This study deals with the development of journalism in post-Cold War Romania, and it does so with a particular interest in the transnational dimension this entails. Many NGOs and international organizations are currently seeking to monitor journalists’ situations in countries around the world, while at the same time aiming at having the whole world aligned with international standards of the journalistic profession. Much attention is put on the safety of individual journalists and on the need to protect them from both legal and physical harm. Reports are continuously launched, frequently worded to impart a sense of emergency, effectively linking putative universal values of journalism with the image of vulnarable journalists carrying out dangerous work for the benefit of large publics. Romania is a fertile place for this kind of global activism, partly due to the country’s totalitarian past and to what many commentators see as an unfulfilled process of democratization where powerful media owners and executives influence journalistic standards with business interests foremost in mind, and where harassments of journalists have been on the rise during the last decade. By combining an ethnographic account of the journalism field with an exploration of how global media development activities are operating in contemporary Romania, the prime question of the thesis is how journalism is constructed and made meaningful in a transnational context. The study is based on ethnographic material collected during the period of 2000-2002 among journalists and NGO activists in Bucharest, Romania.

How does the international system move from an anarchic system driven by power to a global community driven by the needs/wants of the community at large? Jürgen Habermas utilizes the tenets of his Communicative Action Theory to underline the importance of communicatively based repertoire in the international system between and among states and non-state actors and the citizens themselves. How does arguing and reasoning among states and international institutions bring together legitimization and order? My research aims to analyze the movement of the international system from anarchy towards a global civil society. In doing so, I will examine Communicative Action Theory in International Relations, in particular the development of legitimization processes in international politics, the role of state sovereignty and its effect on the legitimization process of non-state actors. I argue that underdeveloped legitimization processes at the international level consist of fragile consensus building mechanisms that explain why disagreement can and often does lead to violence. However, I also contend that the international system is moving toward a more developed global civil society.

Online public fora based on social media facilitate social interaction and synchronous online discussion. Social-media-based public fora resemble real-life political talks, and induce a larger number of and a wider variety of participants than blogs or Usenet newsgroups. By investigating two online groups centered on political discussions on Twitter, this study explores how information and influence flow, how diverse the actual discourse is, and to what extent the online groups communicate with the government. Using network analysis and content analysis/co-word analysis, this study has the findings as follows: In terms of the structural qualities, online public fora are relatively inclusive, but are centralized on a few participants and do not have a statistically significant indication of being equitable in discussion. The two-step flow of communication operates along with the presence of opinion leaders who turn out to be influentials but not content creators. Interestingly, the flow of influence is likely to be less centralized than the flow of information, which implies the importance of the reliability of a given message rather than that of the author. In terms of the actual discourse, participants turn to like-minded fellow citizens’ remarks. Discourses are more emotional than cognitive and exhibits more anger than anxiety. Influential discourses are those with negative emotion more so than with positive emotion and those that are cognitive rather than emotional. Among cognitive components, assertive and strong discourses have greater social influence than analytical discourses. In terms of the interaction with the e-government outlet, the distance between public authorities and private citizens is continuously present despite the decline of temporal and physical distance via the Internet. Based on the results, this study suggests a reconsideration of the Habermasian public sphere in online public fora. It contributes to the literature by empirically confirming the presence of the two-step flow of communication in online public fora and testing the difference between the flow of information and the flow of influence. In addition, it broadens the realm of research on political communication by exploring not only sources/ideological perspectives but also emotional/cognitive aspects in discussions. Methodologically, structure/context, multi-level, and quantitative/qualitative analyses allow this study to have a comprehensive account of online public fora. Practically, this study proposes to improve the interactivity with citizens as the next stage of e-government development. / text

In November 2012, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) announced the implementation of the Local Community Radio Act of 2010, which marks the largest expansion of community radio stations in U.S. history. The act responds to the decade-long community radio movement in which many civilian groups advocated that community radio—an “old-fashioned” yet affordable public medium—still plays a significant role in fostering the expression of diverse voices and citizen participation in this digital era. Despite the successful advocacy effort in the policy-making arena, the real impact of community radio remains a question. Who listens to and participates in community radio? Does the connection between community radio and community exist? This dissertation investigates audience interaction and participation in the U.S. community radio sector, seeking to empirically and theoretically advance audience research in community radio and alternative media in general. Methodologically, this dissertation is based on case studies from two community radio stations KOOP and KPFT in Texas through multiple methods including 5-year ethnographic fieldwork, in-depth interviews with 70 individuals including staff, programmers and listeners, a web-based listener survey with 131 respondents, and a textual analysis of producer-audience communication platforms such as blogs and social networking sites. The results demonstrate the limitations of audience interaction and participation caused by resource constraints and community radio programmers’ tendency to speak with themselves. Therefore, I recommend that community radio broadcasters should consider developing systemic approaches to evaluate and facilitate audience participation, which requires an understanding that the value of community engagement lies beyond audience size or the amount of listener donations. This dissertation concludes that community radio remains relevant in this digital era. This affordable and accessible form of alternative media to some extent bridges a digital divide. The medium also facilitates the development of a genuine relationship between radio programmers and listeners, thus the formation of virtual and real communities. These are the very elements that make meaningful dialogues possible in any communication environment. / text

