| 1. |
- Abalo, Ernesto, 1982-
(författare)
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Through a post-political gaze : on the ideological loading of democracy in the coverage of Chávez's Venezuela
- 2015
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Rooted in ideology critique, this dissertation studies the construction of democracy in the coverage of Venezuela during the era of President Hugo Chávez. The aim of this endeavor is twofold. First, the dissertation aims to understand the relationship between ideology and the construction of democracy in journalism on foreign political phenomena. Second, it attempts to explore the ways in which the relationship between ideology and democracy in journalism serves to legitimize or delegitimize the struggle for social justice in nations in the global South vis-à-vis the political and economic fundamentals of global capitalism.The dissertation comprises three articles that study the construction of democracy in depictions of the Venezuelan political system and its key political actors. Article I studies the construction of (il)legitimate democracy in relation to the Venezuelan government, Article II explores the construction of difference between Chávez’s supporters and his opponents, and Article III studies the coverage of the coup d’état against Chávez in 2002. All three articles are methodologically rooted in critical discourse analysis and rely on materials from a sample of three elite newspapers: Dagens Nyheter (Sweden), El País (Uruguay), and the New York Times (US).Across the studies, there are four macro-strategies that in different ways serve to ideologically load the notion of democracy. Three of these strategies – the constructs of populism, of power concentration and of difference – serve to define political deviance and to (de)legitimize political actors in relation to democracy. The fourth macro-strategy, relativization, serves to justify actions that contradict established democratic principles but serve greater politico-ideological goals.(De)legitimation in relation to democracy corresponds with the closeness of a group of actors to the dominant political practices and values within global capitalism. Journalistic reporting thus follows a post-political gaze; it is generally in accordance with the political consensus that characterizes the post-Cold War era. Through this gaze, any challenge to the political tenets of global capitalism fails on democratic grounds.
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| 2. |
- Al-saqaf, Walid, 1973-
(författare)
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Breaking digital firewalls : analyzing internet censorship and circumvention in the arab world
- 2014
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This dissertation explores the role of Internet censorship and circumvention in the Arab world as well as Arabs’ views on the limits to free speech on the Internet.The project involves the creation of an Internet censorship circumvention tool named Alkasir that allows users to report and access certain types of censored websites. The study covers the Arab world at large with special focus on Egypt, Syria, Tunisia, and Yemen.This work is of interdisciplinary nature and draws on the disciplines of media and communication studies and computer science. It uses a pioneering experimental approach by placing Alkasir in the hands of willing users who automatically feed a server with data about usage patterns without storing any of their personal information.In addition to the analysis of Alkasir usage data, Web surveys were used to learn about any technical and nontechnical Internet censorship practices that Arab users and content producers may have been exposed to. The study also aims at learning about users’ experiences with circumvention tools and how such tools could be improved.The study found that users have successfully reported and accessed hundreds of censored social networking, news, dissident, multimedia and other websites. The survey results show that while most Arab informants disapprove censoring online anti-government political content, the majority support the censoring of other types of content such as pornography, hate speech, and anti-religion material.Most informants indicated that circumvention tools should be free of charge, fast and reliable. An increase in awareness among survey respondents of the need for privacy and anonymity features in circumvention solutions was observed.
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| 3. |
- Andersson, Linus, 1979-
(författare)
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Alternativ television : former av kritik i konstnärlig TV-produktion
- 2012
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This dissertation analyses social critique, communication critique and aestheticalcritique in television produced by artists. Theoretically it draws on researchon alternative media, TV studies, especially genre analysis and narratology,and media aesthetics. It conducts a text-production study of three examplesof alternative television from the period 2004-2008: ContemporaryArt Center TV (CAC TV): A show produced by the CAC in Vilnius, Lithuaniaand aired on a commercial TV-channel; Good TV who aired video art ona local public access channel in Stockholm, Sweden; and Candyland TV, apirate transmission from an art gallery in central Stockholm.Empirically it builds on TV-texts, web sites and documents, as well asinterviews with participants. Through a study of form and stylistics, relationto conventional genres and modes of narration, it engages in a discussionabout the features of a critical, alternative media text.The study shows how these televisions work in a tradition of alternativetelevision and connects them to tactics and aesthetical forms as found inhistorical examples, but also how this type of formalist media critiquemight inform an understanding of alternative media. From the analysis ofrelations between social and formalist aspects of alternative television, adistinction between alternative as ”alternative worldview” and as ”alternativeexpressions” is suggested, a distinction that contributes to the developmentof theory in the study of alternative media.
