The African American Language word “woke,” which means being awake to social injustices, is an important part of the discourse surrounding the evolving Movement for Black Lives. While the concept has a long history in the Black freedom struggle, its recent uses have been politicized and at times polarized. Between 2015 and 2020, a “woke” vocabulary emerged in lifestyle magazines that typically avoid politically charged topics and discourses. Informed by Raymond Williams’s keywords on culture and society, my analysis reveals that a “woke culture” evolves from a corpus defined by “a shared body of words and meanings.” Stuart Hall’s encoding/decoding model and critical discourse analysis illustrate how the publishers, editors, and writers of three magazines invoke the concept of “woke” in a commodified cultural product.
Existing global public relations (PR) scholarship categorizes PR practice responses to globalization as either global, local, or glocal, but whether these categories capture the complexity and fluidity of practice in globalizing countries with distinct political and economic environments from Western contexts remains underexamined. Our research provides a comprehensive understanding of PR practice in Vietnam’s business sector by integrating three interconnected dimensions: how practitioners conceptualize and operationalize PR, how environmental factors (infrastructure, culture, and media environment) shape practice, and the current state of PR professionalism and education. From a critical realism perspective, we conducted in-depth interviews with 20 experienced Vietnamese PR professionals and analyzed data through two coding cycles and categorical themeing. Findings demonstrate that Vietnamese PR practice does not fit into global, local, or glocal categories as mutually exclusive; rather, practitioners navigate among these approaches depending on contextual factors such as organizational type, industry sector, corporate culture, and personal ethics, potentially producing hybrid practices. The single-party political system facilitates government relations, creating a landscape in which practitioners strategically leverage state partnerships to enhance organizational effectiveness. Ongoing ethical challenges related to media opacity persist, yet professionals are adapting to digitalization, balancing legacy media relations with emerging media strategies in a complex media environment. However, Vietnamese PR lacks formal associations, standardized education, and ethical codes, hindering the industry’s development. Based on these findings, we propose an integrative framework that synthesizes the three dimensions to offer a lens applicable to other emerging, postcolonial, or transitional economies.
For our field to respond to identity-related violence and discrimination, we need resources for research, teaching, and activism that are not just intellectually robust but also normatively empathetic. To that end, I’m hoping that colleagues in our field and others will engage in metatheoretical work that helps synthesize the best of the human rights and identity traditions. These traditions are complementary. Both seek to alleviate human suffering and build inclusive and just societies. Each has different emphases that compensate for the other’s potential inadequacies. While a human rights approach grounds struggles for social change in universal, humanistic principles, identity studies tend to privilege the particular perspectives and experiences of groups that suffer exclusion and oppression. - This is the Accepted Manuscript version of: George, C. (2026). My Outlook Is Bisexual: Why the Identity Turn Needs a Human Rights Course Correction. Journalism & Communication Monographs, 28(1), 50-56. https://doi.org/10.1177/15226379251409625
By juxtaposing social responsibility theory with the theory of corporate responsibility to race, this study examines how newspapers combined text and visuals to address the issue of race in the first quarter of the 21st century. Fifteen race reporting projects have been produced since 2015, with most initiated after the death of George Floyd. Our textual and visual analysis shows how education-related reporting projects, apologies for past wrongdoings, and racial reconciliation stories can spotlight racial issues. When analyzing these 15 race reporting projects and 745 photographs, both social responsibility theory and corporate responsibility to race theory help explain the strategies that newspapers use to discuss race in the 21st century.
This article is a commentary on a monograph about media entrepreneurs in Yemen. The article argues that the circumstances of media entrepreneurs in war, disasters and conflict requires new conceptual frameworks. This means moving beyond theoretical approaches developed in the context of Western liberal democracies - encompassing ideas including precarity, scale shifting and resiliance. The article suggests that the structural conditions of media entrepeneurs in war zones requires an understanding of vulnerability. This concept captures not only the likelihood of harm but also the structural conditions that produce it. It shifts the focus from individual resilience to the systems that fail to protect, and sometimes actively endanger, those on the frontlines of information work. And it highlights the fact that vulnerability is not just an unfortunate state but a socially produced condition.
This monograph investigates factors associated with sustaining independent media entrepreneurs and subsequently, entrepreneurial media around the globe in contexts of precarity, such as areas with conflicts, disasters or humanitarian crises. Specifically, this study examines political, economic and societal precarity conditions that independent media entrepreneurs navigate and not only survive but show signs of resilience and growth in, as they continue to inform their communities of important issues. More importantly, their own and their media organizations’ survival contributes to the existence of pluralistic media in a country dominated by a largely biased and politically influenced information ecosystem. Through studying the precarious context in Yemen, this research explores the strategies that entrepreneurs employ to survive in precarious conditions, factors that help develop media entrepreneurial resilience, and the non-material and material growth experienced as a result of exposure to trauma and traumatic conditions on a daily basis.
