2. DISCUSSION OUTLINE
I. Introduction
II. Communications & Race
III. Theoretical Perspectives of Communication and Race
A. Critical Theory, Cultural Studies & Political Action
B. Contemporary Thories
i. Culture and Cognition
ii. Class as an Aspect of Structure
iii. Social Structure & Determination
iv. Race, Social Status & Communication
v. Market Structure
IV. The Social Construction of Race
V. Discussion Questions
VI. A Critical Research Agenda
3. I. INTRODUCTION
“WE THE PEOPLE OF THE UNITED STATES…”
• 1789 – The Founding Fathers originally meant white
men with land. It was not intended to include nobody
else.
• 2012 - Today “We the people” means that every person
that is within the territory of the United States is
protected, in some way or another, by the Constitution.
– A shift from a narrow meaning to a more broad definition.
• Is this a random or a premeditated incident?
5. II. COMMUNICATION & RACE
• Book’s Goal – To understand the ways in which the relations between
communications and race can be transformed in ways that are
enabling, rather than limiting.
– Role of communication process in racial structuration.
• Book’s Perspective – Conceptual orientation that emphasizes the
theoretical value of notions and structure.
– The book avoids making claims about the underlying reality and instead
talks about the ways in which we might usefully think about social
reality in structural terms.
• Method – Many of the insights discussed in the book were adapted
from social research not explicitly concerned with race, and from
studies of race relations not generally focused on communications.
– The book focuses on scholarship that critically engages media systems
and audiences in on order to understand the ways in which the
consequences of media consumption reflect the structures of power.
that surround it.
6. • One of the purposes of the book is to illuminate the place of
race as an aspect of social structure by examining the ways in
which communicative acts are involved in the creation and
maintenance of the allegiances, bonds, options, and ligatures
that define social location.
• It focuses on matters of race, racial identity, and racism, and
the complex social practices that ensure the continued
existence of race as a critical determinant of the distribution of
life chances.
• The author rejects the label of cultural studies for the book
because it has come to associate the label too closely with the
anti-intellectual strain of radical postmodernist thinking that
opposes the pursuit of theoretical knowledge, denies the
possibility as well as the utility of generalization, and
characterizes political action as meaningless.
7. III. THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES OF COMMUNICATION AND RACE
• There are distinctions to be made between the various approaches to
the study of communication and race.
– Critical and Administrative Research – ideological orientation of the
researcher ,which provides a basis to determine both problems and
methods, and for therefore distinguishing between approaches.
• Competing and complementary theoretical models have affected the
ways in which we have understood and understand communications
and race.
– Relation between races – defined in terms of status and class linked to
skin color, employment, wealth, status, and authority.
– Shift in the definition of race toward the social and away from its
biological basis.
• Biological Orientation – genetically determined capacity, specifically
capacity of reasoning or intelligence and how to measure it.
– Focus on capacity was generally towards one end of the scale; focus in deficit.
8. A. CRITICAL THEORY, CULTURAL STUDIES & POLITICAL ACTION
• Critical theory requires an understanding of the ways in which changes in
the material reality of social life and social theory tend to interact and
influence each other.
– The attempt to understand how social theory affects our commonsense
understanding of reality is best understood as a problem in the sociology of
knowledge.
• Two interacting sources of influence:
– Actual changes in phenomena
» Ready identifiable changes
» Changes that are not so readily observed
– Changes in the theoretical system
– Critical scholars of communications - power and influence.
• The way we think about power and the things that power affects may get in the way
of our efforts to control its abuse.
• There is fear that concerns with power and politics, which had supplied the
initial motivation behind the critical project, might be lost in the move
toward formalization and institutionalization.
9. • Cultural Studies – from its earliest moments in Great Britain, was
concerned with the redistribution of cultural capital, power, and politics.
– Because many people had different theoretical positions, the intellectual
movement experienced uncertainty in choosing an appropriate path.
– Scholars working under it had shift from its original concerns to matters of race and
gender.
– The critical timing is often playful and is directed toward generating a pleasurable
experience for readers to enjoy and learn from creative and expressive
deconstruction of mainstream media products.
• Cultural studies perspectives that prefer to emphasize resistance over
domination were influence by the idea that texts are polysemic or capable
of multiple interpretations.
– Emphasis within cultural studies was on the ways in which individuals could create
new meaning out of symbolic raw material provided by an increasingly international
global media market.
– Critical readings serve at least two primary purposes within cultural studies:
• Criticism of representations that distort, ignore, or displace the reproduction of important aspects of
the lives of subordinate groups.
