Research has shown that as individuals—particularly teenagers—navigate social media, they value authenticity, typically understood as congruence between their online and offline identities. Portraying oneself in an authentic manner, however, is complicated by the phenomenon of context collapse, where multiple audiences (e.g., friends, teachers, parents) become homogenized and boundaries become blurred. Drawing on focus group data with 20 teenagers aged 13–17, we examined how teens use Finstas (“fake Instagram” accounts) to navigate tensions between context collapse and authenticity. Our participants see themselves as quite skilled at creating idealized identities on their Rinstas (“real Instagram” accounts) but turn to Finstas because they find such performances unsatisfying, using these secondary accounts for active resistance to norms of mainstream Instagram, often through negative emotional expression and self-description. Our study adds to the literature on teen social media use by illuminating strategies teens use to navigate context collapse as they seek authenticity.

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In this article, we define and theorize the ''transcendent persona, '' a discursive strategy in which a rhetor draws from a boundary-breaking accomplishment and utilizes the symbolic capital of that feat to persuasively delineate unconventional ways of communicating and behaving in society. Aviator Amelia Earhart's autobiography The Fun of It (1932) functions as an instructive representative anecdote of this concept and demonstrates that the transcendent persona's persuasive force hinges on one's ability to balance distance from audiences with similarities to them. Striking such a balance creates a platform for rhetors to promote transformative visions of society. Earhart utilized the transcendent persona to illustrate an alternative vocabulary of what contemporary theorists might call feminine gender performativity. The article concludes by exploring the implications of the transcendent persona as an enduring, rhetorical resource for communicators, as well as for scholars of persuasion and social change, religious communication, and communication history.

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Violence and race have a tremendous impact on health outcomes in the United States and around the world. Scholars from a variety of fields, including criminology, sociology, communication, and public health, agree that populations experiencing racial discrimination and stigmatization and/or violence and brutality often also experience health inequalities and poor health outcomes. Race and violence have an impact both at the macro, systemic level, where minorities experience institutional racism, unfair treatment, and police violence, and at the micro, psychosocial level, where cultural and social processes influence individuals' predisposition to violence. The constructs of violence and race are both intricately related to health because they create an inequitable social structure that brings minority individuals closer to harmful situations and decreases their ability and desire to seek medical assistance and voice their concerns. With the rise of the “Black Lives Matter” movement more attention has been given to the topics of race and violence and the ways they impact minority communities. Although some health communication scholars have studied the relationships between race, violence, and health, a great deal more work is needed to better understand structural racism, the resulting violence, communicative erasures, and health inequalities racism creates, and how health communication can mitigate the impact of race and violence on minority health.