This thesis studies print culture in colonial Lagos against the background of the public sphere, and brings together a variety of English-language and Yoruba-language newspapers. Such an approach allows for highlighting the practicalities of newspaper production and foregrounding the work accomplished by newspapermen in a changing 'information environment' and political context. It offers insights into Lagos politics, contributes to the history of the educated elite, and to more global histories of communication. Using newspapers as well as archival records, and focussing on events that strikingly reveal dynamics in the public sphere, this thesis narrates a nuanced history of a discursive field which was, amongst other things, central for Lagos politics. This thesis complicates a Habermasian notion of the public sphere as an open discursive space, and not only highlights that the public sphere was an arena of contested meanings, but also illustrates axes along which the composition of this social structure was negotiated. When newspapers emerged in the late nineteenth-century, discussions in the press were largely restricted to the elite. The economy of recognition that was at play in the public sphere was to change in the 1920s. This thesis highlights how newspapermen and contributors sought to carve out niches for themselves in the public sphere in new ways and how their becoming a speaker in this discursive field was challenged and contested. It highlights the nuanced ways in which newspapermen and contributors convened publics through their papers: how they did so around particular issues, in distinction from each other, and how they adapted the convening of publics to new political dynamics in the 1940s. This thesis gives insight into the complex relationship between English-language and Yoruba-language newspapers, and moreover illustrates how the practicalities of the newspaper business were coming to bear on dynamics in the public sphere.

This thesis examines an intermittent uncanniness that emerges in cultural responses to new image technologies, most recently in some impressions of the digital actor. The history of image technologies is punctuated by moments of fleeting strangeness: from Maxim Gorky's reading of the cinematographic image in terms of 'cursed grey shadows', to recent renderings of the computer-generated cast of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within as silicon-skinned mannequins. It is not merely the image's unfamiliar and new aesthetics that render it uncanny. Rather, the image is received within a cultural framework where its perceived strangeness speaks allegorically of what it means to be human at that historical moment. In various ways Walter Benjamin, Anson Rabinbach and N. Katherine Hayles have claimed that the notion and the experience of 'being human' is continuously transformed through processes related to different stages of modernity including rational thought, industrialisation, urbanisation, media and technology. In elaborating this argument, each of the four chapters is organized around the elucidation of a particular motif: 'dummy', 'siren', 'doppelg??nger' and 'resurrection'. These motifs circulate through discourses on different categories of digital actor, from those conceived without physical referents to those that are created as digital likenesses of living or dead celebrities. These cultural responses suggest that even while writers on the digital actor are speculating about the future, they are engaging with ideas about life, death and identity that are very old and very ambivalent.

In my dissertation entitled “The Critical Eye: Re-Viewing 1970s Television,” I argue that TV scholars would benefit greatly by engaging in a more nuanced consideration of the television critic’s industrial position as a key figure of negotiation. As such, critical discourse has often been taken for granted in scholarship without attention to how this discourse may obscure contradictions implicit within the TV industry and the critic’s own identity as both an insider and an outsider to the television business. My dissertation brings the critic to the fore, employing the critic as a lens through which I view television aesthetics, media policy, and technology. This study is grounded in the disciplines of television studies, media industries studies, new media studies, and cultural studies. Yet because the critic’s writing reflects the totality of television as an entertainment and public service medium, the significance of this study expands beyond disciplinary concerns to a reconsideration of the impact of television upon American culture. This project offers a history of the television critic during the 1970s, a decade in which the field of criticism professionalized and expanded dramatically. Methodologically, I am incorporating three approaches, including historical research of the 1970s television industry, textual analysis of critical writing, and interviews with critics working during that decade. I’ve identified the 1970s for a variety of reasons, including its parallels with today’s significant technological and industrial transformations. My central texts will be the industry trade publications, Variety and Broadcasting, and national daily newspapers including the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, and Chicago Tribune. Viewing TV criticism as a profession, a historical source, and a site of scholarly analysis, this project offers a series of interventions, including a consideration of how critical writing may serve as a primary source for historians and how television studies has overlooked the significance of the critic as an object of analysis in his/her own right.

This thesis examines an intermittent uncanniness that emerges in cultural responses to new image technologies, most recently in some impressions of the digital actor. The history of image technologies is punctuated by moments of fleeting strangeness: from Maxim Gorky's reading of the cinematographic image in terms of 'cursed grey shadows', to recent renderings of the computer-generated cast of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within as silicon-skinned mannequins. It is not merely the image's unfamiliar and new aesthetics that render it uncanny. Rather, the image is received within a cultural framework where its perceived strangeness speaks allegorically of what it means to be human at that historical moment. In various ways Walter Benjamin, Anson Rabinbach and N. Katherine Hayles have claimed that the notion and the experience of 'being human' is continuously transformed through processes related to different stages of modernity including rational thought, industrialisation, urbanisation, media and technology. In elaborating this argument, each of the four chapters is organized around the elucidation of a particular motif: 'dummy', 'siren', 'doppelg??nger' and 'resurrection'. These motifs circulate through discourses on different categories of digital actor, from those conceived without physical referents to those that are created as digital likenesses of living or dead celebrities. These cultural responses suggest that even while writers on the digital actor are speculating about the future, they are engaging with ideas about life, death and identity that are very old and very ambivalent.

