Research

Sociolinguistic research has long documented the appropriation of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) across media including film, music and advertising. In this article, we add to this body of work by exploring the digital recontextualisation of a subset of AAVE features as ‘TikTok/internet language’. To do this, we analyse metalinguistic discourses of linguistic appropriation in a corpus of 178 TikTok videos. We identify two main competing discourses: On the one hand, a concern regarding the indexical erasure of AAVE as a variety of English spoken by Black Americans; and on the other, claims of a new register of ‘internet language’. Concluding, we argue that, in the participatory context of social media, the circulation of the label ‘TikTok language’ poses an issue for the raciolinguistic enregisterment as a ‘Black variety’ of English.

Noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) have become an urgent public health crisis and a significant cause of death, especially in developing countries like Ghana, where news media coverage influences public understanding of health issues, just as it does in other jurisdictions. This study employs an unsupervised machine learning method on 505 Ghanaian news articles published between 2014 and 2024 to analyze how the themes related to NCDs and the main attribution frames are presented. The results identified four primary thematic frames: stakeholder partnerships and crisis management efforts, Ghana’s NCD risk factors, systemic barriers to managing the crisis, and advances in healthcare technology. Additional attribution analysis revealed two key frames: a lifestyle frame, highlighting individual choices, and a socio-economic frame, connecting NCDs to poverty, weak health systems, urbanization, and environmental factors. Findings reflect global trends while emphasizing the influence of local structural factors in NCD crisis narratives. The study demonstrates the usefulness of computational methods for analyzing large news media text corpora, showing how Ghanaian news media mirror international framing patterns and also reveal unique local barriers and dependencies during public health emergencies.

An organization’s message design during crises is crucial to maintaining its legitimacy. This study extends the framing theory to analyze the strategies used by Ghana’s and Nigeria’s central banks to build discursive legitimacy during their respective financial crises. It also helps to decolonize our understanding of how central banks respond to crises and preserve their license to operate using evidence from two African countries. 

The article analyzed 28 statements, ranging from one to 13 pages, issued by the two central banks in their efforts to respond to and manage the crises, using a qualitative frame-analytical approach.

The two central banks emphasize four similar but nuanced frames: stability and resilience in the financial sector; consumer protection and interest; national interest and sovereignty and technological efficiency and inclusion. These findings suggest that, although a shared foundational narrative exists, each country’s central bank employs unique legitimation strategies that align with its socio-economic context. 

This study offers practitioners, researchers and students some valuable insights into how public relations technicians in Africa develop crisis response messages during financial emergencies. It also highlights findings that show the reflective situational and cultural factors shaping the content of crisis statements. This study advances broader discussions of discursive legitimation during financial crises and crises more broadly, while also helping overcome the limitations of geographical viewpoints in crisis studies.

Associate Professor Sahar Khamis discusses egalitarianism, government control and citizen journalism in the digital world.

Listen to Sahar Khamis on "The Stream"

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." 

Can Muslims move beyond fragmented hashtags and fleeting online outrage to build a shared digital future rooted in Islamic principles and civilizational vision? This session explores how the digital realm—once a catalyst for national uprisings like the Arab Spring—might now be reclaimed as a space for transnational ummatic unity.

Listen to Sahar Khamis on ‘Ummatics’

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.