“Out of Sight, Out of Mind: The Role of the Body in Canada’s Multicultural Religious Identity” examines the role of the body in contemporary conflicts of religious dress in public spaces in Canada. Utilizing policies, policy proposals, and legal precedents that regulate the religious body, I argue the physical religious body resides in a liminal space between the inclusive ideals of multicultural policy and the exclusionary policies of an overtly secular public sphere. Particular definitions of secularism and liberalism shape the construction of public life and civic spaces, and these specific understandings produce public space that is seemingly inhospitable to certain embodied religious expressions. The religious body complicates the assumed separation of religion and state, which understands religion to be an element of private, not public life. I argue that policies which seek to limit the religious body in public or civic spaces work to create an “ideal” secular citizen. / October 2015

More than sixteen years have passed since the launch of the Qatar-based Al Jazeera news channel. Looking back, the state of Arab media and its relationship with the political sphere was different from what we see nowadays. The launch of Al Jazeera in 1996 was a significant event that led to subsequent changes both in the media and politics. Among these changes, the Arab spring, which started in Tunisia in December 2010, is certainly the most remarkable one. This ongoing event has already resulted in the fall of four dictatorships and is expected to unleash a democratization wave and reshape the face of the Arab region. This research analyzes the Al Jazeera democratizing effect and looks at the political implications of the new Arab public sphere. In doing so, it seeks to fill a gap in the existing literature, which tends to ignore the Arab world that remains largely under-researched. Contrary to the top-down approach inherent in the dominant narratives on democratization, that pay almost no attention to the growing role of the media in political change, I adopted a bottom-up approach arguing that, particularly in the Arab setting, it has become almost impossible to separate changes in the media landscape from those in the political field. The Arab spring provides us with a telling empirical example where this interplay is remarkably manifest. In this context, Arab democratization is no longer an abstract; it is rather a developing process that needs our attention and requires concerted scholarly efforts. To develop an original approach to understanding Arab democratization and analyze its complex dynamics, I used grounded theory and its powerful tools in theory building. Based on this theoretical framework I opted for qualitative methodology to elaborate the empirical part of this research, which consists primarily of analyzing and interpreting in-depth interviews conducted with a sample of Al Jazeera’s staff in various managerial and editorial positions.

As the realm of social life where public opinion forms, the public sphere has been the focus of much theoretical debate and empirical operationalization in political sociology. However, by conceptualizing the public sphere as a nationally circumscribed and normatively defined space that excludes governance institutions, much existing research provides a limited set of tools to define and assess the structure of a supranational public sphere. A deeply integrated supranational polity, the European Union (EU) provides a revealing terrain for tracing the structure of a public sphere emerging between national politics and supranational institutions. In this dissertation, I delineate the contours of the supranational public sphere in the EU by exploring the subjective meanings, national political influences, and institutional interpretation of public opinion about political integration in the EU. I answer the following questions: (1) How salient is EU political integration among Europeans, and what does this concept mean to them? (2) How does Europeans' awareness about EU political integration vary across policies, time and social strata? (3) How is public opinion on EU political integration shaped by national political discourse, as reflected in the positions of national parties? (4) How do officials at the European Commission (EC) measure and interpret public opinion data, and to what extent are these data used to construct an image of the European public and an EU public sphere? Based on quantitative survey data and on interviews with French and Romanian citizens, I show that political integration in the EU remains a distant and abstract concept to which citizens attribute personalized or nationalized meanings. Longitudinal panel models show that public opinion on EU policy often relies on cues from national party discourse. Moreover, interviews with EC staff revealed that, because of logistical and institutional constraints that stifle civil servants' analytical aspirations, public opinion data collected by the EC fail to define a European public and to construct a supranational communicative space for this public. The EU public sphere is a product of supranational polity, but its public is absent and its structure remains nationally embedded. / Sociology

