What were the main goals in Navalny’s political agenda and how did this influence his rhetorical approach? This paper explores how Navalny and his aspirants were disqualified as political candidates in Russian elections, and how this affected his approach to being focused on contentious politics as it became the only viable means to push for political change in the country. Two of his most viral videos are analysed to investigate the rhetorical strategies he used to set frames on the political elite, and the main answers revolved around corruption, theft, and the self-image of Medvedev and Putin. Although there were clear similarities between the two videos, the most recent “Palace for Putin” displayed new and more moral, judgmental and offensive methods than the previous “He is not Dimon to you”. Furthermore, this paper investigates the large-scale protests of 2021 and how public opinion about Navalny has developed in Russia. The expectation was that public opinion would be more favourable in recent times than it has been in the past, largely due to the massive protests which he managed to spark. However, the answer was surprisingly the opposite, as statistics tilted slightly against him rather than the other way around. Part of the explanation to this was that the highest number of people who disapproved of Navalny used state television as their main source of information, as opposed to the majority of the younger population who frequently used the internet, and thereby had a more positive view of him. When examining the protest trajectories, it was possible to find elements of Navalny’s political message amongst the people in terms of keywords and phrases that they chanted, evidence of his success above the fact of the protests themselves. The final aim was to review how the authoritarian regime responded to Navalny’s contentious politics, and in this regard, it was concluded that both domestic and international pressure moved the regime to increasingly repressive measures against Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation and further deteriorated the relationship between the EU and Russia.

The Age of Trump witnessed the visible rise of intense culture wars and polarization in the United States. While culture wars are not new phenomena, the current iteration has digital media acting as new discursive structures and mediating battlegrounds for all sides of the cultural conflict. This project chronicles these online culture wars, demonstrating how within a neoliberal and postmodern socio-cultural condition, the rise of ambivalent, profit-driven digital technologies and platforms structure affect and mediate newly networked neo-reactionary populist (sub)cultural ideologies and discourses. The resulting online ecosystems afforded the digital formations of obscure reactionary subcultures (trolls, antifeminists, the alt-right, etc.) with particular personalized and affectively driven memetic communicative logics. These reactionary affective publics eventually began converging under perceived common ideological and social interests as online actions and reactionary discursive (re)formations and (re)networkings were catalyzed by (sub/cross)cultural conflicts and moments of sentimental activation. This led to the emergence of affectively charged and informally networked reactionary publics which began spilling out into the offline world alongside Trump's ascendancy to the White House. The increasing progressive reactions during the Trump Era also faced limitations in combatting reactionary politics due to structural dynamics of digital media and the larger culture war filtering of politics. The overall macro function of these new online culture wars is the bipartisan obfuscation and undermining of a collectivist and materialist reality and engagement with politics in the favor of a more personalized, symbolic and affective engagement that is indicative of the neoliberalized postmodern era.

The Islamic movement study mostly focused on radical, extremist, violent, or military aspects. The current research was carried out to examine the nonviolent elements of the Islamic movement. Based on the ethnographic photo research conducted in the Ethiopian Muslims Protest, the Islamic movements nonviolent aspect investigated. The Ethiopian Muslims were organized social media-led protests called Let Our Voices be Heard for their religious rights between 2011 and 2015. The study first examined where this Let Our Voices be Heard protest fits in civil resistance studies. Second, it investigated Facebook's role in initiating, organizing, and sustaining the nonviolent Islamic movement in Ethiopia. Using Johnston's defining terms of social movement theory, the Let Our Voices be Heard protest tested. The result shows that the protest well fit with the dimensions and components of social movement theory. The result indicates that the Let Our Voices be Heard protest exemplifies nonviolent Islamic movement in the Eastern Africa region, Ethiopia. The study further shows that Facebook, when used for a common goal, is a robust platform for successfully mobilizing nonviolent Islamic movements.

The Islamic movement study mostly focused on radical, extremist, violent, or military aspects. The current research was carried out to examine the nonviolent elements of the Islamic movement. Based on the ethnographic photo research conducted in the Ethiopian Muslims Protest, the Islamic movements nonviolent aspect investigated. The Ethiopian Muslims were organized social media-led protests called Let Our Voices be Heard for their religious rights between 2011 and 2015. The study first examined where this Let Our Voices be Heard protest fits in civil resistance studies. Second, it investigated Facebook's role in initiating, organizing, and sustaining the nonviolent Islamic movement in Ethiopia. Using Johnston's defining terms of social movement theory, the Let Our Voices be Heard protest tested. The result shows that the protest well fit with the dimensions and components of social movement theory. The result indicates that the Let Our Voices be Heard protest exemplifies nonviolent Islamic movement in the Eastern Africa region, Ethiopia. The study further shows that Facebook, when used for a common goal, is a robust platform for successfully mobilizing nonviolent Islamic movements.

