scholarly journals E-scaping apartheid: Digital ventures of Zionist settler colonialism

2021 ◽  
pp. 194277862110557
Author(s):  
Ivana Bevilacqua
Keyword(s):  
Media Coverage ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
Massive Data ◽  
Data Traffic ◽  
International Media ◽  
Terra Nullius ◽  
Global Pandemic ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
A Site ◽  
Geospatial Mapping

The ongoing “Intifada of Unity” against Israel's settler colonialism has resuscitated discussions about the liberatory potential of digital emancipation due to the massive data traffic circulation through its international media coverage. In fact, in a process that has intensified since the outbreak of the global pandemic at the very least, social media platforms and geospatial mapping tools have been subverted from more mundane uses, developing into new forums for organizing, imagining, and practicing more just futures. Yet, the centrality of infrastructure both as a means of digital extractivism and as a site for rupture and resistance demonstrates that the path toward new trajectories of e-scaping cannot be conceived as a virtual venture directed at designing alternative volatile geographies alone, but should always involve facing and challenging power in its everyday forms. By investigating the materiality of cyber colonialism, this paper explores the entanglement between imperial cartography and digital map-making which has reduced Palestinians and their space to a pixelated terra nullius, sanitized from the paradigmatic sites of the occupation and overwritten by a pseudo-biblical narrative that aims to legitimize the re-indigenization of the Zionist settlers . At the same time, it unpacks online processes of hyper-visibility through which Palestine suddenly materializes as a signifier for its dangerous nature, yet fragmented and enclaved by an intangible and discretional regime of im/mobility enforced through the neglect of permits and visas, as well as by the material constraints posed by apartheid roads, barriers, checkpoints, gates, and walls. Finally, it retraces the rationality of Israeli violence diluted through the technical means of built environment, infrastructure, machines and algorithms which, on one hand, contributes to the de-development of Palestine and the censorship of its people, and on the other, normalizes Israel’s position in the region due to its perceived technological superiority vis-à-vis its neighboring counterparts.

The Critical Risk of Disinformation for Humanitarians – The Case of the MV Aquarius

2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 28-39
Author(s):  
Sean Healy ◽  
Victoria Russell
Keyword(s):  
Media Coverage ◽  
Asylum Seekers ◽  
Criminal Activity ◽  
Search And Rescue ◽  
State Agencies ◽  
Far Right ◽  
Conspiracy Theories ◽  
Mainstream Media ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
A Site

The search and rescue of refugees, asylum seekers and migrants on the Mediterranean has become a site of major political contestation in Europe, on the seas, in parliaments and government offices and in online public opinion. This article summarises one particular set of controversies, namely, false claims that the non-government organisations conducting such search and rescue operations are actively ‘colluding’ with people smugglers to ferry people into Europe. In spring and summer 2017, these claims of ‘collusion’ emerged from state agencies and from anti-immigration groups, became viral on social media platforms and rapidly moved into mainstream media coverage, criminal investigations by prosecutors and the speech and laws of politicians across the continent. These claims were in turn connected to far-right conspiracy theories about ‘flooding’ Europe with ‘invaders’. By looking at the experience of one particular ship, the MV Aquarius, run in partnership by MSF and SOS Méditerranée, the authors detail the risks that humanitarian organisations now face from such types of disinformation campaign. If humanitarian organisations do not prepare themselves against this risk, they will find themselves in a world turned upside-down, in which their efforts to help people in distress become evidence of criminal activity.

scholarly journals Cultures of Abuse: ‘Sex Grooming’, Organised Abuse and Race in Rochdale, UK

2015 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 50-64 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Salter ◽  
Selda Dagistanli
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Abuse ◽  
Sexual Violence ◽  
Media Coverage ◽  
Cultural Norms ◽  
Power Dynamics ◽  
Children At Risk ◽  
Minority Communities ◽  
International Media ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Racial Issues