• The reproduction of critical reading skills and an informed political sense within the subordinate
population.
10. • French critical theorists influenced the history of cultural studies by drawing
attention to the fields, sites or spaces in which social practices and
discursive forms come to reflect their origins in social structure.
– It became important for claims about the social practice of media
consumption to be derived from direct observation of those practices in their
natural and usual settings.
– The focus on resistance, which had already shifted toward creativity, shifted
again towards the celebration of the uniqueness of cultural fields and social
identities – The celebration of difference.
• Shift from the debate of power and politics to the debate of culture and difference.
• Besides the polarity of theoretical positions and the shift from its original
concerns, other challenges to the critical mission of cultural studies include:
– Its growth outside Great Britain – U.S. cultural studies as the most notable.
– Professionalization of the cultural studies ↔ Depoliticization of critical
scholarship – avoidance of political topics.
– It can no longer rely upon a single analytical approach.
– The politics of identity are incapable of making use of the insights and
presumed power of postmodernist theory because political struggle is
organized within the category of identity.
– A move toward a new postmodern citizenship because of the forged link
between the critical academia and the state.
11. B. CONTEMPORARY THEORIES
• Differences between political economy, effects research, literary
criticism, and cultural studies can be understood in terms of differences in
the underlying theory of society and the underlying theory of science.
• Different theoretical systems or paradigms have their own means of
evaluating truth claims made within; therefore, at some point of
intersection they would be incompatible with each other.
– Political economy and effects research tend toward the pole of objectivity.
– Cultural studies and literary criticism tend toward the pole of subjectivity.
• An analytical goal and methodological stance characteristic of cultural studies is the
search for generalizable, rather than universal, claims.
– The work tends to deny that it is making claims about generality and focuses on single
cases producing a tendency toward particularism.
• Important to understand the relation between concrete social experience and
cognitive structure and the affective and cognitive dimensions of our beliefs
systems.
– A shift within the field to ethnographic observation shows the shift towards rarely using
multiple informants as a way to increase confidence in the typicality of the case studies
provided.
– They are on similar poles with regard to ontology, or theories of existence.
– Both have historically tended to emphasize conflict rather than consensus.
12. • Shift from behavioral science to cultural studies emergence of an
information-processing paradigm.
– Shift within the behavioral sciences on two levels:
• Dependent variables – from attitudes to cognitions.
• Independent variables – from purposive communications, aimed at
persuasion, to more subtle processes involving cognition and meaning.
– Rejection of simple outcomes and favors more complex transformations of
cognitive structure.
– Opened a way for the study of stability or resistance to change in cognitions.
– Shift away from the goals and intentions of the communicator or source toward
the receiver as active processor of information.
• Helped to define the contours of this new paradigm.
• Radical tradition of media studies – assumes that there is a link between
media ownership and content and that this link serves an ideological
function on behalf of dominant groups rather than societal interests.
– Forced retreat – shift in focus away from media ownership to consideration of
journalist practice with an emphasis on structural complexity and contestation.
• These shifts in critical media theory have tended to be discussed as examples of
intellectual progress.
13. • Structuration theory – Structure is both the product and the
source of social or cultural activity.
– Both social change and social reproduction are the products or
regularized interactions between individuals and representatives
of organizations.
– Routine interaction – expose people to the influence of others –
Social influence.
• Provides the cumulative instantiation that produces everyday
racism.
• The individual is seen as a knowledgeable actor who engages in
goal-directed activities that involve continuous assessment and
adjustment of those activities on the basis of available
information.
• One challenge is to understand the nature of change within
complex social system.
14. I. CULTURE AND COGNITION
• Cognition and constraint – Structure of attitudes and opinions product of social experience.
– P. Bourdieu concept habitus – set of objectives conditions that are incorporated into a logically
structured set of principles and ideals.
• One difficulty lies in specifying the underlying process through to which the cognitive connections are
established, reinforced, and changed through experience.
– E. Durkheim – introduced the notion of the collective mind, which was subject to change as a
product of social conditions.
• Sociology became psychologized by the acceptance of the view that everything social consists of images or
is the product of images.
– Soviet Psychology and Vygotsky – established a dialectical focus on psychic activities.
• The joint outcome of inner biological and outer sociocultural conditions.
– Cognitive Schemas – Thematic structures of memories.
• Produced by the links between images and impressions that are developed and reinforced over time
through a process of social learning.
• Attitudes and opinions – Structural nature of social perceptions occupying a conceptual
space defined by evaluations of:
– Evaluative
– Potency All have an Emotive dimension
– Activity
15. II. CLASS AS AN ASPECT OF STRUCTURE
• Legitimizing myths – any coherent set of socially acceptable
attitudes, beliefs, values, and opinions that provide moral and
intellectual legitimacy to the unequal distribution of social value.
