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22 Social Representations As Anthropology of Culture

Ivana Marková, Department of Psychology, University of Stirling, Stirling, Scotland, UK

• Published: 21 November 2012
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The Theory of Social Representations studies formation and transformation of meanings, knowledge, beliefs, and actions of complex social phenomena like democracy, human rights, or mental illness, in and through communication and culture. This chapter examines the nature of interdependence between social representing, communication, and culture. It first explains differences between mental, collective, and social representations with respect to culture and language. It then focuses on two meanings of social representing: first, on representations as a theory of social knowledge and second, representations as social and cultural phenomena and as interventions in social practices. Rationality of social representations is based on diverse modalities of knowing and believing shared by groups and communities; it is derived from historically and culturally established common sense. This perspective justifies the claim that social representations should be treated as anthropology of contemporary culture. Finally, the chapter discusses main concepts linking social representations, language, and culture.

In this chapter we explore interdependencies between social representing, language, communication, and culture. In contrast to individual representations, social representations are dynamic phenomena that are embedded in culture and formed and transformed in and through language and communication. The researchers of social representing aim to understand how citizens think, feel about, and act on phenomena that are in the center of societal, group, and individual interests and discourses, be they political, health-related, environmental, or otherwise. Such phenomena pose significant challenges for social psychology generally and social representing specifically. Their understanding cannot be fitted within narrow and static frameworks, which still dominate large parts of social sciences. Instead, the study of social phenomena requires researchers’ and practitioners’ creativity in broadening and deepening the scope of their disciplines. This involves a scholarly interest in the ways in which traditions and novel ideas enrich each other, in the ability to understand how the relatively stable and new phenomena struggle for dominance and transform one another and how these tensions and conflicts are reflected in thought and language. The Theory of Social Representations, we shall argue here, provides researchers and practitioners with the means of coping with such challenges and so ensures the credibility of social psychology as a scientific discipline.

Because the concepts of “representation” and “representing” are used in different fields of social sciences and psychology, the study of social representing must dispel confusions between social and individual representations, the problem or rationality and irrationality, and misunderstandings of meanings of concepts linking social representing with cultural anthropology. Such issues also pose challenges for social psychology as a social scientific discipline: Can we make it theoretically convincing and useful in practical interventions?

Representation and Culture

During its long history in European scholarship, the meaning of representation has undergone considerable changes and diversification. Today, there are three main meanings of representation in human and social sciences and in philosophy. They stem from diverse epistemological traditions, address different levels of analysis, and imply contrasting relations with respect to culture and language.

Mental Representation, Culture, and Language

The first meaning refers to mental representations. It has been associated, at least since the seventeenth century with philosophers René Descartes and John Locke, with glorification of the cognition of the individual and with mirroring of the objective reality. According to this tradition, the self's cognition is the only source of certain knowledge or representation of reality.

The concept of mental representation as a mirror of objective reality has nothing to do with culture. The proponents of this perspective attribute any mistaken representations to the influence of other people and, indeed, of culture. As Descartes ( 1637/1985 ) put it, true knowledge cannot be pursued by an “example and custom.” Whereas Descartes did not say much about language, the philosopher John Locke ( 1690/1975 ) argued that the perfection of knowledge could be hindered or facilitated by incorrect or correct use of words. Although views of these philosophers were highly original in the context of philosophy and science of the seventeenth century, they have become a hindrance in social sciences of the twenty-first century. Their variations with respect to representations, culture, and language still play a significant role in contemporary cognitive sciences and in philosophical traditions based on foundational epistemology (for criticism of foundational epistemology, see Rorty, 1980 ; Taylor, 1995 ). Reflecting on views of foundational philosophy, the anthropologist Gellner ( 1998 , p. 3) characterizes them by saying: “We discover truth alone, we err in groups.” In his influential book Reason and Culture , Gellner ( 1992 ) claims that human reason is innate and universal and that it exists independently of culture. On the one hand, it can be argued that this idea expresses an essential presupposition that all humans have the same potential for rationality and for the development of intelligence and so that it mitigates racism. Gellner insists that culture and common sense knowledge hinders this universal human potential: “reason is latent in us all,” but “most cultures fail to promote it” (Gellner, 1992 , p. 53). On the other hand, we shall see later, to ignore culture in the growth of human intelligence leads to a paradox: any human individual always belongs to one culture or other, and it remains questionable what it could possibly mean to claim that reason can be explored independently of culture or that culture fails to promote reason.

Collective Representation, Culture, and Language

A different meaning of representation was held by the sociologist Emile Durkheim who, despite remaining philosophically within the framework of Descartes and Kant, dramatically altered the concept of representation. First, Durkheim ( 1898 ) sharply distinguished between individual and collective representations. Individual representations are of physiological and neurological nature and do not have much to do with knowledge. In contrast, collective representations do not originate in single minds but arise directly from social structures. They are generated in social life and in social groups, institutions, and cultures. For Durkheim, representing referred to various forms of thinking—whether scientific, religious, social, or ideological—rather than to specifically defined objects. Such meaning was fully in agreement with the French use of the word representation in arts, literature, and daily discourse as well as in social sciences.

Collective representations are social facts, and as such, they form the basis of all understanding, knowledge, and logic. Durkheim's ambition was to develop the idea of collective representations as a theory of sociological knowledge. Being social facts, collective representations impose an irresistible pressure on individuals who yield to their coercion, internalize them, and so perpetuate specific forms of thinking, feeling and acting. For something to be knowledge, it must be stable. Durkheim held the position that representations change very slowly during the historical journey of mankind from religion to science and from less to more adequate representations.

In Durkheim's time, social and cultural phenomena were understood as intertwined and Durkheim's concept of collective representations formed an interface between culture and society; he used the term social both for social and cultural systems. Representations included religion, normative constraints of society, moral orders, social solidarity, as well as systems of beliefs and knowledge. Being social facts, collective representations are external to individuals who acquire them through internalization. Language, too, is a social fact. It circulates in society, forms the individual's social environment, and imposes itself on the individual. When the individual acquires language, he/she adopts the whole system of social thoughts, their classifications, and evaluations. Words fix ideas and transmit them from generation to generation. Therefore, language is a social thing (Durkheim, 1912/2001 ; Marková, 2003/2005 ).

Social Representations, Culture, and Language

Having considered relations between mental and collective representations with respect to culture and language, in the rest of this chapter we turn to social representations.

Building on the ideas of Durkheim and Piaget, Serge Moscovici has proposed an original Theory of Social Representations and developed it, both conceptually and empirically, in La Psychanalyse: Son Image et Son Public (Moscovici, 1961 /76). This book was published in English as Psychoanalysis: Its Image and Its Public (2008). This classic explores transformations of professional and scientific knowledge of psychoanalysis into everyday thinking and discourse of various social groups, and the mass media reporting, in a specific socio-political culture in the late 1950s in France. But we need to make a general point: it would be a mistake to understand the transformation of professional and scientific knowledge into everyday thinking as a naïve form of thinking and developing simplified lay theories. Instead, these transformations into common sense thinking and knowledge are accomplished and enriched through different means of communication and images; they involve arguments based on trust and distrust of others, collective memories, conscious and unconscious beliefs, myths and metaphors, fears and hopes. Following the publication of La Psychanalyse , social representing has been studied in various social, political, health-related, and other kinds of phenomena preoccupying the minds and discourses of general public (for a comprehensive review, see Wagner & Hayes, 2005 ).

The Dynamic Nature of Social Representing

Moscovici's social representations, in contrast to Durkheim's collective representations, are dynamic: they arise and are maintained and transformed through interaction and different forms of communication between the established social structures—for example, traditions, on the one hand, and the individuals’ and groups’ mental and social activities and social practices on the other. From the inception of the theory, language and communication have been vital features of representing, and this is already expressed in La Psychanalyse . As Moscovici explains, a representation is always directed at others: it speaks through pointing something to someone; it communicates through mediating meanings and symbols to someone. Representing and communicating is jointly generated by human subjects and groups that have different histories and experience. Their interaction does not follow the Durkheimian path of the progress from less adequate (e.g., religious representations) to more adequate (e.g., scientific representations). Arising in traditions, social experience, and communication, social representations are discontinuous; emotions, contents of beliefs, and images are sensitive to socio-cultural changes and to tensions and preferences of the Zeitgeist.

In contrast to collective representations that refer to various ideas and forms of thinking, social representations refer to specific objects or specific social phenomena. For example, the way citizens think, feel, and act (or represent) democracy depends on their historical and cultural experience as well as on their knowledge of, beliefs, and images about contemporary socio-political circumstances as well as of their expectations of the future. What is important to emphasize, however, is that it is not the object that is social. On the contrary, social representations arise from the fact that objects or phenomena are socially shared (Moscovici, 1988 ; Wagner, 1998 ; Wagner et al., 1999 ).

Unlike Durkheim's time, contemporary meanings of the notions “social” and “cultural” are not synonyms, although the boundaries between them are not always clear. The notion social ranges from usages in social sciences and their subdisciplines (e.g., economics, sociology, social psychology, politics, etc.) to professional fields like social security, health services, social work and social practices, among many others. Numerous attempts and failures to define culture as an entity point to inherent difficulties of this notion, and these difficulties also transpose themselves with respect to their relations to social representations (Duveen, 2007 ). These problems are raised by Jodelet ( 2002 ) in her article, “Social Representations in the Field of Culture.” The author draws attention to the changing relations between psychology, anthropology, and culture in the course of the last two centuries, arising both from diversifications within human and social sciences and from the more recent cognitive revolution, among other factors ( see also Valsiner, 2003 ).

During the five decades after the publication of La Psychanalyse , the explorations of social representations have become widely differentiated. A large volume of research has been carried out in different social and cultural conditions. Individual researchers have subscribed to divergent underlying epistemologies, and numerous studies have been performed on different topics, contents, and structures. As a result, some researchers (e.g., Wagner et al., 1999 ; Wagner & Hayes, 2005 ; Palmonari & Emiliani, 2009 ) speak about social representational approaches—or schools of social representations—rather than about a single theory. For example, these authors refer to the Aix-en-Provence school based on structuralistic approach that emphasizes central nucleus and periphery of representations (e.g., Abric, 1994a , 2001 ; Flament, 1994a , 1994b ; Guimelli, 1994 ), whereas the Genevean school of Doise specifies organizing principles of social representations (Doise, 1985 , 1986 ). Jodelet's approach is anthropological and cultural (e.g., Jodelet, 1989/1991 , 2002 , 2006a , 2008 ); Wagner, Duveen, and their collaborators (Wagner et al., 1999 , 2000 ; Duveen, 2007 ) bring to attention the role of social construction and discourse; and Valsiner draws on the role of semiotic mediation and social experience (e.g., Valsiner, 2003 ). In addition, one can hardly discuss social representations and culture without foregrounding language, communication, and, more specifically, dialogicality as a major feature of the relation between social representations and culture (Marková, 2003/2005 ; Valsiner, 2003 ).

Within these diversities in focus, we can nevertheless distinguish between two fundamental meanings of the concept of social representations that underlie all approaches (Jodelet, 1989/1991 ; Duveen, 2002 ; Marková, 2003/2003 ). First, the Theory of Social Representations is a theory of social knowledge. As such, it establishes networks of concepts and figurative schemes that are generated in and through tradition, common sense, daily knowledge, and communication and that are shared by particular groups and communities. The theory of social knowledge enables the researcher to define research problems. Second, social representations or social representing refers to concrete social phenomena and to forms of apprehending and creating social realities in and through communication, experience, social practices, and interventions (Jodelet, 2006a ; in press ) and semiotic mediation (Valsiner, 2003 ). This also enables the researcher to understand problems posed by the theory and to attempt their answers. Let us consider these two meanings in some detail.

Social Representations As a Theory of Social Knowledge

There is a fundamental difference between what is considered by knowledge in cognitive sciences and in the Theory of Social Representations. In the former, building blocks of epistemologies are knowledge and justified beliefs arising from the cognition of the individual. In parallel with this, in social sciences, epistemologies are often considered as paths from beliefs to knowledge, implying a gradual progress in intellectual development (for a historical account of these ideas since ancient times, see Lovejoy, 1936 ). Such was the position, for example, of Jean Piaget whose epistemology focused on transformations of less adequate patterns of thought to more adequate ones. In his studies of moral development, Piaget ( 1932 ) conceptualized this path as a gradual transformation of beliefs into knowledge or as a transformation of the morality of constraint to the morality of cooperation. Asymmetric relations—say, between a child and an adult—imply constraint and, therefore, only the possibility of belief or compliance resulting from the authority of the source. In contrast, symmetric relations in terms of social status and influence between individuals allow for co-operation and, therefore, for the mutual construction of knowledge (Duveen, 2002 ). As we have already seen, Durkheim's ideas concerning the transformation of less adequate to more adequate collective representations throughout human history take a similar path. The Piagetian and Durkheimian way of progress in the intellectual development relies on classical—that is, the Kantian form of—rationality. This means that the action of reason and of intellect excludes partly or totally those actions based on motives, desires, or emotions—that is, on irrational activities (Kant, 1788/1873 ). The Piagetian rationality (1970), like the Kantian rationality, is universal. All children pass through the stages of operational development, and through these stages they acquire, step by step, higher forms of intelligence.

Although informed and inspired by Durkheim and Piaget, Moscovici takes a different route:

The proper domain of our discipline is the study of cultural processes which are responsible for the organization of knowledge in a society … In parallel more attention should be paid to language which has not until now been thought of as an area of study closely related to social psychology. ( Moscovici , 1972/2000 , pp. 55–56)

But how can one link, epistemologically, culture, language, and knowledge, in and through social representations?

From Taxonomic Psychology of the Ego-Object to Representing Through the Ego–Alter–Object

Moscovici's ( 1970 , 1972/2000 ) analysis and criticism of what he called a “taxonomic” social psychology is instructive. It will lead us to overcoming problems of taxonomic psychology and to understanding the fundamentally important link between culture, language and knowledge. The study of the relation between the Ego and the Object in social psychology refers to no more than classification—or taxonomies—of stimuli or variables. For example, in taxonomic social psychology that is undertaken in numerous laboratory experiments, the Ego is treated (or classified) as undifferentiated and undefined; it is a subject without culture. The aim of such experiments is to discover how social stimuli affect classes of variables like perception, attitudes, judgment, and so on. But humans live in societies and are differentiated from one another in many ways; they live in cultures and they communicate. Therefore, “others” are not “other subjects” with whom humans compare themselves—for example, as in Festinger's ( 1954 ) social comparison theory— in order to reduce uncertainty with respect to what is right and wrong, or good or bad; neither are they subjects whose presence facilitates the Ego's activities, as in Zajonc's ( 1965 ) social facilitation theory. Instead, the Ego and the Alter communicate and jointly generate knowledge and social representations. Therefore, we must substitute the dyad Ego–Object, in which the Ego is taxonomically undifferentiated, by the triad Ego–Alter–Object. Once we introduce the Ego–Alter, we are immediately in the realm of language, communication, and culture. The Ego–Alter are not undifferentiated and undetermined subjects; they interact, communicate, and speak. As it is already clear in La Psychanalyse , representing takes place in communication. If knowledge is generated neither by the Ego nor by the Alter alone, but jointly by the Ego–Alter, then the minimum unit in the formation of knowledge cannot be expressed as a relation between the Ego–Object but as a triadic relation, the Ego–Alter–Object (Moscovici, 1970 , 1972/2000 , 1984 ; Bauer & Gaskell, 1999 ; Marková, 2003/2005 ; Jesuino, 2009 ). But who is it that stands behind these abstract notions, the “Ego” and the “Alter?” Although in this generalized model the “Ego–Alter” could mean an interaction between any kind of the self and other(s), in concrete and contextualized dialogical situations, there is always the specific Ego and the specific Alter (or the self–other[s])—for example, “I–you,” “minority–majority,” “I–group,” “group–another group,” “I–culture,” and so on. Indeed, these specific Ego and Alter are embedded in other dyadic Ego–Alter interactions. For example, a mother–child interaction (Ego–Alter) takes place in a specific culture; this means that we can conceptualize this mother–child dyad as the Ego within a particular culture (Alter), or that this same dyad can be conceived as the Ego within a specific social group (Alter), and so on. Or a conversation between two individuals is not just an exchange of words between I and you that takes place in a specific here-and-now, but it has its past, present, and future. Moreover, parents, leaders of political groups, friends, the “generalized other,” and so forth, speak through the mouth of each conversational partner. All these social and language-based interdependencies make the dyadic relations between the Ego–Alter dynamic, with implicit and explicit meanings affecting their discourses and contributing to transformation of representations in all dialogical participants. They all contribute to different dialogical perspectives and create tensions among them.

