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On 2 February 2020, 99.9 million viewers learnt about the Women's Football Alliance (WFA), the largest women's American football league in the United States, when former player Katie Sowers became the first woman to coach in the Super Bowl. In the same month, the WFA announced several corporate partnerships and a new television deal with statements that connected the support for women's American football to advancing gender equity.

This chapter examines the professionalisation of women's American football in the United States through the lens of mediated visibilities. We use the term mediated visibilities, rather than media coverage, to move beyond how journalists are writing about sport (or ‘covering’ sport) and account for the complex ways in which content about women's sport circulates across producers and platforms in the digital media environment. In particular, our analysis examines the opportunities and limitations of digital media in the process of (semi-)professionalisation of women's American football.

The WFA joined the broader ‘momentum’ of women's sport in the United States as both the league's social media platforms and the sponsors aligned their messages with cultural narratives around women's sport to invoke gender equity in promoting women's American football. Moreover, the league positioned the strategy to enhance mediated visibility the sport as an integral step in the process of (semi-)professionalisation. However, the role of the WFA's digital media platforms alone appears to be limited without substantial structural change.

The burgeoning practice of peer-to-peer breastmilk sharing in the United States conflicts with public health concerns about the safety of the milk. In-depth interviews with 58 breastmilk sharers highlight the ways in which these respondents counter widespread risk narratives. These caregivers deploy existing social values such as self-reliance, good citizenship, and “crunchy,” or natural, mothering to validate their milk-sharing practices. However, because of stratified reproduction, in which society encourages White motherhood while it disparages motherhood among poor women and women of color, these discourses are more accessible to milk sharers who are White and from middle-class. Black and Latinx milk donors and recipients offer additional rationale for milk sharing that includes reclaiming their legacies as worthy mothers and elevating milk sharing to justice work. In rejecting and reframing risk, all of these milk sharers work toward flattening the good mother/bad mother binary.

In this chapter, post-qualitative educational researcher Maggie MacLure discusses intimate scholarship and qualitative research within the new materialist turn, which has at its core a fundamental challenge to the humanist notion of the “self.” She suggests that, through new materialisms, we are much more intimately connected with human and non-human entities, which in turn requires us to continually push at the ways conventional research constructs researchers as sovereign subjects. At the same time, we must inquire into what these posthuman intimate connections might entail, reimagine the body outside the Cartesian mind/body dualism, and perhaps rethinking the notion of intimacy itself. She suggests that we might do so by explicitly attending to flesh and materiality in our research; focusing on affective intensities – the “hot spots” that continue to haunt us in our data; and aiming for difference, rather than sameness in our analyses, “dwelling with the data,” rather than trying to rise above it. Further, she contends that, rather than thinking of the data as something one dominates, we consider each instance with the data as alive, as an encounter.

Filicide, the killing of a child by a parent, is one of the only crimes committed by women and men in roughly equal numbers. Women's violence against their children, however, more profoundly confounds common understandings of the links between gender and family violence, leading to its ambivalent treatment within the media. When men kill their children, they are usually characterised as either monsters or as sad, failed men. When women kill their children, they are usually represented as bad mothers or mad mothers suffering under the burdens of the pathological female body. In both cases, a mental illness/distress lens is common, though how it manifests is inflected by gender. This chapter examines recent Australian news representations of maternal filicide-suicide. Focussing on the mental illness/distress frame in news, it examines the ideological work this frame does in decontextualising and de-gendering maternal filicide, framing women's mental illness/distress in ‘psychocentric’ terms that strip it of political or social significance and subjecting it to an individualised lens that obscures the gendered aetiologies of women's use of violence.

