Much recent scholarship celebrates the early modern period for its development of broader public political engagement through printed media and coffeehouse culture. It is the argument of this study that the formation in England under Charles II of a public sphere may be shown to have followed a reassessment of political discourse that began at Westminster during the troubled reign of that king’s father, Charles I. The narrative of parliament’s growth in this era from an “event to an institution,” as one historian describes it, tells of more than opposition to the King on the battlefields of the English Civil War. Parliament-work in the early years of England’s revolutionary decade also set new expectations for rhetorical deliberation as a means of directing policy in the House of Commons. The ideals of discursive politics that were voiced in the Short Parliament (May 1640), and more fully put into practice in the opening session of the Long Parliament (November 1640), were soon also accepted by politically-minded authors and readers outside Westminster. Prose controversy published in print and political poetry that circulated in manuscript both demonstrate that the burgeoning culture of debate outside parliament could still issue “in a parliamentary way.” Such promotion of productive textual engagements eventually constituted a wider, notional assembly, whose participants – citizen readers – were as much a product of deliberate education and fashioning as they were of the “conjuring,” “interpellation,” or “summoning” that recent scholarly vocabulary suggests. Following the spirit of reform in the English parliament, and subsequently developing through the years of partisan political writing that followed, public opinion, like the Commons, established itself in this era as an institution in its own right. These public and private assemblies disseminated the unprecedented amount of parliamentary writing and record-keeping that distinguishes the period under review, and this rich archive provides the literary and historical context for this study.

Pedagogic practice often involves preparing the student for different roles in society as well as personal development. The aim of the thesis is to investigate how the concept citizen is understood by single individuals and is shaped in pedagogic practice. Its theoretical starting points are taken from sociological theories about society and from theories about education. It is primarily Jürgen Habermas’ theories about society and communication that provide the framework for this investigation and discussion. Even the criticism which Habermas has received is presented and discussed. Society is presented as divided in a private and a public sphere where the individual fulfils the role as a citizen by acting in the public sphere. Four empirical studies are carried out; interviews with single individuals, observations at a folk high school, observations in study associations and analysis of reports from European projects where folk high schools and study associations participated. The public sphere that is most apparent is an every day, local public sphere where single individuals and participants in folk high school and study associations discuss common matters. In the discussion there are few references to public political discussions on national or international level. Assuming that citizen is defined broader than as a relation between the individual and the state, the study presents and discusses a variety of ways to act as a citizen within and outside pedagogic practice, and also the obstacles. The thesis provides arguments for a discussion about the concept citizen and citizen action within pedagogic practice. There are also arguments for independent citizen actions outside the pedagogic context. Thereby the citizen action can be brought back to the pedagogic discussion for reflection.

This thesis examines online journalism in the Kurdistan region of Iraq and its role in political debate in this emerging democracy. It also focuses on the role of the internet in the public sphere, explores the historical context in which Kurdish online journalism has developed and compares mass media in the Kurdistan region to that in other newly democratic countries, in addition to the mass media landscape, human rights conditions and political system in the Kurdistan region and Iraq overall are explored. Data has been collected through in-depth interviewing of journalists, both independent and affiliated with political parties, as well as media academics and other educators. Moreover, as a case study, a qualitative thematic analysis has been carried out on opinion articles in online news sites to search for key themes and messages published and explore the limits of free discussion online. The thesis argues that although there are many barriers to media work and freedom of expression, online journalism in the Kurdistan region is an alternative tool for expression and constitutes a better medium for promoting freedom of speech than mainstream media outlets. It then suggests recommendations for conducting further studies about the development and influences of online journalism and social media on Kurdish society.

