Opinion leaders are important political players who bridge the gap between the political elite and the general public. Traditionally opinion leaders use social pressure and social support via interpersonal communication to personally influence the opinions, attitudes and behaviours of their everyday associates (who make up the general public). However, in a hybrid media system opinion leaders have access to added channels which mean they can communicate with audiences beyond their everyday associates and/or engage in non-interpersonal interactions, potentially setting the stage for opinion leaders to become more influential since they can access more members of the general public. Conversely, since the ability of opinion leaders to influence others traditionally relies on strong social bonds, even if audiences are accessible for information transfer, the lack of social connection could mean influence does not flow. As such, opinion leaders' channel choice in a hybrid media system is potentially very important. To investigate the patterns of channel use as well as motivations for, and impacts of, channel choices by opinion leaders, a two phase mixed-methods study is employed. Phase one includes online social network analysis of the #CDNpoli (Canadian politics) hashtag on Twitter and an online survey. Phase two investigates the communication practices of 21 specific digitally enabled opinion leaders drawn from the #CDNpoli network. Two hour in-depth interviews are paired with visualizations of the participants trace data. Telephone interviews with associates (alters) of the primary interviewee were conducted (N=27). This design is therefore responsive to the multi-channel reality of a hybrid media system and improves upon large scale and single channel studies which are most common in this line of research. Now strategic and, at times, impersonal, a fundamental shift in how influence is derived challenges theories of social influence and information dissemination. Two types of strategic opinion leaders emerge: enthusiasts and champions. Their strategies contribute to a wider trend - a "just-in-time" informed citizenry - where those who do not opt in to receiving messages from the political elite only get information at the last possible minute, such as during a scandal or an election. Future research and communication strategy must be sensitive to the varied aims and tactics of digitally enabled opinion leaders as well as the subsequent inconsistent relationship between the uninformed and their political system.

This study seeks to examine how Ugandan journalists’ and politicians’ views on journalism professionalisation in Uganda relate to the broad theoretical arguments about professionalism within sociology and media studies. It also seeks to examine how such views impact on the democratic role of the media. The study finds out that there are two sets of distinct ideas on journalism professionalisation. The idea espoused by politicians is statutory professionalisation in which the state plays a major role through regulation and control, hence professionalisation is seen primarily as a control system. On the other hand, journalists perceive professionalisation as nurtured by voluntarily and socially inculcated professional values, hence as a value system. The study however, finds that both sets of understandings have their own complexities. While the statutory approach has complexities like how core elements of professionalism such as professional values can be imposed through legislation, the voluntary approach to professionalism also exhibits tensions within, especially stemming from the relationship between the professional and the news organisation regarding what constitutes professionalism. The study concludes that both sets of ideas have implications for the democratic role of the media, with both perceptions of professionalism curtailing this role. Statutory professionalisation in the Ugandan political context where the state is the dominant institution brings media institutions within its control, which leads to suppression of content of democratic value through a number of means. On the other hand, the self-regulatory perception does not protect media professionalism from the assault of commercial imperatives, especially when fused with state patronage in regard to broadcasting licences and placement of advertising.

This inquiry explored the everyday struggles of several women who worked as coordinators and instructors in three government-funded job-entry programs for women in the non-profit sector. The programs studied included an entry program for native women, a program which trained immigrant women in bookkeeping skills, and a program which trained women on social assistance to enter the construction trades. The work of the staff in these programs was considered in light of a theoretical framework developed by Nancy Fraser. Fraser has called for a different approach -- a more critical discourse-oriented inquiry -- to the study of social-welfare policies and programs. This approach focuses on the political struggle over the interpretation of needs, particularly women's needs, which she sees as central to social-welfare policy-making. In her study of the American system, she has found that "needs talk" is the medium through which inequalities are symbolically elaborated and challenged. She also has found that needs talk is stratified and differentiated by unequal status, power, and access to resources, and organized along lines of class, gender, race, ethnicity and age. For this study, information was collected through interviews with the staff in the three programs, observations of life skills classes, and examination of program proposals. Government and government-related documents were also examined. The analysis revealed that, in the official policy documents at the national level, women’s needs were interpreted within a dominant policy framework which focused on reducing spending, matching workers to the market and privatizing training programs. Programs for women were developed based upon a "thin” understanding of women's needs -- one which focused on women’s lack of training and job experience and ignored the structural inequalities of the labour market and women’s different racial and class struggles. At the local level, analysis of the interviews, observations and documents indicated that the staff struggled to respond to the trainees' diverse and complex needs which the official policy discourse addressed in only a limited way. In their negotiations with the state, the staff employed a plurality of needs discourses, engaging in a process which both challenged and reproduced the dominant policy orientation toward getting women "jobs, any jobs”. There were moments of resistance by the staff to the dominant policy orientation, most notably in the program for native women. The trainees also challenged the narrow interpretation of women's needs, particularly in the program training women to enter the construction trades. Generally speaking, the analysis indicated that the staff played a crucial role in mediating between women and the state and in producing a kind of discourse which tended to construct the trainees as subjects needing to be "fixed". The analysis also revealed that the relationships between staff, trainees and the state were organized around unequal access to resources based on gender, race and class. In order to transcend the limitations outlined in this study, efforts are required to democratize decision-making, collectively organize the non-profit private sector, challenge privatization and the exploitive practices of the state, and bring alternative approaches which support participatory and dialogical processes of need interpretation. The analysis brings to light the importance of studying the implications of state policies on adult education practice, particularly policies which promote privatization. It also reveals the explanatory power of a feminist theoretical framework which provides a more critical, discourse-oriented approach to examining policy and practice, and the usefulness of this framework for further research and political advocacy. / Education, Faculty of / Educational Studies (EDST), Department of / Graduate

