Howard-Williams, Rowan

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  • Publication
    CARGC Briefs Volume I: ISIS Media
    (2019-04-01) Damaj, Yara M.; Degerald, Michael; El Damanhoury, Kareem; Girginova, Katerina; Howard-Williams, Rowan; Hughes, Brian; Salih, Mohammed; Vilanova, John; Youmans, William
    The essays that comprise CARGC Briefs Volume I: ISIS Media began their lives as presentations at a small, by-invitation workshop, “Emerging Work on Communicative Dimensions of Islamic State,” held on May 3-4, 2017 at the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication at the Annenberg School for Communication. Consistent with CARGC’s mission to mentor early-career scholars, the workshop was a non-public event featuring graduate students, some affiliated with the Jihadi Networks of Communication and CultureS (JINCS) research group at CARGC, and others from around the United States and the world, in addition to postdocs and faculty members. Parameters were purposefully broad to encourage independent thought and intellectual exploration: contributors were asked to write short essays focusing on any single aspect of Islamic State that was part of their research. The result is a group of fascinating essays: using mostly primary sources (textual, visual, or audio-visual), examining several media platforms and modalities, considering multiple levels of theoretical deployment and construction, and shedding light on various aspects of Islamic State communication against the broad back drop of history, ideology and geopolitics, the following include some of the most innovative approaches to Islamic State to date, and promise a wave of fresh voices on one of the most important challenges to global order.
  • Publication
    A World Of Our Own: Climate Change Advocacy In The Anthropocene
    (2017-01-01) Howard-Williams, Rowan
    The effects of human impacts on the environment are often not comprehensible to people and have to be given meaning through communication. Such impacts, most prominently climate change, have increased to the extent that human actions are the dominant force in planetary biophysical systems. Yet these impacts are for the most part unintentional and not subject to democratic control. A critical discourse analysis of campaign material and media content examines how three advocacy groups – 350, a climate activist organization, The Breakthrough Institute, a think-tank, and The Nature Conservancy, an established conservation organization – discursively construct climate change. The three groups acknowledge the need to more consciously or deliberatively manage environmental impacts, and yet all have very different assumptions, objectives and tactics in their advocacy. Analysis of the communication activities of the organizations and how their ideas are represented and contested in other media shows not only how they construct the particular issue of climate change but their relationship to societal power relationships. How the organizations build their case for action involves discursive acts which define or re-define the boundaries between nature and society and what (and who) is to be included or excluded from political concern. Unless directly challenged, these new formations will reproduce existing power structures and inequalities.