M.A.(Media Studies), Faculty of Humanities, University of the Witwatersrand, 2009 / This research will critically analyse “conscious” hip-hop music and the way in which it contests media and mainstream ideas in the media. Conscious hip-hop refers to rap music that critically engages with hegemonic discourses and popular culture. It is framed and named in this manner by both the performers/ artists themselves as well as by leading hip-hop scholars within South Africa and globally. This research uses the music of Godessa and Brasse Vannie Kaap to interrogate representations of Black identities and gender in society.

As the main vehicle through which the majority of the population comes to understand the world around them, the media has the power to dominate public opinion, reinforce traditional notions and introduce new ideologies. With regards to gender, the media’s role is two-prong: it pathologizes and highlights gender deviance, and simultaneous reinforces culturally constructed gender norms. The current study examines media representations of Mary Winkler, a Tennessee woman who shot her minister husband to death in 2006. Winkler’s role as the wife of a religious and community leader implies high morality, sexual demureness, nurturance and obedience. Because Winkler’s involvement in the shooting death of her husband severely conflict with these social and gender role expectations, this work examines how Winkler’s social position affect media depictions of her criminality, and the implications of these depictions on society’s perception of gender, religion, and crime. To answer these questions, 97 newspapers articles produced between April 9th, 2007 (the first day of Winkler’s trial) and August 15, 2007 (the date of Winkler’s release on parole) were analyzed using content analysis methodology. The study results show that Winkler’s adherence to feminine norms was highly influential in her construction as a sympathetic figure and her receipt of a lesser conviction of voluntary manslaughter. / text

This thesis explores the relationship between the media, murderous women, and the concept of separate spheres. Murderous women challenged established gender norms. They did not conform to the societal expectations of their gender, therefore, they were not considered “normal.” As such, women like Alice Mitchell, Jane Toppan, and Amy Archer Gilligan became objects of media, medical, and public curiosity. As defined by medical science and society, newspapers policed the boundaries of “normality” by sensationalizing the lives, actions, and trials of deadly damsels. Newspaper coverage of murderous women reminded the public of the consequences of “abnormality” and non-conformity. This thesis argues that sensationalized stories of lethal ladies between 1890 and 1920 shaped public perceptions of gender, crime, mental illness, and substantiated the perceived “need” for separate spheres. Furthermore, it gives a voice to a group of historical women who existed on the fringes of society.

This study is a discourse analysis of media representations of young people’s participation in the summer riots that spread across the UK in August 2011. Drawing on articles published in three UK newspapers The Guardian, The Daily Mail and The Sun this paper critically assesses the ways in which the media identified the behaviour of young people as symptomatic of a general moral decline in British society. Along with the media portrayal of children and young people during these events, the study also highlights the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child as a further way of questioning the reporting practices of mainstream media. Articles 2, 12 and 13 will have specific focus in the study, in order to evaluate the media’s recurrent misrepresentation of young people’s participation in decision making on matters concerning their own wellbeing.

Cette thèse de doctorat en Sciences de l’Information et de la Communication analyse la construction médiatique de l’Etrangère en France contemporaine. Elle permet une approche communicationnelle, politique et sociologique de ce sujet à la lumière des études culturelles, subalternes, coloniales, postcoloniales et des études de Genre. Cette recherche s’appuie sur l’analyse de discours et de contenu d’un corpus de presse écrite de 2007 à 2013 et sur une enquête de terrain en observation participante au sein de plusieurs associations. Il s’agit de saisir l’importance des représentations de la figure de l’Etrangère au sein de nouveaux enjeux politiques où la question du corps des femmes demeure centrale. Le Genre comme grille d’analyse constitue l’espace de réflexion de cette thèse permettant de repenser les concepts de pouvoir et de domination dans la société. A partir de l’Histoire et des mutations politiques sociales, cette étude décrit aussi la transformation des représentations sociales des femmes d’origine étrangère et le fonctionnement du Genre comme dispositif de pouvoir agissant sur leur corps. L’étude minutieuse des rapports entre Genre, sexe, corps et du principe d’intersectionnalité structurent ainsi une multiplicité de constructions et de modélisations identitaires inédites. Enfin, les bouleversements politiques et pratiques du pouvoir actuels réhabilitent aujourd’hui plus que jamais les questions de mémoire collective et d’identités dans la société par un investissement majeur autour de la question des femmes. / The present PhD thesis in the field of Information and Communication Sciences analyzes media representations of foreign women in contemporary France. It entails communication, political and sociological approaches of the subject in light of cultural studies, colonial studies, postcolonial and gender studies. Also included is a detailed study of subalternity within the new representations of French women of foreign origin.The presented research is based on discourse and content analyses of newspaper articles published between 2007 and 2013, as well as on field surveys with participant observations, performed in several organizations.From media analyses and field analyses, representations of foreign women within novel political issues can be understood ; settings where the question of women’s bodies remains central. Using gender as an analytical grid is the basis of the reflections is this thesis.This allows a rethinking of the notions of power and domination in society. The inquiry also describes the transformation of social representations of women of foreign origin and the practice of gender as an instrument of power applied to the female body. A transformation that has evolved with political mutations in society. An in-depth study of the relationships between gender, sex, body and the concept of intersectionality leads to a multitude of constructions and unique identity models. Finally, the political upheavals and current practices of power stir up more than ever collective memories and identity issues in French society through a major investment in the question of women.