Language and communication as a point of departure in epistemology of social representations has yet another implication: to communicate means to take diverse routes, leading once to intersubjective understanding between individuals or between groups or cultures, once to conflict; to negotiation, to compromise, or to a firm self-positioning. Therefore, communication does not necessarily lead to a better understanding and “true knowledge.” In contrast to the ascent theory of knowledge toward science and true knowledge that was adopted by Durkheim and Piaget, the Theory of Social Representations does not presuppose progress toward higher forms of knowledge or toward more adequate representations. Instead, it presupposes transformation of one kind of knowledge into another one; transformation of different kinds of knowledge is pertinent to specific socio-historical and cultural conditions. This is why the triangularity of the Ego–Alter–Object forms the basis of linking language and communication, culture, and social representation.

The Dialogicality of the Ego–Alter in Mikhail Bakhtin

We can arrive at the triangularity of the Ego–Alter–Object from a different theoretical perspective, like the dialogicality of the Ego–Alter in Voloshinov's ( 1929/1973 ) and Bakhtin's ( 1981 ) approaches to language and communication. For these scholars of the early part of the twentieth century, alike, social knowledge and social reality is jointly created by the Ego–Alter. In Voloshinov's and Bakhtin's work, too, the Ego and Alter dialogically co-constitute one another in a dynamic figure-ground set-up. I am using the term dialogicality to characterize the fundamental capacity of the Ego to conceive, create, and communicate about social realities in terms of the Alter. What the human individual has become through the work of the past, and what his/her prospects are for the future, results from dialogicality (Marková, 2003/2005 ).

To my mind, these two epistemological approaches, the one stemming from Moscovici and the other arising from Bakhtin ( 1981 , 1979/1986 ), enrich one another and provide potential, in the Theory of Social Representations, for a more focused study of relations between knowing, believing, language, and speech. In both epistemologies, the Ego and the Alter transform one another's representations in and through dialogical and symbolic interactions. The concept of transformation in both approaches is characterized by tension and by multifaceted and heterogeneous relationships between the Ego and Alter. There can be no single mind without other minds: they dialogically co-constitute one another. Neither for Bakhtin nor for Moscovici can dialogue be neutral. Neutrality can be only artificially imposed but daily speech is always judgmental, evaluative, and orientated to creating new meanings.

Bakhtin expressed this idea pertinently in his analysis of Dostoyevsky's novels. Consciousness must be in interaction with another consciousness to achieve its proper existence: “justification cannot be self- justification, recognition cannot be self- recognition. I receive my name from others, and it exists for others (self-nomination is imposture)” (Bakhtin, 1984 , pp. 287–288).

Social Representations As Phenomena and As Interventions

The second meaning of social representations refers to the ways in which humans apprehend, interact with, and create their social reality. As they attempt to orientate themselves and create meanings of events in their lives, humans form representations of complex social phenomena that are in the center of social life and social disputes, whether they are political, ecological, or health- or community-related. Resources for generating social representations are phenomena that disrupt routines, turn them upside down, and call for action. Specifically, firm or irresistible beliefs ( see below) concerning, say, democracy, management of banks, social responsibility, mental illness, distrust, freedom of speech, and so forth, are sources of action, and they instigate social change. Complex phenomena obtain their specific and multileveled meanings in interdependence with culture and in relation to other representations within that culture and community. For example, the representation of freedom of speech would be related to other social representations and actions within that particular culture, like political protests against terrorism, expressions of abuse of the dominant political Party, censorship of any dissent, of the media, and the like. Thus, freedom of speech would have different meanings in relation to different semiotic networks and social phenomena. Two points should be mentioned as fundamental with respect to culture: social representations are phenomena in the making and representing can take part of action and intervention.

Social Representations Are Phenomena in the Making

In emphasizing relationships between social representations and communication, Moscovici (Moscovici & Marková, 1998 , pp. 393–394) draws attention to viewing them “in the making, not as already made.” This characteristic is essential both historically and developmentally. Social representations are not quiet things (Howarth, 2006 ); being phenomena in the making, social representations are formed and transformed in and through asymmetries, conflict, discontinuities, and tension. Representing, like communication, requires commitment. For example, one cannot study influence and innovation processes between majorities and minorities by removing tension and engagement: “Whether in conversation or in influence processes, one deals with change, with negotiation between two opposing partners—one cannot exist without the other” (Moscovici & Marková, 1998 , p. 394).

Interdependencies between communication and different social groups can be illustrated by Duveen's analysis of communication systems in Moscovici's ( 1961/1976 ) La Psychanalyse: Son Image et Son Public . Specifically, Duveen ( 2008 ) analyzes Moscovici's thoughts about social groups in relation to different communicative systems through content analysis of the French press. Focusing on different types of social groups in relation to the three genres of communication—that is, diffusion, propagation, and propaganda—Duveen identifies specific forms of affiliation corresponding to each communicative genre and consequently also to different representations of the members of the in-group and the out-group in each instance. He characterizes diffusion as the voluntary association of the members of in-group who possess a skeptical intelligence, whereas the out-group embraces forms of dogmatism. Duveen describes this kind of group in terms of sympathy. Propagation, on the other hand, refers to groups in which a central authority sets limits to creativity or intellectual curiosity. The out-group does not share the belief in the legitimacy of such authority or the relevant ideology. Duveen calls this kind of group a communion. Finally, propaganda is used by groups whose political commitment and organization defines the way of conduct of in-group. In contrast, the out-group is either committed to a different kind of ideology or simply does not share the ideology of the in-group. Duveen characterizes such group in terms of solidarity. His analysis shows that commitment to a particular kind of ideology elicits a particular kind of communicative genre. It illustrates that communicative genres of groups are part of their particular cultures and that, therefore, representing, like communication, is never a neutral exchange of information. Moreover, if we attempted to remove tension from communication, “it would become a kind of dead psychology” (Moscovici & Marková, 1998 , p. 394).

Thus we arrive at an important feature of representations as phenomena in the making: Social representations are structured semiotic mediators that are constantly in the process of innovation, created in and through conflict and tension (Valsiner, 2003 ). In experiencing tension, humans attempt to construct a predictable world out of great diversity and regulate their conduct. Referring to Moscovici's back-and-forth movement between experiencing and representing Valsiner ( 2003 , p. 73) concludes: “representing is needed for experiencing, while experiencing leads to new forms of representing.”

Representing As Action and Intervention

Another feature of representing, Valsiner ( 2003 ) maintains, is its implication for action and social change, or its function as intervention. Jodelet ( in press ) characterizes intervention as a practice involved in an “explicit and intentional project of a deliberate act of change.” Intervention encourages transformation of knowledge and behavior of individuals and groups toward better standards of living. Jodelet specifies three forms of activities interconnecting social representations and intervention: first, social representations can modify thinking of individuals or groups about a practical issue; second, they can transform practices, and these, in turn, can lead to transformation of representations; and finally, intervention of social representations is intentionally directed at producing changes in activities of individuals and groups concerned.

The relation between intervention practices and social representations is itself an object of research practice (Abric, 1994b ), in particular in health research (Jodelet, 2006a ; Jovchelovitch & Gervais, 1999 ; Morin, 2004 ) or in education (Garnier & Rouquette, 2000 ). For example, intervention should allow for exchanges between traditional and new forms of knowledge (Quintanilla, Herrera, & Veloz, 2005 ), the preservation of culture, and its negotiation with emerging alternatives in society (Jodelet, 2006b ). Doise ( 2002 ) regards social representations of human rights as interventions into social relations, whether these concern relations between individuals and groups, or individuals and institutions. Human rights must be clearly defined precisely because they are interventions of one kind or other.

Culture and Social Representations Are Relational Phenomena

Referring to two ways of studying social representations (which basically correspond to the two main meanings as discussed in this section), Jodelet ( 1989/91 ) emphasizes that when we focus on positions held by individuals and groups with respect to objects, representations are treated as structured fields. By “structured fields,” she means relations between contents contributed by subjects (or the Ego and Alter) and principles that organize contents, like cultural schemata, norms, and so forth. This perspective draws attention, again, to the relation between social representations and culture. I suggest that this does not mean to consider a social representation on the one hand, and culture as its context on the other hand, and to ask how they are related. Equally, it would be wrong to consider culture as a container within which one can identify a set of specific social representations.

Jodelet's concept of a structured field, I suggest, can be viewed as something like the concept of an electromagnetic field in physics of relativity. Electromagnetic field is a totality of forces that exists “between the two charges and not the charges themselves, which is essential for an understanding of their action” (Einstein & Infeld, 1938/1961 , p. 151). Thus “force between particles,” rather than “behavior of single entities” defines the field. Equally, we cannot understand the specificity of the Theory of Social Representations without taking on the concept of the force of interaction that binds elements to one another as complements, rather than as behavior of single entities (individuals, groups) that come to interact with one another. Taking Jodelet's concept of the structured field, individuals and groups are not undifferentiated subjects as in the taxonomic psychology ( see above), but their meanings are defined in and through concrete society or culture. Their internal interaction (in contrast to external interaction; e.g., in the analysis of variance) constitutes a new reality: the interacting components define one another as complements, whether this involves institutions vis-à-vis environment, institutions vis-à-vis groups, one group vis-à-vis another group, or social representation vis-à-vis culture ( see above, the Ego–Alter). Like an electromagnetic field, the structured field of social representations is dynamic. It is open to participants’ new experiences and to social change.

There is yet another implication of the concept of structured field. Just like when speakers communicate, they select different ways of expression with respect to one another depending on their relations, status, experience, and otherwise, so when they represent a phenomenon they are in an intimate complementary relation with culture. In other words, it is not the case that the same culture would be in relation with a set of different social representations. Such a position would be something like Piaget's mountain seen from different perspectives. In this case, the mountain remains the same, but the child's position is different and through the growth of intellectual development, the child learns to understand this. In contrast, the relation between social representation and culture is unique. Each social with culture in a specific manner; it selects different aspects of that culture because not all aspects are relevant in the same way for each social representation. Consequently, the forces of interaction between them imply that for each representation we have a slightly different meaning of culture. If we return to communication between groups and their communicative genres, propaganda and propagation view different aspects of culture. The former places emphasis on authoritarian aspects of the culture, whereas the latter focuses on more democratic features.

We need to view forces as both constraining and stimulating. In Moscovici's words, “society is an institution which inhibits what it stimulates. It both tempers and excites … increases or reduces the chances … and invents prohibitions together with the means of transgressing them” (Moscovici 1976 , p. 149).

Social Representations As Anthropology of Contemporary Culture: The Case of Rationality

Throughout his career, Serge Moscovici (e.g., 1987 , 1993a , 1988/93 ; Moscovici & Marková, 1998 , 2006 ) has persistently insisted that the Theory of Social Representations is—or should be treated—as anthropology of contemporary culture. Cultural anthropologists are concerned with the totality of life of social groups under study—that is, with beliefs and knowledge, myths, images, as well as with social practices in daily living. To understand these phenomena, anthropologists study them in relation to one another, like meaningful wholes, rather than as independent elements that, if need be, could either be joined together or disjoined. In the previous section, I touched several times on the problem of rationality, culture, and social representations. This issue is significant in contemporary social sciences, and it raises specific questions in relation to social representing; therefore, in this section, I turn attention to this issue in some detail.

Rationality and Irrationality in Social Sciences

Whatever we can say about rationality and irrationality of, and within, social sciences, it is necessary to place this issue in the context of natural sciences. Since the end of the seventeenth century, natural sciences have been based on “knowledge which eliminates mystery. In contrast to Greek science it does not end in wonder but in expansion of wonder,” as says Michael Foster ( 1957 , p. 53) in his treatise of “Myth and Philosophy.” Since the seventeenth century, natural sciences have prided themselves on being rational disciplines.

In contrast, social sciences started their scientific career as irrational disciplines. As Moscovici ( 1988/1993 ) reminds, they originated in the study of phenomena like nationalism, religion, myth, and beliefs. For example, Weber and Durkheim commenced from religion, Simmel from the relativity of values, and Marx from a kind of the Hegelian concept of historical forces. Vico, Herder, Hamann, and Humboldt were developing ideas of relativism and cultures. Other social scientists, like Le Bon, Ortega y Gasset, or McDougall, preoccupied themselves with the study of collectives and crowds in which rational individuals turned themselves into irrational beings.

Since the nineteenth century, the ideas of relativity, variability, and the evolution of species have been drawing attention to the importance of perspective-taking in the growth of knowledge. Yet perspective-taking has influenced natural sciences and social sciences differently. Natural sciences, despite the influence of theories of evolution and relativity, defined these scientific discoveries in rationalistic manner and so remained rational disciplines; in social sciences, however, we can observe a split between rationalistic and less rationalistic (or non-rationalistic) approaches.

In social sciences—specifically in anthropology and social psychology—the meaning of rationality has become a subject of keen interest. This has led to the search for universals that apply to all humans and to all cultures. Consequently, this has raised questions about the sources of relativism and irrational beliefs. Rationality as opposed to relativism even forms titles of classic volumes like those by Wilson ( 1970 ; Rationality ) and by Hollis and Lukes ( 1982 ; Rationality and Relativism ). The contributors to the latter volume suggest that the problem of understanding relativism and irrational beliefs arises from the fact that different cultures, languages, and the minds of others can be understood only within their own idiosyncratic socio-historical situations, rather than universally. Can we, therefore, identify anything transcultural among humans? Does culture challenge “the very idea of a single world” ( ibid , p. 1)? The dichotomy between the presupposition of universal rationality and questions concerning the sources of irrational beliefs as well as their rich and extensive presence in different cultures have led to the search for different forms of relativism. For example, researchers have been concerned with weak and strong forms of relativism, types of representational beliefs (convictions, persuasion, opinions), and different kinds of translation, interpretation, and explanation of beliefs.

Yet such questions can hardly be settled by academic discourses about rationality and relativism. Cultures are no longer isolated in their geographical ghettos. Therefore, Harris ( 2009 ) argues that it would be less misleading to abandon the notion of a singular rationality and speak, instead, about rationalities in the pluralistic sense. The contemporary world of societies is opened to other cultures and it set the stage for permanent situations of uncertainty moving cultures in different directions. In this situation, reason is not a private domain of the individual but it must be negotiated (Rosa & Valsiner, 2007 , p. 697). A narrow rationality of the individual defined in formal terms cannot meet the world of ambiguities of the contemporary world, and it transcends not only individual reason but also a particular cultural reason. In these circumstances, judgments of what is right and wrong and what is and is not ethical guide any kinds of preferences, control the individual and social choices, and confront different reasons for choosing something rather than something else. In these confrontations, “Reason then turns into Rationality ” ( ibid , p. 697), giving rise to Ethics and to Objectivity that emerges in and through transformations of rules and new norms. As Rosa and Valsiner ( ibid , p. 698) argue, “Rationality, Ethics and Objectivity” (all with capital letters) cannot be disentangled from one another. It is in this sense that we shall view rationality and social representations.

Reason and Cultures

The interdependence between culture, rationality, and social representations is perhaps most clearly expressed in Moscovici's ( 1993a ) lecture on Razón y Culturas (Reason and Cultures). One could say that the red thread through this lecture is an ethical concern of culture and social representations. Moscovici notes that the Cartesian approach discarding example and custom has also led to discarding culture, whether religious or profane, and substituted it by a narrow concept of rationality. However, to rationalize in this narrow way, Moscovici argues, means to ignore moral and ethical values of traditions in human histories and cultures as well as their symbolic values. He raises the question as to whether this narrow approach means that social psychology has nothing to say about arts or literature or whether this means that humans are satisfied with perceiving others, making judgments about objects, or looking for motivations of their conduct. Moscovici notes that humans have deep experiences in and through living in their cultures; they read novels, appreciate arts, listen to music, and experiment with ethical and moral values. These issues that have been neglected by social psychology are brought back to life by the Theory of Social Representations. Moscovici draws on three fundamental concepts: social representations, anthropology, and culture.

