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Vol 26, No. 3 
November 2021
Published three times annually by the Mass Communication Division of NCA.
Publications/Web Editor - Emory Daniel, Appalachian State University

Sponsored by:

In this issue:

Welcome from the Chair Editor's Note Announcements Gatekeeper Scholar Chat NCA MCD Officers (2019-2020)

 

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Welcome from the Chair

Davis CA -  On Seattle

 Just outside Davis, California, there's a place that advertises itself as the world's largest corn maze. A lot of the international students from my university go for Halloween, and this year, my wife and I took our high school Sophomore son and some of his friends. At the entryway, they hand everyone a map; there's only one direct route through, and they say that if you hit all the turns, it takes about 90 minutes.

Well, we get into the maze, and my son and his friends dig up a pencil from somewhere, map out the one and only direct route through, and they're off to the races. My wife and I decide to wander. We check the map from time to time, we make sure we hit the key 'checkpoints' in the maze, but for the most part, we sort of mosey. After 80 minutes, we get a call from the kids (they’re done and ready to go home), so we took a sneaky short cut to the edge of the maze and followed it to the exit. The kids felt accomplished (and a little smug) that they’d gotten through the maze efficiently, and my wife and I felt relaxed after having some loosely-structured, diverting time outdoors. Everybody won.

So this year, I'm going to mosey

 And of course, I'll encourage you to help make the Mass Comm Division's corner of NCA Seattle a better place to mosey.

 First, if you're in Seattle on Friday, please attend the business meeting! We will be discussing division business, and it's a great time to see colleagues. We will also be presenting awards, including our first-ever research award, and holding a drawing for an authentic autograph from a Seattle celebrity--more details at the meeting!

 Finally, if you aren't going to make it to Seattle, please join us virtually for the sessions that the Association is making available online. (https://www.natcom.org/2021-nca-convention-live-stream-sessions) 

See you in Seattle!

Sincerely,

Dr. Laramie Taylor
Chair, Mass Communication Division
University of California - Davis
lartaylor@ucdavis.edu  

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Boone, NC -- Please enjoy reading through mlast  issue as editor The Gatekeeper. I have enjoyed being your web editor for this division, as it marks the final of my three-years as publications and web editor. Below you will find announcements about key dates for the convention. Please feel free to reach out with any news you'd like to share at danieles@appstate.edu.

Further down you'll find this issue's Gatekeeper Scholar Chat with Robert Mejia who is a Communication Manager at A New Way of Life Recentry Project in Los Angeles, CA! 

In closing, I hope everyone is well and staying safe.  

All the Best,

Dr. Emory Daniel Jr.
Publications and Web Editor, The Gatekeeper
Appalachian State University
danieles@appstate.edu

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Announcements

NCA Mass Comm News 

NCA Mass Communication Dates      

 Mass Communication Division Research Escalator

Date and Time: Friday, November 19th - 9:30am - 10:45am

Location: Washington State Convetion Center, 615 - Sixth Level

Mass Communication Top Paper Session

Date and Time: Friday, November 19th - 11:00am - 12:15pm 

Location: Washington State Convetion Center, 615 - Sixth Level

NCA's Mass Communication Division Business Meeting 

Date and Time: Friday, November 19th - 12:30pm - 1:45pm         

Location: Washington State Convetion Center, 615 - Sixth Level

Mass Communication Division Top Student Paper Panel 

Date and Time: Friday, November 19th - 2:00pm - 3:15pm 

Location: Washington State Convetion Center, 615 - Sixth Level

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Dr. Robert Mejia 

Los Angeles, CA - Robert Mejia is the Communications Manager at A New Way of Life Reentry Project in Los Angeles, California. Before joining A New Way of Life, Mejia was an Associate Professor of Communication at North Dakota State University. He earned his PhD in Communications with an emphasis in Media and Cultural Studies, minor in Gender & Women Studies, and certificate in Criticism and Interpretive Theory from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Mejia is a critical-cultural scholar focused on the politics of communication. Examples of this scholarship include his recent edited forum in Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies on “Communication and the Politics of Survival,” his forthcoming co-authored CCCS article (with Emily Winderman) “Victims, Vectors, and Violators: The Cultural Logic of Dis-ease,” and his forthcoming co-authored Present Tense: A Journal of Rhetoric in Society article (with Nina M. Lozano and Ariana Cano) “‘People Were Being Nasty’: White Fragility and Calls for Collective Violence against Scholars of Color.” He is also a public scholar, with essays in Humanities North Dakota, New Philosopher, CounterPunch, and more.

