Resistance Performances: (Re)constructing Spaces of Resistance and Contention in the 2010-2011 University of Puerto Rico Student Movement

On the night of April 20, 2010, a group of students from the University of Puerto Rico (UPR), Río Piedras campus, met to organize an indefinite strike that quickly broadened into a defense of accessible public higher education of excellence as a fundamental right and not a privilege. Although the history of student activism in the UPR can be traced back to the early 1900s, the 2010-2011 strike will be remembered for the student activists’ use of new media technologies as resources that rapidly prompted and aided the numerous protests. This activist research entailed a critical ethnography and a critical discourse analysis (CDA) of traditional and alternative media coverage and treatment during the 2010 -2011 UPR student strike. I examined the use of the 2010-2011 UPR student activists’ resistance performances in constructing local, corporeal, and virtual spaces of resistance and contention during their movement. In particular, I analyzed the different tactics and strategies of resistance or repertoire of collective actions that student activists used (e.g. new media technologies) to frame their collective identities via alternative news media’s (re)presentation of the strike, while juxtaposing the university administration’s counter-resistance performances in counter-framing the student activists’ collective identity via traditional news media representations of the strike. I illustrated how both traditional and alternative media (re)presentations of student activism developed, maintained, and/or modified students activists’ collective identities. As such, the UPR student activism’s success should not be measured by the sum of demands granted, but by the sense of community achieved and the establishment of networks that continue to create resistance and change. These networks add to the debate surrounding Internet activism and its impact on student activism. Ultimately, the results of this study highlight the important role student movements have had in challenging different types of government policies and raising awareness of the importance of an accessible public higher education of excellence.

O envelhecimento no espaço midiático: a produção de sentidos pelos meios jornalísticos

Aging as a social phenomenon is guided in the ways of production and reproduction, that is linked to the peculiarities and compliances of the social structure influence the values and erected senses. The search for the understanding of the reality will be given by the appropriation of knowledge/information that in contemporary times are increasingly tied to the media means, so that they go beyond the mere condition media, reaching the condition of instruments of direct, attitudes and opinions production. Among the media instruments, there are news medias, that are important means of information dissemination and consequently production of senses, including over aging. Thus, the objective is to: apprehend the social representations and meanings associated with aging in the media space about aging; browse the social representations about aging in media space and their influence on the relations that are established in the cultural socio-economic context. To do it The Theory of Social Representation will be used. To collect the data, 57 online news from the three main state newspapers were studied: Tribuna do Norte, Gazeta do Povo and Jornal de Hoje, which were captured through a search tol of these newspaper sites, using the words: “aging””elderly”. These materials were analyzed making use of Bardin’s Qualitative Analysis, which allowed the establishment of five categories, namely: Aging and violence; Aging in contemporary times; Aging and health; Aging and citizenship; and Aging, work and action. In the first category news reporting violent situations are framed the regardless of the victim’s condition or the one charged by the violence, the fragility of elderly persists. In Aging in contemporary times the attempts of the news media to explain the demographic changes of the quantitative increases in the elderly, the burden it may lead to the full development of the country are noticed. In Aging and health is noticed the imminent end of the condition brought on age, as a synonym for diseases and conditions. In the fourth category, Aging and citizenship situations are shown where peculiarities and needs or the elderly need to turn into obligation to be fulfilled, denouncing the condition of low expression and social power of the class. Finally, in Aging, work and action situations that indicate the non-expectation of elderly interaction with new technologies and participation in decision-making directions of society are brought. In a general and specific form this analysis allowed learning the ways of production of meanings about aging in the papers, as these ones tend to represent aging through intentioned situations as hegemonic needs, building the social representation of the elderly as fragile person, submissive, inactive, subject to violence and susceptible to becoming ill.

Managing Vietnamese newsrooms: the role of internal communication

There have been many studies on news production but little has been found about newsroom efficiency despite the fact that this is journalists’ main concern. The very few (mostly foreign) researchers who study Vietnamese media usually look at them from policy making and political-social perspectives, and with an outsider’s eye. They have little physical access, if any, to the media houses, which surely limits their view. Their approach implicitly over-emphasizes the influence of political forces and neglects the media’s own dynamics. This research takes a different approach: from insiders’ point of view. Using two daily newspapers as case studies, this multi-disciplinary ethnographic research seeks to understand the strategies Vietnamese news media employ to cope with the subsidy cuts and increasing competition while still under close political control. A particular focus is on the newsroom operational strategies to improve efficiency. It is found that organizational structure and culture, work climate, motivation and employee satisfaction, leadership and management styles, personnel policies (task requirements vs personal abilities and skills), systems/policies and procedures, and most importantly, communication are the factors that affect the newsroom efficiency, as well as newsroom strategy implementation and results.

