Race and Ethnicity as Foundational Forces in Political Communication

Stewart M. Coles (Ph.D., University of Michigan) is Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Drawing from political communication, media psychology, and social psychology, he examines how individuals’ identities and media use, and the identities of mediated subjects, influence people’s political attitudes and behaviors, particularly in social media and political entertainment contexts. He has published in journals such as Communication Theory, New Media & Society, and Human Communication Research, and he and his work have been featured in popular press outlets such as the New York Times, CNN, and the BBC.Daniel S. Lane (Ph.D., University of Michigan) is Assistant Professor in the UC Santa Barbara Department of Communication. Working at the intersection of political communication, intergroup communication, and communication technology, his interconnected lines of research examine how digital media shape political engagement, intergroup relations, and political inequality. His research has appeared in outlets such as the Journal of Communication, Communication Research, Information, Communication & Society, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, Human Communication Research, and Social Media + Society.

“This collection makes a compelling case for the centrality of questions of race and ethnicity, and dynamics of racialization and racial power, as central to the future of political communication. Its contributors draw from an impressive range of epistemologies, methodologies, and contexts.” - Sarah J. Jackson, Presidential Associate Professor, Annenberg School of Communication, University of Pennsylvania, USA“This groundbreaking volume makes the definitive case for the necessity and urgency of placing race and ethnicity at the center of the field of political communication. The chapters clearly demonstrate that we simply cannot answer the big questions of our time without accounting for the role of race and ethnicity in everything from human psychology to the workings of powerful political institutions.” - Daniel Kreiss, Edgar Thomas Cato Distinguished Professor, Hussman School of Journalism and Media, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill“Race and Ethnicity as Foundational Forces in Political Communication calls for communication scholars and, consequently, the public to think more critically about the absence of discourse about race in research on political communication. Spanning approaches from big data analyses to case studies, the editors and authors signal that this work is ripe for a new look among scholars across the discipline.” - Catherine Knight Steele, Associate Professor, Department of Communication, University of Maryland, College Park

• Introduction: Race and Ethnicity as Foundational Forces in Political Communication 1. #politicalcommunicationsowhite: Race and Politics in Nine Communication Journals, 1991-2021 2. Differential Racism in the News: Using Semi-Supervised Machine Learning to Distinguish Explicit and Implicit Stigmatization of Ethnic and Religious Groups in Journalistic Discourse 3. “We Never Really Talked About politics”: Race and Ethnicity as Foundational Forces Structuring Information Disorder Within the Vietnamese Diaspora 4. Dimensions of Pandering Perceptions Among Hispanic Americans and Their Effect on Political Trust 5. Don’t Make My Entertainment Political! Social Media Responses to Narratives of Racial Duty on Competitive Reality Television Series 6. Destabilizing Race in Political Communication: Social Movements as Sites of Political Imagination