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| 4. |
- Berglez, Peter, 1973-
(författare)
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The materiality of media discourse : on capitalism and journalistic modes of writing
- 2006
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The purpose of the study is to analyse the relationship between the capitalist hegemonic order and the mass media, with the latter restricted to two elite newspapers (Swedish DN and Slovenian Delo) and the selection of news materials from three bodies of international media coverage: NATO’s military intervention in former Yugoslavia, 1999, the political demonstrations against the IMF and the World Bank in Prague, 2000, and 9/11, 2001. There are two sub-purposes, one theoretical-methodological and one political-democratic. The first sub-purpose is to accomplish an integrative kind of media analysis (Williams 1977) in which the approaches of political economy (emphasising the economic/material) and cultural studies/discourse analysis (emphasising the symbolic/discursive) are supposed to interact. The hypothesis is that such a ‘third way’ approach is possible to achieve through the qualitative analysis of journalistic modes of writing. The second sub-purpose (the political-democratic one) takes an interest in the modes’ political dimensions. In what manners do the identified modes counter-act, or co-produce, miscellaneous political struggles? In addition, the purpose of the study also includes a more practical dimension. In the light of the results, how should one nowadays imagine an emancipating kind of journalism that tries to explain, unmask, or even counteract the mechanisms of the contemporary global capitalist system?The news media material consists of 438 items (articles, photos etc.), which are analysed by means of a cultural materialist CDA (critical discourse analysis). An identified journalistic mode is analysed as: (1) a practice with certain cognitive, discursive and linguistic characteristics, (2) a structural product (as constituted by underlying social and material structures), and (3) a dialectical force, being a potentially active part of an ongoing mode of production (the capitalist or another mode). The last analytical moment is the central one.Two categories of journalistic modes are identified. To begin with, the modes of de-permanence (The Remote control mode, Differentiation, Semiotic compression), which comprises modes that are part of the ‘new economy’, of reflexivity, individualism, consumption, mobility, and flexibility. The political dimension of these modes is that they counteract radical (leftist) politics by reducing emancipation, freedom, justice etc. to a matter of individualism and privatisation. The second category is the modes of permanence (Disconnection, Cognitive recycling), which involves an opposing structural dimension of the capitalist system: the production of reification, i.e. the repression of the complex nature of reality – how seemingly autonomous ‘things’ (spaces, objects etc.) are de facto interwoven with a ‘complex whole’ of various social, material, cultural, economic relations that are in constant motion. More precisely, the here identified modes reify and eternalise an explanatory structure (the modern division of explanatory labour), a particular power (the US) and a particular territory (the nation state), generating the impression that social reality works ‘as usual’ while repressing the complex network-like development of global capitalism and its impact on our lives. By sustaining these increasingly archaic structures, what is politically counteracted is the emergence of ‘the new’: transnational politics and democracy (Beck 1998).The analysis of modes (in total 8) furthermore demonstrates that Swedish DN is more integrated with the capitalist system than Slovenian Delo. The study emphasises the democratic importance of creating new journalistic modes endowed with a transnational journalistic epistemology that decisively include the reality of global capitalism in everyday (local) news reporting when covering and explaining social, political, cultural etc. issues.
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| 5. |
- Breazu, Petre, 1978-
(författare)
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Representing the Roma in Romanian Media : A Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis
- 2020
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- In this thesis, I addressed the representation of the Roma in Romanian newspapers, television news, and social media. I focused on Romania, a country with the largest Roma population in Europe, and where the Roma have historically experienced centuries of discrimination and social exclusion. I conducted an in-depth Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (MCDA) to reveal what kind of discourses are used to represent this minority group, after Romania joined the European Union. The analysis in this thesis confirms the well-documented discourses in reference to Roma as criminal, uneducated, dirty, immoral, and as resisting assimilation into wider society. In addition, this research shows how these discourses have been incorporated into newer forms specific to the current political climate across Europe, increasingly dominated by right-wing populist politics, where minority groups, such as the Roma have become easy targets for politicians to justify their political failures and are scapegoated for lack of jobs, declining economic prosperity, instability, fears of immigration and of the loss of national autonomy and traditions. The detailed MCDA analysis allowed me to show how racism can be communicated in a variety of ways, not so much in relation to biological differences but in terms of culture, behaviour, traditions and national values. The multimodal approach was instrumental in showing how different media, with their different affordances have their specific way of avoiding overt racism while nevertheless the ideology remains. We see how the combination of different modes help to communicate the civil nature of violent actions, such as camp evictions, or the representation of poverty as a choice, rather than embedded in the social structures. Moreover we see on social media how ‘simple fun’, in the form of humour and ridicule, is loaded with extreme forms of racism that even call for ethnic cleansing.
