Abstract This article examines the discourse of imperialist aggression against the Global South state as an instantiation of the topos of “state as style,” defined as the reduction of the state to a rhetorical form that is distinct, and thereby detachable, from its true content, namely the oppressed people. This topos, I argue, articulates media, military, economic, and academic discourses, resulting in a discursive alliance that uncouples people from the state institutions and infrastructures that sustain them. Once the dis/articulation is achieved, wars may be waged on forms rather than peoples. Exploring the implications of this topos for critical scholarship, I argue that our valorization of the category of the oppressed at the expense of state theory is implicated in this ideological war machine.
Abstract While not the majority, polls and demonstrations indicate that a notable portion of Iranians supported the 2026 war on Iran. Strikingly, support for a war of “liberation” was echoed even within Iran. How can we make sense of this? The Islamic Republic’s decades of repression explain the desire for change, but not the belief that liberation could come through war. This belief is especially notable given the recent histories of neighboring states promised similar outcomes. This article looks at the information environment that allowed for and sustained a myth of liberation through bombs—an environment shaped by dark money, digital campaigns, and diaspora media that flourished due to Iranian state’s tight control over domestic broadcasting.
Abstract This article frames the forum as an urgent reflection on the present conjuncture, marked by the U.S.–Israeli war on Iran, the expansion of the conflict in the region, and the collapse of the international rules-based order. It briefly sketches the political economy of the Persian Gulf and America’s “energy security” logic, which explains the conditions of permanent instability in the region. After offering a brief history of how media have portrayed Iran, this article argues that media, communication technologies, information, and narratives must be understood as integral components of the infrastructure of empire, situating this claim within a historical and geopolitical framework informed by media representations of Iran. This framework provides a space in which the circulation of transnational media myth that foreign military intervention can liberate Iranians without harming civilians, as well as the problematic separation of the people from the state infrastructures that sustain them, can be interrogated.
Abandoned accounts are becoming increasingly common within the world of corporate social media platforms, yet their afterlives pose a range of challenges for sociotechnical researchers. This article proposes a method for studying the aftermath of institutional disconnection that I call the "governance probe," which in this instance, involves taking control of an abandoned handle and waiting to see how institutions respond. This technique makes visible the power struggles that unfold between platform firms, state actors, and others across time. In this case, I took hold of @JTFGTMO, the Twitter account previously managed by the U.S. Joint Task Force at Guant & aacute;namo Bay, the governing body of the U.S. detention facilities created in the aftermath of September 11, 2001. When the U.S. military attempted to reclaim the handle, I show that Twitter left the handle in the hands of an academic researcher (me). While Twitter reinstated Donald Trump's account, the probe makes visible how platform power is selectively exercised; some accounts are restored, whileothers are simply abandoned altogether. The method involves three stages: (1) conducting an archival analysis of the account's institutional history, (2) claiming the handle, and (3) examining whether and how non-use elicits institutional response. As governments migrate between platforms, experimenting with the promise and perils of different corporate infrastructures, governance probing offers evidence of the contestation and uncertainties that institutional disconnection produces.
In moments of democratic backsliding, the need to build and maintain trust with private contractors and career civil servants, who seek to safeguard democratic institutions and the rule of law, becomes even more methodologically urgent, but the roadmap forward is fraught with risk for both researchers and participants. This article reconfigures the potential of transparency regimes, such as the U.S. Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Challenging linear and extractive accounts of disclosure and denial, I argue that the FOIA instead constitutes an ongoing communicative encounter, undergirded by hidden labor and power struggles within the U.S. administrative state. The encounter does not always conclude with the release or refusal of documents and data, but adopting a longitudinal praxis of care may allow for a more fulsome understanding of the state and the people working on its behalf.
Gun violence in the US is an endemic condition that structures everyday life, makes loss ordinary, and exposes the insufficiency of existing systems of care. Dominant media representations often detach firearm injury from these structural conditions. This article analyzes recent documentary projects on the afterlives of gun violence. Through critical discourse analysis, I show how documentary can function as slow care infrastructure. I identify four dimensions of this work: critical seeing and listening, trauma-informed protocols, institutional uptake of testimony, and temporal endurance with material effects. Across schools, hospitals, universities, and community organizations, they protect participants, circulate survivor knowledge, support clinical and educational practice, and help build spaces, tools, and relationships for care. Documentary's value lies in how it reorganizes grief, survival, and accountability across institutions and over time.