This study aims to examine the media representations of the refugees in the United Kingdom, during the first three months of 2018. The stated period succeeds the peak of the refugee crisis, which benefitted from a high media coverage. Scholars have concluded that media representations of the refugee crisis during its peak were often stereotyped and collectivised. This thesis aims to find out how the refugee crisis is represented in the period after the peak. Thus, the thesis analyses the newspaper The Guardian, by using the method of Critical Discourse Analysis in order to reveal the frames and collectivisation/individualisation practices in the news articles. In this way, the theories of representation, stereotyping and framing represent the basis of this study. Furthermore, individualisation and collectivisation practices represent the core of this thesis, since studying their presence can reveal underlying stereotypes in the news articles. The analysis revealed that The Guardian’s reports presented both individualised and collectivised representations of the refugees. Hence, the thesis concluded that The Guardian has attempted a more positive way of reporting, but their reports are not totally objective and unbiased.

The transgender community in India, commonly known as hijras, consists of people who were born as males but address themselves as females. They have been considered as the third gender in India for millennia and have had specific religious and sociocultural values and roles, but are forced to live in shadows in this day and age. Isolation of this community is also reflected in the way transgender characters are represented in Indian entertainment media. The study analyses two transgender themed films semiotically and the audience reception of those representations by 20 members of the transgender community. Semiotics is a helpful tool to understand the ways signs communicate ideas to viewers. This study applies syntagmatic and paradigmatic analyses to understand how images are used to represent and relay information to the audience. Reception theory along with double colonization has been incorporated in this study to analyse the ways in which the transgender community interprets the representations in entertainment media.

No description available.

This thesis considers why some crimes persist beyond the moment of newsworthiness and how they are able to transcend this period of intense reporting to become a feature of popular memory. The central argument is that the popular memory of a crime is built up over time through a synthesis of public discourses, which are predominantly developed in news reporting, people s everyday experience and the normative social frameworks of everyday life. A temporally sensitive analysis of two case studies, the murder of James Bulger and the murder of Sarah Payne, tests this hypothesis by exploring the connections and disconnections between the ongoing reporting of these crimes and the remembering of them. The study finds that the personal past and public discourse intertwine in remembered accounts of these crimes and considers that this is evidence of the ways audiences utilise crime news as an imaginative resource for understanding crime and criminality more broadly. It can thus be said that audiences use the news to frame, but not define their understandings of the world around us.

There have been many studies on media (mis)representations of the Middle East and Iran. However, the experts and analysts who serve as major sources for those representations (and for government policy making) have not been systematically studied. This project studies discourses and networks of widely published Iran experts during the first year of the presidency of Iran’s Hassan Rouhani (2013-2014), the period during which unprecedented direct U.S.-Iran diplomacy paved the way for the historic nuclear agreement with Iran. Norman Fairclough’s three dimensional critical discourse analysis method and Peter Haas’s Epistemic Community approach are employed to study discursive as well as non-discursive (networked) characteristics of the most widely published U.S. Iran experts during this time period. Results identify five major epistemic communities that, altogether, represent the spectrum of U.S. Iran experts: neoconservatism, liberal interventionism, containment (tactical engagement), strategic engagement, and rapprochement. These five epistemic communities are described in detail throughout the five results chapters. Findings show that these experts influence the terms of media representations as well as the foreign policy making process. Findings also show that experts operate in a web of discursive as well as networked affiliations (i.e., epistemic communities) in order to be able to develop and circulate their discourses. It is however important to recognize that epistemic communities are not uniform in terms of formation stage, cohesion and level.