During the late eighteenth century, as part of a broader reform initiative commonly referred to as the “Bourbon reforms,” royal officials attempted to transform theatrical productions at Mexico City’s Real Coliseo (Royal Theater). Influenced by new intellectual trends in Spain, especially the neoclassical movement, reformers hoped that theater could serve as a school of virtue, rationality and good citizenship. This essay analyzes the theatrical reform effort, traces its foundations from sixteenth-century Spain to eighteenth-century Mexico, and seeks to explain why the initiative failed to transform either the Coliseo’s shows or its audience’s artistic predilections. It argues that the initiative was unsuccessful for three primary reasons. First, reformers did not have the power to compel impresarios and actors to obey their new regulations, and economic constraints sometimes forced officials to bend their strict aesthetic standards to appease the audience's largely baroque predilections. Second, Mexico City’s diverse and thriving public sphere made imposing a new popular culture profoundly difficult, especially given that reformers’ one-dimensional vision of neoclassicism failed to account for the variety and debate within this movement. Consequently, the theater added fuel to public debate over the definition of buen gusto (good taste), rather than merely instructing passive citizens as reformers had hoped. Finally, widespread public derision of the performing profession meant that many spectators did not take actors seriously as teachers of morality, taste and rationality. Actors’ reputation as immoral lowlifes, which derived in part from late-sixteenth century debates in Spain over morality and illusion in drama, complicated reformers' already difficult project of transforming the theater into a school of sociability and citizenship. / text

Interneto vartotojų skaičius per pastaruosius 8 metus išaugo daugiau negu 2,5 karto ir dabar siekia beveik penktadalį pasaulio gyventojų. Tai reiškia, jog internetas tampa visa vis svarbesne erdve bendraujant, ieškant informacijos, dirbant ar poilsiaujant. Ne veltui, įvairios kompanijos siekdamos būti pastebėtos pirmiausia siekia atsirasti internete, o tik paskui rūpinasi savo reklama. Būti internete, reiškia, būti pastebėtu. Nedaug nustebino ir tai, kad Lietuvos interneto erdvėje pradėtos kurti ne tik komercinių įmonių, bet ir žiniasklaidos bendrovių elektroninės dienraščių versijos ar nuo jų nepriklausomi interneto naujienų tinklalapiai. Laisvas ir nepriklausomas internetas reiškė, kad kiekvienas individas, turintis priėjimą prie kompiuterių tinklo, galės laisvai ir nevaržomai reikšti nuomonę, dalyvauti diskusijose, paveikti valdžios struktūras ir pan. Internetas reiškė naujas galimybes viešajai erdvei – pagrindinei demokratijos sąlygai – atgimti ir plėtoti. Tradicinė žiniasklaida nuvylė ir ilgainiui iš politinio diskurso bei debatų skatintojos tapo politinio spektaklio teatru. Darbo tikslas atskleisti, kaip Lietuvos internetinių naujienų tinklalapių www.delfi.lt ir www.lrytas.lt straipsniai atitinka viešosios erdvės koncepciją bei kokį poveikį žiniasklaida turi viešojo diskurso kūrimui internete. Šiam tikslui atkleisti buvo atliktas kiekybinis ir kokybinis turinio analizės tyrimas, kurio esmė buvo atrasti atsakymą į klausimą, kokio pobūdžio informacija dominuoja... [toliau žr. visą tekstą] / The number of Internet users has grown rapidly over last 8 years and at the moment embraces more than one fifth of world’s population. By no means, Internet becomes more important in the terms of communication, searching for information, working or resting. This also encouraged growing number of companies to present themselves on the internet prior to taking care of advertising campaigns, since being online in nowadays means existing. Therefore, not that it was a great surprise to observe the appearance of online sites for well-known business corporations or to meet the online versions of public newspapers. Free and independent Internet from the very beginning meant open possibilities for every individual with an access to the computer network to express itself, to take part in public debates and to have a chance to influence the authorities in order to accomplish the mission of public interest. Nevertheless, Internet also meant new opportunities to develop the main element of democratic society and state – it was a chance for public sphere to come back into force, because traditional means of media have been disappointing lately due to the process where the main subject public discourse and debate was replaced by tiresome political performance. The main objective of this thesis is to reveal the background for analysis to uncover the role of Internet media for creating the discourse online, and also what the results on how the Internet news portal of Lithuania www.delfi.lt... [to full text]

