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- Castaldo Lundén, Elizabeth, 1974-
(author)
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Exploring Fashion as Communication : The search for a new fashion history against the grain
- 2020
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In: Popular Communication. - : Informa UK Limited. - 1540-5702 .- 1540-5710. ; 18:4, s. 249-258
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- This introductory essay calls for a new fashion media history informed by truly interdisciplinary scholarship, nuanced in both fashion and media studies. It reflects upon the ways in which the study of fashion as communication and fashion journalism have been addressed, arguing that fashion studies has laid out a western backbone of this history that invites and deserves to be confirmed and contested. It encourages future authors to find those fashion media discourses, voices, and practices that brought attention to fashion and dress moving past the so-called ‘fashion bibles’ to unravel discourses reaching popular audiences, underrepresented minorities, unlisted geographies, and subcultures.
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| 2. |
- Najem, Chafic T., 1991-
(author)
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Smuggle, Frame, Shoot : Illicit Media Practices and Visual Insurgency from Lebanese Incarceration
- 2023
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- This research explores prisoners’ illicit use of digital-media technology during their incarceration in Lebanon. Prisoners smuggle cellphones and access internet and telecommunication connection to produce and mediate videos, images, and voice recordings documenting quotidian experiences of imprisonment, violent events, and the COVID-19 Pandemic inside the notorious and overcrowded Roumieh Central Prison. Fragmentary prison amateur cellphone media messages make their way from behind bars to various media ecologies, from social media to local and international news-media platforms, where they are (re)mediated and often appropriated to feed partisan and sectarian media narratives. In this dissertation, I investigate prison cellphone recordings and their political and testimonial possibilities by tracing the prison media practices responsible for their production and circulation. Influenced by Amel’s (1976, 1988) intellectual project of theorizing from the periphery and the lo popular approach to theorizing media with and from individuals’ media practices in their territory (Martín-Barbero, 1998), I propose a framework for the conceptualization of prisoners’ illicit use of digital-media technologies and the recordings they produce as media from the prison. Based on a foundation of media-practice theory, more specifically the articulation of activist media practices and mediation theory (Martín-Barbero, 1993; Mattoni, 2012; Mattoni & Treré, 2014), I introduce three overarching and overlapping conceptual themes: media witnessing, media mobilization, and vulnerability in resistance. Using this theoretical framework, I examine the categories, characteristics, and modes of framing reflected in prison cellphone recordings, explore their alignment with mechanisms of mobilization and organized protest, and consider them as visual and sonic recorded testimonies that document and communicate personal impressions and the conditions of quotidian life in confinement. The analysis draws on a qualitative, multi-method approach combining visual analysis and contextual interviews. Location- and event-based searches were used to systematically collect a corpus of prison cellphone recordings remediated between 2011 and 2022 on Facebook, YouTube, and local and international news-media platforms. I propose the notion of visual insurgency as a step towards understanding the role and function of recordings that are produced and mediated through inherently prohibited media practices. Through the examination of composition, POV, frame, sound, (re)mediation, and the partisan context of Lebanon and the colonial history of its prisons, I trace the illicit media practices responsible for these prison representations. I claim that, through their media practices, prisoners mediate from the prison testimonies of their lived experiences, expose their vulnerabilities to the precarious conditions they exist in, re-claim a sense of mundanity, and incite feelings of affinity to mobilize support. I conclude that prison cellphone recordings are the result of meticulous prison media practices that are intended to actively mobilize support and sympathy, as well as to establish communication networks with affiliates and media personnel. Prison media practices continue to grow as prisoners smuggle digital-media technologies, develop new approaches to framing their testimonies and shooting the precarious environment, stories, performative assemblies, and lived experiences behind bars.
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| 3. |
- Pamment, James, 1977-
(author)
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The Limits of the New Public Diplomacy : Strategic communication and evaluation at the U.S. State Department, Foreign & Commonwealth Office, British Council, Swedish Foreign Ministry and Swedish Institute
- 2011
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- The new public diplomacy is a major paradigm shift in international political communication. Globalisation and a new media landscape challenge traditional foreign ministry ‘gatekeeper’ structures, and foreign ministries can no longer lay claim to being sole or dominant actors in communicating foreign policy. This demands new ways of communicating foreign policy to a range of nongovernmental international actors, and new ways of evaluating the influence of these communicative efforts. But where do the lines between old and new public diplomacies actually meet? How much current PD policy and practice conforms to older styles of communication, and how much can truly be considered new? What are the practical constraints upon the adoption of an entirely ‘new’ PD? This PhD thesis investigates the methods and strategies used by 5 foreign ministries and cultural institutes in 3 countries as they attempt to adapt their PD practices to the demands of the new public diplomacy environment. The question is not simply of how government actors have phased out their archaic old PD practices, but of how the continual need for short-term influence – for discernable impact, outcomes, value-for-money – complicates the paradigm shift. The case studies are based around an analysis of US, British, and Swedish strategies. Each chapter covers national policy, evaluation methods, and examples of individual campaigns. Material consists of 25 interviews with PD practitioners, detailed policy studies, reconstructions of 5 PD campaigns, and analysis of communication models and evaluation methodologies.
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| 5. |
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| 6. |
- Kuzmičová, Anežka, 1982-, et al.