The purpose of this study was to examine the practices and perceptions of professors of reading education in the issues surrounding teaching reading and learning with digital media. This study aimed to understand the strategies and thoughts of a select group of professors of reading education as they worked with pre-service teachers in preparing them to meet the needs' of their future students. The four respondents that participated in this inquiry were professors of reading education at various California Universities. The guiding research question was stated as: What are the issues surrounding the teaching and learning of reading through digital media? Two sub-questions were also posed: What strategies and practices are reading educators using in teaching reading education with traditional and digital media? In what ways are reading educators connecting traditional and digital literacy skills? Multiple case study methodology was used to acquire various perspectives on the issues of teaching and learning through digital media. From the four cross-case analyses of interviews, documentation, and observations, four themes and an overarching theme emerged depicting the issues educators are discovering with digital media. Reading competency is driven by intrinsic motivation. Current practices which neglect "real-world" reading are producing student who know how to read, but do not have the desire to read. The pressures to conform to educational mandates has created a disconnect between "good teaching" strategies and mandated school district requirements. The use of updated practices utilizing digital media is tempered by the current knowledge and self-efficacy of professors of reading education, as well as, the inconsistent availability and/or limited technological accessibility. These four themes acted as the foundation in support of the culminating theme. The overarching theme indicated that meeting the needs of today's students by looking at education through a new lens and gaining tools and strategies for the 21st century is imperative. Since the professor of reading educations' knowledge and self-efficacy is essential in the process of integrating digital media, the respondents themselves are transforming the practices and perceptions of educators. Thus, professors of reading education are change agents in their own practices, Universities, surrounding schools and the community. Based on the results of this study, implications for practice and recommendations for further research are suggested.

This Master thesis concerns Swedish Academic libraries current lack of ability to offer interlibrary loans of e-books to their primary users. Today it is possible for university-and college libraries primer user to make request of inter library loan for physical books, however, they cannot make such request for e-books. We will argue for that this problem should not be viewed as a simple inconvenience for the users. Our argument will be built on the assumption that access to information is an essential part of a well working democracy, and that libraries therefore should prioritize the question of inter library loans.  In our study we have interviewed librarians who is currently working with interlibrary loans and digital media. After that we have interpreted the transcriptions of those interviews with a phenomenographical perspective. Our aim with the study has been to examine how librarians experienced the phenomenon of interlibrary loan of e-books. We have therefore attempted to answer three research question: How do librarians work with inter library loans and which values do they connect to them? What difficulties and possibilities do they see in making inter library loans of e-books possible in the future? How do they view interlibrary loans in the digital era and how do they view the future of inter library loans of e-books?  We have found that librarians connect inter library loans with a will of sharing information and that they believe that libraries will have to cooperate to make inter library loans of e-books possible. Furthermore, we have found that our informants believe that interlibrary loans will still be needed in the near future, even though they might become irrelevant in far future due to increase in open access publications. This is a two years master’s thesis in Library and Information Science.

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<p>   </p> <p>Health-related misinformation presents a significant threat to public health and wellbeing. Misinformation exposure is associated with decreased compliance with public health initiatives, decreased trust in science, and greater levels of disease transmission. Unfortunately, fact-checking is not a panacea for mitigating the negative effects associated with misinformation exposure. The present dissertation, guided by the Theory of Planned Behavior, investigated across two studies whether providing participants with different levels of media literacy education could enable them to successfully determine news articles, on a variety of different health topics, contained either legitimate or illegitimate information. Both studies utilized a three-group, pretest-posttest, between-subjects experimental design in which participants were randomly assigned to either a brief or detailed media literacy skill promotion message, or a no-message control. The messages took the form of Facebook posts from a fictitious organization dedicated to promoting media literacy. The first study recruited 305 undergraduate students. Results from the first study indicated that participants assigned to the detailed message condition were more successful compared to the other conditions in identifying health-related misinformation. A content analysis of participants’ open-ended responses revealed that participants in the detailed message group were the most likely to utilize skills related to media literacy and were the least likely to utilize heuristics or to guess when determining whether news articles contained legitimate or illegitimate information. The second study sought to replicate and extend the results of the first study in a sample of adults recruited through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. The results of the second study found that the detailed message condition promoted a greater ability to identify misinformation compared to either the brief message or control condition. Similarly, participants in the second study were most likely to use skills related to media literacy when completing the misinformation identification task. The results suggest that brief media literacy messages may be insufficient in enabling participants to successfully identify health-related misinformation online. However, more detailed media literacy education messages show promise for potentially limiting the spread of misinformation online. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed. </p> <p>  </p>