Focuses on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (VVM). Evaluates the critical responses of communication scholars and others to the VVM. Suggests directions for research which would attempt to explain the social functions and ideological uses of this extraordinary site. (MS)

Reexamines the history of the apprehension, consumption, and production of reality by means of the aural in light of developments in virtual reality technology. Suggests that, by acknowledging and examining its roots in aural media, the connections of virtual reality to the discourse of authenticity are made clear. (SR)

Proposes viewing journalists as members of an interpretive community (not a profession) united by its shared discourse and collective interpretations of key public events. Applies the frame of the interpretive community to journalistic discourse about two events central for American journalists--Watergate and McCarthyism. (SR)

Analyzes the status of the audience as a theoretical construct. Argues against the usefulness of a unified conception of audience effects. Develops an epistemological framework for reconstructive theorizations of the concrete structures and practices studied as audience issues. (MS)

Critiques Erving Goffman's research on the experience of radio frames by providing the results of a complete empirical phenomenological analysis of Goffman's report on data. (RAE)

Proposes four defining conditions for undoable phenomena and applies them to power, examining the foundation of its inevitability and looking for a lever to unhinge its constructions. Suggests, with four procedural steps, how power may be contested, rearticulated, and undone. Explains the distinction between power and force, and demonstrates the…

Examines a representative World Wide Web page about India to determine ways in which it addresses the "ingroup" of diasporic Indians and "outgroup" visitors to the site. Identifies several textual strategies including modes of formatting, use of language, specific selection of images and multimedia elements, and specific links…

Explores the multiple and heterogeneous deployment of the Other within discourses that intersect and contest each other. Shows how the 19th century discourse of "le femme orientale," which informed the Romantic critique of capitalism, was recuperated in a hegemonic manner to promote an expanding consumer culture. Discusses the colonial…

Examines news accounts of lives caught in violent political conflict--accounts of suffering and death that record a discourse closer to silence than to talk. Concludes that such journalism can be read as a flight from chaos and a demand for order, or as an appeal for human solidarity in the midst of history's cruelest contingencies. (SR)

Examines how, in the 1920s and 1930s, birth control advertisements (prolific and illegal) conflicted with the arguments for birth-control legalization. Applies M. Bakhtin's grotesque and classical categories and M. Douglas's pollution metaphors to analyze the language birth-control advocates used to distinguish between medical and nonmedical…