This dissertation investigated the relationship between news coverage of immigration and readers' reaction to such coverage. Quantitative content analysis was used to study the subject with a comparative approach across regions that constitute borderlands between first and second world countries: the state of Arizona in the United States of America and Italy in the European Union. Coders analyzed content of 800 stories published by four daily newspapers in 2013. Degree of antipathy or sympathy for immigrants was assessed from 1,470 online comments posted by readers of those stories. Hypotheses stemming from theories of national identity were tested to evaluate frames used to talk about immigration in the outlets considered and audiences' feedback while controlling for regional particularities. News coverage of immigration was generally unfavorable to immigrants in both Arizona and Italy. Readers commenting online on immigration did generally not empathize with immigrants. No statistically significant correlation was found between degree of antipathy or sympathy for immigrants expressed in online comments and stories' degree of unfavorableness or favorability to immigrants. The study also concluded that the Associated Press style change banning "illegal immigrant" from a journalist's vocabulary resulted in a sharp decrease of use of the phrase in the pair of Arizona dailies examined. Frames criminalizing immigrants appeared with comparable frequency across all four newspapers considered. Nationalistic and patriotic attitudes recorded in the studies carried out across multiple countries did not provide the sociological lens suited to explaining the tone of journalistic coverage of immigration addressed in this study and the public's reaction to such coverage. However, stories framed episodically provided more positive representations of immigrants than stories framed thematically, and readers' reaction seemed less antipathetic to immigrants. Previous comparative research of immigration coverage recommended that journalists write fewer human interest stories and more articles providing context and analysis of the issue. Representations of immigrants in the four dailies and attitudes emerging from online comments analyzed in this study, instead, suggest that journalists should focus on human interest stories to reframe immigration issues and reverse the often stereotypical nature of immigration coverage.

<ul>The growing field of Indigenous media has contributed greatly to theorizations around digital appropriation, self-representation and political advocacy, and the importance of media to Indigenous People’s movements. However, these theorizations and scholarly works tend to primarily focus on Indigenous men’s media practices and contexts. This dissertation presents findings from the Mẽnire Making Movies project, a participatory media project that explores Kayapó women’s digital worlds through a case study that merges ethnographic research and on-site media training in the village of A’Ukre in the Kayapó Indigenous Lands in northeastern Brazil. This project trained 4-6 Kayapó women in introductory audiovisual production and editing and is the first project to focus exclusively on Kayapó women’s engagements with digital technology. Through a decolonial and participatory methodology, this media project centers Kayapó social values of accountability, relationality, and conviviality, to analyze how Kayapó women’s media-making speaks to gendered and generational dimensions of personhood through an Amazonian social lens. Drawing from literature on feminist geography, Amazonian social theory, and Indigenous media in Latin America, this project presents findings that broaden the current literature on Kayapó media by introducing the conceptual framework of accompanied media. As an analytical and theoretical framework, accompanied media approaches Indigenous media as both a product and a social practice, centering the relational dimensions of production, consumption, and circulation. Scholars and media facilitators can apply the accompanied media framework to design inclusive media workshops with Indigenous communities that take into account barriers that can limit women’s participation like language, gender, social and behavioral norms, and other practical elements of participatory media work.</ul>

The purpose of this project was to create a rubric from which researchers and filmmakers can begin producing media different from the existing English language, jargon-laden, instructional videos currently in use in the United States. From this rubric, one video detailing a clinic visit was produced, screened for a diverse audience and evaluated for its efficacy. This video utilized only images to convey information in an attempt to circumvent the confusion that may result while viewing media in a foreign language. Communication theories and strategies such as the Sabido method of edutainment and social cognitive theory guided the filmmaking process. Although it is impossible to create a universally comprehensible text, the development of potentially transcultural media helped identify key issues that should be carefully considered. Effective intercultural communication strategies and an awareness of cultural concerns factored into decisions on representations of gender and nationality, shot composition and editing, as well as the use of positive, negative and transitional characters. This task resulted in both a rubric for media production as well as a reflection on transcultural communication in a broader context. Pre- and post-screening feedback sessions were used to evaluate the comprehensibility of the video and results across varying cultures showed an improvement in knowledge of clinic procedures and protocol. This study represented an important first step in participatory transcultural media creation in partnership with the increasingly diverse patient population of the United States. / Media & Communication

