International Journal of Communication Publishes a Special Section on Health Communication for Displaced Populations

What does it mean to communicate care across borders, barriers, and bureaucracies? And how might health communication rise to meet the needs of those who are so often left at its margin?

Guest-edited by Stefanie Z. Demetriades, Nathan Walter, and Ayse D. Lokmanoglu, this Special Section on Health Communication for Displaced Populations brings together 10 original articles that examine how communication shapes health experiences in contexts marked by mobility, precarity, and adaptation.

Spanning rhetorical, ethnographic, interpretive, and quantitative approaches, the Special Section traces the institutional, familial, and political dynamics that make communication both a potential bridge and a recurring barrier. The authors explore a wide range of issues: from digital inequality in refugee humanitarian organizations to the challenges of telehealth acceptance; from intergenerational health talk in immigrant families to the communicative tensions faced by asylum medicine practitioners. Others highlight how structural inequities around food security, health literacy, and cultural competence are experienced and resisted through communicative means.

At a time of growing global displacement and widening health disparities, these contributions call for a conscious orientation of the field away from viewing displacement as an exception and toward recognizing it as a central lens for understanding health communication’s obligations to equity and justice. Rather than treat communication as a downstream intervention, this collection positions it as a foundational element of health itself.

We invite you to read these articles that published in the International Journal of Communication on July 1, 2025. Please log into ijoc.org to read the papers of interest. We look forward to your feedback!

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Health Communication for Displaced Populations—Introduction
Stefanie Z. Demetriades, Ayse Lokmanoglu, Nathan Walter

Narratives of Dispossession: Reading Antecedents of Public Health Rhetoric in Reconstruction
Bailey Flynn

Living Through Food Rations: A Culture-Centered Study With Rohingya Refugees
Md Mahbubur Rahman, Mohan J. Dutta, Phoebe Elers

The Limits of Language: New Directions for Measurement of the Buffering Effects of Social Support on Acculturative Stress
Chris L. Robbins, Danielle Hagood

Physician Advocacy in a “Culture of Disbelief”: A Critical-Interpretive Study of Asylum Medicine
Smita Misra-Latty

Cultural Competence in U.S. Health Care: Voices of the Arab Community
Kayan Khraisheh

Communicatively Constructing Health and Healing: Cultural and Behavioral Determinants of Prostate Cancer Screening Among Ghanaian Men in the United States
Kate Nimako, Amy E. Chadwick

Knowledge, Attitude, and Behavior About COVID-19: The Roles of Health Literacy and English Proficiency Among Korean Immigrants in the United States
Seulgi Park, Rukhsana Ahmed

Exploring Relationships Between Family Communication Patterns and Willingness to Communicate About Health Topics Among Vietnamese Americans
Angie Vo, Grace Ellen Brannon

Digital Inequality and Resilience in Humanitarian Refugee Organizations
Minkyung Kim, Marya L. Doerfel

Using a Modified Technology Acceptance Model and Communication Inequality Theory to Evaluate Telehealth Acceptance Among Resettled Refugees
Lindsey Disney, Rukhsana Ahmed, Yohan Moon

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Silvio Waisbord, Editor 
Kady Bell-Garcia, Managing Editor
Chi Zhang, Managing Editor, Special Sections
Andrew Taylor, Webmaster 
Stefanie Z. Demetriades, Nathan Walter, Ayse Lokmanoglu, Guest Editors

Please note that according to the latest Google Scholar statistics, IJoC ranks 7th 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 True Costs of Misinformation

Guest-edited by Jonathan Corpus Ong and Joan Donovan, this Special Section on True Costs of Misinformation engages the following key questions: Who pays for the harms and damage brought by misinformation? What are the financial, social, and human costs to society? Whose definitions and measures of digital harms matter when coordinating a global response? Crucially, what is the future of disinformation studies? What concepts and debates should disinformation scholars continue to engage with, and what methodologies and advocacy strategies need to be discarded?

This Special Section gathers articles written by senior and junior scholars who attended an international and interdisciplinary workshop of the same name in March 2022. Most of these papers were written during a more hopeful and less risky “peak moment” for tech accountability and tech justice advocacy especially in the United States. These papers collectively offer powerful critiques to the foundational frameworks and methodologies in disinformation studies and the tech-first, top-down, and U.S.-centric interventions industry.

In this first paper, Alice Marwick and Katherine Furl offer extremism and radicalization researchers a framework to study “redpilling” as a process as they advocate for long-term, values-based interventions. In the second paper, Amogh Dhar Sharma presents a model of deep ethnographic investigation that move beyond examining disinformation as content to explore how politicians in India misuse state resources and funnel “black money” to reward media manipulators who help them stay in power. Three papers deal with the important yet overlooked issue of audience reception of misinformation and conspiracy theories-across diverse contexts of the Asian diaspora in the United Sates (Rachel Kuo, Madhavi Reddi, and Lan Li), audiences in Kenya and Senegal (Dani Madrid Morales, Melissa Tully, Kevin C. Mudavadi, Frankline Matanji, and Layire Diop), and political fans in the Philippines (Nicole Curato and Sofia Tomacruz). Finally, Samantha Bradshaw, Gabrielle Lim, and Monzima Haque critique the global diffusion of anti-fake news legislation in a global context and how a more inclusive and context-aware approach is less vulnerable to authoritarian capture than the mainstream securitization frame.

