About this Research Topic

Background

Decades of political struggles and social pressure from enlightened publics have forced the media to heed its ethical role in reflecting and creating discourses on racial minorities and other vulnerable populations. One of the last holdouts is admitting nonhuman animals into the group of vulnerable populations.

Today, ethical media guidelines are freely available for best practices in reporting on animals as sentient beings (ASB). Turning such guidelines into common practice, though, has faced many challenges. Prejudices like racism and speciesism continue to obstruct the creation of an accountable, responsible media. For instance, in 2021, most US media broadcast the image of a manatee with the word ‘Trump’ etched into her back, without any contextual explication of either the suffering involved in the action of etching or her belonging to a species that has become vulnerable. This shows us how evening television news and social media spread unethical, inhumane accounts of ASB as 'humorous' memes. The rise of white supremacist discourses within anti-environmental movements exacerbate this worrisome situation.

These two prejudices, racism and speciesism, are deeply interconnected and may continue to persist when challenged separately. What we need today, then, is a new popular direction that goes beyond fighting each prejudice separately. For example, we need to explore the interconnected forms of violence and suffering of humans and ASB under white supremacy. Specifically, we need a common frame of media ethics that addresses the diverse ways in which the culture, politics, and histories of systemic racism and speciesism intersect in mediated forms of communication. This common frame is important because it will allow us to create popular, more successful resistance to both forms of prejudice.

The value of this Research Topic, then, comes from exploring how the study of mediated communication helps us understand our world and the increasing role technology plays in it. Given the global trends of digitization and media convergence, the Research Topic benefits this broad inquiry in two ways. The first is by exploring how technological advances that allow increasing civic participation through social media open new possibilities for the convergence of social movements, such as anti-racism and anti-speciesism. The second is by exploring what new forms of ethical regulation will address the challenges of speciesist and racist misinformation and hate speech posed by the same digital media.

The essays in this article collection grapple with how the building of a responsible, accountable media that is both anti-racist and anti-speciesist would be like from a number of diverse perspectives, such as critical animal media studies, media ethics, media governance, critical cultural studies, critical animal rhetoric and media studies (CARMS), environmental communication, political communication, political science, international relations, and sociology, to name a few. The Research Topic fosters intersectional media research into creaturely racism, exploring the responsibilities of media educators and consumer-citizens, in order to recognize rhetorical maneuvers that harness attitudes of hatred to harm specific sentient beings. Other essays, meanwhile, address discourses and actions that foster and effect productive changes toward intersectional awareness by including ASB within the ethical purview of media practices.

Our contributions are intended to point out and sensitize audiences to harms hidden in plain sight, while also seeking ways to productively address the problems and challenges of theorizing racism within CARMS, so as to curtail and prevent discursive, systemic, and visceral violence. The aim is to produce inclusive, heuristic emerging CARMS by connecting the Anthropocene to critical race scholarship. In particular, contributors can foster such connections by building on the important work by Nuria Almiron, Carrie P. Freeman, Carol Adams, and other leaders in the multidisciplinary area of critical media/critical cultural studies of ASB in the Anthropocene. Contributors can also build on the research of critical race scholars such as Zakiyyah Iman Jackson and M. Shadee Malaklou, as well as legal scholars like Josh Milburn and Alasdair Cochrane, whose works focus on ‘biotic’ or ‘creaturely racism,’ to consider how to incorporate nuanced, respectful, and ethical perspectives in portrayals of sentient beings (aside or beyond human animals) in the present context of the racialized social underpinnings of media.

We seek contributions that 1) problematize current issues related to racism in CARMS, or 2) attempt to explore proactive ways we can use scholarship, teaching, activism, and other forms of theorizing and educating to surmount biotic or creaturely racism within CARMS.

Key questions include the following:

• How are ASB used in the media to advance racist ideas?
• What normative and structural aspects of public communication allow for speciesism, racism, xenophobia, ethnocentrism, and white nationalism to harm Black Indigenous People of Color (BIPOC), Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI) people, and ASB in intersecting ways?
• In what ways has critical animal studies been implicated in racist historical narratives, and what can scholars do to interrupt that problematic history that feeds into present-day media (Malaclou 2020)?
• How can we arrive at a common frame of media ethics based on anti-racism and anti-speciesism from one or more of the following perspectives: critical animal media studies, media ethics, media governance, critical cultural studies, critical animal rhetoric and media studies, environmental communication, political communication, political science, international relations, and sociology?
• What new possibilities do global trends of digitization and media convergence open for the confluence of social movements such as anti-racism and anti-speciesism?
• How can the specific affordances of different social media platforms be employed to challenge racism and speciesism in various settings?
• How do technological advances in communications benefit and/or challenge civic participation against or in support of racism and speciesism?
• Will new forms of ethical regulation address the unforeseen challenges of speciesist and racist misinformation and hate speech posed by the digital media?
• How can the single/multidisciplinary study of the media address the needs of activists, educators, and informed citizens for new approaches to resisting interconnected racist and speciesist media frames?

Keywords: critical animal rhetoric and media studies (CARMS), critical race theory (CRT), sentient beings, Anthropocene

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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