This article examines the feminist escraches of Somos 2074 y Muchas M & aacute;s, a Peruvian collective that mobilizes public shaming to demand justice for the forced sterilizations of marginalized women during Alberto Fujimori's regime. Focusing on two interventions (Empolleradas and the dead speaking back) the article situates these performances within Latin American traditions of feminist protest and human rights activism. I argue that embodied performance, as it is documented and re-encountered over time, sustains collective memory and ethical implication in the absence of institutional recognition. Rather than producing linear political effects, these actions generate uneven encounters shaped by bodily exposure, performance duration, and mediated return. Drawing on the concept of zones of intermediacy, the article shows how past violence is reactivated in the present and oriented toward unresolved demands for justice, redirecting shame from racialized women's bodies toward state institutions and collective complicity, while vulnerability becomes a condition of political appearance.
This article argues that the field of communication studies needs to understand how race functions as a discourse of power in order to more thoroughly reckon with the ways that race shapes key concepts in our field. This article aims to clearly lay out for communication scholars who don't "do race" how race has shaped European liberal modernity's logics, ways of knowing, institutions, and practices. I do so by building a framework from decades of critical race scholarship to help us see why understanding race beyond identity and representation is especially important in times when liberal humanism is in peril. I demonstrate what changing our collective understanding of race changes in how we theorize, research, and teach canonic topics in communication, such as advertising, citizenship, rights, and journalism.
South by Southwest (SXSW) is an annual tech, media, and music megaevent in Austin, Texas, that curates a future-focused program around themes of convergence, innovation, inspiration, and impact. This article examines how such media industry events catalyze resistant and reparative communicative practices when social justice movements gain traction in popular discourse at critical junctures like the one that followed the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing on three years of ethnography and 17 interviews, I analyze how SXSW participants navigate "conditional solidarity"-a pervasive norm where justice commitments under progressive neoliberalism remain contingent on elite values and interests while co-opting movement symbols to maintain relations of power. At events like SXSW, marginalized communities tactically "sneak in" resistant discourses and "carve out" alternative spaces for worldmaking. Ultimately, this study proposes a framework for reparative praxis that leverages discursive openings and opportunities for participation within dominant industry spaces when they arise.
This study revisits Gayatri Spivak's question-Can the subaltern speak?-through digital media, focusing on how Syrian refugees in T & uuml;rkiye negotiate visibility, belonging, and exclusion online. Drawing on 37 semi-structured interviews and proxy reporting, the research explores how refugees tactically negotiate their ability to speak online. Findings show that refugees employ digital tactics such as performative citizenship, mimicry-adopting temporary identities as Turks, Palestinians-to gain social acceptance. These practices point to a strong continuity between contemporary digital tactics and the region's historical memory, as refugees draw on ancestral migration routes and the historical permeability of borders to construct hybrid identities that are "both from here and from there." By contrast, women and participants with limited Turkish proficiency often resort to tactical invisibility, withdrawing into digital ghettos as safer spaces. Rather than digital emancipation, the findings point to the emergence of a regime of conditional audibility.
This study examines how major British news organizations frame the Gaza war through YouTube video journalism, focusing on linguistic and paratextual elements that structure audience interpretation in platform-based news. Using a qualitative comparative design, it analyzes coverage by the BBC, The Telegraph, and Daily Mail World, examining video titles, on-screen captions, and spoken narration. The findings reveal a clear convergence across outlets that are conventionally understood to differ in editorial orientation. Across all three organizations, coverage is structured by security-centered framing, unequal representation that dehumanizes Palestinian lives, and genocide-blindness, defined as the systematic absence of legal, moral, and human frameworks necessary to recognize large-scale civilian destruction as genocide. Large-scale destruction of Palestinian civilian life is depoliticized and detached from responsibility, while Israeli military action is framed as intentional and legitimate, normalizing genocide as a justified outcome of war.
Communication studies ignore colonial policing in racial capitalism. The oversight continues seven years after #CommunicationSoWhite studies called for needed inquiry into colonization and racialization, five years after the January 6, 2021 coup attempt by MAGA militia and mobs, and as federal police build new historic infrastructures of racial subordination. I address these gaps and communication studies' marginalization of W. E. B. Du Bois's Black Reconstruction, which inspires a methodological sensibility illuminating policing as a discursive and material force necessary to create racial capitalism. However, the central contributions of the article are case studies of settler colonial revolt, the Baconites and the Black Boys, which offer a framework for understanding the development of racial capitalism through police practice. Settler-policing, I find, was a form of work and performance that divided White settlerness from Indigeneity and Blackness as it produced racialized systems of land control, economy, and the state.
