Professor and School of Communication Director Sarah Banet-Weiser has been named co-editor of Communication, Culture, & Critique, the cultural criticism journal of the International Communication Association.
Beginning in the summer of 2016, Banet-Weiser will edit the journal with Laurie Ouellette, Associate Professor at the University of Minnesota.
Communication, Culture, & Critique publishes research that focuses on contemporary cultural criticism. Recent articles in the journal have covered topics such as girls and their interaction with photos on social media; immigrant narratives presented by Indian women on YouTube; and visions of petrochemical America as seen in HBO's True Detective.
As co-editors, Banet-Weiser and Ouellette will be tasked with guiding the direction of Communication, Culture, & Critique. The two envision the journal as "a major venue for scholarship on the role of communication in power dynamics on a global scale." They plan to publish several special issues focusing on specific topics and to increase the journal's focus on international scholarship. Also on their agenda is raising the journal's digital profile by engaging with the community through blogs and podcasts.
Banet-Weiser studies gender, race, media, consumer culture, and feminist media studies. She's currently working on a book titled Empowered: Popular Feminism, Popular Misogyny and the Economy of Visibility.
She also recently published an article with Annenberg doctoral student Kate Miltner that looks at popular misogyny as a response to popular feminism and to movements and media that encourage women and girls to be confident, powerful, and assertive.
Their article, "#MasculinitySoFragile: culture, structure, and networked misogyny," was published in Feminist Media Studies and introduced the term "networked misogyny" to describe the current phenomenon of "an especially virulent strain of violence and hostility towards women in online environments."
Banet-Weiser's forthcoming book will focus on many of the same issues.