Revelations of organised abuse by men of Asian heritage in the United Kingdom have become a recurrent feature of international media coverage of sexual abuse in recent years. This paper reflects on the similarities between the highly publicised ‘sex grooming’ prosecutions in Rochdale in 2012 and the allegations of organised abuse in Rochdale that emerged in 1990, when twenty children were taken into care after describing sadistic abuse by their parents and others. While these two cases differ in important aspects, this paper highlights the prominence of colonial ideologies of civilisation and barbarism in the investigation and media coverage of the two cases and the sublimation of the issue of child welfare. There are important cultural and normative antecedents to sexual violence but these have been misrepresented in debates over organised abuse as racial issues and attributed to ethnic minority communities. In contrast, the colonialist trope promulgating the fictional figure of the rational European has resulted in the denial of the cultural and normative dimensions of organised abuse in ethnic majority communities by attributing sexual violence to aberrant and sexually deviant individuals whose behaviours transgress the boundaries of accepted cultural norms. This paper emphasises how the implicit or explicit focus on race has served to obscure the power dynamics underlying both cases and the continuity of vulnerability that places children at risk of sexual and organised abuse.

scholarly journals COVID-19 Social Media Information and Misinformation: a Geospatial Analysis of Inter-regional Tweet Disparities in Ghana

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richmond Takyi Hinneh ◽  
Alex Barimah Owusu
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Information Dissemination ◽  
Accurate Information ◽  
False Information ◽  
Global Pandemic ◽  
Study Results ◽  
Other Information ◽  
Spatial Differences ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Precautionary Measures

Abstract BackgroundIn an era of the global pandemic and social media dominance, trying to control the narrative on COVID-19 has been a challenging task for most governments particularly with news about the disease on various social media platforms. There have even been instances where people have sent false information about the number of confirmed cases, precautionary measures, drugs that boost the immune system which can threaten the lives of some users who are accessing this false information and misconceptions.Method This study analyzed spatial differences in Twitter misinformation on COVID-19 across 16 regions of Ghana by scraping 1,167 tweets from Twitter using API access. A total of 514 tweets were analyzed. The data were categorized into three namely; accurate information, misinformation, and other information. ResultsThe study results show that 72% of the tweets were accurate, 14% were misinformation and 14% represented other information. Among the regions, Greater Accra had the highest number of accurate information (45 tweets), and the Upper West Region recording the highest number of misinformation (12 tweets).ConclusionSpatial monitoring and management of information dissemination are useful for target setting and achievement of direct results in terms of diffusing misinformation and propagating accurate information. We, therefore, recommend official usage of Twitter for COVID-19 information dissemination as this usage will help offset possible misinformation from unformed individuals.

scholarly journals News Narratives across Borders: The Convergence of Interests and Patterns of Meaning in International Media Coverage of Disaster

2021 ◽  
pp. 207-225
Author(s):  
Jamie Matthews
Keyword(s):  
Media Coverage ◽  
News Coverage ◽  
Japanese Culture ◽  
National Context ◽  
International News ◽  
Global Media ◽  
International Media ◽  
Western Discourse ◽  
Recent Case Study ◽  
Mediation Processes

Shared narratives emerge across transnational news, circulating meaning and contributing to how publics process and make sense of significant issues and events (Cottle, 2014; Pantti, Wahl-Jorgensen, Cottle, 2012). These narratives are also reflected in the spaces made possible by digital communication technologies, including social media, and the through the formation of transnational discursive communities. Disasters, or at least those that meet the criteria of proximity for Western media (Benthall, 1993; Gans, 1980), are exemplars of such global media events, where analogous narratives or frames are rendered in media coverage across national borders. The evidence from studies of national media, however, suggests that journalistic narratives to disaster tend to reinforce a discourse of difference between spectators and sufferers through the representations of those communities and societies affected by disaster (Bankoff, 2011; Joye, 2009). This chapter considers how difference is reinforced in transnational news narratives of disaster through the circulation of cultural stereotypes, arguing that the prominence of stereotypes are a consequence of the processes of domestication that shape the characteristics of news and the dominant news flows in the global media system. More specifically, that to enable accounts to resonate with audiences, news is often packaged and adapted to a national context (Gurevitch, Levy and Roeh, 1992), which can be achieved by using familiar images of different societies and cultures to provide a link for audiences when covering distant events (Tanikawa, 2017). At the same time, as news and information becomes increasingly deterritorialised the overlaying of cultural frames to inform and explain a disaster in one national context may evolve across media coverage in others, contributing to the development of shared narratives to a single event. This is facilitated, for example, by the flow of information from news agencies and international news organisations, in particular those emanating from the core (the West) to the periphery (Wu, 2003). To elucidate these mediation processes across borders, the chapter will draw on one recent case study of disaster journalism to consider how essentialist notions of Japanese culture emerged as a unified narrative across international news coverage of the tripartite disaster of March 2011, reflecting its position as a dominant Western discourse on Japan.