In 1971, Robert Bourassa, then Premier of Quebec, launched a major hydroelectric scheme to be built 1400 km North of Montreal. Known as the "James Bay" project, the first phase included the creation of eight powerhouses, six reservoirs and the diversion of two rivers. These transformations necessarily impacted the local Cree people; a territorial agreement partly compensated them but remains controversial to this day. While northern communities overwhelmingly bear the ecological cost of the project, the bulk of James Bay energy flows south to the industrial centers of Quebec, Ontario and the U.S. The assertion then that "James Bay belongs to all the Quebecois" which was meant to ease political tensions about the project begs the question, "Who are the Quebecois" and how do the Crees fit within such a community? This thesis explore that question by looking at the Quebecois cultural production of territory and its resources in the north. If James Bay was out of reach, it was never out of view. Media and political discourses reiterated key elements of a Quebecois cultural relationship to place, some of which are contained in the rural literature known as the roman de la terre. Several elements of this literature and its broader context were recontextualized in James Bay, particularly as they pertained to the will to occupy the land and develop natural resources. This was an important aspect of making James Bay - a land historically inhabited by the Crees - into a "Quebecois" national landscape. I suggest that this process was largely rooted in representations of nature that sought to bind it with nation and national identity. Thus James Bay demonstrates the close connection between identity and environmental struggles. For the Quebecois, the access to James Bay was supported by a territorial discourse that performed their own cultural past. This provoked an organized resistance from the Crees which constituted them as a modern political unit. A look at the cultural geography of the region highlights the political scales created in the accessing of resources that render their equitable and sustainable use more difficult to achieve. / Arts, Faculty of / Geography, Department of / Graduate

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This dissertation investigates roles of cultural practice in China’s revolution. It begins with cultural experiments in the War of Resistance to Japan (1937-1945) and culminates with the agrarian cooperativization of the People’s Republic of China in the 1950s. I interrogate how China’s “cultural workers” –– meaning the writers, performers, artists, and filmmakers engaged in the revolutionary project –– participated in mass mobilization. In doing so, I develop elements for a new approach to analyzing cultural works in their relations to political movements. This approach aims to address my study’s driving question: how did the practice of cultural workers advance, challenge, and transform China’s revolutionary process? My formal approach is drawn from an issue at the heart of revolution; namely, that of time. I argue that revolutionaries repeatedly wrestled with remaking time–– whether to and how to break with the past in constructing the future. My study investigates this problematic as it was developed in two temporal fields: campaign time and narrative time. Activists developed campaign time, or standardizing temporal structures, to reform society through sequences of mass mobilization. Distinct from campaign time, cultural workers articulated narrative time through acts of narrative creation in literary prose, theater, art, and cinema. I argue that by analyzing the collisions, collusions, and contradictions between campaign time and narrative time, we can define cultural workers’ interventions in the revolutionary process. The first four chapters focus on the historical emergence of campaign time through mass movements of the Communist base areas during the War of Resistance to Japan. I seek to demonstrate: first, that a coherent series of strategies for mass movements was developed, bearing consistent, repeatable patterns for social reorganization; and second, that cultural workers contributed to, contradicted, and at key moments innovated mass movements through expressions of narrative time. Each of these four chapters proceeds chronologically through major mass movements: the reform of “vagrants” in chapter one; family reforms and women’s labor in chapter two; the hygiene movement in chapter three; and chapter four takes up the anti-spirit medium movement. Chapter five argues that the narrative time of novels stretched the political imagination of campaign time in the scope of the agrarian cooperative movement (approx. 1953-1957). The sixth and final chapter focuses on the case of Liu Qing’s unfinished epic The Builders. I interrogate fraught relations between narrative and campaign times in the novel’s historical trajectory to foreground a problem I call campaign-narrative equivalence. When cultural narratives were conflated with historical movements, such equivalences were produced. The campaign-narrative equivalence is not only a problem for historical interpretation but also for the political imagination. By disentangling these equivalences, which have been grafted upon histories of cultural creation and political transformation, I seek to grasp the distinctive contributions and transformative valence of the cultural worker in China’s revolution –– for then and now.

