Feminist political theory argues that democratic political foundations have been gender-biased and suffer from various discrepancies that prevent women's participation in the political public sphere and limit their role as political citizens. Parallel to this, feminists have questioned the role of media in representing women's concerns; since media are a dominant part of the public sphere and are crucial sites of debate where meanings are constructed and public consciousness is shaped, their role in political awareness is important. Using such frameworks, this study explores the relationship between political theory and media practice in India, which offers a democratic political system and an autonomous press modelled after the Western political system. However, within the context of a Third World traditional society, the relationship between theory and practice in relation to women's rights is not the simple equation that the Western feminist political theory suggests. A historical and cultural analysis of Indian society reveals that higher-caste patriarchal culture - a Brahmanical hegemony - still defines women's roles and position. Although an explicit model of democracy guarantees legal and political rights to women, the state remains undemocratic and patriarchal towards women, and strengthens the traditional social order in its practice, thus also demonstrating a connection between cultural practices and political practices. Using content analysis, the study reveals that the Indian national press has contributed towards the existing patriarchal order and supported the social consensus by making certain women's issues 'invisible' in a democratic polity. Its insensitivity towards women's issues is examined through the analysis of the media content, in the journalistic practices in covering women's news/issues, and in opinions of journalists towards women's issues and the women's movement. It has been argued that the press and/or journalists are part of the same culture and cannot proceed without values prevalent in India's patriarchal society. Interviews with women activists and journalists suggest that apart from the cultural prejudices, a myriad of issues like poverty, basic needs, etc. facing majority of the population in a developing country impinge upon gender, leading to its perceived insignificance, and causing ideological differences between journalists and women activists.

The study had a number of dimensions. Through a discussion of opposed views of the situation and role of broadcasting within British political culture an attempt was made to locate the factors which frame the production of political television and which therefore need to be considered in any discussion of political television as political communication. An initial premiss, supported by the research literature was that one needed to consider both the internal and external context of programme making and the institutional and intellectual restraints which derive from those contexts. Consideration of the internal context was based on interviews with those involved in making programmes and periods of observation with particular programmes. Consideration of the meaning of the political and commercial structures which surround programming was through analysis of four case studies. Attention was drawn to a number of features of the internal context: the operation of 'identities' or stylistic paradigms; the limitations of resources; a number of ground rules; the absence of any adequate image of the audience. Consideration was also given to the role of the institutions of the State and of commerce in influencing programme production.

Centring on information technology (IT), this thesis examines two broad but related areas of interests: ideological formations and material movements. Starting from a historical survey it contrasts two visions of 'information society' (IS), and then goes on to depict the social background from which these visions arise. It is found that since the 1960s the capitalist world system has been undergoing crisis, and it becomes especially obvious in the 1980s that IT has been playing a crucial role in restructuring capitalism. As such, the concept of IS and practical functions subsumed by IT have important implications for (semi-)peripheral countries . As one of the widely claimed economic 'miracles' Taiwan's recent developmental trajectory is particularly useful for realising how IT functions and how dominant ideas about 'IS' disseminate. Benefiting from selling IT, Taiwan's experience cannot be said to have constituted a successful story supporting the modernisation theory. Rather, the developmental process she has so far gone through fits the arguments of the world-system approach. Taiwan's quick rise to seize IT for expanding her economic base tells a very good example as how the international capital, the state, and the national capital cooperate and clash. In contrast, Taiwan's records of using IT for production, transmission or consumption are rather poor. This reflects her position in the world system in general, however, it is a necessary result considering that her economic structure is based on small business. On the side of ideological representations, this study confirms the dominant pattern of IT coverage in the popular media (newspapers). Though the newspapers have not yet produced a coherent articulation of different elements of the idea of 'IS', it relays uncritically the established (the government and the business) perspectives on IT and 'IS'. The protesting or suspicious opinions about them are therefore contained in marginal places like the environmental movements or expressed in science fictions.

