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- Ezz El Din, Mahitab, 1972-
(author)
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Beyond Orientalism and Occidentalism : Identity constructions in Arab and Western news media
- 2016
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- This study examines how the media construct the identities of the Other by creating various ‘us’ versus ‘them’ positions (Othering) when covering non-violence-based intercultural conflicts in Arab and Western news media. Othering in this study is understood as an umbrella concept that in general terms refers to the discursive process of constructing and positioning the Self and the Other into separate identities of an ‘us’ and a ‘them.’This process is analysed using a mixed method approach. A content analysis is used to map the data, and then a closer examination of the discourse is conducted using a qualitative approach inspired by critical discourse analysis. Two empirical studies are conducted based on this analysis: 1) the case of the Swedish newspaper Nerikes Allehanda’s publication of caricatures of the Prophet Mohamed in 2007 and 2) the media coverage of the headscarf ban in French state schools in 2004. This study also employs Galtung’s Peace Journalism model as a frame of reference in the conclusions to discuss how this model could contribute, if applied in journalistic texts, to more balanced constructions of intercultural conflicts.The results show that Othering is a central discursive practice that is commonly adopted in both Arab and Western media coverage of non-violent intercultural conflicts, but it appears in different forms. Many of the previous studies have devoted considerable attention to rather conventional dichotomous constructions of Eastern and Western Others. The present study, in contrast, brings to the fore more non-conventional constructions and, while recognizing the occurrence of the conventional constructions, goes beyond these binary oppositions of ‘us’ and ‘them’. Variations in the types of identity constructions found in my study can be attributed to the mode of the article, the actors/voices included, the media affiliations and the topic and its overall contextualization.The different types of identity constructions in the media coverage may bring about a less black and white understanding of an event and help bring forth a more nuanced picture of what is going on and who is doing what in a conflict situation. Their occurrence in the media can possibly be linked to a new vision of a global society that does not necessarily constitute homogenous groups with the same characteristics, but rather is more consistent with a hybrid identity.This research is timely, as with the recent arrival of large groups of migrants from the Middle East, the ‘fear of Islam,’ and the right wing propaganda regarding Muslims as a threat is increasing. Islamophobia can be seen as a new form of racism used by elites to serve particular agendas. If media practitioners applied a more critical awareness in their writings so as not to reproduce culturally rooted stereotypes, which can inflame conflicts between people and nations, we might see less hostility against migrants and achieve a less racist world.
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| 2. |
- Stenersen, Johanna, 1974-
(author)
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Citizens in the making : critical perspectives on civic identity and culture
- 2014
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- This study aims at critically assessing contemporary discourses, processes and experiences of citizen identity and participation in the everyday life of members of the Nicaraguan women’s movement.Theoretically the project draws on critical theories from political science,political anthropology, gender, communication and cultural studies.Methodologically the study builds on a critical ethnographic approach and discourse studies, and the material consists of interviews, participant observations, video recordings, organizational documents and various online materials.Empirically, the research focuses on the women’s movement in Nicaragua. The findings indicate that citizen identity and participation are constructed and performed through a variety of rituals that merge local, as well as ‘global’ forms of citizen culture. Citizen identity construction is not consistent or coherent and therefore requires different strategies of negotiation in order to hostsocial, cultural and religious contradictions and demands.Cultural practices and communication technology make way for new rituals and perceptions of the self and communicative rituals become an important tool for the informants’ development of democratic practices and civic culture. Furthermore, the rituals are a vehicle for powerful discourses on democracy, agency, participation and social change and the underlying ideas and ideologies. Rituals constitute valuable resources that are used, individually as well as collectively, for strategic political and social purposes. They also alter the informants’ spatial experiences and appropriations. The contribution of the thesis is to challenge and broaden current understandings of civic identity and culture.
