Drawing on 2 years of ethnographic research that included an engaged participant component, this article seeks to build a critical theory of technology adoption in urban communities. While the high cost of broadband Internet is undeniably an obstacle to adoption, we argue that solving the problem of cost is a necessary but not sufficient solution to the digital divide. To this end, the article contends that a community's relationship to communication technology—and their ability to see it as a political and cultural tool that can be utilized not just instrumentally, but more broadly as a way to fight poverty, inequality, and other forms of oppression—is a substantial factor leading to what we call emancipatory adoption.

Adding to the growing literature considering public relations practitioners as activists, this qualitative, interpretative research article explores the controversial idea of acting as spokesperson for a so-called leaderless social movement, Occupy Wall Street (OWS). Through interviews with members of the erstwhile OWS Press Relations Working Group in New York, this article explores their negotiated dual roles as both activists and practitioners. Using critical cultural theory with its emphasis on power, context, and history, the group’s media relations tactics are discussed with an emphasis on the role of spokesperson, revealing contested meanings about public relations work. The framework of the circuit of culture explains the constraints experienced by many of these activist practitioners as they navigated ideals of their movement that were often in conflict with their public relations practices. The study finds uneasy relationships with power in relation to internal and external communication. Specifically, the group disrupts the false binaries of managerial and critical cultural approaches to public relations, as well as agency and oppression through contextual power. Their work brokers a paradox – speaking to change the status quo through a media system arguably captured by the status quo, while using a tactic that was seen as equally problematic.

This article extends Coombs and Holladay’s (2018) social issues management model to provide new perspectives on activism and public relations. It also fills a gap in the literature on internal activism by analyzing the case of The Ogilvy Group and their employees, many of whom pushed for the agency to resign its work for U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Through a textual analysis of a leaked transcript documenting a meeting between Ogilvy management and internal activist employees, the communicative tasks of definition, legitimation, and awareness (Coombs & Holladay, 2018) are explored in a way that complicates identity and power. As public relations practitioners are increasingly called upon to either advocate for or against social issues, this study provides an interesting contrast, showing one interpretation of what happens when there is dissension in the ranks.

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The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) department offers immigrants wishing to naturalize, or become citizens, a package of study aids for the citizenship test, including a video. This essay argues that the video is much more than a study aid; it furthers the myth of American freedom, a myth that effectively erases the struggles of marginalized groups. Situated within critical cultural studies and semiotics, the essay describes the content of the video and interprets the myth. The deployment of diversity is considered, along with implications for immigrants who intersect with some of the marginalized or absent groups.

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