“Out of Sight, Out of Mind: The Role of the Body in Canada’s Multicultural Religious Identity” examines the role of the body in contemporary conflicts of religious dress in public spaces in Canada. Utilizing policies, policy proposals, and legal precedents that regulate the religious body, I argue the physical religious body resides in a liminal space between the inclusive ideals of multicultural policy and the exclusionary policies of an overtly secular public sphere. Particular definitions of secularism and liberalism shape the construction of public life and civic spaces, and these specific understandings produce public space that is seemingly inhospitable to certain embodied religious expressions. The religious body complicates the assumed separation of religion and state, which understands religion to be an element of private, not public life. I argue that policies which seek to limit the religious body in public or civic spaces work to create an “ideal” secular citizen. / October 2015

More than sixteen years have passed since the launch of the Qatar-based Al Jazeera news channel. Looking back, the state of Arab media and its relationship with the political sphere was different from what we see nowadays. The launch of Al Jazeera in 1996 was a significant event that led to subsequent changes both in the media and politics. Among these changes, the Arab spring, which started in Tunisia in December 2010, is certainly the most remarkable one. This ongoing event has already resulted in the fall of four dictatorships and is expected to unleash a democratization wave and reshape the face of the Arab region. This research analyzes the Al Jazeera democratizing effect and looks at the political implications of the new Arab public sphere. In doing so, it seeks to fill a gap in the existing literature, which tends to ignore the Arab world that remains largely under-researched. Contrary to the top-down approach inherent in the dominant narratives on democratization, that pay almost no attention to the growing role of the media in political change, I adopted a bottom-up approach arguing that, particularly in the Arab setting, it has become almost impossible to separate changes in the media landscape from those in the political field. The Arab spring provides us with a telling empirical example where this interplay is remarkably manifest. In this context, Arab democratization is no longer an abstract; it is rather a developing process that needs our attention and requires concerted scholarly efforts. To develop an original approach to understanding Arab democratization and analyze its complex dynamics, I used grounded theory and its powerful tools in theory building. Based on this theoretical framework I opted for qualitative methodology to elaborate the empirical part of this research, which consists primarily of analyzing and interpreting in-depth interviews conducted with a sample of Al Jazeera’s staff in various managerial and editorial positions.

As the realm of social life where public opinion forms, the public sphere has been the focus of much theoretical debate and empirical operationalization in political sociology. However, by conceptualizing the public sphere as a nationally circumscribed and normatively defined space that excludes governance institutions, much existing research provides a limited set of tools to define and assess the structure of a supranational public sphere. A deeply integrated supranational polity, the European Union (EU) provides a revealing terrain for tracing the structure of a public sphere emerging between national politics and supranational institutions. In this dissertation, I delineate the contours of the supranational public sphere in the EU by exploring the subjective meanings, national political influences, and institutional interpretation of public opinion about political integration in the EU. I answer the following questions: (1) How salient is EU political integration among Europeans, and what does this concept mean to them? (2) How does Europeans' awareness about EU political integration vary across policies, time and social strata? (3) How is public opinion on EU political integration shaped by national political discourse, as reflected in the positions of national parties? (4) How do officials at the European Commission (EC) measure and interpret public opinion data, and to what extent are these data used to construct an image of the European public and an EU public sphere? Based on quantitative survey data and on interviews with French and Romanian citizens, I show that political integration in the EU remains a distant and abstract concept to which citizens attribute personalized or nationalized meanings. Longitudinal panel models show that public opinion on EU policy often relies on cues from national party discourse. Moreover, interviews with EC staff revealed that, because of logistical and institutional constraints that stifle civil servants' analytical aspirations, public opinion data collected by the EC fail to define a European public and to construct a supranational communicative space for this public. The EU public sphere is a product of supranational polity, but its public is absent and its structure remains nationally embedded. / Sociology

