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- 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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| 2. |
- 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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| 3. |
- Rapado, Irene, 1986-
(författare)
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Performing and Re/Defining Democracy in Post-austerity Spain : Political Communication and Discursive Practices of the 'Podemos' Party-Movement
- 2019
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis looks at the Spanish Podemos party-movement in its attempt to both undertake and to a large extent ‘live’ a certain political experiment in the context following the 2007–2008 economic crisis. Podemos is thus perceived as performing and re/defining democracy as part of undertaking political action and building a political identity. Democracy is seen as being conceptualized and enacted in political discourse and in a variety of (mediated) contexts. At its core, the thesis examines how Podemos defines and enacts democracy in the lead-up to, and the aftermath of, the December 2015 general election, eventually bringing the partymovement into the Spanish Parliament. The thesis first explores how the notion of democracy is conceptualized and communicated in Podemos’ Twitter discourse and how these conceptualizations relate to various ways of performing democracy via the construction of Podemos’ and other parties’ (political) identities. The thesis then examines how Podemos’ online political communication campaign spots particularise various democratic imaginaries as well as discursively construct a political frontier between ‘us’ and ‘them’. Last, the thesis looks at how Podemos’ leader and his key counterparts perform political identity work as part of their own democratic imaginaries in a televised pre-electoral debate. By linking the above strands of analysis, the thesis shows that Podemos communicates visions and practices of democracy in line with social democracy and participatory democracy and in opposition to the neoliberalism and political elitism that have long dominated Spanish representative democracy. As is also shown, the party’s populist identity is not only constructed at the intersection of its party and movement identities but also intensely enacted as a disclaimer in the aftermath of its institutionalization. Overall, this thesis contributes in particular to demarcating ideological limits within populism, and it does so from a critical discourse and wider media and communication perspective. It is shown that leftwing populism à la Podemos constructs an inclusive ‘people’ and defends a vision of representative democracy that promotes social justice and popular sovereignty. This puts left-wing populism in stark contrast to the by now prevalent right-wing populism that constructs nativist visions of the people rooted in calls for the exclusion of various social groups and arguing for nationalist, authoritarian and conservative views of ‘doing’ politics.
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| 4. |
- 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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