Singapore has long been known for combining economic development with strict limits on political opposition. But its 2011 parliamentary elections suggest that it is moving toward competitive authoritarianism.
Gendered barriers to womens advancement in STEM disciplines are subtle, often the result of gender practices, gender stereotypes, and gendered occupational cultures. Professional socialization into scientific cultures encourages and rewards gender practices that help to maintain gendered barriers. This article focuses more specifically on how individual women scientists gender practices poten…
This article explores an aspect of womens transnational labor migration that has been understudied in many labor-sending countries: how men experience shifts in the household labor division triggered by womens migration. In so doing, we shed light on the diverse ways notions of masculinity and gender identities are being reworked and renegotiated in the transnational family. Drawing on qualit…
This paper analyzes how military service can be a source of womens antiwar voices, using the Israeli case of Women Breaking the Silence (WBS). WBS is a collection of testimonies from Israeli women ex-soldiers who have served in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. The WBS testimonies change the nature of womens antiwar protest by offering a new, paradoxical source of symbolic legitimacy fo…
Research on gender inequality has posited the importance of gender discrimination for womens experiences at work. Previous studies have suggested that gender stereotyping and organizational factors may contribute to discrimination. Yet it is not well understood how these elements connect to foster gender discrimination in everyday workplaces. This work contributes to our understanding of these…
Feminist news researchers have long argued that in the macho culture of most newsrooms, journalists daily decisions about what is newsworthy remain firmly based on masculine news values. As such, issues and topics traditionally seen to be particularly relevant to women tend to be pushed to the margins of the news where the implicit assumption is that they are less important than those which in…
Scholarship examining media coverage of social problems largely examines coverage of contentious issues. In this study, I contribute to our understanding of journalist practices by examining coverage of an issue over which there is a US consensus: female genital cutting (FGC). With an analysis of newspaper coverage supplemented by interviews and primary documents, I find that, in contrast to ex…
Although the 2003 Iraq invasion was not wholly framed as a humanitarian intervention, the rhetoric of bringing liberation, democratization and human rights to the Iraqi people was widely advanced by the coalition and supporters as a legitimating reason for war. This article assesses the role played by press photography in legitimizing or challenging this crucial framing during the invasion ac…
Online delivery of content has changed media advertising markets, undermining the business model which has underpinned provision of public media. Three business models have sustained mass media: direct payment for content, payment for advertising and state subsidy, and the author argues, contrary to others claims, that advertising finance has made possible production and provision of high-qu…
While the dimensions of what it means to witness are interrogated within recent scholarship on media witnessing, what it means to bear witness is rarely explained. Bearing witness conceptually organizes what journalism does, and names a subject position for audiences other than voyeurism, but what it means requires clarification. I detail the plasticity of bearing witness within the disco…
The article focuses on a frequently used but under-researched protest medium through which transnational movement networks express their collective demands what are termed here global group petitions (GGPs), and activists themselves call sign-on statements or joint statements. GGPs are online petitions typically framed as global and linking sometimes hundreds of advocacy groups behind…
Peace journalism has been developing as a field since the 1970s. However, confusion remains about its central theoretical problematics, its core methodologies and its political project. In this article, we aim to contribute to the development of peace journalism in two ways. Theoretically, we develop peace journalism theory to support analyses of cold conflicts by incorporating insights drawn…
Although entertaining media content is considered to be highly influential on values and norms shared by the recipients, little is known about the orientation and self-perceptions of entertainment media workers conveying these values and norms. This article offers an overview of existing research on TV entertainment workers and concludes that the common stereotype of a primarily commercial orie…
Decades of research on media coverage of the campaigns of women running for high public office have identified several patterns of gendered reporting that supposedly have discouraged citizens from voting for women candidates, discouraged them from contributing to womens campaigns and dissuaded women from entering politics. This study examines the ways in which each of the patterns was evident …
War discourse is typically characterized by a confluence of nationalist and sexist discourses, and tends to reduce the multiple identities and affiliations of human beings to a black-and-white contrast of us and them. Yet, as argued in this article, we should be wary of over-emphasizing the homogeneity and monovocality of war discourse. While the onset of conflict certainly narrows the rang…
The expansion of reality programming across televisions changing landscape has been the result of industrial strategies that seek out specific types of real people in order to cast them on particular types of shows. In the US, this practice has resulted in the reconfiguration of ordinary people into durable forms of talent. This paper adopts a generational model in order to contextualize the e…
Gender anchors cultural negotiations over what media franchising is and how its serial production practices and narratives are valued. Cultural tensions between the economic viability and cultural legitimacy of seriality are both smoothed and exacerbated by the gendered discourses of media franchising. These discursive interventions are evidenced through examination of popular and trade talk ab…
This article explores the concept of sonic memory via the investigation of popular music that constitutes a radio playlist. Our case study focuses on the songs aired on Israels Memorial Day for the Holocaust and the Heroism during the states first decade of local-commercial radio broadcasting (19932002). The critical analysis sought to understand what makes certain songs so identifiable with…
This article argues that humour can provide researchers with a unique access point into the professional cultures of media producers. By reconsidering an earlier case study, and reviewing relevant literature, it illustrates how humour can fulfil several functions in media production. Importantly, humour is a central means of performing the emotional labour that increasingly precarious media w…