Communication, Culture & Critique

@ccc-journal.bsky.social

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An International Communication Association journal publishing critical/cultural research and commentary on media, culture and technology. https://linktr.ee/cccjournalica

Journal Article Strongman imperialism: media infrastructures and the war on Iran Mehdi Semati Communication, Culture and Critique, Volume 19, Issue 2, June 2026, Pages 95–98, https://doi.org/10.1093/ccc/tcag023 Published: 24 June 2026 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.
ICA colleagues going to Cape Town in June ... We invited you to attend the pre-conference on Anti-Apartheid Legacies: Mediating Solidarities from South Africa to Palestine, June 4, 2026, 9AM to 5PM, Location: UCT Centre for African Studies, CAS Gallery Harry Oppenheimer Institute Building, Engineering Mall Road, Upper Campus; Addressing ICA's theme of inequalities in Context, this pre-conference will focus on the parallels between the mediated struggle against institutionalized segregation during South African apartheid and the ongoing global solidarity movement against Israeli occupation, segregation, and genocidal violence in Palestine; Register at https://www.icahdq.org/event/anti-apartheid
Article spotlight, Framing Gaza: Medical Journals and the destruction of Healthcare, by Osama Tanous, Yara Asi, Weeam Hammoudeh, David Mills, Bram Wispelwey, published in the Communication, Culture and Critique special issue "Palestine as Communicative Epistemology," edited by Paula Chakravartty, Karma R. Chavez, Dina Matar; Volume 19, Issue 1 (March 2026)
Communication, Culture & Critique is proud to publish its first thematic issue: "Palestine as Communicative Epistemology." Volume 19, Issue 1 (March 2026). Editors: Paula Chakravartty, Karma R. Chavez, Dina Matar. White letters on red background.
Journal Article Forging a feminist approach to peer review and mentorship: the case of OSU press’s intersectional rhetorics series By Karma R Chávez and Taralee Cyphers Communication, Culture and Critique, Volume 18, Issue 4, December 2025, Pages 300–301, https://doi.org/10.1093/ccc/tcaf046 Published: 26 December 2025 Abstract In this article, the authors reflect on their purpose in creating the Intersectional Rhetorics series with Ohio State University Press, and what the series reviewing and editorial process looks like as feminist praxis.
Journal Article Citing with care: citational politics, the communication canon and the responsibility of scholarly acknowledgment Purchased Kim Fox Communication, Culture and Critique, Volume 18, Issue 4, December 2025, Pages 297–299, https://doi.org/10.1093/ccc/tcaf042 Published: 26 December 2025 Abstract This article explores citational politics as a practice that actively constructs and sustains the communication canon. It contends that citation is not a neutral academic formality, but a political and ethical act that shapes whose scholarship becomes visible, legitimate and foundational. Drawing from critical race, feminist and decolonial perspectives, the article highlights the systemic exclusion of Black women, the least cited group in academia, and interrogates how this erasure impoverishes the field. It also identifies patterns of exclusion, from disciplinary bias to technological barriers, that limit the discoverability of Black women’s scholarship. Building on initiatives like #CommunicationSoWhite and #CiteBlackWomen, the article urges communication scholars to adopt more inclusive and reflexive citation practices. It concludes that dismantling exclusionary canons requires both individual responsibility and collective structural change, ultimately reshaping the discipline’s intellectual DNA toward equity and epistemic justice.
Journal Article Tips for getting your work published by an overworked journal editor Isabel Molina-Guzmán Communication, Culture and Critique, Volume 18, Issue 4, December 2025, Pages 294–296, https://doi.org/10.1093/ccc/tcaf049 Published: 26 December 2025 Abstract In this article, I discuss the constraints today’s journal editors are facing to help authors understand what they can do to more effectively manage the process. Specifically, I share advice with authors for improving the success rates of interdisciplinary and early career scholars. I conclude with a brief discussion of my journey into editing as way to open pathways for others interested in journal editing.
Journal Article A Black sensibility for intersectional scholarship by Meshell L Sturgis Communication, Culture and Critique, Volume 18, Issue 4, December 2025, Pages 292–293, https://doi.org/10.1093/ccc/tcaf043 Published: 26 December 2025 Abstract Most advice on how to write critical theory tends to focus on the logistics. Taking the perspective that writing is a skill rather than a talent, such approaches tend to overlook the presence and consequences of emotions in writing. Intersectional scholarship entails navigating and cultivating relations, rituals, and evolving emotional states from the most private to the more generalizable. This essay documents just some of the feelings experienced by one queer Black woman who studies race and communication in the United States. It begins with Black feminist theorizing about writing, research, and the embodiment of intersectional harm. Then, it captures discrete writing experiences and some of the emotions paired with such experiences over the course of the author’s writing career. Finally, it ends with a poetic reveal of writing habits to distill some of the sensory inputs and emotional underpinnings of a Black feminist writing praxis.
