Mathieu Kassovitz's 1995 film La Haine (Hate) is recognized as a key component of the cine´ma des banlieues genre that arose during the late 1980s in France. By addressing the representational logic of the film's critique of economic and racial tensions in the marginalized cite´s ringing Paris, this essay tracks how it mediates the construction of postmodern identity. In particular, this analysis positions La Haine as a text that appropriates what I call ''postmodern Blackface'' as a tropological application of identity that explores the liminality of Whiteness and the performance of postassimilatory difference. Reading Kassovitz's role in relation to his main character, Vinz, encourages close reading of the film as a rich text for cultural critique. This essay first articulates postmodern Blackface as a mediating response to assimilation and Whiteness before considering how La Haine contributes to the evolving rhetorical and cultural interrogation of postassimilatory identity.

From brutal Nazi killers to Hanukkah heroes in the ‘hood, tough Jews refute images of doomed Holocaust victims, wandering Jews of exile before them, and post-war ‘nice Jewish boys’ who followed. They foster belligerent responses to polemics of fear and self-hatred, and as such, materialize as a challenge for postmodern cultural identity. A Culture of Tough Jews reframes the tough Jew as an enduring act of rhetorical regeneration by reifying a related figure, the vital Jew. As corrective to the tough Jew, the vital Jew encourages robust cultural production and dialogue.

The book highlights three important contributions. At its core it reifies a new figure, the vital Jew, to advance the ongoing critique of Jewish public culture. For audiences of rhetoric and cultural studies, the book offers critical and theoretical study of rhetorical regeneration, including original constructs of postmodern blackface and transformative performativity, as resource for contemporary rhetorical invention. It also constitutes a case study for the postmodern critique of identity by invoking concerns of (post)assimilation, gender and power, and the social construction of race, ethnicity, class, and power to advance conversations on fractious cultural exigencies. A Culture of Tough Jews is a spirited call for postmodern cultural vitality that responds to contemporary politics of identity and memory.

This essay considers cruelty as a shared cultural value in the Age of Trump. In particular, I examine the representation and societal positioning of cruelty in two film depictions from 2017, the first year of the Trump presidency. I invoke affect theory as a heuristic for reading the application of cruelty, and I reify visual intimacy on screen as a technique for how contemporary publics might engage and respond to the cultural role of cruelty.

Using textual and visual media framing analysis, this research examines contemporary
depictions of yoga in U.S. general interest women’s magazines. Critique of narrative and images from three leading magazines demonstrates how the representation of yoga depicts and positions tropes of female objectification that reify values of commodity, consumerism, and divisive exclusionary identity. Narrative and images dominated by bodies of slim, White, upper-class women perpetuate not only the commodification of yoga but also media framing of its appropriation and negotiation to support a multimillion-dollar industry. Two threads of research dominate this study: (1) how do today’s media representations of yoga practice in the United States foster critical and cultural understanding in light of yoga’s long history, and (2) how does the objectification of women’s bodies in this context contribute to ongoing conversations about commodification, exclusion, and identity in contemporary media depictions of women?

Despite long-standing concerns over self-reported measures of media use, media research has relied heavily on self-reported data. This study not only examined discrepancies between survey and logged smartphone data but assessed whether correlational outcomes using self-reported measures produce greater or smaller effect sizes compared to outcomes using logged measures. College students (n = 294) and MTurk workers (n = 291) provided self-reported and logged data of smartphone use over seven days. The correlations we examined involved four psychosocial contexts, including bridging, bonding, well-being, and problematic use of smartphones. The results showed that the effect sizes of correlations using self-reported data tend to be smaller compared to those using logged data. We believe that this is a hopeful message to the field. This could mean that extant survey results have not erroneously inflated communication findings and that communication researchers still have a lot to reveal w...

Many companies have been training their employees on how to be more mindful at work (Winter, 2016). However, some people are skeptical of mindfulness (Simpson, Simpson, Wood, Mercer, & Mair, 2018). Mindfulness is a state of consciousness in which individuals focus their attention on the present moment (Sutcliffe, Vogus, & Dane, 2016). This study uses the reasoned action approach to explore if human resource managers or people in similar positions have a more favorable view of mindfulness training in their organization after using salient behavioral benefits, behavioral skills, and normative referents (Ajzen & Albarracín, 2007). This study also provides the participants’ most salient behavioral benefits and behavioral skills of mindfulness training and normative expectations of ways to incorporate mindfulness in their organization. After I interviewed sixteen participants, results indicated that (a) the top salient behavioral skills of mindfulness training is communication improvement and the top salient behavioral benefit of mindfulness training is stress reduction; (b) participants had a more favorable outlook on mindfulness training in their organizations after I explained that mindfulness programs can lead to their desired employee training outcomes; and (c) participants in this study tended to have normative expectations of incorporating in-person mindfulness workshops/training and yoga. Additionally, participants in this study tended to think others would be skeptical of mindfulness trainings despite their favorable opinion. This phenomenon reflects the findings of third-person perception (Eisend, 2017).

This research examined how multiple factors (i.e., hours of gameplay, types of gameplay, preferred genre of video games, technology used to play games, and biological sex) were associated with both trait and situational verbal aggressiveness. Cross-sectional data were collected from 435 undergraduate students via an online questionnaire. Results indicated similar patterns to previous literature in that video gameplay hours were positively related to verbal aggressiveness. However, we extended research by also showing that a preference for certain genres and technology used to play video games were also related with both situational and trait verbal aggressiveness. Based on these results, we argue that player choice of genre and technology should be considered when examining the relationship between video games and verbal aggressiveness.

This study examined the transition of veterans from the military to the classroom. Guided by communication accommodation theory (CAT), results of semi-structured interviews (N = 20) of military veterans were analyzed to see how and why participants described communication approaches in the university setting. Approaches appeared guided by inculcated values developed during earlier cultural experiences, in the military. Participants described interpersonal and group communication exchanges in three broad themes: cultural clash, perspective taking, and self-silencing. This research supports prior psychological research that explored difficulties combat veterans face after exit and extends this research to non-combat veterans from a communicative perspective.