• Social class and the relations between antagonistic classes are more
than the hierarchical order of upper to lower class but are also based on
the ownership and control of capital.
– Class is a structure that translates inequality and power into different
life-chances opportunities.
• Life chances may vary with social position and some are more influenced by
race than others are.
• The notion of life chances does not describe a definable set that could be
represented as points on a surface. They are:
– Probabilistic, or uncertain, relationships between any particular location with a
social structure, and particular outcomes.
– Accumulations of advantage and disadvantage that accrue to people who
occupy different positions within the social structure.
– The proposed use of caste as a structural feature emphasizes the social
behavioral, rather than the economic, relationships.
16. III. SOCIAL STRUCTURE & DETERMINATION
• Social structure has a material force that produces what is
implicated in determining observable patterns in a variety
of social phenomena.
• Important to understand the nature of relations between
elements of the structure defined by class, as well as in
structures based on other organizing principles such as race
and gender.
– Class position
– Class identity
– Class consciousness
• Relationships within the service or information sectors
might also influence racial group consciousness.
– Ex. Routine efforts to survive economically by satisfying the
demands of the clients.
17. IV. RACE, SOCIAL STATUS & COMMUNICATION
• All members of racially identified groups participate to some degree in the
process of status production.
• Social status is conceptual and its links to self-esteem are relational.
– Self-concept – formed in relation to the reference groups and subcultures one
identifies and is identified with, and with the individual sense of self-worth based
on the shared features that we use to characterize people according to
race, ethnicity, class, and gender and reflected in terms of the characteristics of
one’s social life.
• Status and self-esteem are socially produced notions.
– Interactions involving esteem might be thought of as a zero-sum event in which
increases in status for one group necessarily mean a decrease in status of another.
• Ideology of consumption – transformation in capitalism where
consumption becomes the basis for individual and group identity.
• Commercial mass media – becomes an instrument of social control
because of the ways in which help to construct indicators of social status.
– Mainstream media is often criticized because for failing to reflect the diversity
within minority populations.
18. V. MARKET STRUCTURE
• Structural influence is an aspect of the social environment that
may limit or constrain the ability of the corporate controllers to
always have things as they wish.
• Capitalism – social formation determined by the domination of
social interaction by a process of material production.
– Competitive status of the market refers to the level of competition that
indicates the presence or absence of power within those markets.
– Consumer demand can be examined in relation to the specific attributes
of the communication market.
• Racial group membership and structural inequality represent
different structural features that are predictive of media
orientation and use.
– Racial composition of markets – become an important structural
feature to understand the relations between supply and demand.
• The pursuit of greater precision in the characterization of audience segments
produced the inclusion of racial identification to the traditional demographic
categories of age and gender.
19. IV. THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF RACE
• Classification is a form of knowledge creation – Race ≠ Ethnicity
– Race – is an unstable, unreliable, basis of classification
• Racial classification ≠ Racial Identity – Externally observable characteristics.
– Ethnic classification – even less reliable. Depends on a greater degree of
active choice that is influenced by society and cultural identity.
• Ethnicity and culture are historically and socially emergent.
– Ethnogenesis – process of ethnic identification that is developed in the service
of commercial interest with the support of government action.
• There is contemporary uncertainty about the meaning of racial
categories, the distinctions implied by racial classifications, and a
powerful impression that social relations and the distribution of life
chances are greatly influenced by such classifications.
– A complex of inequalities has resulted from the inability of racial and
ethnic minorities to voice their opinions in ways that can overcome the
constraints inherent in a structure of race and class based privilege.
20. • It is suggested that the social construction of race evolved through four stages that
reflect the influence of the political and economic concerns of the day:
– Racial typology – approach that sought to characterize races on the basis of clusters of
physical attributes supporting the view that each race was biologically different and
permanently distinct.
• In the 19th Century and early 20th Century to be anti-racist was the regarded as being anti-
scientific, unpatriotic and opposed to progress.
• Although is not commonly used today, it has not yet been swept away.
– Social Darwinism – Evolutionary hypothesis to explain the apparent variation in racial
characteristics and their relationships in clusters understood as an adaptation to
environmental conditions.
• Privileged biology over society
– Proto-sociology – Classification from a social system perspective.
• Focus was on race relations and not on race itself.
• An intent to replace race by caste because of the ways in which caste emphasized the relational
aspects of the problem.
– Black Power – Marked as an emergent nationalism and an active struggle to for self-
definition.
