Daenerys Targaryen Will Save Spain:Game of Thrones, Politics, and the Public Sphere

2018 ◽  
Vol 20 (5) ◽  
pp. 423-442 ◽  
Author(s):  
Concepción Cascajosa Virino ◽  
Vicente Rodríguez Ortega

This article deals with the use of the American television series Game of Thrones (HBO: 2011–) as part of the political discourse of the emerging political party Podemos in Spain. First, we focus on Podemos leader, Pablo Iglesias, who, in 2014, edited a book devoted to analyzing this series from a political science viewpoint. We then move on to study ideologically charged symbolic gestures and the detailed analysis of the parallelisms between Daenerys Targaryen’s revolutionary enterprise and Podemos’s bottom-to-top quest to seize power. We then scrutinize how emergent political forces that threaten the enduring hegemony of traditional parties use popular cultural artifacts to intervene in the social fabric and how they attempt to tune in with the Internet-dedicated, socially networked younger classes. This article, thus, analyzes how the relationship between politics and serialized TV fiction has morphed within the Spanish mediascape, paying special attention to the impact of participatory culture.

Author(s):  
Guillaume Heuguet

This exploratory text starts from a doctoral-unemployed experience and was triggered by the discussions within a collective of doctoral students on this particularly ambiguous status since it is situated between student, unemployed, worker, self-entrepreneur, citizen-subject of social rights or user-commuter in offices and forms. These discussions motivated the reading and commentary of a heterogeneous set of texts on unemployment, precariousness and the functioning of the institutions of the social state. This article thus focuses on the relationship between knowledge and unemployment, as embodied in the public space, in the relationship with Pôle Emploi, and in the academic literature. It articulates a threefold problematic : what is known and said publicly about unemployment? What can we learn from the very experience of the relationship with an institution like Pôle Emploi? How can these observations contribute to an understanding of social science inquiry and the political role of knowledge fromm precariousness?


Author(s):  
Thomas Olesen

The chapter’s premise is the social contract between media and democracy, which features strongly in the professional values of Danish journalists. Media have become so central to the political process that many refer to a mediatization of politics. At the same time, research points to a crisis of journalism with declining readership, trust, and professional authority. These challenges have been set in motion at least partly by new media consumption and production patterns. The crisis of journalism prompts two questions: is it reversing the process of mediatization, and does it erode journalism’s role as democratic watchdogs in Denmark? The chapter shows that the crisis of journalism must be considered in a comparative perspective and that the Danish media system demonstrates a degree of resilience to it. It also notes, however, that traditional media have indeed lost their privileged position as organizers of the public sphere. Rather than seeing a reversal of mediatization, it makes more sense to speak of a mediatization 2.0, and rather than identifying an erosion of the media’s watchdog role, it is more accurate to say that they now share it with a host of other agents in the current hybridized media system.


2021 ◽  
pp. 0094582X2110293
Author(s):  
Tatiana Berringer

An analysis of the relationship between classes and class fractions and Mercosur under the PT (Workers’ Party) governments suggests that the transition from the open regionalism of the 1990s to the multidimensional regionalism of the 2000s and the crisis of the latter were linked to the overlap between the regional integration mechanisms Unasur and Mercosur and the social base of the neodevelopmentalist front. Multidimensional regionalism went into crisis after 2012, when the country began to suffer the impact of the 2008 financial crisis and changes in international politics and when the political process that culminated in the 2016 coup began. Uma análise da relação entre as classes e frações de classe e o Mercosul dos governos PT sugere que a transição do regionalismo aberto dos anos 1990 para o regionalismo multidimensional dos anos 2000 e a crise deste últimoestão ligados à imbricação entre os processos de integração regional, Unasur e Mercosur, e a base social da frente neodesenvolvimentista. O regionalismo multidimensional entrou em crise a partir de 2012 quando o país começou a sofrer mais o impacto da crise financeira de 2008 e das transformações na política internacional e iniciou-se o processo político que culminou no golpe de 2016.


2008 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 88-115
Author(s):  
Dietmar Neutatz

The Russian Constitutional Experiment, 1906–1918: On the Relationship between Tradition and Modernity The revolution of 1905 turned the virtually unlimited autocracy of the Russian Empire into a constitutional monarchy. However, this experiment survived the fall of the Tsar in 1917 by only a few months and was obliged to give way to the Bolshevik dictatorship. This article investigates how far the failure of constitutionalism in Russia was due to the special circumstances surrounding the crisis of 1917, or whether it is better explained by the ill-conceived application of a notion imported from Western Europe that could not be grafted onto indigenous Russian traditions. The article discusses the competing concepts of Western-style parliamentarianism on the one hand and a ‹Russian› ideal of direct popular representation on the other (i.e. the ‹Zemskij Sobor› dating from the era before Peter the Great). It investigates the constraints within which the State Duma worked, and the social and political practice of Russian constitutionalism between 1906 and 1918, in order to analyse how deeply rooted constitutional concepts were in late Tsarist society. Special attention is paid to the following themes: the capacity of the Duma to address practical problems; the changing character of political culture; new forms of the public sphere and the growth of civil society; the relationship between parliament and the peasantry; the activities of both supporters of a parliamentary order and their right- and left-wing opponents; and finally the importance of ‹Russian›-style counter-proposals to ‹Western›-style constitutionalism during the crisis years of 1917/18.