scholarly journals For lack of a better word: neo-identities in non-cisgender, non-straight communities on Tumblr

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christine Feraday
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Academic Research ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Creation ◽  
A Site

Non-cisgender and non-straight identity language has long been a site of contention and evolution. There has been an increase in new non-cisgender, non-straight identity words since the creation of the internet, thanks to social media platforms like Tumblr. Tumblr in particular has been host to many conversations about identity and self-naming, though these conversations have not yet been the subject of much academic research. Through interviews and analysis of Tumblr posts, this thesis examines the emergence of new identity words, or neo-identities, used by non-cisgender and non-straight users of Tumblr. The work presents neo-identities as strategies for resisting and challenging cisheteronormative conceptions of gender and attraction, as well as sources of comfort and relief for non-cisgender/non-straight people who feel ‘broken’ and excluded from mainstream identity categories. This thesis also posits that Tumblr is uniquely suited for conversations about identity because of its potential for self-expression, community, and anonymity.

Downs Meets the Press: How Party Systems Shape the News

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew A. Baum ◽  
Philip B. K. Potter
Keyword(s):  
Political Parties ◽  
Government Policy ◽  
Media Coverage ◽  
Party Systems ◽  
International Media ◽  
The Press ◽  
Content Analyses ◽  
Multiparty Systems

This chapter examines the validity of the “Downsian Premise,” which states that democratic multiparty systems tend to engender political coverage that is more diverse, more policy-centric, and more prone to challenge the government's policy line than coverage in two-party democracies. To test this proposition, the chapter conducts content analyses of international media coverage of four recent multinational conflicts (Kosovo 1999, Afghanistan 2001, Iraq 2003, and Libya 2011). Newspapers in countries with more political parties offered relatively more policy-oriented news, more criticism of government policy, and more varied topical coverage than their counterparts in countries with fewer parties. These results lend credence to the Downsian Premise.

scholarly journals Transcriptional and proteomic insights into the host response in fatal COVID-19 cases

2020 ◽  
Vol 117 (45) ◽  
pp. 28336-28343 ◽  
Author(s):  
Meng Wu ◽  
Yaobing Chen ◽  
Han Xia ◽  
Changli Wang ◽  
Chin Yee Tan ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Lung Tissue ◽  
Host Response ◽  
Drug Targets ◽  
Potential Role ◽  
Host Responses ◽  
Human Lung Tissue ◽  
Proteomics Analysis ◽  
Global Pandemic ◽  
A Site ◽  
Potential Drug Targets

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), the global pandemic caused by SARS-CoV-2, has resulted thus far in greater than 933,000 deaths worldwide; yet disease pathogenesis remains unclear. Clinical and immunological features of patients with COVID-19 have highlighted a potential role for changes in immune activity in regulating disease severity. However, little is known about the responses in human lung tissue, the primary site of infection. Here we show that pathways related to neutrophil activation and pulmonary fibrosis are among the major up-regulated transcriptional signatures in lung tissue obtained from patients who died of COVID-19 in Wuhan, China. Strikingly, the viral burden was low in all samples, which suggests that the patient deaths may be related to the host response rather than an active fulminant infection. Examination of the colonic transcriptome of these patients suggested that SARS-CoV-2 impacted host responses even at a site with no obvious pathogenesis. Further proteomics analysis validated our transcriptome findings and identified several key proteins, such as the SARS-CoV-2 entry-associated protease cathepsins B and L and the inflammatory response modulator S100A8/A9, that are highly expressed in fatal cases, revealing potential drug targets for COVID-19.

