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In A Case for Community-Centered Journalism: Solutions, Engagement, Trust, Andrea Wenzel maps out a process model for building trust—not just in journalism, but between different sectors of communities. She details how, in many communities, residents gauge trust in news not only based on factors like accuracy and credibility, but also based on how these are intertwined with the perceived motives of news media, and whether outlets are seen to represent communities respectfully. For this reason, Wenzel contends that more local journalism alone is not enough. Rather, she argues that a different kind of local journalism is needed—a community-centered journalism that is solutions-oriented and that engages and shares power with community stakeholders. Through a series of case studies across the U.S., in urban, suburban, and rural communities, Wenzel uses a communication infrastructure theory framework to explore how local journalism interventions attempt to strengthen relationships between residents, community organizations, and local media. She examines the boundary challenges to dominant journalistic practices and norms that arise from place-based interventions to build relationships of trust. Mindful of dynamics of race, class, place, and power, Wenzel recommends a process that is portable – rather than scalable -- that centers on community stakeholders, and is shaped as much by local assets as by needs. She argues that if they shift away from a model that puts journalists at the center and marginalized communities on the periphery, engaged journalism and solutions journalism have the potential to strengthen not just journalism, but the communication health of communities.

With the rise of China’s information and communications technology (ICT) sector, a number of Chinese high-tech firms are approaching transnational stages and shifting the center of gravity in global ICT markets. In the meantime, China’s digital economy has raised the debate with regard to the nature and direction of its developmental model. This book investigates Huawei Technologies—China’s most competitive high-tech company—as a microcosm of the rise of China’s corporate power and its evolving digital economy. Yun Wen first traces Huawei’s history against the backdrop of China’s ICT development and its outward expansion in global markets. Focusing on Huawei’s research and development strategies, she then delineates Huawei’s path to its cutting-edge technology and innovation leadership. Huawei’s distinct experience in the design of its ownership structure and labor practices is also examined in the book. By examining how Huawei’s growth intertwined with the trajectory of China’s ICT development and how it responded to various forces of corporate China’s globalization, this book sheds light on distinguishing features of the “Huawei model” and the geopolitical economic implications of China’s corporate globalization. It argues that the core of China’s pathbreaking model lies in local alternatives and indigenous agencies that have the ability to insist on a self-reliant, open-minded, and innovation-oriented developmental strategy.

This book utilizes an interdisciplinary approach to expand the parameters of satire to include the satirization found in twenty-first-century African American forms of expression crossing generic boundaries. While many of these texts and performances are satires or comedies in a traditional sense, some offer the satirization of race itself as a strategy to create space for possible satiric readings. The use of comedy, humor, and satire in these texts and performances incisively problematizes the existing social sphere by highlighting its absurdity in both the reality of racialization and the mythology of the “post-racial.” These texts reveal the irrationality of racialization and critique anxieties surrounding race and Blackness to demonstrate the usefulness of satire as a critical frame for articulating Black selfhood. Here the power of satire is found in “laughing to keep from dying,” a form of revolutionary laughter in two registers. The in-group laughter opens up Black interior space to make room for autonomous Black identity formation. Out-group laughter either indicts the listener or offers protective plausible deniability of “just jokes” in which comedy is feigned to lack sociopolitical meaning. This laughter opens up space for kaleidoscopic Blackness, where all autonomous performances of Black self-identity are valid.