Research

This study examines how feminist activists in Ghana and Nigeria utilize digital media to challenge gender inequality and reframe public discourse. Drawing on African feminist theory and employing Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis (FCDA), the research examines case studies of digital activism campaigns, online discourse, and health advocacy initiatives that mobilize resistance against gender-based oppression. Data were collected through scraping of social media posts on digital feminist discourses via screen captures and archiving. Findings show that Ghanaian and Nigerian feminists strategically use digital media to amplify women’s voices, confront sexual violence, and advocate for reproductive and health rights. These communicative practices disrupt patriarchal discourses, reimagine African womanhood as politically active and self-defining, and facilitate intercultural communication by translating global gender justice narratives into localized forms of resistance. Overall, the study demonstrates how feminist resistance in these contexts is historically grounded, socially transformative, and expands African feminist scholarship by highlighting digital media as a tool for agency, solidarity, and social change.

Despite a growth in scholarship on feminist and gender advocacy in Ghana, little attention has been paid to how non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have leveraged digital platforms to communicate. Using African technocultural feminist theory (ATFT), we analyse NGOs’ digital communications, paying attention to how they use these platforms to define their organizational identities while challenging gender stereotypes. We argue that although NGOs use digital platforms to communicate, their praxis may not necessarily be accessible to the communities with which they work; these platforms enable them to share their women’s empowerment programmes with other stakeholders while bringing awareness to issues affecting marginalized people in these communities. This study presents practical strategies for effectively communicating gender advocacy in the Ghanaian context and beyond.

In this blog post, Zia explores how "YouTube travelers practice a quiet kind of people-to-people diplomacy, drawing thousands of viewers with each video uploaded reshaping perceptions more effectively than any official campaign. What’s more, though, they also construct new illusions: realities filtered through framing and imagery where the line between representation and reality begins to blur as without a single policy statement, YouTubers have reframed the post-conflict country as a destination of beauty and normalcy." 

This study investigates the potential for integrating AI and journalistic networks to create real-time, priority-driven maps of infrastructure damage during natural disasters. Focusing on Hurricane Florence in 2018, we collected over a million tweets using the REST Twitter API and extracted 11,638 images for analysis. Tweets were categorized by source, including news organizations and citizen journalists. We applied the OpenAI CLIP unsupervised machine learning model for image classification, splitting the data into 80 % for training, 10 % for validation, and 10% for testing. The model achieved an average precision of 92 %, recall of 78 %, and an F1 score of 85 %. When compared to other models such as ViT and DeiT, which achieved F1 scores of 82.9 and 81.2, respectively, CLIP performed similarly but stood out due to its accessibility and zero-shot learning capabilities, making it ideal for rapid deployment in newsrooms and crisis scenarios. The framework's success was further demonstrated by cross-referencing model predictions with geotagged metadata and journalist sources, which linked damage locations with credible information. By leveraging this AI-based framework, journalists can significantly reduce the time needed to identify disaster-response targets, helping to focus relief and recovery efforts in real time. This approach enhances disaster data collection, analysis, and dissemination, ultimately saving lives and reducing harm by providing more efficient and accurate damage assessments. The study highlights how AI and journalistic networks can collaborate to improve crisis response efforts.

