions of Human-Nature Relationship: The “Human-Nature Unity” Frame Found in a Chinese Village
Sibo Chen

Reading Movement in the Everyday: The Rise of Guangchangwu in a Chinese Village
Maggie Chao

Research as Communicative Praxis: Crossing the Urban–Rural Divide in Understanding Hong Kong’s Occupy Central Movement
Vanessa Kong

Rewiring UNESCO’s World Heritage Centre and Rural Peripheries: Imagined Community and Concrete Inequality from France’s Corsica to China’s Heyang
Joseph Nicolai
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Larry Gross
Editor

Arlene Luck
Managing Editor

Yuezhi Zhao
Guest Editor

Information Technologies & International  Development

Publishes Special Section on ICTD 2016 

More than 10 years ago, the first information and communication technologies and development (ICTD) conference was held in Berkeley, California. The now annual conference is a place to understand, examine, critique, and refine the persistent and pervasive hope that ICT (Information and Communication Technology) can support human development.  In June 2016, nearly 300 scholarly researchers from around the world gathered for the eighth ICTD conference at the University of Michigan to explore the role of ICTs in social, political, and economic development. In this Special Section (guest-edited by Susan Wyche) we present four selected papers from the conference proceedings.

These articles reflect the breadth of disciplines that epitomize the ICTD community (from communication, policy, human-computer interaction, and information studies). They also focus on a range of populations and geographic regions including foreign brides in Singapore and mobile phone repairers in Kampala.  Though diverse, all articles demonstrate how the community is expanding the scope of its concerns beyond traditional areas within socioeconomic development (e.g., health, education, and livelihoods) to also include a wider range of activities, (e.g., repair, privacy, and women’s empowerment).

We are pleased to announce that these five articles have been published in  Information Technologies & International Development on October 26, 2017.  Please Ctrl+Click on the article titles below for direct links to the papers of interest.  We look forward to hearing your feedback.

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From the Guest Editor ― Editorial Introduction
Susan Wyche

Deploying ICTs for Development: An Evolutionary Perspective
Balaji Parthasarathy, Yuko Aoyama

Mobile Phones and Gender Empowerment: Negotiating the Essentialist–Aspirational Dialectic 
Hoan Nguyen, Arul Chib, Ramaswami Mahalingam

Privacy in Repair: An Analysis of the Privacy Challenges Surrounding Broken Digital Artifacts in Bangladesh
Syed Ahmed Ishtiaque, Shion Guha, Md. Rashidujjaman Rifat, Faysal Hossain Shezan, Nicola Dell

Caring for the “Next Billion” Mobile Handsets: Proprietary Closures and the Work of Repair
Lara Houston, Steven J. Jackson

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François Bar, Kentaro Toyama
Co-Editors in Chief                                                  

Arlene Luck
Managing Editor

Susan Wyche
Guest Editor

International Journal of Communication

Publishes a Special Section on
Growing Economic Inequality and Mediated Communication

The International Journal of Communication announces the publication of a Special Section focused on “Growing Economic Inequality and Mediated Communication” guest-edited by Paschal Preston and Andrea Grisold.

Sharp rises in economic inequalities have been one of the most significant developments in the heartlands of the capitalist system since the 1970s. Widening income gaps, increasingly uneven distribution of wealth and falling wage ratios comprise key aspects and indicators of this transformation. But many analysts also view the rise of populist nationalism and decline in the public’s trust in established political parties, media and other institutions as closely linked to the polarized distribution of income and other material resources.

After decades of benign neglect, the issues of economic and social inequalities have re-entered the stage of mainstream political attention in the core western countries over the past couple of years. This is due, in part, to the prominent public profile and popularity of books by Thomas Piketty and Tony Atkinson who have worked on this topic for many years.  Moreover, the renewed attention to economic and social inequality unfolds against a background of very slow, partial and highly uneven “recovery” from the major financial crash in the north-Atlantic region in 2007‒2008. Sluggish economic growth, declining or stagnant incomes, state policy regimes oriented toward austerity have followed in many countries and extreme turbulence in the formal political arena.

This special themed section of IJoC engages with two broad, if overlapping, sets of questions:

How do the new forms of economic inequality, power and privilege relate to relevant theories of the news media and prevailing conceptualizations of the role of the institutions of public communication? How does this knowledge base serve to help forward-looking analyses of the meaning and implications of recent trends in economic inequalities?

What role do the new forms of economic inequality, thus power and privilege, play in the typical narratives of mediated communication today? How does the “story-telling” take place? How is inequality framed and discussed?

The seven papers in this themed section are transdisciplinary in scope, bringing together several leading researchers, based in the communication studies, journalism and the political economy fields―all engaged in complementary ways in exploring the relations between media and public communication institutions on the one hand, and significant economic inequality trends and related developments on the other.

We invite you to read these articles that published on October 25, 2017 in the International Journal of Communication.  Please Ctrl+Click on the article titles below for direct links to the papers of interest.

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Economic Inequalities and Mediated Communication―An Introduction
Paschal Preston, Dublin City University, Andrea Grisold, Vienna University of Economics and Business

How Come We Know? The Media Coverage of Economic Inequality
Andrea Grisold, Hendrik Theine, Vienna University of Economics and Business

The Mediation of Hope: Communication Technologies and Inequality in Perspective
Robin Mansell, London School of Economics

Citizen Detriment: Communications, Inequality and Social Order
Peter Golding, Northumbria University

Contrasting Conceptions, Discourses and Studies of Economic Inequalities
Paschal Preston, Dublin City University, Henry Silke, University of Limerick

Favoring the Elites: Think Tanks and Discourse Coalitions
Núria Almiron, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain 

Economic Inequality in German Quality Press: Framing Concerns About Inequality and Redistribution
Julian Bank, University of Duisburg-Essen

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Larry Gross
Editor                                                  

Arlene Luck
Managing Editor

Paschal Preston, Andrea Grisold
Guest Editors