published_or_final_version / Public Administration / Master / Master of Public Administration

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Coercion and repressive legislation are widely recognised measures employed by hybrid regimes as a way of stifling the media. This thesis illustrates the long shadow cast by these measures by examining the impact of transgressions on self-censorship among Ugandan journalists, and how these are weighed against their notion of professionalism. Self- censorship is experienced as an unwanted, but vital practice that moves in tandem with the level of political tension, being an extraordinary rather than general measure. The study was conducted in the summer of 2016, founded by a Minor Field Study scholarship from the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA).

This master thesis discusses the sensitive topic of internet censorship in People's Republic of China (PRC). The first part provides a detailed overview on current situation of internet censorship in PRC. Some of the important terms related to censorship are also explained here. The theoretical part acquaints reader with technical aspects of censorship, as well as with the legal policies of Chinese government. Furthermore, this part also presents an analysis of keywords blocked by the search engines in China. Next part of this thesis offers a discussion on future development of censorship in both China and the rest of the world. The author proposes two potential scenarios and argues whether present state of censorship is feasible for upcoming years or not.

Recent years have seen a rising trend of censorship in US secondary schools. This dissertation looks at incidents when censorship caused a sensation in schools and beyond. The censorship events explored are moments when a text, pedagogy, bounded notion of curricula, or a body was removed from a classroom because it was deemed objectionable to someone. I trace how certain texts, pedagogies, and subjectivities get affectively invested as inappropriate for secondary students in four events between 2008-2014. Since each of the events caused affective intensities in schools and communities, at times even reaching national media, I take up the affective turn in cultural studies to explore the intensities both motivating and resulting from censorship. I see affect as the body reading the world and as a particularly potent theoretical lens for the investigation of contemporary literacies. Patricia Clough (2010) urges that “affect studies calls for experimentation in methodology and presentation styles” (p.228) and this dissertation labors to take up that call. To work towards generating affect in addition to theorizing it, I explore different modes and method of ‘working’ data, including visual analysis, autographics, sketching, and glitch methodologies.

Since the cultural turn and the publication of André Lefevere's Translation, Rewriting and the Manipulation of Literary Fame (1992), the field of translation studies has increasingly focused on the question of ideological influences in the translation process and the subsequent textual or paratextual censorship. While a broad range of studies identify a number of alterations, omissions or disappearances in the translation process under totalitarian or otherwise restrictive regimes (Fabre, 2007; Merino & Rabadán, 2002; Thomson-Wohlgemuth, 2007 among others), only a handful of them researches censorship of non-normative sexualities and identities (Baer, 2011b; Gorjanc, 2012; Linder, 2004). This thesis complements this still largely under-explored subject through an insight into the censorship of male same-sex affection in former Czechoslovakia and the present-day Czech Republic and Slovakia. Focusing on two key periods of the two countries' history, the communist era of 1948-1989 and the current democratic period that started with the Velvet Revolution, the project compares a series of consecutive translations in order to uncover possible patterns of censorship. The corpus of this work consists of Czech and Slovak translations of Shakespeare's sonnets, a poetry collection known for its potential for a homoerotic reading which became subject of controversy almost from the moment of its first known publication in 1609. This project utilises a theoretical background borrowed from poststructuralism and queer theory, chiefly represented by the works of Foucault (1978), Sedgwick (1985, 1990) and Halperin (2002). One of the key questions that these scholars attempted to answer is how to successfully conduct research into the history of human sexuality, given the fact that its conceptualisation changes across temporal and spatial axes. It is based on the assumption that it is not possible to research the history of translation of non-normative sexualities without an awareness of these changing perceptions of the very basic terms like homosexuality. The key aim of this thesis is to introduce the theoretical frameworks from queer studies into a historical enquiry within the field of translation studies in order to test this hypothesis. The methodological framework for this work was designed to suit the large corpus used for this project, encompassing fifteen translations of a collection of 154 sonnets. It consists firstly of a quantitative methodology devised in order to uncover the potential shifts in the gender of the recipient of the sonnets, which is one of the crucial elements in the reading of the corpus as a collection of amorous poetry written by a man for another man or men. The second stage consists of a qualitative analysis of the translations which focuses on textual, contextual and paratextual features that will complement the macro-level insight of the quantitative part with micro-level observations. The aim of this study is to uncover patterns of censorship related to same-sex affection and desire in the sonnet collection, place them into their respective historical context and finally to answer the question of whether there is a correlation between the socio-political changes in Czechoslovakia, the shifting conceptualisation of homosexuality throughout the various periods, and the strategies applied in Czech and Slovak sonnet translations.

