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Purpose – Building on the work of Wenner (2011) and Messner and Montez de Oca (2005), this study provides an updated critical stocktaking of the narrative tendencies in sport-related alcohol advertising on television. Set in contemporary understandings of a ‘crisis of masculinity’ and in the political economy of the alcohol industry, this study anchors a critical reading of masculinity, the sporting context and alcohol advertising in Wenner's (2007, 2013) ‘dirt theory of narrative ethics’.

Design/methodology/approach – Our theoretical and methodological approach is grounded in a dirt theory of narrative ethics. Set at the intersection of reader-oriented literary theory (Iser, 1978) and ethical criticism (Gregory, 1998), we ‘follow the dirt’ to understand how contagion from imported communicative meanings (McCracken, 1990) exerts power (Leach, 1976) by influencing reading and interpretation. We draw upon a diverse sample of 20 television ads representing a balanced cross-section of sport-dirtied beer commercials produced between 2010 and 2019. To balance this sample, we divided the ads by their opposing tendencies to characterize men as either ‘real men’, drawn in mythical masculinity terms, or ‘himbos’, drawn as ‘losers’ or slackers. To address the dominance of Anheuser-Busch InBev (ABI) in the American market, we further divided our ‘real men’ and ‘himbo’ samples, contrasting five ads produced for ABI brands with five ads produced for beer brands not held by ABI.

Findings – We contend that contemporary sports-dirtied beer ads combine to form a schizophrenic picture of American manhood. Male sports fans are alternatively hailed through mocking and misandry, through playfully saluting the norms of ‘bro culture’, and through encouraging men to understand themselves as proud keepers of tradition. We critically consider the ethical implications of building brand affinities through staking disparate positions in contemporary cultural and political debates about the place of men and masculinity in contemporary society.

Research limitations/implications – We discuss the difficulties involved in holding advertisers accountable for balancing ethical and market demands. Nevertheless, we call on the industry to engage in a more reflexive and responsible approach to crafting sports-dirtied alcohol advertising.

Comics and graphic novels can disrupt traditional texts by challenging the “worship of the written word” (Torres, 2019), a feature of white supremacy that perpetuates textual hierarchies within educational spaces. Giving all of our students access to contemporary literature that centers Black youth perspectives is not only important in decolonizing literature education but also in presenting a holistic view of Black childhood. They can be used in the classroom as subjects to challenge stereotypical depictions by centering experiences, ideas, and concepts that are often marginalized in traditional curriculum. Within this chapter, we focus on comics and graphic novels as tools to enact students’ multiliteracies and to analyze visual stories depicting BlackBoy adolescence, using the frameworks of BlackBoy Crit Pedagogy (Bryan, 2022), an equity framework that interrogates the interdisciplinary ways that Black boy students' literacy learning can be formed through the teaching and learning of Blackness, maleness, and the schooling experiences of Black boys. We utilize this framework to analyze the use of diverse comics and graphic novels to facilitate critical conversations of bringing inclusive visual texts into the classroom. We invite practitioners to reimagine curricular ideas and content centered on empowerment and Black boy adolescence and how those ideas are presented to youth through a variety of visual narratives.

African American males experience acute or chronic stress from discriminatory treatment and racial microaggressions, decreasing their biopsychosocial health. Racial microaggressions include but are not limited to merciless and mundane exclusionary messages, being treated as less than fully human, and civil and human rights violations. Racial microaggressions are key to understanding increases in racial battle fatigue (Smith, 2004) resulting from the psychological and physiological stress that racially marginalized individuals/groups experience in response to specific race-related interactions between them and the surrounding dominant environment. Race-related stress taxes and exceeds available resilient coping resources for people of color, while many whites easily build sociocultural and economic environments and resources that shield them from race-based stress and threats to their racial entitlements.

What is at stake, here, is the quest for equilibrium versus disequilibrium in a society that marginalizes human beings into substandard racial groups. Identifying and counteracting the biopsychosocial and behavioral consequences of actual or perceived racism, gendered racism, and racial battle fatigue is a premier challenge of the twenty-first century. The term “racial microaggressions” was introduced in the 1970s to help psychiatrists and psychologists understand the enormity and complications of the subtle but constant racial blows faced by African Americans. Today, racial microaggressions continue to contribute to the negative experiences of African American boys and men in schools, at work, and in society. This chapter will focus on the definition, identification, and long-term effects of racial microaggressions and the resultant racial battle fatigue in anti-black misandric environments.

This paper is concerned with the obstacles of educational reform in a racial climate and the acceptance of Barack Obama as the 44th president of the United States.

As a result, while the president’s positions on educational reform are important, the question still remains; can the majority of Whites support an agenda coming from a Black president? Moreover, as a Black man, can the president really be “allowed” to be a “representative” of all of the people? Do many people think that the election of Mr. Obama ushered in a “postracial” society; in that he is the living testament that we no longer need to focus on social justice, civil rights, and educational reform, especially for underperforming minority schools? Is race a factor among Whites and Blacks regarding President Obama’s approval ratings? How much success can any president expect to have when a significant majority of the population is resistant to his vision of “change?”

Based upon these lingering questions, the issue of race has been and will remain a factor in the Obama presidency that no other president has had to contend. Obfuscation, control, and fear appear to be the raison d’être regarding a strategy of resistance toward President Obama and his interest in “change.” These are the reasons why President Obama’s time is significantly spent on negotiating racial obstacles to change.

The goal of this paper is to provide a sociological and psychological context within a historical framing to understand obstacles to change faced by President Barack Hussein Obama.

In this chapter, we present a case study that explicates the work that two Black boys undergo to write their narratives despite the low expectations of their academic abilities espoused by their White teacher. Orienting ourselves within a critical race theory framework, we relied upon storytelling to tell the stories of John and Seth, two young Black boys whose science interests fueled their engagement across school subjects despite the semantic deficit-oriented positioning of their academic abilities by the White teachers and staff within their school. Throughout this chapter, we center their experiences to argue that understanding the inherent underrepresentation of Black men in science-based professions requires an examination of the pivotal educational moments preceding this disparity. Rich and culturally responsive science teaching may support equity for Black boys, but John and Seth's stories illustrate that these practices alone will only perpetuate the status quo unless teachers challenge their dispositions regarding who their students are and what they are capable of. We conclude by offering suggestions for practitioners to consider when designing and implementing equitable student-centered science instruction.

Although men's studies is no longer a novelty on college campuses, it can still raise some bewildered eyebrows and prompt a few explosive reactions. Recently, on a national computer bulletin board used by reference librarians, a request for journals, articles, and books “that analyze drama from a male/masculine perspective” touched off considerable crossfire among respondents. Beneath the hostilities, however, were serious questions and understandable confusions about the topic of men's studies. These concerns suggest that some clarifications concerning the new men's studies might be useful.