Since its origins as a grassroots movement in the 1960s, the fair trade movement has found a consistent, reliable base of support from various Christian churches, ministries, and organizations. This article reviews coverage of fair trade in several of the most prominent, U.S.-based Christian publications between 2006 and 2016 to identify the distinct ways in which Christian themes and language are interpolated within broader framings of fair trade. In particular, it addresses certain tensions between Christian concepts like "global missions" and "evangelism" in relation to a market-driven framing of fair trade as a Robin Hood-like means of redistributing income from the consuming [global] North to producers in the South. The article also describes the unique role of gender throughout the coverage in these publications. Finally, it explains how a particularly pro-capitalist Protestant formulation described as "Calvinist social piety" informs the ways in which Christian publications frame fair trade.
More than just a drink, tea embodies social, cultural, economic and political meanings through time and across cultures. There is an essential tie between media and this meaning-making process. Media often create and carry the visions of health, nature, tranquility, and prosperity offered by tea. This mediated imaginary seems to persist even in the face of vast human inequalities and suffering and irreversible negative environmental impacts through the current practice of tea production under global conglomerates. Through textual analysis of media narratives of Teavana, a well-known tea brand, this project explores how media's mythic narratives potentially naturalize and celebrate the current production practice and the conspicuous consumption of tea, and silence the human suffering and environmental destruction endured, in order to gratify the very practice and consumption promoted by media.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.