Today is an exciting time to be a political activist in sub-Saharan Africa, particularly for the technically inclined. New media technologies including the mobile phone, the Internet, and social media are proliferating rapidly and their potential as potent political tools is being realized. While 2012's Arab Spring in North Africa captivated the world, similar campaigns have been occurring south of the Sahara both before and since. But the embrace of social media for political ends raises the question of how, if at all, these new media actually perturb the political landscape. These questions have been well-studied in Western contexts, but remain virtually unexplored in developing regions where traditional media are scarcer, democracies are younger, and the effect of social media on politics has the potential to be quite distinct. This dissertation explores these questions by focusing on social media use during elections in Nigeria and Liberia in 2011. It asks how social media impacted the democratic process during these key events, and compares social media discourse to formal election monitoring operations. The findings suggest that given sufficient civil-society coordination, social media can be an effective tool for electoral scrutiny. Furthermore, for this and other reasons, it appears that social media has the potential to emerge as a key influence on public faith in electoral processes. Based on these results, it is further argued that social media's true disruptive power in developing world contexts lies in its ability to transcend the economics of scarcity that have dominated traditional media in such contexts. This observation is offered as an extension to the networked public sphere theory of Yochai Benkler that frames this work.

Despite the existing fragmentation amongst social change agents serving women on Vancouver's downtown east side, they are seeking fresh and innovative ways to work together to communicate their social change needs and to alleviate social problems facing their clients. Using appreciative inquiry to elicit stories of successful collaborations with alternative media, I collected narratives from seven change agents and then employed narrative analysis to understand what agents considered positive experiences and expressions. I found that successful collaborations are primarily ad hoc and are driven by: the organization's source of funding, the organization's viewpoint towards media, and the trust held towards the media outlet. Enabling factors for successful collaborations with media include: a viewpoint that media coverage is integral to an organization's success, dedicated resources to pursue collaborations with the media, and a high level of respect and admiration for the intended media partner.

Thesis analyses imaging of women in the Cairo graffiti field that emerged after 2011 January 25 revolution. Author raises and argument that Cairo graffiti is not only a romanticized and heroic space created as genre of freedom of expression and used as a struggle against changing political systems in Egypt, but rather a pluralistic public sphere where different opinions, ideas and arguments are emerging. Thesis distinguishes major archetypes used as predominant images of women, it analyses what features are used in constructing the "correct" role of woman. / Magistro darbas analizuoja moterų vaizdavimą Kairo miesto graffiti erdvėje. Keliant pagrindinę tezė, jog tai nėra vien tik romantizuota ir herojiška kovos prieš kintančią sistemą Egipte forma (Mubarako rėžimas, Armijos valdymas, prieštaringai vertinamo prezidento Morsi kadencija), o veikiau dinamiška bei pliuralistinė viešoji sfera, kur išreiškiamos skirtingos nuomonės, vyksta dialogai ir debatai ir kartais net „graffiti karai“. Bandoma nustatyti kokios moteriškumo įvaizdžiai bei vaidmenys naudojami konstruojant „teisingąją“ moteriškumo idėją. Analizei pasitelkiami vokiečių sociologo Jurgeno Habermaso viešosios sferos principai bei Yuval Davis lyties kaip nacionalinio simbolio konstravimo teorija; naudojami surinkti graffiti darbai gatvėse, interviu su graffiti piešėjais, moterų teisių aktyvistais. Kairo graffiti erdvė ir joje varijuojančios idėjos yra lyginama su visuomenėje vykstančiais debatais apie moters padėti, vaidmenį bei teises. Pirmoji darbo dalis iškelia tris pagrindiniu moteriškumo archetipus: moteris-tauta, moteris-mama, moteris- kekšė, - dominuojančius graffiti sferoje, kur moters atvaizdas dažnai naudojamas kaip metafora įvairių struktūrų, režimo, ar pačios šalies kritikai bei šlovinimui. Analizuojama kaip šie tipai atspindi visuomenėje vyraujančias vertybes susijusias su moters padėtimi bei elgesiu. Antrojoje dalyje analizuojama trys vyraujantys debatai susiję su moterų teisėmis ir padėtimi: seksualinis priekabiavimas, moterų teisių aktyvizmas bei tradicinis... [toliau žr. visą tekstą]