 His current work as the Communications Manager at A New Way of Life Reentry Project continues this passion for understanding and intervening upon the politics of communication. A New Way of Life is a nationally renowned reentry program that offers reentry services—including housing, pro bono legal services, advocacy, leadership training, and workforce development—for formerly incarcerated communities. Mejia works closely with A New Way of Life’s president Susan Burton and Co-Directors Pamela Marshall and Michael Towler to develop and implement ANWOL’s communication strategy and efforts to transform the criminal justice system.

 Mejia was named co-recipient of the 2018 NCA Critical and Cultural Studies Division’s New Investigator Award (alongside Myra Washington). His co-authored article (with Kay Beckermann and Curtis Sullivan) “White Lies: A Racial History of the (Post)Truth)” in Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies (2018) received the 2019 NCA Critical and Cultural Studies Division’s Outstanding Article Award.

GK: First and foremost: I am interested in the piece you wrote regarding the American drug policy and the housing policy with the emphasis of post-truth. The idea of post truth has not only been discussed in scholarship but has been salient in mass mediated coverage. Can you explain your thoughts on this topic as it pertains to media coverage?

RM: The question of the post-truth is too often framed in epistemological terms, as a question of whether a claim constitutes a justified true belief. Conceived as an epistemological question, most scholars, political pundits, and public figures tend to approach what is termed the post-truth with befuddlement and as if it were a new post-factual moment. That is, if you believe that once we—whomever that is—had truth, and that this truth was good, and now we have lies, and those lies are bad, then it is difficult to understand why anyone would abandon this commitment to the truth.

My approach, however, is ideological analysis, which conceives of questions of the “truth” in epistemological, ontological, and axiological terms, or what Marxist scholars like Tommie Shelby term epistemological, genetic, and functional terms. In other words, we have long lived in a post-truth world, or rather, our pre-“post-truth” era, was no more committed to the truth than our current era. If we believe our current era is post-truth, then this necessarily means that our prior era was one of truth, which puts those who claim this in the uncomfortable position of having to explain Native American genocide, slavery, Jim Crow, anti-miscegenation, misogyny, mass incarceration, heterosexism, and every other atrocity that predates our current “post-truth” era as somehow rooted in truth.

For me, this is an untenable position, and so instead of asking why some claims are accepted as true from the perspective of epistemology—i.e., whether something constitutes justified true belief—I ask how does one come to believe that something is true and to what effect. Some may consider my first question, how does one come to believe that something is true, as an epistemological question (i.e., a question of a logical process) but I consider this in ontological terms, as in, how does one’s environment and lived experiences give particular truth claims a greater sense of legitimacy than others. That is, some claims are considered true not because of their facticity but rather because they are felt and perceived as true by those who experience them. We can of course critique whether those perceptions are grounded in reality (i.e., whether they constitute justified true belief) but the question of ideology does not end with epistemology but continues with functional or ethical outcome of that epistemology.

So to give a media coverage example, one that pertains to my work with A New Way of Life, there is an overriding ideology that incarcerated individuals, in general, are immoral people undeserving of the basic necessities of humanity. Indeed, the other day, the hosts of a show on an otherwise progressive Los Angeles radio station were discussing whether torture or slavery constituted acceptable punishments for incarcerated individuals. The question being that if a particular heinous crime were committed, would it be acceptable to torture or enslave the individual as a form of punishment. Epistemology on its own is ill-equipped to answer this question. Indeed, most post-truth scholars would not be interested in this question. For me, however, the above example is relevant because the question raised on the talk show encapsulates all aspects of ideology as defined above. The hosts, in essence, are asking: (genetic/ontology) in certain circumstances and for certain individuals (functional/axiological) are torture and slavery ethical acts (epistemological) that are not yet utilized but should be if premises 1 and 2 be true. This is an ideological claim on all accounts. It is an ideological claim because (epistemological) it obscures the fact that torture and slavery persist into the present (e.g., it is still a common practice to shackle and chain incarcerated women during child birth); (ontological/genetic) it positions incarcerated peoples as being categorically distinct from the public; and (c) (functional/axiological) it positions torture and slavery as ethical acts when committed against the “right” people. Though this claim was made in 2021, it is not unique from those that were made throughout the history of the United States—and perhaps this is why it evades the attention of most post-truth scholars, to our detriment