• Race was used as evidence that social practice had generated and reproduced inferior socioeconomic
status.
• Racial group identity expanded to include the notion of community.
– Multiculturalism – Suggested as the fifth stage. Political movement that extends the
aspect of choice involved in constructing what it means to be part of any group in
cultural terms that entail far more biology, and indeed, emphasizes social origins.
21. • Identity is socially constructed, not limited to an individual or personal frame of
reference. Is enacted through communicative behaviors and routine interactions
that analysis and characterization of the process of identity formation.
– Types of identity:
• Sociological identities (religion, social class, gender, etc.)
• Occupational identities
• Geobasic identities (rather than Racial) Asian, African, Latin, American, etc.)
• National identities
• Ethnic identities
• Political identities (emerging)
• Racial ideology – system of beliefs that is incorporated into a range of discourses in
ways that reinforce and reproduce beliefs and assumptions about individuals
because of their identification with a particular racial group.
– Recognition that race is a social construct has done little to suppress a common belief that it
is necessary and important for governments and courts to recognize this construction and use
it as a basis for legislative and judicial action.
• Prerequisite for illegal racial classification – The rules for racial classification reflect rules for social
relations, which ultimately reflect the distribution of power.
• Considered to be a hopeless task because the category schemes are inconsistent and vague:
Africans, Europeans, Asians, Hispanics, and American Aboriginals.
– An emergent political correctness created a need to develop alternative measures of racism.
22. • Racial discrimination and prejudice – component of racial ideology that emerged as a
product of differential social status and the orientation of actions taken within the legal
system toward the mitigation of social problems.
– Is a process that in general does not vary along class lines.
– Became an aspect of race relations around which experts argue and debate.
• Theoretical conversations about race have shifted in response to particular social and historical
circumstances from merely irrational and unjustified, to the achieved status of a more rational response to
individual interests.
– It have been shaped rather than discouraged by the rule of law by reflecting the influence of the
particular social and political concerns that dominate the social agendas and by changing the
importance of racial identity and the quality of life chances that people enjoy.
– Racial discrimination is the primary form through which the exercise of power transforms prejudice
or ethnocentrism into the experience of racism.
• Determination of group membership is an exercise of power that is not always tempered by concerns about
justice.
• Racial Stereotypes – aid to automatic and biased social perception that is
reinforced, enhanced, and then integrated into broader systems of meaning by our own
experiences and their different forms of communication.
– Are the result of a complex motivational social process and are developed and used as a product of
social interaction with a context-dependent functionality role. Useful in routine information-
processing tasks.
– Mass Media, which is to a great extent influenced by the logic of capitalist markets, makes profit a
dominant role in the reproduction of racial stereotypes.
23. • Racism – its definition changes with the shifts in the meaning of race and its
framing as a social problem.
– Racist behavior is the stigmatization of difference in order to justify advantage or
abuse of power.
– Is a system of structural inequalities and a historical process created and recreated
through routine practices.
• It is suggested that racism is both structure and process.
– Structure – forms of domination, which implies an exercise of power, exist and are
reproduced through the formulation and application of rules, laws, and regulations
and through access to and allocation of resources.
– Process – Structures exist only through the everyday practices through which they
are created and confirmed.
• Everyday racism – integration of racism into everyday situations through cognitive and
behavioral practices that activate underlying power relations. It has meaning only in relation to
the whole complex or relations and practices.
• Institutionalized racism and widespread discrimination contributes to self-esteem
and self concept and ensures very few opportunities to success.
– Development of cognitive maps and cognitive structures is dependent upon the
amount and quality of information one processes in a day-to-day routine basis.
• Media dependency – produces and reproduces a distorted or biased image of the out-group
and of role models that we use for self-evaluation.
– Information is likely to be mediated by other individuals or by the mass media and is therefore
structured by the interests that motivate or govern those sources.
24. • Ethnic humor – a type of humor in which fun is made of the
perceived behavior, customs, personality, or any other traits of a
group or its members by virtue of their specific sociocultural identity.
– Relies upon readily available stereotypes reinforcing the symbolic structures in which
they exist and do their cultural work, and represent another critical site for the nature of
structuration and the reproduction of racism.
– Subjective assessment – A joke’s power to amuse depends on the context and the way
it is delivered; whether one gets the joke or not depends on the nature of one’s
experiences accumulated over time.
• Symbolic function - The influence of group identity is substantial and the salience of identity is
socially determined.
• Propaganda – a strategic resource that involves a careful and
predetermined plan of prefabricated symbol manipulation to communicate
to an audience in order to fulfill an objective, which requires the audience
to reinforce or modify attitudes and/or behaviors.
