Chisom Nlebedum and Dr. Jennifer Sclafani co-presented a multimodal critical discourse analysis of news coverage of Boston’s “Mass and Cass” drug addiction and homelessness crisis at the Italian Association for the Study of English (Associazione Italiana di Anglistica [AIA]) biennial Conference, AIA 32, which took place at the University of Turin, Italy September 11th -13th, 2025.
Dr. Sclafani and Chisom’s work on Mass and Cass, a homeless encampment at the intersection of the Roxbury, Dorchester, and South End neighborhoods of Boston, known as the epicenter of the region’s opioid and homeless crises, comes on the heels of recent federal and state ramp-ups to sanitize cities of homeless individuals. Please click here for more information about recent incendiary media comments about homelessness, and two recent shootings at another urban homeless encampment in Minneapolis.
Through an analysis of abstraction and transitivity from ABC and CBS News, Chisom and Dr. Sclafani showed that the broadcast coverage of the homelessness crisis at Mass and Cass employed several multimodal choices (visuals, sounds, words) to portray the homeless in dehumanizing ways, as nameless and voiceless people in tents and tarps breeding crime and disorderliness in an otherwise safe and orderly city. These findings are also supported by an analysis of news articles from the Boston Globe (based on previous research conducted with UMB colleague Dr. Peter Federman and Ph.D. alumna Dr. Nasiba Norova). The study demonstrates the dominant news framing of the issue which sensationalized and simplified an otherwise complex nexus of policy issues in Boston (substance addiction and treatment, mental health services, homelessness and affordable housing, public safety, and infrastructure).
Chisom and Dr. Sclafani plan to continue this work, which was supported by a grant from the UMass Boston John W. McCormack Graduate School of Policy and Global Studies, by engaging in cross-disciplinary research with colleagues (Dr. Peter Federman of the Dept. of Public Policy, Co-PI) to understand how this dominant framing of Mass and Cass contributes to policy decisions and outcomes at the city and state level.