Looking for Determinants of Ontological Security in the Spain of the Crisis

The concept of ontological security has a remarkable echo in the current sociology to describe emotional status of men of late modernity. However, the concept created by Giddens in the eighties has been little used in empirical research covering various sources of risk or uncertainty. In this paper, a scale for ontological security is proposed. To do this, we start from the results of a research focused on the relationship between risk, uncertainty and vulnerability in the context of the economic crisis in Spain. These results were produced through nine focus groups and a telephone survey with standardized questionnaire applied to a national sample of 2,408 individuals over 18 years. This work is divided into three main sections. In the fi rst, a scale has been built from the results of the application of different items present in the questionnaire used. The second part explores the relationships of the scale obtained with the variables further approximate the emotional dimensions of individuals. The third part observes the variables that contribute to changes in the scale: These variables show the structural feature of the ontological security.

Prensa escrita mendocina y construcción identitaria sobre los pueblos originarios de Argentina

En el siguiente trabajo presentamos un estudio multidimensional sobre la conceptualización de los pueblos originarios que han constituido los medios de prensa escrita en Mendoza durante la primera década del siglo XX. Para llevarlo a cabo acudimos al Archivo de Hemeroteca de la Biblioteca General San Martín de la Ciudad de Mendoza, teniendo como referencia al Diario Los Andes, principal periódico de la provincia, creado en 1882 y vigente en la actualidad. El objetivo del estudio es la identificación de las distintas formas de construcción conceptual sobre los pueblos etnográficos del actual territorio argentino que difundió dicho diario, y del modo en que dichos artículos periodísticos jugaron un rol activo en relación con el proceso de construcción de alteridad sociocultural y la legitimación de las políticas etnocidas implementadas por las clases dominantes.

EuroNews - europejska stacja telewizyjna?

Przegląd Politologiczny

A full report of the proceedings of the ... annual conference of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.

Includes a Report of the Exerciese in the Salt Lake Assembly Hall.

La influencia del discurso sobre cambio social en la agenda de los medios. El caso de la Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca

Los movimientos sociales son uno de los motores del cambio social. Organizaciones como la Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca (PAH) denuncian injusticias y cuestionan la construcción de significados sociales a través del discurso. Impulsan estrategias de automediación para, especialmente a través de las redes sociales, influir en la agenda mediática y el debate público. Mediante un análisis crítico del discurso cualitativo, nuestro objetivo es conocer si la PAH introduce sus temas y encuadres en la agenda mediática. Los resultados demuestran que este movimiento activista logra condicionar de qué se habla y también cómo se habla, obteniendo una cobertura favorable.

The Discursive Construction of Japanese Identity and its Haunting Others

This dissertation examined the formation of Japanese identity politics after World War II. Since World War II, Japan has had to deal with a contradictory image of its national self. On the one hand, as a nation responsible for colonizing fellow Asian countries in the 1930s and 1940s, Japan has struggled with an image/identity as a regional aggressor. On the other hand, having faced the harsh realities of defeat after the war, Japan has seen itself depicted as a victim. By employing the technique of discourse analysis as a way to study identity formation through official foreign policy documents and news media narratives, this study reconceptualized Japanese foreign policy as a set of discursive practices that attempt to produce renewed images of Japan’s national self. The dissertation employed case studies to analyze two key sites of Japanese postwar identity formation: (1) the case of Okinawa, an island/territory integral to postwar relations between Japan and the United States and marked by a series of US military rapes of native Okinawan girls; and (2) the case of comfort women in Japan and East Asia, which has led to Japan being blamed for its wartime sexual enslavement of Asian women. These case studies found that it was through coping with the haunting ghost of its wartime past that Japan sought to produce “postwar Japan” as an identity distinct from “wartime imperial Japan” or from “defeated, emasculated Japan” and, thus, hoped to emerge as a “reborn” moral and pacifist nation. The research showed that Japan struggled to invent a new self in a way that mobilized gendered dichotomies and, furthermore, created “others” who were not just spatially located (the United States, Asian neighboring nations) but also temporally marked (“old Japan”). The dissertation concluded that Japanese foreign policy is an ongoing struggle to define the Japanese national self vis-à-vis both spatial and historical “others,” and that, consequently, postwar Japan has always been haunted by its past self, no matter how much Japan’s foreign policy discourses were trying to make this past self into a distant or forgotten other.