No description available.

This study addresses the post-revolutionary history of Roma in the Romanian public sphere by examining the social construction of this minority in press and history textbooks. The objective is to illuminate synchronic and diachronic structural patterns in public texts debating Roma in order to offer a deeper understanding of the Romanian xenophobia assuming that the public debate affects the status quo of Roma. Public texts represent fruitful channels of communication through which selective social realities par excellence, stocks of knowledge and typifications are proclaimed by different societal actors. The press possess a critical function whilst history textbooks a manipulative function advocating normative historical realties par excellence. The modi operandi utilized are quantitative, qualitative content- and critical discourse analysis, which are applied in the monitoring of approximately 6000 newspapers, 197 articles (1991-2012) and 6 textbooks (2008-2014). The results indicate that the media history of Roma resembled police investigations rather than conventional journalism. Manifest and latent stereotypifications have synchronically and diachronically formed uncritical and demonizing stocks of knowledge, whose societal truths sustained the othering of Roma in press and were depicted as a force behind the destruction of [“our”] national self-image. History textbooks have offered an inexistent stock of historical knowledge omitting, e.g. the slavery and deportations of Roma but highlighting ethnocentric perspectives, patriotism and other minorities.

Sex and sexuality are embodied experiences that are highly constructed by society. Sexual acts are subject to varied historical meanings, both dominant and subversive, which change over time and space. This dissertation explores how embodied heterosexual married sexual experiences were constructed for, and by, women in the immediate postwar era (1946-1966) and how that sexuality interacted with related social paradigms such as gender roles, motherhood, and femininity within English Canada. Using the body as a lens, this dissertation explores how three main sites of authoritative discourse attempted to police postwar sexual bodies through the creation of ideal, or Leviathan, bodies and associated systems of encoded knowledges and mores called “body politics.” The first case study examines the medicalized body, using the Canadian Medical Association Journal demonstrating how mothers were constructed as the keystones of their families; it reveals the intimate ties between familial gender and sexual role deviance and reproductive illnesses in women’s bodies. The second case study examines how the Anglican, United and Roman Catholic Churches reframed sex as sacramental for English Canadian married couples encouraging them to engage in sexual coitus to both strengthen their marriages and renew their spiritual connection to God. The third case study uses I Love Lucy to interrogate how mass media created and reflected postwar sexual and gender norms while simultaneously subverting them, generating a carnivalesque situation of tightly contained deviance. This dissertation then moves on to examine how the discourses of the previous three chapters affected actual women as demonstrated by a series of eighteen interviews with women who married between 1939 and 1966. The oral histories establish that actual corporeal bodies were at best distorted, or “fun house,” mirrors that only ever reflected imperfect copies of the ideal bodies they were supposed to emulate. In addition to making significant contributions to the historiographies of each of the case studies contained therein, this dissertation adds new knowledges about the ways that “normal” bodies work throughout history, creating simultaneous continuity and change, as well as how sexuality and gender norms are intimately connected within the realm of the body.

