Critical Media Effects Framework: Bridging Critical Cultural Communication and Media Effects through Power, Intersectionality, Context, and Agency

Abstract

In this essay, we advance the Critical Media Effects (CME) framework as a way of bridging two major subfields of communication that seldom speak to one another: media effects scholarship and critical cultural communication. Critical Media Effects is situated within the dominant mode of social scientific theorizing within media effects scholarship and draws on four key interrelated concepts from critical cultural communication: power, intersectionality, context, and agency. Critical Media Effects advocates for greater reflexivity, rigor, and nuance in theorizing about media effects to better respond to the complexity and dynamicity of emerging global sociopolitical mediated contexts. Recommendations, salient examples, and future directions for co-creating a shared research roadmap for CME are discussed. Through this work of bridging, we hope to promote more collaborative partnerships, productive engagement, and mutual solidarity across these two important subfields to address the most pressing social issues and challenges of the world today.

Media Use During COVID-19: An Investigation of Negative Effects on the Mental Health of Asian Versus White Americans

“…By incorporating these subtle and indirect forms of stigma in our measures, health communication scholars can better understand the ways in which media stereotypes influence minoritized populations. Even as this study illuminates our understanding of the mental health influence of media use during a particularly vulnerable historical moment (i.e., the COVID-19 pandemic), the findings reported here contribute to the growing corpus of research that seeks to address the important role of racial/ ethnic identity in media effects scholarship (Ramasubramanian and Banjo, 2020). The fact that media use differentially affects the mental health distress of racially/ethnically distinct groups is both theoretically and practically significant and invites further exploration of how racial/ethnic identity moderates media effects related to other facets of mental health and wellbeing.…”

Communication scholar-activism: conceptualizing key dimensions and practices based on interviews with scholar-activists

“…Although qualitative and interpretive methods are frequently used for communication activist-scholarship, this is not to say that empirical quantitative methods are not also essential for bringing about social change. Intervention or program evaluation research has often used multiple empirical methods to address several critical social issues, especially within health communication and media education contexts (Dutta, 2011;2020;Ramasubramanian & Banjo, 2020).…”

Critiquing Children’s Consumer Culture: An Introduction to The Marketing of Children’s Toys

“…Therefore, critical perspectives add depth to the social scientific study of children's material culture, including macro factors such as the social, political, economic, and cultural conditions that contour media effects (Ramasubramanian and Banjo 2020). When scholars undertake studies of children's culture from critical/cultural approaches, it becomes clear that discourses surrounding toys-including whom certain toys are meant for and what various toys and brands can signify about their owners' identities-have implications for our understandings of adults' expectations of children and of broader societal norms into which children are being socialized.…”