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The issue of democratic deficit and crisis of legitimacy has been at the forefront of the development of the European project in the last twenty years. However, little attention has been directed towards analysing the way in which democratic legitimacy underlines the construction of the EU s foreign policy. This thesis draws on a broad understanding of democratic legitimacy which is seen to encompass various aspects: transparency, accountability, responsiveness and openness to public debate. It shows that the media had a positive effect (although in contrasting degrees) on the democratic legitimacy of the EU s foreign policy in two issue areas, highlighting the ways in which it achieved this. Drawing on insights from political theory, it argues that the European public sphere has the potential to foster the four characteristics highlighted above through the ability of the media to politicise foreign policy issues, which are commonly closed off from democratic scrutiny. Three types of interaction effects between the media and policymakers within the European public sphere are identified: indexing, bounding and agenda setting. Firstly, indexing captures the ability of policymakers to influence and shape media discourse in order to aid their interests and goals by communicating in a favourable manner their policies to the general public. Secondly, through bounding the media can have a constraining or limiting effect on the range of policies and their effectiveness that policymakers can pursue, even if the latter are not aware of or willing to engage with the frames constructed by journalists. Finally, agenda setting captures the ability of the media to purposively influence decision-making processes through its discourse. Empirically two distinct areas of EU foreign policy are explored: the EU s approach to global climate change and its policy towards Russia. Hence, the study makes a significant contribution to the understanding of EU foreign policy and to its international actorness. Secondly, it extends in a comprehensive manner the debate regarding the crisis of legitimacy and democratic deficit in the EU to the realm of foreign policy. Finally, it also contributes to the literature on Foreign Policy Analysis which engages with the issue of democratic legitimacy.

This dissertation explores the relationship between gender, war, and media constructions of both. Using the theoretical frameworks of the social constructions of gender and the gendered constructions of the public sphere, I have analyzed how Time magazine portrayed Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton in discussions of war. Time represents mainstream mediated coverage in this case. Rice and Clinton represent women outside the normal boundaries of femininity. First, they were participants in the public sphere, which is largely male-dominated in our society. Second, both women were involved in discussions of war and foreign policy. Their participation in this area of the public sphere is a contradiction to how society expects women to act during war time. The most interesting conclusion is the way the women are linked back to the private sphere through their relationships with men. These representations align with historical theoretical definitions of the public sphere, which favor male participation and often disregard female participation. / text

This dissertation explores how recent feminist authors uses their literature to create, sustain, and expand the feminist movement through their creation of communities and readerships. This project consists of four case studies, each of which examines how a feminist author represents feminist identity, where she locates herself in relation to the mainstream marketplace, which strategies she uses to circulate her representation, and what forms of small and large feminist communities she is able to create. To develop this analysis of feminist literary public culture, I focus on playwright Eve Ensler and her work with the V-Day movement, novelist Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez and her expansion of the chick lit genre, poet Lorna Dee Cervantes and her online small press, and the members of spoken word group Sister Spit and their traveling road show. These individual case studies, taken as a whole, speak to the ways that feminist authors are engaging mainstream and feminist readers in ways that create and energize feminist communities. / text

This thesis argues that the elite and urban women leaders of the Palestinian women's movement neglected to engage rural women and women living in refugee camps as their equals in a women's movement. Further, despite women's active presence in the public sphere, the sphere remained defined in masculine terms. As a result, Palestinian women, as "guests" in the domain of men, were easily pushed out after they had served their purpose in the nationalist crisis. What is remarkable is that even after Palestinian men reclaimed the public sphere, Palestinian women remained politically active in the private sphere. In order to understand how this was possible, we must look more closely at the terms "public sphere" and "private sphere".

人類的政治與日常生活內容存在於公共領域和私領域中，隨著社會的自由化與民主化，公私領域也對教育產生影響。本研究把公共領域視為政治生活的空間，人們在其中通過彼此的共同經驗來討論各種議題。私領域則是涉及自身關係與親密關係等內容，其發展與公共領域有密不可分的關係。本研究重新描述了Dewey教育理論中的經驗與民主等概念，且針對其中的不足之處，企圖以公私領域的概念加以充實之。研究者主要從四個部分的分析來重構Dewey的理論：一、增加生活經驗的多樣性；二、社會化與個性化的兼顧；三、公共與私人的民主生活；四、民主教育的自主與團結。根據上面的分析，最後研究者對Dewey的教育理論提出了四點建議：第一，把公私領域的概念融入Dewey的經驗理論中，使人們注意到在經驗的連續性及交互作用中，存在那些公共與私人生活的複雜關係；第二，重申個性化和社會化必須兼顧的重要性；第三，瞭解各種團體的互動關係能使共同生活更為完善；第四，把各種公共與私人的關係納入考量中，將有助於彰顯出完整的人類生活面貌。 / The politics and daily life of human lay both in the public and the private sphere, along with the liberalization and democratization in the society, the public and the private sphere also bring about influence on education. The study treats public sphere as the realm of political life. In the realm, people discuss various subjects with their associated experiences. The private sphere involves self and intimacy relations, their development have inseparable relevance to public sphere. The study redescribes the concepts of experience and democracy in the Dewey’s educational theory, and attempts to enrich his shortage with the concept of the public and the private sphere. The Author reconstructs Dewey’s educational theory by four points: Adding the variation of life experiences, giving equal attention to socialization and individualization, public and private democratic life, autonomy and solidarity of the democratic education. Accordingly, the author proposes four suggests to Dewey's educational theory: Firstly, if people want to understand the complexity of the public and the private life, they need to integrate the public sphere and the private sphere into Dewey’s experience theory. Secondly, reiterating the importance of the individualization and the socialization must be given equal attention. Thirdly, understanding the interactive relationships in various associations could cause to a better associated living. Fourthly, it will be helpful to show a complete human life by taking all kinds of the public and the private relation into account.