Academic literature and news media on young people’s activism predominantly champions young people who align with liberal or progressive values, evident most recently in the youth-led climate strikes around the world. Research is often undertaken by scholars who see their work as advocacy for children and young people, countering deficit-based depictions of politically disengaged or ill-informed youth. Yet, this scholarship rarely includes young people whose forms of political activism align with conservative, right-wing, or even alt-right politics. Such ‘selective advocacy’ reinforces a limited picture of the who and what of young people’s political participation. In this chapter, I explore what it might mean for the field of youth studies to provide a more complex picture of young people’s activism and the necessary discomfort that emerges when the desire to advocate for young research participants conflicts with a researcher’s own political and moral concerns. Through a feminist post-structural frame, I examine media and public discourses surrounding instances of young people’s activism in conservative, right-wing, and alt-right spaces. I present the case of a conservative protest organised by a group of university students and targeting a drag queen hosted children’s story time at a library in Brisbane, Australia. This case highlights the importance of maintaining ‘epistemic uncertainty’ when it comes to the complexity of youth and activism. If we are to provide a fuller picture of youth activism, I argue that it is important not to overlook less ‘comfortable’ forms that do not neatly align with the progressive advocacy that dominates the field of youth studies.

To highlight some of the tensions and complexities that persist in President Obama’s widening support of Marriage Equality during his second administration.

My primary research design uses autoethnographic detail and draws on two methodological frameworks: (1) the “personal is political” use of subjective voice in feminist theory (particularly in the writings of black feminists), and (2) the postmodern view of complex, “messy” and conflictual intersections of race, gender, sexuality, in the writings of critical race and queer theorists.

My primary finding highlights how macro social structural processes related to white privilege and racial domination and how micro cultural narratives contributing to homophobia and heteronormativity in African American religious circles creates both positive and questionable views of President Obama’s support of Marriage Equality, among African Americans heterosexuals, and within the African American LGBTIQ community.

The primary value of this chapter contributes to the discussion on the persistent tensions between religion, race, and sexuality, which make fragile allies between supporters of Marriage Equality and supporters of Civil Rights and racial justice.

Medicaid home and community-based services (HCBS) support community living for three million disabled people in the United States. As a state-federal partnership, these programs are highly variable across states. Because eligibility determination and services differ from state to state, this Medicaid structure becomes a barrier for those HCBS users whose desired futures include cross-state moves.

I examine narratives of citizenship and personhood for Medicaid HCBS users circulating within policy arenas and explore tensions between these and the stories Medicaid HCBS users tell of their own lives. Specifically, I explore the degree to which narratives about Medicaid HCBS users include an affirmation of the right to cross-state movement. My analysis includes data from public statements from policy makers, legislative texts, organizational framings of Medicaid policy, and 18 semi-structured interviews with Medicaid PCA users who desired or pursued cross-state moves.

I conclude that institutional narratives of Medicaid HCBS users are an inadequate representation of the stories told by those who rely on this program and, in consequence, programs stemming from policy fail to offer services that would allow service recipients to pursue their objectives.

Medicaid HCBS policy is part of a broader story of disability rights progress over the last four decades, making its role as an obstacle to cross-state movement a bit of a paradox. This paradox points to the value of narrative analysis in calling attention to invisible contradictions and the need for institutional and organizational change.

Purpose – We delineate how the concept of reputation has been used in different literatures. We develop some formal definitions of observers and reputation that bring together the different literatures. We then ask how noncooperative or “bad” reputations might be repaired. Based on the developed definitions and past research, we suggest some possibilities for reconciliation. We also work on developing an experimental paradigm to investigate reputation.

Methodological/Approach – We review research from different disciplines, develop definitions, and design an experiment.

Findings – We suggest that, under certain conditions, group reconciliation can occur. However, these conditions are quite specific.

Practical Implications – When the goal is to solve a social dilemma, reconciliation is an important part of the process. Without reconciliation, group integration is problematic.

Social Implications – Reconciliation can be a powerful process that encourages cooperation. We suggest some ways that reconciliation might be possible.

Originality/Value of the Chapter – This chapter suggests a new formalization to connect different conceptualizations of reputations.