A main feature of the Israeli genocide in Gaza has been the systematic destruction of the healthcare system. The Israeli military has methodically generated conditions that drive disease, disability, and death, while simultaneously dismantling the capability of the health system to respond. Despite a purported emphasis on issues such as health equity and social determinants of health, many influential medical bodies across the world have failed to condemn these attacks on healthcare, let alone take meaningful steps for advocacy and accountability. To interrogate this state of affairs, we undertook a descriptive analysis of selected academic articles in medical journals. We explore how anti-Palestinian racism operates to dehumanize Palestinian healthcare workers and Palestinians generally, hindering meaningful institutional solidarity. We find that, through various tropes, violence against Palestinians is widely obscured, overlooked, or even justified. We argue that the framing and curation from health journals contributes to the Israeli military's ability to continue the targeting of healthcare infrastructure without consequence, in essence manifesting a permission structure for mass atrocities.
Since the start of the ongoing war in Gaza, debates have intensified about social media platforms' bias in moderating content related to Palestinians. These debates draw attention to platforms' political role in shaping content visibility and reach and highlight algorithmic power imbalances. Pro-Palestinian activists and ordinary users have formulated algorithmic imaginaries and folk theories about how moderation works, and they have developed a repertoire of resistance aimed at achieving visibility despite perceived bias. Through digital ethnography and expert interviews, we investigate the moderation of Arabic-language pro-Palestinian content on Meta's Facebook. By connecting users' imaginaries and practices of resistance to expert knowledge, we develop a typology of algorithmic and non-algorithmic resistance that extends the Palestinian context in the era of platform power. The article contributes to the literature on human interaction with social media algorithms in the Arab context within asymmetric frameworks, moving beyond a narrow linguistic focus.
From its outset, the Israeli war on Gaza was understood by many Israeli Jews as a battle over image evidence that they risked losing-in large measure, they believed, due to the threat of the Palestinian media ecosystem, streaming genocide to global publics in real time. Drawing on a set of diverse case studies, this article examines the myriad ways that Israeli state and mainstream media institutions, influencers and ordinary citizens, endeavored to manage, control and supplant the perceived threat of the Palestinian viral image of Israeli state violence. All engaged in a range of visual tactics and pedagogical strategies to change the international view of Gaza and to keep Palestinian victims out of the Israeli frame: all were efforts to unsee Gaza and, in the process, an attempt to persuade global audiences to unsee a genocide. This article foregrounds the ways that Israeli visual practices-which tethered the images and visual literacies of the AI age to longstanding colonial ideologies of denial-have played a key role in supporting and sustaining the genocide.
This article examines the converging roles of legacy news media and official political speech in enabling genocide to take place in Gaza. Drawing on BBC coverage as an example, I explain how dominant Western media relied on a cacophony of silence and noise to amplify state narratives. This repertoire is characterized by selective omission of context from coverage, the policing of words, mainly the word genocide, and the inflation of a "war on terror" narrative and its merger with colonial language about the savage enemy. The effects of this strategic politics of silence and noise are in enabling impunity in committing war crimes, undoing of witnessing as a 20th-century framework with its rhetorical claims towards a universal "never again" modality, and taking a sharper authoritarian turn in Western media's reporting conventions.
This article explores how digital blackface functions as a contemporary form of gendered and racialized appropriation, targeting Black femme affect and expression as cultural and emotional resources within platform economies. Using two case studies-the Twitter counter-campaign #YourSlipIsShowing (2014) and the Black TikTok Strike (2021)-I examine how Black femmes respond not only through critique but also through practices of strategic withdrawal, misdirection, and play. Using Black feminist theory, affect theory, and critical technocultural discourse analysis (CTDA), I theorize "affective refusal" and "strategic misrecognition" as tactics through which Black femmes undermine the surveillant and extractive logics of digital platforms. These performances do not always take the form of visible protest; rather, they move through silence, satire, and deliberate misdirection. Situating digital blackface within the afterlives of slavery and the erotic life of racism, this article contributes to critical debates in Communication Studies on race, gender, affect, and the politics of digital labor.