The increasingly politicized presence of Muslim communities in Britain today is raising issues not only for society in general but for other faith communities as well. Among these the Evangelical constituency, including the members of various Christian diasporas, is struggling to find a coherent response which is true to its Bible-based, activist roots. This thesis discusses the relationship of religion to the theoretical notion of the public sphere. Specifically it hypothesizes an Evangelical micro public sphere as the framework for an empirical exploration of the responses of British Evangelicals to Muslims since the events of 11th September 2001. It describes the formation, composition and discourse of this sphere drawing on data gathered from books, articles, lectures and interviews with key participants. The data reveal a marked tension, indeed a polarization, amongst Evangelicals, with an increasingly sharp disagreement between ‘confrontationalists’ and ‘conciliators’. A detailed analysis of the interaction of this sphere with Muslims, the national media and church leaders follows, leading to a concluding discussion of the future trajectory of the British Evangelical movement. Whilst it is still too early to say whether Evangelicalism will be strengthened or weakened, its encounter with Islam is likely to be an increasingly significant factor in British public life for the foreseeable future.

The dissertation examines how economic matters were depicted between 1770 and 1820 in two European kingdoms. Britain and Sweden are studied during this Age of Revolutions from the state’s perspective; state-managed newspapers are examined, one from Britain, the London Gazette, and two from Sweden, Stockholms Post-Tidningar and Inrikes Tidningar. These were stable types of media that transformed slowly alongside the changing popular press. State-managed newspapers were produced both to inform and manage the loyalty of populations. Aside from the continued development of the centralized state, this was also the time when Enlightenment ideals were spreading, the public sphere was transforming, notions of the nation and nationalism were developing, and communication strategies were changing; these concepts are the basis for the model of the development of modernity used in this study. Economic matters are seen as existing in a value-realm model that gradually disintegrated over time, expressing the birth of the modern world. This model included political, social-cultural, and technological values, in addition to economic matters. This disintegration involved a sense of uniformity. In both Britain and Sweden, economic objects, practices, ideas, and discourses received similar treatments over time. This process was, however, non-linear and not complete by the dawn of industrial transformation.   The first two chapters discuss the theory and methodological approaches. The form, order, and content of the newspapers are analyzed to show how economic matters became separate or unembedded to varying degrees over a fifty-year time span. British and Swedish descriptions are compared, as well as how the other state was portrayed in the opposing newspapers. These observations are described in three empirical chapters, relating events and analyses from 1770 to 1775, 1790 to 1795, and 1815 to 1820. The results of this dissertation show how early modern economic matters can be viewed beyond quantitative contents as an expression of becoming modern, offering complimentary context. Advances in thinking about data generated modern numerical indicators, also reflected by form and order qualities. The unembeddedness of economic matters was an ongoing and non-linear process that was expressed by increased abstractness, separation, and emphasis.

L'espace public (1962) de Jürgen Habermas est souvent lu comme le premier ouvrage de sa carrière. Notre mémoire tâche de porter un éclairage différent sur celui-ci, de lire L'espace public comme point d'aboutissement de la pensée habermassienne des années 1950. Par l'exploration d'un certain nombre d'écrits mineurs et majeurs pré-1962, L'espace public se révèle une sorte de théorie critique de la société, encore fortement empreinte de marxisme, faisant figure de synthèse partielle des écrits de jeunesse. / Jürgen Habermas' The structural transformation of the public sphere (1962) is often read as the first landmark of his career. Our study sets out to shed a different light upon it, to read The structural transformation of the public sphere as the arrival point of Habermas' 1950s thought. While we explore a certain number of minor and major pre-1962 works, his thesis reveals itself as some kind of critical theory of society, still deeply rooted in Marxism, that embodies a partial synthesis of his early works.

New Ways To Express Old Hatred is a sociological account of the consistencies and changes comic racist discourse has experienced over the past forty years in British popular culture, accounting for both content and communicative form in relation to the ethics and aesthetics of humour. The main focal point of the study concerns a case study representative of the communicative changes installed by the digitalisation of media in the cultural public sphere. Sickipedia.org which demonstrates a contemporary, participatory comic community that is simultaneously representative of popular culture. Sickipedia.org circulates explicit comic racist material on a large scale across several formats including its main website, several smart phone applications and a range of social media including Facebook and Twitter. This contemporary emergence of comic racism is discussed in relation to the historical context of wider comic racism in British popular culture, comparatively evaluating the form and content of material from the 'clubland' humour of the 1970s, the anti-racist tradition of 1980s Alternative comedy, the thematically fragmented popular comedy of the 1990s through to prejudicial liquidity evident in more recent comedy. The central argument being asserted is that comic racist discourse has been consistently reproduced for the last forty years. However its communicative form, aesthetic presentation and in some cases its content has undertaken a process of transformation in order for it to be circulated in contemporary popular cultural products unchallenged by both social critics and institutional authorities. Critical humour studies stresses that ridicule-based humorous discourse must be treated critically, especially if that ridicule is directed at groups who are socially marginalised. Comic racism represents the discursive stability of traditional racist discourses that have circulated in society since the Enlightenment, reproducing the ideological perspectives of white supremacy, social exclusion of 'Others' and the perceived, amalgamated biological and cultural inferiority of non-white 'races'. Drawing from content analysis and critical discourse analysis of Sickipedia.org, this study, on a textual level, with reference to theory and history, critically discusses the persistent reproduction of comic racism in the cultural public sphere of the UK, deconstructing the hateful messages embedded in racist jokes and providing an original contribution to critical humour studies.