Journal Article Grounded under a Blue Sky: tools for disrupting the peer review process as we know it Purchased by Meredith D Clark Communication, Culture and Critique, Volume 18, Issue 4, December 2025, Pages 290–291, https://doi.org/10.1093/ccc/tcaf051 Published: 26 December 2025 Abstract This article provides an introduction to a scholarly forum on intersectional approaches to challenging the peer-review process. Developed out of a Blue Sky session at the International Communication Association’s annual conference in 2025, the article and the forum discuss ways to build out of the strength of differences with practical insights that can be adopted throughout the publication process to advance critical scholarship.
It is impossible to reorient the operation of a society’s economic life in an anticapitalist path without a decisive presence from the state. Yet the ever-growing presence of the state in society causes a progressive stifling of democratic spaces. This is the dilemma that was posed at that time and it is the dilemma that frames the processes of change today. To put it bluntly: bread and democracy seem to be mutually exclusive concepts; all that is left is to opt for one or the other. During these long years, the Latin American left – and not only the Latin American left, of course – justified “real” socialism on the basis of the admission that it had been able to solve the same persistent issues affecting the people of Latin America. According to it, those who, also from the left, insisted on speaking about democracy did so with the narrow-minded goal of denying the conquests achieved by socialism – in the end, who cared about those miserable bourgeois freedoms, like reading the newspaper of one's choice, compared to the countless benefits that socialism gave to humanity!
Protestors in a city park holding signs reading "JIN JIYAH AZADI" and "FEMINISTS FOR JINA" and "From Iran to Palestine, End the War, End the Crime" among other slogans.
Call for Papers Journalism in Ruins: Interrogating norms of ‘independent’ journalism Thematic Issue for Communication, Culture & Critique (2026/27) Abstract Deadline (500 words): December 15, 2025 Complete Manuscript Deadline (7,000-8,000 words): June 15, 2026 Co-editors: Natalie Fenton (Goldsmiths, University of London), Srirupa Roy (University of Göttingen)
Prison media mobilization: smuggled technologies and media practices in Lebanese carceral spaces by Chafic Tony Najem in Communication, Culture and Critique, published 15 May, 2025
The urgency of producing Palestine, Ather Zia's review of "Producing Palestine: The Creative Production of Palestine Through Contemporary Media" edited by Dina Mater and Helga Tawil Souri (Bloomsbury Press, 2024), published in Communication, Culture and Critique
Arm’s length or joined at the hip? Public service media’s coverage of Gaza, by Sydney L. Forde and Des Freedman. Abstract: Critiquing normative articulations of a public versus commercial media binary, we explore the contradictory juxtaposition of democratic expectations assigned to public service media (PSM) broadly, alongside actual PSM reporting. We examine US and UK PSM coverage of two major events related to the bombardment of Gaza and subsequent humanitarian crisis in the months following the Hamas attacks on October 7, 2023. Contextualized within the UK, US and Israel’s historical and ongoing colonial violence within Palestine over the past 75 years, we assess coverage that stands in contradiction to the often fetishized notion of PSM’s role in serving a broadly conceived and normatively accepted “public,” and challenge the independence afforded to existing PSM structures via a critique of the notion that PSM organizations operate at “arm’s length” from government. Throughout our analysis, we find evidence of systematic failures and highlight PSM’s use as an instrument perpetuating state power and control.
"Make Iran Great Again: Apolitical Influencers and the Revival of a Romantic Patriarchal Nationalism." By Hoornaz Keshavarzian and Nicole K. Stewart, Communication, Culture and Critique, March 2025 Abstract: The Woman Life Freedom (WLF) Movement in Iran represents a longstanding struggle for social justice, gender equity, and civil rights. Our study details how this grassroots feminist uprising faced an attempted co-optation by a monarchist Coalition’s rhetoric of unity for regime change. Through an analysis on X (formerly known as Twitter) and Instagram, we illustrate how apolitical influencers center Man, Homeland, Prosperity (MHP), a far-right mantra alongside WLF to perpetuate a patriarchal Persian nationalism. Given that language and hegemonic politics are closely intertwined, we argue that MHP is WLF’s ontological and epistemic opposite as it violates and oppresses the progressive ethos of a feminist movement. By invoking a sense of nostalgia for a glorious and imperial past (God, King, Homeland), Reza Pahlavi and his Coalition reproduce discourses of a populist, romantic, and patriarchal nationalism around the Persian identity. While WLF is committed to a pluralistic “solidarity,” MHP revolves around a monolithic “unity.”
Photo of Jonathan Sterne, arms crossed, smiling, wearing a red shirt
Cover of Communication, Culture & Critique, Vol. 18, Issue 1, March 2025 — the first under the leadership of a new editorial collective.