The power to control Discourse is the power to maintain distinct discursive practices with particular ideological agendas prevailing others, including oppositional practices (Fairclough,1995a). Media discourse thus is a powerful tool in the creation and maintenance of the hegemony of a preferred Discourse. Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) aspires to disclose discursive practices that involve unequal relations of power and aim to contribute to social change by creating more equal power relations (Jorgensen & Phillips, 2002). The present study, by using CDA, aims to understand the role of the media in the selling of the war on Iraq by looking at Time magazine articles prior to the war in contrast with President George W. Bush speeches during the same period. The major themes found were patriotism, the Discourse of fear, glorification of the army, polarization of us vs. them, the "if" Discourse and trivialization of war. The findings suggest that there is an influence from the presidential Discourse reflected in the Discourse presented by the magazine as well as some themes that are only present in the magazine and also serve to the same end of shaping the public support for the war.

An investigation into the intruder dynamics of dry dimensionless, frictionless discs in bidispersed, disordered systems is carried out using computer simulations. The velocity of an intruder particle driven under constant force is used as a tool to determine scaling of velocity as a function of packing pressure. Using these velocity for a range of pressures, $4 \times 10^{-7}\leq P \leq 4 \times 10^{-2}$. A universal scaling relation is proposed and plotted. The force required to cause the packing to yield to the driven intruder is determined and plotted as function of pressure. Power law exponents were extracted for the yielding force vs. the pressure. The extracted values were used to study the micro-rheology of the intruder particle. Grain scale characteristics are used to infer global elastic modulus properties.

Tesis para optar al grado de Magíster en Lingüística mención Lengua Española / La influencia de las ideologías lingüísticas está presente en un amplio rango de campos sociales que involucran aspectos del lenguaje, y las políticas lingüísticas y educativas no están exentas de ellas. Este estudio busca indagar en las ideologías lingüísticas subyacentes en los últimos miembros del proceso educativo, es decir los profesores y los estudiantes. Se centra específicamente en dos lenguas: por un lado en la lengua indígena mapuche y por otro lado en el inglés. El presente estudio de caso que busca responder a la interrogante de qué ideologías lingüísticas y representaciones sociales poseen profesores y estudiantes en torno a la enseñanza del inglés y al mapudungun en el Instituto Nacional en Santiago de Chile. Se entrevistaron 9 alumnos de primero medio y 3 de segundo medio y se realizaron reuniones y grupos de. Los estudiantes rondan entre los 15 y 16 años de edad. Además se entrevistó al educador tradicional del establecimiento. Los resultados permitieron mostrar que gran parte de las ideologías lingüísticas y representaciones sociales en torno a la enseñanza del inglés y del mapudungun que se desprenden de las autoridades se replican en los estudiantes y educadores. Y éstas son fundamentales a la hora de entender las relaciones que se producen entre ambas lenguas y las decisiones detrás de las políticas lingüísticas en Chile.

Past research has established that children typically learn better from live demonstrations than from 2-dimensional sources of information like video. The current dissertation investigated the efficacy of a new form of 2-dimensional learning medium, specifically the self-paced slideshow, where children advance through slides of an unfolding action sequence at their own pace. The primary purpose of this dissertation was to test whether the "video deficit effect" extends to the self-paced slideshow. In Experiment 1, children saw demonstrations of novel event sequences either live, via a video, or by advancing through a self-paced slideshow. They were then tested on their ability to perform the sequences, as well as their verbal memory for the action. Individual difference measures were also collected to provide some insight into how children's inhibitory control, theory of mind skills, and verbal ability related to their performance. Findings suggest that all children showed learning, in that children across the three learning media outperformed their peers in a no demonstration control group. In line with past work, children in the live condition outperformed those in the video and self-paced slideshow conditions at reproducing the target actions. However, children's memory did not differ across conditions. To further explore the self-paced slideshow, Experiment 2 directly compared learning from the self-paced slideshow to learning from a video. Two alterations were made to the slideshow: the method of extracting slides was altered to create a more natural flow of action, and the content of the slides was altered to help children focus more on the object than the person. Children's performance differed little between conditions, with the exception of children reproducing fewer actions in the slideshow condition on two (of four) toys. Ultimately, this dissertation documented that the video deficit effect extends to the self-paced slideshow: live demonstration produces superior learning for children. Future work should investigate at what age the self-paced slideshow might become a useful learning medium as well as how to enhance children's learning from 2D sources given the increasing role that they play in daily life.

