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Existing research on Instagram-based political legitimation has largely focused on Western contexts, whereas leader-centered African cases and fragmented media settings remain underexplored. This study analyzes how Zimbabwe’s President, Emmerson Mnangagwa, constructs political legitimacy on Instagram over 8 years (2017–2025). Using Van Leeuwen’s four legitimation strategies and Kress and Van Leeuwen’s social semiotic grammar of visual design as the analytical framework, we employed Zeeschuimer, a browser-based social media data-collection tool, to purposively collect still photographs from the sampled period. We coded the posts as image–caption pairs according to Van Leeuwen’s typology and organized them into emerging thematic narratives of legitimation. Findings highlighted strategic narratives about Zimbabwe’s alignment with international powers, infrastructure development priorities, the people’s consensual choice, and regional leadership, collaboration, and support. We argue that these findings demonstrate Mnangagwa’s use of Instagram’s features for curated self-presentation and narrative control to build a discourse of competent, people-focused, and internationally recognized leadership that consistently downplays legitimacy-challenging information. This study offers a multimodal analytical perspective on political legitimacy in the Global South, extends the boundaries of political communication scholarship, and provides insights into how platform-based legitimation and affordances operate in Zimbabwe’s contested political environment.

Morris and VanHaitsma "assemble for this special issue of Rhetoric & Public Affairs— in the pages of one of the most revered journals in rhetoric and public address— a cast of queer scholars and scholarship from across generations to reflect on and illustrate diverse perspectives concerning where queering public address has been since 2007 (and its longer history), what its current state entails and does not but should include, and where it might— should— venture into the future. Much has changed since the queer turn in the field began, with exhilarating and vexing challenges to whiteness, coloniality, transantagonism, ableism, and more in emergent scholarship. Research is also becoming much less US- centric than it was when Queering Public Address was published nearly two decades ago. What the very key term “queer/ing” meant variously then has transformed significantly over time. We have thus asked the contributors to time travel bidirectionally to account for and embody queer/ing rhetoric and public address for the readership, for the generation to come, of Rhetoric & Public Affairs and the field writ large."

Social media play crucial dialogic and strategic roles during paracrisis. Responding to a prior call to extend agenda‐setting theory to study paracrises, this manuscript builds on the literature by moving beyond the dominant focus on for‐profit organisations in public relations and crisis studies into the political sphere. Adopting unsupervised machine learning and qualitative methods, this study used a comprehensive dataset of 2451 user‐generated comments on X during the 2023 U.S. House of Representatives Speaker election to contribute to the broader discourses on paracrises. Findings from topic modelling revealed that the agenda narrative focused on House proceedings and conflicts, the GOP's internal struggle, a leadership crisis and Democratic alternatives, as well as shared political interests and ideologies. In addition, a combination of sentiment analysis and sentence mapping highlighted positive user comments focused on the theatricalisation of serious politics and on appreciation for Democratic comportment. Conversely, negative comments emphasised attacks on figures/party, criticism of legislative dysfunction, and mismanagement of resources. This study first advances a definition for political paracrisis and highlights the profound contribution of these findings to the praxis of crisis studies.