110f. / Submitted by Suelen Reis (suziy.ellen@gmail.com) on 2013-04-16T16:21:13Z No. of bitstreams: 1 Dissertacao Ilca Menezesseg.pdf: 651126 bytes, checksum: 7317e68c70bdedb293ee0c1dd982092d (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Rodrigo Meirelles(rodrigomei@ufba.br) on 2013-05-11T15:20:56Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 Dissertacao Ilca Menezesseg.pdf: 651126 bytes, checksum: 7317e68c70bdedb293ee0c1dd982092d (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2013-05-11T15:20:56Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Dissertacao Ilca Menezesseg.pdf: 651126 bytes, checksum: 7317e68c70bdedb293ee0c1dd982092d (MD5) Previous issue date: 2008 / A esfera pública é um tema polêmico. Desde sua origem na sociedade burguesa, o ideal de espaço discursivo e deliberativo, em que todos podem participar, fazendo uso de uma razão esclarecida, exercendo influência sobre o sistema político, é fundamental para a democracia. Mas há grupos excluídos, e a mídia de massa, que exerce influência sobre a opinião pública, com freqüência atende a interesses privados, provenientes de grupos, partidos políticos, e pessoas com poder econômico e de influência. Na sociedade contemporânea, essas questões críticas permanecem e a democracia precisa de seus fundamentos básicos. Em vista disso, Habermas pretende reabilitar o conceito de esfera pública, na complexa sociedade. Ele nunca abandona a questão do caráter normativo da comunicação pública esclarecida em relação à integração social e ao controle das ações políticas. As teorias da ação comunicativa e da ética do discurso, em Habermas, valorizam a racionalidade comunicativa, inerente à esfera pública. Essa racionalidade tem potencial normativo para a auto-regulação dos sujeitos e também para a manutenção da ordem social, porque as leis são fundamentadas através do discurso argumentativo. Habermas teoriza sobre a relação entre a normatividade da comunicação intersubjetiva e o sistema de direitos, do Estado democrático, que exerce controle sobre a sociedade civil e o Estado. A política democrática deliberativa surge dessa relação, e configura, na sociedade contemporânea, o ideal de esfera pública. / Salvador

Reader comment forums of online newspapers, a relatively new feature of online journalism, have been called spaces of public deliberation. At their inception among large newspapers just five years ago, the forums were heralded as a new way for the public to advance public dialogue by sharing opinions in an unconstrained way, promoting the democratic principles of the newspaper institution itself. Rampant incivility, however, has since become one the forums' chief defining characteristics. By content analyzing comments from online newspapers that allow anonymity, this research confirms anecdotal evidence from journalists that Latinos are regularly debased in the forums by commenters following news on immigration. This study also compares the civility of anonymous comments following news on the Tea Party movement, a non-racialized but also controversial topic. Finally, civility is measured in the comments following news on immigration from online newspapers that have disallowed anonymity. In all, more than 22,000 comments from nearly 200 news stories in more than a dozen online newspapers were collected between 2010 and 2012, and a sample of 1,350 was coded. The analysis shows that online newspaper discussion boards that allow anonymity and that follow news about immigration predominantly contain comments by those who support tough immigration laws and who express themselves with emotionally laden, uncivil comments directed at Latinos. Similar discussion boards that disallow anonymity predominantly contain comments by those who support tough immigration laws and who express themselves with emotionally laden yet civil comments directed at Latinos. Overall, this research demonstrates that a racialized topic is apt to draw more uncivil anonymous comments than a non-racialized one and that removing anonymity elevates the level of dialogue. Building on the theories of the public sphere, reduced cues in anonymity and critical race theory, this paper demonstrates that in their new role in creating a new public square of open discussion, newspapers are sometimes creating forums for hate speech while also publishing content that is perpetuating negative portrayals of Latinos. Findings reveal that a new public sphere created by online newspapers, meant to promote democracy, is actually having the opposite effect for some minority groups.

abstract: This dissertation discusses how Twitter may function not only as a tool for planning public protest, but also as a discursive site, albeit a virtual one, for staging protest itself. Much debate exists on the value and extent that Twitter (and other social media or social networking sites) can contribute to successful activism for social justice. Previously, scholars' assessments of online activism have tended to turn on a simple binary: either the activity enjoyed complete success for a social movement (for instance, during the Arab Spring an overthrow of a regime) or else the campaign was designated as a failure. In my dissertation, I examine a Twitter public-relations campaign organized by the New York Police Department using the hashtag #MyNYPD. The campaign asked citizens to tweet pictures of themselves with police officers, and the public did, just not in the way the police department envisioned. Instead of positive photos with the police, the public organized online to share pictures of police brutality and harassment. I collected six months of tweets using #MyNYPD, and then analyzed protestors' rhetorical work through three lenses: rhetorical analysis, analysis of literacy practices, and social network analysis. These analyses show, first, the complex rhetorical work required to appropriate the police department's public-service campaign for purposes that subverted its original intent; second, the wide range of literacy practices required to mobilize and to sustain public attention on data exposing police abuse; and third, the networked activity constituting the protest online. Together, these analyses show the important work achieved within this social justice campaign beyond the binary definition of successful activism. This project shows that by increasing our analytical repertoires for studying digital rhetoric and writing, scholars can more accurately acknowledge what it takes for participants to share experiential knowledge, to construct new knowledge, and to mobilize connections when engaging online in public protest. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation English 2016

My dissertation focuses on nineteenth-century American literature texts that engage with ruins and monuments. Traditionally, this interaction has been treated as a formal curiosity for literary critics, but this project argues interarts literature carries important implications for public sphere theory, especially in cases when an author writes about nationalist architecture and iconography.

