This research looks at the French press coverage of the 2014 uprising in Burkina Faso. The aim is to focus on the nature of the coverage by Libération and Le Figaro. Another goal is to find out how these newspapers framed their reporting and whether there are similarities and differences in their coverage. This research draws upon news framing. It is built on findings about the coverage of demonstrations and how the Western media reports about African news. It aims at refining the existing research on the subject of French media reporting about Africa and at filling the research gap of foreign news coverage of demonstrations in Sub-Saharan Africa. The research uses a qualitative content analysis to study the articles published by Libération and Le Figaro during the first week of the uprising. It examines the terms used to name actors, actions and to define the events. The thesis found that both newspapers covered the events in a rather similar way, pointing out the same actors and focusing on the same actions. They both draw a violent picture of the events. There were nevertheless differences in framing the responsibilities for the violent actions during the uprising.

This research looks at how a small group of young Muslim Kashmiri men perceive their representation in BBC and Al Jazeera news coverage about the Kashmir conflict, with focus on the August 2016 unrest. It is an exploratory study aiming to give insights on how the Kashmiri people and particularly young Muslim Kashmiri men might perceive their proper representation and that of the conflict in foreign news. The research uses a questionnaire method by asking a sample of six Kashmiri men to watch two news video clips covering the 2016 August unrest, one from BBC news and the other from Aljazeera news asking them to answer relevant questions. One of the main findings exists in discovering that although the group of men generally perceived the representation of Kashmiris as positive in the video clips, the general consensus on how truthful the depictions were, proved to be more complex.

This research aims to study the discourse of French newspapers on Russia based on the analysis of the coverage of Anna Politkovskaya’s murder in 2006 and to analyse how French newspapers represent Russia. The goal of this thesis is to study the representation of Russia in French newspapers through the analysis of this specific event. The analysis is based on the literature previously produced on three different topics: the notion of representation and national identity and their links with language, the representation of national identity and other nations in media coverage as well as the representation of Russia in French media.In order to conduct this study, this thesis uses a critical discourse analysis applied on the coverage of Politkovskaya’s murder in three different French national newspapers from three different political wings: Le Monde, Le Figaro and Libération.The results of this study outlined a specific representation of Russia, mostly negative and based on its stereotypisation, the emotionalisation of the event covered as well as an ideologically orientated discourse. The thesis also found that this representation of Russia is notably embodied by the person of Vladimir Putin but also on-sided and partial as it gives the view of the event covered from an Occidental point of view.

Literature connects sports with creating a feeling of unity and nation building amongst people. In a country such as Rwanda, a nation that is rebuilding itself after ethnic tensions that resulted into genocide against one of the ethnic groups, the Tutsi, it is important to understand the role of the new national identity in the process of rebuilding the country. Subsequently, this study aimed at investigating the link between national identity and sport specifically how professionals in Rwanda, as football fans, perceive their national identity. To this end, the study used survey questionnaire to investigate perceptions of new national identity. The findings relate football to the new national identity based on unity and professionals identify themselves with that new national identity. These findings suggest that football plays an important role in building the national identity for a country. This study presents original findings about new Rwandan national identity and its representation and, thus, fills a gap in existing literature. It also serves as a basis to study further the Rwandan national identity.

No description available.

The study analyzes media representation on social media of environmental issues in China and audience attitudes toward this. The study concretes upon People Daily’s discourse of Chinese haze problems on the Chinese Twitter-- Weibo. Quantitative method and critical discourse analysis are the research methods of the study. Based on reviews of previous studies and theories on media representations, critical discourse analysis, it examines how People Daily constructs discourse about haze problems on Weibo. It also focuses on audience’s interaction in order to discuss how this strengthens, negotiates or alter the discourses about haze and identify what happened with their discourses on Weibo.

No description available.

This study takes as its point of departure the theorizing on citizenship and globalization. Today it is common to discuss a “flexible” citizenship beyond the paradigm of the nationstate, which, besides its legal aspects of rights and obligations, also includes identification with and participation in various communities, primarily political ones. “Politics”, in this context, is considered to be constituted on the micro-level, discursively between individuals (e.g. Laclau and Mouffe 1985). The aim of the study is to, through the study of collective meaning making, contribute to the theory building about citizenship and globalization. The study consists of three cases, each of which attracted much media attention, with varying degrees of proximity and distance. The construction of political community, on various levels on the globalization scale (subnational, national, transnational) within the collective meaning making, is studied. The aim of the study also includes the analysis of the discursive resources that are used for the making of meaning. “External” discourses such as media messages and interpersonal communication are analyzed as well as “internal” ones: e.g. values, norms, identifications and experiences. In addition, the study aims at localizing the construction of meaning and community within the structural context , and relating it to current structures of power. The thesis is concluded with a suggestion of how to relate the discursive construction of political identity to deliberative democracy theory. The empirical material is collected by means of focus-groups interviews, including 2–5 people, with a total of 133 respondents. The transcribed material is analyzed by means of critical discourse analysis, CDA. The study identifies two different types of identity constructions: processes of nationalization, where the experienced Swedish identity and community function normatively in the making of meaning, and processes of subnationalization, among those groups that somehow felt excluded from and mistreated by the national (Swedish) environment. The thesis concludes that the collective making of meaning within an assumed national community contains ideological elements and works to a large extent in the service of power. However, the subnationally compressed communities create meaning in an oppositional manner, compared with the nationalized community and in relation to structures of power.  Active citizenship is thus best located in conflict, among groups that experience exclusion and oppression in different situations (Mouffe 1995b). If this is right, the focus must shift from consensus to communication, efforts to open up discursive bridges between the hegemonic community and dissident voices should be made (c.f. Aronowitz 1995). An important space for transgressing communication is of course the media. However, the study shows that the media must deal with some problems before they are ready to serve as discursive bridges, for instance the tendency to make the factual antagonisms subordinate to homogenizing emotional reporting. In addition, there seems to exist a need for the political institutions to move beyond the paradigm of the nation-state, and find other frameworks for the democratic processes, not least at the subnational level. Thus, instead of discussing either a global or a national citizenship one could, with Habermas (2001), reflect on a postnational citizenship relating to the reflexive transformation of national civic sovereignty into subnational and supranational citizenship.

