Cathy Winkler
Biographic Data
| ID | 148295 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Cathy Winkler |
| GIVEN NAMES | Cathy |
| FAMILY NAME | Winkler |
| SIGNATURE | WINKLER C |
| AFFILIATIONS | Georgia State University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1692-6062 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 27 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 29 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 27 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1989 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
The Moscow Spin
By utilizing Hallin and Mancini’s four media systems criteria as a baseline interpretive lens, this study expands understandings of how Russian global media challenge existing international institutions. It illustrates how Russia Today (RT) frames Russia's media system vis-à-vis the West to online audiences. It examines 5 years of media-related posts (prior to Meta's ban) on RT's Arabic, English, French, and Spanish Facebook pages to reveal how a…
Strategic drivers of multimodal messaging
Resistance is Far-Right from Futile
Image Content Indicators of Extremist Group Evolution
Policymakers, researchers, and responders alike focus on the evolution of terrorist and other groups associated with political violence. This study offers a comparative analysis of the images of ISIS and U.S. far-right groups’ use of flag images, as such emblems contribute to community building, heighten emotional responses, and have political import. It adds to previous work by comparing groups across the ideological spectrum, by recognizing dif…
Signalling media professionalism
The messaging content of Russia Today (RT) and China Global Television Network (CGTN) provides alternatives to those offered in mainstream western media. Comparative studies point to RT’s aggressive, ideological rhetoric and CGTN’s more tacit, celebratory, and culture-focused approach. This study adds to these understandings by examining how messaging strategies construct media professionalism – one of the four historic pillars of media systems a…
Mediated Public Diplomacy and RT on Instagram
Changes in the global media environment now challenge relationships between and within states. To expand understandings of mediated public diplomacy, this study examined 13,500 Instagram posts distributed on RT's non-Russian accounts from September 2021–September 2022. It used LDA to identify RT topics across language accounts, explored the topics' relation to UN statehood, examined audience engagement levels, and compared their frequency before …
Censoring Extremism
Recognizing that militant, non-state groups utilize social media and online platforms to reach members, sympathizers, and potential recruits, state agencies and social media corporations now increasingly regulate access to accounts affiliated with such groups. Scholars examining deplatforming efforts have, to date, focused on the extent of audience loss after account restrictions and the identification of strategies for regrouping online follower…
Revisiting representative form in Isis media
This study reconsiders the concepts of representative form and visual ideographs in the context of collectives-in-formation heavily reliant on the online environment to communicate with global audiences. Focusing on the online media products of ISIS, the study conducts a quantitative content analysis of over 9,000 images that the group distributed from 2014 to 2020, coupled with a qualitative assessment of the group's religious and institutional …
Proto-State Media Systems
Textual Messaging of Isis’s al-Naba and the Context Drivers That Correspond to Strategic Changes
Recognizing the importance of the Arabic publication for reaching a key target audience for ISIS, this expansive study of al-Naba’s text-based content will add to the scholarship of non-state actor communication using a mixed methodology of unsupervised machine learning and rhetorical analysis. First, it uses the ANTMN methodology to identify the frequency of the top Arabic thematic word clusters. Second, through time series and regression analys…
Dynamic/Static Image Use in Isis's Media Campaign
The rebound of ISIS in the online environment in the aftermath of the coalition force liberation of Mosul and Raqqa has reinvigorated the need to understand the strategic choices of the group’s media campaign. This study explores ISIS’s use of dynamic vs. static imagery, with a particular focus on how the image form helps facilitate the group’s goals. Experimental studies document that the use of dynamic imagery heightens viewer attention, recall…
Intersections of the Real and the Virtual Caliphates
In 2014, the Islamic State (ISIS) emerged as one of the most prominent global security threats after securing large swaths of land in Syria and Iraq. By 2018, it has lost nearly all of its territory to the various military forces allied against it. ISIS's territorial expansion correlated with the group's online propaganda activities. With the established contribution of online media efforts to ISIS recruitment and fundraising, isolating factors t…
Shifts in the visual media campaigns of Aqap and Isis after high death and high publicity attacks