Jürgen Habermas’ The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere has been described as outdated and incompatible with 21st century democracies. Among other things, Habermas’ initial formulation excluded the state from the public sphere. Recently, a revised model of the public sphere has emerged that positions the state and other law-making bodies at its centre. Although some theorists have embraced this revised model, others continue to exclude the state or oversimplify its role. While some research has examined how parliaments fit into this revised model, no research has been published on this in a Canadian context. This thesis attempts to fill this gap by answering the research question: Does the Canadian House of Commons constitute a form of the public sphere? To answer this question, the Canadian House of Commons is explored along three dimensions of the public sphere – structure, representation, and interaction. This system of classification conforms to the essential function and institutional criteria of classical theory and also accounts for revised models of the public sphere. Ultimately, this work argues that the Canadian House of Commons satisfies the structural and representational dimensions of the public sphere. Its interactional dimension, however, is found to be inconsistent with public sphere theory due to a lack of real deliberation and the pervasiveness of party politics.

Much recent scholarship celebrates the early modern period for its development of broader public political engagement through printed media and coffeehouse culture. It is the argument of this study that the formation in England under Charles II of a public sphere may be shown to have followed a reassessment of political discourse that began at Westminster during the troubled reign of that king’s father, Charles I. The narrative of parliament’s growth in this era from an “event to an institution,” as one historian describes it, tells of more than opposition to the King on the battlefields of the English Civil War. Parliament-work in the early years of England’s revolutionary decade also set new expectations for rhetorical deliberation as a means of directing policy in the House of Commons. The ideals of discursive politics that were voiced in the Short Parliament (May 1640), and more fully put into practice in the opening session of the Long Parliament (November 1640), were soon also accepted by politically-minded authors and readers outside Westminster. Prose controversy published in print and political poetry that circulated in manuscript both demonstrate that the burgeoning culture of debate outside parliament could still issue “in a parliamentary way.” Such promotion of productive textual engagements eventually constituted a wider, notional assembly, whose participants – citizen readers – were as much a product of deliberate education and fashioning as they were of the “conjuring,” “interpellation,” or “summoning” that recent scholarly vocabulary suggests. Following the spirit of reform in the English parliament, and subsequently developing through the years of partisan political writing that followed, public opinion, like the Commons, established itself in this era as an institution in its own right. These public and private assemblies disseminated the unprecedented amount of parliamentary writing and record-keeping that distinguishes the period under review, and this rich archive provides the literary and historical context for this study.

"Reading the Narcosphere: A Queer Hemispheric Critique of Narco Cultural Production," analyzes the emergence of contemporary drug politics (drug trade and drug war) as a dominant cultural narrative of the public sphere, producing what I call the narco-sphere. Drawing from theories on sexuality, subjectivity and biopolitics, I examine the intractability and interconnectedness of social relations of race, gender, and class in narco cultural production by building on critical work in social and political theory as well as narco studies. Rather than merely reflecting on the effects of the ongoing drug war, narco cultural texts about Colombia, Mexico, and the U.S.-Mexico border produce relations of power that while intending to critique drug culture and neoliberalism, reify complicit social hierarchies through discourses of difference that promote marginalization and exclusion of vulnerable subjects. Through readings of cultural texts such as Jorge Franco's Rosario Tijeras, Lourdes Portillo’s Señorita Extraviada, Fernando Vallejo's Our Lady of the Assassins, and Luis Estrada’s film El Infierno, I further demonstrate how the social relations portrayed are not simply endemic to the drug trade and the drug war but instead are deployments of power in accordance with neoliberalism and neocolonialism. Through my notion of the narco-sphere and a queer critique, I offer a more incisive way to read difference within western hemispheric cultural politics.