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No description available.

This study examines politics disadvantages used in competitive policy debate. Specifically, this research examines politics disadvantages for their role and relevance in deliberation, an important form of political communication. Deliberation is the means by which citizens can engage in discussions of salient policy issues, and make political judgments about policies. This study developed a grounded theory about the type of deliberation manifest in politics disadvantages. Pre-constructed politics disadvantages from websites such as PlanetDebate.com, Cross-X.com, as well as from summer policy debate workshops were analyzed to develop a grounded theory. Through the process of coding and theoretical memoing, categories of political communication emerged from the disadvantage shells. The theory indicated that politics disadvantages develop an acontextual, narrowly adversarial view of deliberation. This theory was juxtaposed against already established theories of deliberation to reveal that politics disadvantages show serious deficiencies in the ways in which deliberation is taught to policy debaters.

In many economic applications, a collective outcome experienced by a group of people is determined by individual decisions made by its constituents. Hence, understanding how individuals make decisions in group settings is important, but empirical and observational analyses are often complicated by confounding factors. This dissertation contains three essays that use controlled experiments designed to isolate, and measure the impact of, mechanisms predicted to affect behavior. Chapter 1 studies behavior under digital anonymity. A distinctive feature of the digital world is the ability to calibrate or withhold one's identifier: a person can be identified by a string of letters, an avatar, their real name, or even nothing at all. That digital identifiers allow a person to mask their physical identity also makes it difficult to attribute digital actions to a physical person, even when the actions are observed. I embed these features in an experiment where subjects play a finitely repeated, linear public goods game. Treated subjects are identified in one of three ways—by their photograph, by a random number, or by a self-designed cartoon avatar—and their individual choices are revealed and either attributed to, or decoupled from, their identifier. In line with the previous literature, identifying subjects and increasing the precision of attribution increases contributions relative to a baseline condition without identifiers or revealed individual choices. Remarkably, however, the largest impact on behavior comes from having an identifier in the first place: for a given level of attribution, the experimental data suggest that being identified by a number or by an avatar is as powerful as being identified by one's photograph. Chapter 2 studies whether and how individuals imbue digital avatars with self image and social image considerations. While digital avatars have become more commonplace and sophisticated, they need not resemble the physical appearance of the person using it. This inconsistency raises the question of how an avatar induces image considerations, relative to a person's physical appearance. I embed avatars into a dictator game and conduct two experiments, one addressing self image and the other social image. The direction of the treatment effect in the dictator game for both experiments suggests that individuals do attach image considerations to their avatars, though the effects are not statistically significant. Additionally, I find that subjects create significantly more positively perceived avatars when they know that their avatar will be shown to another subject who will decide how to allocate an endowment with them. Chapter 3, joint with Alessandra Casella and Michelle Jiang, studies the impact of an alternative voting system on the minority's turnout and resultant victories. We start from the observation that under majoritarian election systems, securing participation and representation of minorities remains an open problem, made salient in the US by its history of voter suppression. One remedy recommended by the courts is Cumulative Voting (CV): each voter has as many votes as open positions and can cumulate votes on as few candidates as desired. Theory predicts that CV encourages the minority to overcome obstacles to voting: although each voter is treated equally, CV increases minority's turnout relative to the majority, and the minority's share of seats won. A lab experiment based on a costly voting design strongly supports both predictions. Chapter 3 was published in Volume 141 of Games and Economic Behavior, pp. 133-155, September 2023, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geb.2023.05.012.