scholarly journals A global pandemic is not a good time to introduce ‘opt-out’ for organ donation

2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 155-166
Author(s):  
Jordan A. Parsons ◽  
Greg Moorlock
Keyword(s):  
Organ Donation ◽  
Media Coverage ◽  
Public Awareness ◽  
Good Time ◽  
Organ Donors ◽  
Resuscitation Orders ◽  
Global Pandemic ◽  
Opt Out ◽  
The Impact ◽  
New System

Following several international examples, England introduced a system of deemed consent for organ donation in May 2020. This had been planned for over a year. However, the unprecedented circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic raise issues that make the timing of this change unfortunate. The planned public awareness campaign has thus far been overshadowed by media coverage of the pandemic, and will likely continue to be, creating a situation in which a significant portion of the population may be unaware of having become potential organ donors. Further, the immediate impact of the new policy is likely to be significantly weakened by the suspension of the majority of organ donation and transplant activity. In this article, we first outline the details of the new model introduced in England, before considering the impact of the pandemic on transplantation services. We put forward three ethical reasons why, given the unprecedented circumstances, the change should have been postponed. We argue that (1) COVID-19 dominating headlines will prevent widespread awareness of the change, thereby undermining the autonomy of those who do not wish to be donors; (2) a lack of transplant activity during the pandemic will make the impact of the change difficult to measure; and (3) trust in the new system may be damaged given controversial decisions regarding Do Not Attempt Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation orders and the allocation of scarce intensive care resources. These reasons combined make for a shaky start at best and present a risk of the new system failing to achieve its desired and essential effect of increasing the number of voluntary organ donors.

Where the Fault Lies: Representations of Addiction in Audience Reactions to Media Coverage of the Opioid Epidemic

2020 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 83-102
Author(s):  
David Russell ◽  
Kelly M. Thames ◽  
Naomi J. Spence ◽  
Callie M. Koeval
Keyword(s):  
Media Coverage ◽  
Opioid Epidemic ◽  
Structural Factors ◽  
Contributing Factors ◽  
Public Attention ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
The Media ◽  
Facebook Pages ◽  
Overdose Deaths ◽  
The U.S

The unprecedented number of deaths in the U.S. attributed to opioids has been referred to as an “epidemic of addiction.” Media coverage of the epidemic has stoked public discussion of addiction on social media platforms. This article describes how addiction is represented in comments on media coverage of the “opioid epidemic” and examines the relationship between media framing and audience representations of addiction. Content analysis methods were applied to data obtained from news posts ( n = 397) and comments ( n = 2,836) on the Facebook pages of 42 newspapers in Ohio, where overdose deaths are among the highest in the U.S. Eleven percent of comments were identified as referencing addiction ( n = 319). These comments were classified into two overarching categories: (1) support, disease, and contributing factors expressed support for persons affected by the epidemic, represented addiction as a disease requiring treatment, and highlighted social and structural factors seen as contributing to the epidemic (61.1% of comments referencing addiction); and (2) misdirected attention and individual blame questioned the media focus on addiction and overdose deaths, highlighted individual choices to misuse opioids, and suggested that media coverage of the epidemic diverts attention away from other social problems viewed as being more worthy of public attention (38.9% of comments). Representations of addiction in comments were found to be independent of (not associated with) frames in media coverage ( p = .945). Together, these results suggest that while a majority of commenters represent addiction as a legitimate social problem that warrants intervention and support, a substantial minority are dismissive of the epidemic, express anger and disdain for persons who use opioids, and seek to counter popular narratives of social and structural factors contributing to addiction.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document