The lecture on Razón y culturas was written at a time when it became clear that the cognitive revolution failed to cope with complex human and social phenomena. In the late years of the twentieth century, cultural psychology gained importance because it was thought that it would solve questions of economic, educational, and political psychology as well as of child development and transformations of mental faculties in adulthood, migration, and nationalism, among others. Cultural psychology was seen as a plausible alternative to individualistic and mechanistic approaches (e.g., Bruner, 1985 ; Jodelet, 2002 ; Valsiner, 1987 ; 1989 , 1998 ; Valsiner & Lawrence, 1996 ) in focusing on intentionality, indigenous psychologies, language and communication, and on semiotic and symbolic practices. But, Moscovici points out that even if cognitive revolution were to succeed, these phenomena could be understood only with reference to culture. But instead, as we have seen in the previous section, contemporary social psychology and anthropology are still disputing problems of rationality and the relation between universality and cultural relativism. These problems are not new.

Three Paradoxes of the Individual and Collective Mentality

Moscovici ( 1993a ) identifies three historically established paradoxes with respect to individual and collective mentality; both Durkheim and Lévy-Bruhl struggled against them in their particular ways. Therefore, Theory of Social Representations, to fulfill its role as anthropology of contemporary culture, needs to address these paradoxes.

The first paradox concerns individual rationality and collective irrationality. As we saw at the beginning of this chapter, for Descartes and Locke, only the individual was rational whereas culture and language were sources of error. Yet no individual starts thinking and talking from nothing like the biblical Adam; each individual lives in a culture and in language. Durkheim acknowledged this paradox, and therefore, for him, all representations were rational beliefs; however, as mankind progressed from religion to science, some became closer to true knowledge than others. Collective representations are socially true, as Durkheim ( 1912/2001 ) states in “The Elementary Forms of Religious Life.” They are founded in the nature of things and they hold to and express reality. Religions, too, express reality, and therefore, all are true in their own fashion: there are no religions that are false. All religions respond, although in different ways, to the given conditions of human existence, and this is why for Durkheim a collective representation is a rational belief. In contrast, and as Moscovici ( 1998a , p. 134) analyzes this question, Lévy-Bruhl showed that members of different cultures did not view rationality of social representations in the same way. He has studied throughout his life the ways of thinking of primitive cultures and tried to understand why it was not possible to explain one form of thought by another one.

The second paradox to which Moscovici refers concerns the presupposition of “the mental unity of mankind” that contradicts with the observation that local cultures are very diverse. This paradox leads to the question as to whether it is possible to find any commonalities within these diversities. It is this question that is being vehemently discussed by social scientists and particularly by social psychologists and anthropologists, as we indicated above.

The difficulty of resolving this paradox might be magnified by ancient beliefs that were clearly expressed in Darwin's assumption that all species could be placed on an upward continuum and that humans differed from animals in degree but not in kind (Lovejoy, 1936 ; Ingold, 2004 ). As Ingold explains, for Darwin, “the evolution of species in nature was also an evolution out of it” (Ingold, 2004 , p. 210, his emphasis) as the mind progressively liberated itself “from promptings of innate disposition.” This means that ancestors of humans became humans gradually, in stages, rising from primitive savages to humans, developing (in degrees) reason and language. But at what point does an animal become a human?

If no organic being excepting man had possessed any mental power, or if his powers had been of a wholly different nature from those of the lower animals, then we should never have been able to convince ourselves that our high faculties had been gradually developed. But it can be shown that there is no fundamental difference of this kind … yet this interval is filled up by numberless gradations … Differences of this kind between the highest men of the highest races and the lowest savages, are connected by the finest gradations. ( Darwin , 1859/1874 , p. 157)

Darwin stated that in The Origin of Species he aimed to show this continuous development of species toward perfection (compare this with Durkheim's and Piaget's ideas toward progress). Thus the idea of gradual perfection might have led to an implicit assumption that cultures could be at different stages of their development, and it seems that this assumption is implicit in the ideas of rationalists and relativists that we discussed above.

The third paradox concerns the difficulty of intergroup or intercultural communication. Moscovici notes that groups or cultures in general believe that others understand their point of view but, in fact, others are not always capable of understanding others. Groups are often closed to the perspective of other groups, and communication between groups is absent even if groups occupy the same public space. This incommunicability affirms mutual incompatibility between different social representations and diverse forms of communication, and it characterizes our present society, which consists of numerous groups with noticeable antagonistic representations. For example, Europeans can hardly understand exotic beliefs of primitive assumptions. Moscovici maintains that a question like, “What objects constitute the world around us?” cannot be answered otherwise than by specifying the framework of a particular representation to which it is pertinent. Loyalty to certain values makes groups insensitive to values of others (Geertz, 2000 , p. 70). The third paradox results in incompatible implicit or explicit ethnocentric beliefs. These beliefs, on the one hand, are based on assumptions of superiority of the own group, and at the same time, groups propagate multiculturalism.

How does the Theory of Social Representations respond to these three paradoxes? The first paradox, arising from treating the individual and group as independent entities is being resolved by treating the Ego–Alter as interdependent. The second paradox, arising from the narrow treatment of rationality, is substituted by fiduciary rationality (see below). The third paradox can be surmounted by the reflection of the group on the existing incommunicability and attempting to improve communication. Yet overcoming this paradox remains one of the challenges for social representing. In conclusion, all paradoxes arise from the difficulty to overcome the traditional epistemology based on reasoning capacities of the individual, the narrow concept of rationality, and the treatment of groups as independent categories.

Fiduciary Rationality

Interdependence between the social representation and culture of a group also makes the communication within a group preeminent above the communication with outsiders. I suggest that to understand the nature of this preeminence, we need to return to the epistemic question of rationality in the triad Ego–Alter–Object. The Ego–Alter dialogical relation within a group comes from the ethics of common sense pertaining to social representations of that group. Social representations captured by common sense within a group, Moscovici argues,

are analogous to paradigms, which, contrary to scientific paradigms, are made partly of beliefs based on trust and partly of elements of knowledge based on truth. In as much as they contain beliefs, validating them appears a long, uncertain process, since they can be neither confirmed nor disconfirmed. ( Moscovici & Marková , 2000 , p. 253)

Within the epistemological triad of Ego–Alter–Object, relations between these components can take on different forms and strengths. For example, if the Ego searches for knowledge of this or that, he/she might pursue the route of own discovery and autonomous thought, focusing, within this triangularity, more strongly on the Object than on the Alter. In this case, the Ego would examine, in a step-by-step strategy, dispassionately and systematically, the object of knowledge. Dispassionate knowledge can be expanded by new learning, or it can be suspended, resisted, or ignored. Moscovici ( 1993b ) calls such kinds of knowledge (or beliefs) resistible.

For example, if the knower does not care about certain facts like “The Earth is not flat,” or “AIDS is caused by a virus,” then he or she might ignore, not think about, or suspend such facts and substitute them by others that appear more convincing. In a way, in such cases we can say that we possess beliefs just like other kinds of possession; if we do not need them any longer, then we can dispose of them.

Another kind of relation within the triangularity of the Ego–Alter–Object could be based on a strong relation between the Ego and Alter, whereas the relation between the Ego and Object would be treated as secondary. In this case, knowledge/beliefs can range from those that Moscovici calls irresistible to those that would function as constraints—be it compliance, conformity, or obeisance. Let us consider the latter, irresistible beliefs. Such beliefs can hardly be changed through evidence to their contrary, by facts, or by persuasion. Irresistible beliefs can lead to self-sacrifice and other-sacrifice of individuals and groups, rather than to their change. Such strong beliefs within a group are often based on trust and trustworthiness of the other. Irresistible beliefs “are like perceptual illusions: we are not a liberty to dismiss them, to have them or correct them if need be. Like many ideas, memories, or rituals, they take possession of us and are … independent of our reasoning” (Moscovici, 1993b , p. 50).

The rationality of these forms of relations in the epistemological triad is based not only on knowledge and justified beliefs but on the totality of human experience embedded in, and accumulated through, history and culture. It includes the struggle for social recognition, desires and their symbolic transformations, ethics and morality, myths and metaphors, judgments and evaluations of the self/other relations, and objects of knowledge. It is the epistemology of living experience and of daily thinking rooted in common sense, which is being transformed into new social representations when conditions for them are obtained.

In his analysis of Razón y culturas , Moscovici ( 1993a ) argues that what makes one group distinguishable from another one is “the act of privileging a type of representation and as a result, a form of communication” with other members of that group. He calls this kind of group loyalty the fiduciary rationality . As I understand it, fiduciary rationality is a form of dependency among group members that arise from within, from trust and loyalty, rather than from an outside pressure. Fiduciary rationality functions like irresistible beliefs. It is rooted within the group and it binds groups together. Rationality of the common sense, too, is based on fiduciary rationality.

We need to view social representations of various dependencies within a group—for example, rules and norms of acting and constraints of group members and solidarity and sympathy as established in and through tradition, history, and culture. They are present already in informal organizations that develop from within the group, before any more formal organization is formed. Similarly, communication is based on an inner contract among the in-group members. A contract is an ethical requirement for communication (Rommetveit, 1974 ), and we can say with Mikhail Bakhtin that there is no alibi for communication.

Concepts Relating Social Representations, Language, and Culture in Empirical Research

The term culture permeates a great deal of empirical research on social representations—particularly the research that aims to separate itself from narrow rationalistic and cognitive perspectives. This research examines diverse topics ranging from political, ideological, and historical issues to mental health, illness, social services, and child development, among others. As one would expect, in many studies the terms social representations and culture are rather nonspecific and could be easily replaced by other terms like opinions, attitudes, stereotypes, or prejudice in the case of the former, and context, situation, or community in the case of the latter. In view of this, in this section I focus only on those studies that theoretically enrich this growing field addressing relations among culture, language and communication, and social representations. To do this, I focus on three fundamental concepts of the Theory of Social Representations that make such contributions—specifically on cognitive polyphasia; figures and metaphors; and communicative and cultural themata. These concepts, we shall see, are not mutually exclusive or exhaustive, and I can do no more than to draw attention to them.

Cognitive Polyphasia and Heterogeneity in Thinking and Dialogue

One of the basic features of the Theory of Social Representations from the beginning has been the focus on dynamic co-existence of distinct modalities of thinking and communication in common sense knowledge (Moscovici, 2008 ). These distinct and rich modalities of thinking and communicating co-exist in communicative actions, contribute to viewing the issue in question from different perspectives, and so enable formulation of diverse arguments. They originate from knowledge and beliefs shared by social groups, and they have been established through their cultural and historical experiences. Such communication-centered thinking is directional and controversial, although it checks and validates its normative coherence (Moscovici, 2008 , p. 168). It forces humans to take up their own positions in social situations and defend them; it is the thinking that judges, evaluates, criticizes, and makes proposals for action. Moscovici coined these diverse modalities of thinking and communicating as cognitive polyphasia .

It is not that humans change their ways of thinking according to their mood, temporary preferences, or personality characteristics. The concept of cognitive polyphasia is inherently dialogical. The divergent modalities of thinking are articulated as specific Ego–Alter communications. This point is important: We relate to others dialogically, which means that we express our thoughts as it is specifically pertinent with respect to this or that Alter. Whereas a Cartesian scholar would expect that the thought of the individual should be rigorous and should follow an identical logical route from one moment to the next, in the Ego–Alter dialogical communication, different cognitive and emotional goals employ heterogeneous modes of thinking. To think means to pursue diverse mental routes. These may range from scientific to religious, from literal meanings to metaphoric interpretations, from jokes to formal expressions, and so on. They are suited to and articulated in different contexts of which they are parts. Speakers create links to others’ communications, anticipating their responses, reactions, and feelings. Moreover, the speakers’ dialogues are also filled with ideas of absent others; in communication, speakers express commitment and loyalties to views of those who are not physically present in dialogue or they object to, reject, or contest opinions of absent “others.”

Probably no other work has provided a deeper insight into cognitive polyphasia than Jodelet's ( 1989/1991 ) research on social representations of madness. We can see here that cognitive polyphasia dominates different kinds of communication among villagers, and Jodelet examines in these contexts the production of social representations from communication, different modes of thinking, and knowledge. She shows that cognitive polyphasia emerges from the villagers’ necessity of coping with fear of mental illness and enabling villagers to live together with patients. At one level, most villagers do not believe in medical dangers coming from mental patients. They know that mental illness is not contagious and that the lodger with mental illness does not transmit germs or microbes as in the case of tuberculosis. At another level they believe in contamination, but these beliefs remain unspecified because they are difficult to articulate. Beliefs take form of folk-fantasies, superstition, and convictions of a magic power. Jodelet emphasizes the persistence and forms of dual appeal in speech and actions of villagers, ranging from “biological and social, to ancestral, indeed archaic, representations of insanity with their magic contents borrowed from the realms of animism and sorcery” (Jodelet, ibid , p. 300). At the same time, villagers pride themselves on living in modern ways, on using advanced technology like fast trains or television, and on being aware of new means of medical treatment. Jodelet raises the question as to how can archaic beliefs retain their power in the face of modern medical treatment. She comments:

The embedding of these beliefs in the language codes which are transmitted by communication and the everyday acts which are transmitted by tradition, both conditions of collective memory, suffice to explain their permanence, not their intensity of character or the veil of secrecy with which they are covered. ( Jodelet , ibid , p. 300)

Such diverse meanings and beliefs are usually implicit and hidden in linguistic codes and in meanings of words. One may guess that they have been unconsciously transmitted for generations and that the contradictory forms of knowledge and belief have their specific expressions in particular social situations.

Other researchers have presented many examples of cognitive polyphasia in common sense thinking, and we can find excellent reviews of these studies (for example, see Duveen, 2007 ; Jovchelovitch, 2007 ; Wagner & Hayes, 2005 ) showing diverse forms of thinking in different social and cultural settings and among different groups. Numerous studies show that different cultural communities—for example, in India (Wagner et al., 1999 ), in Chinese immigrants in the United Kingdom (Jovchelovitch & Gervais, 1999 ), or citizens in Turkey (Narter, 2006 )—think about health issues both in terms of traditional ways of thinking and modern medicine. Cognitive polyphasia also dominates new and old ways of thinking about environment and science (Castro & Lima, 2001 ). Psaltis ( 2011 ) is concerned with diverse forms of thinking between Greek and Turkish Cypriots, relating them to varying meanings, emotions, distrust, and threat. These forms of thinking about the Cyprus issue express cognitive polyphasia when groups consider solutions to the problem from the point of view of the past, the present, and the future.

Research on cognitive polyphasia directs attention to shifts and changes in societies that experience movement from traditional forms of thinking toward modern forms. Yet it shows that traditional elements of representing, for example, mental illness, are deeply embedded within the communal life and are drawn “into a more active form of reflection and change through this process of cultural contact, communication, and exchange” (Duveen, 2007 , p. 557, his emphasis).

Wagner and Hayes ( 2005 , p. 235) have argued that the concept of cognitive polyphasia highlights two research areas. Instead of treating language and thought as independent, “representations are social because of their articulation within the context of their genesis and enactment.” The other research area places attention on the processes of change and transformation in representational systems. Just as a contemporary society's culture is constantly in flux and transformation and rarely in the state of equilibrium, so are the modes of thought and representations within it. Wagner and Hayes observe that cognitive polyphasia emerges primarily when members of groups are coping with new conditions during their lifetime and that transformations in forms of thinking and communicating continuously run between different generations.

