Eleanor M. Novek

Mass Culture and the American Taste for Prisons

Over the last 30 years, popular culture in the United States has demonstrated an extraordinary obsession with prisons. The stories Americans tell about themselves have involved outlaws and gangsters for more than a century, but today the nation’s cultural environment celebrates themes of punishment and retribution with increasing frequency. The United States has become what journalist Sasha Abramsky calls ‘‘a society marinated in the subtleties of criminal justice,’’ and its citizens increasingly choose to be entertained by stories about confinement. Movies, television dramas and comedies, reality shows, websites, toys, fashion, and tourist destinations based on incarceration all demonstrate the nation’s interest in and enjoyment of correctional themes. Prison-focused entertainment has become as American as football.

‘The devil’s bargain’ Censorship, identity and the promise of empowerment in a prison newspaper

A free press is necessary for a healthy democracy but how can imprisoned journalists speak the truth to power? To answer that question, this article maps the development of an inmate newspaper over two and a half years. In 2001, the author began teaching journalism classes at a state prison for women in the northeastern United States. Following the objectives of social justice research, the classes offered inmates literacy skills, vocational training and social benefits through regular independent publication of a prison newspaper. Such a publication proved to be a paradoxical ‘devil’s bargain’ - on one hand, a control mechanism employed by prison administrators and, on the other, a potentially empowering aspect of prison culture for inmates. Yet the intrinsic value of news-making demonstrates itself even in repressive circumstances. Because prison journalism helps incarcerated people enhance their self-efficacy in pro-social ways, it should be supported as a rehabilitative approach by prison administrators.

The Alternatives to Violence Project's Work for Peace Behind Bars

A young man wearing a khaki prison uniform perches nervously on the edge of a plastic chair. He is one of twenty inmates who will spend the weekend learning how to overcome hostility in the Alternatives to Violence Project. By the end of three days in a musty chapel or an echoing gymnasium, he will have a group of new allies and a clearly identified set of skills for approaching conflict in a peaceful way. If he practices these skills, he will do nothing less than transform the relationships and interactions that make up his life. Men and women in prisons and community settings across the United States and Rwanda, Colombia, Bosnia, Mexico, South Africa, the West Bank, the Sudan, and many other nations are doing the same thing: listening, talking, laughing together, and learning to reach inside themselves for new solutions to an ancient problem.

Service-Learning in Communication Education: A Case Study Investigation in Support of a Prisoners' Human Rights Organization.

This article offers a case study of a graduate class in communication research methods with a service-learning approach. Students were engaged in evaluating the public information campaign of a nonprofit organization exposing human rights abuses in US prisons. They gained hands-on experience in the use of a variety of basic research methods and offered their client insight into its current and potential audiences. With a community partner to serve, the students understood the importance of systematic research inquiry and its value to nonprofit organizations. The project demonstrates the value of service-learning in communication education and describes how best practices can be applied for the development of similar courses in the discipline.

Observation is Only the Beginning: A Case Study of a Committed Communication Intervention

Feminist scholars have long been interested in emancipatory philosophies and practical advocacy research, and have pioneered new methods for enacting social change and sharing this work in the discourse of our field. This article chronicles the development of a learning method called “committed communication intervention.” By emphasizing ethics of care, dialogue, and the teaching of strategic communication practices, committed communication intervention opens up important avenues for further inquiry by feminist communication scholars.

West Urbania: An ethnographic study of communication practices in inner‐city youth culture

In the inner city community here fictitiously referred to as West Urbania, young African American high school students inhabited a sociocultural realm with a distinct set of values, rules, and practices. Although the young men and women faced discrimination, lack of opportunity, pervasive media stereotyping, and alienation, they treasured self‐expression, using it as a means of resistance and self definition. The oral, written, and nonverbal communication practices of these youth empowered their daily efforts to balance the conflicting pressures of the social worlds of street and school, home, and peers. This ethnographic study of West Urbania youth culture illuminates the use of communication as a strategic tool that, in some contexts, can enable members of nondominant social groups to empower themselves by sharing common values and reframing their identities.

Communication and community empowerment

Scholars of contemporary society say that communities empower themselves when people share common goals and act together for social change. These communities often share a vision of “civil society,...

Gates of conflict: Communication, symbolic spaces and the construction of difference in faith communities

Marking symbolic boundaries is an essential act of group identity. But the imaginary borders that unite some antagonize others; real‐world tensions evolve from these metaphoric moves of inclusion and exclusion. In two case studies of conflict over metaphorical boundaries erected by members of religious faiths, this paper demonstrates how symbolic communication devices have consequences both inside and outside the boundaries they set out to establish.

Refraining a house of mirrors: Empowering community in a grassroots leadership program

Scholars assert that communities strengthen themselves by bringing residents together and mobilizing them to solve local problems. What communication practices enable individuals to act together for the common good? This paper uses a communication perspective to explore the development of a community leadership program in an economically troubled resort city in the northeastern United States. Combining the methods of participant observation, open‐ended interview, and collaborative dialogue, the author traces how the communication practices are used in the first year of a grassroots empowerment initiative. The article illustrates how meaning making and reframing enabled some group members to construct visions of a renewed city and imagine themselves as public leaders. It also identifies constraints encountered by the group as members tried to form connections and collaborate with one another.