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| 6. |
- Buskqvist, Ulf, 1975-
(författare)
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Medborgarnas röster : studier av Internet som politisk offentlighet
- 2007
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The Voices of the Citizens: Studies of the Internet as Political Public Sphere. The purpose of the study is to investigate the conditions for and forms of citizen participation in the websites’ communicative practices. A mainpoint is to compare websites located within separate institutional contexts, in terms of how they are designed and how they are used. Three types of websites are studied: media corporations, political parties and social movements, in connection with the Swedish parliamentary election 2002 and the election to the European parliament 2004. The dissertation involves case studies that take into account three different links of the communicative chain: production, content and interaction. The production dimension was studied with the help of qualitative interviews and observation. The content dimension – the design of websites, discourses and communicative invitations – was studied with critical multimodal discourse analysis (see e.g. Kress & van Leeuwen 2001). Finally, the interaction dimension was studied with inspiration from the theoretical and methodological perspectives of discourse and conversation analysis (see e.g. Hutchby 2001, van Dijk 1998, and Fairclough 1995). The results of the case studies of the three categories of websites shows that it is necessary that answers to the question of the Web’s importance for the public sphere be based on concrete empirical studies and an institutional perspective. The studies have shown that websites set up within the frame of media corporations and political parties strive to spread ready-made messages, and partly or entirely avoid interaction with the websites’ visitors. It is a question of activities that display and make visible, but neither open up nor include. On the political youth associations’ and one the social movements’ websites the imagined user is also constructed as a politically interested citizen who wishes to discuss politics with other (youths) in the website’s community, but also as a potential new member of the association.The dissertation emphasis the web as an important complement to the mass-media dominated public arenas and serves the needs of citizens in areas where journalism and established politics do not suffice.
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| 7. |
- Cotal San Martin, Vladimir, 1979-
(författare)
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The Mediated Representation of Working Conditions in the Global South : Discourse, Ideology and Responsibility
- 2019
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis examines the mediated representation of workers’ working conditions in the Global South. Using a qualitative approach inspired by Critical Discourse Studies, it focuses on ideological representation in newspapers from Sweden, the USA, Chile and China/Hong Kong. The aims are to understand how working conditions are represented; identify key themes of news reporting; understand how newspapers convey ideological discourses about ‘foreign’ and ‘distant’ working conditions; and provide critical insights into how the topic is represented in newspapers in terms of its relevance (to a national readership) as well as agency and responsibility (i.e. who is responsible for working conditions?) and the possible ideological impact thereof on the reader and their knowledge/interpretation of this issue. The results suggest that the general structuring of Swedish media discourse on workers’ conditions runs thematically across various parts/sections of the production industry: garments, electronics, food, furniture and toys. In addition, further themes/frames are used in the coverage (working conditions in the workplace, salary, conditions of employment, housing, workforce composition and workers’ organizations), further particularising the explored focus of media representation. The study also suggests that mainstream news media represent working conditions in ways that exclude a range of key issues, actors and causalities. Constructed at the level of media discourse, such problematic representations largely conceal the structural, institutional and corporatist responsibility behind the global exploitation of workers and their largely unfavourable working conditions. Instead, responsibility for those working conditions is effectively and strategically shifted away from the wider global system of capitalist-driven exploitation into individual social actors, in both the Western world (in the form of particular transnational corporations and in the form of readers/ users as consumers) and the Global South (in the form of local factory owners, governments, officials etc.). Speaking from a critical perspective and offering a number of empirically-funded insights, the study suggests that newspapers construct the key topic as relevant through a number of thematic and argumentative frames. Of these, the ‘consumer framework’ – which effectively serves to shift responsibility away from wider structural socioeconomic causes to an individual level – remains central. The thesis also shows that the representation of working conditions in the Global South is strongly embedded within a highly problematic colonial (or post-colonial) imagery. Therein, the exploitation in the Global South is seen as a localised ‘cultural problem’ of ‘them’ rather than a systematic problem related to global capitalism and its transnational system of social and economic inequality.