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| 3. |
- Vikström, Axel, 1991-
(author)
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The Mediated Representation of the Super-Rich : Secrecy, Wealth Taxation and the Tensions of Neoliberal Capitalism
- 2024
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- This thesis examines how the wealthiest apex of the capitalist class, a segment commonly referred to as ‘the super-rich’, is represented in Swedish legacy newspapers. As decades of neoliberal reforms have paved the way for increasing wealth concentration at the very top, the super-rich has emerged as both a material and discursive phenomenon. The news media provides an influential site for studying meaning-making around the super-rich in the context of the underlying tensions of the neoliberal capitalist social order. Combining Nancy Fraser’s theory of normative contradictions with a critical political economy approach to the media, this thesis explores mediated representations of the super-rich as sites of ideological struggle between ideals of market justice and social justice. The thesis conducts an in-depth Critical Discourse Analysis to uncover what discourses Swedish newspapers – both in contemporary and historical settings – draw upon when representing the super-rich. The thesis consists of three case studies, each zooming in on different dimensions of the super-rich. The findings suggest that, while the feature reporting on the super-rich is no twithout its ambivalences, the critique is largely limited to questioning the morality of individual billionaires or business models, not billionaire wealth in itself. The thesis also shows how the secrecy surrounding the super-rich, hailed as a key part of the reproduction of economic inequality, can be mobilized by the tabloid media to intensify the ‘wealth porn’ genre rather than questioning inequalities per se. It also argues that the longterm coverage of the Swedish wealth tax in the liberal/conservative press between 1969 and 2007 delegitimated the tax as an immoral and irrational anomaly in a globalized world, paving the way for the social acceptance of large individual fortunes. As such, the thesis provides a comprehensive account of how the news media operates to incorporate the super-rich into the justice narratives of neoliberal capitalism, thus serving to mitigate the tensions of the social order.
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| 4. |
- Elmadagli, Cansu, 1992-
(author)
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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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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)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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| 5. |
- Voronova, Liudmila, 1987-
(author)
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Gendering in political journalism : a comparative study of Russia and Sweden
- 2014
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- The news media are expected to provide equal space to female and male political actors, promoting the idea of equal access to political power, since they are recognized as a holder of power with a social responsibility to respect gender equality. However, as previous research shows, political news coverage is characterized by so-called “gendered mediation” (Gidengil and Everitt 1999), i.e., gender imbalance, stereotypes, and a lack of discussions about gender inequality. Scholars point to media logic, organization, and individual characteristics of journalists as the main reasons for this pattern, but still very little is known about how and why gendered mediation is practiced and processed in political news.This dissertation focuses on gendering understood as the perceived imprint of gender on the media portrayal of politics and politicians, as well as the processes by which gendered representations materialize. By applying a perspective of comparative journalism culture studies (Hanitzsch 2007; Hanitzsch and Donsbach 2012), it examines the processes and modes of origin of gendering as they are perceived and experienced by journalists. The study is based on semi-structured interviews with 40 journalists working for the quality press in Russia and Sweden.The results show that the national culture of political journalism, and the context it is located within, are of crucial importance for understanding gendering and its modes of origin. Gendering may cause problems to the democratic development of society and the position of the quality press in it; however, it also offers a potential for promoting gender equality. The choice of the form of gendering does not fully depend on journalists. It depends on the contextual possibilities for journalists to fulfill the gender-ethical ideal of the quality outlet as long as they need to meet the demands of society and market, and to face the challenges of political communication.
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| 6. |
- Rasmussen, Joel
(author)
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Safety in the making : studies on the discursive construction of risk and safety in the chemical industry
- 2010
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- This compilation thesis aims to analyse how risk and safety are constructed, reproduced, and negotiated by communicative means in safety-critical workplaces. It conceptualizes these communicative moments of shaping and reshaping risk and safety as enmeshed in multiple forms of governing. That is, the management of risk and safety may not only be an employer’s responsibility delegated by the State, in a welfarist fashion, but may take different forms through a variety of institutional practices and communicative means. These defining practices seem particularly urgent to study, since it is through them that the locus of risk may be moved from one type of area or object to another, that attention is or is not paid to certain conditions of human exposure, and that parties are appointed responsible for safety measures.The thesis centres on three safety-critical factories located in Sweden that handle corrosive and/or explosive chemicals. It analyses interviews with various employees as well as recorded talk at a safety committee meeting. Previous research has addressed the existence of a tension between a strategy of individual responsibility and one of collective protection. This study makes a further contribution by demonstrating how these traditions are advocated and negotiated in discourse, and the dilemmas that emerge in the process. Although the study demonstrates that a discourse of collective prevention is reflected and reproduced in some narratives, it also makes evident that a great deal of responsibility is placed on the individual worker to avoid risk. The analysis has been able to show that this is due to the co-presence of traditional, hierarchical advice-giving and self-reproach, which amplify the importance of workers conducting themselves with greater caution, and of those newer concepts and technologies for worker involvement and responsibilization which are implemented in line with neoliberal ideas of human resources utilization. Furthermore, the thesis demonstrates how employees’ risk and safety discourse exposes dilemmas, especially when, consciously or not, egalitarian norms are taken into account. For instance, the moralizing elements of behavioural discourse are regularly supplemented by mitigating, pronominal, or entirely agentless discursive choices, and thus by an anticipatory display of awareness of egalitarian norms. It is argued that this discoursal softening of workers’ risk responsibilities helps condition the sustained prevalence of a behavioural approach to risk and safety. It also exposes some of its fragility.
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