In the sociology of mass communication, there is a gap in empirical research into how news corporations relate to professional and socially developed conventions about 'how to make news look like news'. Moreover, there is a gap in research on how public service and commercial television news services relate to such conventions, and on how such conventions, and the different productional contexts for public and commercial news, are reflected in television news programmes. By means of a case study, the thesis sets out to address precisely these gaps in an analysis of two news services: Dagsrevyen of the Norwegian public service corporation the NRK, and International News of the Scandinavian commercial satellite channel TV3. The thesis aims to analyse how relations to the state and the market, and to the institution (or formation) of news, are reflected in the everyday news production processes and in the news programmes. Through the analytical concepts of context, genre and textual claims, the productional processes, the presented news texts, and the relations between productional and textual aspects, are examined. More specifically, the following research issues are raised: 1. What elements constitute the production processes in the two channels. 2. What characterises the news programmes; the content, the composition/form and the presentation. 3. What are the relations between the productional aspects and the output/text of the news programmes. 4. To what extent do finance, news-policy, organisation of the news departments and the news-production processes produce similarities and differences in the two news programmes. To analyse the above issues, methods of observation, interviews, document analysis and qualitative and quantitative text analyses are applied. The examination of productional and textual aspects shows that although the broadcasters were clearly different in regard to policies and economic resources, the activities and the presented news texts were closely related to conventions for how to 'implement' the social institution of news. The policies to establish credibility and seriousness based on conventions descending from the news institution resulted in similarities in the two programmes. The theoretical framework developed for the analysis has made it possible to look further into the dynamics producing such similarities and differences.

This thesis examines the portrayal of the problems and issues of the inner city by an Independent Television Company across its factual programming over an eight year period from 1982 to 1989. Following a critical review of existing mass communications' literature an intermediate level of analysis and theorisation is secured which, recognising the explanatory contributions won by competing approaches, nonetheless identifies a significant theoretical lacuna in their midst. This concerns the deliberate pursuit of established programme forms by professional journalists and programme makers and which are reproduced as a 'known result*. The portrayal of the inner city is examined in terms of substantive content, access, forum and means of communication at both 'reading' and 'production' stages of empirical analysis. Essentially the study attends to the interpretative 'resources and accounts' found within this inner city portrayal and placed within the public domain as well as the characteristic, and impacting properties of the medium'. Following an extensive 'reading', including an examination of the characteristic forms, subject interests and relational appeals of established programmes genres, as well as substantive inner city news and riot coverage across different factual programmes and employing a variety of quantitative and qualitative reading methods, the study turns to an examination of professional practices within the production and institutional domains. Participant observation, semi~structured interviews and a number of in-depth case studies are used to complement the findings elicited at the 'reading' stage. Professional practices are examined to the extent that they enact and reproduce on a daily basis established interests and properties of the regional news programme. Finally the thesis situates the analysis within the wider and changing institutional context already found to impact upon the limited and characteristic forms of inner city portrayal.

Copyright represents a constant and delicately poised balance among three, often competing interests: the author's and his/her rights in a protected work; the enterpreneur's who exploit such works and his/her own rights; and finally, the public who needs to have access to these works. However, especially since the mid-twentieth century, the system of copyright, and even its existence itself, has been seriously challenged. These challenges have come from the attitude of the 'developing countries', the advent of new technologies, and the consequent changing nature of piracy and private copying. This thesis examines these challenges in particular in relation to the audio-visual industries. Findings drawn from a wide range of sources ranging from private industry sources to intergovernmental bodies are used to determine the extent of piracy and private copying and the effects of these on the copyright industries and copyright owners alike. Different ways of meeting the challenges to copyright are explored in detail including technological solutions or 'fixes', trade-oriented measures, legal remedies, and educational programmes. Detailed attention is also paid to recent steps taken by the European Union and the GATT to establish a framework of copyright protection across the world. The likely success of all these measures is addressed in the concluding chapter.

This thesis examines the vicissitudes around psychiatric practice in the Italian city of Gorizia, from the 1960s to the present day. It addresses the work of alternative psychiatry initiated by Franco Basaglia in the city, in the early 1960s, and how this work has been remembered in the local community across the decades. It is an interdisciplinary qualitative case study research based on an ethnography I conducted in Gorizia between 2011 and 2012, which has primarily involved archival research, formal interviews and informal conversations with some of the protagonists of psychiatric deinstitutionalisation in the city. I analyse how elements such as narratives around ‘Basaglia in Gorizia’, public events and health care approaches, as well as the state of several locales and resources in official archives, are informed by fractured and contrasting understandings of the meaning of ‘the Basaglia experience’, and I frame such cleavages in terms of a ‘remembering crisis’. Within the scarcity of historical research that has been conducted on the psychiatric history of Gorizia, I suggest that these cleavages are crucial for an analysis of the cyclical erasures, rewritings and forms of ‘removal’ that are structural features in remembering ‘the Basaglia experience’ in the city. The research is situated in the field of cultural studies. It examines an archive of crisis and it explores the ways in which such crisis is transmitted and circulates across the decades in the community, affecting interpretations of the past and current social and affective practices. I simultaneously draw upon and make a contribution to the fields of affect studies, psychosocial studies, trauma studies, and human geography. My contribution is both theoretical and methodological. In suggesting ways of engaging with a haunted sociality and the psychic significance of a remembering crisis, I advance innovative epistemologies of the unconscious, and I formulate a non representational approach to social research.