Figure, Myth, and Metaphor

From the outset, the Theory of Social Representations included the figurative dimension—or images and metaphors—as features of representing. The term figure is preferable to image because imaging could be confused with mirroring or with a passive reflection (Moscovici, 2008 , p. 20). I wish to emphasize once more that the transformation of one kind of knowledge into another one, including that from science into common sense, involves creating metaphors, figures, and myths. Scientific discoveries diffuse themselves into common sense not as simplified versions of science; transformation of scientific knowledge into common sense knowledge is accompanied by creating figurative schemes and metaphors. It is well-documented that the science of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has had a profound effect on literature, art, and public imagination (e.g., Beer, 1993 ). For example, the discovery of X-rays at the end of the nineteenth century has led to artists’ and public's images of the invisible world and to fantasies and occult ideas. More recently, metaphors of illnesses like cancer, tuberculosis, and HIV/AIDS in language and thought and their transformations in public representations were captured by Sontag ( 1978 , 1989 ). Political, economic, and educational changes, too, are accompanied by new images and metaphors. The collapse of the Soviet bloc was marked by creating new symbols in re-emerging states. For example, Baltic States, in designing their new banknotes, chose symbols that represented preferred values of the newly created free nations (Mathias, 2008 ). Images, Moscovici ( 2007 , p. 9) maintains, speak to the public and accelerate communication. In her chapter on “Crossing Latin America: Two French perspectives on Brasil and Mexico,” Jodelet ( 2007 ) shows that since ancient Greece, alterity or others have always played crucial roles in imagination. The discovery of the New World has created, from the beginning, rich forms of imagination of indigenous peoples in Latin America by European intellectuals, arts and literature, as well as social scientists and has contributed significantly to generating social representations filled with imaginary others.

If we turn to the research on figurative schemes, metaphors, and images in social representations, we find that it has considerable methodological implication. To access processes of thinking and communication, questionnaires and scales are substituted by other means such as drawings, analyses of the media images, posters, and by studies of semiotic contents of these.

Representing in Drawings of Maps

One of the first studies of figurative schemes was the exploration by Milgram and Jodelet ( 1976 ) of drawings representing mental maps of Paris. The study showed that subjects were not drawing maps based just on their personal experiences but that they were transmitting images of certain subcultures and ethnic groups to which they belonged. For example, certain places were drawn only by those belonging to special professions—for example, slaughter houses were drawn by butchers but scarcely by anybody else. Other places, such as the icons of the town like Notre Dame, Place de la Concord, or the Eiffel Tower, were drawn by nearly everybody. We can say that drawings express historical-cultural networks of meanings that are part of subjects’ and subgroups’ experiences, knowledge, and feelings about the place where they live (Guerrero, 2007 ). Institutions that societies create are nourished by collective memories, myths, national identities, and imagination (Banchs et al., 2007 ).

Imagining based on drawings of maps inspired extensive studies in Latin America (Arruda & de Alba, 2007 ). In her study of maps of the city of Mexico, De Alba ( 2007 ) shows that the symbolic construction of the city is an imaginary sphere in which mythical references, mystical beliefs, reveries, and urban legends have no correspondents in the real world. An interesting theoretical issue discussed in Arruda and Ulup's ( 2007 ) research of mental maps of Brazil is the presence of blank spaces in the center or center-west region. The authors maintain that void spaces coincide with the colonial occupation of these territories and that drawings sometimes reproduce the ancient images of isolated and dangerous places. The authors observe that although one might consider empty spaces on maps as signs of lack of knowledge, it is more likely that these distant places in the center of Brazil express strangeness from which subjects wish to dissociate. These empty places may also serve as reminders of the past and collective memories of occupation. Thus, emptiness does not always mean nonexistence but a choice or a defense (Arruda, Gonçalves, & Mululo, 2008 ). In contrast, seaside spaces were filled with images. They were inhabited by Europeans and civilized local people. In addition, the authors found that the participants from northern Brazil represented south as a very different region because of its temperate climate and its population of the European origin.

Figurative Schemes in Comparative Research

A considerable amount of research has been carried out to compare figurative schemes and images in different fields like health and illness (e.g., Herzlich, 1973 ; Joffe, 2003 , 2008 ; Joffe & Haarhof, 2002 ), biotechnology (e.g., Wagner et al., 2002 ), the body (Jodelet, 1984 ), the body and hygiene as culturally determined (Jodelet, 2005 ; Wagner & Hayes, 2005 ), historical and cultural events (e.g., Sen & Wagner, 2005 ; Wertsch & Batiashvili, 2011 ). Kalampalikis ( 2007 ) analyzes symbolic conflicts embedded in social representations of two interpretations of history that are embedded in the name of Macedonia.

Equally, images and metaphors in social representations have been explored across cultures or in specific groups. In the 1980s, De Rosa ( 1987 ) carried out a multimethod research on the social representation of mental illness. In this research, children and adults were asked to draw images in connection with madness; their drawings suggested the presence of ancient images of madness ( see also Schurmans & de Rosa, 1990 ).

Visual images in the press, advertisements, and campaigns are used to influence or change social representations of political or health issues (De Rosa, 2001 ; Joffe, 2008 ). Intentions of the producers of posters, on the one hand, and images of the public, on the other hand, could be quite divergent. For example, some posters produced on behalf of people with mental disabilities sometimes confirmed, rather than changed, the existing representations (Marková & Farr, 1990 ). Visual images in the press have been particularly influential in staged photographs capturing public images about genetic engineering as injecting tomatoes with genes that make them grow bigger (Wagner et al., 2002 ). Wagner and Hayes ( 2005 , p. 181) comment that images of tomatoes injected with genes remind inoculation and injecting foreign materials into bodies known from medicine and chemistry. There is also an associated belief of infection that passes from one organism to another:

Finally, the monstrosity of genetically engineered organisms is related as well. The topic of ‘ Frankenstein foods’ is not far from these ideas and in fact frequently came up in interviews. Just as tomatoes are good to eat, they are also good to think with. These images and metaphorical projections capture the ‘What is it’ and the ‘How does it work’ part of popular imagination about ‘genetic engineering. ( Wagner & Hayes , 2005 , p. 181)

These examples show how the two opposite yet complementary explanations of phenomena in the world of reason and myth, or logos and mythos, mix to generate social representations. Nevertheless, it would not be correct to say that sciences are guided by logos ( see Moscovici, 1992 , on “scientific myths”) and common sense by mythical thinking.

A recent volume on Mythical Thinking and Social Representations forms a true dialogue between anthropology and the Theory of Social Representations (Paredes & Jodelet, 2009 ). The contributions to this volume show that mythical thinking does not disappear with scientific progress, technology, and mass education but that it continues to be present in everyday reasoning and that it permeates daily practices. Jodelet ( 2009 , p. 31) observes that there are least three central aspects that relate social representations and mythical thinking. There is an instrumental aspect of common sense that utilizes certain mythical thinking in the construction of social life. Furthermore, production of common sense re-activates ancient myths with requirements of contemporary cultural identities. Finally, through functional aspect of common sense, the formation of myths facilitates interpretations of events or objects in social life and in social relations.

Communicative and Cultural Themata

In contrast to cognitive polyphasia, figurative schemes, metaphors, and myths, the concept of themata has entered into the Theory of Social Representations more recently (Moscovici, 1993c ; Moscovici & Vignaux, 1994/2000 ). It has since become one of the most important theoretical concepts in social representations with respect to culture and communication. Let us explain.

One of the fundamental features of human thinking is making distinctions and understanding phenomena as antinomies. For example, we understand freedom in contrast to what we consider to be a lack of freedom; justice is understood through what is considered to be an absence of justice; logos as contrasted with mythos, and so on. Antinomies are features of thinking, language, and communication in all cultures, but different cultures and societies employ their capacity of making distinctions and thinking in antinomies in specific ways. We find them throughout eons of human history both in scientific and in common sense thinking, although very often they are present implicitly without becoming an explicit topic of discourse. Socio-cultural changes, however, may bring implicit antinomies to the public awareness and into discourses, reflecting societal tensions and conflicts. This means that from that moment on, they turn into themata , whether in scientific thinking where they generate scientific theories (Holton, 1975 , 1978 ) or in common sense thinking where they generate social representations (Moscovici, 1993c ; Moscovici & Vignaux, 1994/2000 ).

Many antinomies are implicitly present in our common sense thinking for centuries, and they may never be brought to explicit awareness. This is so, because there may never be any reason—or at least there may not be any reason for many generations—for them to become problematized and thematized. For example, logos and mythos could be viewed throughout history as complementary antinomies until, for one reason or other, logos become a superior and rational way of explanation of phenomena, whereas mythos is degraded as irrational thought (Moscovici, 2009 ). In principle, all antinomies can become themata—that is, issues for public debates and disputes—but many of them do not rise to that status.

Themata that generate most social representations are those pertaining to the Ego–Alter, like private/public, morality/immorality, justice/injustice, and freedom/oppression, among others. Such themata are in the heart of social sciences, and they generate social representations of phenomena like democracy, citizenship, quality of life, and health and illness, to name but a few. How and in what ways themata become problematized and which meanings become foregrounded is specific to the structured field in which a social representation in engaged. A social representation is rarely generated from a single thema. If we consider, as an example, a social representation of HIV/AIDS and its vicissitudes over the last three decades in different parts of the world, we find that re-thematization of morality/immorality has been associated with re-thematization of social values related to sexuality, promiscuity in the general public, discrimination of minorities, and social recognition, among other issues (Marková et al., 1995 ). Although the antinomy morality/immorality itself has not been questioned, the content and context of morality/immorality has been differently thematized in different structured fields in which the social representation of HIV/AIDS has been engaged. For example, the question of personal and social responsibility, medical confidentiality, and human rights all became part of discourse in such specific structured fields. Communicative processes, through which these changes in meanings are usually achieved, carry symbols and images, which not only circulate in public discourses but also organize and generate discourses; they shape common thinking, language, and behavior; and provide grounds for the formation of new social representations.

Liu ( 2004 ) describes themata as “deep structures” of social representations. In his research on rapid changes of social representations of the quality of life in China, he identified two themata that, in contemporary society, compete with one another: “to be” and “to have.” Being prioritizes traditional Chinese values like the authentic relation between subject and object, a union between self and others, and their rootedness, connectedness, and mutual commitment. Having , on the other hand, gives priority to how subject instrumentalizes object as a resource to be possessed and consumed. Possession has become a new value in the rapidly changing China, whether it is the possession of money and material objects or of symbolic objects like social status and power. Neither having nor being exist in pure forms, but they are both dynamically inter-related into the meaning of the quality of life in contemporary China.

In their research on social representations of Roms, Peréz et al. ( 2007 ) identified two underlying themata. One of them highlights nature versus culture. This polarity emphasizes the superiority of cultured European majorities over natural minorities of Roms. The second thema, human versus animal, represents Roms as having deficits in human qualities. Drawing on his socio-anthropological research, Moscovici ( 2011 ) shows that in the case of Roms themata are also articulated along the extensive historical narratives artistic/criminal.

Research on social representations of genetically modified food as presented in the press shows that these are underlain by themata of health versus disease and risk versus safety (Castro & Gomes, 2005 ). The already noted research by Wagner et al. ( 2002 ) implies that social representations of genetically modified tomatoes, both in the press and in interviews with citizens, are triggered by themata like natural versus unnatural.

Morality of Human Rights As a Thema

Although Doise ( 2002 ) does not use the concept of thema, we can subsume his work on human rights as social representations under this concept. Moral universality of human rights codified itself in societies as a basic thema, although naturally, it has been thematized differently in specific cultures and societies. Doise's own empirical research shows that participants in different countries express consistent attitudes on general principles or articles of the Declaration of Human Rights. This strong coherence disappears, however, when subjects respond to specific contexts in which human rights are presented. Having examined theories and practices in relation to human rights, Doise concludes that the basis of legal thinking on human rights is not to be sought in their institutional expression, but it is profoundly anchored in normative social representations. Doise traces the origin of normative social representations of human rights in communication and human interactions. Communicative contracts carry implicitly ethical norms (Rommetveit, 1974 ; Bakhtin, 1979/1986 ) that regulate our mutual interactions, mutual commitment, and social recognition of one human by another. These contracts are then built into social norms and social representations.

In a similar manner, Mead ( 1915 ) drew attention to the error in the assumption of theorists who were convinced that individuals had originally possessed their natural rights before any formal societal organizations existed. He was critical of those who thought that formal organizations had to be established to protect those natural rights. Mead argued that, on the contrary, already in informal organizations that developed within groups, the rights, rules, norms of acting, and constraints had already existed. Mead specifically referred to philosophers like Hobbes, Spinoza, and Locke who were not aware of this fact. Thus, he said that if Locke had the knowledge of the contemporary anthropologists, then he would have recognized that people had been organized in informal groups from which governmental institutions later developed. Governmental institutions arose out of communities that already had formulated their customs. In other words, rights were already in existence, and they were recognized by group members, although in a different form than in governmental institutions. No special introduction or special instruments were required to establish them in formal institutions.

Doise has maintained that although norms do not translate themselves automatically into institutional expressions, they remain to be the shared references to which victims can appeal (Doise, 2002 , p. 25). Concerning the issue of how to assess whether human rights are upheld by different countries, normative social representations are used as a tool of evaluation. Countries use their own norms and ethnocentric social representations of human rights to evaluate different countries with respect to discrimination and prejudice in others, and they commonly overvalue their own morality. Doise has analyzed contemporary trends and habits of speaking about different kinds of human rights—for example, individual rights, socio-economic rights, the self-determination rights of ethnic groups, and rights for natives to maintain special ties with the land of their forefathers. Variability in dealing with human rights is great and anchored in different kinds of beliefs that are rooted in histories, politics, and in common sense.

Conclusion: Toward Theoretical and Empirical Diversity in Social Representing

After World War II, the social sciences exerted a strong effort to establish their places in reconstructing the world and to coordinate themselves internationally. Among these efforts was the UNESCO research of the roles of social sciences in higher education. Social psychology was grouped together with cultural anthropology and sociology because it was assumed that this was its proper place (Moscovici & Marková, 2006 ). But the UNESCO research showed that the position of social psychology was split between psychology and sociology. In the years to come, social psychology leaned toward experimental psychology and its methods, and the relation to culture considerably diminished or totally disappeared. Equally, language and communication played only a minimal role in social psychology, the situation that Moscovici ( 1972 ) and Rommetveit ( 1974 ) deeply regretted.

In contrast, we have seen in this chapter that from its beginning, the Theory of Social Representations has been conceptualized within culture, language, and communication. In this chapter I have discussed three concepts: cognitive polyphasia; figurative schemes, myths and metaphors; and themata. These three concepts have made most significant contributions to the Theory of Social Representations. However, there is also substantial empirical research in social representations that covers diverse topics in education, politics, environmental problems, health, mental health, and aging. There is growing research on social representations of otherness or alterity, everyday life (Haas, 2006 ), identity (Moloney & Walker, 2007 ), and historical events. Jodelet ( 1992 ) has initiated the study of collective memories as an important aspect of social representations. Examining historical perspectives of collective memory in the work of social scientists like Halbwachs and Douglas, she has analyzed the process with the Nazi Klaus Barbie that took place in 1987 in France. Numerous studies of social representations of historical events that have followed Jodelet's research have provided accounts of groups’ representations in which history and collective memory have mixed and organized and have transformed these representations. Such accounts are never neutral cognitive narratives but dialogical evaluations and justifications of history; they are forging many ethnic, social, and national identities and pose questions about how histories could be re-interpreted and rewritten on the basis of politics and ideology (e.g., Liu et al., 2009 ; Lastrego & Licata, 2010 ; Paez, 2010 ). Raudsepp, Heidmets, and Kruusvall ( 2008 ) have explored social representations of collective memory in their study of the socio-cultural context of Estonia during the transition from a post-Soviet republic to a liberal State in the European Union. They have analyzed explicit and implicit socio-cultural regulative principles, and they have explored how these principles have transformed in the course of the transition period, focusing on the changed roles of Russian minorities and Estonian majorities during that time. Social representations of collective memories of daily life during communism in Rumania have been captured by Neculau ( 2008 ) and those of the Cyprus conflict by Psaltis ( 2011 ). Findings of these substantial empirical studies feed back to the theory.

Future Directions

The growing interest in theoretical and empirical research in social representations also highlights challenges and problems for the future. Among these I mention the following.