Extreme militant groups use their media campaigns to share information, recruit and radicalize followers, share worldviews, and seek public diplomacy ends. While previous research documents that various on-the-ground events correspond to changes in the groups’ messaging strategies, studies of how competing militant groups influence one another’s media campaigns are nascent. This study helps fill that gap by examining how successful attacks by one…
Intersections of Isis media leader loss and media campaign strategy
The decision to target leaders of groups like ISIS to hamper their effectiveness has served as a longstanding principle of counterterrorism efforts. Yet, previous research suggests that any results may simply be temporary. Using insights from confiscated ISIS documents from Afghanistan to define the media leader roles that qualified for each level of the cascade, CTC (Combating Terrorism Center) records to identify media leaders who died, and a c…
Considering the military-media nexus from the perspective of competing groups
To address if and how militant, non-state actors in the online environment react to on-the-ground military pressures facing their competitors, this study explores AQAP’s visual media campaign during the 2016–2017 military operations to retake Mosul and Raqqa from ISIS control. Using chi-square analyses and content analysis, we analyzed 4027 images from Inspire, Jihad Recollections, and al-Masra to reveal how the onset of the ISIS battles correspo…
Definitions matter
Definitional assumptions within and across terrorism databases cause variations in terrorist incidents that can have impactful implications for time-series analyses. This study compares 2002–2016 Western Europe attacks recorded by the open source media Global Terrorism Database (GTD) and US governmental reports, Country Reports on Terrorism (formerly Patterns of Global Terrorism). The findings indicate significant differences exist between the GT…
The medium is terrorism
Daesh’s ability to successfully recruit foreign fighters from more than one hundred countries worldwide raises the importance of understanding the group’s strategic media campaign. Recognizing that visual images, in particular, often increase viewers’ attention, recall, and emotional response, this study of Daesh’s official magazine, Dabiq, moves beyond earlier studies primarily focused on the magazine’s textual content to analyze the group’s vis…
Picturing Law and Order
The rise of ideologically-driven lone actor terrorist attacks, coupled with the use of Internet-circulated media products as sources of inspiration, raises the need to understand the message strategies embedded in media campaigns of groups like ISIS. To better understand “enforcers” of ISIS’ interpretation of Shari’a law on the global stage, this study examines how ISIS has visualized law enforcement in its claimed territories in Iraq, Syria, and…
Images of death and dying in Isis media
Images of death and dying in the media around the globe have a symbiotic relationship with nation states as they can bolster state control by defining who has the right to take lives in the interests of the community, by identifying enemies of the state, by demonstrating dominance over enemies, and by lending a moral posture to the state’s war efforts. Previously, the growing corpus of research on media’s display of death and about to die images …
Examining the military–media nexus in Isis’s provincial photography campaign
Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) views military action and media operations as two equally important, reinforcing components of its campaign. With provinces disseminating 95% of ISIS’s media output, provincial media play a central role in achieving appearance shifts in the contested balance of power. Yet, scholars have not fully examined the interactions between the media and military components of ISIS’s campaign at the provincial level. T…
Rational Model for Analyzing U.S. Foreign Policy Advocates and Decision Makers
Research Article| December 01 2018 Rational Model for Analyzing U.S. Foreign Policy Advocates and Decision Makers: The Newman Legacy Carol Winkler Carol Winkler Carol Winkler is Professor of Communication Studies at Georgia State University in Atlanta. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2018) 21 (4): 683–694. https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.21.4.0683 Views Icon Views Article contents Figu…
One Night
Part 1 Raped Once, Physical Rape Chapter 1 Another Rape Saga Part 2 Raped Twice, Social Rape Chapter 2 Rape as Social Murder Chapter 3 Traumatized Evidence Part 3 Raped a Third Time, Legal Rape Chapter 4 Chasing the Rapist Chapter 5 It Was Just One Night Chapter 9 Treating Trauma Chapter 10 Confronting Institutional Barriers Chapter 11 Judging Civil Justice Chapter 13 Looking for Justice Chapter 14 Confronting Status, not Justice Chapter 15 Publi…
One Night
One night, anthropologist Cathy Winkler awoke from a deep sleep to discover a rapist standing by her bed. For the rest of that night, she lived a woman's worst nightmare as she was repeatedly raped and beaten by the stranger. The event changed her life into something resembling a Kafka novel: a justice system that bungled the case then blamed the victim, a social service system that provided no services or comfort, uneasy and awkward friends, exp…
