Knowledge from the Inside: Latina talent on audiobooks as a window into how U.S. media’s systems of (mis/dis)information shape Latine conditional inclusion
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Knowledge from the Inside: Latina talent on audiobooks as a window into how U.S. media’s systems of (mis/dis)information shape Latine conditional inclusion

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Abstract

There is a significant disconnect between Latina/e reality and our representation in U.S. English-language media. While research tends to study this issue from a Cultural Studies lens, I shift our view and argue that addressing this problem also demands a structural analysis and the insider knowledge of these marginalized workers, as only they can describe what oppressive acts feel like at the moment of impact, and when and where they occur within production processes. My work asks what new insights we might gain by centering Latina talent.My challenge was multifold. To manage my scope, I look into one under-studied yet major global growth market arena: commercial audiobooks. As an industry at the convergence of media and tech, audiobooks provide a window into legacy and digital media labor structures. While their history can be traced to Edison’s invention of the phonograph (1877), digital audiobooks, as format, industry, and site of labor, are a relatively new phenomenon that represents a generative site for studying how digital labor platforms and AI are impacting workers and the future of work. I engage with braided theoretical and methodological frameworks that bring Information Studies, Latina Feminism, labor, Critical Race Theory (CRT) and Critical Political Economy of Media (CPE) into conversation. This approach reorients our focus to the humans who do the work, brings intersectional concerns into view, and opens new lines of questioning. I conducted six in-depth Pláticas with Latina audiobook narrators and triangulated my findings with textual analysis, culturally intuitive observation (CIO, a method I am introducing to the Latina/Chicana feminist toolkit), and Critical Technocultural Discourse Analysis (CTDA). My findings reveal that U.S.-Latina views are critical because they bring transnational, transcultural, intersectional, and often multilingual perspectives to the conversation, and highlight the power dynamics that have shaped the audiobook industry. Their insider knowledge provides a window into how Latina/e exclusions from U.S. English-language media have been conditional on hegemonic imperatives, operationalized via the industry’s systems of mis/disinformation and data processes, and surfaced the ways that these have historically been complicit in creating barriers to Latina/e representation and excluding us from the historical record.

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This item is under embargo until August 12, 2026.