Adam Hodges

Ideologies of language and race in US media discourse about the Trayvon Martin shooting

This article examines the discourse about race and racism that ensued in the US media after the shooting death of an African American youth, Trayvon Martin, by a neighborhood watch volunteer, George Zimmerman, in February 2012. The analysis examines news programs from the three major cable television channels in the United States: CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC. The theoretical framework builds upon Hills (2008) discussion of the ‘folk theory of race and racism’ in contrast to critical race theory, and asks, to what extent does the mainstream medias discourse about race remain embedded in folk ideas and to what extent (if at all) does the conversation move beyond those ideas? The paper aims to unpack the ideologies of race and language that underpin talk about race and racism in an effort to expose the hidden assumptions in the discourse that hinder more productive dialogue on the topic. (Critical race theory, folk theory of race and racism, George Zimmerman, ideology, language ideology, media discourse, race, race talk, racism, slurs, Trayvon Martin)*

Surveillance & Modesty on Social Media: How Qataris Navigate Modernity and Maintain Tradition

Recent research on social media use in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region has focused on their role in the Arab Spring uprisings, but less work has examined the more mundane uses of these technologies. Yet exploring the way populations in the MENA region use social media in everyday life provides insight into how they are adapted to cultural contexts beyond those from which they originated. To better understand this process, we interviewed eleven Qatari nationals currently living in Doha, Qatar. Our analysis identifies ways users, particularly females, practice modesty, manage their own (and by extension) their familys reputation, and use social media to monitor and protect others. These findings are placed within a framework of social, or participatory surveillance, which challenges conventional notions of surveillance as a form of control and instead shows how surveillance has the potential to be empowering.

Rethinking Context: Leveraging Human and Machine Computation in Disaster Response

Human-computer systems that treat context simply as enumerated facts, rules, or axioms about the surrounding physical and social environment will always have trouble handling information requiring human pragmatic interpretation. One way to overcome such limitations is to draw upon human pragmatic awareness to create hybrid systems capable of both extracting large quantities of data and processing that data in a way that is meaningful to users. The Web extra at http://youtu.be/pqI2qcigiCw is a video demonstrating Artificial Intelligence for Disaster Response (AIDR), a free, open source, and easy-to-use platform to filter and classify relevant microblog messages during humanitarian crises.