(author)
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Reading and company : embodiment and social space in silent reading
- 2018
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In: Literacy. - : Wiley. - 1741-4350 .- 1741-4369. ; 52:2, s. 70-77
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Reading, even when silent and individual, is a social phenomenon and has often been studied as such. Complementary to this view, research has begun to explore how reading is embodied beyond simply being ‘wired’ in the brain. This article brings the social and embodied perspectives together in a very literal sense. Reporting a qualitative study of reading practices across student focus groups from six European countries, it identifies an underexplored factor in reading behaviour and experience. This factor is the sheer physical presence, and concurrent activity, of other people in the environment where one engages in individual silent reading. The primary goal of the study was to explore the role and possible associations of a number of variables (text type, purpose, device) in selecting generic (e.g. indoors vs outdoors) as well as specific (e.g. home vs library) reading environments. Across all six samples included in the study, participants spontaneously attested to varied, and partly surprising, forms of sensitivity to company and social space in their daily efforts to align body with mind for reading. The article reports these emergent trends and discusses their potential implications for research and practice.
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| 7. |
- Robertson, Alexa, 1959-, et al.
(author)
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AI narratives and unequal conditions : Analyzing the discourse of liminal expert voices in discursive communicative spaces
- 2023
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In: Telecommunications Policy. - : Elsevier BV. - 0308-5961 .- 1879-3258. ; 47:5
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- The stories told by expert activists about the relationship between AI and inequality are the focus of this article. It explores internet governance discourse in two fora - RightsCon and Sweden's Internet Days - which, it is argued, comprise a communicative space that is both global and liminal. Narrative analysis is used to map how 30 expert activists from around the world, whose engagement is bound neither to state nor corporate interests, talk about how AI can be understood as a boon or a bane to inequality, both social and communicative. While common themes are in evidence (such as the need to safeguard people's right to own their own data), some noteworthy dissonances are also discernible (such as whether such people should be envisaged as individuals or collectivities). The narratives are critical in that they resist the impetus of rapid, and in some cases unfettered, technological advancement while at the same time pushing back against the apocalyptic AI narratives familiar from popular culture. The study contributes to an understanding of the socio-technico imaginaries of a category of actors who merit more attention than they have been paid by scholars to date. Their expertise grants them authority, and the stories they tell speak of agency.
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| 9. |
- Skågeby, Jörgen, 1972-, et al.
(author)
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What is Feminist Media Archaeology?
- 2018
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In: Communication +1. - Amherst, MA, United States : University of Massachusetts Amherst. - 2380-6109. ; 7:1
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- In a fairly recent blog post, Jussi Parikka discusses how media archaeology can be criticized for being a “boy’s club”. In the introduction of this text, he writes: One of the set critiques of media archaeology is that it is a boys' club. That is a correct evaluation in so many ways when one has a look at the topics as well as authors of the circle of writers broadly understood part of 'media archaeology'. I make the same argument for instance in What is Media Archaeology?, but there is also something else that we need to attend to.
There is however a danger that the critique also neglects the multiplicity inherent in the approach. For sure, there are critical points to be made in so many aspects of Kittler's and others' theoretical work, but at the same time it feels unfair to neglect the various female authors and artists at the core of the field. In other words, the critique often turns a blind eye to the women who are actively involved in media archaeology. Let's not write them out too easily. Parikka then goes on to briefly introduce several female researchers and artists who are active in the media archaeological field. These are women who are, in different ways, doing media archaeology. This is of course an important issue – skewed representations or lopsided citation practices are never good – and the contributions of these researchers are significant and important. However, we could also argue that there is an important difference between the body of work being done by women and, what we may call, feminist media archaeology. There can, of course, be overlaps between these two ways of representing feminist interests in media archaeology, but for feminist theorizing and practising to truly have an impact, we have to ask ourselves what is feminist media archaeology? By looking for empirical gaps and putting questions of, for example, design, power, infrastructure and benefit, to the fore we can shine a different light on the material-discursive genealogy of digital culture, still very much in the vein of media archaeological endeavors. What we suggest is quite simple – a transdisciplinary approach which emphasizes “the unity of intellectual frameworks beyond the disciplinary perspectives [which] points toward our potential to think in terms of frameworks, concepts, techniques, and vocabulary that we have not yet imagined”. As such, we want to take an exploratory tactic to the question posed in the title of this paper. We do not intend to provide a single nor definite answer – rather we want to think with media archaeology and feminism together, seeking to raise other questions in order to find dynamic parallels and crosscurrents.
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| 10. |
- Hajin, Mona, 1985-
(author)
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Seeking Personal Autonomy Through the Use of Facebook in Iran
- 2013
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In: SAGE Open. - : SAGE Publications. - 2158-2440. ; 3:1, s. 1-13
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- In Iran, where males and females are kept separated in different spheres, Facebook may be used as an opportunity to bridge this gap between the genders. However, this study showed that Facebook, as a nonymous platform in which people are in contact with their already-made social ties, didn’t seem to be liberating from the existing norms and rules within society. Facebook was a stage that became restricted with the involvement of social ties. The study’s analysis of interviews with six young Iranians showed that social meanings and norms of self-presentation on Facebook are defined to a large degree in terms of gender. The informants used a variety of strategies when presenting themselves on Facebook. They used Facebook simply for gaining personal autonomy. Strategies were adopted especially when one’s personal and community needs were in conflict. Efforts made to apply strategies were gendered and were used mainly by females. Males conformed to and women resisted societal norms and expectations.
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