| 1. |
- Stenersen, Johanna, 1974-
(författare)
-
Citizens in the making : critical perspectives on civic identity and culture
- 2014
-
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)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.
|
|
| 2. |
- Voronova, Liudmila, 1987-
(författare)
-
Gendering in political journalism : a comparative study of Russia and Sweden
- 2014
-
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)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.
|
|
| 3. |
- Rasmussen, Joel
(författare)
-
Safety in the making : studies on the discursive construction of risk and safety in the chemical industry
- 2010
-
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)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.
|
|