First, despite the fact that strong emphasis on language and communication was already part of La Psychanalyse , this remains a neglected area of studies of social representations. Language and communication are usually taken for granted as essential features of human interactions but rarely studied as phenomena that require a specific exploration. We only see beginnings of such research in dialogical studies of different kinds of discourse (e.g., conversation and dialogue, polylogue, inner speech, focus groups studies) that have been recently emerging. They include analyses of various grammatical structures like modalizations, positioning, deontic claims, and other means by which speakers take distance from or express closeness to objects of social representations (e.g., Harré, this volume; Salazar Orvig, 2007 ; Marková et al., 2007 ; Salazar Orvig & Grossen, 2008 ; Linell, 2009 ). In addition, what participants communicate to one another is not produced solely by them; they necessarily draw on their cultural resources, on perspectives of the parties that are not present in discourse (third parties), and on groups to which they belong or which they reject. For example, absent others could become, directly or indirectly, participants in talks among villagers in Jodelet's ( 1989/1991 ) research on madness, because absent others could become invisible or semi-visible judges of relations between villagers and patients. Groups do not live in a vacuum but are part of a broader community. Outsiders coming to the village are not neutral onlookers but they communicate with in-groups: they can make flattering as well as damaging comments about relations between villagers and patients. A close association with mentally ill patients could downgrade, in the eyes of others, the villagers’ social identity. These different circumstances involving numerous communicating parties reflect themselves in diverse modalities of thinking.

Participants in interactions may jointly construct utterances that may suggest that they share—or assume sharing—a social representation. Alternatively, in and through a joint construction of utterances, they may question limits of their shared knowledge (Marková, 2007 ). They may refer to beliefs, to a super-addressee (god, generalized other, consciousness), the law and its different kinds, rules and norms, morality and ethics, traditions, habits, and stereotypes. There are countless examples of the interdependence among language, communication, and social representations that have not been explored or have only just become subjects of research interest.

Another challenging issue was implied earlier in this chapter. It concerns the fact that cultures live no longer in isolated ghettos, and rather, the contemporary world of societies is open to other cultures and they “set the stage for permanent situations of uncertainty,” moving cultures in different directions (Rosa & Valsiner, 2007 ). This is also the issue that Moscovici expressed in his third paradox concerning incommunicability among different groups (see above, p. 497). The challenge for the Theory of Social Representations concerns the issue of studying ethical problems arising from the growing uncertainty in the world of increasing complexity; and with problems how to establish reflective communication in intergroup and intercultural relations. Such issues concern the future developments of relations between the Theory of Social Representations and culture (Permanadeli et al., 2012 ). Moreover, the Theory of Social Representations is only one psychological approach that focuses on culture. Cultural diversity is studied, for example, by structuralist, discourse, anthropological, phenomenological, narrative, and other approaches (Jodelet, 2012 ). Among all of these, what specific contributions can the Theory of Social Representations make that will differentiate it from other approaches? This is a challenge in the world of rapid changes that is characterized by a series of “trans-” processes (Jodelet, ibid ) What different forms will transformation of knowledge take in these changes where the local competes with the global and crossbreeding thinking produces new kinds of cognitive polyphasia?

Finally, there are theoretical challenges concerning the epistemological status of social representations. Both knowing and believing co-constitute social representations, although some social representations are based primarily on knowledge or factual beliefs and others mainly on passionate beliefs and convictions. Knowledge and beliefs are transmitted in and through culture, language, and communication, as well as through learning (tacit or explicit) by repeating and changing others’ activities. But what status can be attributed to knowledge generated from trust in authority of other individuals or institutions and of collective norms? Can these serve as preconditions of rationality and coherence of reasoning?

No doubt there are other theoretical and empirical challenges. The theory is now 50 years old, and over these long years it has undergone transformations and has become gradually enriched by different cultures all over the world as it has spread from Europe to other continents—particularly to Latin America and most recently to Asia.

Acknowledgements

I am very grateful to Denise Jodelet for her generous help in providing ideas and references to research on social representations and culture and to Angela Arruda for references to the research in Latin America. This chapter was written during the period of my Emeritus Fellowship awarded by the Leverhulme Trust, and I wish to acknowledge the Trust's generous support for this project.

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Why Representation Matters and Why It’s Still Not Enough

Reflections on growing up brown, queer, and asian american..

Posted December 27, 2021 | Reviewed by Ekua Hagan

• Positive media representation can be helpful in increasing self-esteem for people of marginalized groups (especially youth).
• Interpersonal contact and exposure through media representation can assist in reducing stereotypes of underrepresented groups.
• Representation in educational curricula and social media can provide validation and support, especially for youth of marginalized groups.

Growing up as a Brown Asian American child of immigrants, I never really saw anyone who looked like me in the media. The TV shows and movies I watched mostly concentrated on blonde-haired, white, or light-skinned protagonists. They also normalized western and heterosexist ideals and behaviors, while hardly ever depicting things that reflected my everyday life. For example, it was equally odd and fascinating that people on TV didn’t eat rice at every meal; that their parents didn’t speak with accents; or that no one seemed to navigate a world of daily microaggressions . Despite these observations, I continued to absorb this mass media—internalizing messages of what my life should be like or what I should aspire to be like.

Because there were so few media images of people who looked like me, I distinctly remember the joy and validation that emerged when I did see those representations. Filipino American actors like Ernie Reyes, Nia Peeples, Dante Basco, and Tia Carrere looked like they could be my cousins. Each time they sporadically appeared in films and television series throughout my youth, their mere presence brought a sense of pride. However, because they never played Filipino characters (e.g., Carrere was Chinese American in Wayne's World ) or their racial identities remained unaddressed (e.g., Basco as Rufio in Hook ), I did not know for certain that they were Filipino American like me. And because the internet was not readily accessible (nor fully informational) until my late adolescence , I could not easily find out.

Through my Ethnic Studies classes as an undergraduate student (and my later research on Asian American and Filipino American experiences with microaggressions), I discovered that my perspectives were not that unique. Many Asian Americans and other people of color often struggle with their racial and ethnic identity development —with many citing how a lack of media representation negatively impacts their self-esteem and overall views of their racial or cultural groups. Scholars and community leaders have declared mottos like how it's "hard to be what you can’t see," asserting that people from marginalized groups do not pursue career or academic opportunities when they are not exposed to such possibilities. For example, when women (and women of color specifically) don’t see themselves represented in STEM fields , they may internalize that such careers are not made for them. When people of color don’t see themselves in the arts or in government positions, they likely learn similar messages too.

Complicating these messages are my intersectional identities as a queer person of color. In my teens, it was heartbreakingly lonely to witness everyday homophobia (especially unnecessary homophobic language) in almost all television programming. The few visual examples I saw of anyone LGBTQ involved mostly white, gay, cisgender people. While there was some comfort in seeing them navigate their coming out processes or overcome heterosexism on screen, their storylines often appeared unrealistic—at least in comparison to the nuanced homophobia I observed in my religious, immigrant family. In some ways, not seeing LGBTQ people of color in the media kept me in the closet for years.

How representation can help

Representation can serve as opportunities for minoritized people to find community support and validation. For example, recent studies have found that social media has given LGBTQ young people the outlets to connect with others—especially when the COVID-19 pandemic has limited in-person opportunities. Given the increased suicidal ideation, depression , and other mental health issues among LGBTQ youth amidst this global pandemic, visibility via social media can possibly save lives. Relatedly, taking Ethnic Studies courses can be valuable in helping students to develop a critical consciousness that is culturally relevant to their lives. In this way, representation can allow students of color to personally connect to school, potentially making their educational pursuits more meaningful.

Further, representation can be helpful in reducing negative stereotypes about other groups. Initially discussed by psychologist Dr. Gordon Allport as Intergroup Contact Theory, researchers believed that the more exposure or contact that people had to groups who were different from them, the less likely they would maintain prejudice . Literature has supported how positive LGBTQ media representation helped transform public opinions about LGBTQ people and their rights. In 2019, the Pew Research Center reported that the general US population significantly changed their views of same-sex marriage in just 15 years—with 60% of the population being opposed in 2004 to 61% in favor in 2019. While there are many other factors that likely influenced these perspective shifts, studies suggest that positive LGBTQ media depictions played a significant role.

For Asian Americans and other groups who have been historically underrepresented in the media, any visibility can feel like a win. For example, Gold House recently featured an article in Vanity Fair , highlighting the power of Asian American visibility in the media—citing blockbuster films like Crazy Rich Asians and Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings . Asian American producers like Mindy Kaling of Never Have I Ever and The Sex Lives of College Girls demonstrate how influential creators of color can initiate their own projects and write their own storylines, in order to directly increase representation (and indirectly increase mental health and positive esteem for its audiences of color).

When representation is not enough

However, representation simply is not enough—especially when it is one-dimensional, superficial, or not actually representative. Some scholars describe how Asian American media depictions still tend to reinforce stereotypes, which may negatively impact identity development for Asian American youth. Asian American Studies is still needed to teach about oppression and to combat hate violence. Further, representation might also fail to reflect the true diversity of communities; historically, Brown Asian Americans have been underrepresented in Asian American media, resulting in marginalization within marginalized groups. For example, Filipino Americans—despite being the first Asian American group to settle in the US and one of the largest immigrant groups—remain underrepresented across many sectors, including academia, arts, and government.

Representation should never be the final goal; instead, it should merely be one step toward equity. Having a diverse cast on a television show is meaningless if those storylines promote harmful stereotypes or fail to address societal inequities. Being the “first” at anything is pointless if there aren’t efforts to address the systemic obstacles that prevent people from certain groups from succeeding in the first place.

Instead, representation should be intentional. People in power should aim for their content to reflect their audiences—especially if they know that doing so could assist in increasing people's self-esteem and wellness. People who have the opportunity to represent their identity groups in any sector may make conscious efforts to use their influence to teach (or remind) others that their communities exist. Finally, parents and teachers can be more intentional in ensuring that their children and students always feel seen and validated. By providing youth with visual representations of people they can relate to, they can potentially save future generations from a lifetime of feeling underrepresented or misunderstood.

Kevin Leo Yabut Nadal, Ph.D., is a Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the City University of New York and the author of books including Microaggressions and Traumatic Stress .

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Media constructions of culture, race, and ethnicity.

• Travis L. Dixon , Travis L. Dixon Department of Communication, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
• Kristopher R. Weeks Kristopher R. Weeks Department of Communication, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
•  and  Marisa A. Smith Marisa A. Smith Department of Communication, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228613.013.502
• Published online: 23 May 2019

Racial stereotypes flood today’s mass media. Researchers investigate these stereotypes’ prevalence, from news to entertainment. Black and Latino stereotypes draw particular concern, especially because they misrepresent these racial groups. From both psychological and sociological perspectives, these misrepresentations can influence how people view their racial group as well as other groups. Furthermore, a racial group’s lack of representation can also reduce the group’s visibility to the general public. Such is the case for Native Americans and Asian Americans.

Given mass media’s widespread distribution of black and Latino stereotypes, most research on mediated racial portrayals focuses on these two groups. For instance, while black actors and actresses appear often in prime-time televisions shows, black women appear more often in situational comedies than any other genre. Also, when compared to white actors and actresses, television casts blacks in villainous or despicable roles at a higher rate. In advertising, black women often display Eurocentric features, like straight hair. On the other hand, black men are cast as unemployed, athletic, or entertainers. In sports entertainment, journalists emphasize white athletes’ intelligence and black athletes’ athleticism. In music videos, black men appear threatening and sport dark skin tones. These music videos also sexualize black women and tend to emphasize those with light skin tones. News media overrepresent black criminality and exaggerate the notion that blacks belong to the undeserving poor class. Video games tend to portray black characters as either violent outlaws or athletic.

While mass media misrepresent the black population, it tends to both misrepresent and underrepresent the Latino population. When represented in entertainment media, Latinos assume hypersexualized roles and low-occupation jobs. Both news and entertainment media overrepresent Latino criminality. News outlets also overly associate Latino immigration with crime and relate Latino immigration to economic threat. Video games rarely portray Latino characters.

Creators may create stereotypic content or fail to fairly represent racial and ethnic groups for a few reasons. First, the ethnic blame discourse in the United States may influence creators’ conscious and unconscious decision-making processes. This discourse contends that the ethnic and racial minorities are responsible for their own problems. Second, since stereotypes appeal to and are easily processed by large general audiences, the misrepresentation of racial and ethnic groups facilitates revenue generation. This article largely discusses media representations of blacks and Latinos and explains the implications of such portrayals.

• content analysis
• African American portrayals
• Latino portrayals
• ethnic blame discourse
• structural limitations and economic interests
• social identity theory
• Clark’s Stage Model of Representations

Theoretical Importance of Media Stereotypes

Media constructions of culture, race, and ethnicity remain important to study because of their potential impact on both sociological and psychological phenomena. Specifically, researchers have utilized two major theoretical constructs to understand the potential impact of stereotyping: (a) priming and cognitive accessibility (Dixon, 2006 ; Scheufele & Tewksbury, 2007 ; Shrum, 2009 ), and (b) social identity and social categorization theory (Mastro, 2004 ; Mastro, Behm-Morawitz, & Kopacz, 2008 ; Tajfel & Turner, 2004 ).

Priming and Cognitive Accessibility

Priming and cognitive accessibility suggests that media consumption encourages the creation of mental shortcuts used to make relevant judgments about various social issues. For example, if a news viewer encounters someone cognitively related to a given stereotype, he or she might make a judgment about that person based on repeated exposure to the mediated stereotype. As an illustration, repeated exposure to the Muslim terrorist stereotype may lead news viewers to conclude that all Muslims are terrorists. This individual may also support punitive policies related to this stereotype, such as a Muslim ban on entry to the United States. Therefore, this cognitive linkage influences race and crime judgments (e.g., increased support for criminalizing Muslims and deporting them).

Social Identity Theory and Media Judgments

Other scholars have noted that our own identities are often tied to how people perceive their groups’ relationships to other groups. Social categorization theory argues that the higher the salience of the category to the individual, the greater the in-group favoritism one will demonstrate. Media scholars demonstrated that exposure to a mediated out-group member can increase in-group favoritism (Mastro, 2004 ). For example, researchers found that negative stories about Latino immigrants can contribute to negative out-group emotions that lead to support for harsher immigration laws (Atwell Seate & Mastro, 2016 , 2017 ).

Both the priming/cognitive accessibility approach and the social identity approach demonstrate that cultural stereotypes have significant implications for our psychology, social interactions, and policymaking. It remains extremely important for us to understand the nature and frequency of mediated racial and ethnic stereotypes to further our understanding of how these stereotypes impact viewers. This article seeks to facilitate our understanding.

Stage Model of Representation

In order to provide the reader with an introduction to this topic, this article relies on the published content-analytic literature regarding race and media. Clark’s Stage Model of Representation articulates a key organizing principle for understanding how media may construct various depictions of social groups (Clark, 1973 ; Harris, 2013 ). This model purports that race/ethnic groups move through four stages of representation in the media. In the first stage, invisibility or non-recognition , a particular race or ethnic group rarely appears on the screen at all. In the second stage, ridicule , a racial group will appear more frequently, yet will be depicted in consistently stereotypical ways. In the third stage, regulation , an ethnic group might find themselves depicted primarily in roles upholding the social order, such as judges or police officers. Finally, a particular social group reaches the respect stage in which members of the group occupy diverse and nuanced roles. Given Clark’s model, this article contends that Native Americans and Asian Americans tend to fall into the non-recognition stage (Harris, 2013 ). It follows that few empirical studies have investigated these groups because empirical content analyses have difficulty scientifically assessing phenomena that lack presence (Krippendorff, 2004 ).

Bearing in mind Clark’s stages, Latinos appear to vacillate between non-recognition and ridicule. Meanwhile, blacks move between the ridicule and regulation stages, while whites remain permanently fixed in the respect stage. In other words, in this article, our lack of deep consideration of Native Americans and Asian Americans is rooted in a lack of representation which generates few empirical studies and thus leaves us little to review. The article offers a quick overview of their portrayal and then moves on to describe the social groups that receive more media and empirical attention.

Native American and Asian American Depictions

Although severely underrepresented, there are a few consistent stereotypical portrayals that regularly emerge for these groups. In some ways, both Native American and Asian Americans are often relegated to “historical” and/or fetishized portrayals (Lipsitz, 1998 ). Native American “savage” imagery was commonly depicted in Westerns and has been updated with images of alcoholism, along with depictions of shady Native American casino owners (Strong, 2004 ). Many news images of Native Americans tend to focus on Native festivals, relegating this group to a presentation as “mysterious” spiritual people (Heider, 2000 ). Meanwhile, various school and professional team mascots embody the savage Native American Warrior trope (Strong, 2004 ).