Resistance performances: (Re)constructing spaces of resistance and contention in the 2010-2011 University of Puerto Rico student movement

On the night of April 20, 2010, a group of students from the University of Puerto Rico (UPR), Río Piedras campus, met to organize an indefinite strike that quickly broadened into a defense of accessible public higher education of excellence as a fundamental right and not a privilege. Although the history of student activism in the UPR can be traced back to the early 1900s, the 2010-2011 strike will be remembered for the student activists’ use of new media technologies as resources that rapidly prompted and aided the numerous protests. ^ This activist research entailed a critical ethnography and a critical discourse analysis (CDA) of traditional and alternative media coverage and treatment during the 2010 -2011 UPR student strike. I examined the use of the 2010-2011 UPR student activists’ resistance performances in constructing local, corporeal, and virtual spaces of resistance and contention during their movement. In particular, I analyzed the different tactics and strategies of resistance or repertoire of collective actions that student activists used (e.g. new media technologies) to frame their collective identities via alternative news media’s (re)presentation of the strike, while juxtaposing the university administration’s counter-resistance performances in counter-framing the student activists’ collective identity via traditional news media representations of the strike. I illustrated how both traditional and alternative media (re)presentations of student activism developed, maintained, and/or modified students activists’ collective identities. ^ As such, the UPR student activism’s success should not be measured by the sum of demands granted, but by the sense of community achieved and the establishment of networks that continue to create resistance and change. These networks add to the debate surrounding Internet activism and its impact on student activism. Ultimately, the results of this study highlight the important role student movements have had in challenging different types of government policies and raising awareness of the importance of an accessible public higher education of excellence.^

Policy directive

The purpose of this policy is to facilitate the flow of information between the South Carolina Department of Public Safety, the news media and the general public, while protecting the rights of both the defendants and the prosecuting authorities in pending cases from exposure to prejudicial publicity. The DPS is committed to and recognizes the right of the general public and the news media to be fully and accurately informed about all matters of public interest regarding DPS. This policy will assure that the release of information meets the needs of the general public and news media without infringing on an individual’s right to privacy or interfering with the process of conducting a fair and impartial trial.

Democracy, participation and convergent media : case studies in contemporary online news journalism in Australia

The shift from 20th century mass communications media towards convergent media and Web 2.0 has raised the possibility of a renaissance of the public sphere, based around citizen journalism and participatory media culture. This paper will evaluate such claims both conceptually and empirically. At a conceptual level, it is noted that the question of whether media democratization is occurring depends in part upon how democracy is understood, with some critical differences in understandings of democracy, the public sphere and media citizenship. The empirical work in this paper draws upon various case studies of new developments in Australian media, including online-only newspapers, developments in public service media, and the rise of commercially based online alternative media. It is argued that participatory media culture is being expanded if understood in terms of media pluralism, but that implications for the public sphere depend in part upon how media democratization is defined.

Democracy, participation and convergent media : case studies in contemporary online news journalism in Australia

The shift from 20th century mass communications media towards convergent media and Web 2.0 has raised the possibility of a renaissance of the public sphere, based around citizen journalism and participatory media culture. This paper will evaluate such claims both conceptually and empirically. At a conceptual level, it is noted that the question of whether media democratization is occurring depends in part upon how democracy is understood, with some critical differences in understandings of democracy, the public sphere and media citizenship. The empirical work in this paper draws upon various case studies of new developments in Australian media, including online- only newspapers, developments in public service media, and the rise of commercially based online alternative media. It is argued that participatory media culture is being expanded if understood in terms of media pluralism, but that implications for the public sphere depend in part upon how media democratization is defined.

Democracy, participation and convergent media : case studies in contemporary online news journalism in Australia

The shift from 20th century mass communications media towards convergent media and Web 2.0 has raised the possibility of a renaissance of the public sphere, based around citizen journalism and participatory media culture. This paper will evaluate such claims both conceptually and empirically. At a conceptual level, it is noted that the question of whether media democratization is occurring depends in part upon how democracy is understood, with some critical differences in understandings of democracy, the public sphere and media citizenship. The empirical work in this paper draws upon various case studies of new developments in Australian media, including online- only newspapers, developments in public service media, and the rise of commercially based online alternative media. It is argued that participatory media culture is being expanded if understood in terms of media pluralism, but that implications for the public sphere depend in part upon how media democratization is defined.