Article Database

Developing Collaborations with Parents: Some Examples

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Change is Gonna Come: Transforming Literacy Education for African American Students

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#HashtagActivism: Networks of Race and Gender Justice

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How marginalized groups use Twitter to advance counter-narratives, preempt political spin, and build diverse networks of dissent.

The power of hashtag activism became clear in 2011, when #IranElection served as an organizing tool for Iranians protesting a disputed election and offered a global audience a front-row seat to a nascent revolution. Since then, activists have used a variety of hashtags, including #JusticeForTrayvon, #BlackLivesMatter, #YesAllWomen, and #MeToo to advocate, mobilize, and communicate. In this book, Sarah Jackson, Moya Bailey, and Brooke Foucault Welles explore how and why Twitter has become an important platform for historically disenfranchised populations, including Black Americans, women, and transgender people. They show how marginalized groups, long excluded from elite media spaces, have used Twitter hashtags to advance counternarratives, preempt political spin, and build diverse networks of dissent.

The authors describe how such hashtags as #MeToo, #SurvivorPrivilege, and #WhyIStayed have challenged the conventional understanding of gendered violence; examine the voices and narratives of Black feminism enabled by #FastTailedGirls, #YouOKSis, and #SayHerName; and explore the creation and use of #GirlsLikeUs, a network of transgender women. They investigate the digital signatures of the “new civil rights movement”—the online activism, storytelling, and strategy-building that set the stage for #BlackLivesMatter—and recount the spread of racial justice hashtags after the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and other high-profile incidents of killings by police. Finally, they consider hashtag created by allies, including #AllMenCan and #CrimingWhileWhite.

Visualizing Diversity: Data Deficiencies and Semiotic Strategies

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This chapter explores the complicated dynamics that are inherent to the practice of data visualization involving issues of race and identity. We focus on data from the US Census and the profound questions that are raised as visual forms purport to represent groups. After reviewing historical context and related limitations and controversies, we present a project that explores a novel approach to visualizing US immigration patterns, an approach that relies on visual metaphors and algorithmic construction of visualization patterns based on massive sampling of Census microdata. The chapter suggests that the use of innovative expressive techniques to convey insights through poetic, and thus less literal, and limiting, forms is a way of grappling with underlying deficiencies in administrative population data.

The Disavowal of Race in Communication Theory

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Here, we consider how graduate education in communication fares when it comes to engaging conceptual and theoretical legacies of racial apartheid and modern European and American imperialism. Treating syllabi as a discourse which powerfully represents the field to future scholars, and graduate classrooms as sites of power, we assess foundational theoretical pedagogy through an examination of syllabi from required doctoral seminars across sixteen highly ranked communication, media studies, and mass communication programs in the US. Finding an ongoing disavowal of critical theories of race and imperialism, but hopeful exceptions, we offer recommendations as part of ongoing projects to decolonize university curriculum.

Politicians, Social Media, and Digital Publics: Old Rights, New Terrain

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In this interdisciplinary roundtable discussion, five scholars interested in political communication work through the democratic dilemmas created when privately owned social media platforms are used as digital public squares by elected officials in the United States. This conversation unfolds in the context of ongoing legal cases that challenge politicians’ efforts to block select interlocutors and bar them from participation. We grapple with the tension between politicians’ use of social media to broadcast their own messages as a form of publicity with the desire by some members of the public that politicians be transparent online by allowing the electorate to question or even criticize them. Through this discussion, we weigh the importance of the right to criticize the government and its leaders alongside the realities of contentious content on social media platforms that are rife with abusive content, in a cultural context marked by social inequalities.

#GirlsLikeUs: Trans Advocacy and Community Building Online

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Race as a Social Construct: the Genetic Fallacy

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Maternal Perspectives: Qualitative Responses About Perceived Barriers to Care Among Children with Orofacial Clefts in North Carolina

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Objective: To examine maternal perceptions of barriers to care of children with orofacial clefts (OFC) in a population-based survey that solicited open-ended qualitative responses.

Design and setting: In 2006, a combination mail/phone survey was sent to all mothers of children with OFC. The questionnaire included 76 items. A final open-ended question was included for additional information about cleft-related care. The analysis included responses to the open-ended question and sociodemographic characteristics of the respondents. Qualitative responses were transcribed and entered into a qualitative software package for analysis, and common themes were elucidated.

Participants/patients: The North Carolina Birth Defects Monitoring Program was used to identify all resident infants born with OFC from 2001 to 2004. Of 478 eligible mothers, 52.9% (n = 248) responded to the survey, and 39.5% (n = 98) responded to the final open-ended question.

Main outcome measures: Percentage reporting problems accessing care, frequency of positive and negative comments, and indicators of financial, personal, and structural barriers to care.

Results: Of the 98 respondents, the majority (n = 95, 96.99%) were the biological mother. Almost 40% of mothers indicated that accessing primary craniofacial care was a problem. Of those citing perceived barriers to care, the major issues cited were financial, structural, and personal barriers.

Conclusions: Collaborative efforts between craniofacial centers and teams, health care systems, and birth defects registries are warranted to reduce perceived barriers to care among families of children with OFC. Further exploration of the themes and factors associated with barriers to care and services is needed.

Institutional Racism and Pregnancy Health: Using Home Mortgage Disclosure Act Data to Develop an Index for Mortgage Discrimination at the cCommunity Level

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Objectives: We used Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) data to demonstrate a method for constructing a residential redlining index to measure institutional racism at the community level. We examined the application of the index to understand the social context of health inequities by applying the residential redlining index among a cohort of pregnant women in Philadelphia.

Methods: We used HMDA data from 1999-2004 to create residential redlining indices for each census tract in Philadelphia County, Pennsylvania. We linked the redlining indices to data from a pregnancy cohort study and the 2000 Census. We spatially mapped the levels of redlining for each census tract for this pregnancy cohort and tested the association between residential redlining and other community-level measures of segregation and individual health.

Results: From 1999-2004, loan applicants in Philadelphia County, Pennsylvania, of black race/ethnicity were almost two times as likely to be denied a mortgage loan compared with applicants who were white (e.g., 1999 odds ratio [OR] = 2.00, 95% confidence interval [CI] 1.63, 2.28; and 2004 OR=2.26, 95% CI 1.98, 2.58). The majority (77.5%) of the pregnancy cohort resided in redlined neighborhoods, and there were significant differences in residence in redlined areas by race/ethnicity (p<0.001). Among the pregnancy cohort, redlining was associated with residential segregation as measured by the percentage of black population (r=0.155), dissimilarity (r=0.250), exposure (r=-0.115), and isolation (r=0.174) indices.

Conclusions: The evidence of institutional racism may contribute to our understanding of health disparities. Residential redlining and mortgage discrimination against communities may be a major factor influencing neighborhood structure, composition, development, and wealth attainment. This residential redlining index as a measure for institutional racism can be applied in health research to understand the unique social and neighborhood contexts that contribute to health inequities.