Interactive storytelling has attracted plenty of research interest in recent years. Most current interactive storytelling systems follow a goal-oriented approach to story representation, i.e. the user is engaged with the story through fulfilling a number of goals rather than empathising with the characters and experiencing anenriched emotional experience (Pizzi and Cavazza 2007). This fails to satisfy potential users who are oriented to traditional media, such as movies (Louchart et al. 2008) and demographic groups who are interested in attractive and challenging stories (Duh et al. 2010). Given this consideration, an emotion-driven interactive storytelling approach is proposed in this research. In contrast to the goal-oriented interactive storytelling approach, emotion-driven interactive storytelling attempts to create an engaging emotional experience, and involve the user’s emotion with the characters. More importantly, the user’s emotions, evoked by empathising with the characters, determine the character’s behaviours and therefore have an impact on the whole storyline. In this sense, emotions, as a driving force, directly and explicitly contribute to storytelling and the user experience. An interactive video was made by re-editing existing TV material to interpret the concept of emotion-driven interactive storytelling. The examination of user experience of playing this interactive video revealed that non-gamers were more likely to be emotionally involved with the interactive video and empathise with the character. Participants in this group also exhibited higher enjoyment and engagement than gamers. In addition, females were found more likely to empathise with the character and satisfy with the storyline. However because the TV material used to make the interactive video was female-oriented, males failed to enjoy and engage themselves as much as females. But it is important to note that in comparison to males’ previous experience of watching TV Ugly Betty, emotion-driven interactive storytelling increased their enjoyment and engagement. Therefore, emotion-driven interactive storytelling enriches the approach to developing interactive storytelling systems and has the potential to provide an engaging user experience to some types of users. Future research possibilities are discussed with respect to a wider population and research where materials suitable for both genders are presented.

Ghana Television shares many of the post-colonial historical features that public broadcasting systems in African countries inherited at independence. The television producers’ perceptions of role and job function, politics and organisational structures impact the role of Ghana Television and its contribution to contemporary Ghanaian society. Through a consideration of national post-colonial history and theories of media, communication, culture and development communication, this thesis considers the agency of Ghana Television in social development by analysing producers’ perceptions of their production system and broadcast outcomes. Ghanaian public television service faces many challenges that are primarily political and historical. Producers struggle to straddle a line between instinctively championing ideals within content creation processes and maintaining a ill-functioning system and politicised culture of production. The research finds that there are difficulties inherent in delivering a truly public service remit, within the historicised post-colonial context, and highlights the challenges as well as opportunities for improving the delivery of public television service. It draws conclusions that have lessons for similar countries in the post-colonial South.

Creating controlled dynamic character animation consists of mathe- matical modelling of muscles and solving the activation dynamics that form the key to coordination. But biomechanical simulation and control is com- putationally expensive involving complex di erential equations and is not suitable for real-time platforms like games. Performing such computations at every time-step reduces frame rate. Modern games use generic soft- ware packages called physics engines to perform a wide variety of in-game physical e ects. The physics engines are optimized for gaming platforms. Therefore, a physics engine compatible model of anatomical muscles and an alternative control architecture is essential to create biomechanical charac- ters in games. This thesis presents a system that generates muscle activations from captured motion by borrowing principles from biomechanics and neural con- trol. A generic physics engine compliant muscle model primitive is also de- veloped. The muscle model primitive forms the motion actuator and is an integral part of the physical model used in the simulation. This thesis investigates a stochastic solution to create a controller that mimics the neural control system employed in the human body. The control system uses evolutionary neural networks that evolve its weights using genetic algorithms. Examples and guidance often act as templates in muscle training during all stages of human life. Similarly, the neural con- troller attempts to learn muscle coordination through input motion samples. The thesis also explores the objective functions developed that aids in the genetic evolution of the neural network. Character interaction with the game world is still a pre-animated behaviour in most current games. Physically-based procedural hand ani- mation is a step towards autonomous interaction of game characters with the game world. The neural controller and the muscle primitive developed are used to animate a dynamic model of a human hand within a real-time physics engine environment.