Cette thèse traite des school shootings, soit les fusillades perpétrées par des élèves dans leur école. Elle rend compte de la globalisation de ce phénomène, observée depuis que les auteurs des fusillades prémédient leurs actes de violence via l'usage des médias participatifs. Il s'agit d'analyser cette stratégie de communication et montrer comment différents publics se l'approprient. Cette forme de violence produit des événements médiatiques disruptifs globaux. Nous montrons comment les citoyens ordinaires prennent part à ces événements en développant des formes contemporaines de sociation au sein des réseaux sociaux numériques. Nous en singularisons notamment une, la communauté cocon. Parmi ces publics ordinaires, on voit également émerger un contre public, celui des school shootings. Ils investissent les médias participatifs pour rappeler qu'une révolte souterraine se prépare. Ils la font vivre au quotidien dans une scène subculturelle numérique hébergée par YouTube, via des vidéos à l'effigie des tueurs. Leurs pratiques communicationnelles sont au cœur de cette thèse tant leur association est suspectée d'alimenter le vivier de futurs tueurs. L'investigation de cette subculture nous a amenée à singulariser le fait que les plus extrêmes, ceux qui passent à l'acte, s'engagent dans un processus d'individuation posthume d'anti-sujet. Si les auteurs des fusillades connaissent l'issue fatale qui les attend, un suicide by cop, ils la déjouent avec leurs stratégies médiatiques. En mobilisant des procédés imitatifs, ils instrumentalisent les médias pour garantir la signification de leurs actes et prendre leur revanche sociale en accédant au statut d'anti-héros. / This thesis deals with the phenomenon of "school shootings". It accounts for the globalization of this phenomenon, observed since school shooters started using participatory media for communication strategies. This thesis analyzes this strategy of premediation and shows how their audiences appropriate it. This extreme form of school violence creates global disruptive media events. We show how ordinary citizens take part in this event by developing contemporary forms of sociation in digital social networks. We shall highlight one particular: the cocoon community. Among the ordinary audience of the media event, we see the emergence of counter-public, “school shooting” fans. The use participatory media to remind everyone that an underground revolt is underway. The remind us of this daily in broadcasting videos to the effigy of the killers on a digital subcultural stage hosted by YouTube. These fans, as well as their audiovisual and communication practices, are at the heart of this thesis, as their subculture is suspected of constituting a pool of future killers. The investigation of this subversive subcultural scene has led us to single out a phenomenon that is characteristic of the youth in search of points of reference beyond good and evil. The most extreme, those planning to act, appear to engage in what we call a process of posthumous anti-subject individuation. Even if they know the fatal outcome awaiting them, “a suicide by cop”, they thwart it with their media strategies. By the means of imitation, they guarantee the attribution of meaning to their acts and instrumentalize the media to take their revenge by achieving social fame and the status of an anti-hero.

This master’s thesis revolves around the means of participation established around the newly formed Social Democratic Party in Sweden at the end of the 19th century. In 1889 the party was organized in close proximity to the editorial office of the party newspaper, Social-demokraten, and dependent on the support of its subscribers to uphold and increase circulation. Simultaneously, the consolidation of the Second socialist international provided a new framework for the national organisations as it was decided that May 1 of 1890 would be the date of synchronized mass- demonstrations for the legislation of the 8-hour working day. The thesis examines the means of participation and the associated construction of participatory political subjects in relation to the newspaper, the demonstration and the question of work time regulation. The analysis shows that the Swedish campaigns promoted an increased sense of self-awareness and obligation towards the larger organizational structures as well as society as a whole. Participation was put forth as a means of confessing to a genuine and unadulterated identity. This identity and its assigned biological features, as they were portrayed in relation to the question of work time regulation, created the physical characteristics of the participant as a focal point of the political project. The question was used to create knowledge about the participant as an objective outset in the quest for legitimacy. This process can also be seen as the creation of a situated public as an origin of power.

With digital media and the web becoming increasingly pervasive in our everyday lives, few historians have considered in depth the impact that this is having on the ways that history is represented and communicated in the public sphere. This thesis is an examination of how the practice of public history in Australia is being reshaped in the Web 2.0 environment. In the context of new media theory, public history practice is considered in relation to identifiable changes in the ways the web is used and understood. / The public historian’s concern with interpreting the past to a public audience means that changing social practices and information patterns are pertinent to their work. This thesis highlights the ways in which different forms of history are being produced, distributed and consumed on the web. It focuses on the potential role of the web user as an active producer of personal and creative interpretations of the past and on how experimental public history practices in the Web 2.0 environment have emerged in response to changing audiences. / This study argues that the rise of Web 2.0 is reflected by personalised, ubiquitous, democratic and innovative public history practices on the web. Through an in depth analysis of The Powerhouse Museum collection search and YouTube as case studies, this thesis shows how increased participation, the proliferation of user-generated content, social networking and existing practices by users in the Web 2.0 environment reshapes public history. / This thesis goes beyond conceiving of the web as a site of historical source material, both digitised and born-digital, to an understanding of the value of participatory media and informal communication in enabling the sharing of historical knowledge and materials between and among networks of people on the web.

