Gnovis Volume 25 Launches: Celebrating 25 Years of Interdisciplinary Scholarship at Georgetown’s CCT Program

Gnovis is a shining example of the interdisciplinary work being done at Georgetown University’s Communication, Culture & Technology Master’s Program that could not exist without the hard work of the editorial team.

Gnovis’ three senior editors, Merielle Agorilla, Erica Sun, and Anika Maney, have done incredible work in their two years on the Gnovis team– bringing back the Gnovis podcast, hosting their inaugural peer-review learning sessions, and inspiring collective learning that extends beyond the CCT community. As they graduate, it would be remiss not to highlight the incredible work they have done both for Gnovis and for CCT.

Next year, Katya Kazimir and Jisoo Choi will be taking over in their stead, and we cannot wait to see all of the incredible things that they accomplish.

Volume 25 features formal contributions from 8 CCTers: Zhidong Sun, Troy Cheng, Riley Tinlin, Jisoo Choi, Jonathan Briggs, Kunjika Pathak, Jeremiah LaStrap, and Jade Silverstein, and countless contributions from the incredible team of peer reviewers.

In the words of the senior editors:

Volume 25 proudly presents seven peer-reviewed articles. We begin with critical examinations of public trust, cultural memory, and political sentiment during a time of intensifying precarity. In these articles, technological interventions are cast less as dependable solutions and more as begrudging necessities, serving as both a culprit and a crutch for the global crises we face. Zhidong Sun’s survey research reveals a meaningful relationship between trust in social media and public reliance on it for news but warns that this dynamic can leave users “trapped in information cocoons” and left “increasingly vulnerable to rumors and deceptive content.” Troy Cheng’s sentiment analysis of YouTube commentary similarly prompts us to question how online media may reinforce contextual linkages of major offline events that go on to shape the tone of public discourse. In Kevin Echavarria’s study of the island nation of Tuvalu’s “last-hope response” to climate change, reliance on digital technology likewise reflects a dual tension—between cultural preservation and disappearance, and between agency and dependency. Together, these pieces explore the inherent contradictions and possible legacies behind the infrastructures through which digital publics are continually renegotiated, reimagined, and remembered.

The second half of this volume questions negotiations of power and identity in global cultural-political contexts, beginning with Jisoo Choi and Sophia Sinsheimer’s scrutiny of the pursuit of hegemonic recognition. As Sinsheimer notes in her examination of An Archive of Our Own, the quest to legitimize fanfiction and fanworks in the era of platform capitalism may mean aligning with extractive structures that sideline the well-being of its audience. Choi raises a similar conflict in her cross-cultural analysis of media responses to South Korean writer Han Kang’s Nobel Prize recognition, inquiring how participation in the global literary field simultaneously offers visibility and reaffirms the symbolic authority of Western cultural centers. Such symbols and artifacts are further explored in the works of Fauzi Bin Abdul Majid and Riley Tinlin. Fauzi Bin Abdul Majid deconstructs the linguistic markers of collective identity and ancestral heritage in a ritual song of the Ko’a people, while Tinlin tracks the transformation of the protagonist in The Hunger Games trilogy into a mythologized revolutionary symbol. Methodologically, these papers also foreground the enduring value of close readings and measured contemplative engagement in an era of rapid production and seamless consumption.

Following in the steps of earlier editions, this volume additionally publishes seven book reviews exploring a wide range of intersections across digital technology, politics, identity, and social justice in the contemporary world. Jonathan Briggs considers the erosion of our cognitive freedom at the hands of tech giants (Susie Alegre’s Freedom to Think); Kunjika Pathak historicizes artificial intelligence as a construct rooted in surveillance and labor control (Matteo Pasquinelli’s The Eye of the Master); and Luthfi Dzulfikar reflects on the ambivalent opportunities of digital technology in Kenya’s state politics (Nanjala Nyabola’s Digital Democracy, Analogue Politics). Maple Htet scrutinizes recent developments in gender discourse on the Chinese Internet (Altman Yuzhu Peng’s A Feminist Reading of China’s Digital
Public Sphere), while Jeremiah LaStrap recenters the conversation on dismantling obstacles to African-American student achievement in a collection of three essays (Young, Gifted, and Black by Theresa Perry, Claude Steele, and Asa Hilliard III). Themes of pressing global dilemmas are last explored in Jade Silverstein’s review of climate narratives as constructed myths (Jonas Staal’s Climate Propaganda) and in Seyoung Kim’s careful reading of Mohsin Hamid’s novel Exit West, which confronts the ongoing migration crisis.

This is an incredible issue, and we are so excited for you to see all of our students’ hard work.