IAMCR is pleased to announce the recipients of the 2025 Stuart Hall Award, granted to graduate students and early-career scholars whose work demonstrates analytical excellence and a strong commitment to critical, interventionist scholarship in the spirit of Stuart Hall. This year’s winning papers engage pressing issues in media and cultural studies, including Black media witnessing, intergenerational communication and menstrual stigma, and the cultural politics of representation.The award-winning papers are:
- "Media Witnessing from the Perspective of Black Audiences", Nandi Pointer, University of Colorado Boulder (USA).
- "'Mom won’t let me use tampons and cups': Mother-Daughter Intergenerational Interaction about Menstrual Stigma and Hymen Myth", Xiaodong Yan, University of Colorado Boulder (USA), Shulun Wang, Pennsylvania State University (USA), Yujie Zhong, Temple University (USA).
- "Unpacking cultural politics at the metarepresentational conjuncture: Towards an interfaced approach to representation", Florian Vanlee, Ghent University (Belgium).
The award will be formally presented at a special session during the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore.
Media Witnessing from the Perspective of Black Audiences
Nandi Pointer
Submitted to the History Section
Abstract
From slavery to police brutality, the Black struggle in the U.S. can be traced in the visual field. The latest instantiation are images recorded on cell phones and circulated on social media platforms. Indeed, the online dissemination of disparate acts of violence against Black men has evolved into a U.S. cultural phenomenon, culminating with the video of the murder of George Floyd in 2020. Yet insufficient scholarly attention has been paid to how audiences with lived experiences of systematic injustice bear witness to these videos of state-sanctioned violence. Drawing on Richardson’s (2020) conceptualization of Black media witnessing, this paper asks how if at all, Black audiences engage with the cacophonous sites of violence captured on cell phones and disseminated on social media platforms. The goal is to understand how Black people see and read these videos of police brutality and state-sanctioned violence. In doing so, the paper situates the role and specificity of audiences as central to discussions about media witnessing more broadly.
Nandi Pointer is a PhD Candidate in Media Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. A former journalist and TV producer, Pointer studies questions about media, race, and identity. Incorporating writing and documentary filmmaking, her dissertation examines how and why Black men leave the U.S. to teach English in Southeast Asia and the Middle East and what their experiences illuminate about the global dynamics of race and racism. Pointer is the recipient of the 2025 IAMCR Stuart Hall Award.
"Mom won’t let me use tampons and cups”: Mother-Daughter Intergenerational Interaction about Menstrual Stigma and Hymen Myth
Xiaodong Yan, Shulun Wang, Yujie Zhong
Submitted to the Community Communication and Alternative Media Section
Abstract
This study examines how menstrual stigma and the hymen myth are perpetuated through intergenerational mother-daughter interactions, focusing on mothers’ discursive power dynamics that constrain daughters’ autonomy in choosing menstrual products. Drawing on Miller-Day’s Necessary Convergence of Meaning (NCM) framework and analyzing data from Reddit communities, we reveal how maternal authority, cultural nationalism, and religious ideologies intersect to regulate menstrual practices. Findings highlight four key mechanisms: (1) disciplining and regulating “inserted” actions, (2) rejecting Western/White culture, (3) excluding medical-scientific knowledge, and (4) restraining bodily autonomy. Mothers employ emotional coercion, cultural essentialism, and moralistic reasoning to enforce patriarchal norms, positioning insertable tampons and menstrual cups as threats to virginity, ethnic and religious identities. Despite daughters’ covert resistance, maternal control reinforces menstrual stigma in their daily life and patriarchal sexual exploitation in marital relationships, underscoring the undemocratic nature of mother-daughter interactions. This study engages with family talk through re-enactment and sharing in online communities, contributing to feminist discourse analysis by revealing how maternal power structures perpetuate menstrual stigma and uphold patriarchy within the family and, more broadly, in society.
Xiaodong Yan is a doctoral student in Research Track – Community and Social Interaction, Department of Communication, University of Colorado Boulder. He is a research assistant at Center for Communication and Democratic Engagement (CDE), and a Graduate Fellow at Barney Ford Lab for Civic Thought and Engagement. His research interests center on Community-based and Engaged Research, for instance, Civic Activities and Democratic Engagement. In addition, he also primarily employs Critical Approaches to examine how Stigmatized, Marginalized, and Dirtied People negotiate and reclaim their autonomous identities in society.
Yujie Zhong is a doctoral student at Lew Klein College of Media and Communication, Temple University. Her research explores the interactions between Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) and marginalized groups, particularly women. She aims to investigate how ICTs facilitate digital empowerment and drive social change across diverse cultural and societal contexts.
Shulun Wang is a doctoral student at Department of Communication Arts and Sciences, The Pennsylvania State University. Her research focuses on Health, Risk, and Interpersonal Communication.
Unpacking cultural politics at the metarepresentational conjuncture: Towards an interfaced approach to representation
Florian Vanlee
Submitted to the Popular Culture Working Group
Abstract
To media and cultural studies, media representations express hegemonic struggle: they enable and constrain what social differences mean. By analyzing mediated otherness at the moment of production, text and reception, representations are read as conjunctural utterances of social formations – showing how depictions of sexuality, race, class… reflect and refract societal asymmetries. But through this identity-centrism – examining portrayals of specific differences – we disregard popular concerns with representation. Still, mainstream mediascapes are increasingly regulated and shaped by normative discourses on representing difference. Particularly so regarding public service media (PSMs) in Europe, who must carefully navigate, negotiate and consolidate ideas on ‘proper representation’. This theoretical paper centers on PSMs to examine the politics of representation at the ‘metarepresentational conjuncture’. Arguing PSMs function as ‘interfaces of representation’, it shows how production, text and reception are reconfigured by normative discourses on representing difference – affecting and regulating which kinds of ‘difference’ are granted visibility.
As a senior postdoctoral FWO fellow, Florian Vanlee studies how public service broadcasters navigate conflicting, normative discourses about 'acceptable' representations of sexual and gender diversity. Additionally, he acts as vice-chair of IAMCR's Popular Culture Working Group, and as associate editor of DiGeSt: Journal of Diversity and Gender Studies
Stuart Hall Award 2025 Selection Committee
- Chair: Hopeton Dunn
- Gabriel Faimau
- Audrey Gadzekpo
- Graham Murdock
- Usha Raman
- Sandra Ristovska