Hypatia ◽  
2000 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 163-174
Author(s):  
Eduardo Mendieta

María Pía Lara's two books, La Democracia como proyecto de identidad ética and Moral Textures: Feminist Narratives in the Public Sphere are described and analyzed. Her contribution to a feminist left-Habermasian theory of the relationship between the aesthetic dimension and the political imaginary are discussed. Questions and concerns, however, are raised regarding the assumptions of universal pragmatics and Lara's attempt to offer a positive reading of the dependence of the political imaginary on literary acts and genres.


2008 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 255-265 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian Greener

‘Choice’ and ‘voice’ are two of the most significant means through which the public are able to participate in public services. Choice agendas position public service users as consumers, driving improvements by choosing good providers over bad, which then thrive through greater allocations of funds as money follows their selections (Le Grand, 2007). Choice-driven reforms tend to be about trying to make public services more locally responsive (Ferlie, Freeman, McDonnell, Petsoulas and Rundle-Smith, 2006). Voice-driven reforms, on the other hand, tend to position public service users as citizens, suggesting an emphasis on accountability mechanisms to drive service improvements through elections, with the possible removal of low regarded officials, or a greater involvement of local people in the running of services (Jenkins, 2006). Voice implies that citizens hold the right to participate in public services either through the political process, or through their direct involvement in the running or delivery of the services themselves. Of course, it is also possible to combine choice and voice mechanisms to try and achieve greater service responsiveness and accountability. In this review, choice reforms will be treated as those which are based upon consumer literature, and voice reforms those based upon attempting to achieve greater citizenship.Citizenship and consumption are two areas with significant literatures in their own right, but whereas the citizenship literature is widely cited in the social policy literature, the consumption literature appears rather more selectively. This review examines each area in turn in terms of its application to social policy, and then presents a synthesis of commonalties in the two literatures, which represent particularly promising avenues for exploring the relationship between public services and their users.


2021 ◽  
Vol 03 (04) ◽  
pp. 221-231
Author(s):  
Youness HABBACH

This research aims at analysing the pragmatic prominent discourse in the public sphere, the digital sphere in particular, that reflects special changes in the society. The meant discourse has not been investigated adequately and sufficiently namely the social, the political and the digital virtual discourses which bear an effective semantic and pragmatic power on the public space and at the same time incorporate strong transformations in the values patterns. This study utilizes a pragmatic approach, since the pragmatics is a study of using language in communication, and works on analysing daily discourses using a journalistic editorial. So, what are the changes reflected by this discourse? And what are the values represented and expressed by the prevailing discourses in the public sphere?


Author(s):  
Fauzia Ghani, Bushra Ghani

Madrassa system in Pakistan is providing an alternative mean to education. In Pakistan, different education systems are involved in developing different kinds of social and political beliefs. The most influential of which is madrassa system that is directly affecting the process of political socialization. Being an Islamic state, this system was given much importance after the independence of Pakistan. Islamization policy made religious education more significant. At that time, religious extremism was also increasing in the country. After 9/11 and Enlightenment policy, madrassa system became a controversial system in the world and in Pakistan as well. People now perceive madrassa system as a place of spreading terrorism and extremism. Though, not all the madrassa in Pakistan are involved in extremist militant activities. Most of the madrassas are spreading peace and harmony in the society. This research aims at to analyze the perception of people about madrassa on local and global level. And the most important point is analyzing the impact of madrassa education on its students. But the question arises how does madrassa education is involved in spreading extremism and effecting the social and political beliefs of every individual in the society. The nature of research methodology is qualitative and research design used is content analysis. In this research, the relationship between madrassa education and political socialization is developed where it is directly and indirectly influencing each other and the public specifically. Though, result shows that people still think of Madrassa system as a negative system but now studies show that there are some good and peace loving madrassa as well. But since the religious political parties are affiliated with madrassas, the social and political beliefs are also shaped according to the policies made by religious leaders and Ulma’s showing that religion effects society and politics to a great extent.  


Author(s):  
Leonida Tedoldi

This article rethinks the political and institutional causes of the rapid debt growth and its exploitation in the italian “blocked” political system (so-called “First Republic”). Italian State has always lived above its means, with a constant imbalance between income and expenditure and at the same time expanding its distance with respect to society (but the debt was paid by social groups that took advantage of it). This process triggered off a perennial crisis of representation and strengthened the instability of relations between political institutions and society. Therefore, sovereign debt downturns are always crises of institutional legitimization and require a redefinition of the ways in which sovereignty and power are exercised. Thus, the article investigates the impact of the “political use” of the public debt by governments on the relationship between the State and society.


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