Asian Americans overall have often been associated with being the model minority (Harris, 2009 ; Josey, Hurley, Hefner, & Dixon, 2009 ). They typically represent “successful” non-whites. Specifically, media depictions associate Asian American men with technology and Asian American women with sexual submissiveness (Harris & Barlett, 2009 ; Schug, Alt, Lu, Gosin, & Fay, 2017 ).

Overall, scholars know very little about how either of these groups are regularly portrayed based on empirical research, although novelists and critical scholars have offered useful critiques (Wilson, Gutiérrez, & Chao, 2003 ). Hopefully, future quantitative content analyses will further delineate the nature of Native American and Asian American portrayals. Consider the discussion about entertainment, news, and digital imagery of blacks, Latinos, and whites presented in the next section.

Entertainment Constructions of Race, Culture, and Ethnicity

Entertainment media receives a great deal of consideration, given that Americans spend much of their time using media for entertainment purposes (Harris, 2013 ; Sparks, 2016 ). This section begins with an analysis of black portrayals, then moves on to Latino portrayals to understand the prevalence of stereotyping . When appropriate, black and Latino representations are compared to white ones. Two measures describe a group’s representation: (a) the numerical presence of a particular racial/ethnic group, and (b) the distribution of roles or stereotypes regarding each group. When researchers have often engaged in examinations of race they typically begin by comparing African American portrayals to white portrayals (Entman & Rojecki, 2000 ). As a result, there is a substantial amount of research on black portrayals.

Black Entertainment Television Imagery

Overall, a number of studies have found that blacks receive representation in prime-time television at parity to their actual proportion in the US population with their proportion ranging from 10% to 17% of prime-time characters (Mastro & Greenberg, 2000 ; Signorielli, 2009 ; Tukachinsky, Mastro, & Yarchi, 2015 ). African Americans currently compose approximately 13% of the US population (US Census Bureau, 2018 ). When considering the type of characters (e.g., major or minor) portrayed by this group, the majority of black (61%) cast members land roles as major characters (Monk-Turner, Heiserman, Johnson, Cotton, & Jackson, 2010 ). Black women also fare well in these representations, accounting for 73% of black appearances on prime-time television (Monk-Turner et al., 2010 ).

However, recent content analyses reveal an instability in black prime-time television representation over the last few decades. Tukachinsky et al. ( 2015 ) found that the prevalence of black characters dropped in 1993 and remain diminished compared to previous decades. Similarly, Signorielli ( 2009 ) found a significant linear decrease in the proportion of black representation from 2001 (17%) to 2008 (12%). Signorielli ( 2009 ) attributes this decrease in black representation to the decrease in situation comedy programming. Indeed, African Americans appear most frequently in situation comedies. Sixty percent of black women featured in prime-time television are cast in situation comedies, and 25% of black male prime-time portrayals occur in situation comedies (Signorielli, 2009 ). However, between 2001 and 2008 , situational comedies decreased, while action and crime programs increased.

The previously discussed analyses describe the frequency of black representation. However, frequent depictions do not equate to favorable representation. Considering role quality (i.e., respectability) and references made to stereotypes, entertainment media offers a mixed bag. On the one hand, some recent analyses found that the majority of blacks are depicted as likable, and as “good characters,” as opposed to “bad character”-like villains (Tukachinsky, Mastro, & Yarchi, 2015 ). In addition, the majority of black characters are depicted as intelligent (Tukachinsky et al., 2015 ). On the other hand, the rate of blacks shown as immoral and despicable (9%) is higher than that of whites (2% and 3%, respectively) (Monk-Turner et al., 2010 ). In addition, black depictions exhibiting high social status and professionalism trended downward. Between 2003 and 2005 , higher status depictions reached their peak at 74.3% but sharply fell in subsequent years to 31.5%, with black women faring worse than black men (Tukachinsky et al., 2015 ). Classic studies of entertainment representations found that blacks tend to be the most negatively represented of any race or ethnic group, often being depicted as lazy and disheveled (Mastro & Greenberg, 2000 ). Overall, black characters tend to be portrayed in less respectful ways compared to whites in content intended for general audiences, although they sometime fare better when the targeted audience is African American (Messineo, 2008 ). For example, crime drama television frequently depicts white women as at risk for murder, but FBI statistics demonstrate that murder victims are more often likely to be black males (Parrott & Parrott, 2015 ).

Black Representations in Magazines and Advertising

African Americans remain well represented in magazines, though they are not as prominent in this medium as in television (Schug et al., 2017 ). Moreover, the trend in the representation of African Americans, particularly women, appears to be improving (Covert & Dixon, 2008 ). Images of black women represent 6% of advertisements in women’s magazines and 4% of advertisements in men’s magazines (Baker, 2005 ). However, both black-oriented and white-oriented magazines appear to advance portrayals of black women with Eurocentric rather than Afrocentric features, referencing whiteness as a beauty standard. Overall, compared to black-oriented magazines, white-oriented magazines feature more black women with fair skin and thin figures. Black-oriented magazines feature more black women with straight hair. Moreover, straight hair textures outnumber other natural styles (i.e., wavy, curly, or braided) in both white- and black-oriented magazines.

Conversely, black men typically assume unemployed, athletic, or entertainment roles in these ads (Bailey, 2006 ). Moreover, mainstream magazines are most likely to depict black men as unemployed. Meanwhile, black-oriented magazines tend to portray African Americans in more managerial roles.

Black Representations in Sports Entertainment

Besides prime-time television, black stereotypes in sports coverage and music receive substantial attention in the literature. The unintelligent or “dumb” yet naturally talented black athlete remains a programming staple (Angelini, Billings, MacArthur, Bissell, & Smith, 2014 ; Rada & Wulfemeyer, 2005 ). For example, Angelini et al. ( 2014 ) found that black athletes receive less success-based comments related to intelligence than white athletes (Angelini et al., 2014 ). The findings echo previous research arguing that black athletes receive fewer positive comments regarding their intelligence than do white athletes (Rada & Wulfemeyer, 2005 ). Fairly similar depictions exist in broadcast commentary (Primm, DuBois, & Regoli, 2007 ). For example, Mercurio and Filak ( 2010 ) content-analyzed descriptions of NFL quarterback prospects featured on the Sports Illustrated website from 1998 to 2007 . The descriptions portray black athletes as possessing physical abilities while lacking intelligence . Conversely, Sports Illustrated described white prospects as intelligent but lacking in athleticism.

Black Representations in Music Videos

Music videos tend to sexualize black women, reinforcing the black jezebe l stereotype (i.e., a sassy African American woman who is sexually promiscuous) (Givens & Monahan, 2005 ). Also, black men appear aggressive and violent in music videos (e.g., like a criminal, thug, or brute ) (Ford, 1997 ). According to rap research, blacks appear in provocative clothes at a higher rate than whites, and black women are the most provocatively dressed in music videos (Turner, 2011 ). Even black female artists are twice as likely to wear provocative clothing than are white female artists (Frisby & Aubrey, 2012 ). Furthermore, Zhang, Dixon, and Conrad ( 2010 ) and Conrad, Zhang, and Dixon ( 2009 ) found that black women appeared in rap videos as sexualized, thin, and light-skinned while black men appeared dark-skinned and threatening .

Latino Entertainment Television Representation

Unlike African Americans, Latinos remain significantly underrepresented in English-language television outlets. For instance, Tukachinsky et al. ( 2015 ) found that of all characters, the number of Latino characters was less than 1% in the 1980s and increased to over 3% in the 2000s. However, these numbers fall significantly below the proportion of people who are Latino within the United States (about 18%) (U.S. Census Bureau, 2018 ). Similarly, Signorelli ( 2009 ) also found that the percentage of Latinos in the United States Latino population and the percentage of Latino characters in prime-time programming differed by approximately 10%.

Latinos continue to be underrepresented in a variety of genres and outlets. For instance, Latinos remain consistently underrepresented in gay male blogs. For example, Grimm and Schwarz ( 2017 ) found that white gay models (80.2%) were most prevalent, followed by black gay models (4.5%). However, Latino models were the least prevalent (1.5%). In addition, Hetsroni ( 2009 ) found that the Latino population makes up 14% of patients in real hospitals, yet they only comprise 4% of the patients in hospital dramas. Conversely, whites make up 72% of real patients but comprise 80% of hospital drama patients.

Latino Underrepresentation in Advertising

Latino underrepresentation extends to the advertising realm. For example, Seelig ( 2007 ) determined that there was a significant difference between the Latino proportion of the US population and the Latino proportion of models found in mainstream magazines (1%). Another study that investigated Superbowl commercials conducted by Brooks, Bichard, and Craig ( 2016 ) found that only 1.22% of the characters were Latino.

Prominent Stereotypes of Latinos in Entertainment Media

Although underrepresented, Latinos are also stereotypically represented in entertainment media. For example, Tukachinsky et al. ( 2015 ) discovered that over 24% of Latino characters were hypersexualized in prime-time television. Furthermore, Latinos tended to occupy low-professional-status roles. This trend also occurred more often with Latina females than Latino males.

Spanish-language television also reinforced stereotypes. For instance, Mastro and Ortiz ( 2008 ) studied the portrayals of characters in prime-time Spanish-language television broadcasts by Azteca America, Telefutura, Telemundo, and Univision. They found rich Latina women reinforced the harlot stereotype . They were sexualized , were provocatively dressed, and had slim body types (Mastro & Behm-Morawitz, 2005 ). Similar to the findings for African Americans and rap music, colorism was also part of these depictions, with idealized Latinos having more European features. Men with a dark complexion were depicted as aggressive (e.g., the criminal stereotype) , while men with a fair complexion were portrayed as intelligent and articulate.

Entertainment Imagery Summary

Blacks appear to be well represented in entertainment imagery, often in favorable major roles as professionals. However, their positive portrayals appear to be on the decline as situation comedies become displaced by other genres where blacks are less prominent. Although well represented, black depictions continue to embody many stereotypes. African American males are portrayed as unintelligent or “dumb” athletes whose only assets are their inbred athletic abilities. Black men tend to appear as aggressive criminals or brutes in music videos while black women appear as sexualized jezebels with European features.

Latinos, on the other hand, face substantial obstacles related to their lack of representation. They tend to be grossly underrepresented across a number of entertainment outlets including television, magazines, and advertising. When they are seen, they tend to occupy two primary stereotypes, the harlot stereotype and the criminal stereotype. This appears to be a constant across both Spanish-language and English-language outlets.

News Constructions of Culture, Race, and Ethnicity

News remains an important area to consider when it comes to media stereotypes for two reasons. First, news can be considered a powerful purveyor of social truth (Romer, Jamieson, & Aday, 2003 ; Tewksbury & Rittenberg, 2012 ). While entertainment can be considered by lay audiences to have a weak relationship with social reality given its fictional nature, news is rooted in actual events, and therefore seems more real. Stereotypes found in news content may seem believable, increasing these stereotype’s influence on audiences’ perceptions of reality. Second, citizens rely on news to form opinions about policies and politicians (Iyengar, 1987 ; Price & Tewksbury, 1997 ). News reports contain the reservoir of information that citizens utilize to make decisions within our representative democracy (Iyengar, 1991 ). If the news falsely points to racial groups as the cause of social problems, these citizens may advocate for ineffective and misguided policies. The next section explores how the news purveys racial and ethnic stereotypes.

Blacks in the News

A number of early studies suggested that the news often stereotyped blacks as violent criminals , consistently overrepresenting them in these roles by large margins (Dixon, Azocar, & Casas, 2003 ; Dixon & Linz, 2000a , 2000b ; Entman, 1992 , 1994 ). At the same time, many of these studies showed blacks underrepresented in more sympathetic roles, such as victims of crime (Dixon & Linz, 2000a , 2000b ).

However, recent research suggests that the criminal stereotype has not remained consistently part of the news landscape. For example, Dixon ( 2017b ) found that current depictions of blacks in local news reflect actual percentages of blacks in these various roles, including as criminals. Similarly, Dixon and Williams ( 2015 ) found African Americans underrepresented as both criminals and victims. On the other hand, another recent content analysis that investigated black family depictions in the news, conducted by Dixon ( 2017a ), found that black family members were overrepresented as criminal suspects compared to crime reports.

Furthermore, Mastro, Blecha, and Atwell Seate ( 2011 ) content-analyzed articles pertaining to athletes’ criminal activity published in newspapers and found that mentions of black athletes’ criminal activity outnumber white and Latino athletes. Furthermore, mentions of criminal activity among black athletes outnumber their real-world proportion in professional sports (Mastro et al., 2011 ). In addition, crime articles discussing black athletes provide more explicit details of the crime and mention more negative consequences (e.g., jail or fines) than articles regarding white athletes. News narratives also present less sympathetic coverage for black athletes, more support for the victim, a less respectful tone, and fewer thematic frames (i.e., situating the crime in a larger context) for black athletes compared to white athletes.

Besides criminality , news tends to also depict blacks as part of the underserving poor . For example, van Doorn ( 2015 ) content-analyzed images depicting poverty in news magazines (i.e., Time, Newsweek , and USNWR ). News magazines picture blacks as the majority of persons in poverty (52%), while blacks only account for around 25% of Americans in poverty (van Doorn, 2015 ). Blacks experience similar misrepresentations as welfare recipients . Based on magazine depictions, black people comprise 55% of all welfare recipients. However, in reality, blacks only account for 38% of welfare recipients. Furthermore, the black elderly are depicted as only accounting for 1% of poor elderly persons pictured, while the true percentage is 6%. In addition, during times of economic stability, African American association with poverty increases, but during times of economic upheaval (e.g., the Great Recession) white association with poverty goes up.

Latinos in the News

If there is an overarching issue to consider regarding Latino depictions in news, it would again be their perpetual underrepresentation. Overall, Latinos remain severely underrepresented on television news, especially in sympathetic roles. For example, early studies by Dixon and Linz ( 2000a , 2000b ) found Latinos were underrepresented as perpetrators, victims, and police officers in the news. In one of these studies, Latinos were 54% of the homicide victims in Los Angeles County but were depicted as homicide victims only about 19% of the time on television news. A recent update to this study found that Latinos were accurately represented as perpetrators, but continued to be underrepresented as victims and police officers (Dixon, 2017b ). This invisibility extends to newspapers and magazines (Sorenson, Manz, & Berk, 1998 ). For example, Latinos are underrepresented in Time and Newsweek as part of the obese population, 5% in these magazines versus 18% according to medical statistics (Gollust, Eboh, & Barry, 2012 ).

When we considered the pervasive stereotype that is present with Latinos, it revolved around the issue of immigration and Latino immigrants as criminal or cultural threats . For instance, a meta-analysis (i.e., a type of method that unearths patterns of academic research) by Rendon and Johnson ( 2015 ) on studies that analyzed media coverage of Mexican affairs in the United States revealed a Threat Phase, from 2010 to 2014 . During this phase, reporters investigated the notion that immigrant Mexicans imperil the United States. Furthermore, Chavez, Whiteford, and Hoewe ( 2010 ) found that more than half of analyzed stories concerning Mexican immigration from the New York Times , Washington Post , Wall Street Journal , and USA Today focused on illegal immigration. Furthermore, within these immigration stories, crime was addressed most often (50.6%), followed by economics (e.g., job competition) (30.6%), and legislative deliberations (28.1%). Similarly, Branton and Dunaway ( 2008 ) found that English-language newspapers were almost twice as likely as Spanish-language news to depict immigration in a negative light.

Kim, Carvahlo, Davis, and Mullins ( 2011 ) found that illegal immigration stories produced by the media focus on the negative consequences of crime and job competition. A more recent study conducted by Dixon and Williams ( 2015 ) appears to confirm the media link between immigration, Latinos, and criminal behavior. They found that criminal suspects identified as immigrants in news stories were greatly overrepresented as Latino. In addition, almost all of the illegal or undocumented immigrants appearing in the news were depicted as Latino, which is a great overrepresentation based on official government reports. Dunaway, Goidel, Krizinger, and Wilkinson ( 2011 ) confirm that news coverage encourages an immigration threat narrative, meaning that the majority of immigration stories exhibit a negative tone.