GK:Continuing on your line about critical/cultural work, would you expand on your work on public health? Referring to your piece about sensory rhetoric?

RM: My work on public health has focused on how disease operates as the entanglement of political, economic, social, cultural, and biological processes. These processes are entangled to the extent that we must understand them as operating in tandem with and penetrating each other—so that we should not think of these processes as hermetically sealed functions that happen to influence each other, but nonetheless are capable of autonomous operation. Rather, within every seemingly distinct operation, we see aspects of the others. Political economy and sociocultural practices penetrate and influence biological processes, biological processes and sociocultural practices penetrate and influence political economic processes, and biological and political economic practices penetrate and influence sociocultural processes, so on and so forth. In making this claim, my colleagues and I are particularly interested in how diseases become salient, that is, diseases are sensed only when they cause dis-ease on any of the previously listed registers.

GK: You wrote an interesting piece on casual vs hardcore gaming and significant cultural impacts, what are those impacts? And what are the future implications within the gaming community?

RM:My longtime collaborator, Ergin Bulut, and I have published a number of pieces analyzing the political economy of the video game industry. Our publications have explored how audience and industry interests operate in imperfect alignment (as most things do), and the implications of that misalignment. This does not mean that audience interests do not matter, they clearly do, but rather we are interested in how audience interests are leveraged by industry and towards what ends. As it pertains to the conversation about casual and hardcore gaming, our primary interest was to illustrate that the concepts refer not to distinct audiences but rather a historical moment in which play was conceived as a legitimate and desirable cultural pastime. As others have noted, there is nothing necessarily hardcore about playing Fortnite and nothing necessarily casual about playing Animal Crossing. These games are often played in the same devices, with similar time commitments, and by the same gaming communities.

Though we do not adopt this framework in our analysis—which builds upon Lauren Berlant concept of cruel optimism and Sara Ahmed’s concept of happiness objects—our approach can be thought of resonating with the often overlooked final clause from uses and gratifications theory: the unintended consequences of gratification seeking. Where we differ from U&G is that we conceive of these “unintended consequences” as operating on personal, political economic, and sociocultural levels—as opposed to just the audience level. For instance, players of The Oregon Trail, to offer a much beloved “casual” game, are presented a relatively benevolent narrative of settler colonialism and manifest destiny. Purchasing this game carries with it sociocultural and political economic effects, and the sociocultural lessons offered by the game is buoyed by the political economic success of the game (amongst other effects). The reason we used cruel optimism and happiness objects as our analytic, instead of U&G, is we are equally interested in how public desire for play and leisure is leveraged and turned back upon the player by the industry in ways that may in fact undermine the happiness and wellbeing of the player. For instance, how does the persistence of time in Animal Crossing encourage players to dedicate more of themselves to the game than they otherwise would, if time operated according to a virtual instead of real-time schedule? How does this seemingly trivial distinction make play feel obligatory? Those are just a handful of questions we have taken up in our research.

GK: What are some projects that you are most excited about? Projects that are coming out soon?

RM: What I most excited now is how my current line of work enables me to directly put my research into practice. As the Communications Manager for A New Way of Life, my work on the intersection of race, class, gender, technology, media, and politics is directly applicable. My work places me in constant and regular contact with journalists, politicians, community organizers, academics, activists, formerly incarcerated individuals, and other communities and publics. Core to my position is that of working to transform public and political understanding of mass incarceration, and the effects it has on society—that is, how mass incarceration interwoven into the very fabric of contemporary society, from politics, economics, entertainment, etc. My background in the history of race, class, and gender, and media and cultural studies is an asset to these conversations and the work that we do at A New Way of Life.