Sex and Violence
Tuskegee Update
Images of death and dying in Isis media
Images of death and dying in the media around the globe have a symbiotic relationship with nation states as they can bolster state control by defining who has the right to take lives in the interests of the community, by identifying enemies of the state, by demonstrating dominance over enemies, and by lending a moral posture to the state’s war efforts. Previously, the growing corpus of research on media’s display of death and about to die images …
Textual Messaging of Isis’s al-Naba and the Context Drivers That Correspond to Strategic Changes
Recognizing the importance of the Arabic publication for reaching a key target audience for ISIS, this expansive study of al-Naba’s text-based content will add to the scholarship of non-state actor communication using a mixed methodology of unsupervised machine learning and rhetorical analysis. First, it uses the ANTMN methodology to identify the frequency of the top Arabic thematic word clusters. Second, through time series and regression analys…
Intersections of Isis media leader loss and media campaign strategy
The decision to target leaders of groups like ISIS to hamper their effectiveness has served as a longstanding principle of counterterrorism efforts. Yet, previous research suggests that any results may simply be temporary. Using insights from confiscated ISIS documents from Afghanistan to define the media leader roles that qualified for each level of the cascade, CTC (Combating Terrorism Center) records to identify media leaders who died, and a c…
Considering the military-media nexus from the perspective of competing groups
To address if and how militant, non-state actors in the online environment react to on-the-ground military pressures facing their competitors, this study explores AQAP’s visual media campaign during the 2016–2017 military operations to retake Mosul and Raqqa from ISIS control. Using chi-square analyses and content analysis, we analyzed 4027 images from Inspire, Jihad Recollections, and al-Masra to reveal how the onset of the ISIS battles correspo…
Definitions matter
Definitional assumptions within and across terrorism databases cause variations in terrorist incidents that can have impactful implications for time-series analyses. This study compares 2002–2016 Western Europe attacks recorded by the open source media Global Terrorism Database (GTD) and US governmental reports, Country Reports on Terrorism (formerly Patterns of Global Terrorism). The findings indicate significant differences exist between the GT…
Examining the military–media nexus in Isis’s provincial photography campaign
Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) views military action and media operations as two equally important, reinforcing components of its campaign. With provinces disseminating 95% of ISIS’s media output, provincial media play a central role in achieving appearance shifts in the contested balance of power. Yet, scholars have not fully examined the interactions between the media and military components of ISIS’s campaign at the provincial level. T…
Mediated Public Diplomacy and RT on Instagram
Changes in the global media environment now challenge relationships between and within states. To expand understandings of mediated public diplomacy, this study examined 13,500 Instagram posts distributed on RT's non-Russian accounts from September 2021–September 2022. It used LDA to identify RT topics across language accounts, explored the topics' relation to UN statehood, examined audience engagement levels, and compared their frequency before …
The medium is terrorism
Daesh’s ability to successfully recruit foreign fighters from more than one hundred countries worldwide raises the importance of understanding the group’s strategic media campaign. Recognizing that visual images, in particular, often increase viewers’ attention, recall, and emotional response, this study of Daesh’s official magazine, Dabiq, moves beyond earlier studies primarily focused on the magazine’s textual content to analyze the group’s vis…
Image Content Indicators of Extremist Group Evolution
Policymakers, researchers, and responders alike focus on the evolution of terrorist and other groups associated with political violence. This study offers a comparative analysis of the images of ISIS and U.S. far-right groups’ use of flag images, as such emblems contribute to community building, heighten emotional responses, and have political import. It adds to previous work by comparing groups across the ideological spectrum, by recognizing dif…
Shifts in the visual media campaigns of Aqap and Isis after high death and high publicity attacks
Extreme militant groups use their media campaigns to share information, recruit and radicalize followers, share worldviews, and seek public diplomacy ends. While previous research documents that various on-the-ground events correspond to changes in the groups’ messaging strategies, studies of how competing militant groups influence one another’s media campaigns are nascent. This study helps fill that gap by examining how successful attacks by one…