This thesis explores the relationships and experiences that young adults have with and within complicated and always changing new media environments, such as those afforded by social media platforms and mobile media applications. By analyzing the ways in which digital realms are both open and interconnected and also marketized and restricted, this thesis explores how a contemplative approach to new media literacy pedagogy could help young adults to perceive new media from multiple, contradictory viewpoints at once, thereby supporting them in creating healthy, productive, creative, and imaginative relationships with the digital and public technologies mediating their lives, at the same time mitigating the challenges associated with commercialized, habituated new media experience. This thesis takes an auto-ethnographic approach, merging personal narratives with qualitative interpretations of where philosophies of technology, theories of media literacies, and the results of focus group studies intersect.

In the face of a shifting political climate in Latin America, movements for indigenous rights and autonomy are leveraging community media in new ways transcending the state-market binary. Through ethnographic research with Zapotec media producers in Oaxaca and the supportive organizations forming points of connection between radios and activists, I argue that the strength of the indigenous community media movement in Oaxaca, and its potential to build a movement to resist destructive state and market forces, is best explained by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s concept of the rhizome, which portrays Oaxacan indigenous media as a map of heterogeneous interconnections defying structural hierarchies and binaries. With this picture of a rhizomatic media movement, I demonstrate how radios have paved the way for innovations, revealing creative ways that indigenous groups are connecting with each other and the outside world, while asserting agency in their interactions with the market and the state.

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More recent theories of the 'revolutions' of 1989 in the societies of Eastern and Central Europe now suggest that the underlying dynamic was continuity rather than disjuncture in terms of social and political relations. Yet such theories fail to explain the nature of and the reasons for this continuity in terms of gender relations in the public sphere. The thesis suggests that the clue to understanding the nature of the gendered transformation in Poland's public sphere in its mediated aspects between the years 1980 and 1994 lies in the role of 'socially inherited memory'. Socially inherited memory is the dialectical and gendered process by which a given society both remembers and forgets past events, feelings, thoughts and knowledge through representations. The key to Poland's social memory concerns the repressed stories of political right developed during the nation's period of identity formation in the nineteenth century and interwar years. Certain aspects of this social inheritance were recalled by the Polish United Workers' Party and then by Solidarity to legitimize their power: Because Poland's social memory was formed around the public exclusion of women and Poland's ethnic minorities this resulted in the continuation of exclusionary mechanisms and public ghettoization after World War Two, and, in the 1980s and 1990s. However, the evidence of the thesis also suggests that there were sub-plots of women's resistance and inclusion within the public sphere from at least the nineteenth century onwards. Thus the exclusionary impact of socially inherited memory is not an inevitable historical process: At particular historical moments inclusive representations of women and ethnic minorities are recalled or reenacted in the form of Public organisations or alternative cultural productions. Socially inherited memory it is suggested may provide a useful concept for examining the (en)gendering of the public sphere in other societies.

Roberto Bolaño’s posthumous book 2666 is often considered his masterpiece. As it was a race against his own death, Bolaño won it while leaving a dominant statement behind, a supreme landmark of our new post-national world, where everything seems entwined (Lethem, 2008). In this five-part narrative, intertextuality plays a crucial role. The common link between all these stories is a series of murders in a Mexican city. The narrative of 2666 happens in around ten countries, and their characters are from a dozen more, with every story being somewhat tangled into a reality where violence is abundant. The references to the natural essence of evil set the atmosphere. In 2666, we have the opportunity to explore the condition of evil in a globalized world (Macaya, 2009). The aim of this dissertation is to better understand how the underlying ideologies of globalization and capitalism unify the different parts of the novel, establishing a dialogue between them, while creating a comment on our over connected postcolonial world.

The goal for this study has been to examine how sexual interactions are portrayed in the norwegian Webb and TV-series Skam. It has been done by studying different elements that are included in a scene with sexual interaction. The scenes has been studied with semiotic content analysis from a multimodal perspective. Other theroies that has been important for this study is the triangular theory of love and a theory about the meaning of music for the in narrative media.   The study aims to examine the content, the portrayal and the what message it could give the viewers of Skam. Furthermore the series outplays on several internetbased social platforms, and therefore the viewer comes closer to the characters and gets more absorbed in their lives. The result shows that sexual interactions occurs mostly between persons that is a part of a realationship based on love. Therefore the couple has built a storng emotional bond before they engage in intercourse. Which mostly occurs without verbal communication and therefore there’s music in the scene which can guide the viewer. As the series goes on the characters experienses both positive and negative sides of sexual interactions, as a result the viewer gets a more nuanced perspective about how sexual interactions can play out.