Research

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.

The transformative force of AI is largely redefining how public relations professionals approach their work, understand their responsibilities, and make sense of the meaning and value associated with being a PR practitioner. While research in other disciplines have increasingly recognized the implications of AI toward professional identities, this topic remains underexplored in the public relations field. Through a quantitative survey (N = 285), we assessed how PR practitioners experience professional identity threats across five dimensions: expertise, status position, autonomy, professional influence, and job responsibility. Our findings highlight that these perceived threats are associated with a combination of factors, including AI use patterns, attitudes and assessment of AI, and influences from leaders and peers. Overall, this study contributes to ongoing conversations about the impact of AI toward the future of public relations through a novel perspective exploring PR professional identities. It also offers practical insights for leaders and organizations on strategies to support PR practitioners in successfully navigating the AI-driven public relations landscape.

Discussing classic and cutting-edge research in corporate social responsibility (CSR) and its communication practices, this book critically examines key issues and debates of corporate social responsibility communication in global contexts.

This book conceptualizes CSR communication as a reflective practice anchored in organizational values, identity, and purpose, yet responsive to continually shifting societal expectations. It draws on current case studies to explain why reflective CSR communication has never been more crucial to help organizations articulate their evolving roles in society. Organized into three sections – core concepts, a framework for reflective practice, and applications in areas such as employee relations, crisis communication, and the rapidly developing terrain of artificial intelligence – it highlights how organizations can tell their CSR stories authentically to create ethical brand identities that can continue to resonate with their stakeholders.

The book will be of interest to advanced students, educators, researchers, and practitioners pursuing advanced credentials who are interested in the intersections of CSR and strategic communication, public relations, corporate communication, and communication management.

Social media is an indispensable component of strategic communication and public life in China, positioning it as a central arena for crisis communication research. As social-mediated crisis communication (SMCC) scholarship expands, questions arise not only about what has been studied, but how methodological choices shape theory development. This study conducts a mixed-method review of 105 articles published between 2009 and 2025 in 15 SSCI-indexed journals spanning communication, public relations, risk and crisis management, and new media studies. By integrating manual coding, structural topic modeling (STM), and network analysis, the study demonstrates how mixed-method computational reviews can function as a theory-building device. Rather than cataloging topics, this approach maps the alignment between research topics, theoretical frameworks, and contextual dimensions, revealing under-theorized areas and methodological lock-ins. It identifies 13 research topics, highlights government-focused research as central, notes uneven use of framing theory and SCCT, and recognizes economic factors as an emerging contextual dimension. Overall, this study not only contributes methodological and theoretical insights to crisis communication scholarship by foregrounding China’s distinctive digital, institutional, and sociopolitical environment but also illuminates the theoretical and thematic blind spots generated by Western-influenced research agendas in engaging with the complex realities of non-Western societies.

As climate variability intensifies, effective climate risk communication has become a central element of crisis prevention and adaptive governance. However, existing studies on the climate crisis and risk communication remain predominantly informed by Global North perspectives, with limited attention to how Global South countries communicate climate risks. This study addresses this gap through in-depth interviews with 25 climate leaders across 18 Global South countries. Findings reveal three key factors shaping climate risk communication: epistemic disjuncture, discursive inequality, and material constraints. By centering communicators rather than audiences, this study contributes to rethinking climate communication infrastructures toward more equitable, actor-centered perspectives.

This autoethnographic paper explores how I, as a woman of color from the Global South, construct, challenge, and reshape my environmental identity. Drawing on personal experiences, the paper traces my journey from an initial gender-neutral understanding of climate action to a gradual realization of the gender and regional inequalities embedded in global climate governance systems, ultimately seeking pathways for self-expression in academic research, policy engagement, and climate communication. This study reveals the dynamic shaping process of environmental identity within discourse structures. The paper not only reflects on the realities faced by women from the Global South in climate action, but also critically examines how the global climate communication system defines the roles of Southern women through a ‘victim-savior’ binary narrative. It explores the transition from being ‘defined’ by others to ‘self-defined’ within this system. In this process, I came to understand that environmental identity is not a static accumulation of individual experiences, but something continuously constructed through dialogue, negotiation, and resistance.

Public understanding is essential to advancing energy transitions. Yet less is known about how energy transition is understood and communicated at the local level in Global South contexts, what barriers emerge in communication practices, and how local actors respond to these constraints. To address these questions, this study focuses on local climate communicators who are actively engaged in frontline energy transition communication. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 28 local climate advocates from 14 Global South countries, the findings show that energy transition is rarely understood as a technocratic pathway toward decarbonization. Instead, it is commonly framed around survival needs, local control, justice concerns, and gendered energy labor. In practice, energy transition communication is shaped by four challenges: linguistic and cognitive barriers; technological breakdowns and project discontinuities that erode trust; deeply embedded cultural meanings associated with energy use; and the systemic exclusion of women from communication and decision-making processes. In response to these constraints, local advocates develop a set of context-specific communication practices, including the use of local languages and visual tools, narrative storytelling, participatory dialogue, the mobilization of trusted community communicators, and the integration of communication with visible and tangible energy actions. While these practices emerge under comparable structural constraints, the meanings and communicative pathways of energy transition diverge across socio-cultural contexts. This study demonstrates how energy transition is continuously negotiated and reconstituted through concerns of survival, trust, and participation, thereby offering empirically grounded insights from the Global South to energy transition and energy communication research.

To publicly declare that one is a feminist in contemporary South Korea yields a certain stigma and risk, a phenomenon that has drawn sustained and marked attention from international media and scholarly communities. The contemporary wave of feminism in South Korea for the past decade has been met with a strong misogynistic backlash in both online and offline spaces, with cases of femicide, digital and physical violence, a rise in digital sex crimes utilizing emerging technologies, and other cases of gender-based violence. One might ask: What reasons do instigators of misogynistic violence cite as justification for their violence? In this short piece, I point to a few contemporary moments in South Korean politics and discourse to argue that violent misogynistic acts frame feminism as symbolically violent, therefore deserving of physical and material violence in retaliation. Violent misogyny, which comes in forms of physical, sexual, material, or financial harm via misogynistic logics, operates by justifying its violence in pointing to the supposed violence of feminism that “attacked” men “first.” The catch, of course, is that the violence of feminism is but a challenge against heteropatriarchy and hegemonic masculinity, or the institutionalization of heteronormative patriarchy and the ideology of masculinity embedded within social norms, systems, and logics. Misogyny interprets feminism as a challenge to these systems and, therefore, as aggression. It turns to “reciprocate” with magnified acts of violence, actively threatening women and gender minorities’ safety. Violence, therefore, operates as both a rhetorical and material tool to uphold existing cultures and structures of heteropatriarchy and misogyny.