Whites as the “Good Guys”

While black representations as criminal suspects does appear to vary in intensity and Latinos tend to be depicted as either invisible or threatening immigrants, white portrayals remain consistently positive in this domain. Classic studies of both news and reality-based programming show whites overrepresented as officers and victims (Dixon et al., 2003 ; Dixon & Linz, 2000a , 2000b ; Oliver, 1994 ). This includes network and local news programs. More recent studies show that this continues to occur regularly and remains a news programming staple (Dixon, 2017b ). When contrasted with black and Latino representations, this reinforces the notion that whites resolve social problems and people of color create social problems.

Summary of News Constructions of Culture, Race, and Media

Based on this literature review, three significant findings that summarize news’ construction of race and ethnicity emerge. First, African Americans tend to be overly associated with criminality and poverty . However, the intensity of these portrayals depends on context (e.g., a focus on families, athletes, or general economic conditions). Second, Latinos tend to be largely underrepresented, but when they are seen, they tend to be overly associated with problematic illegal immigration , especially immigrants who may pose a threat or be prone to criminality. Third, news depicts whites most favorably, overrepresenting them as victims (e.g., innocent portrayals) and officers (e.g., heroic portrayals).

Digital Media Constructions of Culture, Race, and Media

The vast majority of research detailing the portrayal of people of color in the media relied on the analysis of traditional media sources including television and magazines. However, increasingly, people turn to digital media for both entertainment and news. This section provides an overview of this growing industry that will eventually dominate our media landscape. The discussion first entails video games and Internet news websites. Speculation about the role social media will play with regard to these depictions follows.

Black Depictions in Video Games

An abundance of research focuses on racial representation within video games (Burgess, Dill, Stermer, Burgess, & Brown, 2011 ; Williams, Martins, Consalvo, & Ivory, 2009 ). Similar to traditional entertainment media, African Americans comprise approximately 11% of popular video game characters for major game systems (e.g., Xbox 360, PlayStation 2, Nintendo GameCube) (Williams et al., 2009 ). Conversely, blacks are underrepresented in massive multiplayer online games (MMO) in which players customize their own avatars’ features, including gender and skin tone (Waddell, Ivory, Conde, Long, & McDonnell, 2014 ). In this environment only 3.84% of all unique characters within MMOs are black.

When considering gender differences in portrayals, more problematic depictions exist. For instance, black women are underrepresented in gaming magazines and almost completely absent from video game covers (Burgess et al., 2011 ). Meanwhile, black men are typically portrayed as either athletic and/or violent . Black aggression does not occur in socially sanctioned settings (e.g., war). Instead, many black males appear as outlaws (e.g., street fighters).

Black Depictions in Digital News Sources

There is limited research on news depictions and race within digital media contexts, but this will most likely become the focus of future scholarship over the next few years. This focus will be fueled by the rise of political figures, such as Donald Trump, who utilize media stereotypes to advance their political agendas (Dixon, 2017a ). Much of what we do know stems from research on websites and digital news sources. One earlier study of this phenomena found that African Americans were underrepresented as part of images and headlines used in these web news stories (Josey et al., 2009 ). They were also more strongly associated with poverty than what the actual poverty rates suggest. A more recent analysis of a wide variety of online news sources similarly found that black families were overrepresented as poor and welfare dependent (Dixon, 2017a ). In addition, black fathers were misrepresented as excessively absent from the lives of their children. Finally, African American family members were overrepresented as criminal suspects. These findings complement the traditional news conclusions reached by previous scholars.

Latino Depictions in Video Games

Waddell, Ivory, Conde, Long, and McDonnell ( 2014 ) found that the trend of Latino underrepresentation in media extends to the video game industry. Latino avatars were not observed in the highest grossing MMO games in 2010 (0%). Williams, Martins, Consalvo, and Ivory ( 2009 ) also assessed the racial characteristics of video game characters across 150 games and found that white characters were observed more often (59.32%) than Latino (1.63%) characters. Furthermore, Latino characters were never observed assuming primary roles.

Latino Depictions in Digital News Sources

In terms of digital news sources, the research presents extremely similar findings between Latinos and African Americans. Latinos continue to be largely underrepresented across a variety of roles in web news (Josey et al., 2009 ). They are underrepresented in both headlines and images. They are also likely to be overassociated with poverty (Dixon, 2017a ; Josey et al., 2009 ).

Summary of Digital Constructions of Culture, Race, and Ethnicity

In summary, underrepresentation remains the norm for both African Americans and Latinos in digital media. At the same time, digital news overly associates these groups with poverty . Clearly, as traditional media and its audience migrate to new digital platforms, this area will continue to be researchers’ focus well into the future. One digital platform not mentioned is social media. Many users receive, consume, and share entertainment and news content via social media. This includes music and music fandom content (Epps & Dixon, 2017 ). Social media’s specific and unique characteristics may contribute to media stereotype cultivation and prevent positive intergroup contact (Dixon, 2017c ). Much work needs to be undertaken in the future to explore these possibilities.

Conclusions

This article began with a discussion of the possible impact of mediated stereotypes to contextualize our discussion. Social categorization theory, social identity theory, and priming/cognitive accessibility suggest that the prominent black stereotypes of black laziness , criminality , innate athleticism , jezebel, and poverty would be embraced by heavy media consumers. Similarly, even though Latinos remain underrepresented, the reinforcement of Latino stereotypes like poverty , harlot , criminal , and illegal immigrant would result from regular media consumption. While underrepresented, Latinos receive enough mainstream media attention for scholars to conduct quantitative social research. Asian and Native Americans’ underrepresentation in mainstream media, however, indicates these groups’ general absence.

When educators teach these topics in class, they are often asked: Why? Why does media perpetuate these stereotypes? Consider these two prominent answers. First, media creators suffer from mostly unconscious, and sometimes conscious bias, that scholars believe facilitates an ethnic blame discourse (Dixon & Linz, 2000a ; Romer, Jamieson, & de Coteau, 1998 ; Van Dijk, 1993 ).

This discourse tends to occur within groups (e.g., whites conversing with one another) and leads them to blame social problems on ethnic others (e.g., Latinos and blacks). Given that media producers remain overwhelmingly white, this explanation appears plausible. As white people engage in these discussions, their way of thinking manifests in their content. The second explanation revolves around the structural limitations and economic interests of news agencies (Dixon & Linz, 2000a ). This explanation suggests that media agencies air material most appealing to audiences in the simplest form possible to increase ratings. This process heavily relies on stereotypes because stereotypes make processing and attending to media messages easier for audience members. In turn, profits increase. This points to problems related to the relationship between media content creation and the media industry’s profit motives. Skeptics may question these explanations’ plausibility, but overall, mediated stereotypes remain a persistent part of the media environment. Digital media exacerbate the negative effects of mediated stereotype consumption.

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Exploring the representation of Chinese cultural symbols dissemination in the era of large language models

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• Yixiao Zhang 1 ,
• Yuan He   ORCID: orcid.org/0009-0002-7913-1371 2 ,
• Yining Xia 1 ,
• Yanbo Wang 1 , 3 ,
• Xianghui Dong 4 &
• Junchen Yao 1  

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Cultural symbols serve as one of the most direct and tangible representations of culture spreading, including for the dissemination of Chinese civilization. This study embarks on an exploratory analysis and comparison of the portrayal of these ‘Chinese cultural symbols’ by Chinese and international mainstream large language models. Our findings reveal that calligraphy, Confucian philosophy, the Forbidden City, Peking Opera, and the Great Wall constitute the top five Chinese cultural symbols that receive the most attention from large language models. However, the depiction of the “Chinese cultural landscape” by current large language models predominantly concentrates on elements of traditional humanities and social sciences, with a noticeable absence of China’s contemporary development and technological accomplishments. Concurrently, there are significant disparities in the representation of “Chinese cultural symbols” between domestic and international large language models. This includes issues such as the international models deficiency in providing a holistic portrayal of China’s Political Ideologies and Institutional Systems. In light of these findings, this study proposes strategic suggestions and recommendations for promoting exchanges and mutual learning among civilizations in the era of large language models.

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Zhang, Y., He, Y., Xia, Y. et al. Exploring the representation of Chinese cultural symbols dissemination in the era of large language models. Int. Commun. Chin. Cult (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40636-024-00293-z

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This episode was produced by Marc Rivers. It was edited by Courtney Dorning. Our executive producer is Sami Yenigun.

• The Sympathizer

The Radical Art of the Depression Years

By working within the constraints of the WPA, artists like Philip Guston discovered new modes of representation and irony.

The art of the 1930s occupies a unique place in American cultural history, for it was in the 1930s that art—so often a world apart from politics—became inseparable from the socialist, communist, and labor movements. When we think of the era, we think of the paintings, prints, murals, and photographs created under the auspices of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), and of the posters, propaganda, and other works created by artists affiliated with left causes in the 1930s—from members of the Communist and Socialist parties to those supporting the rank and file of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO).

These were the documents of Depression-era hardship: testimonies to the resilience of those who lived through it and indictments of the capitalist system that had caused it. They are also works of art, rich with personal and political meaning and aesthetic value. And yet, especially these days, it can be difficult to shake a sense of homogenizing nostalgia that transforms what was a lively and contested cultural milieu into a blur of burly bodies and simple scenes of social realism.

“Art for the Millions,” a new exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, invites us to look with fresh eyes at the art of the 1930s and seeks to bring together lesser-known works and unexpected objects from the era to show the diversity and daring in the cultural production of this period.

“Art for the millions” opens with a section that focuses on the kinds of artistic engagement with left-wing politics and the labor movement that we associate with the era’s art. Yet even when the subjects are those you might expect—factory workers, protests, various social ills—the visions on view are individual, even idiosyncratic.

Take, for example, a mural design proposed by Philip Guston for the Queensbridge Houses Community Center in Queens. Somber and ominous, the colored-pencil study shows, against a foreboding urban skyline and among scattered construction fragments, a mother upright in her coffin and children dueling with two-by-fours and trash-can lids while a vagrant slumps across a stoop. Unsurprisingly, this scene of deprivation was rejected by the WPA in favor of a more uplifting image, and Guston’s completed mural focuses instead on the nuclear family, children at play, and the applied arts—although not without an unsettling, ironic edge that prefigures the artist’s later work, which features bubblegum-colored viscera and cartoonish images of Klan members driving around in cars.

The chasm between Guston’s proposal and the completed mural hints at the reason WPA work can be challenging to engage with as art, rather than as history or propaganda: Created for government-run facilities and subject to state-imposed constraints, it clashes with our ideals of artistic freedom. The WPA’s guidelines forbade overt political content (although it found its way in nonetheless) and steered artists toward legibility, prioritizing representation over abstraction and favoring the social realist aesthetic. Artists trying to get by in an era of mass unemployment had little choice but to accept these constraints. Yet this context makes the individual visions that shine through all the more meaningful. By working within such constraints, artists like Guston discovered new modes of representation and irony.

By including Black artists and images of Black workers, “Art for the Millions” challenges other dominant narratives of the Depression, the New Deal, and the art of this period. One such representation appears in a painting by Ben Shahn, an artist who created some of the era’s most arresting imagery.

Though he was happy to describe his work as propaganda, Shahn’s paintings were rarely straightforward. In the painting on view at the Met, the artist depicts a ruddy-complexioned man with his gaze lifted to the horizon. In the distance, scaffolding rises, reflected in the lenses of his welding goggles. Next to him, another welder, who is Black, looks into the middle distance with a furrowed brow. Shahn created this painting in 1943 while working in the graphics division of the CIO’s political action committee—established that year as the first PAC in American history. Reproduced as a poster, the work circulated among union members with the caption “For full employment after the war REGISTER—VOTE.” On its face, this painting presents a vision of racial solidarity within and beyond the workforce, suggesting the power that American workers could wield at the ballot box regardless of their background. Yet there is something more ambiguous at work: Its Black subject occupies an uneasy space in the composition, to the left of the white worker, squeezed into the corner and strangely cropped. I can’t help but feel that he is an afterthought, although compellingly rendered and despite the artist’s own anti-racist bona fides: Shahn was a member of the Committee for the Negro in the Arts, a diverse organization dedicated to the fight against discrimination in theater, the visual arts, music, and beyond.

The Black figure’s marginalization captures a deeper tension of the era: the exclusion of Black Americans from the post–World War II promise. Although Franklin Roosevelt’s 1944 State of the Union address would propose a Second Bill of Rights guaranteeing Americans the right to “a decent home” and “a useful and remunerative job,” state and local authorities enforced segregationist measures that denied Black Americans these advantages. Likewise, returning Black GIs found it difficult to enroll in colleges and gain meaningful employment. Meanwhile, discriminatory federal housing policy and redlining kept Black families from purchasing homes in new suburban developments. However unintentionally, Shahn’s painting recalls this history and reminds us of the unevenness with which the era’s supposedly universal assistance programs were applied.

Elsewhere in the exhibition, the Black figure appears front and center, yet similar tensions and contradictions remain. A 1940 watercolor by the Black painter and printmaker Dox Thrash suggests the complexities of union affiliation for Black workers. Thrash, better known for the richly toned and inky prints that he created using a method of his own invention, shows us a larger-than-life Black orator giving an impassioned speech. While the surrounding figures, also Black, are attentive, some seem unconvinced, standing with hands on hips rather than with fists raised. Two people—perhaps children—can be seen laughing from an open window in the background. While this image has been read as an affirmation of Black unionism, the apparent skepticism of the crowd reflects an on-the-ground reality.

The Nation Weekly

At the time Thrash created this painting, major labor unions such as the CIO, which pledged to organize all workers regardless of color at its founding in 1935, had only recently taken steps to combat segregation and discrimination in their ranks. Thrash’s vociferous orator brings to mind the real-life Frank Custer in the 1984 TV masterpiece The Killing Floor , which follows Custer’s efforts to bring his fellow Black meatpacking workers into the Amalgamated Meat Cutters in the years leading up to the 1919 Chicago race riot. But there are deeper ambivalences at work too, including Thrash’s own attitude toward organized labor. In 1937, he wrote a letter to Ellen Woodward, an administrator of the Federal Arts Project, in support of Mary Curran, the director of the project’s Philadelphia branch, where Thrash was employed. Curran had been asking the artists under her to sign a letter rejecting the Artists Union, an organization that had pressured Roosevelt to extend New Deal employment relief to artists and that continued to vigorously advocate for working artists and strongly opposed reductions to the program. The Artists Union had accused Curran of mismanagement and anti-union activity, but Thrash praised her leadership. “As a negro artist,” he wrote, “I would like to commend the entire staff for their impartial and fair treatment to all those employed.” One of Thrash’s fellow FAP artists, Claude Clark, remembered Thrash’s own anti-union activity, recollecting that Thrash “seemed to feel that it was patriotic to stand across the street from the union hall and tell how many employees [of the FAP workshop] went into that meeting.” A close look at Thrash’s ambiguous painting may serve as a reminder that we cannot assume the politics of the artists of this period.

Despite the diversity of the visions of labor on view, the working body in “Art for the Millions” is consistently represented as male. Although millions of women entered the workforce during the Depression, it is the heroically masculine working-class body, broad-shouldered and burly, that has come to represent the era and its art.

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A compelling exception is a lithograph by the painter and illustrator Elizabeth Olds. Olds’s prints also valorize working men—her Miner Joe was chosen as the banner image for this show—but in this one, titled Burlesque , we find a tightly packed row of women in leotards, posed identically with bare legs flexed and extended. The mechanical quality of their movement, the precision and duplication in their pose, recalls representations of work on the assembly line, lampooned nearby in a clip from Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times .

While Depression-era conceptions of labor were unlikely to include burlesque dancers, Olds’s print appears to frame entertainment as work and to suggest that performance is also a form of alienated labor, consumed here by the rapt, cigar-smoking audience squeezed into the corner of the image. Only recently have nightlife workers—strippers, dancers, door and coat-check workers—moved to unionize, shining a bright light on the uniquely precarious and exploitative conditions of this form of employment. In Olds’s prescient lithograph, we catch a glimpse of this broader understanding of the composition of the working class.