I am equally excited about my forthcoming academic projects in the journals of Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies and Present Tense: A Journal of Rhetoric in Society, as well as chapters in the edited collections The Routledge Handbook of Ethnicity and Race in Communication and Equal Protection v. Religious Freedom: Clashing American Rights. Each of these works blend my passion of communication, media and cultural studies, and social justice work.

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NCA MCD OFFICERS

2020-2021 MCD Officers Chair Laramie Taylor University of California - Davis Communication Department 396 Ker Hall  Davis, CA 95616  lartaylor@ucdavis.edu Vice-Chair Valerie Kretz St. Norbert College  Communication and Media Studies 100 Grant Street, Boyle Hall 352, De Pere, WI 54115  valerie.kretz@snc.edu Vice Chair-Elect / Ad-Hoc Awards Veronica Hefner   St. Mary's College - California School of Liberal Arts - Communication  105J Sichel, Moraga, CA 94575 vh10@stmarys-ca.edu Past Chair David Rhea  Governors State University Communication Program One University Parkway, University Park, IL 60484 drhea@govst.edu Secretary Ashton Speno Southern Illinois University - Edwardsville Department of Mass Communication 1017 Dunham Hall Edwardsville, IL 62025 aspeno@suie.edu Secretary-Elect Kristin Drogos  University of Michigan - Ann Arbor LSA Communication & Media 7415F North Quad, 105 South State Street Ann Arbor, MI 48109 kdro@umich.edu Publications & Web Editor (Position through 2019-2021) Emory S. Daniel Jr. Appalachian State University Department of Communication 121 Bodenheimer Dr. Boone, NC 28607 danieles@appstate.edu Graduate Student Rep. Lindsay Roberts University of Califonia - Davis Communication Department 469 Ker Hall Davis, CA 95616 laroberts@ucdavis.edu Ad-Hoc Appointment - Group Parliamentarian Shane Tilton Ohio Northern University Department of Communication Freed PAC 137 Ada, OH 45810 s-tilton@onu.edu Graduate Student Rep. - Elect Lauren Taylor University of California - Davis Communication Department 469 Ker Hall Davis, CA 95616 lautaylor@ucdavis.edu Research Committee Committee Chair Lisa Glebatis Perks  Merrimack College 315 Turnpike St. Cushing Building North Andover, MA 01845   perksl@merrimack.edu  First Vice-Chair Joseph Hoffswell  Wetern Kentucky University Department of Communication FAC 145 Bowling Green, KY 42101 joseph.hoffswell@wku.edu  Second Vice-Chair Arienne Ferchaud  Florida State University College of Communication & Information 4100 University Center, Building C Talahassee, FL 32306  aferchaud@fsu.edu  Second Vice-Chair - Elect David Stamps  Louisiana State University Manship School of Mass Communication 252 Hodges Hall Baton Rouge, LA 70803  dstamps@lsu.edu  Nominations Committee Committee Chair Hillary Gamble  Auburn Universiy - Montgomery Communication & Theatre 7430 East Drive Montgomery, AL 36117 hgamable@aum.edu  Vice Chair Colin Kearney  University of Dayton Department of Communication St. Joseph's Hall 106  Dayton, OH 45469    ckearney1@udayton.edu  Vice Chair-Elect Benjamin K. Smith  California State University - East Bay Department of Communication 3011 Meiklejohn Hall  Hayward, CA 94542   benjamin.smith@csueastbay.edu  Nominations Committee - Representitive Jeanette Ruiz University of California - Davis Communication Department 364 Kerr Hall, 1 Shields Ave, Davis CA 95616 jbruiz@ucdavis.edu Representatives to NCA General Assembly Legislative Assembly (Position through 2021-2022)   Stan Tickton Norfolk State University Mass Communication/Journalism 700 Park Ave., Unit 3249 Norfolk, Virginia 23504 sdtickton@hotmail.com Legislative Assembly (Position through 2020-2021) Jennifer Stevens Aubrey The University of Arizona College of Human & Behavioral Sciences  Communication 218 Tuscan, AZ 85721 jlsa@arizona.edu  <<back to top>>