We address the challenge of providing low-cost, universal access of useful information to people in different parts of the globe. We achieve this by following two strategies. First, we focus on the delivery of information through computerized devices and prototype new methods for making that delivery possible in a secure, low-cost, and universal manner. Second, we focus on the use of participatory media, such as blogs, in the context of news related content, and develop methods to recommend useful information that will be of interest to users. To achieve the first goal, we have designed a low-cost wireless system for Internet access in rural areas, and a smartphone-based system for the opportunistic use of WiFi connectivity to reduce the cost of data transfer on multi-NIC mobile devices. Included is a methodology for secure communication using identity based cryptography. For the second goal of identifying useful information, we make use of sociological theories regarding social networks in mass-media to develop a model of how participatory media can offer users effective news-related information. We then use this model to design a recommender system for participatory media content that pushes useful information to people in a personalized fashion. Our algorithms provide an order of magnitude better performance in terms of recommendation accuracy than other state-of-the-art recommender systems. Our work provides some fundamental insights into the design of low-cost communication systems and the provision of useful messages to users in participatory media through a multi-disciplinary approach. The result is a framework that efficiently and effectively delivers information to people in remote corners of the world.

We address the challenge of providing low-cost, universal access of useful information to people in different parts of the globe. We achieve this by following two strategies. First, we focus on the delivery of information through computerized devices and prototype new methods for making that delivery possible in a secure, low-cost, and universal manner. Second, we focus on the use of participatory media, such as blogs, in the context of news related content, and develop methods to recommend useful information that will be of interest to users. To achieve the first goal, we have designed a low-cost wireless system for Internet access in rural areas, and a smartphone-based system for the opportunistic use of WiFi connectivity to reduce the cost of data transfer on multi-NIC mobile devices. Included is a methodology for secure communication using identity based cryptography. For the second goal of identifying useful information, we make use of sociological theories regarding social networks in mass-media to develop a model of how participatory media can offer users effective news-related information. We then use this model to design a recommender system for participatory media content that pushes useful information to people in a personalized fashion. Our algorithms provide an order of magnitude better performance in terms of recommendation accuracy than other state-of-the-art recommender systems. Our work provides some fundamental insights into the design of low-cost communication systems and the provision of useful messages to users in participatory media through a multi-disciplinary approach. The result is a framework that efficiently and effectively delivers information to people in remote corners of the world.

Working alongside five queer-identified theatre artists, using critical arts-based participatory action research, this research project worked through a creative process in which the research team identified, deconstructed, and disrupted normative queer discourses on the video-sharing website YouTube. Using notions from queer theory, cultural studies, and anti-oppression education, along with embodied analysis as a deconstructive strategy, the research team used collective theorizing and performance to facilitate an analysis of the online videos. In this thesis, I discuss embodied knowing by analyzing performative moments in the creative workshop undertaken by the research team. I then provide a thematic analysis of the online videos, followed by an analysis of how the research team used collective creation and personal narrative to produce a counter-hegemonic response video. Finally, I conclude with a discussion on how to engage video creation as a form of anti-oppression education that queers public pedagogy.

Working alongside five queer-identified theatre artists, using critical arts-based participatory action research, this research project worked through a creative process in which the research team identified, deconstructed, and disrupted normative queer discourses on the video-sharing website YouTube. Using notions from queer theory, cultural studies, and anti-oppression education, along with embodied analysis as a deconstructive strategy, the research team used collective theorizing and performance to facilitate an analysis of the online videos. In this thesis, I discuss embodied knowing by analyzing performative moments in the creative workshop undertaken by the research team. I then provide a thematic analysis of the online videos, followed by an analysis of how the research team used collective creation and personal narrative to produce a counter-hegemonic response video. Finally, I conclude with a discussion on how to engage video creation as a form of anti-oppression education that queers public pedagogy.