After the sections on leftist politics and labor in art, “Art for the Millions” shifts its focus to explore the broader search for an American cultural identity. What exactly was “American” about American art? This question concerned artists and critics alike during the 1930s and ’40s, reflecting longstanding anxieties about the perceived lack of a uniquely and cohesively American artistic tradition. As the show demonstrates, this search for an American cultural identity—far from encouraging or yielding a homogeneous vision of Americanness—resulted in a cacophony of contested expressions.

One case in point is the dazzling and meticulous drawings of American folk art on view. Among the jobs for artists created by the Federal Arts Project were those documenting objects of American craft, which were just beginning to be valued as art—from the head-shaped jugs created by enslaved artisans in Edgefield, S.C., to Navajo woven blankets. The intricate and exact renderings produced by these FAP illustrators (many of them women) formed an Index of American Design, a repository preserving American artistic traditions and serving as a resource for artists and designers. These drawings are works of art in their own right. The trompe l’oeil effect of a watercolor painting depicting the embroidery made by an anonymous woman from colonial New England had me looking twice—I thought I was seeing a textile fragment behind glass.

A few works in the show draw on the history and heritage of the American West in particular to stake competing claims to American artistic authenticity. In Frontier , a solo dance choreographed and performed by Martha Graham in 1935, a long-skirted female figure, her back to a split-rail fence, surveys the expanse before her, as suggested by her wide arms and smile, before dancing into a space she claims with brisk and competent movement. Graham’s celebration of female independence and ingenuity in the American West represents a landmark in the history of modern dance. Her explorations of expressive and communicative motion were aimed at creating a form that was “uniquely American.”

Later, during the Cold War, Graham’s work would be exported as a celebration of American creative liberty. In 1955, her company went on a State Department–sponsored tour of the East and South Asian “domino nations”—those that the Eisenhower administration deemed likely to come under communist influence. Yet in the 1930s, before they came to represent an artistic corollary for anti-communist liberalism, these experimental and modernist visions of American identity were explicitly opposed to another artistic movement gaining ground at the time: regionalism, which rejected the urban intellectualism of modern art and the influence of the European avant-garde and turned instead to rural America, its history, and its salt-of-the-earth inhabitants for inspiration.

Regionalism is represented in the Met’s show with a lithograph by Thomas Hart Benton, who had studied art in prewar Paris—the avant-garde’s ground zero—and claimed to have destroyed his early work “to get all that modernist dirt out of my system.” Titled Approaching Storm , it too commemorates the independence of the pioneer, represented here by a lone male figure who, alongside a team of mules hitched to a plow, watches dark clouds rise above a rolling agricultural landscape.

While Benton’s lithograph is ambiguous about its intentions, in the hands of regionalism’s big promoter, the gallerist Maynard Walker, the movement took on an explicitly nativist character. In 1933, Walker urged the art-viewing public to leave behind European “rubbish” and hew to “real American art…which really springs from American soil.” These overtures set off alarm bells for some, as news of developments in Germany began to circulate among America’s radical artists. In a 1936 article published in Art Front , the magazine of the Artists Union, the leftist critic and art historian Meyer Schapiro warned of the dangers of linking national identity and cultural production in the search for an authentic American artistic heritage. “Many liberal, and even radical, artists who uncompromisingly reject nationalism, share the belief in fixed racial or national characters in art,” Schapiro wrote. “We must denounce appeals for an American art which identify the American with a specific blood group or race, or which identify American art with supposedly fixed and inherent psychological characters inherited from the past.” The “American character,” Schapiro concluded, “is as varied as the American scene.”

While the modernist Graham and the regionalist Benton offered different formal and conceptual approaches to the American West, in neither Frontier nor Approaching Storm is there any suggestion of the Indigenous claim on and presence in the region. At the Met, however, Native relationships to the land can be glimpsed in the work of the Pueblo artist Quah Ah, who also went by the Spanish name Tonita Peña. Throughout the 1920s and ’30s, she created hundreds of paintings representing everyday life and ceremonial events in Pueblo communities.

In Peña’s Pueblo Parrot Dance , we find a sharp contrast to Graham’s and Benton’s evocations of pioneer independence. Instead, we see regalia-clad women and men moving past each other and into a center space between two lines of dancers, in a composition that balances order and movement. In their own moment, Peña’s paintings appealed to preservationists and tourists as timeless and “authentic” expressions of Indigenous culture. Yet Peña was a modern artist: Her experimentation with new modes of representing Pueblo communities reflects a Native modernism emerging in this period and a countercurrent within the search for an American cultural identity.

If much of the work on view in “Art for the Millions” reflects the era’s pluralism and diversity, the exhibition’s final section shows the streamlining of history. As the United States emerged from the Depression, populist art and politics gave way to narratives of technological and industrial innovation. New consumer goods in gleaming chrome promised luxury and efficiency, while the futuristic visions of the Chicago and New York world’s fairs conjured brave new worlds of progress. “Art for the Millions” puts on full display the magnetic, even seductive qualities of American design in this period. A sleek Bakelite baby monitor, or “Radio Nurse,” designed by the sculptor Isamu Noguchi is covetable. So is the “Streamliner” meat slicer, whose aerodynamic shape and tapering curves reflect the era’s belief that everything, from appliances to automobiles, could be engineered to achieve its optimal form. Also on view is ephemera from the era’s various world’s fairs. Postcards and silk scarves allowed attendees to take home souvenirs from “The World of Tomorrow,” as the 1939 New York World’s Fair was dubbed.

Some of the most eye-catching images in this final section are from a series of Fortune magazine covers from January to December 1937. A magazine created to cover both business and culture, Fortune was a deluxe publication, amply illustrated and printed on heavy stock. Its covers are full of slick modernist citations: a sinuous snare of stock ticker tape; an abstract field of ships’ stacks emblazoned with shipping-line logos, like a Mondrian composition; a surrealist, trompe l’oeil treatment of the transformation of raw lumber into newspaper. At the exhibition’s end, these covers stand in contrast to those of the leftist periodicals on view in the first gallery—the Daily Worker , New Masses , Labor Defender , and the Yiddish-language monthly Der Hammer —which illustrated, with photocollage and bold symbolism, the era’s struggles against political and economic oppression. These two sets of magazine covers bookending the exhibition recall to me the cultural historian Michael Denning’s provocative suggestion that the visual expressions of working-class consciousness in American art, however familiar they may seem today, constituted a genuinely radical avant-garde, a modernist aesthetic for the masses.

I admit to being wary as I approached this exhibition, worried that I (as well as others) might feel unmoved by the familiar. But if this Depression-era art does feel familiar, it’s for a good reason. Perhaps more than any other artistic movement of the 20th century, the art of the 1930s and ’40s has become a living legacy. WPA murals, prints, and paintings adorn our schools, post offices, hospitals, government buildings, and public housing projects. Their presence, in these spaces and in exhibitions like the Met’s, might evoke nostalgia for a time gone by. But we can also allow these works to remind us of a moment when artists, along with countless others, organized to bring not only art, but so much more, to the millions.

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The Best A24 Movies to Stream in 2024

Starring everyone from Jacob Elordi to Mahershala Ali and Michelle Yeoh

Putting acting talents like Robert Pattinson, Mahershala Ali, and Michelle Yeoh in front of the camera, and directors such as Greta Gerwig and Yorgos Lanthimos at the helm, A24’s offerings continue to garner fans all over the world. We’ve rounded up 20 of the best A24 movies to date—including intense dramas, unexpected romantic comedies, apocalyptic mysteries, and more.

Aftersun (2022)

Director Charlotte Wells made her directorial debut with 2022’s Aftersun , a coming-of-age drama starring Paul Mescal, who received an Oscar nomination for his performance. The film focuses on an 11-year-old girl named Sophie who embarks on a vacation to Turkey with her dad, Calum. Aftersun explores the complicated relationship between father and daughter, who attempt to bond after a period of separation, in spite of the personal problems they have.

Multi-award-winning documentary Amy showcases the incredible talent of British singer Amy Winehouse , while also exploring the tragic circumstances that led to her untimely death. The film chronicles her rise to fame, the huge success of her two albums, the troubling side of stardom, and the personal difficulties she experienced—including destructive relationships and health issues such as bulimia, self-harm, alcoholism, and drug addiction. Whether or not you’re a fan of Winehouse’s music, Amy is an intimate portrait of an icon.

Civil War (2024)

Alex Garland’s dystopian thriller stars Kirsten Dunst as photojournalist Lee, who is traveling across a warring United States, documenting the country’s unrest on the way. In Civil War , cavernous divisions have formed between the government and multiple factions of citizens, leading to violence, destruction, and fear. En route to interview the president, Lee and her colleagues contend with threats, both physical and existential.

Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)

2022’s Everything Everywhere All at Once , directed by filmmaking team Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheiner, took the world by storm. Spanning a multitude of genres, the movie follows Chinese-American immigrant Evelyn Quan Wang (Michelle Yeoh), whose IRS audit takes an unexpected turn involving parallel universes and an evil force intent on destroying the world. Yeoh stars alongside Jamie Lee Curtis, Stephanie Hsu, and Ke Huy Quan in the unmissable movie, which took home seven Oscars.

Lady Bird (2017)

Before 2019’s Little Women and 2023’s Barbie , Greta Gerwig established herself as an impressive directorial talent with 2017’s Lady Bird , starring Saoirse Ronan and Timothée Chalamet. The dreamy coming-of-age drama is set in Sacramento in the early 2000s, and explores the tense relationship between Christine/Lady Bird (Ronan) and her mom (Laurie Metcalfe). This relatable teenage story focuses on what it’s like to be a young person frustrated by your surroundings and searching for an escape.

Midsommar (2019)

Ari Aster’s follow-up to the equally terrifying Hereditary stars Florence Pugh as a young woman who travels to Sweden with her terrible boyfriend and his friends to attend a midsummer festival. Following the loss of her entire family, Dani is in a fragile place, but embraces the chance to immerse herself in a different country. However, something feels off about the commune they’re staying at, and it soon becomes clear that its residents have some… unique beliefs.

Minari (2020)

Writer-director Lee Isaac Chung drew inspiration from his own life for Minari , which tells the story of the Yi family, who leave South Korea for Arkansas in the 1980s. As the family attempts to build a life in their new country, they face tragedies and difficulties. Costarring Steven Yeun, Han Ye-ri, and Youn Yuh-jung, the movie received six Academy Award nominations, with Youn becoming the very first Korean to take home an Oscar for acting.

Moonlight (2016)

Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight took home three Academy Awards, including the coveted Best Picture Oscar, beating La La Land in dramatic fashion. Based on Tarell Alvin McCraney’s semi-autobiographical play, Moonlight tracks the life of a young man as he deals with complicated familial relationships, emotional and physical abuse, and his own sexuality. Featuring incredible performances by Trevante Rhodes, Mahershala Ali, Naomie Harris, and Janelle Monáe, Moonlight has rightfully been declared a masterpiece .

Obvious Child (2014)

Gillian Robespierre’s directorial debut is a love letter to abortion access if there ever were one. Jenny Slate stars as Donna, a heartbroken bookstore worker and comedian who accidentally gets pregnant after a one-night stand with Max (Jake Lacy), a man she meets at a bar. Combining elements of romantic comedy with discussions about the essentiality of abortion access, Obvious Child is an important movie, particularly at a time when women’s rights are under threat.

Past Lives (2023)

Greta Lee, Teo Yoo, and John Magaro star in Celine Song’s Past Lives , a romantic drama partially based on her own life experiences. Childhood sweethearts Nora and Hae are separated when Nora’s family leaves South Korea for Canada. Over the course of more than 20 years, Nora and Hae make intermittent contact with one another, and when they eventually meet face to face, she is married to an American named Arthur.

Priscilla (2023)

Based on Priscilla Presley’s book Elvis and Me , which tells the story of her romance with and marriage to rock ’n’ roll legend Elvis Presley, Priscilla is a delicate portrayal of a complex relationship. Cailee Spaeny takes on the role of Priscilla, a young girl who meets a 24-year-old Elvis (Jacob Elordi) when she is just 14 years old. Directed by Sofia Coppola, Priscilla tackles the darker side of Elvis’s life and relationships, and finally takes an honest look at the predatory nature of one of pop culture’s most famous romances.

Room (2015)

Based on the best-selling novel by author Emma Donoghue , who also penned the screenplay, Room is a taut and disturbing thriller starring Brie Larson and Jacob Tremblay. The movie tells the story of a woman who has been kidnapped and held captive by a man for seven years, giving birth to his son in the tiny prison constructed to keep them from getting away. The claustrophobic drama explores the longevity of trauma, and the terrifying escape attempts made by mother and son.

Talk to Me (2022)

Australian horror movie Talk to Me is not for the faint of heart. A group of bored teenagers attend a party at which a severed hand is the main attraction. One by one, the teens take part in a supernatural ritual, in which they hold the embalmed and seriously gross hand and utter the phrase, “Talk to me.” Each time, the person is overtaken by a creepy and often grotesque spirit, and it’s not long before the afterlife is infecting everyone’s day-to-day. You’ll be sleeping with the lights on long after the credits roll.

The Farewell (2019)

In The Farewell , Awkwafina stars as Billi Wang, a Chinese American woman whose family reunites when her grandmother Nai Nai is diagnosed with a terminal illness. The family decides to conceal Nai Nai's illness from her, using a number of conceits to explain their decision to stage an impromptu reunion. Written and directed by Lulu Wang, The Farewell won several high-profile awards, with Awkwafina winning Best Actress in a Musical or Comedy at the Golden Globe Awards for her performance.

The Iron Claw (2023)

Zac Efron, Jeremy Allen White, and Harris Dickinson star in Sean Durkin’s biographical drama about real-life wrestling family the Von Erichs. Raised in the world of professional wrestling, Fritz Von Erich’s sons follow in his footsteps, both finding success and meeting immense tragedy in the process. Taking place throughout the 1980s and ’90s, The Iron Claw explores the so-called “Von Erich curse” and the devastating events that led to the term being coined.

The Lobster (2015)

Yorgos Lanthimos directs this bizarre black comedy starring Colin Farrell, Rachel Weisz, and Olivia Colman. Following the breakdown of his marriage, David (Farrell) moves into a hotel for single people, which has some very strange stipulations: If residents don’t find love with another person within 45 days of moving in, they will turn into animals. While the deadline can be extended under certain circumstances, the pressure is on to find a partner and avoid a lifetime void of humanity.

The Witch (2015)

Anya Taylor-Joy made her feature film debut in Robert Eggers’s The Witch , a foreboding folk horror story about a Puritan family in New England in the 1630s. After being banished from the main settlement, the family starts to experience strange occurrences, including the mysterious disappearance of one of their children. It soon transpires that a witch lives in the woods near their farm, and satanic panic ensues.

The Zone of Interest (2023)

Loosely based on the book of the same name by Martin Amis , Jonathan Glazer’s adaptation takes place in the “zone of interest,” an area lived in by Nazi SS officers and their families on the land surrounding the concentration camp Auschwitz. The movie examines what the lives of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss and his family may have been like, as they resided next door to the grievous death camp.

Uncut Gems (2019)

Josh and Benny Safdie’s New York crime thriller netted a ton of acclaim upon release, and it’s easy to see why. Adam Sandler stars as a Jewish-American jeweler with an unfortunate gambling addiction, who ends up in a race against time to retrieve a priceless gem he hopes can solve his problems. Costarring LaKeith Stanfield, Julia Fox, and Idina Menzel, Uncut Gems will have you on the edge of your seat, screaming that Sandler should have been nominated for an Oscar . No, really.

Zola (2020)

Zola is based on a series of tweets by Aziah “Zola” King, which went viral because of the wild story they told. In the movie, waitress and stripper Zola (Taylour Paige) is invited on a weekend road trip to Tampa by fellow stripper Stefani ( Riley Keough ), who claims they can make a lot of money. Their plans almost immediately descend into chaos, thanks to the presence of Stefani’s boyfriend (Nicholas Braun) and her so-called “roommate” X (Colman Domingo). An unmissable crime caper.

Amy Mackelden is a freelance writer, editor, and disability activist. Her bylines include Harper's BAZAAR, Nicki Swift, Cosmopolitan, Marie Claire, ELLE, The Independent, Bustle, Healthline, and HelloGiggles. She co-edited The Emma Press Anthology of Illness , and previously spent all of her money on Kylie Cosmetics.

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