Big Tobacco and other stakeholders, such as vape shops and smaller e-cigarette manufacturers, have adapted traditional tobacco marketing techniques to digital platforms. Warning labels are essential for informing consumers about the potential harms of tobacco use, including e-cigarettes. However, in a rapidly changing digital landscape, social media platform policies often lag behind, leaving digital marketing largely unchecked. This has allowed Big Tobacco to modernize traditional cigarette marketing in the digital sphere with e-cigarettes, a phenomenon we term ‘remediated marketing’. Without adequate warning labels, exposure to tobacco promotion may increase e-cigarette use among youth, who engage with social media at particularly high rates. This article presents a rule-based classifier developed to detect warning labels in TikTok and YouTube videos by combining computer vision technology with rule-based classification. Our classifier achieved 97.33% accuracy in detecting posts with warning labels. However, only 2.32% of YouTube video frames (240 out of 10,344 frames) and 1.32% of TikTok video frames (61 out of 4639 frames) contained warning labels, suggesting that warning messages are infrequent across e-cigarette content on platforms popular among youth, including TikTok and YouTube. Among the detected warning labels, there was notable diversity in wording and length, indicating a lack of standardization. Additionally, within YouTube and TikTok video frames, 63.7% and 30.0% of the warnings appeared in the first five seconds of the videos, respectively. These results highlight the need for improved policies and standardized warning labels to better protect young adults from e-cigarette promotion on social media.

In this blog post, Lamia Zia grapples with the rapid rise of artificial intelligence, especially in Washington, D.C. 

Zia works to answer questions such as, "What does sub human–machine collaboration actually look like? How does this partnership between humans and technology take form beyond theory and imagination? From human–machine relations to international relations, how will this emerging partnership between humans and intelligent systems reshape the theory and practice of diplomacy, negotiation, mediation, and global dialogue? Will this partnership deepen cross-border understanding, or will it risk reducing the subtle art of diplomacy to a mere exchange of data, algorithms, and calculated logic?"

She argues that robots might mediate disputes over resources or climate policy with impartial accuracy, while humans interpret the emotional undercurrents, the trust, hesitation, and hope that no algorithm can fully quantify. 

Rhetorica Rising introduces a range of feminist rhetorical methods and methodologies that can help us understand social justice movements, past and present.

The collection highlights how the field of rhetorical studies has evolved over the past decade, taking up the challenge of creating intersectional feminist scholarship that engages with BlPOC histories and rhetorics, decolonial rhetorics, digital studies, disability studies, queer studies, transnational studies, and discourses regarding reproductive justice.

Be sure to check out the chapter, "What Should We Ask? Feminist Methodological Inquiries into Commemoration," by Dr. Carly Woods (Communication) and Dr. Jessica Enoch (English)! The book was edited by Eileen E. Schell, K.J. Rawson, Curtis J. Jewell, Abigail H. Long, Sidney Turner, and Gabriella Wilson.

Omoleye Adeyemi recently published a book review of Black Networked Resistance: Strategic Rearticulations in the Digital Age by Raven Maragh-Lloyd. Adeyemi explains that Black Networked Resistance explores the use of rearticulation to amplify the methods utilized by Black individuals against white power structures. This book enables readers to conceptualize the factors of media that we engage with and how those factors are rearticulations of past concepts that have been used. 

Adeyemi's review was published in Communication and Race. 

Lamia Zia's new blog post for the USC Center on Public Diplomacy explores the power of public sphere through a reflection on espresso and cafes. Zia discusses coffee's diplomatic power and how it operates as an ambassador of culture in this intriguing read!

As Digital Cultures becomes the dominant term used by many across a variety of intellectual fields to describe the social, aesthetic, and political impact of digital media, it is necessary to provide a reference volume that specifies and defines the bounds of scholarly debates and curricular outlines for an otherwise amorphous interdisciplinary space.

This handbook provides a comprehensive reference for the varied methodologies, historical frames, and theoretical perspectives essential for the study of Digital Cultures today. In outlining these foundations, it serves as a practical guide for educators and students into the broad range of perspectives grouped together for the critical, historical, and social scientific study of digital media.

It also looks into the future and outlines an agenda for future research by examining not only the origins of the concept of Digital Culture, but emerging topics and themes still in development, such as the relation between digital technology and climate change, artificial intelligence and knowledge, sensation and aesthetics, and the rise of new infrastructures reinventing not only the built environment, but the boundaries of nations and sovereignty.

• The first handbook to provide the historical, theoretical, and methodological foundations for the study of Digital Culture
• Contributions by leading scholars in the field
• Discusses emerging themes and areas of research