We argue that corporate mission statements, as dual-purpose documents that externally communicate an organization's values and goals to the public while internally communicating the organization's identity to its workers, are a useful window into the inner workings of the games industry. To demonstrate this utility, we examine statements posted to the Riot Games website: The Riot Manifesto (2014-2018) and the Our Values statement that replaced it in 2019. We approach our analysis as a close reading grounded in feminist media studies, linking the underlying messages embedded in Riot's statements to broader issues in gaming cultures. We focus our case study to statements made before and after the publication of Cecelia D'Anastasio's (2018) investigative article for Kotaku, "Inside the Culture of Sexism at Riot Games," where current and former employees described Riot's workplace as a "bro-culture." Our goal is to demonstrate that mission statements warrant serious consideration as ideological documents that play a role in shaping workplace cultures and influencing who is (or is not) seen as "belonging" in the game industry.
Scholarship in African communication and media studies increasingly focuses on how Africans use mediated communication to enact epistemic freedom in environmental contexts. Contributing to this line of inquiry, this article analyzes how Zimbabwean civil society organizations challenge state and corporate narratives that cast mineral extractivism as essential to national development. We examine the Centre for Natural Resource Governance, a civil society organization that produces anti-extractivist documentaries on the negative consequences of mineral extraction for rural and Indigenous communities. Advancing the concept of "concessionary storytelling," we argue that these documentaries enact epistemic freedom by rendering mineral concessions-government contracts granting corporate access to land, labor, and resources-intelligible through community-grounded knowledge of their promises and pitfalls. We develop this argument through an analysis of three documentaries addressing platinum, diamond, and lithium concessions. Our analysis shows how community testimony and audiovisual evidence are organized through recurring dialectics of order and rupture, resettlement and displacement, and sustainability and degradation. Ultimately, this article opens new avenues for analyzing the role of mediated communication in concessionary politics across the Global South.
In this essay, we build upon theories of intersectionality and queer worldmaking using the method of autoethnography to demonstrate intersectional disidentifications to the narrative disruptions of white, heteronormative patriarchy represented in Everything Everywhere All at Once. Our co-autoethnography journey as queer women helps us recognize how the film confronts the limits of colonial capitalism with an intergenerational, intercultural multiversal possibility that we can learn and teach from at the intersections of our personal, political, and professional selves. Through disidentification, EEAAO provides a popular media intervention to resist homogenizing, demonizing political discourses about marginalized communities, especially immigrants and queer and trans communities.
While online technologies were once hailed as tools of democratization and global connectivity, scholars increasingly argue that they now serve as platforms for constructing exclusionary national identities. That said, at the core of this debate, two fundamental questions remain unresolved: How do online news narratives reproduce colonial hierarchies of power and perception? In what ways does nationalist discourse in online news media transform political conflict into a hyperreal performance of sovereignty and identity? To address these questions, this study investigates the 2025 Pahalgam attack as a case through which to understand how Hindutva's nationalism-as articulated in online news discourse-reconstructs the colonial logic of rule through mediated representations. Drawing on Jean Baudrillard's theory of Simulacra and Simulation as the primary analytical framework, this article examines how online news media discourse constructs political reality rather than merely reflecting events. Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is used to examine how language, narrative framing, and representation in media coverage from The Hindu Bureau, Hindustan Times, and Al Jazeera Journalism Review produce narratives of loyalty, treachery, and national belonging. The study argues that Hindutva's nationalist discourse in online news operates through simulated media narratives that reproduce colonial hierarchies under the guise of national revival.
Virtual ethnography often begins with a seemingly simple act: sending a message. Whether an email to a YouTuber, a DM to a subreddit moderator, or a friend request on social media, this initial correspondence marks the first point of contact between researcher and research participant. Surprisingly, this early stage of fieldwork has received little attention in ethnographic scholarship. This essay conceptualizes correspondence as a methodological and reflexive site in digital ethnography, arguing that these initial interactions are not merely logistical but are also consequential for relationship formation, access negotiation, and ethical engagement. Through analysis of exemplar cases from virtual ethnographic studies, the paper demonstrates how attention to these exchanges illuminates the labor, positionality, and strategic decisions involved in entering digital fields. This paper further addresses ethical considerations, including privacy, consent, and anonymization, and proposes practical approaches for incorporating correspondence reflexively into ethnographic reporting. By foregrounding early-stage digital interactions, this paper seeks to expand the scope of reflexivity and enhances methodological transparency. Ultimately, including and analyzing researcher-participant correspondence strengthens the rigor and representational fidelity of virtual ethnography, offering scholars a richer understanding of how digital relationships and field access are co-constructed from the very outset of inquiry.