Critics have observed that in early Stuart England, the broad, socially significant concept of melancholy was recoded as a specifically medical phenomenon—a disease rather than a fashion. This recoding made melancholy seem less a social attitude than a private ailment. However, I argue that at the Stuart universities, this recoded melancholy became a covert expression of the disillusionment, disappointment, and frustration produced by pressures there—the overcrowding and competition which left many men “disappointed” in preferment, alongside James I’s unprecedented royal involvement in the universities. My argument has implications for Jürgen Habermas’s account of the emergence of the public sphere, which he claims did not occur until the eighteenth-century. I argue that although the university was increasingly subordinated to the crown’s authority, a lingering sense of autonomy persisted there, a residue of the medieval university’s relative autonomy from the crown; politicized by the encroaching Stuart presence, an alienated community at the university formed a kind of public in private from authority within that authority’s midst. The audience for the printed book, a sphere apart from court or university, represented a forum in which the publicity at the universities could be consolidated, especially in seemingly “private” literary forms such as the treatise on melancholy. I argue that Robert Burton’s exaggerated performance of melancholy in The Anatomy of Melancholy, which gains him license to say almost anything, resembles the performed melancholy that the student-prince Hamlet uses to frustrate his uncle’s attempts to surveil him. After tracing melancholy’s evolving literary function through Hamlet, I go on to discuss James’s interventions into the universities. I conclude by considering two printed (and widely circulated) books by university men: the aforementioned The Anatomy of Melancholy by Burton, an Oxford cleric, and The Temple by George Herbert, who left a career as Cambridge’s public orator to become a country parson. I examine how each of these books uses the affective pattern of courtly-scholarly disappointment—transumed by Burton as melancholy, and by Herbert as holy affliction—to develop an empathic form of publicity among its readership which is in tacit opposition to the Stuart court. / Thesis (Ph.D, English) -- Queen's University, 2011-09-27 15:30:01.702

Studiens syfte är att undersöka internetanvändares medvetenhet och åsikter om filterbubblor på sökmotorn Google. Undersökningens frågeställning är: Vad har internetanvändare för tankar och förhållningssätt till filterbubblor som skapas på Google? Studien är avgränsad till studenter vid Uppsala Universitet. Det är en population som kan förmodas vara storkonsumenter av information via sökmotorer. En stor majoritet av respondenterna menade också att Google var ett viktigt hjälpmedel i studier och vardag. För genomförandet av undersökningen användes en kvalitativ metod med fokusgrupper. 17 respondenter i fyra grupper fick diskutera medvetenhet, åsikter och uppfattningar om filterbubblor och informationsinhämtning som sker via Google. Som teoretisk vägledning användes sex olika samhällsvetenskapliga teorier mot vilka det empiriska materialet prövades. Resultatet från undersökningen visar att en majoritet av respondenterna inte var medvetna om den filtrering av informationen som sker på Google och därmed skapar filterbubblor. När respondenterna vid intervjuerna blev informerade om filterbubblor och dess effekter framkom olika uppfattningar och åsikter. Många respondenter uttryckte oro för effekterna av avskärmningen från information och utbyte med andra användare som bubblorna medför. Andra respondenter ansåg att så länge det inte medförde några negativa effekter i användandet av söktjänsten var det inget problem. Avskärmningen som filterbubblor skapar kan begränsa internetanvändares exponering för ”ny” information. Detta kan innebära en risk att människors tillgång till fri och icke styrd information manipuleras av kommersiella intressen. Detta lyfts fram i studiens analys med en teoretisk anknytning till Habermas inflytelserika arbeten om den publika sfären. Ett problem i det sammanhanget, som lyfts fram i forskning, är att filterbubblor kan komma att motsäga fundamentala demokratiska informationsprinciper. Resultatet visar därmed att filterbubblor fungerar som en slags grindvakt för internetanvändarens tillgång till information på Google. Med andra ord har en förändring skett där de “nya” nätbaserade grindvakterna saknar den mänskliga faktor som traditionella mediers grindvakter hade och som styrdes av transparanta värderingar. Respondenterna menade slutligen att Google bör vara mer transparant om problematiken med filterbubblor för att stärka sitt förtroende bland användarna.