1st Edition
Race and Ethnicity as Foundational Forces in Political Communication
Race and ethnicity are increasingly central to our lived experiences of politics, yet they are often absent from studies of urgent questions in contemporary political communication. This volume responds to this crucial issue in the field, illuminating a multitude of ways that identity and power shape the interpersonal, mediated, and technological dimensions of politics. The book empirically illustrates the lack of race-focused scholarship in this area, while demonstrating how studying race/ethnicity as endogenous to politics sheds new light on the “big questions” facing multiracial, multiethnic societies.
Contributions address both heavily studied topics (e.g., misinformation, political trust) as well as topics that emerge through a centering of race/ethnicity (e.g., Hispandering, politically relevant entertainment media). They do so through diverse methodologies (e.g., ethnography, computational text analysis) and communities (e.g., Black & Hispanic Americans, the Vietnamese diaspora). Collectively, this scholarship aims to catalyze challenging conversations about how race and ethnicity can and should be integrated into the core of global political communication scholarship.
A groundbreaking contribution to the field of political communication, Race and Ethnicity as Foundational Forces in Political Communication will be a key resource academics, researchers and advanced students of communication studies, politics, media studies and sociology. This book was originally published as a special issue of Political Communication.
Introduction: Race and Ethnicity as Foundational Forces in Political Communication
Stewart M. Coles and Daniel S. Lane
1. #politicalcommunicationsowhite: Race and Politics in Nine Communication Journals, 1991-2021
Deen Freelon, Meredith L. Pruden, and Daniel Malmer
2. Differential Racism in the News: Using Semi-Supervised Machine Learning to Distinguish Explicit and Implicit Stigmatization of Ethnic and Religious Groups in Journalistic Discourse
Philipp Müller, Chung-Hong Chan, Katharina Ludwig, Rainer Freudenthaler, and Hartmut Wessler
3. “We Never Really Talked About politics”: Race and Ethnicity as Foundational Forces Structuring Information Disorder Within the Vietnamese Diaspora
Sarah Nguyễn, Rachel E. Moran, Trung-Anh Nguyen, and Linh Bui
4. Dimensions of Pandering Perceptions Among Hispanic Americans and Their Effect on Political Trust
Marques G. Zárate
5. Don’t Make My Entertainment Political! Social Media Responses to Narratives of Racial Duty on Competitive Reality Television Series
M. Brielle Harbin
6. Destabilizing Race in Political Communication: Social Movements as Sites of Political Imagination
Rohan Grover and Rachel Kuo
Biography
Stewart M. Coles (Ph.D., University of Michigan) is Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Drawing from political communication, media psychology, and social psychology, he examines how individuals’ identities and media use, and the identities of mediated subjects, influence people’s political attitudes and behaviors, particularly in social media and political entertainment contexts. He has published in journals such as Communication Theory, New Media & Society, and Human Communication Research, and he and his work have been featured in popular press outlets such as the New York Times, CNN, and the BBC.
Daniel S. Lane (Ph.D., University of Michigan) is Assistant Professor in the UC Santa Barbara Department of Communication. Working at the intersection of political communication, intergroup communication, and communication technology, his interconnected lines of research examine how digital media shape political engagement, intergroup relations, and political inequality. His research has appeared in outlets such as the Journal of Communication, Communication Research, Information, Communication & Society, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, Human Communication Research, and Social Media + Society.
“This collection makes a compelling case for the centrality of questions of race and ethnicity, and dynamics of racialization and racial power, as central to the future of political communication. Its contributors draw from an impressive range of epistemologies, methodologies, and contexts.”
- Sarah J. Jackson, Presidential Associate Professor, Annenberg School of Communication, University of Pennsylvania, USA
“This groundbreaking volume makes the definitive case for the necessity and urgency of placing race and ethnicity at the center of the field of political communication. The chapters clearly demonstrate that we simply cannot answer the big questions of our time without accounting for the role of race and ethnicity in everything from human psychology to the workings of powerful political institutions.”
- Daniel Kreiss, Edgar Thomas Cato Distinguished Professor, Hussman School of Journalism and Media, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
“Race and Ethnicity as Foundational Forces in Political Communication calls for communication scholars and, consequently, the public to think more critically about the absence of discourse about race in research on political communication. Spanning approaches from big data analyses to case studies, the editors and authors signal that this work is ripe for a new look among scholars across the discipline.”
- Catherine Knight Steele, Associate Professor, Department of Communication, University of Maryland, College Park
