Frantz Fanon’s explosive Black Skin, White Masks is a merciless expose of the psychological damage done by colonial rule across the world. Using Fanon’s incisive analytical abilities to expose the consequences of colonialism on the psyches of colonized peoples, it is both a crucial text in post-colonial theory, and a lesson in the power of analytical skills to reveal the realities that hide beneath the surface of things.  
Fanon was himself part of a colonized nation – Martinique – and grew up with the values and beliefs of French culture imposed upon him, while remaining relegated to an inferior status in society. Qualifying as a psychiatrist in France before working in Algeria (a French colony subject to brutal repression), his own experiences granted him a sharp insight into the psychological problems associated with colonial rule.  
Like any good analytical thinker, Fanon’s particular skill was in breaking things down and joining dots. His analysis of colonial rule exposed its implicit assumptions – and how they were replicated in colonised populations – allowing Fanon to unpick the hidden reasons behind his own conflicted psychological make up, and those of his patients. Unflinchingly clear-sighted in doing so, Black Skin White Masks remains a shocking read today.

An Analysis of Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks

Deciding What's News: A Study of CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, Newsweek, and Time

In recent decades, struggles for recognition have increasingly dominated the political landscape.1 Recognition theorists such as Charles Taylor (1994) and Axel Honneth (1995) seek to interpret and justify these struggles through the idea that our identity is shaped, at least partly, by our relations with other people. Because our identity is shaped in this way, it is alleged that feelings of self-worth, self-respect and self-esteem are possible only if we are positively recognised for who we are. Consequently, for many political theorists, recognition is an integral component of a satisfactory modern theory of justice, as well as the means by which both historical and contemporary political struggles can be understood and justified.

The Politics of Recognition

Deciding What's News: A Study of CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, Newsweek and Time, Herbert Gans. Vintage Books, New York (1980), 393 pp., $5.95

* Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society, rev. ed. James W Carey. New York and London: Routledge, 2009. 205 pp. James W. Carey collected essays he wrote in the 1970s and 1980s into a volume titled Communication as Culture, originally published in 1989. Carey died in May 2006 after a long and influential academic career. This re-publication as a "revised edition" comes with a bibliography of Carey's lifetime production of 170 or so essays and book reviews, compiled by his son Daniel, and an insightful forward by G. Stuart Adam, a journalism scholarship fellow at The Poynter Institute. Shortly after Communication as Culture first appeared twenty years ago, as Adam points out, American Journalism devoted an issue to scholars' commentaries on Carey's essays. In the year he died, a book of essays by scholars, titled Thinking with James Carey, examined his life's work. So perhaps there's not much left to review and learn from a new reading of the work of a prodigious intellect whose ideas have already received a thorough engagement by his academic peers. What follows, therefore, is not so much a review in the classic sense as the reflection of one who practiced newspaper and magazine journalism for twenty-five years before spending a decade in a university working at the intersection of public policy, politics, and journalism. As media companies struggle with difficult challenges posed by technological change and severe economic shocks, publishers and editors, as well as journalism critics, teachers, and students, would find no better guide to thoughtful analysis of the future than Carey's case study of the telegraph and how it transformed not simply "communication" but society itself. Indeed, Carey's central insight is profound in its simplicity: that communication is both "a structure of human action" and a "structuring set of social relations." Thus, he argues, people inhabit the culture they create by and through their communication with one another. This leads to an important lesson for professionals and would-be journalists: They cannot see themselves solely as observers somehow apart from the dynamics they report and analyze, because the act of communicating itself shapes the community in which they live and work. One of the strengths of Carey's work is that it emerged from a moral core. He drew comfortably from religious intellectual traditions and applied lessons to today's secular issues. Fundamentally, Carey sought through his thinking and writing to contribute to building a good society. A second strength, related to the first, is Carey's devotion to democracy. In this devotion, he comes across as an idealist; he recognizes the factionalism and disagreements of a continental democracy, but he tends to celebrate person-to-person conversation that creates common ground for decision making. Though no provincial American, Carey clearly had in mind the shaping of democratic conversation in the United States. Still, it is important that in developing a theoretical construct for understanding communication, he seemed to have as a goal the building of a good, democratic society. Carey's approach to the news in a democratic society led him to delve into the intellectual conflict of Walter Lippmann and John Dewey. …

Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society

This article presents a general framework for deconstructing and classifying conflict news narratives. This framework, based on a nuanced and contextual approach to analyzing media representations of conflict actors and events, addresses some of the weaknesses of existing classification schemes, focusing in particular on the dualistic approach of the peace journalism model. Using quantitative content analysis, the proposed framework is then applied to the journalistic coverage in the Israeli media of three Middle-Eastern conflicts: the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, the conflict surrounding Iran's nuclear program, and the Syrian civil war. The coverage is examined in three leading news outlets – Haaretz, Israel Hayom, and Ynet – over a six-month period. Based on hierarchical cluster analysis, the article identifies four characteristic types of narratives in the examined coverage. These include two journalistic narratives of violence: one inward-looking, ethnocentric narrative, and one outward-looking narra...

/pdf/beyond-peace-journalism-3r6z09zfso.pdf

Beyond peace journalism

This article presents a general framework for deconstructing and classifying conflict news narratives. This framework, based on a nuanced and contextual approach to analyzing media representations of conflict actors and events, addresses some of the weaknesses of existing classification schemes, focusing in particular on the dualistic approach of the peace journalism model. Using quantitative content analysis, the proposed framework is then applied to the journalistic coverage in the Israeli media of three Middle-Eastern conflicts: the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, the conflict surrounding Iran’s nuclear program, and the Syrian civil war. The coverage is examined in three leading news outlets – Haaretz, Israel Hayom, and Ynet – over a six-month period. Based on hierarchical cluster analysis, the article identifies four characteristic types of narratives in the examined coverage. These include two journalistic narratives of violence: one inward-looking, ethnocentric narrative, and one outward-looking narrative focusing on outgroup actors and victims; and two political-diplomatic narratives: one interactional, and one outward-looking. In addition to highlighting different constellations of points of view and conflict measures in news stories, the identified clusters also challenge several assumptions underlying existing models, such as the postulated alignment between elite/official actors and violence frames

/pdf/reclassifying-conflict-narratives-in-the-israeli-news-media-4rghlnz33q.pdf

Reclassifying conflict narratives in the Israeli news media

Recognition is vital for conflict resolution. This study was designed to learn more about the factors underlying the willingness to recognize the pain and suffering of the opponent in the asymmetri...

Predicting Jewish-Israeli Recognition of Palestinian Pain and Suffering

A major barrier to resolution of asymmetric conflicts is the unwillingness of the stronger side to see the out-group as having the right to national self-determination. In the context of the conflict between Jewish Israelis and Palestinians, we investigate psychological factors related to this barrier. We first review the threat and dehumanization two-factor model that was developed by Maoz and McCauley to explain Jewish Israeli support of aggressive acts towards Palestinians that hinder the resolution of the conflict. Using this model, we then explore the extent to which perceived threat and dehumanization also predict – together with other ideological and demographic variables – Jewish Israeli attitudes towards Palestinian demands for national self-determination. Implications of the findings for the “barriers” approach in settings of asymmetrical conflict are discussed.

(Non)acknowledgment of rights as a barrier to conflict resolution: Predicting Jewish Israeli attitudes towards the Palestinian demand for national self-determination

Rotem Nagar

Papers

Beyond peace journalism

Reclassifying conflict narratives in the Israeli news media

Predicting Jewish-Israeli Recognition of Palestinian Pain and Suffering

(Non)acknowledgment of rights as a barrier to conflict resolution: Predicting Jewish Israeli attitudes towards the Palestinian demand for national self-determination