Gendered Narratives of Mobility

2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
pp. 323-341 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara Grossman-Thompson

In the last 30 years women have been making significant inroads into Nepal's public sphere, troubling long-held normative assumptions about women's place in modern Nepal. In this article I examine the discursive strategies that working-class Nepali women employ to justify and legitimate their presence in Nepal's urban public spaces and simultaneously claim an identity as a modern Nepali woman. Drawing on an ethnographic case study of one group of publicly visible women, female trekking guides, I provide a close analysis of how spatial language is leveraged by both state actors and informants to articulate multiple, sometimes conflicting, messages about Nepali women's “place” in contemporary society. In particular, I focus on the use of spatial metaphors, showing how informants use terms such as inside, outside, forward, and backward to locate themselves within narratives of modernity, development, and national progress. I conclude by showing that unlike women in other examples from the global South, who have framed their emergent presence in the public sphere as an extension of a traditionally feminine and domestic role, informants in the present case study appropriate a masculine language of overt publicness and mobility to justify their visibility. In so doing, informants author themselves as agents of modernity rather than objects of the state's development efforts.

Author(s):  
Rachel Baarda ◽  
Rocci Luppicini

Ethical challenges that technology poses to the different spheres of society are a core focus within the field of technoethics. Over the last few years, scholars have begun to explore the ethical implications of new digital technologies and social media, particularly in the realms of society and politics. A qualitative case study was conducted on Barack Obama's campaign social networking site, my.barackobama.com, in order to investigate the ways in which the website uses or misuses digital technology to create a healthy participatory democracy. For an analysis of ethical and non-ethical ways to promote participatory democracy online, the study included theoretical perspectives such as the role of the public sphere in a participatory democracy and the effects of political marketing on the public sphere. The case study included a content analysis of the website and interviews with members of groups on the site. The study's results are explored in this chapter.


Author(s):  
Judith Bessant

This chapter presents a case study of Facu Diaz, a Spanish satirist whose on-line ridicule of the Spanish government created a political furor that brought him before the courts. The chapter engages the problem of the criminalization of political dissent by liberal states in the digital age. The case highlights how digital media is now being used to create content for satire, as well as to replicate and infiltrate more traditional political and media forums, changing many traditional forms of political practice. The case [points to some of the central problems inherent in liberalism which may give reason to curb the enthusiasm of those who think that new digital media creates fresh opportunities for augmenting the ‘public sphere'. It is argued that liberalism as a political theory and ethos, tends to be blind to non-traditional political expressions like satire and other artistic work. In addition, the expansion of security laws in many countries suggests, liberalism's ostensible commitment to freedom needs to be reframed by recalling its historical preoccupation with security.


2014 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 57-81
Author(s):  
Oriol Poveda

Through a case study of the Facebook page of a Jewish Orthodox environmental project based in Germany, this paper explores the ways in which religion and modernity might be made compatible and what role digital media plays in such interaction. On the basis of the empirical material gathered for this paper, the author presents a typology of religious-environmental processes of hybridization. The analysis draws from the concepts of multiple modernities, public religions and religious branding in order to discuss whether the combination of religion and modernity is enabled or compromised by the collapsing of boundaries between the public sphere and the marketplace in late modern societies. The findings suggest that Facebook and its affordances make possible the particular intersections of religion and environmentalism, of public sphere and marketplace, that are characteristic of the case under study.


2007 ◽  
Vol 14 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephanie Ho

Blogging is a twenty-first century phenomenon that has heralded an age where ordinary people can make their voices heard in the public sphere of the Internet. This article explores blogging as a form of popular history making; the blog as a public history document; and how blogging is transforming the nature of public history and practice of history making in Singapore. An analysis of two Singapore ‘historical’ blogs illustrates how blogging is building a foundation for a more participatory historical society in the island nation. At the same time, the case studies also demonstrate the limitations of blogging and blogs in challenging official versions of history.


2004 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
pp. 439-446 ◽  
Author(s):  
Angela Phillips

Evidence of ‘dissemination’ is now seen as part of research delivery by grant-giving bodies such as the ESRC and Joseph Rowntree Foundation. Drawing on the growing body of research into media sources (Manning 2001, Davis, 2000) and relating it to debates on the public sphere (Habermas 1989), the paper will ask what (if anything) researchers have to gain from involvement with the mass media and whether specialised help can assist in bringing social policy research from the margins into the mainstream of media discourse. It will look in particular at the special difficulties of disseminating ‘fuzzy’ qualitative research findings which do not lend themselves to obviously eye-catching headlines. The paper will draw on an ESRC funded experiment at the University of Leeds as a case study with which to explore these issues.


Author(s):  
A.S. Smolyarova

The article examines the foreign Russian-language blogosphere on Instagram through the lenses of the public sphere theory. The study revealed active cooperation of bloggers living in different countries during coverage of the coronavirus pandemic in March-April 2020. More than 4,000 Russian-speaking Instagram users commenting on posts became members of the networked publics because of this cooperation, the audience coverage of the most popular bloggers exceeded the threshold of one hundred thousand subscribers. Bloggers who initiated contributory publications on the situation with COVID-19 in their countries were points of crystallization of public discussions for people with migration experience, who are often excluded from the national public spheres of both their home countries and countries of residence. By inviting their subscribers to get acquainted with the situation in different countries, bloggers have formed a global arena that arises at the intersection of online public groups that have developed around bloggers. The main mechanism for creating such an arena is the cooperation of bloggers aimed at their own promotion and helping other bloggers in opposing the algorithms of the online platform. Collaboration in the form of a one-time publication of posts on the same topic, united by a unique hashtag and including direct links to bloggers from other countries, leads to the emergence of online ad hoc, or situational, global media in Russian. In the arena constituted by ad hoc media, Russian-speaking migrants living in different countries could discuss the measures that states were taking to defeat the pandemic. At the same time, this global networked public remains a “weak public” that has not transformed into a participatory counter-public sphere.


2018 ◽  
Vol 32 (4) ◽  
pp. 389-400
Author(s):  
Brendan O’Hallarn ◽  
Stephen L. Shapiro ◽  
Marion E. Hambrick ◽  
D.E. Wittkower ◽  
Lynn Ridinger ◽  
...  

Popular social media platforms have faced recent criticism because of the tendency for users to exhibit strongly negative behaviors, threatening the open, prodemocratic discourse that proponents believe was made possible when social media sites first gained widespread adoption a decade ago. A conceptual model suggests that the microblogging site Twitter, and especially sport-themed debate through hashtags, can still realize these ideals. Analyzing a dataset of tweets about the firing of former Major League Baseball pitcher Curt Schilling by ESPN on April 20, 2016, as well as a qualitative questionnaire given to the users of the hashtag, this study attempted to ascertain how closely the discourse comes to realizing the ideal of the Habermasian public sphere. The findings demonstrate that although users draw value from participation in the discussion, they are less inclined to desire interaction with other hashtag users, particularly those who disagree with them. This suggests that Twitter hashtags provide an open forum that approaches the participatory requirement of the public sphere, but the lack of back-and-forth engagement suggests the medium is not ideal for the generation of deliberative public opinion.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document