Presidents held hostage
Hostage crises have had negative effects on the last two presidents, crippling reelection bids and executive effectiveness. The public never forgave Jimmy Carter, but allowed Ronald Reagan to leave office the most popular president since Franklin Roosevelt. This analysis argues that presidential rhetoric is a key variable which explains the public's discrepant response. Recognizing the constraining effect of presidential rhetoric on future words …
Crises of confidence
Crises of confidence have plagued the American presidency since the introduction of television into the political sphere. Recognizing from previous research that unpopular incumbents use rhetoric in an effort to regain their credibility, this study looks at these rhetorical choices to see how they constrain or provide opportunities for the incumbent party's successors. Specifically, the study looks at the rhetoric surrounding instances where pres…
Tuskegee Update
Sex and Violence
One Night
One night, anthropologist Cathy Winkler awoke from a deep sleep to discover a rapist standing by her bed. For the rest of that night, she lived a woman's worst nightmare as she was repeatedly raped and beaten by the stranger. The event changed her life into something resembling a Kafka novel: a justice system that bungled the case then blamed the victim, a social service system that provided no services or comfort, uneasy and awkward friends, exp…
One Night
Part 1 Raped Once, Physical Rape Chapter 1 Another Rape Saga Part 2 Raped Twice, Social Rape Chapter 2 Rape as Social Murder Chapter 3 Traumatized Evidence Part 3 Raped a Third Time, Legal Rape Chapter 4 Chasing the Rapist Chapter 5 It Was Just One Night Chapter 9 Treating Trauma Chapter 10 Confronting Institutional Barriers Chapter 11 Judging Civil Justice Chapter 13 Looking for Justice Chapter 14 Confronting Status, not Justice Chapter 15 Publi…
Picturing Law and Order
The rise of ideologically-driven lone actor terrorist attacks, coupled with the use of Internet-circulated media products as sources of inspiration, raises the need to understand the message strategies embedded in media campaigns of groups like ISIS. To better understand “enforcers” of ISIS’ interpretation of Shari’a law on the global stage, this study examines how ISIS has visualized law enforcement in its claimed territories in Iraq, Syria, and…
Images of death and dying in Isis media
Images of death and dying in the media around the globe have a symbiotic relationship with nation states as they can bolster state control by defining who has the right to take lives in the interests of the community, by identifying enemies of the state, by demonstrating dominance over enemies, and by lending a moral posture to the state’s war efforts. Previously, the growing corpus of research on media’s display of death and about to die images …
Examining the military–media nexus in Isis’s provincial photography campaign
Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) views military action and media operations as two equally important, reinforcing components of its campaign. With provinces disseminating 95% of ISIS’s media output, provincial media play a central role in achieving appearance shifts in the contested balance of power. Yet, scholars have not fully examined the interactions between the media and military components of ISIS’s campaign at the provincial level. T…
Rational Model for Analyzing U.S. Foreign Policy Advocates and Decision Makers
Research Article| December 01 2018 Rational Model for Analyzing U.S. Foreign Policy Advocates and Decision Makers: The Newman Legacy Carol Winkler Carol Winkler Carol Winkler is Professor of Communication Studies at Georgia State University in Atlanta. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2018) 21 (4): 683–694. https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.21.4.0683 Views Icon Views Article contents Figu…
Intersections of Isis media leader loss and media campaign strategy
The decision to target leaders of groups like ISIS to hamper their effectiveness has served as a longstanding principle of counterterrorism efforts. Yet, previous research suggests that any results may simply be temporary. Using insights from confiscated ISIS documents from Afghanistan to define the media leader roles that qualified for each level of the cascade, CTC (Combating Terrorism Center) records to identify media leaders who died, and a c…
Considering the military-media nexus from the perspective of competing groups
To address if and how militant, non-state actors in the online environment react to on-the-ground military pressures facing their competitors, this study explores AQAP’s visual media campaign during the 2016–2017 military operations to retake Mosul and Raqqa from ISIS control. Using chi-square analyses and content analysis, we analyzed 4027 images from Inspire, Jihad Recollections, and al-Masra to reveal how the onset of the ISIS battles correspo…
Definitions matter
