Victoria A. Newsom – författare

An international group of esteemed scholars examines how religio-ethnonationalist power is communicatively produced, normalized, and resisted through discourse.This edited volume moves beyond conceptions of democratic decline as a purely institutional or electoral phenomenon to advance our understanding of how religion, nationalism, and media power intersect in struggles over democracy. Foregrounding the communicative processes through which affective narratives of exclusion, tradition, and morality are mobilized to legitimate authoritarian power, contributors demonstrate how discourse is simultaneously leveraged as both a mechanism of domination and a site of contestation as it shapes memory, identity, citizenship, and political belonging. Engaging interdisciplinary conversations across global contexts including North Macedonia, Malaysia, Nigeria, and the United States, contributors highlight not only how discursive tactics of amnesia, amnesty, and cleansing are utilized to sustain religio-ethnonationalist hierarchies but also how discursive resistance can be embraced to reveal the uneven conditions from which resistance emerges. By centering communication as a site of democratic struggle, this volume offers a conceptual framework for identifying how democratic backsliding is (re)produced and challenged, ultimately emphasizing the ethical and political stakes of memory, identity, and power in shaping the future of democracy.

Contained Empowerment and the Liminal Nature of Feminisms and Activisms examines the processes by which activist successes are limited and outlines a theoretical framing of the liminal and temporal limits to social justice efforts as “contained empowerment.” With a focused lens on the third wave and contemporary forms of feminism, the author investigates feminist activity from the early 1990s through responses and reactions to the overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022 and contrasts these efforts with anti-feminist, white supremacist, and other structural normalizing efforts designed to limit and repress women's, gendered, and reproductive rights. This book includes analyses of celebrity activism, girl power, transnational feminist NGOs, digital feminisms, and the feminist mimicry applied by practitioners of neo-liberal and anti-feminism. Victoria A. Newsom concludes that the contained nature of feminist empowerment illustrates how activists must engage directly with intersectional challenges and address the multiplicities of structural oppressions in order to breach containment.