With their critical, contextual, and community-driven approaches mindful of global differences and inequalities, these papers prompt powerful reflection on what the field in its peak moment got right–and also what it got wrong in both its research and activist methodologies.

We invite you to read these articles that published in the International Journal of Communication on June 10, 2025. Please log into ijoc.org to read the papers of interest. We look forward to your feedback!

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The True Costs of Misinformation—Introduction
Jonathan Corpus Ong, Joan Donovan

Mountains of Evidence: Processual “Redpilling” as a Socio-Technical Effect of Disinformation
Alice E. Marwick, Katherine Furl

Political Finance and Patronage Behind Disinformation: Evidence From India’s Election Campaigns
Amogh Dhar Sharma

Transnational Information Networks: Methods for Cross-Diasporic Research
Rachel Kuo, Madhavi Reddi, Lan Li

Exploring Audience Agency in Countering Misinformation
Dani Madrid-Morales, Melissa Tully, Kevin C. Mudavadi, Frankline Matanji, Layire Diop

How Conspiracy Theories Harm Deliberative Democracy
Nicole Curato, Sofia Tomacruz

The Global Spread of Misinformation Laws
Samantha Bradshaw, Gabrielle Lim, Monzima Haque

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Silvio Waisbord, Editor 
Kady Bell-Garcia, Managing Editor
Chi Zhang, Managing Editor, Special Sections
Andrew Taylor, Webmaster 
Jonathan Corpus Ong, Joan Donovan, Guest Editors

Please note that according to the latest Google Scholar statistics, IJoC ranks 7th 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 Unpacking Property: Media, Ownership, and Power in Transformation

How does who owns the media shape what we see, read, and believe?

Property is a cornerstone of modern capitalist societies, shaping the distribution of wealth, power, and access. Yet, in media and communication studies, it has long been overlooked as a subject in its own right. This Special Section on Unpacking Property: Media, Ownership, and Power in Transformation, guest edited by Sebastian Sevignani and Hendrik Theine, sets out to change that.

The Special Section explores how property in the media intersects with today’s social and economic shifts. It delves into transformations in media ownership, the implications for public interest, and how narratives around property and wealth are constructed and legitimized. Key topics include media concentration, feminist political economy, and the expanding dominance of global tech giants in the media landscape.

Through these lenses, the contributions offer fresh perspectives on pressing questions: How does media ownership shape journalistic content? What happens when Big Tech extends its grip to the media, influencing everything from the value chain to the working conditions of journalists? How do surveillance capitalists justify large-scale data dispossession? And can philanthropy-funded journalism provide a viable alternative to commercial media?

This Special Section broadens the scope of property research within communication studies, showing why it’s an essential lens for understanding media’s role in a rapidly changing world. The articles in this special section address crucial intersections—examining how gendered ownership structures link to authoritarian-populist politics and uncovering how the rich use media to construct and legitimize their wealth and property.

Contributors include: Sebastian Sevignani (Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Germany), Hendrik Theine (Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria; University of Pennsylvania, USA), Mandy Tröger and Nils S. Borchers (University of Tübingen, Germany), Julia Bartsch (University of Leipzig, Germany), Marlene Radl and Birgit Sauer (University of Vienna, Austria), Burçe Çelik (Loughborough University London, UK), Mojca Pajnik (University of Ljubljana, Slovenia), Louisa Lincoln (University of Pennsylvania, USA), Stefan Wallaschek (Europa University Flensburg, Germany), and Nora Waitkus (London School of Economics, UK).

We invite you to read these articles that published in the International Journal of Communication on January 27, 2025. Please log into ijoc.org to read the papers of interest. We look forward to your feedback!  

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Media Property: New Explorations in Media and Communication Studies—Introduction
Sebastian Sevignani, Hendrik Theine

Toward Media Environment Capture: A Theoretical Contribution on the Influence of Big Tech on News Media
Sebastian Sevignani, Hendrik Theine, Mandy Tröger

The Internet of Things Presents: A Case Study on Ensuring Legitimacy for Building Data Supply Routes in Surveillance Capitalism
Nils S. Borchers

Structural Masculinism and Women’s Media Ownership in the Context of Authoritarian Populism: A Feminist Political Economy of Communication Perspective
Marlene Radl, Burçe Çelik, Mojca Pajnik, Birgit Sauer 

Does Media Ownership Matter for Journalistic Content? A Systematic Scoping Review of Empirical Studies
Hendrik Theine, Julia Bartsch, Mandy Tröger

Examining the Journalism Philanthropy Model: A Literature Review
Louisa Lincoln

The Past, the Present, the Future: Self-Portrayals of Wealthy Business Owners in the Media
Stefan Wallaschek, Nora Waitkus 

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Silvio Waisbord, Editor 
Kady Bell-Garcia, Managing Editor
Chi Zhang, Managing Editor, Special Sections
Sebastian Sevignani, Hendrik Theine, Guest Editors

Please note that according to the latest Google Scholar statistics, IJoC ranks 7th 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.