Does the Internet facilitate anti-regime dissent within authoritarian states? I argue that the Internet fosters dissent mobilization through three factors: distance, decentralization and interaction. First, the Internet fosters dissent mobilization by allowing protesters to communicate relatively cheaply and instantaneously over great distances. While other communication mediums also reduce distance costs, the second factor, decentralization, allows dissenters to use the Internet to evade state controls and reduces the state's ability to restrict information flows. Third, the Internet's Interactive nature allows users to both become consumers and producers of information. Interactivity also fosters trust between users that can evolve into offline action. However, the empirical record consists almost entirely of open sourcenews reporting and qualitative studies, and there are few clear theoretical links between the traditional dissent and repression literatures and recent Internet mobilization theories. My goal in this project is to place a generalizable theory of Internet-mediated dissent within traditional mobilization context and more recent communication, computer science and legal literatures. I frame my theory of Internet mediated dissent through three components. The first component is Internet access as a mobilizing structure, in which I posit that Internet access creates conditions for social mobilization that are difficult for regimes to counter. The second component is the effect of Internetcensorship on Internet-facilitated dissent. For the third theoretical component, I assess that despite the type of censorship, increased Internet use eventually overwhelms the regime's capacity to censor information. I test my theoretical components through a series of large N cross national time series negative binomial regressions spanning 1999-2010. In the first test, I find that increased Internet access increased the likelihood of protest in non-democratic states. Results of the second tests are mixed: technical censorship has no effect on protest, soft controls decreased incidence of protest, and combined technical and soft programs increase the likelihood of protest, albeit the substantive effect is slight. In the third test, I hypothesize that Internet use eventually crosses a user threshold after which censorship is no longer effective. The results of the third test suggest that censorship is not effective regardless of Internet access levels. However, the influence of Internet use on protest tapers off once a specific threshold is reached. The dissertation proceeds as follows: in Chapter 2, I present literature review that frames my research question within previous empirical work. Next, in Chapter 3 I propose and illustrate my theory of Internet-mediated dissent. In Chapter 4, I test whether or not incidents of anti-regime protest increase as Internet use increases inside non-democratic states. I build on these results in Chapter 5, in which I test whether technical filters, soft controls or a combination of methods decrease the likelihood of protest inside non-democratic states, followed by a test for whether increasing Internet use overwhelms censorship programs. Finally, in chapter 6 I summarize my findings, discuss data complications, offer ideas for future research, and discuss the implications of this project.

Studying the last century and a half of Ukrainian linguistic history reveals relentless attempts to stifle the development of Ukrainian as well as to suppress translation activities under both the tsarist and Soviet regimes. Exploring the morphological evolution of the Ukrainian language discloses evidence of terminological inconsistencies due to the lexical russification of Ukrainian during the Soviet regime, leading to inconsistencies between the standard of Ukrainian used in the Soviet Union versus that used in the diaspora. Additional examination of Ukrainian linguistic history discloses political motives for banning translations, refusing the right to translate, censoring translations, and punishing translators who rejected the mandatory Soviet literary norm of Socialist Realism. In order to further understand the implications of translation practices in the Ukrainian SSR, it is important to examine the language policies, political agendas and translation practices prior to and throughout the Soviet regime. This thesis explores and analyses the russification of Ukrainian through translation policies designed to fulfil Soviet political and ideological agendas. It compares power differentials between Russian and Ukrainian, as well as between Russian and other minority languages in translation, and examines the resulting terminological inconsistencies. It shows unequivocally how translation, transliteration, and censorship were used to foster linguicide and assimilate Ukrainian minorities, from the late tsarist era to the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Studying the last century and a half of Ukrainian linguistic history reveals relentless attempts to stifle the development of Ukrainian as well as to suppress translation activities under both the tsarist and Soviet regimes. Exploring the morphological evolution of the Ukrainian language discloses evidence of terminological inconsistencies due to the lexical russification of Ukrainian during the Soviet regime, leading to inconsistencies between the standard of Ukrainian used in the Soviet Union versus that used in the diaspora. Additional examination of Ukrainian linguistic history discloses political motives for banning translations, refusing the right to translate, censoring translations, and punishing translators who rejected the mandatory Soviet literary norm of Socialist Realism. In order to further understand the implications of translation practices in the Ukrainian SSR, it is important to examine the language policies, political agendas and translation practices prior to and throughout the Soviet regime. This thesis explores and analyses the russification of Ukrainian through translation policies designed to fulfil Soviet political and ideological agendas. It compares power differentials between Russian and Ukrainian, as well as between Russian and other minority languages in translation, and examines the resulting terminological inconsistencies. It shows unequivocally how translation, transliteration, and censorship were used to foster linguicide and assimilate Ukrainian minorities, from the late tsarist era to the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Through the case of film censorship in Hong Kong from the late 1940s to the 1970s, this thesis explores the local impact of the international Cold War. It argues that Cold War politics shaped the nature of local policy. The first chapter investigates the reasons for the rise of film censorship in the late 1940s and the 1950s. It argues that three levels of Cold War tensions led the Hong Kong government to focus on political censorship. Tensions within the British Empire, between the Hong Kong government and foreign governments, and those between local communists and the Hong Kong government led censors to target communist films, foreign governments’ official films, and films echoing local political events. Among these films, those from China remained the primary target. During the period of political censorship, the Hong Kong government ignored the needs of local viewers and focused on reacting to external forces. The second chapter examines how in the 1960s local communists launched two campaigns against the suppression of Chinese films. It argues that the campaigns in 1965 and 1967 showed the influence of the Cold War, as these communists threatened the Hong Kong government that continued suppression of Chinese films would worsen Sino--‐‑British relations. It explains why the 1965 campaign succeeded in forcing the government to adjust its policy towards Chinese films but the one in 1967 did not. Since the late 1960s, Cold War tensions had been easing, particularly between China and Britain. The importance of political censorship and the external aspects of film censorship in Hong Kong started to diminish. Setting the stage for the localisation of film censorship in the 1970s, Chapter Three explores another duty of film censors in the 1960s, to examine sex and violence. By studying the debates about film classification and the censorship of the local film Death Valley (Duanhungu 斷魂⾕谷), this chapter argues that the government did not understand the goals of moral censorship even after examining films for more than twenty years. And it still did not sincerely engage with the Chinese population. The final chapter, on the 1970s, shows how the easing Cold War tensions directed the Hong Kong government to focus on moral censorship of films that was in accordance with the other social policies such as fighting prostitution and violent crime. Localisation of film censorship was followed by comprehensive reforms. The 1970s witnessed the government’s first serious attempt to engage the Chinese public in censoring films. / published_or_final_version / History / Master / Master of Philosophy