Abstract The research observes the profession of reporters in the decades when the field underwent several different changes. The development of editorial hierarchy and the transition to a five day working week increased the need for reporters. At the same time, the strenghtening of trade union politics changed the field towards a more professional direction. In terms of gender, the profession became more balanced when the number of female reporters increased. Female reporters entered the field when the demand for new reporters became higher. However, the change was also connected to the overall development in the Finnish society. It was first and foremost women’s opportunities for work that were negotiated in the role debate that was going on during the 1960s. When the debate turned into an official policy that was maintained through legislation, attention was paid to the gendered structures of working life. During the 1970s, women became a part of career world for good. Finnish working life remained segregated but the profession of reporters was one of the fields where both genders had the same duties. However, the profession was not equal in terms of gender. Female reporters were paid less than their male colleagues and they did not have the same opportunities for promotions. What is more, male reporters worked more often as special reporters whereas females remained as all round reporters. In addition, the vocational culture was still based upon masculine values. Within oral history, the gendered structures of the profession were overshadowed by the rhetorics of sameness. In other words, the profession was seen as equal in terms of gender. The explanation can be found in the Finnish gender culture that maintains the idea of gender neutrality of working life. However, the rhetorics also repeated the ideals of equality that prevailed during the 1960s and 1970s. Furthermore, other factors that divided the profession of reporters like age, political background and education also covered up the question of gender. The source material consists of oral history, archival sources and media texts. Sources form different periods of time are read against each other and the experiences of reporters are connected to the discourses of the 1960s and 1970s. / Tiivistelmä Tutkimuksessa tarkastellaan toimittajan ammattia vuosikymmeninä, jolloin ala koki useita erilaisia muutoksia. Toimitushierarkian kehittyminen ja siirtyminen viisipäiväiseen työviikkoon lisäsivät toimittajien tarvetta ja samanaikaisesti ammatillisten etujen ajaminen muutti alaa professionaalimpaan suuntaan. Myös ammattikunnan sukupuolirakenne alkoi tasapainoistua, kun alalle tuli aiempaa enemmän naistoimittajia. Toimittajanaisten määrän kasvu vastasi lisääntyneen toimittajatarpeen aiheuttamaan kysyntään, mutta muutos liittyi myös suomalaisessa yhteiskunnassa tapahtuneeseen kehitykseen. 1960-luvun roolikeskustelussa neuvoteltiin ennen kaikkea naisten työssäkäynnin mahdollisuuksista, ja tasa-arvokeskustelun valtiollistuttua päähuomio kiinnittyi työelämän sukupuolittuneisuuteen. Naiset siirtyivätkin 1970-luvulla työelämään jäädäkseen. Suomalainen työelämä säilyi kuitenkin eriytyneenä, ja toimittajan ammatti oli yksi niistä harvoista aloista, joilla naiset ja miehet tekivät samaa työtä. Tämä ei tarkoittanut kuitenkaan sitä, että ala olisi ollut tasa-arvoinen. Toimittajanaisten asema oli miehiä heikompi niin palkkauksessa kuin urakehityksessäkin. Sukupuoli näkyi myös toimitustyössä, jossa erikoistoimittajan tehtävät menivät pääsääntöisesti miehille, kun taas naiset työskentelivät ennen kaikkea uutistoimittajina. Myös ammatillinen kulttuuri rakentui edelleen maskuliinisten piirteiden varaan. Toimittajien muistelupuheessa ammattikunnan epätasa-arvoa tuottaneet käytännöt peittyivät kuitenkin samanlaisuuspuheen alle ja ammatti näyttäytyi tasa-arvoisena. Yhtäältä tämä selittyy suomalaisella sukupuolikulttuurilla, joka ylläpitää ajatusta työelämän sukupuolineutraaliudesta. Toisaalta taustalla on nähtävissä 1960- ja 1970-luvulla vallinnut tasa-arvokäsitys, joka korosti sukupuolten samuutta. Sukupuolta peittivät tutkittavina vuosikymmeninä alleen myös muut toimittajakuntaa erottaneet tekijät, joita olivat ikä, poliittinen tausta ja koulutus. Tutkimuksen lähdeaineisto koostuu muistitiedosta, aikalaisteksteistä ja arkistoaineistoista. Eri aikoina syntyneitä lähteitä luetaan toisiaan vasten, ja toimittajien kokemukset kiinnitetään 1960- ja 1970-luvun ajattelumalleihin.

No description available.

The present study inquires into the problematization of attention in the reception and distribution of photography in 19th-century Sweden. It investigates how photography’s alleged abundance of detail and indiscriminate reproduction became a problem in the reception of the medium. The problem became urgent when photographs were put to use by established discourses; specifically, when used in printed publications meant for a public. The thesis therefore argues that the problem of attention had a profound influence on how printed photographic or photographically illustrated editions (photo-texts) were modelled and arranged. For this purpose, the study affirms a particular focus on attention practices: the various ways in which the printed editions aim to regulate the reader’s attention before the supposedly distractive image. Specifically, the thesis focuses on how texts in these printed editions are arranged or juxtaposed in relation to the image, how they speak of and to the images, what values they reflect, and what effects they could be said to produce. Consequently, the present study is more than an investigation of a problem; it is also an inquiry into the various attempts to overcome this problem. The problem and its responsive practices will have different characteristics in the various contexts of individual discourses. Therefore, the study situates the problem of attention in four prominent genres of 19th-century photography: the topographical albums of photographic views, art books with photographic reproductions, the scientific atlas, and the photographically illustrated travelogue. These genres and forms of publication, as well as the discourses of attention relating to them, are discussed in separate chapters. Every chapter departs from a specific Swedish photographic edition from the nineteenth-century. In sum, the thesis aims – with its focus on the problematization of attention – at giving a new historical perspective on the emergent relation between photography and the printed word.