The purpose of this thesis is to illuminate principles that guide mediated participation, taking place through the interplay between users and news producers. Therefore, the study focuses both how spaces for participation are structured (by news producers) and those that exert participatory practices (news users). The research design thus has an approach that ties together analytical strands that previously have been studied separately. The research questions concern how the conditions comprising mediated participation – in terms of opportunities for users’ participatory practices – differ between (1a) various types of online news sites, and (1b) various types of news, as well as how users exercise participatory practices (2a) on various types of news sites, and (2b) in connection to various types of news. The last research question (3) concerns how users express the connection to news producers, through participatory practices within participatory spaces. The thesis includes four papers, that together answer the research questions by applying content and text analyses to various types of news sites (big city national, local rural area, morning broadsheets and evening tabloids) and its content: news articles and features for user participation, such as comments and sharing news through social media (i.e., Facebook and Twitter). The results show that users and news producers take diverging approaches to user participation adjacent to online news. This is illustrated by the fact that the categories of news that users are most often permitted to interact with, coincide precisely with the news that users tend to decline to interact with, while the news categories that users tend to interact with (when given the chance) occur comparatively sparse. The results also show that news producers are much more prone to permit users to share news through social media, than to permit them to comment news on the news site. Almost all news are made to permit users to share news through Facebook and Twitter, whereas commenting news is substantially more restricted, and even more so among big city national news sites than among local rural area news sites. When it concerns user practices, users share news on Facebook 20 times more often than they share news through Twitter or comment news on news sites. Tweeting news almost only occurs in news sites affiliated with big city national newspapers, and most prominently so when it concerns evening tabloids. This means (when controlling for differences in circulation) that commenting as a user practice tend to have a more local character than tweeting news, with its more national focus. The connection between users and news producers is shaped by the approach these groups of actors take to each other, under different circumstances. Sharing news through Facebook and commenting on news sites, are not interchangeable practices. Nor is tweeting news from a news site affiliated with national tabloid compared to from a local morning newspaper. And although it is well known from extant research that producers hold hesitant views concerning users’ influence over content, users also express distrust when it concerns how professional media practices allow various actors salience in the media. These ideas primarily concern “elites” versus “commoners”, differences between public service and commercial media, regulations and media, including roles, genres, and formats. These ideas also concern whether representational principles should guide media representation or if certain views should be excluded, whether journalists’ political views affect media performance, and how crime news should be presented in terms of what events are published and representations of victims and perpetrators. Overall, the thesis illustrates that there are connections between various forms of electronic communication (i.e., commenting and sharing news through Facebook and Twitter), and the specific contextual and social settings that news sites are embedded within, with its specific situated audience, shaping the connections between users and news producers.

Det råder en stark tillhörighet bland fotbollssupportrar som kopplas samman genom sin kärlek till den gemensamma fotbollsklubben. Det är en stark gemenskap som ibland uttrycks i form av våld mellan rivaliserande klubbars supportrar. Den forskning som har gjorts kring våldskulturen bland fotbollssupportrar har sett kopplingar till maskulinitetsidealet men även påvisat att våldet i allt större utsträckning spridits till internet. Det har i forskning visats att det i samband med matcher råder en stark gemenskap bland svenska fotbollssupportrar, det har dock inte kunnat påvisats att en liknande gemenskap återfinns på internet. Jag har haft som syfte att studera hur denna gemenskap tar sig i uttryck på internet. Detta har gjorts genom att studera vilka normer och värderingar som kommer till uttryck på internet och se hur man kan förstå dem i relation till våldskultur och maskulinitetsideal. Studien genomfördes med en kvantitativ innehållsanalys där kommentarer på tre lags supporterforum studerades under sex olika matchdagar. Jag använde mig av teorier om nätgemenskaper som behandlar hur sociala nätverk bidrar till att skapa gemenskaper på internet. Jag använde mig även av en teori om maskulinitetsideal, där manlighet förknippas med självsäkerhet och tuffhet. Studien visade på att det råder en stark känsla av tillhörighet, en vi mot dem-känsla, där individerna till stor del delar samma åsikter och värderingar. Studien visade även att det finns så mycket mer på internetforum än den våldskultur som ofta omskrivs. Tidigare studier har visat att våldet på internet ökat bland fotbollssupportrar. I min studie visar sig dock den rena uppviglingen till våld vara sällan förekommande och det maskulinitetsideal som så ofta förknippas med våld har inte heller visat sig vara frekvent på internetforumen. Hotfulla och hatiska kommentarer förekommer dock mer frekvent. När maskulinitetsidealen väl kommer till uttryck på internetforumen är det ofta i samband med positiva kommentarer medan femininet ofta uttrycks i samband med negativa kommentarer.