Definitional assumptions within and across terrorism databases cause variations in terrorist incidents that can have impactful implications for time-series analyses. This study compares 2002–2016 Western Europe attacks recorded by the open source media Global Terrorism Database (GTD) and US governmental reports, Country Reports on Terrorism (formerly Patterns of Global Terrorism). The findings indicate significant differences exist between the GT…
The medium is terrorism
Daesh’s ability to successfully recruit foreign fighters from more than one hundred countries worldwide raises the importance of understanding the group’s strategic media campaign. Recognizing that visual images, in particular, often increase viewers’ attention, recall, and emotional response, this study of Daesh’s official magazine, Dabiq, moves beyond earlier studies primarily focused on the magazine’s textual content to analyze the group’s vis…
Intersections of the Real and the Virtual Caliphates
In 2014, the Islamic State (ISIS) emerged as one of the most prominent global security threats after securing large swaths of land in Syria and Iraq. By 2018, it has lost nearly all of its territory to the various military forces allied against it. ISIS's territorial expansion correlated with the group's online propaganda activities. With the established contribution of online media efforts to ISIS recruitment and fundraising, isolating factors t…
Shifts in the visual media campaigns of Aqap and Isis after high death and high publicity attacks
Extreme militant groups use their media campaigns to share information, recruit and radicalize followers, share worldviews, and seek public diplomacy ends. While previous research documents that various on-the-ground events correspond to changes in the groups’ messaging strategies, studies of how competing militant groups influence one another’s media campaigns are nascent. This study helps fill that gap by examining how successful attacks by one…
Dynamic/Static Image Use in Isis's Media Campaign
The rebound of ISIS in the online environment in the aftermath of the coalition force liberation of Mosul and Raqqa has reinvigorated the need to understand the strategic choices of the group’s media campaign. This study explores ISIS’s use of dynamic vs. static imagery, with a particular focus on how the image form helps facilitate the group’s goals. Experimental studies document that the use of dynamic imagery heightens viewer attention, recall…
Revisiting representative form in Isis media
This study reconsiders the concepts of representative form and visual ideographs in the context of collectives-in-formation heavily reliant on the online environment to communicate with global audiences. Focusing on the online media products of ISIS, the study conducts a quantitative content analysis of over 9,000 images that the group distributed from 2014 to 2020, coupled with a qualitative assessment of the group's religious and institutional …
Proto-State Media Systems
Textual Messaging of Isis’s al-Naba and the Context Drivers That Correspond to Strategic Changes
Recognizing the importance of the Arabic publication for reaching a key target audience for ISIS, this expansive study of al-Naba’s text-based content will add to the scholarship of non-state actor communication using a mixed methodology of unsupervised machine learning and rhetorical analysis. First, it uses the ANTMN methodology to identify the frequency of the top Arabic thematic word clusters. Second, through time series and regression analys…
Censoring Extremism
Recognizing that militant, non-state groups utilize social media and online platforms to reach members, sympathizers, and potential recruits, state agencies and social media corporations now increasingly regulate access to accounts affiliated with such groups. Scholars examining deplatforming efforts have, to date, focused on the extent of audience loss after account restrictions and the identification of strategies for regrouping online follower…
Signalling media professionalism
The messaging content of Russia Today (RT) and China Global Television Network (CGTN) provides alternatives to those offered in mainstream western media. Comparative studies point to RT’s aggressive, ideological rhetoric and CGTN’s more tacit, celebratory, and culture-focused approach. This study adds to these understandings by examining how messaging strategies construct media professionalism – one of the four historic pillars of media systems a…
Mediated Public Diplomacy and RT on Instagram
Changes in the global media environment now challenge relationships between and within states. To expand understandings of mediated public diplomacy, this study examined 13,500 Instagram posts distributed on RT's non-Russian accounts from September 2021–September 2022. It used LDA to identify RT topics across language accounts, explored the topics' relation to UN statehood, examined audience engagement levels, and compared their frequency before …
Strategic drivers of multimodal messaging
Resistance is Far-Right from Futile
Political science (22 works) · Sociology (18 works) · Law (16 works) · Computer Science (13 works) · Terrorism, Counterterrorism, and Political Violence (13 works) · Law (10 works) · Media studies (8 works) · Psychology (8 works) · Middle East and Rwanda Conflicts (7 works) · Politics (7 works)