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| 8. |
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| 9. |
- Elmadagli, Cansu, 1992-
(författare)
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Challenging Normative Beauty Ideals by Undressing Online? Body Acceptance, Identity Politics and Construction of Non-normativity : A Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis
- 2022
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis is concerned with the problematics of contemporary identity politics of body acceptance as situated in the visibility logics of digital media. It examines how seemingly progressive narratives of body-acceptance can rely on normative discourses and dominant ideologies. Thus, it carries out a case study of an American online body-acceptance platform called StyleLikeU which claims to strive for social change by challenging normative beauty ideals. StyleLikeU, also claims to create visibility for everyone, interviews individuals as they take off their clothes while talking about their experiences of suffering due to their non-normativities. This study applies multimodal critical discourse analysis to examine the textual, visual and audio-visual online content created by StyleLikeU. Theoretically, the Foucauldian understanding of neoliberal governmentality is applied. Moreover, emotional capitalism is mobilised in terms of the commodification of affect and affective publics of digital media. Lastly, postfeminism is adopted and viewed through the lens of depoliticisation and inclusion. From this perspective, the analysis focuses on how SLU represents its movement, its actions, its participants and its aims as an online movement. The study concludes that although StyleLikeU claims to challenge normative beauty ideals, it heavily relies on normative neoliberal, postfeminist and middle-class discourses around identities, bodies, beauty and suffering. The study also finds that while StyleLikeU claims to liberate people from normative judgements of beauty with their online content, it creates a new category of non-normativity of its own. The study argues that StyleLikeU makes use of online content to create and sustain affective publics by highlighting personal experiences of suffering which, in turn, become colonised and commodified as they are situated in the landscape of emotional capitalism.
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| 10. |
- Eriksson, Göran
(författare)
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Den televiserade politiken : studier av debatt- och nyhetsjournalistik
- 2002
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This study takes as its point of departure the discussion around the mediazation of politics. The media are an essential part of, and play a crucial role for, the reproduction of a certain discourse that, within the field of Media and Communications research, has been branded a mediated or mediatized political discourse (Fairclough 1995a; Chouliaraki 2000; Ekström 2001 Ib). Television and TV journalism have been especially important for the development of this discourse (Dahlgren 1995; Thompson 1995). One aim of this dissertation is to investigate how TV journalism functions to establish, reproduce or transform a mediated political discourse, i.e. different ways of understanding and talking about politics and politicians. In order to understand these processes I am proposing an approach in which the analysis of text, text production and reception are intertwined. Thus, there is also a second aim, a methodological one, with this dissertation. The intent is to develop and test an approach in which the studies of text, text production and reception are integrated in one form of case study. This integrated approach is also meant to be applicable to other fields of investigation than that of my own study. Two case studies have been conducted within this frame. One study follows what I have branded a chronological design. The other follows a retrospective design. This approach is founded on the framework for Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) as developed by Fairclough (1992; 1995a; 1995b). Fairclough suggests that the analysis of media discourse should be a multidimensional one: texts must be related to discourse practice – the practices of text production and text consumption – and to the sociocultural practice of which they are a part. In this work I will argue for an “extension” of Fairclough’s approach, i.e. an approach that, in the study of processes of text production and reception, incorporates ethnographic methods, in this case participant observation and interviews. To summarise the result of the different case studies, I make the following conclusion: (1) The day-to-day routinised forms of production and representation which characterises TV journalism as discourse practice can lead to the establishment of such discursive elements in the texts that bring forth negative images of politics. The communicative devices used in TV journalism establish functions in the texts that can have the potential of placing the citizens in a position of suspicion and distrust. Here, two conditions are of special importance. One concerns TV journalism’s beliefs and assumptions of what attracts TV viewers, and the other concerns TV journalism’s understanding of self. (2) Through the functions that they could carry, the texts produced by TV journalistic means reproduce a mediated political discourse that has a tendency to establish a distrustful position in relation to politics. When “offered” this position by TV journalism, it is easy for the citizens to start doubting the politicians’ motives and abilities. (3) A mediated political discourse works ideologically in such a way that it reproduces an image of politics which ultimately favours the position of TV journalism in society. It is through the incessant production of stories and narratives about its own institution, serving up an image of a profession and a practice useful to society (first and foremost as an investigator and a critic of the political institutions), that TV journalism can appear to be a useful institution in society. This is a position that TV journalism can maintain and reproduce by hiding its power to construct the world around it.
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