– It is not directed towards the goal of understanding but toward the manipulation of
consciousness and the subsequent control of behavior.
– Important to distinguish between the consequences of intentional and unintentional or
unanticipated acts and understand their interaction to better comprehend the
reproduction of racism.
25. V. DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
LET’S TALK…
• What is the role of the communications media in helping to
shape the process through which social shared perspectives are
formed?
• How changes in technology, media ownership and
finance, market demographics, and audience preferences
influence representations of groups?
– How the audience incorporates these representations into its cognitive
structure?
• Is status determined by production or in terms of
consumption?
• How communications about race influences the distribution of
power?
– What would be better for society, to banish the concept of power from
the discourse of communications or to rethink this concept?
26. VI. A CRITICAL RESEARCH AGENDA
• The reason of understanding the world is to change it. However we cannot
change everything at once.
• According to the author, there is a need:
– For a community of professionals that understands, and helps others to
understand, that race need not be a determinant of the evaluative structures
that organize the distribution of life chances.
• We need scholarship that is directed toward finding patterns and not focused so
much at the level of individuals.
– The elite opinion and intellectual leadership is what enables the reproduction of
dominant ideological structures that make it likely that people will understand inequality
as the product of individual rather than structural inadequacies.
– To push forward the problems of specification and measurement, and for a
higher level of precision and agreement about the meanings we assign to
important concepts that are the raw materials of theories.
– To find a way to pool our resources and work collectively to develop archives of
media content analysis that would allow for assessment of the relations
between dominant frames in different media and shifts in public opinion over
time.
27. • Resentment has been identified as the dominant feature of
contemporary racial feeling.
– Neo-conservatism – color-blindness or desire to deny the existence of
racial difference through an emphasis on ethnicity or culture.
– New-liberalism – similar with regard to its position on color-blind policy
making but are more willing to invite government action on the basis of
other classifications. Fails in considering privilege.
• Color-blindness as an ideological process that it is attractive because of its
inherently egalitarian and democratic tilt.
• New abolitionists – actively engaged in a process that, if successful, might
dissolve the links between racial identity and status and other material
advantages by beginning changes at the top of the hierarchy where the benefits
are.
• Problems with understanding media effects:
– Insufficient data due to social desirability and unwillingness of people
to reveal their views on racial issues because they do not want to be
thought as racist or narrow-minded.
– While technology reduces the costs of processing information, the
costs of accessing public attitudes and opinions on political issues may
rise dramatically.
28. • Critical research directed to social goals is struggling because it
is harder for sponsors to see its profit and because those who
would benefit the most from it cannot afford to pay for it.
– An operational definition of racial identity should engage the
distinctions between forms of identity with an emphasis on
common experience in consumption (Weberian) rather than on a
common experience of oppression (Marxian).
• Although there are a variety of somewhat reliable and
predictive measures to assess the influence of different forms or
aspects of identity, there is not much progress in the utility of
different measures of racial identity.
– Standardized measures of ideological self-identification should be
developed and implemented in large-scale studies designed to
understand shifts and patterns in public opinion and social
behavior.
29. • The book aims to:
– Underscore the importance of understanding the ways in which
differences in social position are associated with attachment to
particular views and the ways in which people characterize each
other.
– Help us clarify some of the confusion about whether racism has
declined or merely been transformed and asses the impact of
progressive interventions.
– To clarify, understand and asses the influence of different groups
in the articulation of an ideology of color-blindness in opposition
to affirmative action and other race-based public policies and of
an ideological identity that produces racial class.
– To find out whether increasing group participation is a good thing
over all, or whether particular kinds of participation should be
privileged and targeted.
– To understand how the tension between a capitalist logic and
racialized social responsibility is being implemented in different
countries and different media markets.
30. I. Introduction
QUESTIONS
II. Communications & Race
III. Theoretical Perspectives of Communication and Race
A. Critical Theory, Cultural Studies & Political Action
B. Contemporary Thories
i. Culture and Cognition
ii. Class as an Aspect of Structure
iii. Social Structure & Determination
iv. Race, Social Status & Communication
v. Market Structure
IV. The Social Construction of Race
V. Discussion Questions
VI. A Critical Research Agenda
31. Intercultural Relations - 21st Century Communication Skills
Meenakshi Chhabra, assistant professor in the Intercultural Relations Program at
Lesley University, describes the value of learning to build relationships with people
across cultural barriers. importance of building communication skills in the 21st
century.
"There are always possibilities to connect to the other, no matter how challenging
those interactions can be."
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