During the late eighteenth century, as part of a broader reform initiative commonly referred to as the “Bourbon reforms,” royal officials attempted to transform theatrical productions at Mexico City’s Real Coliseo (Royal Theater). Influenced by new intellectual trends in Spain, especially the neoclassical movement, reformers hoped that theater could serve as a school of virtue, rationality and good citizenship. This essay analyzes the theatrical reform effort, traces its foundations from sixteenth-century Spain to eighteenth-century Mexico, and seeks to explain why the initiative failed to transform either the Coliseo’s shows or its audience’s artistic predilections. It argues that the initiative was unsuccessful for three primary reasons. First, reformers did not have the power to compel impresarios and actors to obey their new regulations, and economic constraints sometimes forced officials to bend their strict aesthetic standards to appease the audience's largely baroque predilections. Second, Mexico City’s diverse and thriving public sphere made imposing a new popular culture profoundly difficult, especially given that reformers’ one-dimensional vision of neoclassicism failed to account for the variety and debate within this movement. Consequently, the theater added fuel to public debate over the definition of buen gusto (good taste), rather than merely instructing passive citizens as reformers had hoped. Finally, widespread public derision of the performing profession meant that many spectators did not take actors seriously as teachers of morality, taste and rationality. Actors’ reputation as immoral lowlifes, which derived in part from late-sixteenth century debates in Spain over morality and illusion in drama, complicated reformers' already difficult project of transforming the theater into a school of sociability and citizenship. / text

Interneto vartotojų skaičius per pastaruosius 8 metus išaugo daugiau negu 2,5 karto ir dabar siekia beveik penktadalį pasaulio gyventojų. Tai reiškia, jog internetas tampa visa vis svarbesne erdve bendraujant, ieškant informacijos, dirbant ar poilsiaujant. Ne veltui, įvairios kompanijos siekdamos būti pastebėtos pirmiausia siekia atsirasti internete, o tik paskui rūpinasi savo reklama. Būti internete, reiškia, būti pastebėtu. Nedaug nustebino ir tai, kad Lietuvos interneto erdvėje pradėtos kurti ne tik komercinių įmonių, bet ir žiniasklaidos bendrovių elektroninės dienraščių versijos ar nuo jų nepriklausomi interneto naujienų tinklalapiai. Laisvas ir nepriklausomas internetas reiškė, kad kiekvienas individas, turintis priėjimą prie kompiuterių tinklo, galės laisvai ir nevaržomai reikšti nuomonę, dalyvauti diskusijose, paveikti valdžios struktūras ir pan. Internetas reiškė naujas galimybes viešajai erdvei – pagrindinei demokratijos sąlygai – atgimti ir plėtoti. Tradicinė žiniasklaida nuvylė ir ilgainiui iš politinio diskurso bei debatų skatintojos tapo politinio spektaklio teatru. Darbo tikslas atskleisti, kaip Lietuvos internetinių naujienų tinklalapių www.delfi.lt ir www.lrytas.lt straipsniai atitinka viešosios erdvės koncepciją bei kokį poveikį žiniasklaida turi viešojo diskurso kūrimui internete. Šiam tikslui atkleisti buvo atliktas kiekybinis ir kokybinis turinio analizės tyrimas, kurio esmė buvo atrasti atsakymą į klausimą, kokio pobūdžio informacija dominuoja... [toliau žr. visą tekstą] / The number of Internet users has grown rapidly over last 8 years and at the moment embraces more than one fifth of world’s population. By no means, Internet becomes more important in the terms of communication, searching for information, working or resting. This also encouraged growing number of companies to present themselves on the internet prior to taking care of advertising campaigns, since being online in nowadays means existing. Therefore, not that it was a great surprise to observe the appearance of online sites for well-known business corporations or to meet the online versions of public newspapers. Free and independent Internet from the very beginning meant open possibilities for every individual with an access to the computer network to express itself, to take part in public debates and to have a chance to influence the authorities in order to accomplish the mission of public interest. Nevertheless, Internet also meant new opportunities to develop the main element of democratic society and state – it was a chance for public sphere to come back into force, because traditional means of media have been disappointing lately due to the process where the main subject public discourse and debate was replaced by tiresome political performance. The main objective of this thesis is to reveal the background for analysis to uncover the role of Internet media for creating the discourse online, and also what the results on how the Internet news portal of Lithuania www.delfi.lt... [to full text]

Today is an exciting time to be a political activist in sub-Saharan Africa, particularly for the technically inclined. New media technologies including the mobile phone, the Internet, and social media are proliferating rapidly and their potential as potent political tools is being realized. While 2012's Arab Spring in North Africa captivated the world, similar campaigns have been occurring south of the Sahara both before and since. But the embrace of social media for political ends raises the question of how, if at all, these new media actually perturb the political landscape. These questions have been well-studied in Western contexts, but remain virtually unexplored in developing regions where traditional media are scarcer, democracies are younger, and the effect of social media on politics has the potential to be quite distinct. This dissertation explores these questions by focusing on social media use during elections in Nigeria and Liberia in 2011. It asks how social media impacted the democratic process during these key events, and compares social media discourse to formal election monitoring operations. The findings suggest that given sufficient civil-society coordination, social media can be an effective tool for electoral scrutiny. Furthermore, for this and other reasons, it appears that social media has the potential to emerge as a key influence on public faith in electoral processes. Based on these results, it is further argued that social media's true disruptive power in developing world contexts lies in its ability to transcend the economics of scarcity that have dominated traditional media in such contexts. This observation is offered as an extension to the networked public sphere theory of Yochai Benkler that frames this work.